From "Steel Magnolias"
M'Lynn (Sally Field) agonizing over the loss of her daughter, as friends try to console
From "The Godfather"
Michael Coreleone (Al Pacino) seeing the headline saying his dad has been shot
From "Thirteen"
Mel (Holly Hunter) trying desperately to hold onto her daughter (Evan Rachel Wood)
From "Fearless"
Huo Yuanjia sharing the love of a blind girl who nursed his body and spirit back to health
From "Fearless"
Huo Yuanjia (Jet Li) finally learning to see the beauty of the natural world around him
From "Flags of Our Fathers"
Ira Hayes (Adam Beach) begging to go to see his mom before he has to go back to war
From "Crash"
Christine (Thandie Newton) realizing a cop (Matt Dillon) who humilated her the day before has just saved her life
From "Boyz in the Hood"
father (Laurence Fishburne) telling son (Cuba Gooding Jr.) how much he loves him
From "Brokeback Mountain"
Ennis (Heath Ledger) grieving the death of the love of his life, Jack (Jake Gillenhal)
What is the point of the set of movie stills above?
They show people portrayed in moments so emotionally overwhelming that millions - regardless of their race, gender, politics, philosophy, or worldview - cannot help but feel the raw human power of the scene.
My graphic response to postmodernists. Their whole project, their whole worldview, is doomed to fail to define and/or control what it is trying to define and control.
There is a deeper level of experience, awareness, and meaning in life that any critical theory - postmodernist, socialist, feminist, or what have you - can only take rough stabs at, and sometimes get partly right. If there were not, we would be unable to communicate at all because there would be nothing for us to communicate - person to person or culture to culture - about.
But the deeper levels of life can be analyzed until we all drop from exhaustion without our ever finally pinning life down - with any set of terms and concepts. Real human experience in this life - because it is far more affective than cognitive - defies any encompassing definitions or systems. Our thinking systems are composed of elements selected from our experiences of life; our experiences are not composed of elements selected from our thinking systems.
Thus, it is art that tells us of the things that transcend languages, far more deeply than any criticism that tries to define art. This it does by evoking what we have in common. Uniting us, not dividing us from each other. When it resonates with the fundamentally human, then it works. Not before.
If art did not do this, all art would be a hopeless project.
All systems are explained in symbols - almost always language symbols. And we can show mathematically that no system for communicating ideas can be made exhaustive/complete. That is what Kurt Godel's proof is about.
So postmodernism has had its uses. It has shown us an array of perspectives and motivated us to see more kinds of people in sympathetic ways. But any form of postmodernism that poses as the only answer to every query in the human heart has gone astray and gone sterile.
In the meantime, art keeps portraying life, or - to be more accurate - the artist's subtly selected aspects of life, since no work of art could ever tell all there is to tell about anything.
Reality is protean and elusive - more complex than any set of terms and concepts in any language can ever exhaustively define.
But so are we. Humans. Complex. Subtle. Resilient. Nimble. Speaking many languages and quite able to translate their deeper levels of meaning from one language to another. After all, we grew up here. Evolved here.
In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless, have a nice day. And never forget: there is ...there really is ...always hope.
Michel Foucault
I am being driven, by the contents of some of my university classes, to try to take on post-modernism once again. I have little use for it, as I have said in this space before. So I'll share some further thoughts.
I have no use for post-modernism mainly because it seems very clear to me that it offers no usable tools to its adherents in their struggles against political, economic, and philosophical extremism. What use is post-modernist thinking if it tells us there really is no way to sort out social chaos - when it comes, as periodically it does - except by someone's stepping in and exerting physical power? How do we sort out disputes if all ideas of right and wrong are merely relative to the culture that we are immersed in at the time?
The answer is, of course, that there is no way but violence. All else, that is all other ideas of right and wrong, reason and madness, justice and injustice, and so on, are irrecoverably biased, the pomo's say, by the various discourses that we are agreeing to participate in by even talking about right and wrong in any given cultural setting. In short, in post-modernism's view, we are always stuck inside a culture, its language always contains some terms that can be used to discuss such a subject, and these are always constructed in such a way that they doom the debate from the start to come to the conclusion that is the accepted view of the power elites of that culture. Go somewhere else and the debate will be framed in different terms and will reach different conclusions, often radically different ones. This is the post-modernist line.
White men have long defined the terms and set up the debates - the argument goes - so that they and their way of life will prove the most reasonable, even the most sane, against all comers - if we even begin to talk their talk with its Euro-centered and patriarchal styles of "reason" and "sanity".
It seems very clear to me that there are good things that have come out of post-modernism and deconstructionism, like the way it has taught us to see that there can be many "takes on" or "readings of" a given work of art or event in history, etc. I am an older, white, heterosexual male. Sometimes, I have been taught some profound lessons by fine works of literature or film that showed me the world from a female, gay, or non-white perspective. That is a valuable thing. We all need to strive to understand one another and get along. I believe in democratic pluralism, as anyone who has read this blog for any length of time would know.
But this position is miles from saying that there are no such things at all as "right" and "wrong". Let me repeat: if we accept that premise, then we commit ourselves for all time to a world in which there is no way to resolve disputes except by violence.
That I won't accept.
And I don't have to. I have a solid philosophical base on which to defend democratic pluralism. It can easily be browsed through by anyone who goes back over the posts on this page for the last year or so.
My thoughts today, however, are tending toward dismantling postmodernism for good. How? By showing up the fundamental flaw in its reasoning.
Jacques Derrida
Foucault and Derrida and their followers are very fond of pointing out that all "texts" contain internal assumptions in the terms that they use, the meanings they implicitly give to these terms, and the kinds of evidence for their arguments that they consider valid. Thus, all texts can be deconstructed, their vested interests exposed, and the evil that they perpetuate disarmed. Or so the pomo's say.
This technique can be a good thing if it is applied fairly, in a limited way, to all writers, filmmakers, and other creators of texts. But that includes the postmodernists and their work as well, or at least in fairness, it should.
And in the giant picture, postmodernist reasoning is flawed - fatally.
In the first place, terms like "power", "hegemony", "binaries", and so on - some of the pomo's most frequently employed terms - had meanings long before the ideas of postmodernism were even a gleam in anyone's eye. In other words, and to get to the point in short order, postmodernism, in order to communicate its points at all, must always rely on deeper levels of meaning that readers/viewers are already familiar with. If we were to further deconstruct these deeper terms, we would be beginning a regress that could only terminate by placing electrodes on the exposed neurons of two people's brains and bypassing language altogether as they exchanged thoughts in milliamp-bursts directly. The problem then, however, would be that what my brain actually does at that level is utterly unique to me. To your brain, it would be painful gibberish: milliamps of neuro-noise.
So we're back to the problems of language, and while it may be interesting and even enlightening to hear another person's take or read on an idea or novel or film, deconstruction does not offer us any way to tell whose take is more just or reasonable if it denies that there are such things as justice and reason or human rights or any other concepts that aren't fatally tainted by our many cultural biases. We're back to nattering sarcasm or ...eventually, history seems to aver ...guns and bombs.
Bitching with a big vocabulary is still just bitching and it isn't even very hard for the Nazis to silence. Their methods are well known, and I eschew going into them here.
To drive this point about the incoherence of the whole postmodern worldview and method home, let me offer one more insight.
Consider translation. Derrida and Foucault wrote in French. Most of their adherents around the world must read them in translation. And some translations are better than others. Everyone accepts that.
But such an opinion is again incoherent unless we assume that there was a meaning all along that the writer was trying to get across and that is caught much more effectively in some translations than it is in some others.
The underlying reason for the madness that postmodernism and deconstructionism arrive at, a moral landscape on which those with the most fanatic will to power rule and deserve to rule, is due to their fundamentally flawed epistemology. Discourse that is meaningful cannot be a series of thousands of lexical dogs chasing each other in circles and ovals, ellipses and epicycles.
I may not always get what you mean, but that only means ...MEANS ...that we both are going to have to work harder at our communication, sending and receiving. That I'm willing to do. But consigning the world over to the bullies with a shrug? Not a chance, MF. Not a chance, JD. You go back and start again. I'm confident I can go on.
In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless, have a nice day.
Paul de Man
If social science teaches us anything, it teaches us that social structures and mores and the values and beliefs that underlie them get established in a culture for reasons. They aren't just random occurrences that happen to come along.
So where did patriarchy come from then?
Women aren't as strong as men ...on average. They aren't as proficient at spatial thinking ...on average. But there are plenty of exceptions that deviate a long way from the averages. There are some women who are brilliant mathematicians and engineers and some as tough as nails. And if men, in general, will probably always have to have their own section of the Olympics and will be the majority in some fields, then let's be completely honest and say the complementary truths. Women are better coordinated ...on average ...in the small muscles of the hands and fingers. They are ...on average ...better at verbal reasoning. Why have they never been the majority of surgeons, lawyers, or politicians? They're better suited than men are for these professions. On average.
It makes no sense for any society to waste human talent. What is going on?
Well, I'm fairly confident that I have figured this one out.
Raising kids is hard work. Providing for them -- food, shelter, clothing, health care, shoes, education -- all of these plus the day by day nurture of little persons to get them strong enough in a decade and a half to handle the world, all of this is very hard for a single parent today. In times up till very recently in human history, the job was almost impossible for one person to do effectively.
But society needs new generations coming up all of the time. Every society in the history of our species has always been one generation away from dying out and vanishing into the footnotes of the history texts if it cannot accomplish this reproduction task. Have the kids, raise them well, train them to take over the responsibilities and do it all before you bow out yourself. For hunter-gatherers, early farmers, and industrial societies, the men had to help at least to supply the physical needs of the kids or the whole society was going to teeter, stumble, and crash, out of history.
Centuries worth of men would not get into this tedium, labor, and weariness for just any kids. They put this kind of effort into the raising of kids ...on average ...only if they believed the kids to be theirs. Biologically theirs.
"So what?" you ask, and I reply that the societies that trained their girls to be submissive, to their fathers and then their husbands, simply out-reproduced their competition. On average, well-regulated females won't stray, won't have affairs. Then the men will stay with the family. Then the society will outbreed and outrun its competition.
Nearly all societies in the world that have risen to even a local level of dominance have been built on this patriarchal model. It is so deeply ingrained that many men suffer from what Konrad Lorenz called the "cichlid effect". Cichlids are a species of fish in which the males will only accept as mates females that act submissive. And Lorenz found lots of other species of mammals, fish, birds and so on that showed similar characteristics. The males can't even function sexually unless the females act "coy".
So men. What are we? No smarter than fish? Can't get it up for women who won't bow down, psychologically or even physically. No erection without genuflection?
No. We're better than that. Smarter, kinder, and more versatile, physically and psychologically.
I see evidence of the cichlid effect at deep levels all over the world. What the hell do ISIS want more than submissive women? For me, anyway, that's what's really going on there. They long for women who will tell them they're wonderful, even when they're anything but.
If, on the other hand, we in the West have some feisty, not-so-obedient women on our hands, in the struggle for survival of whole cultures, in today's world ...good. We don't need massive numbers of babies anymore. We need replacement numbers, of quality kids. Smart. Healthy. Confident.
Disease, malnutrition, etc. have largely been brought under control. We don't have 60% infant mortality rates anymore. In fact, there are too many humans on this planet now.
We need humans who are net contributors to society and not net drains on it. Women, loved and supported, become partners in the fight, making contributions to the team that are equal to the ones men make, instead of living among us as self-abnegating, docile baby machines.
And what of the good old days that, in reality, weren't so good? They're gone. Get over it.
Let her go on top tonight. It'll be a ton of fun and she'll love you more for it. Maybe you can even bring yourself to say "thank you". You'll gain by it, not lose. You don't have a problem with that. You're a man who keeps his sense of humor and his sense of reality.
In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, have a nice day anyway.
I feel that I should say something to the women of the world and in my life today. I have just been listening to a program on CBC radio where a debate between two women got hostile. The heat is being generated right now by some leading women who are supporting Democratic Party presidential hopeful, Bernie Sanders, and some - generally older - women who are backing Hilary Clinton, including some who have been doing so for many years.
For example, actor and activist, Susan Sarandon, has gone public and said in interviews:
“[The Iraq war is] where Hillary Clinton lost me,” Sarandon told the [Daily Mail] Wednesday night at the conclusion of Sanders’ Mason City rally, “because there was plenty of information that even I had that said there was a real problem with the logic involved.”
and
“When you have the other candidate (i.e. Hilary Clinton) taking money from Goldman Sachs, speaking to Goldman Sachs, getting a lot of money from Monsanto, I think it’s really naive to believe that that’s not going to have some kind of influence over policy.”
And then there are those on Clinton's side, like Madeleine Albright, whose comments included the following, as reported in The Guardian newspaper:
'Former secretary of state Madeleine Albright introduced Hillary Clinton at an event in New Hampshire on Saturday, telling the crowd and voters in general: “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other!”'
And feminist icon, Gloria Steinem, who, on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, said:
"Women get more activist as they grow older. And when you’re younger, you think: ‘Where are the boys? The boys are with Bernie.’”
(In her defense, I should say that Steinem apologized and retracted her remarks three days later.)
These comments are barely the tip of the iceberg. The internet right now is full of females having at each other.
As an older white male, I know full well what at least some of my peers think when they listen to, and watch, this wrangling. "You can't get three women in a room to agree on anything", or worse yet, "Oh, look! The girls are fighting ...but they are just so cute when they get that way."
Damn such remarks from supposedly decent men. Patriarchy at its worst.
There have been times past counting when men - including men on the left of the political spectrum - have fallen prey to division among themselves and lost sight of their larger political goal. Union leaders whose members are crying out for more jobs just do not see the agenda in the same way as Greenpeace activists, compassionate Christians, or foreign aid supporters do. Splitting them so neatly that they watch their candidates and their ideals go under and give up on the political process entirely is one of the favorite pastimes of the New Right. And they're good at it. Al Gore should have won the 2000 election in a landslide.
In fact there is a side-note to this post that says we should never underestimate the intelligence of the noisemen. The superficial, jingo-spouting suits sometimes hide a guile as cunning as any that has ever existed. We underestimate the strutting and shouting performers - like Donald Rump - at our peril. They know very well what they're doing and they know how to win, far more often than conscience or logic should ever allow. Native cunning, helped on by fanatic fixation on a single goal. The formula - too often - works.
But that is a side-note. My big point is that we shouldn't try to put back in the kitchen what was let out a generation ago. Not because such action would be unfair, but because it simply isn't going to happen. In response to any measures that tried to push them out of the work place, public life, and academia, women in huge numbers really would unite. And good on 'em for standing up for themselves.
Even more deeply, I have to ask men who long for the not-very-good "good old days": Are you crazy? We are in a global race for economic and political survival. The nation that wins, the nation whose way of life wins, will be the one that maximizes all of its resources. Banning women - half the population, let us not forget - from the team, even if it could be done, would not be so much unjust or difficult or even foolish as it would be something else. In the real world, it would be gradual suicide.
Why any men ever wanted women subservient in the first place, I think I have figured out. But that's another whole topic that I will save for my next post.
In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, have a nice day anyway.
