Not someone we can afford to forget.

In replying to the question of why apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic narratives have become so popular in American culture in recent years, one may seek the causes in the major events of the past ten years – the newfound sense of vulnerability caused by the attacks of 9-11, the deepest economic downturn since the Great Depression, and the destruction which overtook New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.  But I was recently at a conference where I got into a conversation about the subject with a professor of politics, who argued that the apocalyptic mood of the culture is nevertheless not quite commensurate with actual events in the world.  The US might be undergoing a diminution of geopolitical influence, but this loss of power is relative, not absolute.  The US is still the most powerful and influential country in the world, even if it is less capable of projecting its power in certain regions of the globe.  Indeed, the scaling down of US power is taking place largely on its own initiative — its hand is not being forced by a military disaster on the scale of the annihilation of the Athenian expedition on Sicily.  While the economic crisis has disrupted the lives of millions across the globe, there is no immediate prospect of famine or the loss of other necessities in the industrialized world.  A global pandemic poses a serious threat, but it remains at present one fear among many drifting through the clouds of an interconnected globe.  The industrialized nations might be faced with economic and possibly political readjustments that are painful for many, but on a historical scale, these changes are quite minor beside such upheavals as the fall of the Roman empire, the coming of the Black Death, or the French revolution.

So does the glut of films, novels, and TV shows in the US dedicated to portraying the apocalyptic collapse of industrial society amount to an overreaction to our current predicaments?  In my book I consider the popularity of apocalyptic narratives as a symptom of the waning of historical consciousness, by which I mean not only historical memory but also the loss of the capacity to believe the possibility of enacting change on the stage of history.  This sense of helplessness turns the specter of historical change into a nightmarish prospect, something which is unwilled, an inhuman force which reveals the vanity and hopelessness of human efforts to control their fates.  But accounting for the sense of disproportion between our historical and economic predicament and our culture’s response to it requires a greater sense of historical specificity.  For it is the lack of historical points of reference that make American apocalyptic narratives so emotionally wrenching, while also depriving them of wit and subtlety.  J. G. Ballard and Michel Houellebecq provide compelling and persuasive depictions of apocalyptic upheaval and transformation, but it is hard to imagine an American writer taking on the motifs of the inhuman with the wry, sardonic, and detached gaze they cast on collective delirium and psychopathology.  Perhaps this is because American culture lacks a concept of radical evil – it is difficult for us to view atrocities, especially our own, as possessing a wholly gratuitous character.  Instead, our violence proves to be inextricably embedded in a redemptive framework, serving to pave the way for a society of universal consumption, a McDonald’s where the descendents of oppressors and the oppressed may alike enjoy cheap, fattening, chemically modified food, while a smaller number among the former rake in the profits.

Both Ballard and Houellebecq, for all their fascination with the global expansion of American values, nevertheless belong to the Old World, and in Ballard’s case, that Old World also includes Asia.  They write from a historical consciousness that runs more deeply than that of their American counterparts.  This depth is not merely a function of quantity, in that Europeans simply have a longer history than Americans.  Rather there is a significant aspect of historical experience that is missing in American culture, which I think goes a substantial distance in accounting for both the mainstream popularity and the hysterical character of our apocalyptic narratives: the experience of being conquered and dominated by a foreign power.

Almost every people, and the majority of countries, in the world have in their historical memory the experience of suffering a defeat in war that led to their being ruled by a foreign enemy.  France was conquered by Nazi Germany, and before Napoleon won his great victories at Austerlitz and Jena, the lands of the German princes were turned into the slaughter-grounds of the wars of religion.  The Russians, Chinese, Arabs, Koreans, and Persians were conquered by the Mongols.  Asia and Africa came under the domination of the Western powers in the 19th and 20th centuries.  But the more ancient a people is, the more memories it has of being subjugated by a foreign other.  Even normally unconquerable England, as Simon Schama reminds us, in essence surrendered to a Dutch armada when William of Orange forced James II into exile and ascended to the throne with his wife Mary.  In most instances, the loss of independence and autonomy becomes a formative aspect of national identity, serving as a decisive rallying point in the constitution of a people, as in the mythologization by Serbian nationalists of the defeat at Kosovo in 1368 or the reverence of the Vietnamese for the Trung sisters, who died as martyrs in the struggle for liberation against the Han dynasty in 42 CE.  While the memory of defeat in war and conquest by the enemy is too often associated in the present with the nursing of grievances that explode in outbursts of fanatical and murderous nationalism, such an experience nevertheless grants a people a broader sense of what is possible in the realm of historical experience.  Foremost among the lessons of such an experience would be the rather obvious truth that no country or people remains ascendant forever, that the process of decline is an unavoidable part of history.  Power, wealth, and influence, as well as social stability and strategic initiative, are finite quantities that dissipate and vanish over time.  One could furthermore add that the experience of conquest provides a powerful incentive to be conscious of how one’s behavior, and the behavior of a society, can make a country vulnerable to forces beyond one’s control.  It provides a kind of hidden railing to check and constrain individual behavior, and to keep it within reasonably cautious limits.

It is said that the American dream stands as a thoroughgoing repudiation of the laws of historical thermodynamics, in its insistence that things will only get better in the future, that abundance is an unalterable norm, and thus that to place constraints on one’s material expectations and ambitions is hopelessly wrongheaded and defeatist.  But in the absence of the experience of foreign conquest, which is a form of traumatic adversity that is not identical to apocalyptic collapse, there seems to be little in American culture that might provide a pivot on which to discard illusions that have become destructive and to embrace a new way of life that is better suited to the times.  Such flexibility and realism, it seems, have been thrown out with the bath-water of the constraining customs and undemocratic hierarchies of the Old World.  Our culture has become bereft of a middle ground between the confident possession of autonomy and the total breakdown of civilized restraints.

Susan Faludi, in an article and book, argues that the attacks of 9/11 opened an old wound in the American unconscious, the bloody war fought by the early colonists against the Wampanoag led by their Chief Metacom (more widely known as King Philip), in which the adult male Puritans were often unable to protect their women and children against the warriors of the enemy.  9/11, in her view, provoked the destructive response of reviving fantasies of omnipotence to repress the “awareness of our vulnerability.”  It is my contention, by contrast, that what is formative for us in the present is a historical experience that we have never known.

The lack of this experience constrains our ability to understand history as well as to create meaningful narratives.  As Simone Weil points out in her famous essay, “The Iliad: Poem of Force,” it is the ability to view war from the perspective of both the conquerors and the conquered, that makes the epic a genuine advance in ethical consciousness, unprecedented and seldom equaled by later works. What gives this insight the status of a moral breakthrough is the “extraordinary equity” that animates it – the brutalities and indignities of war are shown afflicting Greek and Trojan alike (Weil, 179).  The impartiality with which the poem gazes upon the victors and the vanquished strips away the illusion that one can ever master force and exempt oneself from the fate of becoming reduced to the horrifying and inert condition of a thing.  But such dispassionate lucidity, which leads one to wonder whether the author of the poem is indeed a Trojan and not a Greek, is born from the experience of defeat, the trauma of becoming oneself conquered.  Weil refers to Thucydides, who recounts that the Achaeans, eighty years after the sack of Troy, were themselves were conquered and uprooted as refugees.  Only a people that, having once ravaged and plundered the cities of others, was forced to endure the pillaging of their own homes and the slaughter of their loved ones, could come to acknowledge the truth of force.

The turn toward apocalypse, then, serves as a kind of groping in the dark for a lesson that other peoples have already learned.  Whether such a lesson can withstand the assaults of neoliberal affluence is a topic for another post.

Text cited:

Simone Weil, The Simone Weil Reader, ed. George A. Panichas.  Wakefield, RI: Moyer Bell, 1977.

Nuclear terrorism, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, cyberwarfare, and the depletion of resources necessary for running the industrial economy – for J. G. Ballard, missing from this list of the disasters most feared in the present would be the calamity in which there is no disaster.  Millennium People, his novel of 2003, gives us a glimpse into the kind of social problems that would prevail in an affluent, high tech society that had reached the point where it had little to fear from external dangers and could take for granted its continued prosperity.  That human beings might be fundamentally unsuited for such a pacific existence finds support from history as well as evolutionary biology: it is only in the late twentieth century that human beings, at least in the industrialized world, had within their grasp a way of life in which there was no need to struggle for necessities – one needed only to struggle for luxuries, and even then struggle was not always requisite either.  One could also describe this situation as an impasse in which a species long inured to contending with a hostile environment and unrelenting competition from rivals, finds itself at last without any natural enemies.  If human beings only truly take notice of and value what they perceive can be taken away from them, in other words, those things they understand to be under some kind of threat, what happens to their concerns and cares if all significant threats have become swept into the dustbin of history?  The easiest and most immediate answer would be to invent new threats, and thereby bring about one’s servitude to new forms of necessity.  For we do not find intensely meaningful those things that we create or choose, but rather those things to which we find ourselves forced to submit.

The protagonist of Millennium People, the psychiatrist David Markham, is drawn into the sects and rituals of weekend activism after a bomb on a baggage carousal at Heathrow Airport takes the life of his ex-wife Laura.  The fact that he is a psychiatrist supplies a productive point of entry for examining the desires and anxieties of the highly educated professionals who dedicate their spare time to protesting an enormous range of causes: calling for the removal of nuclear waste stations, attacking travel agencies, and defending badger dens from development.  Convinced that the culprit behind the bombing spun out from one of the more deranged orbits within these protest movements, Markham goes undercover at various demonstrations in and around London in the hopes of uncovering clues that would lead him to the Heathrow bombing.  For Markham, the weekend demonstrations are far more than political events, rather, their essence can only be described as religious: “Protest movements, sane and insane, sensible and absurd, touched almost every aspect of life in London, a vast web of demonstrations that tapped a desperate need for a more meaningful world. . . At times, as I joined a demonstration against animal experiments or Third-World debt, I sensed that a primitive religion was being born, a faith in search of a god to worship” (pp. 37-38).

What does Markham mean by a “more meaningful world”?  The world of which Markham speaks is not the narrow and familiar world of pleasures and fears in which we are locked by our own preferences.  Instead, one enters it by means an encounter with otherness that is both painful and pleasurable, painful because it reveals to us the limited nature of own knowledge and experience, and pleasurable because it fills us with new and unfamiliar sensations, which are richer and more potent than ordinary freedom and mundane happiness.  A “more meaningful world” is by definition beyond one’s grasp, as a middle class, law-abiding individual.  One needs contact with someone or something more intelligent, more impulsive, more insane, more dangerous, or otherwise less scrupulous than oneself in order to gain access to it.  We may note that in premodern times, such a role was typically fulfilled, for better and for worse, by the Church.  We may note as well that the fascination exerted by the criminal, the cult leader, and the tyrant arises from their promise to transport us to regions where we would, on our own, never seek to venture.  The enduring popularity of the film Fight Club can be attributed to how it depicts, without quite laying bare, the charismatic appeal of the leader who offers his followers psychic rejuvenation through acts of physical violence and wanton destruction.

As in Fight Club, the protagonist falls in with a group of militants dedicated to committing acts of destruction to shake middle class society out of its spiritual torpor.  But unlike in Fight Club, these gallant activists are longer in the tooth, paunchier, and more grey-haired, making Millennium People refreshingly free of the youthful glamour that absolves all mischief for Hollywood audiences.  They are also portrayed with a biting humor, not least when they are most hell-bent on spreading mayhem.  The most forceful personality in the group belongs to a film studies lecturer named Kay Churchill, who has been suspended from her academic post for giving her students the assignment to shoot a pornographic film.  Her reasoning: “I thought they needed a day trip to reality.  There’s too much jargon around – ‘voyeurism and the male gaze,’ ‘castration anxieties.’  Marxist theory-speak swallowing its own tail. . . Fucking is what they do in their spare time, so why not look at it through a camera lens?  They wouldn’t learn much about sex, but they’d learn a lot about film” (p. 53).  Kay is a force of nature whose outbursts of righteous indignation are charged with an irresistible sexual allure, enabling her to become the telegenic center of attention for both police and protesters.  Markham becomes her lover knowing full well that once the affair ends, she will miss him for ten minutes and take up the “game of emotional snakes and ladders” leading to her bedroom with the next lodger in her house (p. 212-213).  But the psychiatrist also comes across Kay holding a photograph to her chest with tears in eyes – it is a snapshot of her daughter, who moved away to Australia with her father after he was awarded custody over the girl.  “Only the deepest obsession could assuage that kind of sadness,” reflects Markham.

Dust covers Kay’s coffee table and writing desk like “an ectoplasmic presence, a parallel world with its own memories and regrets” (p. 50).  Ballard is not poking fun in this instance at the slovenly habits of a middle-aged single professional woman.  Rather, the fact that Kay does not keep these wooden surfaces bright and shiny is a sign of Ballard’s identification with her.  For a steady source of irritation for Ballard, a single father of three, was how female journalists, whenever they showed up at his modest suburban home to interview him, would without fail note the clumps of dust accumulating in the hallways and over the furniture.  One wonders whether Ballard wishes for Kay’s outlandishness to be more seductive and intoxicating than the extremity of his own vision.  Trying to recruit Markham to their subversive activities, she rails against the spiritual oppression of the middle class in Britain, who are enslaved by their educations, sense of responsibility, and adherence to the law.  When the skeptical Markham asks rhetorically, “like the poor in a Glasgow tenement?” Kay replies without skipping a beat and without a trace of irony, “Exactly.”

But Kay is anything but a humorless scold who wants to announce to one and all the deep personal sacrifices she is making to combat the injustices of the world.  Rather, the operations she undertakes with her group have an air of devilish playfulness, with a lightness of touch that is largely missing in Fight Club.  Pretending to be carrying out a lifestyle survey, Kay asks a housewife if she is in favor of wife swapping, and then steers the conversation towards the legalization of bestiality, after getting the exurbanite to state that she is in favor of consensual sex.  Another interviewee, a female doctor, is asked how often she cleans her toilet.  Kay then suggests that she have her family bathe less often, on the grounds that “natural body odours are an important means of communication, especially within families” and would give her time to “adopt a freer lifestyle” (p. 88).  Kay declares that she and her group seek to root out the beliefs and practices that serve to put the middle class in the straitjacket of proper behavior, the social codes that dictate the “right way to have sex, treat your wife, flirt at tennis parties or start an affair” (p. 89).  But what Kay herself feels about the method of liberation she so mischievously prescribes to others is something of an enigma wrapped in a hypocrisy.  She tells Markham that she is also busy unlearning these tyrannical bourgeois protocols, but makes sure to assuage what she detects must be for him a grave reservation, “Don’t worry, I still shower every day” (p. 89).

Such double-edged characterizations, in which a single gesture can act as both a warning and a come-on, pervade the novel — they are the hallmark of Ballard’s novels, which effortlessly create the vertiginous effect that accompanies the movement of stumbling into a world more historical and thus more real than one’s own.  This playful and alarming sense of ambiguity defines the revolt of the middle class that breaks out in an affluent housing development called Chelsea Marina.  The doctors, academics, and civil servants residing there, confronted by a negligent management company that keeps raising fees while refusing to do repairs (“You have to plan when you need a shit,” complains one of the subversives [p. 79]), decide to go on strike against their school fees, maintenance charges, and utility bills.  They set up barricades against the police, set fire to cars, and hurl a barrage of souvenir stones gathered from tropical beaches in the Seychelles and Mauritius on the officials attempting to serve an eviction notice.  But they also turn to shoplifting from nearby supermarkets and delicatessens, and cannily maneuver their toddlers as human shields to deter police brutality.  The vehemence of their resistance makes the working-class refuse collectors too fearful to enter the development and do their work.

Walking past the burned out hulks of BMWs and Volvos sitting along the empty streets of the abandoned by its residents, Markham lingers over the discarded detritus of the educated middle class: “The skip was filled with books, tennis rackets, children’s toys, and a pair of charred skis.  Beside a school blazer with scorched piping was an almost new worsted suit, the daytime uniform of a middle-ranking executive, lying among the debris like the discarded fatigues of a soldier who had thrown down his rifle and taken to the hills.  The suit seemed strangely vulnerable, the abandoned flag of an entire civilization. . . “ (p. 8).  But if the residents of Chelsea Marina, recognizing themselves as the new proletariat, have fought a desperate struggle against the government and the police, their risky and provocative actions appear wildly of out proportion to the fate they seek to avert.  When Markham asks why the residents won’t simply to move in response to the deliberate negligence of the management company, which is in cahoots with developers eager to tear down the houses and build more expensive units, Vera, one of Kay’s comrades-in-arms, replies, “We’re all locked into huge mortgages.  People have sky-high school fees, and the banks breathing down their necks.  Besides, where do we move to?  Darkest Surrey?  Some two-hour commute to Reading or Guildford?” (p. 79).

The middle class professionals of Chelsea Marina carry on street battles with the police in order to avoid their banishment to more distant and less posh neighborhoods.  While the reader, like Markham, is seduced by their political commitment, their willingness to risk life and limb for the sake of what they consider to be right, it is nevertheless impossible to escape the thought that what they are fighting for does not merit such extreme sacrifice.  While their grievances against the management company are fully justified, the revolt of the middle class takes on a momentum that carries it beyond mere economic concerns.  Liberal democratic ideals like justice and equality proves to be thin gruel compared to the trangressive thrills offered by the suspension of the rules governing everyday reality.  The loss of reality comes through in the hyperbolic identifications made by the bourgeois extremists in decrying their plight, the readiness and utter lack of constraint with which they compare their situation to the gulag and the Holocaust.

Millennium People calls to mind, in a somewhat satirical manner, Giorgio Agamben’s contention that the distinction, foundational for classical politics, between “private life and political existence,” no longer holds in the present epoch, since sovereign power has achieved complete domination over human life (Homo Sacer, p. 187).  Whereas for Agamben the catastrophe of modern politics is exemplified by the unchecked power of the state, for Ballard, the crisis stems from the bourgeois individual’s own conflicting desires. As the novel’s diabolus ex machina, a doctor working with severely handicapped children, puts it:

“People don’t like themselves today.  We’re a rentier class left over from the last century.  We tolerate everything, but we know that liberal values are designed to make us passive.  We think we believe in God but we’re terrified by the mysteries of life and death.  We’re deeply self-centered but can’t cope with the idea of our finite selves.  We believe in progress and the power of reason, but are haunted by the darker sides of human nature.  We’re obsessed with sex, but fear the sexual imagination and have to be protected by huge taboos.  We believe in equality but hate the underclass.  We fear our bodies and, above all, we fear death.  We’re an accident of nature, but we think we’re at the centre of the universe.  We’re a few steps from oblivion, but we hope we’re somehow immortal” (p. 139)

What this means for a bourgeois society undergoing economic hardship, just as it does for one that is unshaken in its confidence in future growth, is the loss of any sense of reasonable equilibrium in political life.  What burdens are fair to ask of every individual?  How are we to distinguish hobbies from duties, or to separate necessary desires from superfluous ones?  Such an equilibrium underpins broad social expectations of fairness and reciprocity.  The fact that such expectations have become a chimerical quantity is in my view the greatest obstacle to a politics of economic justice.

Texts cited:

Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).

J. G. Ballard, Millennium People (London: Harper Perennial, 2004).

Keiko never forgets the grudges she bears against the one she loves.

Himizu is a startlingly inventive film that contains an astonishing constellation of references. It is Heavenly Creatures mated with Krazy Kat, Taxi Driver getting rolled over into Earthquake, and Rebel without a Cause stalked by a manic pixie dream girl. For all the unruly diversity of its sources, the film ultimately adds up to a remarkably coherent whole that is as distinctive and original as it is powerfully moving. It is not at all a pastiche that produces a detached viewing experience heavy on irony, but rather delivers raw emotional punches leavened with quirky moments of humor. In fact, Himizu is the best film about a troubled, nihilistic young person that I have ever seen.

The disaster that overtook Japan on March 11 has conveyed to the world the image of a determined and resilient people stoically enduring hardship and picking themselves up to rebuild the devastated sections of the country just as the entire nation had been rebuilt after the Second World War. Certainly the adults in the film who have lost their homes convey cheerfulness and persistence in the aftermath of disaster, but not even the devastation of his town can wipe the blank, jaded look of indifference from the eyes of the protagonist, a fourteen year-old boy named Sumida.  Sumida looks just as alienated as he most likely was before the earthquake and tsunami. He lives with his mother in a small house out of which they run a modest business renting out boats. Every now and then Sumida casts a rueful glance at a shack that is mostly submerged in water, which relays that their lives have become more constrained since the disaster.

The look on Sumida’s face is so blank and withdrawn that his teacher, who is given to making effusive speeches about the capacity of the Japanese people to bounce back from devastation, is provoked into singling him out in the classroom for being obstinate in his gloom and state of demoralization. One wants to believe the teacher’s words and to hope that he can raise the morale of the students and inspire them to get involved in the recovery of their country. Yet Sumida’s impassive expression communicates a more elusive and troubling truth: the teacher’s enthusiastic and hopeful words are not the words of his generation. As much as the greatest worry of any teacher and parent is whether his or her words are getting through, nevertheless any teacher and parent must eventually come around to realize that his or her words do not have real meaning for the young person. Ultimately, the young person must speak and hear his own words, and until that time comes, there is little that the older generation can do aside from doling out copious quantities of nagging advice.

The film takes Sumida’s perspective in portraying the well-meaning adults around him as ridiculous and mostly ineffectual. His own father is despicable and violent, telling Sumida openly that the boy should have drowned long ago, so that the alcoholic father could have collected the insurance money. His mother runs off with a truck driver, leaving a note saying that he is on his own. Sumida’s classmate Keiko, who is infatuated with him, offers him unconditional support, offering to quit school and work at his business for free, but Sumida rejects her offers and advances, often resorting to abusive behavior to drive her away. Sumida’s rough treatment of Keiko is somewhat mitigated not only by the far more brutal beatings he receives from his father and from the yakuza members to whom his father owes a vast sum of money, but also by Keiko’s sheer pluck. She is unhesitant about fighting back, and on each occasion Sumida angers her, she places a rock in her pocket, assuring him that once her pocket is full of these “grudge rocks,” she will throw all of them at him. Keiko plays Krazy to Sumida’s Ignatz, though Keiko is the one who collects the bricks. Keiko initially strikes the viewer as loopy and a little unhinged – she writes down Sumida’s sayings on papers that she pastes all over her bedroom walls, and she acts with childish enthusiasm in promoting the boat rental business, even though Sumida has refused her help. But Keiko emerges as the moral center of the film, whose quirkiness is merely the visible aspect of a commitment that is as discerning as it is unconditional. She recites repeatedly a poem by Villon, which, over time, reveals how Sumida and Keiko achieve self-understanding in the act of repeating the same lines about knowing the difference between those who labor and those who loaf, and those who are rosy-cheeked and those who are pale.

Sumida responds to the awfulness and desperation of his personal life by deciding to go out and kill people who are destructive to society. Because he feels that his own life is pointless, he reasons that he may as well provide a needed service that the normal law-abiding citizen will not perform. The scene in which he covers himself in mud, determined to go out and murder, is horrifyingly reminiscent of the scenes in Heavenly Creatures showing the imaginary kingdom dreamed up by the two girls. Sono shows a touch of subtle humor when the silhouette of the large knife Sumida carries in a shopping bag becomes visible as he passes under certain types of lighting. Sumida himself finds vigilantism to be rough going when, encountering a half-naked woman covered in bruises who drags a chain wrapped around her ankle, the woman implores him not to rescue her, because her injuries are the result of her own choice. But his spree is cut short when Sumida learns that one of the homeless adults living nearby has somehow found the money to pay off his father’s debt, in a subplot that is by turns hilarious and deeply disturbing. Even the yakuza boss who had beaten him brutally takes time out from his underworld activities to exhort Sumida to be conscious of the many choices he has as a young person.

Sumida is someone who does not want to act unless he first believes in what he is going to do. He is not only unsure about whether he wants a new life, but also about whether he is even capable of wanting it. It is thus fitting that things conclude on a road, with words that were once pointless and empty being given the equivalent of a moral CPR.

Andrea Mantegna, detail from Pallas and the Vices

The problem with making compassion into the foundation of an ethic is that compassion by itself does not provide a very solid incentive to conquer one’s fears, to struggle against one’s weaknesses, or to pursue undertakings that are high in risk, low in material reward, and provide gratification that cannot be accounted for in terms of the crude calculus of sex, money, and power. Compassion leads us to feel sympathy for others, but it is of limited use in helping us to understand their grievances, ambitions, and aspirations, and is of even less value in enabling us to determine the extent to which the desires, animosities, and anxieties of the other are justified. The latter task involves two contrary movements, first in the form of detachment, in which we move away from our immediate emotional response to the person, and second in reflecting on our own passions, our own capacities for injustice, anger, and excess. Compassion by itself does not obligate us to look within ourselves, or to confront instances in which we ourselves have been blinded by rage, passion, or humiliation.  Instead, it is a projection of our own softness onto others, which exempts us from engaging with the other in the terms in which he or she sees himself or herself.

In the NY Times review of Steven Pinker’s latest book, we find the following bien pensant commonplace from Peter Singer:

“We prefer life to death, and happiness to suffering, and we understand that we live in a world in which others can make a difference to whether we live well or die miserably. Therefore we will want to tell others that they should not hurt us, and in doing so we commit ourselves to the idea that we should not hurt them.”

There is a total obliviousness here to the fact that human beings are comparative creatures, for whom happiness is not something fixed and settled for all time, but changes, often drastically, with the rising expectations and material wealth of a society. It is these rising expectations that arouse envy in people who might otherwise have every reason, historically and rationally speaking, to be happy (steady access to food and reliable shelter, a modest income, a family), but find themselves made discontented by the perception that there are others enjoying an even greater happiness than them in the form of earning vast wealth, possessing a more attractive physical appearance, enjoying a far greater number of  sexual partners, etc.

There is a stronger desire than the desire not to die and the desire to be happy: the desire to be exceptional. This can take the form of violating the dominant values of a society simply for the sake of negating them, even if these values are as enlightened as the ones stated by Singer. The drive for distinction is the source of enormous social disruption as well as immense creativity. If even only one person experiences this desire strongly enough, it is often the case that the many who do not will prove no match for such intensity, as the history of dictators bear out, because the desires of the many for happiness is always a moderate desire, one which is not ready to sacrifice everything for its fulfillment, because it considers unthinkable the very possibility of sacrificing anything. It has no answer for unwavering commitment that risks everything. Tenderhearted liberalism reflects an obstinate determination not to learn what the person driven by a singular passion has learned: that pain is the best teacher.

If the virtue of courage often coexists with a tendency toward impulsiveness and recklessness, then compassion can accompany a general slackening of the spirit. But it is easy to see why people living in an individualistic, affluent, and fragmented society would gravitate toward an ethics based on sympathy, because compassion is the only virtue which arouses no disagreement. It is also the virtue that demands the least of the individual, unlike temperance and chastity, which entail self-control, and charity and diligence, which call for action. The illusion of linking compassion to progress and evolution masks the rigid and ultimately unreasonable demand that the other respect one’s show of tenderhearted feelings.

From World on a Wire: the CEO and his henchmen.

An important measure of speculative narrative consists of its prescience – how well it anticipates the future.  The test of a great work of art, IMHO, is whether it rewards multiple viewings or readings.  Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s nearly forgotten science fiction film of 1973, World on a Wire (Welt am Draht), merits a place of singular distinction with respect to the first criterion, but it is not a work that I am in a hurry to watch a second time.

The film concerns a research institute that has, with support from a powerful and shady corporation, created a virtual world called Simulacron.  This world is populated by entities, composed of masses of data, that believe themselves to be human beings.  The purpose of this virtual world is to enable its creators to play out various scenarios in order to gain a better grasp of the future, and the economic and geopolitical advantages such insights would confer.  But the creators lose control over this world when their digital creations begin to appear in the real world and plant doubts in the minds of at least two characters that the world they inhabit might also be no less artificial.

It is hard not to be amazed throughout the film, originally made for German television with a running time of three and a half hours, over how eerily it anticipates cyberspace, virtual reality, and the whole subgenre of science fiction films that explore such themes as the illusory nature of human identity, the abolition of reality, and alternate worlds.  One could point to Philip K. Dick as the major source of influence, but it’s still remarkable how Fassbinder’s film encompasses the key motifs that have become familiar in contemporary science fiction, especially cyberpunk.  I found World on a Wire far more charming than special effects-driven blockbusters in the mold of The Matrix.  When a character experiences the distortion of reality in Fassbinder’s film, he gets a headache – no fancy overpriced CGI here.

But where Fassbinder chooses to take his material is somewhat disappointing.  The pacing is uneven, the plot meanders, and Fassbinder doesn’t show enough conviction in working out the film’s themes.  The world inside the computer looked to me like East Germany from the outside, and like pre-World War II Germany in its interiors.  The missed opportunity of the film lies in not working with these historical and ideological markers to map out the simulated world and to shape the conflicts at the heart of the film.  Instead, it’s as though Fassbinder traveled into the cinematic future and watch Blade Runner, Existenz, The Thirteenth Floor, Dark City, as well as The Matrix trilogy, and then returned to his own time to give a slightly disdainful and desultory take on the same material.

This is not to say that the film contains some well-executed sequences.  The ending is in particular quite memorable, confronting the audience with an unsettling sense of ambiguity in giving the two opposed fates of the protagonist equal weight.  The film does manage to succeed quite well in having it both ways: a brutal killing and salvation by love.  There is a scene in a nightclub in which the song “Lili Marleen,” sung by a female singer, is interrupted by the martial chorus of the “Westerwald.”  It’s also a nice touch that Klaus Löwitsch, who later absconds to Australia as the war veteran husband in The Marriage of Maria Braun, is one who sticks around this time, as his character replaces the head scientist who mysteriously vanishes.

The kind of science fiction that exposes the world to be an illusory construction echoes the gnostic myth in which uncreated spirits are held captive in bodies by malignant agents called archons.  What Fassbinder’s film maintains, and what Hollywood films typically leave aside, is the gnostic doctrine that the physical world, which is our prison, is simply one level of the cosmos, and that in liberating ourselves from this world, our task of emancipation is not over, as higher levels of captivity await us.  He also raises the problematic whereby we ourselves can serve as the archons for another group of imprisoned entities.

The Path of Salvation

The 2009 horror film Daybreakers, in which a plague has turned most human beings into vampires, provides as overt allegory for the dependence of advanced industrial societies on fossil fuels, so it’s nice in a slightly regressive sort of way that salvation in the film comes from getting behind the wheel of a speeding, out of control vintage Chevy.  It also contains supporting performances by Sam Neill and Willem Dafoe, whose film careers took off, respectively, after their portrayals of an underachieving (by today’s standards) Antichrist and a deeply ambivalent Jesus of Nazareth (it’s too bad that Graham Chapman is not around to fill out the triumvirate).

The few surviving humans are hunted relentlessly by the bloodsuckers, who, to their misfortune, now make up the majority.  The humans they have caught are kept comatose and hooked up to machines that extract their vital fluids, in many-tiered platforms that recall the limitless levels of dreaming pods that make up the Matrix.  They are housed in a complex owned by the Bromley Marks Corporation, this fictional world’s red-dyed corn syrup version of Monsanto or Halliburton.  But their supply of blood is being rapidly exhausted — there are not enough humans left in the wild to replace those that die once they are all used up.  The CEO of the corporation, played by Sam Neill pushes his top scientists to develop a blood substitute that does not skimp on the iron content and preserves the metallic aftertaste, giving a grim inspirational speech in which he quotes the arch-realist William T. Sherman.

They're not free-range humans.

Ethan Hawke, whose moroseness is usually well done, plays Edward Dalton, the lead hematologist at the firm. Adding to his glumness is the fact that he avoids drinking human blood, taking nourishment instead from a concoction made from the blood of pigs, which would make him something of a vegan in vampire society.  His work in the laboratory is made especially urgent by the fact that vampires who do not get their regular allowance of blood lapse irreversibly into a feral state, their features becoming increasingly grotesque and their behavior uncontrollably violent.  These subsiders, as they are known, provide the second major threat to vampire society.  The other major task of the soldiers, among whom include Frankie, Edward’s brother, in addition to hunting humans, involves remedying the problem posed by this violent underclass by wiping them out.

Daybreakers contains interesting and timely ideas.  An economic system that cannot sustain itself in its present form and is in need of a radical transformation, if collapse is to be avoided.  The insatiability of the desires that drive the society to its destruction.  The painful ordeal involved in breaking with the existing state of affairs.  It moreover contains some startlingly memorable images: a vampire blazing in flames after flying through the windshield of his car; vampires rioting at a coffee stand when they are informed that the blood content in their lattés has been reduced; a group of manacled subsiders being dragged into daylight by an armored vehicle, defiantly raging at the soldiers overseeing their extermination; the gaze of longing which a vampire father turns ominously on a picture of his runaway, still-human daughter; an orgiastic feeding frenzy that ensues when one group of vampire soldiers encounters another group that has returned to being human.

But as various reviewers and several friends have noted, the film does not manage to develop these ideas and images as fully as it might.  Instead, the demands of the genre, i.e. the need for chase sequences, take up too much screen time and prevent the film from becoming a fascinating exploration of a grim and desperate world that mirrors the fears and drives of contemporary capitalist society.  One missed opportunity comes about when the CEO Bromley becomes inadvertently cured of his vampirism.  This moment in the film could have been the occasion for reckoning with and regret over his past actions, or for a deeper look into the fatalism that would lead an individual to reject and repudiate the cure to his affliction.  Instead, the film opts for the conventional path of having Dalton and his female companion Audrey take revenge against the predatory boss.

The film’s critique of capitalism has moreover been derided as obvious and facile (“It was never about a cure. It’s about repeat business.”).  For my part, I thought Daybreakers captured well the cult of choice in capitalism, when Bromley reminds his employees that artificial blood will be a product for the masses, and that they should not neglect the luxury market, as there will always be wealthy vampires willing to pay extra for real human blood.  The cure to vampirism, on the other hand, has emphatically religious overtones.  The accident that cures a vampire of his condition is filmed in a manner that evokes the conversion of Saul of Tarsus — a body bathed in light, after being thrown from his vehicle.  The cure that Ed Dalton devises with the ex-vampire played by Willem Dafoe takes place in a vineyard.  Audrey, to keep Ed from losing focus from hunger, cuts herself and compels him to drink her blood.  The soldier Frankie comes to regret his career, after receiving a damning glare from a girl who has chosen to become a subsider in response to being turned into a vampire by Frankie himself.  After becoming human, he gives himself to a group of ravenous soldiers, who tear and rend his body for nourishment.  But unlike the lead villain, who gets dismembered after being cured, Frankie’s corpse remains miraculously whole, his arms slightly outstretched like the image of Christ offering salvation to his followers, and a peaceful expression is left on his face.

The idea that religion provides resources for countering capitalism, or least mitigates capitalism’s destructive effects on social bonds, has become more prominent in recent years as faith in political change has waned.  But there is something about the resort to religion in films or other narratives that are critical of capitalism that strikes me as inadequate — it seems too easy to oppose consumer society, however vampiric, with images drawn from the religious tradition.  Such imagery might bespeak, if not religious faith, then certainly a desire for religion as an alternative to a society ruled by instrumental values.  The creation of a community in which human beings look after one another and which is governed by disinterested actions on behalf of the common good, however, would not be a morally relativistic one.  Such a change would, for people accustomed to highly individualistic societies, would amount to a step away from what Tocqueville regarded as the “mildness” of democratic rule.  Daybreakers, to its credit, does underscore the pain involved in undergoing the cure, but does not flesh out what it would mean to stumble away from this particular cave.

“That in man which cannot be domesticated is not his evil but his goodness.”

“The loss of a thing affects us until we have lost it altogether.”

“Yes, one must suffer, even in vain, so as not to have lived in vain.”

From Voices, trans. W. S. Merwin.  Copper Canyon Press, 2003.

1. Within the psyche of the communist, the envious desire for the life of bourgeois plenty.
2. Within the heart of the bourgeois, the desire to overcome all barriers to his or her pleasures, and liquidate all the restraints (religious, familial, and moral) that are regarded as vital to the legal mechanisms which ensure the transparency and accountability of the market.
3. Within the soul of the fascist, the impulse to hurry towards one’s death, to establish one’s sovereignty as an individual in the most definite and dramatic way possible by embracing one’s personal extinction: the love of death that mingles with the love of killing, the voluptuousness of exposing oneself to doom as one deals out calamities to others.  In a world where everyone is a killer, only indifference to one’s own fate serves as a marker of distinction.  Men being wolves to each other, only the wolf who most actively courts self-destruction can rise above the pack.

We can notice that a distinct historical type corresponds to each of these temptations, which of course signal the point of undoing for each system.  The communist is really a thwarted bourgeois, who thirsts for the day when he can indulge his desires for material gain, and during the period of actually existing socialism, he takes the form of the corrupt and cynical bureaucrat who no longer believes in communism but enjoys the pleasures made possible by his hypocrisy.  The bourgeois chafes at the burdens imposed on him by the premodern conceptions of the moral life that have been inherited by modern liberal society.  He wills that there be no limits on his capacity for gain, even if this means living in a society with such vast disparities in income and well-being that make a mockery of democracy.  The bourgeois yearns for a society in which he does not need to make sacrifices for his wealth.  But this means he rebels against the very conditions that make the secure possession of wealth and enjoyment of abundance possible.  His singleminded pursuit of his desires will eventually force him to become something else.  Just as Plato notes that innovation, in the form of slavery, is introduced by the city ruled by the erstwhile guardians in order to stay in power, the bourgeois in capitalist society, in order to cope with the changes he brings about, will be compelled to become a repressive policeman or to hire paramilitaries in large numbers to cope with the ensuing social disorder.

The great hazard posed by increasing social violence is the likelihood that the wealthy will, feeling embattled and threatened, hold their possessions even more dear than they might otherwise.  That is to say, they will not have the leisured and peaceable environment in which to grow bored of their money and look to charitable giving or education or some spiritual pursuit to give meaning to their lives.  On the other hand, for Ballard, this boredom sparks the desire for an intensity of experience that can only be produced by sacred violence.  Hedonists, and perhaps former hedonists as well, can only be satisfied by religious experiences that provide “miracle, mystery, and authority.”  The mere love of neighbor is simply too thin a broth – it cannot intoxicate, cannot satisfy the yearning for intensity and drama which are no longer to be found in the fulfillment of corporeal pleasures.

The fascist, or authoritarian, seems to stand at the ready to rescue the bourgeois from his excesses.  But the world he creates will be in many ways substantially different from the one in which the bourgeois could more or less securely pursue the accumulation of wealth, for the moral underpinnings of that world will have been dealt terrible harm.  But though the fascist might salvage some degree of order from the ruins of the bourgeois appetites, what he cannot do is save himself from himself.  Even the most heroic authoritarian cannot extricate himself from his ambitions and the collapse they set in motion.  He cannot help but invade Russia.

“Modern man is the man who does not know how to be either magnanimous or humble.  He is defined by this twofold negation.  He overlooks and rejects these two virtues that correspond to the two principal directions of the human soul and that equally rebuff and make him indignant.  The equal refusal of these two virtues, and the effort to flee them both equally, gives the modern mind its extraordinary irritability and energy.”

“In his polemic against grace, modern man feels like and wants to be natural man and to make himself equal to his nature.  But at the same time, in his polemic against nature, he finds a secret ally in grace that has revealed to him possibilities unknown to nature, in particular possibilities of equality.  Thus, just as grace is a burden for the natural man he still is, so also nature appears as an obstacle to the new man he is becoming.”

“Man in the process of becoming modern discovers that nature and grace both entail his obedience and that, strangely, nature does so no less than grace.  If the life of the Christian is to obey the grace of God who created him, the magnanimous man also only obeys the nature that he did not make, when he becomes aware of his natural superiority and expresses it with disdain and irony.”

“The Americanized vampire is the ultimate fantasy for a nation in decline: the person who has been able to take it all with him when he dies, who has outlived the vagaries of civilization itself.  Having abandoned the culture that forged him, moreover, he deceives us into thinking that he has moved beyond what he always has been – a disease.  Now the plague he spreads is a therapeutic fantasy in which an embarrassment of wealth and youth and hedonism is acceptable as long as its beneficiary is equipped with the right intentions.  We have forgotten to be afraid because, as long as he protects his loved ones, as long as he is conscious of his own dangerous nature, as long as he pits himself willingly against others who share his wrath but not his noble motivations, we are willing to believe that a weapon of evil, in the right hands, can be transformed into an instrument of good.”

This transformation does not stop at vampires – Hannibal Lecter underwent it as well, becoming in the sequel to Silence of the Lambs a cannibal who is a dashing romantic and whose victims are invariably annoying.  The murderer becomes the savior of the heroine and by extension, of the audience as well.  It is a most curious way of dealing with evil, by converting into good by imputing to the evil act good motives: a therapeutic inversion of the tragic consciousness, whereby evil brings about the happy ending desired by the audience.  The film Mystic River (2003) is one of the most significant narratives of recent years to subject this theme to critical scrutiny.  But the unyielding optimism, one might say the relentless Pelagianism, of American culture is quite resistant to the dictum of Bernard of Clairvaux that good intentions pave the road to hell.