Shostakovich: Music for Our Time
“The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.” Jung
Some of Shostakovish's music, in particular the Fifth Symphony, seems to warn us that we are about to realize a painful fulfillment of Jung's formulation. If we do not reconcile the contradictions between what we claim to value most on the one hand, and what our behavior and our way of being reveal about us on the other, our fate is a breakdown. The climate crisis represents the grand externalization of humanity’s inner storms, the drought of the spirit, the heat of cognitive dissonance. The current turmoil . . . Iran, Iraq, Israel, and elsewhere, it reveals the constant state of war within. Will we have the courage to face it, to grow into what we are even if the metamorphosis hurts, even if it scares us?
Not long ago I went to hear the San Francisco Symphony play Shostakovich’s Fifth along with his song cycle based on Jewish folk poetry. In between the song cycle and the Fifth Symphony, conductor Michael Tilson Thomas related possible interpretations of the symphony to the tragic historical context in which Shostakovich composed it. Taking this analysis to its conclusion leaves one with a profound sense of sadness and apprehension for our own historical context, and it gives a sense of urgency to our listening.
I won’t trouble you with a detailed analysis here. I’m not qualified to provide one. I can only echo what you can hear for yourself in various corners of the more informed musical universe. Luckily, we only need broad strokes that can suggest a reasonable and consistent way to listen to this work so we can allow it to provoke reflections about our contemporary circumstances.
Let’s begin with a sense of the historical moment that helped bring the Fifth Symphony into existence. Shostakovich was a musical prodigy, and by the 1930's his career had gathered momentum. Thomas informed the audience that Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk enjoyed so much success that three Leningrad theaters had it running simultaneously. Then Stalin went to see it. He walked out sometime during the first act. A review soon appeared in Pravda (probably written by Stalin) that denounced the work in robust party language. Shostakovich’s musical career hit the hard wall of the dictatorship. Commissions evaporated, performances got dropped. He might have feared for his life, and rightfully so. All this happened at a time when hundreds of thousands of people were being arrested, tortured, sent to prison indefinitely, or executed. Anyone could be labeled an “enemy of the people,” and those targeted included peasants, Jews, monks, nuns, priests, politicians, intellectuals, and many others. In the midst of rehearsing his Fourth Symphony when the Pravda review came out, Shostakovich tossed it in a drawer and at some point decided to write a significant piece of music that would appease the wrath of the Stalinist regime. The Fifth Symphony emerged from these efforts. The question that Thomas asks us to consider: Is this work simply a high example of party line aesthetics, or does it have strong alternative meanings? In other words, Is this a veiled criticism of the insanity of his cultural context rather than a celebration of it?
A cursory glance at the literature on Shostakovich reveals a sometimes bitter dispute over these questions. I cannot presume to even scratch the surface. Suffice it to say, any criticism of his historical context Shostakovich might have written into the symphony would be completely camouflaged. If it were easy to spot, the authorities would have retaliated. If any such criticism exists, it exists because the work allows the conductor and the audience to hear what they want to hear. Thomas notes for instance that in place of giving specific instructions for expressiveness, the score simply says “play expressively.” We all know that how we say something often matters more than what we say. In the absence of overt emphasis, deeper meanings could have been touched in the meeting of music and listener. This might explain why some people were brought to tears by the third movement, and why the applause lasted almost as long as the symphony itself. Maybe each person only thought he knew why he was clapping.
An interesting feature of Thomas’s analysis lies in his emphasis on a three note motif that appears throughout the work. This motif emerges again and again as a kind of dead end, a heartless wall that puts a cold stop to any momentum of hope that might begin to march out of the music’s recurring despair. We must touch this crucial element with a fully open hand in order to receive the deepest secrets of the work. To oversimplify things: the Fifth Symphony begins with a sharp needle that carries a thread of despair through the whole tapestry of the piece; the despair seems to come from the oppression of a historical context in which a small wealthy class thrives because the masses suffer to sustain their way of living; Soviet fascism, under the guise of genuine socialist ideals, presents itself as a solution; the thread of despair seems to be cut, and we experience a sense of hopefulness and even triumph. That’s the Party Line, the way things might stand if we listened to the work with an ear seeking affirmation of the dictatorial revolution. Our modern ear cannot ignore those three notes. They tell us that the needle is still stuck to our pant leg, and our forward march only drags the thread of despair further into human history. They further tell us that the forwardness of that march is an illusion. Our very freedom is an illusion. The needle somehow guides us, and if we pay attention we can see it has sent us into not just another moment of despair but a dead end of potentially catastrophic proportions. Nothing has changed. The hope we felt was a deception. The triumph was false. In this interpretation the symphony becomes a grand lamentation of the tragedy of a social system in which, to paraphrase Thomas, the people are expected to keep smiling in spite of all the lies and atrocities seeping from the ground of their culture like raw sewage.
There is first of all an aesthetic question here. An artist is saying, “Art holds the vision of humankind. Artists help create and sustain the fabric of societies. We see the future coming, and we weave its threads into the tapestry of the past that we hold gently in our hands, whether in honor, laughter, or outright scorn. We’re not ‘special’ in a naive sense, just open. We have our ears to the ground, we let the greater Intelligence work through us. We don’t DO any of this, it comes to us from beyond. So why won’t you just listen? Why tell us what counts as beautiful? Why tell us where YOU think culture must go based on your straight-edged theories that pin human living to the wall? We don’t know either, but that which DOES know speaks through this art you ignore, misunderstand, co-opt, or vilify.”
So he begins with Beethoven. Shostakovich’s music, before the official criticism, had begun to move far beyond Beethoven. Shostakovich was inventing, discovering, exploring. This was interrupted by the march of the party. Political ideals claim to move us forward, from a place of despair to new heights of human achievement. But they often end up going nowhere. All ideas become a merciless wall into which humankind marches . . . closer and closer, the whole of it becoming more and more compressed. It doesn’t take a genius to see how this march suffocates and kills. The trick lies in opening our eyes.
This is not to say we haven’t made some progress. But what kind of progress? And what is the meaning of it? Moreover, what is the significance of the overall picture of our current historical situation? When we consider the latter question, we can see that answers to the former questions can become co-opted by the current context. Looking at our own tapestry reveals that to which the Fifth Symphony responds. The same needle is stuck to our very own leg, and it still guides us into a continued weaving of the same design. If we stop and look, we find that WE are the subject of criticism in this symphony. WE are the ones smiling in the face of lies and atrocities. What are the spiritual, psychological, and physical consequences of our situation?
To answer this question, it will help to get a better understanding of the nature of our situation. In doing so we will confront the possibility that we live in a cultural double bind. Let’s call this a loose analogy so no one gets overly excited by it. Double bind theory, a proposed explanation for the development of schizophrenia, faces certain challenges in terms of scientific verification because it seems difficult to isolate, analyze, quantify, and objectively judge. However, it provides an intriguing framework and should provoke our consideration. Consider, then, the relationship between at least two human beings, as in a nuclear family. One human being, the child, receives repeated exposure to certain commands and assessments from his parent or parents. In some cases, these commands and assessments involve fundamental contradictions. Unfortunately, the child is totally dependent on his context, so he cannot escape having to try to fulfill the contradictory demands. Moreover, he may be partially or totally lacking conscious awareness of the nature of the contradiction, and he is unable, for various reasons, to question the contradiction. There are some classic examples of the double bind. For instance, a child living in a violent household may be told repeatedly that mommy and daddy love each other and that everything is alright. A child may be told repeatedly that he is loved while the body language and actions of the parent or parents consistently demonstrate just the opposite. A child may be expected to spontaneously demonstrate love for his parents, even in times of distress. Or a child may be told that he must always be kind, but he is also expected to win by any means. If these kinds of contradictions and contradictory demands are systemic, chronic, and pronounced, the child’s grasp of reality can break down. He no longer knows how to perceive the world, he cannot trust his own intelligence, he cannot trust anyone around him. The end result can be a schizophrenic break.
Consider the cultural analogy. We are as dependent on our culture as we are on our parents. Indeed, our parents are in some ways the microcosmic manifestation of our culture. They transmit many of its conventions and structures, often unconsciously. The culture employs other bureaucrats and ambassadors as well, from school teachers, to clergy, to various forms of propaganda, including news reports, advertising, and entertainment. We cannot escape trying to fulfill the demands made by these various agents. Not only do we want their approval and validation, but our survival appears to depend on compliance. Failure to comply could not only mean social sanctions of various sorts (maybe people won’t like us, maybe they’ll think we’re bad or strange, maybe we won’t be loved), but failure to comply with the culture’s demands can make it difficult to find meaningful work that supports a healthy lifestyle and provides the things we need to flourish.
We all experience the pain and frustration of the contradictory messages swarming at us from every direction. We hear on the one hand that we must love our enemy, and on the other that we must kill him. We hear from one corner that we should orient ourselves at all times to the Divine Will, but other corners celebrate the ego and goad us on in our neurotic attempts. We are told by our culture that we are free, but we see signs of manipulation on every side. We are told we have a democracy, but our elections are spun at us with the same clever momentum used to get us to buy cell phones and sports cars. We are told that everything is accomplished by the Divine Will, but we find endless encouragement to flatter our egos. We hear the clear command to pray for and live by peace, love, and forgiveness, but we want guns in every home, and we march to war under any pretense–even false ones. We espouse justice and equality, yet we allow our leaders to get away with grave transgressions of the law and we tolerate the most extreme forms of disparity. It is easy to make general claims, and many people will agree with them, but let’s take a few minutes to carefully consider some examples. It’s worthwhile to linger over them in your mind. Respect the great intelligence of the human organism and understand that it might sense these contradictions deeply and profoundly. Keep asking what that could mean.
Let’s start with the political climate. The basic commandments of the culture are: “You should vote;” “You must vote;” “Your vote counts, so be a good American;” “We live in a democracy, so you had better take action and vote;” “Your vote means something, so appreciate your privilege and vote;” “This country is run by democratic principles, and you should be thankful for that;” “This is a government of the people, by the people, for the people, and you better love this country and stand up for those principles.” There are many variations, and sometimes the tone says more, or says it more strongly, than the words themselves.
Is there conflicting evidence or are there conflicting commands? Let’s begin with conflicting commands. Naomi Klein discusses an important one in a speech you can watch here. The double bind is quite clear: vote, but don’t change anything. How do we get such a stark double bind? Because capitalism is held up as the grand victor of history. This is a dubious claim of course. The Soviet Union and its client states were dictatorships first and foremost (non-democratic socialism is essentially an oxymoron). Their collapse occurred because of a constellation of factors, not least of which the putrid nature of such oppressive regimes. They rot from the inside out. However, our consumer anti-culture commands us to see this as a victory not of the spirit or the heart, but of the wallet. We free and rational people live in a capitalistic system, and that system has shown itself to be the supreme system, one that fully supports our democratic way of life (in which we can buy whatever we want, and we are all free to get rich). This carries with it a clear command: don’t try to freely and rationally regulate the capitalists; vote with total freedom, but don’t try to influence the capitalist system. It has already won, so leave it alone. Only capitalism remains, therefore capitalism is the best system ever. Q.E.D.
If we had this discussion a hundred years back, we would be saying similar things about slavery. Noam Chomsky discusses that here. He points out that the supposed progress we see amounts to a pitifully weak argument for our way of living. He doesn’t bother to go very deeply into what "progress" might mean in the first place. We can leave that aside for a bit. As for Klein, she focuses on Fukuyama, who makes what some might hear as a delusional pronouncemnet: that history is over; there will be no more evolution for humanity in terms of its basic ideology. This is it. We’re done growing or evolving. From this viewpoint, we have a fully entrenched political and socio-economic system, and this reveals the double bind that Klein discusses in her speech.
However, William I. Robinson discusses how, in the post WWII era, polyarchy had already equated democracy with “the maintenance of the capitalistic social order.” He quotes Huntington as saying, “The maintenance of democratic politics and the reconstruction of the social order are fundamentally incompatible.” Robinson notes that in the most generous reading, this version of polyarchy leaves open the question of whether or not the “democracy” of its political institutions can foster the democracy of the social and economic fabric of the society. Robinson argues that we should understand that possibility as not only generous, but as absurd. The real triumph we have seen in recent history is not that capitalism proved itself as the best economic system, but that polyarchy proved itself more effective than authoritarianism in its ability to maintain inequality! When we become deeply entangled in the light obscuring net of the double bind, we begin to see the world in a schizophrenic way. We cannot escape the context or question it from a new vantage point, and we begin to accept that this madness is reality. Any part of it too dangerous to accept directly is simply repressed or denied.
Chomsky has consistently critiqued the core structures of the present system, the ones many of us repress, deny, or view from the distorted vantage point of the double bind. In this video he discusses the fact that we don’t live in a democracy, even though we may call it that (a direct double bind). He points out that most of us understand this fact so well that we had no meaningful reaction to the stolen elections of recent years. The academics writing about the elections were surprised by this lack of reaction, but one expects such a loss of affect in a double bind situation. Blunted affect is common in schizophrenia, even though there can be a heightened emotional feeling in certain cases, like when a person is caught in the grips of delusions of persecution. So, on the one hand, when the person is confronted with double bind commands (“you must vote; your vote counts!” along with “the system is run by elites, and your vote means nothing,” or variations of these), the reaction is blunted affect, because it’s a structural threat. To avoid experiencing the full cognitive dissonance, one’s affect becomes clamped. On the other hand, when the schizophrenic senses that “those people” are after him, he gets worked into a frenzy and allows the Patriot Act to pass. Further down the line, when the Patriot Act itself turns out to be part of the double bind (“we’re after THOSE PEOPLE, those law breakers, those malicious ones” and “this is a free and law abiding country in which your rights are protected,” along with “we’re illegally spying on you too”) we again see a blunted reaction, and the Patriot Act remains in place.
Let’s say you think Chomsky is the nutty one. “This IS a democracy!” you say. The political leaders echo this. Religious leaders echo this. Teachers echo this. The echoes come from every direction in this dark cavern of ours. “Participate in the elections!” That’s our command. So is, “It doesn’t matter if you participate in the elections!” “We have fair and democratic elections!” “We have rigged elections!” Look at some of the evidence. Here is a clip of Harvey Wasserman, co-author of How the GOP Stole America’s 2004 Election and Is Rigging 2008. Here he discusses the findings of $1.9 million dollar investigation launched by Secretary of State of the state of Ohio. There appear to have been quite a few shenanigans in Ohio, from people claiming they pushed “Kerry” on the touch screen and seeing “Bush” light up, to people claiming that “Homeland Security” appeared at their voting station and locked everyone out, apparently taking the ballots with them.
That may not be enough evidence, so consider this clip, in which investigative reporter Greg Palast discusses the U.S. Attorney firing scandal. He claims to have evidence that Karl Rove and the Republican party were conspiring to get rid of Latino and African American votes (along with others) by denying these voters the opportunity to participate in the 2004 election. You may remember the so-called missing emails. Apparently some of them were accidentally sent by Rove or other conspirators to georgebush.org rather than georgebush.com. The former is actually owned by people who oppose Bush. Many conflicting commands come through here: “Our citizens and our government must follow the rule of law,” “We do not have to follow the rule of law;” “Aside from a few legalized exceptions, every American enjoys the right to vote, and your vote counts,” “We can exclude your vote based on ethnicity or socio-economic status.”
That may not impress you either. On the other hand, it’s not the end of the story. The press has long been referred to as the Fourth Estate, and we know that the press has a powerful impact on the fate of a nation. Thomas Carlyle wrote that,
Literature is our Parliament too. Printing, which comes necessarily out of Writing, I say often, is equivalent to Democracy: invent Writing, Democracy is inevitable. Writing brings Printing; brings universal everyday extempore Printing, as we see at present. Whoever can speak, speaking now to the whole nation, becomes a power, a branch of government, with inalienable weight in law-making, in all acts of authority.
This view sees the press as a branch of government that checks and balances all the other branches. We might call this “fulfillment of consent.” A democratic republic is a government of the people, by the people, for the people. The people vote, giving consent to representatives to enact their will through the proper channels of the law. They cannot oversee the whole of this process, but checks and balances within the system help to insure their consent is fulfilled. The press, by investigating, criticizing, and reporting on the goings on within our government, including the consequences of the decisions made, offer a powerful, perhaps irreplaceable aid in insuring the fulfillment of the common will.
What if the press instead becomes an instrument of one or more of those governmental branches? Then, instead of insuring the fulfillment of consent, the press manufactures or engineers consent. In a polyarchy, those in power use the press as a principle tool for keeping the masses submissive to, or even happy with, the activities of the leaders. The press withholds stories, fails to investigate claims, and kowtows to the government’s will. The press then becomes indistinguishable from propaganda, public relations, and the manipulation of the collective mind.
The double bind we face is that we have been taught that we can trust the press, and indeed we need to have that reliance. We need to know what is going on in the world, and we have been taught that we can make up our own mind about what should be done to serve our common interests. We have been taught that we can get all the information we need to make good public decisions. We have been taught that the government is run by people like us, and/or by people who have our interests at heart and whom we can scrutinize by means of a press corps that keep discerning eyes on them, reporting to us everything we need to know, especially when they find out the government are doing something wrong. On the other hand, we find stories like this one from Ray McGovern. Here he tells us how The New York Times aided in election fraud by not telling people they were about to vote for a potential fascist. The story relates to the illegal domestic spying initiated by the Bush administration. We heard about this in December of 2005. However, we now know the Times could have published the story before the 2004 elections!! Get this straight: The New York Times had a story that revealed an unacceptable violation of the public trust, or at the least a practice that, as the Fourth Estate, it was their duty to investigate and report, and they withheld it. Moreover, when the story was about to be revealed by other means, it seems the Bush administration tried to stop it again. Why? Because, as McGovern points out, this is “a demonstrably impeachable offense. Authorizing illegal electronic surveillance was a key provision of the second article of impeachment against President Richard Nixon. On July 27, 1974, this and two other articles of impeachment were approved by bipartisan votes in the House Committee on the Judiciary.” What happened when the story finally appeared? The president simply came out and copped to it, so brazenly that we were Jedi mind tricked into accepting it as okay. We rationalized it as a necessary evil in a post-9/11 world. This may not sound like a good argument to you. A truly vigorous Fourth Estate would have hotly debated the issue, and within a matter of days we would have found out that the argument was in fact a sham, a sham because the Bush administration initiated illegal domestic spying as soon as they got in the White House! That’s right, starting in January or February of 2001, long before 9/11, the administration tried to get telecom companies to help them spy on us. That makes the title of McGovern’s article very apt: "Creeping Fascism: From Nazi Germany to Post 9/11 America." Note how this resonates with Naomi Wolf’s new book, The End of America: Letter of Warning To A Young Patriot, in which she draws a very careful parallel between the actions of our government and those of despotic regimes. You can click here to watch or read a Democracy Now interview with her regarding this provocative book.
Incidentally, it turns out that back in 2004, long before he knew about this Times story, Ray McGovern essentially predicted the possibility that the media would help Bush prior to the election. Here is an article about the insanity leading up to the war which points out how cooperative Iraq was and how the mainstream media did NO investigative journalism with respect to administration’s claims, despite evidence of the potential falsity of the claims. At the end, McGovern claims the main issue in the 2004 elections is “whether the administration’s stranglehold on the media can be loosened to the point where the electorate can wake up, take away the president’s driver’s license and put an end to the reckless endangerment.”
Of course, the Times is not alone in this. The entire Fourth Estate are at fault, and we can find other equally prominent examples. For instance, we know that CBS also shelved news damaging to Bush’s reelection bid. They postponed a piece on the false uranium documents until after the 04 election for no apparently good reason, except that this is how things work in a polyarchy in which the press becomes a principle tool of manipulation. More recently, the press tried valiantly to help Bush spook us over Iran, just as they helped fake the Gulf of Tonkin incident during the Johnson regime. You can see some debate and discussion of this by visiting Democracy Now. You can also go to Democracy Now to find criticism of the faux peace summit in Annapolis. Democracy Now and FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting) are two good resources for uncovering failures of the Fourth Estate.
I could go on and on in this particular vein, but I would like to consider the possibility that the core double bind commandments emerge from the basic structures of our consumer anti-culture. The commandments on the one hand are that we should practice our faith, fight for truth and justice, stay connected to our values (e.g. freedom, love, humility) , grow as human beings, and find true happiness in God, in work, in friends, in family, and in the gifts of everyday life. On the other hand, we are bombarded with commands to shop, to see ourselves as needing more, to be fundamentally unsatisfied, to find value outside of ourselves, to be chained to consumption and debt, and so on. We receive a steady and powerful stream of messages that tell us we can be happier through consumption and wealth, even though our experience and our fundamental values disagree with this. Money and stuff do NOT make us more happy in any lasting way (though it may give us a temporary high). If our work is not deeply fulfilling, it doesn’t provide happiness either. We keep trying though. We work harder and shop more in an attempt to keep working harder and shopping more. Shopping, vacations (during which we MUST shop), and recreation (especially television) become principle methods for medicating ourselves so we can work more in order to shop more, take more vacations (to buy more things), and get a bigger television.
Here is a lovely film on the system we are being asked to maintain:
The Story of Stuff
This little film points out, among other things, that our consumer anti-culture produces an insane amount of trash. Comparing this to Tim Flannery’s comments about the climate crisis reveals a double bind created by the clash of genes and human culture on the one hand and the consumer anti-culture on the other. Flannery argues that we have an innate sense of the importance of being responsible with our pollution, one ingrained in our deep culture and even in our genes. He notes that in the places he visited in Papua New Guinea and the pacific islands, certain villages existed in Stone Age conditions, but they “were kept immaculately clean, because people just know that if you let rubbish build up around your village, your health will be compromised, and eventually it will be to your great detriment.” He argues that once humans established settlements, natural selection would have worked on us to eliminate those who did not take care of pollution, “because presumably when we settled down in those first villages, there was quite a few grubby people who didn’t care about throwing their pollution around and a few who did, and evolution favored those who did. Now, those of you who have teenage kids may not believe me in this, but I really do think that evolution has done a great job of making us a neat and tidy species, by and large, that has a really gut feeling, has an important and strong gut feeling about pollution. We just know in our hearts it’s wrong to allow our environment to become full of filth.”
That’s our gut feeling, a deep cultural and genetic command. Our parents and certain other voices of our society echo that command. Then we take a look around and we see another set of commands: to plunder, to pollute, to throw things away without concern for the consequences, to consume without concern for the true costs, and to keep consuming without question, even if what we buy creates suffering, even if what we buy is unnecessary, even if what we buy is gratuitous, even if we are manipulated into buying, even if we cannot afford it, even if it leads us away from genuine human fulfillment. Some of what goes on is repressed: mountain top mining, oil spills, automobile fumes, toxic waste, our wasted lives. In some cases we don’t really understand what these things involve. By and large, however, the facts have leaked into the collective mind. Caught in a web of schizophrenic commands, we begin to view them through the lens of the double bind. Our affect becomes blunted. We accept it and go on in the face of tremendous cognitive tension. Everything’s alright. Except the part where we’re crazy.
The Story of Stuff gives a clear picture of the deep and thoroughgoing nature of the double binds involved in our consumer anti-culture, but let’s take a quick tour of some relatively recent highlights featured in the alternative presses.
Two on Democracy Now:
“Workers Bear the Cross”: Retailers, Churches Accused of Selling Sweatshop-Made Crucifixes
“What Would Jesus Buy?”: As Holiday Buying Frenzy Begins, New Film Tracks Anti-Consumerism Gospel of Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping
These two stories came out during the peak of the consumer spending season. The first is an exposé on the origin of crucifixes being sold nation wide. The second considers the more general trends and implications of living a Christian life in the midst of a consumer anti-culture. Taken together these stories show us the systemic nature of the fundamental double binds our anti-culture promotes. Obviously, Christian ethics are not alone in their clash with the current structures. Muslim, Buddhist, Taoist, Secular Humanist, or any other consistent ethic becomes one of the voices of the double bind when it speaks within our current historical context. Of course, the Christian view has become rather prominent lately we are hearing more and more insistence that we are a Christian nation. Let’s put aside the question of whether or not this claim is or should be seen as true. There are nonetheless people who think it is, and many more who feel the force of the often reasonable commands that should apply to all of us even if it weren’t true. Yet we will not base our society on love. We will not turn the other cheek. We will not love our “enemy.” We will not suffer the children to come to us, or their parents, or their nations. We fat riders goad our camels onward through the eye of history’s needle, stitch by stitch weaving our fate, weaving misery, weaving irony, weaving hypocrisy, weaving ignorance and oblivion. What a tapestry! If we could look at it the way Jung’s patients looked at the images of their own psychic conflicts we might heal. Right THERE we can put our hand on it. Jung touched on this when he wrote that, “The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.” If we do not reconcile the contradictions between what we claim to value most on the one hand, and what our behavior and our way of being reveal about us on the other, our fate is a breakdown. The climate crisis represents the grand externalization of humanity’s inner storms, the drought of the spirit, the heat of cognitive dissonance. The current turmoil . . . Iran, Iraq, Israel, and elsewhere, it reveals the constant state of war within. Will we have the courage to face it, to grow into what we are even if the metamorphosis hurts, even if it scares us?
In case it seems we have lost sight of what inspired this inquiry, let’s take a moment to revisit Shostakovich. While our basic historical situation seems well represented by the Fifth Symphony, it’s third movement touches specifically on these religious tensions. This movement incorporates references to Russian Orthodox religious services. It supposedly brought people to tears, though again we have to wonder about what government officials heard and/or psychically repressed. It sounds to me like an elegy for the human soul, for the lost connection with the spiritual forces that should shape and inform the lives of every healthy human and every healthy culture. These Christian motifs were as forbidden to the Soviets as they are to us. In our context, just as in Shostakovich’s, religion is understood by those in power as an opiate. Genuine spiritual living is essentially banned, replaced with dogma prescribed in carefully measured does and megadoses by political and religious figureheads. A contemporary Shostakovich might make that clear by alluding to, say, “Simple Gifts.” Consider the very Christian, very spiritual sensibility so directly expressed in the music and words. A gift to be simple? Heresy in a consumer culture! Heresy! Ignore it! Gloss over it! We have to. Given the nature of Christ’s response to the money changers, how do we think he would respond to Wall Street? How would Jesus respond after taking one look at our anti-culture and seeing that our religion is consumption, our Eucharist is money? (As an aside, we should note that a contemporary Shostakovich could add whale song to the score, along with the buzzing of wild bees, the babbling of a clear brook, the hoot of an owl, the majestic purr of a tiger. The movement could just as well end with wretching.)
Is this a nation of religious freedom, of religious tolerance, or true religious spirit? Is it a Christian nation? "It is written," he said to them, " 'My house will be called a house of prayer,' but you are making it a 'den of robbers.'" Would it not be a nation of prayers and praying ones? When the benches are filled by those playing for hedge funds, vulture funds, Enron, Tyco, Exxon, and more, how can we not say we live in an enormous den of robbers? This has nothing to do with nitpicking rare examples. This has to do with an overarching structure, one that has all the necessary ingredients to make us very unwell.
Consider “High Price of Fashion Dress for Excess: The Cost of Our Clothing Addiction,” by Stan Cox. He begins by reporting that this season, as in past season, te number one holiday gift will be clothing, this despite the fact that clothing is also statistically the most disappointing gift. He goes on to discuss the massive human and environmental impact of the textile industry: 10 million tons of clothing goes into landfills every year, half of all pesticides used worldwide go on cotton, cotton racks up lots of other environmental destruction after harvest, waste from textile dyeing processes ruins ecosystems and farmland and human lives, and sweatshop conditions keep human beings in atrocious conditions. The dyeing process alone should make your jaw drop. Consider just this one tidbit: “textile and dyeing factories in Sanganer, a city of 2 million people in northern India, have released so much polluted effluent that water from the major stream flowing through the city is actually capable of causing genetic mutations.”
All of this is worth reading, especially if you keep in mind the first few paragraphs. Cox mentions one of two slogans used by Bilking-and-Destroying-Humanity-and-the-Rest-of-Creation-Mart (a.k.a. Wal-Mart): “Save Money. Live Better.” The other one they unveiled for the $-mas season was: “The more you save, the more Christmas you can give.” Can you hear the sound of the human psyche splitting? During the $-mas season you can hardly lean your ear one way or another without hearing people groan under the pressure of the contradictory commands. Superstitious Christians would never dare enter an Up-Against-the-Wal-Mart for fear of stepping right into the midst of fire and brimstone, or lightning strikes, or a rain of frogs, or some other kind of wrathful plague dispatched by a deity who, given the evidence of the Bible, could not possibly tolerate the suggestion that we can “give Christmas” in any way vaguely resonant with these spiritually and psychically toxic slogans. Stan Cox point toward the only path we can follow if we want to actually try “give Christmas” to ourselves, to each other, to the massive majority, and to the planet itself: “Put another way, making a shirt -- any kind of shirt -- can never be as ecologically benign as not making a shirt.” To give the most Christmas, we have to give nothing but ourselves, our hearts, our prayers. Not this shirt, but this moment. What follows from this genuine Christian sentiment? What follows from an authentic spiritual response within the context of a consumer anti-culture in which 70% of the economy runs on consumption? When a money changing table of that size gets flipped over by the mighty hands of the human soul, our materialistic ego had better get its toes out of the way . . .
Bruce Levine does a reasonably good job of revealing the depth of the double bind in this article, an excerpt from his book, Surviving America's Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy, and Community in a World Gone Crazy. I enjoyed this excerpt because it shows how powerful the double bind is. We are not ALLOWED to feel depressed. We are only allowed to shop and be patriotic. We are expected to be happy, joyfully plugged into the system. If we feel depressed, we should wonder whether or not we are sick. Not whether or not the context is a petri dish, but whether we are sick. Our first line of defense is to BUY happy if at any moment we cannot spontaneously muster it (remember, the command to spontaneously muster anything can become a royal road to madness). If we can’t manage to buy it at the car dealership, or the clothing store, or the electronics store, or the jewelry store, we just go to the brain chemistry store. Mind you, we are not diagnosed there in any deep sense of the term. We basically place an order based on the programming provided by the media. Levine points to the deep contradiction between the commands of our consumer anti-culture and the commands of Jesus, the Buddha, and even philosophers such as Spinoza. The commands coming from these voices stand in absolute opposition to the structures of our anti-culture. If we don’t soon put an end to this tension, our problem will go from depression to full breakdown, on a massive scale. These great voices of the soul not only demand that we let go of the compulsion to consume, but they would also insist that we confront the horrifying consequences of doing otherwise. In his review of John Bowe’s book Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy, Josh Rosenblatt makes it clear that our consumption actively contributes to the suffering of the human and more-than-human world in ways so disturbing that we would much rather avoid this confrontation. We hurt and kill so many sentient beings with the simplest actions that we could not possibly accept it en masse. To do so might bring the whole system to a sudden stop. So, in a process of collective repression, we create “plausible deniability.” At the unconscious level, the situation likely shines forth with all too painful clarity, and we are headed toward a fulfillment of Jung’s dictum: “The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.”
The thing is, it’s all so close to the surface that we should only be surprised at how long it is taking for us to suffer a full meltdown. Consider this clip of Regis Philbin and Kelly Ripa. Regis and Kelly actually tell the audience they are being pacified with bread and circus. Maybe Regis said this with pure sarcasm. Maybe he believes deeply and whole heartedly that what he does is important and meaningful, and that it contributes to the fulfillment of human potential. Or maybe he was looking everybody in the eye and saying, “This doesn’t matter, people! Why on earth do you let us get paid at all for this fluff, let alone get paid more than any of you could dream of earning?!” Is the show underwritten by the makers of Thorazine?
The persistent emergence of double bind commands from every direction (politics, mass media, journalism, environmental news, and more) makes this a difficult essay to write. I started out thinking I could summarize things in words almost as neatly as Shostakovich did it in music. I should say again that the Fifth Symphony brought all of this together in my mind, and as a whole it portrays many more dimensions of the double bind than I have discussed here. Moreover, examples continue to appear in a never ending stream. I would like to examine some of the past examples I left out, and to keep track of new examples as they reveal themselves. For now, keep this analogy in mind as you read the alternative presses, and also keep in mind Jung’s dictum.