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craftaesthetic · 7 years

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Polytheism VS Monotheism,

In Jan Assmann’s essay “Monotheism and Polytheism,” he defined monotheism as confessing to or worship one god (17). Later he states that monotheism asserts its identity by opposing polytheism, “defining what god is not and how god should not be worshiped” (28). While Assamnn has a straightforward definition for monotheism, there is “no such self-description exists for polytheistic religions” (17) because polytheism is older and monotheism is newer and thus must assert itself as different from polytheism by opposing it. This can lead to a thinking that Judaism and Christianity “represent the rather unique end of the line, [and] consequently, the more morally and ethically advanced of the two systems” which is simply untrue (Ogden 35). Modern scholars often think that polytheism is barbaric, when referring to sacrifices, or unintelligent, because they are worshiping gods that, in the mind of a scholar, do not exist. However, belief in these deities does not discount the mathematical and philosophical advancements made by the Arabs and Greeks for example, but go hand in hand with their superstitions. One must remember that belief in supernatural figures was part of the average day in those times, even if someone was not actively worshiping them.

The “most cogent theory of polytheism” is Varro’s Tripartite theology which refers general structure applicable to many polytheistic religions. The three spheres of divine presence and religious experience are as follows:

Cosmic theology: cosmic dimension of divine manifestation

Political Theory: cultic dimension

Mythical/narrative theology: stories about the gods (names/epithets/genealogies)

With monotheism, the cosmos comes to be seen as a creation of God. The geographical and cultic dimension is reduced, and Jerusalem does not reflect the pluralistic identity of various religious centers. Stories told about gods to talk about their characteristics is changed to talk about God and his chosen people. Concern with human affairs becomes YHWH’s dominant trait.

In polytheistic religions, “translating gods” became popular. Though the deities are different and personalized by nameand function, the “highly differentiated members of poly pantheons lend themselves easily to cross-cultural translation” (24). Translation works were a reference to the god’s specific character. Thus, these traits make two different gods seem comparable. These translations were important because treaties had to be sealed by solemn oaths, and the gods invoked in these oaths had to be recognized by both parties. The list of gods closes the treaty by having the gods be equivalent in function and rank.

The growing political and commercial interconnectedness of the ancient world and the practice of cross-cultural translation gradually led to the concept of a common religion. The names, rites differ but the gods are the same. This way of translating everything led to the late hellenistic mentality: the names of the gods didn’t matter in the view of overwhelming natural evidence for their existence in the world. This led further to a thinking by some that “all gods are one” (26). For example, there are hierarchies in Mesopotamia and thus in their society there are ideas of deep structural identity. The main god, Marduk, takes all the names of the lesser gods because they are a part of him now, becoming his subordinates.

This belief in a Supreme Being led to the idea that all gods are actually part of the same god leading to the “One-God” idea. Even Oracles would proclaim gods to be the same as other gods (27). The name by which you call god (the supreme god) doesn’t matter because they are all the same. One idea by the Stoics was “that there is only one god, whose names merely differ according to actions and offices” (27-28). This argument could be applied to how Mikalson says Zeus had many different names which each indicated a different function in his book Ancient Greek Religion (48). Mikalson seems to be implying that because the tacked on ‘epithets’ or function is different, that Zeus Herkeios and Zeus Ktesios are worshiped differently because they were seen by their worshipers as different gods, and thus they are given different sacrifices and different specific worship days. However, if the reader takes into account what Assmann is saying in his essay on monotheism and polytheism, then it is unlikely that the worshipers saw these Zeus’ as completely different gods. More likely it is that the worshipers simply wished to invoke and worship certain aspects of Zeus’ functions on the appropriate days and appeasing different aspects of him.

Some argue that polytheism grows into monotheism when someone is particularly devoted to a certain god or goddess. An example of this is from the book “The Golden Ass” by Apuleius for at the end of the novel one reads of the narrator’s love and devotion to Isis, where he joins her priesthood and goes to Rome to worship her under Isis’ local name of Campensis. Though this is written later in history, this is not an uncommon thought. In Mikalson’s book, he describes how Isis could fulfil virtually all the religious needs of Greek citizens because her devotees would credit her with “power over and protection of virtually all aspects of human life and even with the initial structuring of the cosmos and all elements in it” (189) shown with Isidorus’ First Hymn to Isis. Therefore, “Isis alone [opened] the way to concepts of monotheism for her worshipers,” though some may call that henotheism or monolatry instead, as belief in Isis didn’t necessarily mean the rejection or nonbelief of other gods. However, the main idea is the supremeness of one god.

This elevation did not just happen with Isis, but other gods as well. A major example of a shift from polytheism to monotheism is when the prophet Zarathustra elevated Ahura Mazda to a position of supremacy that approaches monotheism (201). The mythos has a savior figure, the Saoshyant, who would redeem the world in the future. This eventually became Zarathustrianism, or Zoroastrianism, which can be seen as either monotheistic or dualistic as there is a sharp contrast between the battles of good and evil, Ahura Mazda, and Aura Mainyu, respectively.. Though this religion is not as monotheistic as say, Judaism, the world was still made up of only two supernatural forces: one good, one evil and the people would have rituals to help the good side and also to help lead them into a good afterlife.

Zoroastrianism scholars as well as others, point to “some affinity between YHWH and Aten in the Bible” (Iran 203, Israel 182). However, Akhenaten’s monotheism was said to based on the physical discovery that sun generates light, warmth, and time. The sun provided helped the crops to grow, while light and time explained the existence of the universe to them, thus the traditional pantheon was superfluous. Abolition was the consequence of a new cosmology. Biblical monotheism is based on non-scientific revelations: Revelation to Moses on Mount Sinai of the Commandments, Enoch and Daniel who received revelations of the end of history for example and judgement of the dead (Israel 181, 187).

Drawing especially and directly from the posted texts of Homer, Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and “Aesop,” discuss what literature tells us about early Greek religion. Then, explain how Jon Mikalson (in Ancient Greek Religion) draws on other sources—especially art and archaeology—to round out or understanding of Greek religion during the classical (i.e. pre-Hellenistic) age.

In Greek myths, an underlying theme is that the earth is eternal while gods have a beginning and end. This can be seen with the transition from the Titans to Zeus and his pantheon. Different cities that celebrated different gods had different religious calendars with different festivals. Cults were usually not practiced in the same way by all Greeks. In Greek civilization, polytheistic religions are about actions: what a person does, and the rituals they engage in. Today, American Christianity is about belief in the heart and mind, and the person practicing that religion doesn’t have an obvious outward component all the time. However, in early Greek religion, it wasn’t about belief because their deities couldn’t read minds. Elements of Greek religion reach back into the Mycenaean period. For example, Zeus is Indo-European and linked with Roman Jupiter, and Mycenaean Linear B tablets contain familiar names of Zeus, Athena, Poseidon, Hera, Hermes, and Dionysus with other, unknown, deities.

In the Iliad, the translation is prose where it was originally poem and the role of the gods in this work portrays them as petty, just like humans. The notion by many modern historians is that though Greeks had religion, they were rational and guided by reason. However, this is not necessarily true. It is often preached by people who do not like religion or do not understand it because the gods are everywhere in these stories. For example, in the Iliad, a Priest of Apollo Shootafar named Chryses calls upon Apollo to make “the Danaans pay for [his] tears” in a good example of Do Ut Des which means ‘I give so that you might give’ (Homer 12). Ancient people thought there was a divine element, and they believed someone who was sick was being punished. They also believed that if one person was wicked, it could bring the wrath upon a whole village or people. This is why Achilles is angry with the King, because by not giving back the daughter of Chryses, the King was tempting the wrath of the gods to fall upon the military camp. This did indeed occur for Apollo shot “deadly shafts… all over [the] camp [and] the people died in heaps” (Homer 18). The relationship between human and divine was that the Greeks wanted fertility of crops, animals, and selves in return for the rituals and sacrifices they gave to the gods. The idea was a mutual exchange of favors and gifts to be the center of human/divine relationships with gifts reflecting honor, not love or fear. Humans like deities because of the power they have and gifts they give and the gods rejoice in honoring those gifts. When relationships are fractured, via impieties by humans or unjust divine behavior, the chaos can ensue and punishment will rain down. Greeks normally had a good relationship with the gods but if there was pollution or religious oversights they could be corrected via rituals and additional gifts. Thus the idea that the gods will punish those they are displeased with through pestilence and illness is strengthened and perpetuated.

Hesiod and Homer created a divine genealogy for Greek by distributing their named via their offices, skills, and outward appearances. They would do this by picking out the gods that they wanted to focus on, making the greek pantheon as it is known today. Many rituals, mythology, etc were oral and local though, and not necessarily contained to what was written about the gods. However, as Jon Mikalson discusses in his essay about Greece religious cults were not limited to worshiping the gods, Heroes also received public cults after death, and became a second class of deification. In Hesiod’s Story of the Ages of Man, there is a golden, silver and bronze age. The theme here is gradual deterioration, for ancient people didn’t believe in progress like modern Americans do. They thought if someone was born a poor man then they would be that poor man for the entirety of their life, and didn’t expect progress or improvement. In fact, the default assumption was that things get worse. For example, in The Story of the Ages of Man first people were gold and then they deteriorate though Hesiod does throw in race of heroes that momentary breaks the trend. The real development of these cults may have actually influenced by the increasing spread and popularity of the Homeric epics. Many cults were not devoted to Homeric heroes and some were even nameless. Hero cults were often very localized, and closely bound to the presumed tomb of the hero.

Humans relationships with the gods is severed by death. Individuals were not rewarded or punished in the afterlife for religious behavior unless really good or really bad. Usually rewards and punishments fell on descendants. The Greek didn’t praise death, for example, Odysseus would “rather be plowman to a yeoman farmer on a small holding than lord Paramount in the kingdom of the dead (Odyssey 134). Life is of utmost importance to the Greeks and is thus humanistic in this way. Odysseus has talked to Circe who says he must perform a ritual a certain way in order to speak Teiresias. In Book 11 Odysseus slits animal's throats so he would be able to understand the dead. A reason for this could be because blood is life in liquid form and thus gives the dead back a sense of life. Odysseus also makes the dead come to him one at a time, and they don’t like the point of his sword that he has. This may be because Odysseus is afraid the dead may overwhelm him, and take his blood or life. When the first person to come is Elpenor, a man who had just died and had not buried, it shows how doing the right burial rites in Greek society and religion was important. Additionally, Elpenor didn’t take the blood, this is likely because he had recently died and didn’t need it whereas older shades needed the blood to be able to communicate with the living. These scenes show the restlessness of the dead when their body has not buried properly.

#heathenism #paganism #hellinism #Hellenistic magick #magick history #history #academia #magick #mine

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newanglicanism · 7 years

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Gospel and culture: a vital lesson from the past

As the world around us exhibits an unprecedented pace of change, the language of gospel fidelity and cultural influence, if not contamination, are frequently set against each other. Suspicion of all things identified under a wide designation of ‘culture’ sets up a simplistic, and missionally disastrous, opposition of gospel against culture. Culture is to be feared, rejected, and as best we are able, held at a distance.

The rhetoric of the day is to establish stronger boundaries over and against ‘culture’, and withdrawal into a less contaminated social environment within the church. A powerful ‘us and them’ dynamic emerges, and in more extreme forms can be seen in geographical enclaves or separatist communities. As extreme as that sounds, social disconnection and withdrawal from wider community engagement is already very evident, together with a desire to undertake things from a church controlled platform, as free from values and constraints from the wider community as possible.

Proclamation of the gospel is framed with reference to battlelines shaped in terms of a gospel vs culture battlefield. One very real danger in this is equating gospel life as the way we used to do things as part of our Christian cultural heritage, or more simply, the way things used to be.

Before I explore a vital lesson to be learned from past missionary experience, we need to clarify what is—and is not—meant by the term ‘culture’. Gerard Arbuckle, in his must-read book Culture, Inculturation, and Theologians (Liturgical Press, 2010), discerns three categories of usage: classicist, modern, and post-modern.

The ‘classicist’ notion is readily understood, referring to a singular quality of ‘refinement’, essentially Eurocentric, drawing on advances in the arts and sciences as informing and demonstrating civilised behaviour.

It is the sum total of the spiritual, intellectual, and aesthetic aspects of human society. The definition stresses the need to detail the observable phenomena: for example, foods, literature, dances. Cultures are then graded aesthetically, with European civilization as the normative culture at the top of the list. Non-European peoples are definitely inferior, but it is possible for them to acquire the normative civilization with its elite values and lifestyles as gifts from above. (2)

The ‘modern’ category is the one most frequently assumed in much theological and ministry speak. This usage is often reflected in big-picture, paradigmic reviews, where ‘culture’ is used of historical epochs or eras. It is used to name culture as a homogeneous and integrated whole, something that can be identified over and against other cultures. Very common is reference to ‘Western culture’, as though there is such a thing that pervades and identifies all living within western communities and States.

Finally, Arbuckle identifies a more post-modern understanding. ‘[Every culture is fragmented to some degree or other, internally contested, its borders permeable. There is no such thing as a “pure” culture: never has been, never will be. Cultures are hybrid, constantly interacting, mixing, and changing’ (xxi). Far from being homogenous and integrated wholes (as in modern usage), culture reflect ‘polyphonic, fragmentary, and hybrid qualities’, including internal dissent and competing visions.

‘Culture’ defies definition, and in many ways is more extensive than the sum of its parts. Coming with expertise as a cultural anthropologist, Arbuckle both commends and urges the church to engage with culture understood within the complexity of post-modern perspectives. His proposed definition shapes the rest of his book, with each chapter unpacking the significance of recognising how a more complex understanding of culture enables us to understand and engage with our changing world meaningfully and constructively. As Andy Crouch puts it, as culture makers, rather than culture deniers. Arbuckle proposes this ‘working definition’ as broader interplay of notions in understanding what is associated with culture:

Culture is a pattern of meanings

• encased in a network of symbols, myths, narratives and rituals,

• created by individuals and subdivisions, as they struggle to respond to the competitive pressures of power and limited resources in a rapidly globalizing and fragmenting world,

• and instructing its adherents about what is considered to be the correct way to feel, think, and behave.

Now this discussion regarding ‘culture’ is simply preparatory to the main concern I want to raise. It is frequently observed that we appear to be living through a profound nexus of world history. Old norms are being replaced with a bewildering array of ‘new normals’, life looks very different from our childhood memories, and from one generation to the next, constant change is the new reality, whether we like it or not.

The impact on churches, especially those associated with a Eurocentric heritage, is profound. While the re-shaping or decline of major social institutions is widespread, together with community associations, political processes, banks and financial institutions, and ever-adapting or innovating business enterprises, the Christian church finds itself in a much more exposed position socially. The privileged status, resources and shared worldview of earlier times has gone.

How do we relate to this ever-changing new world, complete with more open hostilities, competing social drivers and political agendas? Apart from anything else, a whole new publishing industry of theological and missional analysis and guidance has been birthed!

Navigating and engaging gospel and culture is as real and urgent now as it was in the first century. And it is in this context, and mindful of the temptation to set gospel over against ‘culture’, I want to highlight one vital lesson from relatively recent history, initially identified in the Brandenburg Mission Conference in 1932, and subsequently in the landmark 1952 Willingen conference of the International Missionary Council. At issue was reframing mission not as a missional expansion of the Church (and the European culture of the sending Church), but as a movement of God into the fullness of the world, with all its peoples. The term missio Dei (the sending of God) was introduced.

Reference to the terminology of missio Dei is now widespread (and all who know me know that I am a great advocate), but the origins of the term are more specific. Early usage was cast more in reaction to the strong association between mission and European colonial imperialism, with all the cultural baggage that entailed. The terminology of missio Dei as initially construed was more specific and contextual than later adaptations of the term assume, with a concern to distance mission from colonial cultural agendas (mission as cultural propaganda). Opposition was framed in challenging mission cast as a task of the Christian West in sending missionaries with an agenda of cultural transformation (see further John G. Flett, The Witness of God: The Trinity, Missio Dei, Karl Barth, and the Nature of Christian Community). This was a massive mistake, to say the least, and one that brought scars across generations, cultural abuse, and a whole host of post-colonial baggage of which we are still hearing, recognising and repenting.

The entanglement of gospel ministry with the preservation of a perceived ‘Christian culture’ is not only mistaken, it is profoundly counter-missional. The gospel, however it is expressed and understood, is invariably inculturated, and necessarily so. Every word, form, and media of Scripture is inculturated, for that is the nature of God. As Karl Barth responded in critique, there can be no separation of God’s missional purposes and the realm of creation. Salvation and redemption cannot be separated from the world in real time and space. God’s mission cannot be experienced or advanced in any form other than in and through culture.

And no culture has an exclusive claim on the gospel. Any and every culture can be redeemed, transformed and improved through the gospel. The missional calling is not to impose one culture over another, nor to withdraw from culture into some hermetically sealed enclave. The sending of God was into the world. The incarnation of Christ was into a place and time, into a world of competing cultures, narratives, rituals and visions. And it must ever be so. The story of the early church, as reflected in every stream of New Testament tradition, is one of the gospel bridging and transforming cultures, of faithfulness to God witnessed through evangelization, that is, the redemptive transformation as social and communal as it was—and is—personal and relational.

I finish with another quote from Arbuckle, written a decade ago, that seems particularly prescient, both in its analysis and gospel affirmation. Alongside recognising the lack of tools available for practitioners to discern and engage with cultural change, together with a reluctance at official leadership levels to sanction experimentation in missional inculturation, Arbuckle detects a third concern:

…a revitalized fundamentalist view that the study of culture(s) is unimportant for evangelization, that it is even a waste of time, and that all we need to do is preach the Good News just as Jesus Christ did in his time! Yet inculturation is a fundamental imperative of the Gospel itself. In fact, Jesus Christ was extremely sensitive in his preaching to the cultures of his day. As the master of inculturation, he knew that his message had to penetrate to the “very roots” of cultures. (xx)

To which I simply say, ‘amen’ to that!

#mission #culture

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the-utmost-bound · 7 years

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The Happiness Hypothesis: Chapter 4, “The Faults of Others”

[NOTE: I am just outlining this book for my own edification; I don’t expect anyone else to read this post.]

This was the second chapter on how humans related to each other. In the previous chapter, Haidt explained how fairness and cooperation are able to hold society together. In this chapter, Haidt explains how hypocrisy threatens cooperation.

In particular, we are able to notice when other people are acting unfairly, but we don’t notice when we ourselves do it.

Relevant quotes from ancient literature:

Matthew 7:3-5: Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? ... You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.

Buddha: It is easy to see the faults of others, but difficult to see one’s own faults. One shows the faults of others like chaff winnowed in the wind, but one conceals one’s own faults as a cunning gambler conceals his dice.

Haidt opens the chapter by saying:

One of the most universal pieces of advice from across cultures and eras is that we are all hypocrites, and in our condemnation of others’ hypocrisy we only compound our own. Social psychologists have recently isolated the mechanisms that make us blind to the logs in our own eyes. The moral implications of these findings are disturbing; indeed, they challenge our greatest moral certainties. But the implications can be liberating, too, freeing you from destructive moralism and divisive self-righteousness.

The first part of the chapter talks about why we’re hypocrites, and describes the psychological research on hypocrisy.

The second part of the chapter explains how these mechanisms lead to polarization and conflict in society.

Keeping Up Appearances

Tit-for-tat is the optimal strategy when you can fully observe the other player’s actions.

“In real life, however, you don’t react to what someone did; you react only to what you think she did, and the gap between action and perception is bridged by the art of impression management.”

So a better strategy might be to defect but convince the other person that you’ve cooperated. Haidt calls this “Macchiavellian tit-for-tat”.

The best way to convince others that you’ve cooperated is to convince yourself. Hypocrisy works best when you believe your own lies.

Haidt says:

We are well-armed for battle in a Machiavellian world of reputation manipulation, and one of our most important weapons is the delusion that we are non-combatants.

Find Your Inner Lawyer

So how does hypocrisy work? How do we manage to convince ourselves that we’re not at fault?

Recall from Chapter 1 that the rider often acts like a lawyer, arguing on behalf of the elephant’s beliefs.

When given some question (e.g. “should we increase minimum wage?”) the elephant immediately comes up with some intuition (yes or no) and then the rider reaches for some “pseudoevidence” to support it (e.g. an anecdote about someone who is living on minimum wage and can’t support a family).

Once people have this piece of anecdata, they’re done; they don’t look any further for more evidence, and they certainly don’t try to find evidence that argues against their position. Haidt calls this “a one-sided search for supporting evidence only”.

In low-stakes situations, if someone else gives you an argument against your position, you might end up changing your mind; you just won’t reach for those counterarguments yourself.

In high-stakes situations, people are even more determined to find supporting evidence, and are less open to arguments against it.

“Over and over again, studies show that people set out on a cognitive mission to bring back reasons to support their preferred belief or action. And because we are usually successful in this mission, we end up with the illusion of objectivity. We really believe that our position is rationally and objectively justified.”

The Rose-Colored Mirror

When playing Machiavellian tit-for-tat, you need to carefully craft your self-presentation to appear virtuous.

But since everyone else is playing Machiavellian tit-for-tat too, you need to be wary of their claims to virtue.

It turns out that we have a realistic estimate of other people’s virtue, but an overly rosy picture of our own.

A majority of Americans and Europeans rate themselves as above average on skills and virtues.

When asked to predict how much they’ll donate in a charitable event, people predict other people’s donations accurately but wildly overestimate their own.

People believe they do a larger percentage of teamwork or chores than they actually do.

These self-serving biases “can make people feel that they deserve more than they do, thereby setting the stage for endless disputes with other people who feel equally over-entitled.”

I’m Right; You’re Biased

Across many studies, even when people are told about self-serving biases, they still fail to correct for them.

Why are people so blind to their own biases?

Some of this can be explained by “naive realism”, the belief that we see things as they really are.

Since we have access to objective truth, if someone else disagrees, it must be because they are blinded by religion or ideology.

We perceive others as biased, but ourselves as just seeing things the way they really are.

At the end of that section, Haidt starts talking about how our hypocrisy and biases lead to polarization in society.

Naive realism exists at the group level as well as the individual: “My group is right because we see things as they are. Those who disagree are obviously biased by their religion, their ideology, or their self-interest.”

This makes it easy to see the world in terms of good vs. evil, where your group is good and the other group is evil.

Satan Satisfies

Crime and danger are decreasing, but people are always looking for some evil enemy to fight against.

It used to be communism, or Satan himself. These days it’s homosexuals (if you’re conservative) or racists/homophones (if you’re liberal).

All of these villains share three characteristics: “They are invisible (you can’t identify the evil one from appearance alone); their evil spreads by contagion, making it vital to protect impressionable young people (for example from communist ideas, homosexual teachers, or stereotypes on television); and the villains can be defeated only if we all pull together as a team.”

People need an enemy in order to justify banding together as a group. And being on a holy mission gives people a sense of purpose.

“We are thus convinced of our own virtue, but quick to see bias, greed, and duplicity in others. We are often corrected about others’ motives, but as any conflict escalates we begin to exaggerate grossly, to weave a story in which pure virtue (our side) is in a battle with pure vice (theirs).”

The Myth of Pure Evil

A psychologist named Baumeister studied people’s perception of evil.

He looked at evil from both the perspective of the perpetrator and the victim; we tend to think the victim was blameless and the perpetrator was evil, but there’s usually more to the story than that. Usually the victim did something to incite the perpetrator. “Most murders result from an escalating cycle of provocation and retaliation[.]”

That’s not to say that both parties are equally to blame; the perpetrator might be completely overreacting (based on the same self-serving biases Haidt has been talking about in the whole chapter).

But in general, one side is not purely evil and the other purely good.

Yet we seem to have a psychological need to see things in those terms.

He calls this “the myth of pure evil”. This includes ideas like “the evildoers are pure in their evil motives (they have no motives for their actions beyond sadism and greed); victims are pure in their victimhood (they did nothing to bring about their victimization); and evil comes from outside and is associated with a group or force that attacks our group. Furthermore, anyone who questions the application of the myth, who dares muddy the waters of moral certainty, is in league with evil.”

This causes a polarization between groups that can lead to violence and war.

In reality, evil has four main causes: greed/ambition, pure sadism, high self-esteem, and moral idealism. We think of the first two as causing most evil, but actually they don’t. High self-esteem causes evil when people lash out violently to defend against threats to their ego. Moral idealism causes evil when people think that the ends justify the means. “The major atrocities of the 20th century were carried out largely either by men who thought they were creating a utopia or else by men who believed they were defending their homeland or tribe from attack.”

Finding the Great Way

We live in a world that our minds infuse with significance. “That is, the world we live in is not really one made of rocks, trees, and physical objects; it is a world of insults, opportunities, status symbols, betrayals, saints, and sinners.”

Our minds weave us this world of significance, out of our self-serving biases and hypocrisy. When you look at it from the outside, all these conflicts seem pointless and silly. So what do you do about it?

The first step is to view it as a game, in which each person plays out his part. This is what’s taught in the Bhagavad Gita. Hinduism tells you to keep playing the game, but with a sense of irony and self-awareness. Buddhism tells you to quit the game entirely.

Meditation and cognitive therapy can also help us with self-awareness of our own hypocrisy.

In order to get out of this trap it’s good to start looking for the log in your own eye. When you can see your own contribution to conflicts, it makes it harder to be angry and to perpetuate the disagreements.

It’s hard to see the log in our own eye, because we’re programmed by evolution to be moralistic hypocrites. But if we can do it, then it can help decrease conflict and lead to happiness.

Haidt doesn’t give a conclusion about whether he agrees with the ancient sayings, but it’s pretty clear that he thinks they are right about our hypocrisy.

#books #jonathan haidt #the happiness hypothesis

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bluewatsons · 5 years

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Michael Jarvis, "All in the Day's Work:” Cold War Doctoring and Its Discontents in William Burroughs's Naked Lunch, 35 Literature & Medicine 183 (2017)

Abstract

In Naked Lunch, the institutions and practices of science and medicine, specifically with regard to psychiatry/psychology, are symptoms of a bureaucratic system of control that shapes, constructs, defines, and makes procrustean alterations to both the mind and body of human subjects. Using sickness and junk (or heroin) as convenient metaphors for both a Cold War binary mentality and the mandatory consumption of twentieth-century capitalism, Burroughs presents modern man as fundamentally alienated from any sense of a personal self. Through policing the health of citizens, the doctors are some of the novel's most overt "Senders," or agents of capital-C Control, commodifying and exploiting the individual's humanity (mind and body) as a raw material in the generation of a knowledge that functions only in the legitimation and reinforcement of itself as authoritative.

The Man has a branch office in each of our brains, his corporate emblem is a white albatross, each local rep has a cover known as the Ego, and their mission in this world is Bad Shit. -- Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch (1959) is a mythological text, a cultural heritage that circulates socially and produces material effects without needing to be recognized in its actuality—without needing, that is, to be read. The very title conjures scenes of countercultural avant-garde low art, subversive precisely through its filthiness, an icon against which the idealized 1950s White Suburban Family archetype finds its definition, the abjection that establishes normativity. With regard to the book as a trope, Oliver Harris argues that, even before it was published, "an image of Naked Lunch would always precede the real thing and, for the image-hungry, replace it altogether."1 He however regards this relationship as symbiotic, mutually beneficial, and necessary for a critical appreciation of the novel's textual materiality and social function. For Elizabeth Wheeler, by contrast, the image has become the sole extant aspect, and what she portrays as essentially an irredeemably offensive work (which would of moral necessity be correct, if one truly considered the novel to be a glorification of violent rape and murder, as she seems to do) is now consumed only as "an index of the reader's hipness."2 While Wheeler's critique doesn't stem from the same "family values" conservative impulses motivating reviewers from the political Right (such as the movement to ban the book when it was published, or present-day reactions against what the book is supposed to "stand for"), she makes the same mistake of underestimating the critical work the novel does, stopping at the grotesque superficiality of the sadomasochistic revelry and taking Burroughs at his word when he asserts, "I have no secrets."3 In this paper I would like to work against both this type of criticism, inspired by Burroughs's "myth of transparency," and that of critics like Robin Lydenberg who, in privileging the author's textual practice over the book's content, ignore the novel's allegorical register in deference to formal practice in and of itself.4 Without attempting to re-theorize the entire body of Burroughs criticism, I would like to focus on the novel's portrayal of surgical and psychiatric practices and practitioners, and their regulatory role in what Michel Foucault calls "a strange scientifico-juridical complex," in order to move towards an understanding of the novel's larger concerns, macrocosmic sociopolitical interventions which don't stop at the micro-concerns of either drugs or mental illness.5

That is to say, in Naked Lunch, the institutions and practices of science and medicine, specifically with regard to the fields of surgery, psychiatry, and psychology, are symptoms of a bureaucratic system of control that shapes, constructs, defines, and makes procrustean alterations to both the mind and body of human subjects. Harris marks this as a manifestation of Cold War binaries and containment ideologies, noting that "the paranoid rhetoric of public health at risk from [sexual, ideological] contagion was especially potent, since the unspeakable and unnatural were figured as virtually undetectable, viral threats to the integrity of national and individual immune systems."6 Harris associates this with "what Andrew Ross calls 'the Cold War culture of germophobia.'"7 Using sickness and junk as convenient metaphors for the mandatory consumption of twentieth-century capitalism, Burroughs presents modern man as fundamentally alienated from any sense of an independent self. Through policing the health of citizens, the doctors are some of the novel's most overt "Senders," or agents of capital-C Control, commodifying and exploiting the individual's humanity (mind and body) as a raw material in the generation of a knowledge that functions only in the legitimation and reinforcement of itself as authoritative; or, as Burroughs makes clear in a macro-micro analogy of power which draws on the specific concern of heroin addiction, "sending can never be a means to anything but more sending, like junk."8

The novel's portrayal of the individual's relationship to systems of power, including the medical discipline, has been productively connected to the reigning intellectual discourse of the day, especially the critical social theory of the Frankfurt School. As Philip Walsh notes, Burroughs shares concerns with key Frankfurt theorists (Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse, among others) in that they "are all radical critics of certain trends of contemporary mass civilization," including the neoliberal devaluation of individual agency and the "proliferation of large-scale socially induced psychological pathology" by what Louis Althusser called Repressive State Apparatuses (RSAs), institutions such as the police, prisons, or the military, which are invested in violent control of individuals and populations.9

These thinkers join Burroughs (as I demonstrate below) in a belief that the contemporary emphasis on scientific discourse leads to an "instrumental rationality," or, a rationality in which the means justify an uninterrogated end, reducing the individual to a fungible cog in the greater social techno-bureaucratic corpus. The following discussion draws upon one Frankfurt-affiliate in particular, Erich Fromm, whose The Sane Society (1955) found popular success and made the author a household name (in certain circles, at least) during the period directly prior to and during the time Burroughs was writing the bulk of Naked Lunch.10 Fromm's relevance to a discussion of medical discourse in Burroughs goes further than mere contemporaneity, suggesting ways in which Cold War social pessimism found the imagery of pathologization and medical intervention especially resonant metonyms for the ways that the individual is both produced as a human subject and reduced in subjection to impersonal structures of domination.

To begin with the obvious regarding this imagery, Burroughs's depictions of medical spaces and practices are uniformly repulsive. While this is not in stark contrast to any of the novel's other tableaux of abjection, the representations of filth and incompetence in scenes of surgery and psychiatry are particularly striking. Dr. Benway, remembering a former job, recalls, "He gives me a job as ship's doctor on the S.S. Filariasis, as filthy a craft as ever sailed the seas. Operating with one hand, beating the rats offa my patient with the other and bedbugs and scorpions rain down from the ceiling" (28). The novel disrupts the medical image-narrative of order, cleanliness, and sterility by depicting hospital and operation scenes as kinetic, chaotic, and disgusting. In another scene, the aptly-named "Leif the Unlucky" finds himself in a Hieronymous Bosch-like hospital hellscape:

Then there was the time he collapsed with strangulated intestines, perforated ulcers and peritonitis in Cairo and the hospital was so crowded they bedded him in a latrine, and the Greek surgeon goofed and sewed up a live monkey in him, and he was gang-fucked by the Arab attendants, and one of the orderlies stole the penicillin and substituted Saniflush; and the time he got clap in his ass and a self-righteous English doctor cured him with an enema of hot sulphuric acid; and the German practitioner of Technological Medicine who removed his appendix with a rusty can opener and a pair of tin snips (he considered the germ theory "a nonsense").

The formal inertia of this passage presents the curative space as a domain of serial progressions along a negative continuum, where things can only go from bad to worse, either within the time of one visit, or throughout a lifetime of successive treatments. Because of the doctors' fundamental level of incompetence, outcomes range from brain damage to death, but are always alterations, if not annihilations, of the subject's humanity. This is coupled with a clear lack of accountability for members of the medical establishment. Benway, for example, keeps getting work, despite what must be a rather alarming resumé: "During my rather brief experience as a psychoanalyst … one patient ran amok in Grand Central with a flame thrower, two committed suicide and one died on the couch like a jungle rat (jungle rats are subject to die if confronted suddenly with a hopeless situation). So his relations beef and I tell them, 'It's all in the day's work.'"11 The psychoanalyst, tasked with bringing the patient back into line with normative society, produces violence and despair precisely through reducing the patient's options to arbitrary binary positions of sane/insane, normal/abnormal, and so on. These psychiatric narratives are the Cold War geopolitical polarization of "us/US vs. Them" reified and inscribed upon the body, meant to elide the individuated subject positions of patients; the practitioner's smug insouciance is more salt in the wound.

Regarding the larger categorical function of Control exemplified in Dr. Benway's role as diagnostician, Fromm notes in The Sane Society that the sane/insane binary is based on a "sociological relativism" which holds that "each society is normal inasmuch as it functions, and that pathology can be defined only in terms of the individual's lack of adjustment to the ways of life of his society"; however, if one were to postulate "universal criteria for mental health" based on a "normative humanism," then we would gain the ability to consider whether "the problem of mental health in a society is only that of the number of 'unadjusted' individuals, and not that of a possible unadjustment of culture itself."12 Fromm's overall discussion of this "pathology of normalcy" is useful in that he represents the fusion of several discourses in a manner similar to what we see in Burroughs—as a theoretician of the Frankfurt School as well as a clinical psychoanalyst, Fromm blends Freudianism and Marxism in a manner that smooths their jagged edges and resists the dogmatist's tendency towards treating them as totalizing discourse.13 An unfashionable humanism—like the almost pop-psychological emphasis on "Love" so often at the forefront of his thinking—undergirds his critique of industrial capital, and his belief in an a priori "natural" human condition provides an important platform from which to stage his critique and advocate for the political praxis of a "Humanistic Communitarian Socialism."14 As I will discuss below, Naked Lunch also relies on Marxist ideas of alienation and commodification in conjunction with Freudian libidinal drives, and the novel's exploration of alternatives to hegemonic binaries—the "either or, absolute terms" that never truly "correspond to what we know about the human nervous system and the physical world"—is likewise an attempt to theorize the individual's possibility for a more "natural" agency outside of interpellative discourses.15

Junk, for Burroughs, is not simply the object of an individual's addiction, but also a symbol of man's alienation from himself, and a device which positions him within commodity culture. Opiates, as opposed to other drugs, alter an individual's biochemistry at a fundamental level, leading to a "metabolic dependence" on the substance: "Morphine becomes a biologic need like water and the user may die if he is suddenly deprived of it. The diabetic will die without insulin, but he is not addicted to insulin. … He needs insulin to maintain a normal metabolism. The addict needs morphine to maintain a morphine metabolism, and so avoid the excruciatingly painful return to a normal metabolism."16 Use of the drug leads to not simply a desire for more of it (such as, for example, the function of lust or greed), but to an actual endocrinal transformation—the addict's body no longer functions as a human body, but is inducted into a separate junk economy. Using Slavoj Žižek's critique of consumer desire constituted through the symbolic order's always-withheld promise of "pure" pleasure, Ole Bjerg argues that the "complete satisfaction of desire experienced by the drug user in his high is at the same time a momentary cancellation of his desire. Together with the desire, his engagement in social reality, and thereby a fundamental part of what makes him a subject at all, also disappears."17 Indeed, the "addict exists in a painless, sexless, timeless state" as sedation erases the urgency of any Freudian drives;18 Benway speculates, "If all pleasure is relief from tension, junk affords relief from the whole life process, in disconnecting the hypothalamus, which is the center of psychic energy and libido" (30). Addiction to opiates results in a new or "other" life state for the user, one that Burroughs characterizes as vegetative.19

In the terms of Fromm's construction, this alternate state is alienation, and the "better-than-sex" high is, paradoxically, the opposite of happiness—not sadness, but "depression": "the inability to feel … the sense of being dead, while our body is alive."20 This understanding is tied to the user's place in capitalist culture—"It follows that happiness cannot be found in the state of inner passivity, and in the consumer attitude which pervades the life of alienated man"—a point which seems at odds with the countercultural anti-sociality of Burroughs's junkies.21 As a means of disconnecting the addict from the structures of society, the drug would seem to create marginal figures or outlaws, and to represent a potentially disordering force. Robert Holton notes the similarity of the junkie to David Riesman's "anomic," the "maladjusted," a "group including the misfits, the eccentrics, those who cannot fit in, and those who will not fit in, that assortment of individuals existing beyond—or perhaps beneath—the reach of adjusted conformity: drug addicts, sexual 'deviants,' criminals, the mentally ill, and so on."22 In Riesman's formulation, the maladjustment can be a deviation from the stable norm in either direction—the anomic could be a violent outlaw, or a passive catatonic. Holton suggests that "Burroughs' junkie bridges these opposites in his recourse to criminal behavior on one hand and his heroin-induced immobility on the other." Further, what both these poles share is the characteristic of "nonproductivity"; they are the waste products of society.23 Jason Morelyle likewise reads in Burroughs's trope of addiction "resources not simply for theorizing, but also for resisting control, especially in his representations of the so-called drug addict, a figure that is often understood as a subject formed at the limits of 'straight' society."24

While it is tempting to read the junkie as liberated, or "off the grid," the truth is much more complex. Not only do addicts fail to mobilize any sort of resistance to the dominant ideology, but heroin addiction functions to cyclically reintegrate the user back into the very economy that the high has liberated him from. Though, as Bjerg notes, the addict is perhaps able to evade the symbolic baggage of the established order of consumption through a "counterfeiting of the economy of desire," I would argue that the ideology of consumption as a negotiation of lack reaches its apotheosis in the subject's insatiable craving, and that the novel's representations of various addictions are all, as Lydenberg argues, "variations on a pattern of control and domination of the individual's will."25

Further, what critics have neglected to respond to is the important difference between this "junkie" (or opioid) model of addiction and the alternative models offered by other depictions of drug users and mentally disordered individuals. This key distinction may best be illustrated by Benway's ruminations in a scene where he "cures" schizophrenia by turning the patients into heroin addicts:

"A heart-warming sight," says Benway, "those junkies standing around waiting for the Man. Six months ago they were all schizophrenic. Some of them hadn't been out of bed for years. Now look at them. In all the course of my practices, I have never seen a schizophrenic junky, and junkies are mostly of the schizo physical type. …

"And why don't junkies get schizophrenia? Don't know yet. A schizophrenic can ignore hunger and starve to death if he isn't fed. No one can ignore heroin withdrawal. The fact of addiction imposes contact.

"But that's only one angle. Mescaline, LSD6, deteriorated adrenaline, harmine can produce an approximate schizophrenia. The best stuff is extracted from the blood of schizos; so schizophrenia is likely a drug psychosis. They got a metabolic connection, a Man Within you might say."

Schizophrenia is presented as an antisocial disorder here; by curing it through addiction to opiates, the doctor is attacking not the pathologized neurological condition but pathologized individuality and disconnection from consumer culture. By forcing the subjects to engage the junk networks of desire and consumption, the doctor circumvents the individual biological determination of the psychic state (the Man Within) and replaces it with himself, a stand-in for the Man, whose actions from the central position in the junk supply pyramid work to construct the social subject as an addict to an ideology of consumerism and powerlessness. The original (or schizophrenic's) Man Within, regardless of whether "his" effect on the subject is positive or negative, is disconnected from this economy of control. Therefore he must be superseded, denying an individual's mental or biological self-determination, in order to access the Control apparatus directly and reinsert the individual into the field of consumerism. In this sense, the "nonproductivity" of the anomic is of secondary importance, and arguments about the addict's "liminality" lose their force.26 Fromm notes that late capitalism "needs men who co-operate smoothly in large groups; who want to consume more and more, and whose tastes are standardized and can be easily influenced and anticipated," criteria which define Benway's drooling addicts precisely.27 Because of the automation of the means of production, it is less vital that the subject be a producer than an ever hungrier consumer, and heroin is at once a metaphor for and a reification of the control exerted on the subject by capitalist ideology. It is not, in any case, a vehicle for self-liberation.

Additionally, the bizarre reference to hallucinogenic drugs in the blood of schizophrenic subjects is telling, as they are substances that highlight the idiosyncrasies of the perception and experience of the individual, making them challenges to the pleasure, ease, and womb-like security of junk culture. These non-junk narcotics are defined by their widening of subjective experience, in direct opposition to the next-fix tunnel-vision of the opiate addict. Within the novel's ideological framework, we can think of these (LSD, mescaline, schizophrenia, etc.) in terms of their broadening horizontality. If the vertical hierarchies of power make the pyramid an apt metaphor for a junk/consumption addiction, these expansionist substances might be considered a part of the urban sprawl of consciousness.28 In contrast to the psychedelic magnification and opening up of subjectivity, the "relief from tension" provided by opiates is a release from the pain of being alive at all, a welcome dehumanization which imparts "to the organism some of the qualities of a plant."29

Historically, this need for escape into a thoughtless void would make sense as a way of dealing with anxieties and fears arising in part from the constant possibility of nuclear apocalypse. Writing from within what Alan Nadel calls "containment culture," Fromm notes:

Perhaps the most popular modern concept in the arsenal of psychiatric formulae is that of security. In recent years there is an increasing emphasis on the concept of security as the paramount aim of life, and as the essence of mental health. One reason for this attitude lies, perhaps, in the fact that the threat of war hanging over the world for many years has increased the longing for security. Another, more important reason, lies in the fact that people feel increasingly more insecure as the result of an increasing automatization and overconformity.30

Security, here, can be read as a desire for neutrality and normality, and additionally as a release from libidinal drives. Individuals trapped in the Manichaean binaries of Cold War ideology hope for a relief from the indirect tension of containment or the frightening bluster of brinksmanship, either through peace and disarmament or the complete elimination of the opposing superpower. On an individual level, "psychiatry and psychoanalysis have lent considerable support" to the growing segment of the population who "feel that they should have no doubts, no problems, that they should take no risks, and that they should always feel 'secure.'"31 This "security" is an abandoning of libidinal desire and the pursuit of human goals, and represents a fantasy of static certainty. Ultimately, argues Fromm, a thinking, rational human being can never attain complete security from the doubts and uncertainties which attend the complex functioning of the intellect and the passage of the individual through his own life. The real goal of mental health, he argues, "is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity without panic and undue fear."32 If we consider these ideas in terms of Burroughs's junkies, we see that through resorting to the sedation and dehumanization of the opiate high, the user aspires to this false ideal of security, a pursuit which results in the annihilation of the self and the exploitation of the individual by political and economic systems.

The work of the medical professionals in Naked Lunch similarly reflects this desire for security and an end to Cold War anxieties. As Jonathan Paul Eburne explains, the ubiquitous US/USSR sociopolitical binary view created a metonymic and associative bricolage of dread, comprised of "the fear of communism, the Bomb, homosexuality, sexual chaos and moral decrepitude, aliens (foreigners and extraterrestrials)" which were "condensed with nightmarish lucidity upon a unifying rhetorical figure"; in this case, a "festering and highly contagious disease" encroaching upon the national corpus.33 This macro-metaphor maps tellingly not only onto the real world paranoia and persecution of liminal subjectivities and peoples, but also onto the ways in which the novel's medical professionals view their role with regard to their wards. While the efforts of the doctors can be divided into two complementary camps (manipulation of the mind versus alteration of the body), their actions, whether in good faith or bad, all end in similar destructions of the "natural" or unassimilated individual, a pathologized state which needs a "cure."

To begin simply, we might examine the work of surgeons, and Burroughs's depictions of bizarre and counterintuitive alterations to the human body. In keeping with the "Leif the Unlucky" narrative, the surgeon is presented as hapless and error-prone, but there is an element of dark cheer and good intentions (unsurprisingly, paving the road to surgical hell). A German surgeon is prototypical in this sense: "Flushed with success he then began snipping and cutting out everything in sight: 'The human body is filled up vit unnecessitated parts. You can get by vit vone kidney. Vy have two? Yes dot is a kidney. … The inside parts should not be so close in together crowded. They need Lebensraum like the Vaterland'" (152). Surgery in Naked Lunch is based on arbitrary definitions of form and function, and designed to improve the design of the body by removing excess, in the service of a scientific "system which has no purpose and goal transcending it, and which makes man its appendix."34 "Doctor 'Fingers' Schaefer, the Lobotomy Kid" is the best example of the dangers of this type of medical idealism, as he desires, seemingly in good faith, the advance of humanity through alteration of or liberation from the individual's limiting physiognomy (87). His nicknames point to both a tactile manipulation of the patients' bodies and an outlaw, Wild West medical vigilantism. His aim is human betterment through efficiency; in one experiment, he argues that "the human nervous system can be reduced to a compact and abbreviated spinal column"—a rationalization of the excess of the individual. He dubs his creation "The Complete All American Deanxietized Man," signaling the lobotomizing psychiatric institution's misguided curative attempts regarding neuroses as well as the nationalist foundations of this type of discourse, and is shocked when the unveiled result is "a monster black centipede" (87). A courtroom scene presents the social and legislative backlash against these practices, charging him with the "unspeakable crime of brain rape … [;] forcible lobotomy": "He it is—he and no other—who has reduced whole provinces of our fair land to a state bordering on the far side of idiocy. … He it is who has filled great warehouses with row on row, tier on tier of helpless creatures who must have their every want attended. … 'The Drones' he calls them with a cynical leer of pure educated evil" (88–89). The ad hominem rhetoric against Schaefer is a reaction against the materiality of the lobotomy as a surgical practice, when it is, in fact, merely a reification of the ideological work performed by the psychiatric institution as a whole—Schaefer has attempted to give his patients the "security" they desire, and perhaps his only crime is that he has presented his creations to the public, and made the violent alteration and construction of the subject realizable in non-metaphorical terms through his actual cutting and stitching. Considered differently, in his construction of a vast brain-dead class of consumers, thus necessitating industrial production, bureaucratic management, and caretaking services, he might perhaps be lauded as a "job creator," that capitalist par excellence.

Benway is Schaefer's foil, and his prominent role in the text corresponds to the urgency of critiquing his work especially. Benway acts to construct his subjects psychologically, and his efforts recall Antonio Gramsci's concept of cultural hegemony, or Althusser's Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs), which assert themselves indirectly, and lack both overt violence and an identifiable central source. What his manipulation most resembles, however, is Gilles Deleuze's concept of the society of control, the biopolitical rationalization of large swaths of human capital that epitomizes post-industrial social order. While a Foucauldian disciplinary system initially imposes a physical order by delimiting the space available to the human body through "enclosures" (jail, walls, school, the factory), the society of control needs no such material infrastructure: "Enclosures are molds, distinct castings, but controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other."35 This shift is necessary in a post-production economy, where movement and flow are the keys to encouraging consumption behaviors. The result is that the "operation of markets is now the instrument of social control. … Control is short-term and of rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous and without limit, while discipline was of long duration, infinite and discontinuous. Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt."36 The physical focus of discipline/enclosure gives way to the psychosocial manipulation of the consuming subject. Social order is enforced not through the penal code, but through naturalized economic imperatives combined with the data-mining of an Information Age bureaucracy.

Tellingly, then, Benway's tenure in Annexia sees the repeal or destruction of physically repressive laws and institutions:

"I deplore brutality," [Benway] said. "It's not efficient. On the other hand, prolonged mistreatment, short of physical violence, gives rise, when skillfully applied, to anxiety and a feeling of special guilt. … The subject must not realize that the mistreatment is a deliberate attack of an anti-human enemy on his personal identity. He must be made to feel that he deserves any treatment he receives because there is something (never specified) horribly wrong with him. The naked need of the control addicts must be decently covered by an arbitrary and intricate bureaucracy so that the subject cannot contact his enemy direct."

Reading like a crude burlesque of Kafka's The Trial, Benway's psychological experimentation is in the service of mind control, dismissing the use of torture as "puerile" and unsophisticated. It is Benway who speaks the oft-quoted line, "A functioning police state needs no police" (31, emphasis in original). Compare Benway's discussion of heroin and psychological conditioning to Fromm's analysis of the nature of control in the era of Cold War capitalism:

Authority in the middle of the twentieth century has changed its character; it is not overt authority, but anonymous, invisible, alienated authority. Nobody makes a demand, neither a person, nor an idea, nor a moral law. Yet we all conform as much or more than people in an intensely authoritarian society would. Indeed, nobody is an authority except "It." What is It? Profit, economic necessities, the market, common sense, public opinion, what "one" does, thinks, feels. The laws of anonymous authority are as invisible as the laws of the market—and just as unassailable. Who can attack the invisible? Who can rebel against Nobody?37

Like Benway's subjects, Fromm's modern individual is similarly beset by a sourceless, pervasive guilt, an anxiety that drives him to conform to anything whatsoever, at the cost of his individuality. Commenting on work like Benway's, he writes, "[T]he crowning achievement of manipulation is modern psychology. What Taylor did for industrial work, the psychologists do for the whole personality—all in the name of understanding and freedom. … [T]hese professions are in the process of becoming a serious danger to the development of man …; their practitioners are evolving into the priests of a new religion of fun, consumption and self-lessness, into the specialists of alienation, into the spokesmen for the alienated personality."38 Here, the individual is something compiled on an assembly line, put together piece by piece in accordance with a blueprint that he has no access to, becoming a subject only through being subjected to the mechanized hand of an invisible force. Psychiatry as an institution represents both the assembly-line worker who alters the psyche of the individual, and the "spokesmen" who make such manipulation acceptable to a public longing for the security provided by the quick fix.

The novel problematizes these public relations through the character of Benway, who produces overwhelmingly impaired subjects (identified by the label "Irreversible Neural Damage"), and casually absolves himself of any responsibility for his actions:

"Get these fucking INDs outa here. It's a bring down already. Bad for the tourist business."

"What should I do with them?"

"How in the fuck should I know? I'm a scientist. A pure scientist. Just get them outa here. I don't hafta look at them is all. They constitute an albatross."

…

Doctor Benway pauses at the door and looks back at the INDs.

"Our failures," he says. "Well, it's all in the day's work."

His concern is primarily with hiding the hideous results of his work from the gaze of public scrutiny represented by "the tourist business" (and likely also from the same legal institutions which have ensnared his colleague, Dr. Schaefer). Alluding to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (1798), the failed results of Benway's experiments are "albatrosses," symbols that have reversed their aspect from positive to negative through one man's capricious violation of natural order, an excellent analogy for the minds/bodies of his medical subjects. Whether it's the law, the tourists, or relatives' "beef" Benway hides his failures from, there is on the one hand a recognition that he will be perceived negatively by the public, and simultaneously an utter disregard for the concerns of those outside his profession. Unlike the Mariner, Benway's albatrosses are shoved aside, out of sight; while the Mariner wears his sin around his neck for all to see, Benway's sins are worn, irreversibly, upon the bodies of his patients. More frightening than the summary absolution he allows himself with the phrase "it's all in the day's work" is the idea that each successive day will begin the process anew, as he labors unceasingly in his zealous devotion to anti-human techno-bureaucratic rationalities.

His insistence on the "purity" of both himself-as-scientist and science as an institution is an idealism that ignores the ends of experimentation (i.e., "albatrosses") in a valorization of experimentation for its own sake. Walsh reads Burroughs's focus on this type of self-invested scientism as explicating Max Weber's distinction between "substantive" and "instrumental" rationalities: while the former "involves critical questioning … in accordance with a concern with the ends or goals of life and human welfare," instrumental reason is associated with efficiency, a "means-oriented ethics," and "the increasing and unstoppable power of bureaucracies" which create "an unprecedented concentration of power among a technical elite."39 Benway's conception of his work as "pure" science epitomizes the instrumental rationality of any discursive system, medical or otherwise, that uses humanity as the raw materials to legitimize itself, or exerts arbitrary control over others. His hero is Doctor Tetrazzini, whose "operations were performances," "pure artistic creation … [where] the surgeon deliberately endangers his patient, and then, with incredible speed and celerity, rescues him from death at the last possible second" (51–52). Medical intervention has nothing to do with the actual circumstances of health, the patient, or the body, but is entirely self-contained, reflexive. Science/medicine confers upon itself an authority in perpetuity regardless of outcomes and without desire for advancement, based on constantly reinterpreted definitions of health and sickness, participating in experimentation for its own sake. Now, "deviant" or anomic citizens have become a ready pool of subjects for the extension of techno-capitalist mandates. The German doctor's darkly comic concern with affording enough "Lebensraum" to his patient's organs is doubly ironic: the literal meaning of the term is "living space," whereas the doctor's poorly reasoned intervention into the natural organization of the human body can only lead to death, regardless of the "space" created; further, the term unambiguously connects him to the Nazi party, not only in terms of its expansionist telos, but also in its extensive medical experimentation, crimes committed upon the bodies of Jews, homosexuals, and other "undesirable" elements who were imprisoned, surgically altered, sterilized, and euthanized, often in the name of disinterested "pure science" rather than outright hate. Burroughs's pointed inclusion of this character creates a direct connection between the contemporary surgical-psychiatric state and the horrors of the previous decade, as they share a similar nationalist rhetoric of disease and necessity; patients' bodies have become colonized territories, exploited in the name of security, normalization, and medical knowledge. As Harris notes in a discussion of the historical dimensions of Cold War binaries in Burroughs's earlier work Queer, "Both sides are acknowledged to be developing ultimate techniques of social control, and their economic and military applications. The era's defining political issue—the conflict between totalitarianism and individual freedom—no longer defines one side of the Cold War against the other"; rather, "they speak a common language of technological rationality and social engineering."40 Unlike the covert absent-presence of Nazi camps or Stalinist gulags, work like Dr. Benway's occurs almost in the open, becoming socially permissible as a result of Cold War "germophobia" and pathologization of the social (psychological, physical, sexual, political) Other. The novel points to the ways that the pervasive desire for security and dread of infiltration leads to unquestioning acceptance of a disciplinary psychological discourse that produces dehumanized, conforming subjects, hooked on literal junk or its counterpart in consumer ideology and the politics of fear.

Interestingly enough, Benway provides both the critiqued and the critiquing position with regard to the simultaneous epistemological and political roles of medicine/science in modern society. Reassuring Schaefer, who has expressed doubts about the morality of their work ("I can't escape a feeling … well, of evil about this"), he makes what amounts to a case for the aestheticization of science, a la Tetrazzini:

"Balderdash, my boy. … We're scientists. … Pure scientists. Disinterested research and damned be him who cries 'Hold, too much!' Such people are no better than party poops."

…

Schaefer is not listening. "You know," he says impulsively, "I think I'll go back to plain old-fashioned surgery. The human body is scandalously inefficient. Instead of a mouth and an anus to get out of order why not have one all-purpose hole to eat and eliminate? We could seal up nose and mouth, fill in the stomach, make an air hole direct into the lungs where it should have been in the first place. …"

While Benway, the disinterested "pure scientist," hides behind the authority of the institution and disregards the ends of his research through a focus on the means (i.e., experiments as self-justifying additions to abstract knowledge), Schaefer's seemingly genuine desire to improve the human condition leads him to ever more monstrous acts in order to secure a "cured" or ideal end subject. Within the psycho-political state, the novel presents both sides of the binary (mind/body, ends/means) as equally based on the subjugation and consumption of the individual's humanity. Lydenberg correctly asserts that Burroughs emphasizes these moral/ethical/political binaries as a means of critiquing the very concept of dualism; writing of the disease of "moral disapproval and guilt [that] imprisons offenders and judges alike," she argues that "the expulsion of this life-draining virus can only be achieved through a violent undermining of the entire dual system of morality, a system built on repression, antithesis, and conflict. Such structures of conflict represent the channeling and reduction of the infinite potential of difference into the limited realm of moral dualism."41

The Manichaean Cold War weltanschauung of the United States and its citizens in the 1950s works on every level to elide the human individual in favor of social taxonomies and medical categorization. In the novel's overdetermined and multiplying allegories of opposition, surgery, psychology, and junk are all means of control, pathologization is a means of indexing undesirable traits and creating sickness, and the doctor's diagnosis is the patient's entryway into the belly of this postwar Moloch. The "infinite potential of difference" inherent in the body and mind of the citizen-patient is dismantled and re-molded to the demands of social technologies that serve the discourses of power. Like Procrustes's inn, the beds here come in only one size; it is our bodies, the malleable human material, which must be adjusted accordingly.

Schaefer's rumination leads to Benway telling the story of "the man who taught his asshole to talk."42 It ends, curiously, with an indictment of the structure of the organization of which they are a part, and leads him to a consideration of utopian, anti-authoritarian possibility:

Democracy is cancerous, and bureaus are its cancer. A bureau takes root anywhere in the state, turns malignant like the Narcotic Bureau, and grows and grows, always reproducing more of its own kind, until it chokes the host if not controlled or excised. Bureaus cannot live without a host, being true parasitic organisms. (A cooperative on the other hand can live without the state. That is the road to follow. The building up of independent units to meet the needs of the people who participate in the functioning of the unit. A bureau operates on opposite principle of inventing needs to justify its existence.) Bureaucracy is wrong as a cancer, a turning away from the human evolutionary direction of infinite potentials and differentiation and independent spontaneous action to the complete parasitism of a virus.

This indictment of bureaucratization echoes Fromm, among others, who sees the bureaucrat as both a symptom and a cause of the alienation experienced by man in a capitalist society.43 Whether or not the parentheses are a sign of the author inserting himself into the text, the context points at least to the rest of the thoughts being Benway's, which is surprising because of the degree to which he is indicted in his own critique. His belief in a pure science that does not serve humanity, but rather consumes it, as well as his administrative position in Annexia, identify him as the quintessential bureaucrat. As he works to dehumanize his patients and promote conformity, he is precisely the reason for the "turning away" from individual possibility.

There are at least two possibilities for the presence of this passage within a Benway monologue. If we naturalize the text by attributing it to Benway, the speaker seemingly suggested by the context on the page, then the passage points to the hypocrisy of the agent of control, who possesses both keen rationality and sympathy for the macrocosmic efforts of humanity, and a willingness to destroy his patients' minds and bodies in pursuit of some pseudo-Enlightenment ideology of knowledge for its own sake. Wayne Pounds suggests as much when he calls the passage "full-blown parody … of the discourse of scientistic, behaviorist human engineering."44 Harris argues, on the contrary, that the "key self-contradiction" is that "Benway's speech is not spoken by Benway," but rather that perhaps "the master of control is subjected to the ventriloquizing of a routine about ventriloquism; the bureaucrat is made to speak out against bureaucracy; the architect of bodily regulation is forced to narrate a story about bodily disorder."45 This compelling possibility (ultimately rejected by Harris) reads the passage as narrated by Burroughs's direct authorial voice; he puts his critique plainly to the reader in a sudden irruption of metafictional didacticism. However, without re-articulating Harris's comprehensive treatment of the question, we might avoid the author/character debate altogether, and allow ourselves merely to read this as the novel's own voice of critique, rising unbidden from the social context of the Cold War itself, the xenophobia and paranoid distrust of power that entire generations received like a cultural communion—or, indeed, a virus. This moment is in some sense a microcosm of the work the book does around the socio-historically relevant questions of human subjectivity, society, authority, and sanity—a critique of the organization of post-industrial society and the dehumanizing effects it has on its subjects, couched in the medical rhetoric of disease and cure. Though any attempt to partition William S. Burroughs off from Naked Lunch, or to reconcile the two as co-equal, falls into the same binary trap the text works against, it is perhaps enough to say, of author and novel both, that the sophistication of this social criticism (despite its aesthetics of illegibility and misattribution) gives the lie to that common critique expressed most aptly by the Party Leader in his summary dismissal of Benway: "Arty type. … No principles. …" (104).

Notes

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Harris, "Beginnings," 14.

Wheeler, 212.

Malanga, 111.

Harris, "Can You See a Virus?" (245); and, for example, "The structure imposed by the 'pyramid of junk' … is precisely the vertical hierarchy of symbolic meaning which displaces and devours the literal text and the actual world" (Lydenberg, 11).

Foucault, 11.

Harris, "Can You See a Virus?" 250–51.

Ross, No Respect, 45; quoted in Harris, "Can You See a Virus?" 251.

Burroughs, Naked Lunch, 141, emphasis in original. Subsequent references will be given parenthetically in the text.

Walsh, 58, emphasis in original.

As Lawrence J. Friedman explains, "Not long after publication, the book placed fifth on the New York Times bestseller list and was the top selection for the Pastoral Psychology Book Club. It commanded considerable attention from influential figures such as Paul Tillich, Robert Merton, and Joseph Wood Krutch. … If there was any doubt about Fromm's status as a major writer and thinker, especially in the United States, the book overwhelmed the skeptics" (Friedman, 185–86).

Ibid., 32.

Fromm, 12, 6.

Ibid., 12.

Ibid., 354.

Burroughs, "On Coincidence," 98.

Burroughs, "Letter," 214.

Bjerg, 11.

Burroughs, "Letter," 223.

Ibid., 222.

Fromm, 201.

Ibid., 202.

Holton, 28.

Ibid.

Morelyle, 74.

Bjerg, 16; Lydenberg, 34.

For one example of these arguments, see Morelyle.

Fromm, 110.

See note 6.

Burroughs, "Letter," 222.

Fromm, 194.

Ibid., 195.

Ibid., 196, emphasis in original.

Eburne, 60, emphasis in original.

Fromm, 87, pun coincidental.

Deleuze, 4.

Ibid., 6.

Fromm, 153, emphasis in original.

Ibid., 169.

Walsh, 59–60.

Harris, "Can You See a Virus?" 260.

Lydenberg, 6.

Harris notes that "The Talking Asshole" story has become part of "a specific category of textual elements" which "present the reader, weary from the teeming heterogeneity of Naked Lunch, with what appear to be master keys to the text. These are its most seductive but also its most suspect parts" (Secret, 216). Harris, Lydenberg, and Murphy all address the scene at length in their major works on Burroughs, to no great consensus.

Fromm, 126.

Pounds, 613.

Harris, Secret, 219–21. Harris ultimately rejects any singular explanation as it concerns the text on the page, pointing to the book's "redundant doublings and frequent hermetic passages [that] speak an opaque language, a meaningless materiality that cannot be absorbed into the reassuring realms of representation or expression" (Secret, 222). In the end, his argument transcends the text in order to focus on the "material genetic history" of the epistolary records of the novel's composition. While I would in any case avoid duplicating his argument, I would also resist the tendency to make the novel as it exists epiphenomenal to the act of writing it. Lydenberg's approach by contrast negates the hermeneutics of textual criticism by situating the text as a material presence upon which any allegorical reading imposes "the very structures of duality it seeks to destroy" (21). Critically, they themselves represent a certain fundamental polarization: Harris lends the published text an air of insubstantiality, while Lydenberg insists overmuch on its non-contingent existence.

Bibliography

Bjerg, Ole. "Drug Addiction and Capitalism: Too Close to the Body." Body and Society 14, no. 1 (2008): 1–22.

Burroughs, William S. "Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs." Naked Lunch: The Restored Text. New York: Grove Press, 2001.

———. "On Coincidence." In The Adding Machine: Selected Essays, 99–105. New York: Seaver Books, 1986.

Burroughs, William S., James Grauerholz, and Barry Miles. Naked Lunch: The Restored Text. New York: Grove Press, 2001.

Deleuze, Gilles. "Postscript on the Societies of Control." October 59 (1993): 3–8.

Eburne, Jonathan Paul. "Trafficking in the Void: Burroughs, Kerouac, and the Consumption of Otherness." Modern Fiction Studies 43 no. 1 (1997): 53–92.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage, 1995.

Friedman, Lawrence Jacob, and Anke M. Schreiber. The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love's Prophet. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013.

Fromm, Erich. The Sane Society. New York: Rinehart, 1955.

Harris, Oliver. "The Beginnings of 'Naked Lunch, an Endless Novel.'" In Naked Lunch @ 50: Anniversary Essays, edited by Oliver Harris and Ian McFadyen, 14–25. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009.

———. "Can You See a Virus? The Queer Cold War of William Burroughs." Journal of American Studies 33, no. 2 (1999): 243–66.

———. William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003.

Holton, Robert. "'Room for One More': The Invitation to Naked Lunch." In Naked Lunch @ 50: Anniversary Essays, edited by Oliver Harris and Ian McFadyen, 26–35. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009.

Lydenberg, Robin. Word Cultures: Radical Theory and Practice in William S. Burroughs' Fiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987.

Malanga, Gerard. "William Burroughs Interview, July 1974." In The Beat Book, edited by Arthur and Glee Knight, 90–112. California, PA: A.W. Knight and G. Knight, 1974.

Morelyle, Jason. "Speculating Freedom: Addiction, Control and Rescriptive Subjectivity in the Work of William S. Burroughs." In Retaking the Universe: William S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization, edited by Davis Schneiderman and Philip Walsh, 74–86. London: Pluto Press, 2004.

Murphy, Timothy S. Wising Up the Marks: The Amodern William Burroughs. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Pounds, Wayne. "The Postmodern Anus: Parody and Utopia in Two Recent Novels by William Burroughs." Poetics Today 8, no. 3/4 (1987): 611–29.

Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity's Rainbow. New York: Penguin Books, 2006.

Ross, Andrew. No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture. New York: Routledge, 1989.

Walsh, Philip. "Reactivating the Dialectic of Enlightenment: Burroughs as Critical Theorist." In Retaking the Universe: William S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization, edited by Davis Schneiderman and Philip Walsh, 58–73. London: Pluto Press, 2004.

Wheeler, Elizabeth A. Uncontained: Urban Fiction in Postwar America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001.

#literature #literature and medicine #william s. burroughs #heroin #naked lunch #cold war literature #beat literature #beats

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podcast-101 · 8 years

Text

Japanese Historical Context 101: Edo period part 2: What use has a sword in peacetime? Fashion Vs. Function

Although there is a significant gap in time between the Kamakura and Edo period, as these are the main focal points of my object, I only briefly looked at the implications of the Muromachi period on sword development (as one of the supporting objects I am using is from that time) and have decided to completely forego discussing the Momoyama period. This is mainly because I want to keep my podcast concise and well thought out, something I do not think I can achieve if I have too much information.

I have already discussed the events which led to Sekigahara and the formation of the Tokugawa Shogunate in my previous post Japanese Historical Context 101 post. So in an attempt to further understand the new role my object played in the Edo period, I want to explore the development of weaponry.

I am of the mind that aesthetic values, social changes and peace time had a significant impact on Japanese weaponry. Because of how closely linked these elements of Japanese history are, I am expecting there to be some cross over with other parts of my previous research. However I don't think thats a bad thing whatsoever!

The final narrative direction I decided for my podcast is the story of how Japanese swords became so much more than a mass produced piece of metal, they developed a cultural significance that at one point defined a significant number of people in Japanese society, the samurai class. So now with this research, and some more about post Tokugawa/modern era japan, I would like to start finding links across the time period which demonstrate this.

So without further adieu, let's have a look at the Edo period, part 2!

The Samurai in Peacetime

In 1615 Tokugawa Ieyasu laid down rules for the military class the ‘buke sho-hatto”, (laws of the military houses). Rules such as these had been in the works since the Kamakura period, as the Shogun increasingly wanted to control the behaviour of his vassal corps.

Ieyasu took these laws to the next level; his rules extended beyond the samurai class but also to the aristocrats, the emperor and his family, the Buddhist and Shinto shrines as well as scholars had to abide by them too. The aim of this was to make the samurai class an exemplary social class to others; the samurai would practice military arts as well as scholarly pursuits, turning their role into a partially bureaucratic one. This was part of Tokugawa Ieyasu’s plan to create a rigid social hierarchy around which society would function.

Military training was the central focus of the buke-sho-hatto. They emphasised that literature, for example, and military arts should be practiced alongside eachother. This new dual path was indicative of the changes the samurai class went through in the Tokugawa period. As peacetime wore on and the need for a trained class of fighters became less and less important, the samurai’s warrior role took on a more symbolic meaning and their position instead focussed more and more on administration. Due to the hereditary nature of governmental positions, the samurai came to monopolise these roles. In this way the symbolic position of the samurai, and their social status, became institutionalised in Tokugawa society.

The symbolic nature of the samurai and the emergence of the soul in military arts.

The tokugawa period is the time when the samurai sword was really awarded cultural significance on a wide scale. Before hand there had been swords of great significance, famous in myth both and legend, however these were very few in number.

In Tokugawa we see this idea broadens to incorporate samurai swords as a whole. When I say this I don’t mean, that every sword has its own soul, I mean that the sword came to be considered as an extension of the samurai’s own body through which his soul is also housed. It is good to liken it to an extra limb, or an extension of the samurai’s own arm.

Text reads: “The way of letters and of arms, of archery and of horsemanship must be cultivated with all the heart and mind. In times of order we cannot forget disorder; how then can we relax our military training? The sword is the soul of the warrior. If any forget or lose it he will not be excused.” –The Japanese Sword, The Soul of the Samurai, page 71

Sakoku (the closed country policy), a relentless social hierarchy systematically imposed by the government, the formation of new policies and moral codes, were all an extension of the need for stability. The warring period had shown the disastrous side effects of conflict and the need for security within Japan.

These new standardized codes did not exclude the sword; swords had to be mounted in a black saya (scabbard), with metal fittings only coming from the goto school of sword smiths. The tip of the scabbard should be rounded for a katana and squared off for a wakizashi. As we have seen, these are the pair of swords which emerged as the most commonly worn weapon by the warrior class at the end of the Kamakura period. This standardization came about due to the increased focus of society around moral ethics, particularly Confucian ethics. However, we will see that as a result of sankin kotai and the blooming economy, that daimyo and retainers increasingly began to create methods, within the boundaries of these codes, which would show off their considerable wealth.

Sankin Kotai and its significance.

One of my very first questions when approaching this podcast was; did sankin kotai have any impact on its development? As the scope of my podcast has changed from depth to bredth, I have decided to widen this question to not only my tanto, but to swords in general.

The main focus of my research in January and February focused on learning about the Edo period and evaluating Tokugawa society (See Japanese Historical context 101, part 1). However, I did not establish a very clear link between sword modifications and the Sankin Kotai system. I aim to do that in the following sections:

What is Sankin Kotai? Sankin Kotai is a system of alternate attendance used to further restrict the power of daimyos from all the provinces of japan. Every other year they would make their way to Edo for 6 month periods in order to appease the Shogun. They had to abide by this, as their families were kept in Edo essentially as hostages. By 1635, the implication of the buke-sho-hatto, made attendance at court compulsory.

Results of Sankin Kotai

Inevitably the finances of all daimyo were considerably depleted by the cost of Sankin Kotai. Not only did they have to keep up a residence in their own domains, they also had to sustain a house in Edo for their families. This was part of the Shoguns plan to make daimyos less likely to pose opposition later on.

More significant to the development of my tanto however, was the procession of the Daimyos to Edo along routes such as the Tokkaido road. This was the prime opportunity for the daimyos to present the wealth they had so as to assert their dominance among others in their social class. Whilst there were attempts by the government to regulate the size of each daimyos procession so that they were relative to the sixe of the domain, this did not really translate well in practice.

This practice was well suited for showing off pieces of fine armor and weaponry, in fact a lot of the armour and weaponry produced in the Edo period was produced specifically to be worn during these processions. It is not a great leap therefore, to suggest that my blade which was created in kamakura and then adapted in the Edo period, had its mountings changed for this purpose.

My blade would have been significantly different from other pieces of armor and from some swords themselves. Armor was often lacquered on the outside, so as to appear fully functional, however it was usually nothing more than a façade often made form leather rather than iron. For these pieces, it was clear that fashion was more important than function.

Peace time created a perfect environment for artisans and smiths to experiment with laquer, metal work and textiles. Their work was created by the growth of this need for luxurious objects which Sankin Kotai triggered.

Sword Revolution

Under the Tokugawa regime, only the Samurai were allowed to carry swords. New technology had been brought to Japan by European traders pre-Tokugawa, meaning iron and steel production became streamlined and simpler. Foreign iron, which was cheaper, was also imported.

Although some schools of sword making continued to make swords in the old styles, a new shape also emerged; blades now had only a slight curve or none at all, and they were quite narrow at the tip. These blades first appeared in the mid to late 1600s for various reasons: some suggest that the shape was more convenient to carry. However as cutting power had become an important aspect of Japanese swords, it is more likely that these blades were developed for their ability to cut continuously throughout the strike.

Another reason, which directly links back to the Tokugawa regime, is the establishment of dojo’s dedicated to kendo around this time. This was a way to keep up sword practice even when there were no battles to fight. Many schools were established by ronin, master-less samurai, who used bokken to hit their opponents non-lethally. From this developed the armor and movements which are characteristic of kendo today; large shoulder pads, full masks, and quick strikes.

Osaka swords Vs. Edo swords

Edo smiths adhered to strict design regulations laid out by the shogun. In contrast, Osaka sword smiths took liberties in terms of design, particularly the hamon pattern was usually decorative. The mountings of Osaka blades were also more luxurious. Osaka smiths also catered to the large merchant class which resided in the city, who were more often the patrons of sword smiths.

Was cutting power still important?

Like I did before conducting my research, I expected swords produced in peace time to be mainly fashionable items. Whilst this is not untrue specifically, it is clear that efforts were still made to ensure the quality of blades did not fall. Schools of Kendo specifically calle don sword appraisers to check the blades of the samurai. The blades of particular concern were those made by Shinto smiths, who needed to prove that their tachi were as functional as they were beautiful. They tested the swords on corpses sometimes piled high so as to create more resistance to the cuts. Bundles of wet straw or tatami mats were also used.

What was the spiritual significance of the sword? Emergence of Bushido:

Origins: Miyamoto Musashi (1784-1645), a Ronin who fought on the losing side at Sekihagara. He expressed a discontent at the bureaucratic nature of the samurai which developed as a result of the peacetime and the deterioration of martial arts spirit during Edo.

Using his experience as a master martial artist and a devout zen Buddhist, he wrote the book the 5 rings, which is both a manual for sword usage and a spiritual work outlining “the way of the warrior”. As the main principles of the samurai, conflicted with those of Buddhism, it was only truly in Edo that the Bushido spirit as it is known today could really come into being. In terms of virtue, loyalty to ones master was placed highest of all.

If a samurai dishonored himself or wanted to follow his master in death, they would commit seppuku, or hara-kiri. This was often done using a tanto, wrapped in white paper. This is what happened in the 47 ronin incident, when the retainers of Asano Naganori avenged him after his death by murdering his enemy whilst pretending to be firefighters. These samurai, although loyal had to commit seppuku due to their crime.

I will create another Edo period context post which will focus only on Swords in the later Edo period and will hopefully tie together everything I have learnt from my research.

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