Picking up The Master and His Emissary again, I was intrigued to read something that jogged a memory from a neuroscience class I took 20 years ago. McGilchrist mentions almost in passing (on his way to other matters of interest) readiness potentials and their relation to sequences of events in mental processing. My memory is that event-related potentials as measured by electroencephalography (wow, that passed the spell-checker!) reveal a latency period following a stimulus. More specifically, the P3 wave (sometimes P300) signalling the onset of brain processing (as distinguished from background noise) is delayed by anywhere from 250 to 700 ms (usually falling around 300 ms, hence the name). The mere fact that it takes the brain a split second (literally) to respond is unsurprising; one would expect response to follow stimulus by some interval. What’s interesting is that the brain time stamps or backdates stimuli to coincide with their occurrence. Maybe that’s not so interesting either, but for my appreciation of consciousness, it’s pretty significant that any moment in the stream of consciousness had width to it and strict ordering of events as measured by scientific instruments down to the millisecond is time adjusted on the fly in human experience. This is more apparent in McGilchrist’s description of hemispheric cooperation in mental processing:

… the right hemisphere contribution … has both temporal priority and ontological priority, since thought is originally ‘largely imagistic and minimally analytic’, whereas by the moment of utterance, it has become ‘both imagistic and analytic and is a synthesis of the holistic and analytic functions’. In terms of the thesis of this book, then, the process begins in the realm of the right hemisphere, gets input from the left hemisphere, and finally reaches a synthesis of right with left. [p. 190]

This is made clearer perhaps on the next page:

[It was] found that the disconnected left hemisphere could not engage with narrative, for two main reasons: it lacked concreteness and specificity in its relation of the story, and became abstract and generic, and it got time sequences wrong and conflated episodes that were separate in the story because they look similar (in other words, it categorised them, and therefore put them together, even though in the lived world their meaning was destroyed by being taken out of narrative sequence). In place of a narrative, it produced a highly abstract and disjointed meta-narrative. [p. 191]

Considering how the stream of consciousness is narrative, a kind of story we tell ourselves even as it’s experienced from inside the story, temporal displacement and decontextualization enabled by built-in mental mechanisms have some far-reaching implications.  It’s reaching, no doubt, to suggest that our politics, as formulated by technocrats, are an incoherent stew of disjointed abstractions (soundbites, anyone?). And it’s a paradox that the worst offenders could hardly be described as analytical, left-brain types.

What may be going on, which is far beyond the scope of McGilchrist’s arguments up to my reading position in the book, is that technocrats, speaking through mind-numb candidates with nice hair and strong jaws, have intuitively or perhaps brilliantly concocted a bizarre meta-narrative that appeals strongly to left-brain categories but never manages to synthesize with the right hemisphere into an overarching narrative. The candidates can turn on a dime and spew inanities because frankly they’re just as flummoxed by words put in their mouths by campaign managers and strategists interested solely in winning elections, not in governing, as the general public, which goes goggle-eyed at the mere mention of iconic words such as freedom, liberty, and democracy, or alternately, family, wealth, and progress. Thus, one can perhaps embrace McGilchrist’s thesis that the Emissary (left brain), which should take its direction from and serve the Master (right brain) because that’s the way it’s structured biologically, has usurped control and is making us, in a word, insane.

We’re All Animals Now: In Psychology Today, “The Ideological Animal” provides this summary:

We’re easily manipulated by politics. We think our political stance is the product of reason, but we’re surprisingly malleable. Our essential political self is more a stew of childhood temperament, education, and fear of death.

Pretty much says what it says, little comment being necessary. But I’ll offer this: we tend to think of ourselves as smart animals (if we regard ourselves as animals at all), but scientific evidence continues to mount that like other large mammals we share social behaviors to a greater degree than we like to believe.

More on PoliPsy: An article originally published in The New Republic (republished by the Carnegie Endowment) by John Judis called “Death Grip: How Political Psychology Explains Bush’s Ghastly Success” adds to the argument that the public is led around by the nose. A similar argument could be made for Ronald Reagan’s remarkable success. Both presidents essentially carried water for corporate interests and ideologies that aligned with their own self-aggrandizement.

Lessons in Learned Helplessness: The Atlantic published an up-is-down, right-is-wrong-is-right article called “Cultivating Failure” about learning how to grow food. It’s a rich argument that teaching immigrant sons and daughters basic biology returns them to the fields they escaped in Mexico or elsewhere.

Success is Failure: The Guardian has an option column by Simon Jenkins that Eisenhower’s warning that the military-industrial complex would come to define us has been realized. Well, it’s pretty much been true since then, so not exactly a new development. Additionally, the invention of enemies to justify war was novelized two decades before the Eisenhower administration by George Orwell. Same old, same old, but it might as well be acknowledged anew.

Looking Backwards to the Future: An article in Logos by Philip Green called “Farewell to Democracy” describes our fairly brief flirtation with democracy in the West coming to its tawdry conclusion. The even wider perspective I’ve been seeing elsewhere suggests that all types of hierarchical social organization based on concentrations of power and rule of law are doomed to failure. Whether their brief, bright flame is worth it is perhaps yet another debate.

The Jesus Phone and its Discontents: An article in Commonweal by Andrew Bacevich called “Selling our Souls” tells the obvious, not that anyone wants to see or hear it: technolust ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. From other quarters, I can anticipate that the argument would be that since we’re soulless now anyway, there’s no real conflict.

Hanging by a Thread (or a rope): A brief summary of an interview with Sophie Shevardnadze by RT News (a useful alternative to mainstream Western media) states that modern capitalism is nearly kaput, which is another statement of the obvious to which most of us are blind.

Sensible Schooling: An article in the NY Times tells about a school operating in the heart of the silicon beast that refuses to allow computers in the classroom. This is even more ironic as the article states, “Three-quarters of the students here have parents with a strong high-tech connection.” Something about do as I say, not as I do belongs here.

One is the Loneliest Number: An article at Salon.com by Alice Karekezi called “Why Kids Need Solitude” describes how constant overstimulation blocks the conditions necessary for anything to sink in. The article is about education, but it arguably applies to just about everyone everywhere, not just kids in school. There’s simply no time for processing if the fire hose of information and stimulation aimed at us never gets turned off.

The Great Unwashed Masses: Charles Saatchi believes that Eurotrash can’t discern good art from bad as the works are regarded among collectors more as investment vehicles than artistic expressions. I’ve thought the same thing about American art and its audiences for years. But anytime a call for raising standards of taste and erudition appears, it’s attacked as elitist and snobbish.

Lives Lived in Denial: The NY Times reports that 60% of Americans believe they’re living the dream despite everything in shambles around them. I suppose this much is true if one’s dreams are nightmares.

Incarcerated America: Reuters reports on a study noting that by age 23, one-third of U.S. adults have been arrested. Such is life in the modern security state. The article discusses criminal activity, but I can’t help but wonder how many of the arrests were really over acts of dissidence.

Care-Givers Rn’t Us: A shocking account in the NY Times about doctors who learn nothing about care-giving but are only skilled at procedures reveals they overtreat due to perverse economic incentives that reward procedures well out of balance with consultation, which consultation they seem ill-suited to render unless of course procedures are indicated.

I had never seen a Ken Burns documentary before. This one has aged pretty well, especially considering how its subject is already well removed from the present day. Among the many impressions it made on me, it seemed very much that the people profiled, be they presidents, generals, or foot soldiers, were men of surprising integrity who still yet operated at human scale. One might expect to have seen any of them — even those quite famous in retrospect — walking along the streets in Washington, D.C.; Richmond, Virginia; or elsewhere. Much was made of generals who fought, were injured, and sometimes died with their troops, even though military officers have always been somewhat insulated from the thick of battle. So despite having made icons of them as we now look back upon the history they experienced, they were of decidedly human scale in their own time. Washington was undoubtedly the first superstar prez, for instance, but the office didn’t immediately confer upon Lincoln the awe in which we now hold him. Lincoln was actually quite disliked during his first term as president and is resented in the South even down to today.

In contrast, well into the era of mass media, Michael Jackson became known as the King of Pop and carried around him (or everyone projected onto him) a powerful aura or presence. Whereas the folks in the documentary about the stage show Jackson was mounting for his comeback (or swan song) just prior to his untimely death regarded him simultaneously as showbiz genius and saint among men (not even oblique mention was made of Jackson’s many legal, financial, and identity issues), Jackson apparently regarded himself with surprising humility and was more motivated by the work than by being Michael Jackson. No doubt his talent was quite unique. In fact, even though the film was only clips of rehearsal from the show, not yet a fully polished performance, Jackson was riveting to watch. I suspect that this is due in part to how media remakes people into mythological characters or demigods. Who among us would not admit to being star-struck when in the presence of someone as famous as Jackson (or Sherman or Davis)?

The peril, in my view, isn’t one of simple hubris, like the story of Icarus. Rather, it’s that so many of the products of our imagination are enlarged to a scale that is clearly dangerous. We meddle with powers we don’t well comprehend or control, as has been shown repeatedly with nuclear technology. But the impulse to think big is widespread. We regard ourselves as superior to the animals, though we are clearly one of them; we project ourselves into the skies and space as travelers, explorers, and would-be colonists; and our institutions take on lives of their own, often no longer serving the people who created them.

It’s as though SkyNet from the Terminator films is already amongst us, though perhaps not yet sentient and self-aware. It’s not the computer network, however, that is behaving amorally, like a machine or a blind, remorseless algorithm; it’s us. We have lost all sense of ourselves as individuals, as members of families and communities, or as humble servants of the public good. We now think of ourselves, or our idols and models at least, as superhuman, no longer mere participants in the pageant of life but directors and engineers of achievements (and destruction) on scales so vast and impersonal that we scarcely have the capacity to understand them. This may be one of the prices of hypercomplexity: a dangerous lack of awareness of consequence, and if awareness dawns, then indifference to it as well.

In the philosophical realm, discussions of ontological man interest me, though everything points instead to technological man or mass man. Tech man must bec0me something other than himself through the assistance of gadgetry. It’s not just cybernetics, which are surely coming as soon as the mind/computer bridge can be solved (technophiles can hardly wait for the Google implant, whatever its costs). Even now, most average Americans are content to leave knowledge and understanding “out there” at Wikipedia or some other resource to be tapped at will rather than doing the long work to acquire it “in here” where it has meaning and relevance. Tech man is the dream transhumanism, of course, with its undertones of self-hatred (I’d rather be an emotionless machine), grass is always greener (whatever comes next is always gonna be better), and grandiosity (must be no longer human in scale).

Ontological man, in contrast, is content to be who and what he is with his constraints, flaws, and yes sometimes even glory. That contentedness is lost on those always in the process of becoming rather than in being. It’s like the inability to enjoy a good meal, unable to settle into the actual experience because of preoccupations with becoming a connoisseur or trendsetter. The whole idea of ontology is a little too subtle for most of us, and I struggle myself with the idea that perhaps today might be enjoyed for its own sake rather than as a stepping stone to some future greatness, an endless pursuit of the carrot on the stick. I’d like to believe that we’re smart enough that the carrot wouldn’t work as a prod or goad the way it does with a mule, but even cursory evidence demonstrates otherwise.

Anachronistic resetting of operatic or theatrical works is a narrative device that sometimes works marvelously and sometimes renders the work unwatchable. Though not Taymor’s work, I turned off the movie Romeo + Juliet (sometimes given as William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet) reset as the story of rival gangs in Verona Beach (or was it Venice Beach, CA?), and I once played in the pit orchestra for Mozart’s Magic Flute staged as a Texas western (“Whale, howdy hay, y’all!!). In Titus, Taymor’s high concept blends without trace of apology ancient and modern Roman locations (some actually being Croatian), Weimar Germany decadence (citing Nazism and cabaret culture), and 1980s American kitsch. The costuming is similarly inventive and mismatched. While plain and obvious to the eye, these devices in Titus don’t detract as needless distractions or heedless destruction, though they do come across as rather self-aware. And like most other resettings, one should not really notice but simply go with it. However, especially when opulent production values practically scream for attention and the shifts between visual themes snap one’s head back and forth jarringly but without comment, I can’t help but to take special notice.

Titus joins a fairly crowded field of movies based on Shakespearean plays. I may be unusual in that I still feel some obligation to know this bit of our cultural heritage, even though I come to the plays primarily through movie adaptations and have never really considered them in print or read them aloud in classrooms or elsewhere. I read the beginnings of a couple online reviews, and though others critics are doubtlessly far more knowledgeable than I am about Shakespearean canon, I didn’t really care that it’s an early work of his (chronologically, no. 6 of 37) and therefore reputed to be not as fully developed thematically as his later works. It’s still got the rich, allegorical language and brutal, tragic elements.

Rendering late middle English intended for the stage into natural-sounding language is always tricky, and the actors fare well in Titus. One big advantage of viewing a DVD is that one can turn on captioning and track the speech visually as well as aurally. It was a big help for me, though it still takes quite a bit of decoding and a curious cognitive shift to hear that style of language as fluid. (And of course, many of Shakespeare’s references and allusions go right over my head.) Titus may be fortunate not to contain any of the more famous Shakespearean quotes. The other standard DVD bonus feature is the director’s commentary, and though I’ve only yet heard the first few minutes, Taymor starts by describing narrative choices rather than making technical observations (who cares what lens or what kind of dolly shot?) or relaying dumb anecdotes. In my experience, only a few movie commentaries are equally erudite and interested in discussing storytelling (The Name of the Rose and Something’s Gotta Give spring to mind).

I recommend the film, and it’s easy to see why Taymor earns the attention given her. I viewed Titus in perhaps 5 or 6 segments (the film runs rather long at around 2:40:00), but I intend to see it again and then hear the commentary in full, probably neither in one sitting (such is the modern world with its fragmented attention).

What that means for my participation at WebAnswers is that I am finding it harder to locate questions to which I want to contribute an answer. I’ve already steered clear of an inexhaustible stream of questions about medical and legal issues, pregnancy, custody, pets, and favorites. The bot questions (now that I recognize them as such) further reduce my activity potential, which has been more than a little questionable anyway in terms of the reward-to-effort ratio and my association with other regular contributors whose expertise is often unclear despite some impressive numbers.

Nevertheless, these are my latest awarded answers:

• Who has commented about ”the bimbo eruption”? To what is he referring? link
• What does POLICE stand for? (abbr) link
• Is it good for your body to run a marathon? link
• Is music essential to life? link
• Is there really such a thing as a victimless crime? link
• How should “economics” be considered and delineated. Is it truly “a discipline” or something else[?] link
• Was the Big Bang loud? link
• How many James Bond movies have been made? link
• Are we living in a simulated reality? link
• Training for marathons is bad for you? link

As usual, my previous sets of awarded answers can be seen here and here and here.

Sowing with salt was a practice in ancient warfare meant to destroy the soils of a conquered city or country to make it impossible for the conquered to grow food — a particularly nasty way of adding insult to injury. In the modern world, it’s occurring with alarming regularity due to a variety of factors. Plenty of information is out there to be had about salinization (see for example here, here, and here, the last of which appears to be pretty extensive), but do we learn from our mistakes and make the necessary adjustments? Don’t bother responding to that question; everyone already knows the answer. The numbers of ways we continue to insult our injured planet just keep mounting.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 11,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

I learn of new titles only infrequently, now that classical music is no longer available in record stores and browsing must be done online. Further, major orchestras have begun weaning themselves from the record labels as the means of production have been democratized. Some orchestras have also begun to concentrate on multimedia: DVDs of concert and stage performances or educational efforts aimed at illuminating the music. For instance, the San Francisco Symphony has a steadily expanding series called Keeping Score, while the Chicago Symphony Orchestra has its own multimedia stage production called Beyond the Score, an installment of which was made into a companion DVD to its CD recording of Shostakovich Symphony No. 4.

Shostakovich Against Stalin falls into the educational category; it’s a profile (not a full biography) of Soviet-era composer Dmitri Shostakovich and the symphonies he composed during Josef Stalin’s tyrannical reign, specifically, nos. 4–9. Unaccountably, Symphony No. 10, premiered the same year as Stalin’s death, with its furious scherzo depicting Stalin himself, is omitted. The DVD is replete with talking heads, many of them musicologists, friends and family of the composer, fellow composers, and even survivors of the Siege of Leningrad. These are interspersed with archival footage of the composer, street scenes, Stalinist propaganda films, and modern footage of conductor Valery Gergiev leading the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic (or sometimes Gergiev inexplicably riding around in the back of a cab). Musical excerpts of commercial recordings made by Gergiev with the Kirov Orchestra and the Rotterdam Philharmonic are also included. (The Kirov Orchestra also goes by the name Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra.) Which ensemble actually appears onscreen is a little up for grabs, but I recognized at least one member of the Rotterdam Philharmonic mugging for the camera. There are some amazing finds in the historical footage, including Shostakovich at the piano playing his own music, which is cleverly faded into from the orchestral playing. Video of people walking by corpses during the Siege are especially harrowing.

All this is very interesting, of course, and adds depth of understanding to the music, but I’m nonetheless bothered by yoking the music to imagery that often overwhelms the musical content — the same way musical soundtracks often telegraph emotional states in cinema that really ought to be earned through competent storytelling. While musical expression does indeed arise out of historical context, abstract forms such as the symphony are nonrepresentational, and their meanings ultimately lie beyond interpretations too closely tied to events.

The DVD tries to paint Shostakovich as doing battle with Stalin, valiantly resisting edicts from on high that Soviet music only celebrate the glories of Stalin and life in the U.S.S.R. as it embarked on modernization and industrialization before, during, and after WWII. Well, sure, that was all true to an extent, but it is unclear whether Shostakovich was actively resisting (as in denouncing Stalin via protest coded into the music), had knuckled under (due to very real threats to life and limb), or was simply expressing himself musically as best he could under sorely difficult circumstances. The final remarks on the DVD indicate that we have some great music as a result of this struggle, which is reminiscent of well-established tropes about great art being the product of suffering. If I were inclined to misinterpreting such remarks, I’d say we have Stalin to thank for the conditions under which Shostakovich’s great symphonies were conceived and executed. That interpretation is heinous, of course, but not so different from the one about an epic battle of wills between artist and state, eventually won through indomitable spirit and the self-congratulatory assessment of posterity.

As a listener of some erudition, none of this matters to my appreciation of the symphonies (never elsewhere called the “war symphonies”). The bitterness, sarcasm, cynicism, shrieking hysteria, and balefulness of much of Shostakovich’s music is obvious without the history lessons, and his mixture of grandiosity and resignation are equally apparent. However, those are negative descriptors that fit well with the DVD’s underlying theme of suffering and stridency. What’s missing is mention or illustration of the astonishing beauty in many musical passages, even those of heartbreaking sorrow, including, for instance, the plaintive oboe solo of the 2nd movt. of the 5th, the wailing woodwind chorale of the 3rd movt. of the 7th, the hammering machine of the ostinati everywhere in Shostakovich but especially in the chase-like scherzo (3rd movt.) of the 8th, or the awesome foreboding of the opening bass lines of the 1st movt. of the 10th (again, why out of scope?). The DVD, or more properly its creator Larry Weinstein, adopts a filter and thus cannot be all things to all people, but in doing so, it risks putting an extramusical straitjacket on the music that may be too influential on credulous viewers and listeners.

So at the end of the calendar year, having just passed through the year’s biggest by far consumer feeding frenzy (one of several scattered throughout the year), I began to wonder about the normalcy of surplus funds going into collecting stuff of one sort or another, which might fall under the term lifestyle. Appealing lifestyles usually revolved around material opulence even before Robin Leach’s preposterous and spiritually vacuous TV show Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Almost all of us aspire to such trappings as though limits to consumption do not exist in either of two senses: (1) one can only eat so much steak and drink so much wine or (2) the physical and financial wealth of the world can only support so much extraction and exploitation before being emptied out.

On a more mundane level, let’s say with respect to books, what drives a person to collect? At what point does bibliophilia, a love of books, cross over and become an abnormal behavior or psychological disorder, such as hoarding books (bibliomania), eating books (bibliophagy), compulsive stealing of books (bibliokleptomania), or burying book (bibliotaphy)? What causes Aunt Sally to go off the rails and become a ravenous collector of small porcelain figurines? I’m not a clinician of any sort, but my suspicion is that one of the main drivers is sublimation of a universal fear of scarcity. Difficulty meeting one’s physical needs (shelter, food, clothing, etc.) is not something most of us in the West have experienced first hand for several generations now (though demographics are changing), but living memory of the Great Depression is not quite yet gone. Similarly, the danger of not surviving a poor harvest and ensuing winter was very real prior to the 20th century, when more than 90% of American led rural agrarian lives. Social systems have evolved considerably since either of those eras, and with them the means of acquisition (just hop in the car and go to the grocery!). But whereas stockpiling and hoarding basic, essential commodities makes little sense (except when they are proxies for wealth) to most of us, we have accepted as normal and even desirable the analogue: needless collections.

• I believe that our civilization will inevitably collapse, in stages, over the course of this century, and that that collapse will bring immense suffering (though perhaps no more than the suffering that civilization inflicts now, every day, on the human and non-human creatures of this world).
• I believe that, in our desperate efforts to deny or delay inevitable collapse, we will do more damage to our environment and exhaust more of the planet’s natural wealth in the decades to come than has even been done to date.
• I believe that faith in technology, innovation, human ingenuity, ‘free’ markets, leaders, deities and spontaneous global consciousness-raising, to re-form civilization culture, are all desperate salvationist magical thinking, and that such thinking is foolish, dangerous and a distraction from coming to grips with what we can and must do.
• I believe ‘we’ are not the rational ‘individuals’ we imagine ourselves to be. ‘We’ are nothing more than a complicity of our bodies’ organs that evolved our minds for their survival purposes, minds that our culture is, in its struggle to survive, trying to seize control of to have our bodies instead do its bidding. We are all, now, victims of this chronically stressful body-vs.-culture war inside us, that has left us feeling exhausted, anxious, fearful, powerless, helpless, culturally imprisoned, intellectually paralyzed, self-blaming, and physically and emotionally ill.

I subscribe fully to these assertions but have not quoted the rationale behind them. That can be found at his website. It’s significant that Pollard has moved on from his messianic save-the-world message to making peace with himself over the guilt, shame, horror, and despair that accompany recognition of our unstoppable self-destruction. His struggle with these issues is at least double the duration of my own, so I suspect he has processed more of it and perhaps graduated through stages (à la Kübler-Ross) I’m still in the midst of.

Bright-siders might object that Pollard and I have essentially given up in view of our dank pessimism. We both admit publicly that nothing can be done really to stem the awesome force of 7 billion people (and rising) demanding to be fed, clothed, housed, and entertained — but not educated (not truly educated, if one pauses even briefly to think about it). Liberation from the demand that anyone can should fix the unfixable or indeed save the world sounds like a great load lifted. I’m not there yet. In fact, I’m still for all intents and purposes paralyzed at the prospect of it all looming before us. So perhaps I deserve a double-whammy, since about all I’m good for is seeing and pointing like some gawker at the scene an accident — an accident where we are the next victims. Most of us would rather not see the death blow coming.