Tag Archives: Jung

Modern Man in Search of a Sofa

It is 1985, and a corporate colleague tells me his grandfather and father had built the house he would come to grow up in just before World War II, having ordered it out of a Sears Catalog. The house was delivered as a kit, with plans, in parts, via rail to a nearby town, where it was then trucked to the lot where they put it together. Yes, “some assembly required.”

We were reading “In Search of Excellence” in the mid 80s, at all levels of the organization. But what many workers were actually in search of was a job with benefits that paid at least enough to buy a house for the fam and stuff to put in it, including sofa in the living room, pram in the entry, and car in the garage. For my part, I had recently come to realize the community college adjunct job I’d been working full time since the close of the 70s wasn’t going to produce such excellent results.

In the first half of the 20th Century, the Sears Catalog served a bit like today’s Amazon. But I searched Amazon this morning to see if I could buy a house online and have it delivered, and all I found were backyard sheds. Sears discontinued its catalog division in the early 1990s. It’s hard to stay close to the customer when the customer is constantly on the move. In any case, most corporations (and stores and shops) only affect concern for the customer; what they’re really after is a share of the customer’s wallet, or, in Amazon’s case, the whole wallet. But what happens when customers no longer pack wallets?

Or no longer want stuff, or at least, not so much stuff. Or still want some stuff, but different stuff. In other words, does Amazon sell souls? Or, as Jung put in his “Modern Man in Search of a Soul”: “No psychic value can disappear without being replaced by another of equivalent intensity” (209).

There are, it is argued, certain efficiencies that promote the use of Amazon over the emotional expense of leaving one’s safe harbor for the voyage out to the mall or downtown or the shops of Hawthorne. Why should consumers feel shame about where or how or for what they shop? In any case, it appears most feel no shame. But is that because they are driven by unconscious desires, wants that may be manipulated by elevator music, trance inducing ads, or atavistic urges to covet one’s neighbor’s goods?

I don’t know, but it often seems shoppers are led to the market like the Eloi in “The Time Machine” are pulled to the Morlocks. In return for the seemingly safe setting the Morlocks have created, the Eloi serve themselves up as food to sustain the Morlockian system.

David Brooks and The Plaque of Alienation; or, the Consciousness Bubble

Are we making progress? And is the progress good? Have humans improved over time? Are we better than our ancestors? What makes us human, and whatever that is, have we been improving upon it? The universe may be expanding; our consciousness is not. Something seems to be blocking our arteries: the plaque of alienation. Yet there are some who are apparently awakening to a new dawn, a new and improved consciousness, and there’s a consciousness revolution afoot, as David Brooks tells it in his January 17, 2011 New Yorker article, under the Annals of Psychology section: “Social Animal: How the new sciences of human nature can help make sense of a life.” Not since the 1960s have we seen such an upswell in the commercialization of consciousness.

“We are living in the middle of a revolution in consciousness,” Brooks tells us. The revolutionaries in this assault on our personal dark ages include “geneticists, neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists, and others” who “have made great strides in understanding the inner working of the human mind.” Such a list of armed trick-or-treaters makes us want to light out for the territory. But wait, for “far from being dryly materialistic, their work illuminates the rich underwater world where character is formed and wisdom grows.” But how are we suddenly under water? If we’re to have a revolution in consciousness, shouldn’t we be able to talk about it without using metaphors? But there’s more: “They [the revolutionaries] are giving us a better grasp of emotions, intuitions, biases, longings, predispositions, character traits, and social bonding, precisely those things about which our culture has the least to say.” Whose culture? Has Brooks never read Langston Hughes nor heard of the Harlem Renaissance? For Langston talked precisely about “those things.” Has Brooks never read Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Thoreau’s Walden? But there’s even more: “Brain science helps fill the hole left by the atrophy of theology and philosophy.” Mathew Arnold’s “Sea of Faith,” in Brooks’s view, is now bone dry; and apparently Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth is suddenly irrelevant (in spite of our underwater status), as must be Jung’s Modern Man in Search of a Soul, not to mention the work of Mary Midgley. And Brooks must have missed the film Examined Life, with Cornel West, Slavoj Zizek, and Martha Nussbaum. Neither has Brooks seemed to have ever visited the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Theology and philosophy are not atrophying; that’s one of the few immutable laws the brain seems to labor under. It’s what makes consciousness worthwhile, for, as Dostoevsky’s underground man says, “Suffering is the sole origin of consciousness.”

And where Brooks’s tightly-written scenario takes us is to a happiness moral, much cliched, but no doubt true: we’ve been looking in all the wrong places. “Joining a group that meets just once a month produces the same increase in happiness as doubling your income,” Brooks says, siting recent research. The problem, Brooks says, is that “Many Americans generally have a vague sense that their lives have been distorted by a giant cultural bias. They live in a society that prizes the development of career skills but is inarticulate when it comes to the things that matter most.” Agreed. But why must Brooks have the imprimatur of science to get to the moral? And is it really a revolution of consciousness that he’s describing, or a simple increase in awareness that comes with maturity and experience? Jung said, “…if we maintain that mental phenomena arise from the activity of glands, we are sure of the thanks and respect of our contemporaries, whereas if we explain the break-up of the atom in the sun as an emanation of the creative Weltgeist, we shall be looked down upon as intellectual freaks. And yet both views are equally logical, equally metaphysical, equally arbitrary and equally symbolic. From the standpoint of epistemology it is just as admissible to derive animals from the human species, as man from animal species.” Jung is explaining how the scientific method came to dominate explanations of life: “…everything that could not be seen with the eyes or touched with the hands was held in doubt; such things were even laughed at because of their supposed affinity with metaphysics.” The science Brooks has come to rely on is what Jung called “psychology without the soul,” for the soul is now inadmissible evidence in the court of science. Jung explained that “It is the popular way of thinking, and therefore it is decent, reasonable, scientific and normal. Mind must be thought to be an epiphenomenon of matter. The same conclusion is reached even if we say not ‘mind’ but ‘psyche’, and in place of matter speak of brain, hormones, instincts or drives. To grant the substantiality of the soul or psyche is repugnant to the spirit of the age, for to do so would be heresy.”

No doubt Brooks could have made his argument citing the poets instead of the scientists. And no doubt Arnold’s Sea of Faith is indeed today as dry as bone dust. Brooks cites the scientists because poetic currency has been devalued. What is easily missed is that the scientists also trade in a currency, as Jung explains: “We delude ourselves with the thought that we know much more about matter than about a ‘metaphysical’ mind, and so we overestimate physical causation and believe that it alone affords us a true explanation of life. But matter is just as inscrutable as mind…It is only our doubts as to the omnipotence of matter which could lead us to examine in a critical way this verdict of science upon the human psyche.” And it is this doubt which sticks to the arteries of our psyche and alienates us from the fun the scientists today seem to be having. We fear yet another bubble.

The I Ching (Book of Changes); or, where one should not try to be all-knowing

In harmony with the Book of Changes, the 3,000 year old Chinese pursuit of wisdom, I chanced across a copy (3rd ed., 21st printing, 1985), for $2, at a garage sale this past weekend. It’s the Bollingen hard copy, in fair condition, with dust jacket, for which Jung wrote the original foreword, not as worried, he explains of his inability to explain the I Ching to what he calls, in 1949, the “Western mind,” a mind that might best be described by Hexagram 29, “Bound with cords and ropes,” because he was then in his “eighth decade, and the changing opinions of men scarcely impress me any more.” Not only that, but, continuing Hexagram 29, “If you are sincere, you have success in your heart, And whatever you do succeeds.”

The I Ching provided Jung with a practical field of study for his concept of synchronicity, the theory that effects don’t always have measureable causes – or, at least, when we turn our attention away from causality (as John Cage did in his works involving indeterminacy), we seem to form a more perfect union with nature – by which Jung meant, in his foreword to the I Ching, physics.

Yet it’s not clear whether today’s physicists agree or not – that a truly exceptionally simple theory of everything (one that satisfies Richard Wilhelm’s desire to “…[make] the I Ching intelligible to the lay reader”) might be held in the random throw of three coins. In any case, globalization may have already made the Western mind boundary-less, ubiquitous on the planet, but the I Ching is still out there, waiting to be discovered. Like the gospels, the I Ching has, since Jung wrote his foreword, been “pinched and poked,” as e. e. cummings said in “O sweet spontaneous,” by the “doting fingers of prurient philosophers.” Yet, Jung says, “security, certitude, and peace do not lead to discoveries.” In this regard, at least, if in no other, the I Ching would still appear appropriate for “thoughtful and reflective people who like to think about what they do and what happens to them…,” and like to think beyond “reason and pedagogy [which] often lack charm and grace.” Of course, who wants to hear that today’s answer is the same one offered 3,000 years ago? Might make winning the research grant a bit more difficult.

Jung argued that the I Ching is best suited to questions of self-knowledge. That the I Ching has changed over time, been abused, cast aside, like the gospels, should not, with regard to its use toward self-knowledge, Jung seems to be saying, in his foreword, dissuade contemporary readers, for “often our relations depend almost exclusively on our own attitudes, though we may be quite unaware of this fact.” Why would anyone consult the I Ching today? Because, as Jung says, “The I Ching insists upon self-knowledge throughout. The method by which this is to be achieved is open to every kind of misuse, and is therefore not for the frivolous-minded and immature; nor is it for intellectualists and rationalists.” But it is, in other words, the perfect fit for our ideal, general interest reader.

Jung acknowledges that “to one person its spirit appears as clear as day; to another, shadowy as twilight; to a third, dark as night. He who is not pleased by it does not have to use it, and he who is against it is not obliged to find it true. Let it go forth into the world for the benefit of those who can discern its meaning.” So Jung asked “Why not venture a dialogue with an ancient book that purports to be animated?” In an age when neuroscientists like Jonah Lehrer argue that “the mind is really just a piece of meat,” it would not seem that such a dialog as Jung suggests having with the ancient book can do any harm. But if I put the question to the I Ching, is the mind really just a piece of meat, I’d better be ready for the answer: Hexagram 36, “Darkening of the Light,” “…one should not try to be all-knowing.” Not only that, but, Jung adds: “The less one thinks about the theory of the I Ching, the more soundly one sleeps.”