Take Back The Country From The Nation
James Hillman's electrifying presentation at the 2006 Bioneers Conference is even more relevant now, almost 20 years later.
I came here to work with a problem. It is a problem that liberals and intellectuals have (and I'm among them) and it is impeding the adventure of our country. This problem, as I see it, lies in the nature of our thinking. It is a psychological problem, a thinking disorder.
It begins in knowing what's wrong in the nation. We sure know what's wrong. Consumerism and mammon(1), competition, speed and greed, urban sprawl, cult of the quick — quick fame, quick success, quick fixes — American innocence and arrogance, born of a kind of willful stupidity, willful ignorance, wasteful and fearful and angry.
We know what's wrong with Washington, with Wall Street, with media, with agribusiness, with the schools, with the fundamentals of American habits that do not mesh with the American dream. We know as a nation that we underthink and overwork. Mix passivity with bullying. Preach democracy and don't bother to vote.
We know what's wrong. But do we know that knowing what's wrong is some of what's wrong? “Nothing to fear but fear itself”, said Roosevelt. And knowing what's wrong is what's wrong. As we can be paralyzed by fear, so we can be fixated by knowing. Paralyzed by critical awareness. From Hamlet, to Prufrock, to Kerry.
I voted for it, and I voted against it. To be, or not to be. Or as Prufrock, for I have known them all already, known them all. I have known the evenings, the mornings, the afternoons. I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.(2)
One hundred years of psychoanalysis has brilliantly succeeded in separating the mind from action. We have come to be onlookers.
We have come to be onlookers, introspectors, attention riveted on the rear mirror. Don't most psychoanalysts and their clients live in blue areas on the coast? And why, why anyway are we blue? Blue, said Goethe, is the color of withdrawal and contemplation. We used to be called reds, or even parlor pinks, or maybe greens, or anything, but not blue.
The psychoanalytic habit is only one piece of a wider assault on positive thinking. Positive theories in so many fields culminating in the 19th century have been slowly criticized to death. Modernism's ironies and paradoxes and post modernism's deconstructions and parodies have left no positions to stand on or stand for.
Every positive proposition runs into an instant opposition. We're left with only one grand narrative. Human life propelled by a selfish gene, from Big Bang to Black Hole. And, and no place for mushrooms. Is the opposite blind belief in fundamental fables the only way out?
How does knowing what's wrong paralyze? Well, first of all, our minds criticize, dissect, analyze, point out ramifications, implications. And the wrong grows in dimension as we focus upon it. To free ourselves from its hypnotic effect, we jump to the opposite. Not religion, science. Not world trade, protectionism. Stay in or get out. Not materialism, spiritualism. Not blue, red. Everything divides into opposing positions. Everything becomes winning and losing — a boxing match, I think Secretary Rice called it a football game, or pundits shouting at each other as if that were news.
The mind game of opposites goes back especially to Aristotle and the law of the excluded middle. My necktie is red or it is not red. If it is red, it cannot be not red. If it is not red, it cannot be read. No midway, no compromise. Then as Hegel later argued in his logic, every positive assertion is immediately countered, even defined by its negative opposite. When we choose, it's either or. When we judge, it's guilty or not guilty.
The genders become the opposite sex. Setting up an unreflected resistance to all forms of mixed marriages, and not logically straight persons. They violate Aristotle's law of the excluded middle. Even the value of this planet is caught in oppositional thinking. My kingdom is not of this world, said Jesus. “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.” The world is not sacred. Not divine, not blessed, and the divine is not worldly. So it's not what's actually wrong, it's how we think about what's wrong. Let's instead take what's wrong as not only wrong. Let's not be caught in the literalism of our critical conclusions and turn to the opposite for a cure.
Let’s make a basic therapeutic move. Search out the meaning of the symptom, the concealed yin in the overblown yang, the sparks of yang inside passive darkness.
In other words, go with the wrong deeper, follow its lead towards curing itself. In other words, what I'm trying to do is find a new method rather than opposition that could make it possible to rethink all the things that are supposedly wrong or are wrong.
So what's wrong? What's wrong with the American nation? We're too young. Youthful ignorance, youthful fads, youthful cool and entitlement. If that's the case, then respect the symptom. Throw money at kids, at child care, at children's health and nutrition, at youth centers. Kids sports and shows and concerts, arts programs in schools where kids can play music in theater and make movies, recite speeches, and dress in costumes. Let them sleep longer in the morning by changing school bus routes and schedules to suit their natural patterns, rather than the administration’s and the cleaning crew’s.
Bring inventive architects to design buildings for them instead of resort hotels and museums. Let's hear what the kids say about math requirements. Let's hear what the kids say! Reclassify math among the foreign languages as an elective, since these math requirements lie at the core of school failure and the initiation into dropout society. Yes, we are a nation asleep in innocence, needing a wake up call every few months. Suppose we revision that innocence as “always ready for a fresh start.” Starting over, unburdened by moralistic lessons.
The past is a bucket of ashes, said Carl Sandburg. History is bunk, said Henry Ford. So go bankrupt and begin again. Repeal the outrageous new tightening of the bankruptcy laws. Give paroled felons back their citizen rights. Start them off in new neighborhoods with immediate jobs. Release the prospector spirit, the buccaneer, privateer, the adventurer, now trapped in retirement planning, health care benefits, and family values.
Capitalism never intended to promote security. Its slogans say risk, free enterprise, experiment, venture, trial and error. Take back trial and error from personal relationships. That is, take it back from marriage where it becomes repetitive divorce. As for capitalism, let's remember the word comes from caput, head.
Caput, which is the Latin for head and capital evokes the enterprising individual who has something in his or her head to make, to try, to show. Capitalism hurts our private capital, keeps our heads and everything in them in the vice of finance, insurance, accountants, and distant non-owning managers.
Besides, capitalism has sapped motivation all over this nation. Psychologists are running motivation seminars. Best selling business books are all about purpose, about power and push. The urge is out of it. The desire is gone. Managers are unable to move on and are sick at heart.
The country needs to free capital from its ism. Which is anyway an artificial monster, a soulless paper person with all the noble rights of an embodied person. But capitalism's corporation has no real corpus. It is a golem, a ghoul because it can hardly be put to death, only cannibalized by another disembodied paper person in a buyout.
To free capital from capitalism, build up the shadow economy out from under the quarterly reports, the fantasy of growth, the bureau of statistics, and economic indicators. Forget taking capitalism's temperature. Inflation, recession, what's the percent? Any activity with no more than a couple of full time people grossing less than $100,000 or $200,000, that's for others to decide, can carry on whatever it is — roofing, home care, baking, metalwork, catering, publishing — free to follow their heads and hands as independent contractors with no reporting other than reasonable tax as contribution to public services. Note, not federal, not national. Truly independent with local permits and supervision by word of mouth, reputation. Supervision by word of mouth, reputation, gossip, and local nosiness.
As a nation, we are leaving, and have left, the political arena. Only a small elite read newspapers, and the newspapers cut their staff of reporters. Few watch the nightly news bites, preferring parodies of it, church sermons about it, or bloggers opinions on it. Could there be a virtue in political passivity?
Perhaps we already know too much. Not about national affairs, but about the distortion, concealment, and propaganda presented as national affairs. Why be better informed if what we know is disinformation? Perhaps the way to take back the country is not merely by voting, but perhaps the true task is governing the government.
The symptom of passivity says, “I won't take part in this sham!” So the new citizen takes a different tack than merely turning up at the polls once in two or four years. Instead, I shall follow my disenchantment, my distrust, my cynicism. I shall needle and hassle and harass the school boards, the town meetings, the party conclaves, the shareholders meetings, the courtrooms.
Let it be known that I am here and watching, wherever the political life of the country is actually taking place. I shall expose, mock, recall, impeach, and above all speak up fearless in my foolishness (as I am doing here.)
We can take back nosiness and snooping from the IRS and the CIA. Community begins not only in ideals but in noticing your neighbors, gossiping over the back fence. Everything is everybody's business. Why are horrific American crimes done by some young, nondescript white guy no one had any suspicion of, no one had ever noticed?
Crime prevention does not begin in “Have a nice day!” Crime prevention does not begin in the neighborhood watch. It begins in looking and seeing. Who you are with, who are the neighbors, who are the people, you, who's in apartment 12B and so on.
Finally, education. Education is a nation word — national standards, NEA measurements, testing. It's an instrument of capitalism's emphasis on competitive advantage. Instead of education, teaching and learning. A learner says, what did you say? I didn't get it. How did you do that? Would you show me how? And teaching, a teacher says, try it this way, try it again. Not like that, watch me, let me show you how.
Between the innate spontaneous urge to learn, to copy, imitate, comprehend, to work at something, to get it and know it, and the innate urge to teach, to help someone see something, correct a fault, pass on knowledge, excitement of discovery, stands a woolly tusked mammoth called education against which teachers and learners are forever struggling.
Teachers and learners cut corners, disobey, play truant, fudge the rules, or simply quit. No fun in it. No love in it. American education's true aim is long term job placement rather than the stuff at hand. No wonder lack of interest, violence and attention deficit are major school disorders. 90 percent of the Ritalin in the world is made in this nation and consumed by this nation.
Take Back The Country calls for something Ivan Illich said years ago: de-schooling society, taking back learning and teaching from education.
In the end, it comes down to words, to language. Nations and states use large, vague words — education, democracy, diversity, victory, security, progress, equality, globalization, and such abbreviations as FBI, CPI, and so on. States promulgate doctrines, issue policy statements. The very word state, from stare, means “to stand.”
A state aims at stability, seeks to destabilize other states for itself, protection. A paranoid potential is built into the nation state. Suspicious of and threatened by the foreign and the unusual and borders must be defended. Country originally meant an expanse of land with distinct characteristics — earth focused, localized, limited.
Its language, too, is local, concrete, vernacular, metaphorical, compounded rather than abbreviated. Big difference. Homebody, breadwinner, handyman, cracker-barrel, workaday, alleycat, dog-eared, street-smart, potbelly stove. Country is limited by the land and its contours, its dialect and slang.
Uncertain about their limits, nations struggle between their innate expansionism and their paranoid, self-enclosing borders. Whatever the nation begins, expands. Vietnam, Iraq, planned as limited operations, expand into hugeness. Only two atom bombs in 1945, now thousands, and so on. Methods that work for the country, become trial and catastrophe for nations. Small is beautiful, said E. F. Schumacher, which also means the size of our talk. We need to take back small talk, country talk. Keep the language close to reals. No ideas but in things, said Doc William Carlos Williams from Patterson, New Jersey, one of our great poets.(3)
Nation language is acronyms and euphemisms, generics, not specifics. No thing words, no images. Go in fear of abstractions, said Ezra Pound, another of our great poets, Ezra Pound from Idaho. By country, I do not mean mere nostalgia for hayseeds, hillbillies, and hicks, but an attitude, some distrust of slickness and slickers, preference for slowness, chewing cud.
Country talk is Molly Ivins talk, Jim Hightower talk, Lyndon Johnson talk, another sort of Texan. A real one. Though the dictionary defines country as not city, and outside the capital of the state, the city is as much country in mind and speech. So country is not to be literalized into pastoral farmland.
It is, if it's language that counts, then the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the National Park Service, and agribusiness are less country than West Philly, Queens, and South Central L. A. Street smarts and hood talk, the favelas and barrios, use country language, similes, slang, stories, gossip, and a close look at character.
Community, capital enterprise, meetings, learning, and teaching, and the arts, of course all begin outside the purview of the nation and often in the little business of the big city. In fact, big cities are where the positive moves of taking back the country from the nation are beginning, and have already begun.
You probably know that 56 United States cities have adopted referenda to create less fearful conditions for migrants from elsewhere. These cities do not allow their local police to enforce federal immigration laws. For instance, Detroit and Baltimore. The police department shall refrain from enforcement of federal immigration laws. Chicago Executive Order 89-6 (4) establishes that no city agency shall request information about or otherwise investigate the citizenship or residency status of any person unless required by legal process. Also among the 56 cities are Los Angeles, San Francisco, Anchorage, Minneapolis, Boise, Durham, Albuquerque, and Portland, Maine.
Small seeds of secession, going back to the Civil War between the states, when the rebels were called secessionists. Echoes way back even to 1798, when Jefferson, objecting to anti-alien laws passed by Congress, framed the Kentucky Resolution that declared when the nation’s Congress palpably transcends its power, meaning when the central administration transcends its powers, the regional state has an equal right to judge for itself.
235 mayors have committed their cities to meeting or exceeding emissions reductions mandated by the Kyoto Protocol. As one writer has said, cities have become the great incubators of sustainable ideas and generally much farther ahead than the federal government. As the national government cuts back on child nutrition, all over the country, schools are devising new kinds of lunches, banning sodas and snack machines, as Michael Pollan mentioned just a minute ago.
As the national government reduces funding for the arts in favor of its primary focus, money for the military, localities, in Arkansas, for instance, are requiring primary school kids to attend 40 minutes a week of music and arts instruction. Perhaps a post-national consciousness is emerging in which the country, in this case individual cities, is becoming the guarantor of values as were the original city states of Greece and of the Renaissance Italy, even until 1860, and the Hanseatic League of Germany, even until Bismarck.
If we look to the city, said Jacques Derrida, rather than the state, it is because we've given up hope that the state might create a new image for the city. You will surely have noticed that these cities are not caught in oppositional thinking, back to the first point. They are not opposing the national government with legal critiques and argument.
They are not protesting, fighting, not even civil disobedience. They are simply reverting to a favorite American vice — not showing up, dropping out, going fishing, ignoring. The vices of ignoring and passivity can become virtues by turning in an alternative direction. A similar kind of reversion from nation to country is taking place in healthcare, where states set up their own plans and individuals cross the border to buy their medicines, or where states duck the nationalized education requirements, where localities find ways to maintain their same gender intimacy.
Their choices regarding contraception and not having babies and especially of passing out and receiving information apart from and outside the capital and its capitalist ideological media. The way out of the nation is devious. The positive emerges from the negative. The good words like flag and faith and freedom and family — the new F words — have turned bad. And the bad words like doubt, disorder, deviant, dissent, and dependency have turned good.
We are in the hands of the most ancient guide of souls, Hermes Mercurius (as the Greeks called him), Trickster Coyote of the Native Americans, and Legba Elegua of the Caribbean. There is humor here, even fun, and a sneaky kind of power. Thank you.
Source: Original video
Mammon: wealth regarded as an evil influence or false object of worship and devotion. It was taken by medieval writers as the name of the devil of covetousness, and revived in this sense by Milton. “Others have forsaken Mammon in search of something on a more spiritual plane.” (Oxford)
From The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliot: “For I have known them all already, known them all: Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons; I know the voices dying with a dying fall. Beneath the music from a farther room. So how should I presume?”
"No ideas but in things" is a famous phrase by poet William Carlos Williams, meaning that meaningful ideas and insights can only be found by closely observing the details of the physical world around us, rather than relying solely on abstract concepts; essentially, true understanding comes from "things" themselves, like objects and everyday situations.
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