Ruminations From the Shower

Caveat: This post is not about music.
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I do some of my best thinking in the shower. I remember reading somewhere that Douglas Adams greatly enjoyed the bath, or that it was a comfort to him. The shower is something like that for me. This likely results from the fact that I'm removed from the distractions that fill all of our days. My major distraction, I admit, is the computer, or more usually, the internet. With a world of information to gloss, I rarely run out of things to look up. Sometimes I think I need a little 'panic room' where I'm cut off from the information pipeline. Or I need to gain some self-discipline. Since my shower is a ritual, I needn't think about what I'm doing, so my mind is free to wander.

Today I'm thinking about changing the world. How can it be done? What kind of creatures are we?
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Background: I am currently the in process of trying to get into an English literature PhD program. It's not going well, but thanks for asking.

During studies for my Masters degree in English, I came across a series of ideas that are coin of the realm in humanities at the present time. I'm still trying to sort out my beliefs about these ideas, still trying to find a way think about these ideas and their efficacy. In the shower today, I was thinking about the direction I want to pursue as a literature scholar, something I will perhaps discuss more in the future. I mention it now because it leads me on to a larger set of questions, questions that seem to me to be at the very heart of the idea of changing the world. The questions have to do with society, self, human nature, religion, hermeneutics, philosophy, marxism, and to some degree, art. What I will attempt to do here is lay out these questions and discuss my thoughts (not conclusions!) about them.
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The umbrella question under which my later inquiries rest is one of theodicy. I suppose that the term theodicy is a bit misleading, and if I knew my ancient Greek, I could coin a new one. Merriam Webster defines theodicy "defense of God's goodness and omnipotence in view of the existence of evil." Here, I'm not concerned with God or even really with evil. Rather, I've been thinking about the problem of evils. That is, and this question is nothing new, why is there so much suffering in the world?

Now this may seem at first glance to be a theological or metaphysical question, but as a confirmed godless freethinker (or so I hope), I have little interest in such matters. Indeed, topics like metaphysics and theology are better left to professionals, and in truth, I tend to think that such inquiries may be closer to being part of the problem than part of the solution. What I do wish to talk about is more related to how we think and what kind of animals we are.

One cannot study graduate school level literature without confronting marxist thought. In fact, Terry Eagleton asserts that Karl Marx's work formed the defining horizon of European philosophy of the 20th century. I think it is more correct to say ONE of the horizons, for there are certainly others (Nietzsche and Heidegger spring to mind). And to a major degree, my questions deal with marxism. Marx, very much like Nietzsche and Heidegger and even Hegel, took on the problem of evils in the world, particularly the evils of misapportionment and its root causes. I needn't go into Marx's work in depth here, presumably if you've gotten this far you know enough about Marx to have an idea of his basic work. Probably the most influential aspect of marxist thought in literature studies is the idea of reification or commodification. Simply put, this means treating ideas and people such things as objects, and more particularly as objects to be used and/or consumed. Marx, I think, took this idea from Hegel who formulated it to somewhat different effect in his master/slave dialectic. In Marx's view, and not at all in Hegel's, it was capitalism that caused reification. Indeed the psychological state of capitalism is, to marxists, one of relentless reification. Marx argued that we are not naturally users or consumers, or perhaps more correctly, he argued that capitalism unleashed a grossly inhumane sort of usage and consumption mania in humankind. How so? Well, that's where it gets interesting.

Capitalist relationships are fundamentally predatory to Marx and his followers. Capitalism must take advantage: of the weak, of the poor, of the loopholes, of greed, of many of the baser parts of the human mind. As we see the world in an increasingly reified way, we care less and less for our fellow humans. They are things to be moved and shuffled, data to be collected, pawns in the game. Indeed we are all pawns in the game of economics in Marx's view and capitalism is the cruelest game. Capitalism, then, through it's reification, is the source of many of the social evils in marxism.

In order to change the world, then, capitalism must be overthrown or at least dismantled. Revolution, bloody or bloodless, is a necessity in the project of social justice. Capitalism and social justice are, very simply, mutually exclusive.

This idea has been latched onto with great vigor in the academic humanities. Indeed, if we substitute the terms patriarchy, or liberal democracy, or Enlightenment for capitalism we can see a major portion of social theory represented. I think the most useful way to typify this can be found in the words of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, who called it the dialectic of Enlightenment. That is, along with all the good that resulted from the European Enlightenment has come a palpable curse. H&A called it "instrumental reason." Although Critical Theory heads would argue, instrumental reason is merely a rephrasing of reification wherein capitalism has been replaced with Enlightenment-style scientific thought.

Interestingly, instrumental reason very much resembles Martin Heidegger's view of humankind in the technological era, despite Adorno's hatred for Heidegger and his work. Heidegger traced it back to ancient Greece, as did Adorno to some extent, and as did Heidegger's latter day torch-carrier Derrida. And of course this link to ancient Greece, as well as the in-depth examination of the effects of the Enlightenment, really got its start with Nietzsche. Marx, A&H, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Hegel (to whom I'll return) all have slightly different diagnoses of the very same problem, that is the dialectic of Enlightenment; the fact that with increasing scientific knowledge, and an empirical turn of thought and perspective, we have not only lost much of our previous understanding of the way of things, but that in the process we may have produced a system that actually causes atrocities despite it's claim for the "rights of man"kind.

Now it's important to note that Nietzsche and Hegel didn't necessarily subscribe to the doomsday scenarios of the other three. However the problem remains very similar. Marx: "All that is solid melts into air," Nietzsche, "'Where has God gone?' he cried. 'I shall tell you. We have killed him - you and I. We are his murderers,'" Heidegger, "Only a god can save us," A&H, "The whole Enlightened world is radiant with calamity." (all quotes paraphrased)

This train of thought, mostly stemming from Nietzsche and Heidegger, deeply informed the postmodernist philosophers or theorists such as Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, and many others. It also, through H&A, informed the Critical Theory school, personified these days by Jurgen Habermas. These two then came down through the (largely) American academic system in the likes of Judith Butler, Homi Bhaba, Edward Said and others and this train of thought remains dominant in the humanities.
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Ok, after the above excursus we are ready to tackle the problem(s) at hand. There are some basic questions to attend to first, ones to which I do not have great answers. Rather, I have only the conviction that they must be fairly asked and considered. First, I'll attend to those questions. Second, I'll pose a larger question, one which is largely disregarded in much social theory of the stripe I'm talking about here.

The first, and stickiest, question is simply whether we have been worse off as a result of the Enlightenment? Has modern life degraded?

Certainly in the "first world" or "core" nations, the standard of living has only increased. The two questions we must pose against this assertion are: 1) How about the rest of the world? 2) Has quality of life translated into "the good life"?

So first we must answer whether the people living in so-called developing nations are largely better or worse off than they were in the pre-European imperialistic/capitalistic/Enlightened world. I simply don't know enough history to adequately answer this question, but let me say that my gut answer is that things have gotten worse, if not drastically so. The colonialist/imperialist period was largely one of either actual or virtual slavery for the colonized. Were these new social relations worse than the ones of previous conquerors? I cannot say; perhaps a case by case basis would be more accurate than generalization.

Regardless, in the post-colonial era, we can fairly say that things are worse probably than they ever have been in many developing nations: disease, political unrest, dictators, poverty, starvation, genocide, ad nauseam. And in a very basic way, developing countries are serf-states to the core nations. This is nothing new, but in the world of globalization it is becoming all the more the case.

In the case of the second question, we are at something of an impasse. Happiness, or the good life, is difficult and perhaps impossible to measure. Are most adults in the core nations or first world less or more happy than they were before the Enlightenment and the onset of modernity/capitalism?

I think this question is unanswerable. We simply don't have the evidence to make a claim either way. There's just not enough source material. We need written accounts but due to nearly ubiquitous illiteracy before the Enlightenment, we have very little to examine. The great majority of writers up until the late Middle Ages were highly privileged people, not the everyday peasant or worker or proletariat (yes, I know the proletariat class results from capitalism, but you know what I mean). So we have much religious thought and much poetry and philosophy and drama, but we simply don't have enough impressions of what life was really like for average people before (at least in the West) Chaucer or so, and Chaucer's work is deeply arguable when it comes to realism. Certainly literature of the classical world doesn't reflect the lives of real, actual shepherds, wine-makers, slaves or anyone (especially women) who wasn't either a member of the aristocracy or the clergy.

to be continued