subscribeThe Century of the Non-Self
by Guy Zimmerman
Talk to people about sustainability and you might notice them recoiling into a resigned stoicism. The momentum in the direction of over-consumption seems vast and formidable, as indeed it is. Better, when caught picnicking between the hi-speed rails, to avert your eyes from the onrushing bullet train, and focus instead on how the honey drips off the baklava. You can invoke Thomas Malthus while you do so. Malthus, the 18th century economist, who, extrapolating food supplies against population growth, predicted mass famine in Europe in the not-too-distant future. The resourcefulness of human beings in their economic activities has proven Malthus wrong again and again, and perhaps we will sidestep disaster this time too.
Indeed there are many places where human ingenuity continues to show bright magic – the sustained, exponential up scaling of our ability to process and convey information, for example. With such dramatic increases in interconnectivity, un-guessed at solutions to challenges like global warming and peak oil could be right around the corner. But perhaps we shouldn’t count on it.
Speaking of interconnectivity, right now, on your computer, you can find “Century of the Self” and watch a riveting four-part BBC documentary by Adam Curtis that sheds light on how we got here. Curtis illuminates a vast, decades long campaign, begun by Edward Bernays in the 1920s, to reshape human behavior so that it suited the aims of a vanguard elite. No, Bernays was not a Bolshevik. Rather, “fast Eddie” was the American nephew of the great Sigmund “Uncle Siggy” Freud, and his field was public relations, marketing, advertising. Bernays, working with colleagues equally schooled in how to manipulate unconscious drives, used psychological insights to shift America from an economy based on need to an economy based on desire.
As you might guess, Bernays and company did not lack for funding; Curtis quotes Paul Mazer, a Wall Street banker working for Lehman Brothers in the 1930s: “We must shift America from a needs- to a desires-culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. [...] Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.” Creating the churning engine of the consumer economy was every inch a conscious project, which also suggests it can be consciously reversed or, at least, seriously revised.
The Century of the Self follows the evolution of Bernay’s ideas as the post war paradise of an oil-fat America proceeded. The reductive Orthodoxy of the circle around Anna Freud and the crude behaviorism of BF Skinner gave way to the deeper, eros-based critique of Reich and Marcuse. And marketers hung on for the ride, reaping the benefits as the generation of the 1960s shifted from social rebellion to the life-style consumerism of the famous “me” generation. The series concludes with the focus group-based politics Bill Clinton and Tony Blair brought to the world in the 1990s.
While as a whole quite strong, Curtis’ series can only cover such a large historical arc by engaging in historical shorthand. There’s the issue of Curtis’ starting point, for example. While Bernay’s certainly seems to have engineered a huge economic pivot toward desire, America was from the start pre-disposed in that direction. Amor is the root of our name, after all, and we have always been a land of desire, a garden of dreams. When the Enlightenment cut the roots of religion, heaven toppled westward and unfurled toward the blue Pacific, and all the hungry souls of Europe felt the sudden tug of self-invention. Happiness, freedom from lack, could be theirs, if not tomorrow, then the day after tomorrow. The secular religion of progress was born long before clever young Eddie climbed up onto Uncle Siggy’s knee.
What Curtis does very well in this series is to underscore how responsive entire populations can be when their dream lives are massaged and stimulated in the right ways. Here we encounter the plasticity of social relations I mentioned in Part 1 of this post. It’s a correlate, on the collective level, of the plasticity of the neuronal structures in our brains that determine how we behave and the choices we make in the world. All the experts agree: change comes through steady persistent effort lit up now and then by shattering, transformative breakthroughs.
At the science writers workshop in Santa Fe a generational shift seemed clear to me. There was Tanya Elliott herself, speaking with focused passion about new approaches to the issue of sustainability. And the younger people in the group seemed to react differently to her presentation. About Elliott’s dire prognosis many older attendees expressed skepticism tinged with an oddly anxious condescension, while in private comments a number of the younger people spoke to me about how large the problem looms for them. They seemed more than prepared to re-examine established habits in return for a new and more sustainable paradigm. Sensibly enough young people want to know that their choices make sense in terms of irreplaceable resources. And the shadows of Exxon Valdez and BP are never far from their minds.
The key value in the consumer economy is progress, for which you need energy. To shift to sustainability, we must move toward balance as a core value. Respecting the motivational energy of desire while insisting also that the needs of the future must also be kept in mind? Call it the “middle way” economy. And just as the psychology of Freud fueled the shift to a desire-based economy, the neurology of happiness may be what fuels the shift to an economy of balance. Delusions of all kinds need to be left by the wayside. Elliott, for example, cited plenty of empirical evidence that, beyond a relatively low threshold, wealth ceases to provide well-being. Being the object of other people’s envy and seeing yourself as part of an elite – these emotions may feel good, but only if you presuppose an underlying neurosis of chronic, soul-consuming lack. This is the great, dirty secret of La Dolce Vita – it’s full of empty calories and leaves you unprepared and flabby in the face of death, which is, famously, no picnic.
So where then for happiness? The pragmatic approach to mindfulness practice that is flourishing in the West is based on empiricism, the direct observation of sensations, feeling, thoughts – the content of experience moment-to-moment. Stripped of unnecessary cultural baggage, it turns out that the wisdom traditions of Asia share a core value with scientific inquiry, an underlying faith in the world, and an embrace of the notion that we have to start any form of engagement with what is verifiably true. Both traditions have a healthy regard for how our picture of the world can be deeply distorted by the brain-structures and biases laid down by prior experience. As meditation teacher and writer Ken McLeod puts it, science and awareness practice both begin with the faith that we need to look at the truth and open to what we find there.
I began this two-part post describing being haunted by a memory of the cement stairs of the apartment complex my family rented in Santa Monica right before my parents split up. As a child I could already read how the patterns at work in my life might play out. It was certainly cause for some alarm. Indeed, for many years our summers came to resemble the close of one of those Antonioni films, full of mute devastation, the catastrophe extending out toward a distant, flat horizon. Or like a Joan Didion essay right at the end, when she has rolled you out into a thin ribbon of alienated sensitivity exposed beneath a hot SoCal sun. Divorce and dislocation, as we all now appreciate, can be hard on youngsters.
But there was also, standing there looking up at the stairs, already the recognition, hard to articulate but always close by, that on a deeper level I was entirely unaffected by what was unfolding in my family’s life. The sun was shining. The August sea was warm, and if you dug down into the sand with your toes you could feel the small sand crabs there, burrowing away. The world was alive and everywhere vibrant, and at moments I knew myself to be profoundly free. Comfort, for me, would lie not in some remembered security, but in the possibility of a more complete connection to that energized field of experience. This sense of being non-separate is what thinkers like David Loy and Francisco Varela describe as the actual truth of our situation. Learning to embrace the mystery of how this non-separation could be true opens toward an energizing sense that we are, moment by moment, participating in the story of how the material of the universe emerges upwards into self-awareness.
And so I have to note in passing that, wherever you are right now, whatever you’re doing, the world around you is luminous. In the name of social progress, Loy asks us to recognize that this luminosity is a crucial part of what we fundamentally are. We tend to forget this fact more or less completely, and identify instead with what limits and constricts us. Such limitations are, of course, real enough too, but we need to continue to investigate how they may be expressing themselves in the larger dysfunctions that threaten our common future.
No doubt correcting this massive imbalance seems unlikely…but then from the start life itself is utterly unlikely. As is the fact that a collection of splitting, looping protein strands would give rise to the kinds of thoughts I am expressing now, or to the fingers that tap these thoughts out into words…or to the optic nerves that, many miles away, carry these improbable symbol-marks up into your neocortex where they bloom out into something that approaches meaning. If it is miracles we need, we might begin noticing when they arise around us. It’s a task that might keep us surprisingly busy, and that might balance somewhat the other efforts we are now called upon to make.
