Up from Cuturalism to Individualism…and Beyond
So far I havn’t gotten to the point where I think that anyone will be highly entertained by details of my past erotic shipwreaks. Those who arn’t satisfied with their own can have recourse to the National Inquirerer. But in the case of my intellectual biography I think it is high time that I confess a few errors of my steamy (at least cognitively speaking) past. Having been born at the mid point of the Twentieth century there are few intellectual errors of the last half of that century which I havn’t at least sampled, but there are only two which, in Goethe’s phrase I have “swilled with large goblets.” Again, one can do other things with goblets, but even less than sex, these are hard to enjoy on line. The two opiates to which I was mostly addicted were Culturalism and Objectivism, both excellent ideologies as ideologies go, and each presided over by a latter day embodyment of the Pallas Athena archetype, Margaret Mead and Ayn Rand respectively.
Margaret Mead I was actually able to meet personally, however briefly, while I was young and she was…to put it unchivalrously, entering into advanced decay. Yet antique though she might have been, I got the definite impression that she was attracted to me, however on the occasion I was uncharateristically disinclined to act the jigolo, thus depriving myself of any deeper knowlege, Biblical or archeological, which might have ensued. But even to glipse her from afar was a kind of epiphany, in her robes her beads and her forked staff…she was less a scientist than a shammaness.
That last point has been the entire point of anti-Mead criticism during the last few decades. At the time I met her I was still an innocent (not sexually) and could hardly have guessed that Derek Freeman was rigorously at work in Samoa undoing Mead’s life work. It would not have mattered much even had I known, since the criticisms of Freeman (and fellow New Zealander Roger Sandall) in a sense upstaged the criticisms of Culturalism which I felt to be salient. Freeman discovered that Mead’s work was a hoax, although who was the hoaxer, Mead or her informants, remains a legitimate subject of debate. However the attraction of Culturalism was never its scientific rigor. At least in its Ruth Bennedict/Margaret Mead form it was tactily understood by its devotees as a kind of sociological poetry somewhat along the lines of, and ultimately inspired by, the poeticized philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche.
The question in my mind was not so much whether Culturalism was scientific…but rather, was it good or bad poetry? Granted that it was all a conspiracy, and that Mead was using the Samoans as a ventriloquist would use a dummy, to articulate the values that she would like to see acendent in a future world society…were the values themselves coherent or catastrophic? I eventually decided that I couldn’t “stay with the program”…if only because the premises and the conclusions of the Culturalist program contradicted themselves. The premise (for the benefit of anyone who happened to miss the XXth century runup to the multiculturalism of the XXIst century) was that all cultures developed in isolation and could not be judged by any common standard, but that when these cultures were inductively surveyed a posteriori, their very incommesurability gave support to that atavism which is loosely termed “liberalism” in emergent world culture. In the specific variation which Mead espoused, this meant that pan-eroticism gained an important butress distinct from previously existing naturalism (eg. Rousseau) in that post tribal Western Bohemians could (while still honoring the tribal, and perhaps thinking of themselves as tribal) choose pan-eroticism on inductive grounds, thus avoiding the appearance of being coerced by nature. Thus culturalism provided the best of all possible worlds (at least for Western Bohemians) by conflating the ecstasy of instict with the autonomy of the free will.
At the time I certainly had no quarrel with the so-called “sexual revolution.” What troubled me was the deeper logical contradiction implied by the program. The classical notion of the “consensus gentium” was to be supplanted by a purely statistical/comparative study of cultures. Yet when, as was inevitable, this comparason was used to support the default policies of progressivism and liberalism…ie. as pure potential unrestrained by the shackles of narrow tradition or an illusory “human nature”…then at precisely that point the chorus of the “consensus gentium” shouted out in a unanimity too loud to be ignored. Against the background of the poly-form, pan-erotic global culture, or at least its Bohemian advanced guard, the traditional cultures started to look remarkably similar, with systems of sanctions and authority which all bore a striking family resemblance.
In short, the culturalists had argued for moral relativism (and hence “liberalism” as the default option) in bad faith. I considered this far worse than any hoaxing or novelization of the ethnographic data. At least the hoaxing could be justified on esthetic (not to say erotic!) grounds. But the disjunct between the tribal base and the Bohemian concusions of culturalism involved trickyer matters of contradictory logic and values. Something had to go, either the mystical group-mind of the tribes, or the rebellious individualism of the Bohemians.
Anthropology turned left (to the tribes) but I turned right…all the way right to Ayn Rand. It struck me that Western liberalism had gone a bridge too far in the 1960s, when the classical bases of the Whig/progressive historical tradition were thrown overboard in favor of a world view based on existentialism and cultural anthropology. As much as I was alarmed by the eroticism and anti-intellectualism of the Bohemians, I far prefered any defense of the individual against the prospect of a return to the tribe…which was the logical conclusion evisioned by the emergent ecological and counter-cultural movements. (Nota bene: the earlier Bohemian denizens of the American academy were anarchic individualists, like Benedict and Mead. As time went on and culturalism became the ideological foundation of revolt, Bohemians became tribal…as in “counterculture” and the switch from self identification as “beatniks” to “hippies.” For what it is worth, I was a kind of post-hippy.)
Against a sophisticated dialectical non-synthesis of Bohemianism and tribalism in Mead’s culturalism, the multiculturalism of the American XXth century tended more and more towards a fundamentalist culturalism. This wasn’t, counter Sandall, primarily manifested in “designer tribalism.” There were never that many hippies, and they died out pretty quickly. But the forced analogy between a functioning tribal society and modern state tended to wedge itself into the sociological imagination, and turned “liberalism” which originally designated the rights of the individual, into a tag for its polar opposite, social democracy. In desperation I turned to “fundamentalist individualism”…which at the time people were calling libertarianism.
In those days libertarianism meant Ayn Rand and her philosophy of Objectivism. Unlike Mead, I never actually met Rand in person, and indeed by the late 1970s when I started getting interested in the movement, the party was pretty much over. Rand and her lover, Nathaniel Brandon, had split up in 1968, and the salad days of people prancing around in capes and sporting jewel-encrusted cigarette holders was pretty much (fortunately) over. I did meet Brandon, who was by now married for the third time and synthesizing a new philosophy based around something called “biocentrism.” Biocentrism sounded to me like naturalism, and I was still wedded strongly to the superorganicism which I had come by via the tuition of the culturalists. If I had met Rand a few years earlier I would probably have wound up as a cult follower, since the pure conceptual quality of Objectivism appealed greatly to me, but the more Rand and Brandon (now at dagger points) claimed to be the first worthy successors to Aristotle in 25 centuries, the more I suspected that they were just “padding their resume.” I also had the great pleasure of making first hand aquaintance with the philosophers of German Idealism at the time, and while I would be loath to defend Hegel, Schelling et al today, I got enough out of them to realize that the screeds Rand had written against him (lifted in turn from Popper) were written out of ignorance.
In short, I fell out of love with Rand even more quickly than I did with Margaret Mead, a process confirmed when I made aquaintance with the Austrian economists and learned that there was far more to libertarianism than Objectivism. Many a year has elapsed from then to now, but at this moment, as I set down these words I can see connections which at the time escaped me between my two (now rejected) loves. First of all, both Culturalism and Objectivism are poetry. Second, I stand by the statement that there could be ideologies (perhaps saying “philosophies” is a bit much) which are legitimately poetic. Moreover, not only could thought which is poetic be sociologically valid, but thought which is erotic (in the sense of Plato’s Symposium) could also be sociologically valid. Not only Socrates, but Max Scheler who spoke of an “order of loves” in the human heart, would agree with me here.
The question which must be posed is not “can thinking about human society be poetic” but rather “is this particular thinking good or bad poetry”? I found that ultimately both Mead and Rand were bad poets, however technically brilliant they might have been as novelists and thinkers. To be sure, I would rather inhabit a dream-world ruled by the shamaness Mead or the romantic philosopher Rand than a world (as indeed our world increasingly becomes) ruled by cold technocrats. But neither Mead’s tribal world or Rand’s heroic world represents that apex of the “order of loves” which all hearts strive for. Furthermore, I have a hunch as to why this is, one that I should have figured out long ago…but that a slovenly combination of indecision and pride barred my way.
You see, Mead and Rand, who are seldom mentioned in the same breath anywhere in literature or cyberspace, these two women are progeny of a deeper, and darker thinker. Yes, these two titanic women, who have probably had more influence on American (and hence world) popular culture than any two other individuals, are the obverse/reverse sides of the same philosophical-philosophical coin, one originally struck by none other than Friedrich Nietzsche. Both Mead and Rand covered their tracks somewhat, for the former wanted desperately to be the expositor of her beloved Samoans, as the latter wished to be the continuator of Aristotle. But these were just masks for an unacnowledged oracle, one which pronounced the philosophy of moral inversion.
And that is why I call both Mead and Rand bad poets. Not completely bad mind you, in fact both charming in their own way, as was Nietzsche himself. It is a tribute to the great heartedness and then innocence of Americans in the XXth century that they couldn’t drink in their Nietzsche with frothing goblets, that, horn-rimmed academicians aside, they had to be spoon fed by two female social philosophers representing, as it appeared at the time, the diametrically opposite ideologies of tribal naturalism and romantic rationalism. These were, of course, both transvaluations of Western Culture as it had existed up until that time…as it had been been informed (i.e., in the Platonic-Augustinian sense of “formed into”) by Christianity.
Which brings us to the ultimate question, what is “good poetry” in social philosophy, or in life generally. If we are to follow the argument in Plato’s Symposium, then it is poetry which leads us from eroticism in the vulgar sense to some higher, and ungessed at, love. This is precisely what the hot primitivism of Mead and the frenzy of heroism in Rand cannot do, indeed are not intended to do. Love for Mead, however promiscuous, can at most lead to horizontle bonding of the tribe in a participation mystique, one where the individual mind is effaced in the collective. From there, events are allowed to take their course, perhaps in an orgy of passion, or perhaps (a la Rene Girard) in a climactic homicide. Rand’s love is, in contrast, a jealously exclusive kind of love, the love of a hero…which is to say a man who is almost, but not quite, God. Yet, if not God, such a man may at least succeed in becoming a type of god. In Rand’s fiction a single act of love, or a single successful creative accomplishement, is enough to stand against all eternity. Its the sort of stuff that we Americans just can’t get enough of, that is the heroism, not the eternity. Nietzsche at least had the integrity to call this kind of heroism tragic. Rand would have disowned any attempt at calling her fiction tragic…and it is probable that she wouldn’t have liked the term “comic” any better. Perhaps, in spite of her vaunted “rationality” there were many things which she simply didn’t think out to their logical conclusions.
For all of that, I still have a warm feeling for both these fictive daughters of Nietzsche (as opposed to his very real and very evil sister). All I question is whether the philosophy of love got very far in the secular world of the last century. We must look elsewhere to find a poetry of eros which takes us from the world of vulgar passions to the sublimity of a love founded on truth. Our souls testify to the impossiblity of a Jacob’s ladder which leads halfway up to heaven and then stops. Yet all our attempts to break through into the emprean by violence have, in the last and all other centuries, come to what King Soloman rightly called “vanity.” No, rather we must wait patiently at the bottom of the ladder and wait for our Lover to descend and take us into His embrace. Then we shall say, with the Shulamite,
I was sleeping, but my heart kept vigil;
I heard my lover knocking:
“Open to me, my sister, my beloved,
my dove, my perfect one!” (Song of Songs 5:2)
Then we shall find that Love that Plato could only dream of…a Love of which nobody shall tire!
