Category: Ideas

During the week I had a mini eureka moment. The little spark of insight was in relation to the book I reviewed in last week’s post, Patrick White’s Riders in the Chariot. I said at the end of that post that Patrick White would not have been surprised at what has happened over the last three years during the corona event. My realisation was that it was more than that. Patrick White had actually predicted what happened in the last three years. Not predicted the lockdowns or any of the specific details but the underlying form which gave rise to them. Riders in the Chariot was a warning that just such a thing would happen.

Now, admittedly, I am biased here because it turns out that White’s symbolic claim in Riders in the Chariot matches mine in that we both assert that the Devouring Mother is the dominant archetype of modern society. But, as long time readers of the blog would know, I arrived at my position before I had read White. So, all this is yet another of the many synchronicities I’ve been experiencing over the last few years. What are the chances that after arriving at such a hypothesis I would then happen to read an Australian author’s book written 60 years ago and realise he was saying the same thing?

Once upon a time I would have chalked this up to chance but I now believe that such synchronicities are meaningful. They reveal something about the world. Of course, all this goes against the whole tide of modern western culture. So, perhaps as a starting point, let me summarise the assumptions which form the background to this post:

1. The Devouring Mother / Orphan archetype is the governing archetype of the hysteria of the last three years. That was my initial position which I then expanded to say that they are the governing archetype of the whole of the post-war period. Riders in the Chariot is one more piece of evidence for that assertion because White quite clearly identifies the Devouring Mother as the antagonist in the story and, by implication, as the driving force of post-war culture.
2. Archetypal thinking is acausal. The way to think about archetypes is like an electrical circuit. The archetype is the components in the circuit; its structure. Just as an electrical circuit is activated by electricity, an archetype is activated by psychic energy. The Devouring Mother archetype has been dominant for decades in the West but this was mostly at the microcosmic level. The thing that changed at the start of corona was an enormous amount of psychic energy was channeled into the archetype leading to a macrocosmic event.
3. True works of art can say just as much about “reality” as science because they invoke archetypes and the assumption here is that archetypes underlie reality. As the archetypes live in the subconscious, arts is a way of bringing to consciousness what would otherwise be unconscious. Thus, great works of fiction such as a Patrick White novel are not just “make believe”. They can and do say something about the real world. When I say that Patrick White anticipated the corona event, I mean that literally (Note: this assumption is at odds with our dominant materialist cultural script which sees art either as entertainment or epiphenomena).
4. All of the above entails a different way of thinking than the dominant paradigm of the modern west which relies on creating models that are assumed to identify cause and effect relationships. Due to our obsession with binary thinking, we assume such models give binary, true/false answers. However, in any model of medium number systems, the best we can say is that the model gives some probability that the cause and effect relationship will be true while never ruling out that the model is completely wrong. In other words, such models should never be thought of as giving binary answers.
5. In my opinion, which I will need to explain properly in a separate post, acausal archetypal thinking is not just an alternative way of thinking, it is the correct way of thinking about medium number system because it is holistic. I would make the claim that a Patrick White novel gives us a more accurate view of the everyday world than “science” because the way of thinking implied is the correct one for dealing with medium number systems. Reductionist science, by definition, is not holistic. To understand the world holistically, we must bring our whole being to bear. That’s what true art does.

The supreme advantage of the novel as a form of art is that it is holistic. The novel can communicate things that, I would argue, cannot be communicated in any other way because, as I have said in the past, the archetypal structure of the novel – the hero’s journey – is an information technology that facilitates an incredible density of meaning that cannot be matched by other forms. That’s true even in relation to a humble blog post such as this one. Think of it like the difference between a solo violin and a full orchestra. The novel can resonate in a way that the single violin can not.

So, we return to Patrick White’s Riders in the Chariot and we assume that this is not just a story. I made a similar point about White’s Voss in my review of that book. I said that I thought it was a kind of religious text; a spiritual document. I now put Riders in the Chariot in the same category. White did not just write an incredible story that we can appreciate as the work of art, he was sounding a warning. I said in the last post that he wanted Riders in the Chariot to be like a literary bomb. But I hadn’t fully comprehended to what extent he was right and how Riders in the Chariot was warning that exactly something like corona could happen.

What White was saying in Riders in the Chariot was this: post-war Australian culture, and by extension the post-war culture of the West in general, suffered from the same underlying problems that led to Nazi Germany. Contrary to what we tell ourselves, WW2 did not solve any of those underlying problems even though “we won”.

That’s what is implied by the mock crucifixion episode in Riders in the Chariot. Himmelfarb had escaped the horrors of the holocaust. He escaped Nazi Germany. He travelled to the other side of the world to start new life in a country that was supposed to be better than that. What happens? He gets crucified as a Jew. The power in the story is that it is absolutely believable. It may not have happened in such dramatic fashion, but episodes of casual racism, including against Jews, were an everyday experience in post-war Australia. But the problem goes deeper than racism.

We have to learn to think symbolically and to take the symbolism of Riders in the Chariot seriously in order to understand this idea. By our default morality of utilitarianism, the comparison of a fictional episode of workplace bullying to the holocaust seems outrageous or even morally repugnant.  That’s because utilitarianism cares only about material consequences and, by definition, a work of fiction has no material consequences. Millions of people died in the holocaust. Himmelfarb did not die. In fact, he only had a couple of scratches. And, in any case, he’s not even real. He’s a fictional character in a book. Therefore, there is no comparison.

But there is a comparison.

Structurally, formally, archetypally, the episode with Himmelfarb is identical to what occurred in Nazi Germany. It is, in fact, a replica of what happened during the Kristallnacht pogrom; a seemingly random outburst of barbarism. That was the point White was implying. The holocaust was barbarism. Everybody would agree with that. The mock crucifixion of Himmelfarb in Riders in the Chariot is also barbarism. But here we must be very clear about what sort of barbarism we are talking about because barbarism itself operates on multiples levels of being. It has its manifestation in the material domain but it also has its spiritual manifestation and that is the barbarism that we must learn to see and to take seriously. A novel can teach us to do so.

We would all agree that the holocaust was barbaric and yet part of what makes the holocaust so horrific and so different from more obvious forms of barbarism was that it was carried out with all the accoutrements we normally associate with civilisation. The transportation of the Jews was done with modern mass transit. As anybody who’s visited a concentration camp knows, the camps were orderly places. Clean. Organised. The people who worked there earned a wage. To this day, you can still view the meticulous bureaucratic records that were kept by camp officials. Medical experiments were carried out with all the cleanliness, discipline and attention to detail we associate with modern science. The whole thing was sickeningly clinical.

When we think of barbarism, we think of disorder, chaos, destruction. When we think of civilisation, we think of order, rules, law, architecture. Viewed from the outside, the concentration camps looked for all the world like artefacts of civilisation. If you had walked past one and didn’t know what was going on inside, you might have assumed they were a barracks or some kind of industrial facility. The Jews who went into them were processed. It’s a sickening word but that’s really what happened. There were orderly queues. There were official announcements over loudspeakers. There were clear instructions and rules to follow. Camp officials pointed the way to the shower block and eventually to the gas chamber itself.

Barbarism is supposed to be one thing and civilisation its opposite. You are supposed to be able to see the difference with your own eyes. But the holocaust broke that distinction. It was barbarism in the guise of civilisation. The wolf in sheep’s clothing.

It’s telling, and symbolically crucial, that the Kristallnacht pogrom precipitated the holocaust. The pogrom itself was triggered when a German diplomat, Ernst vom Rath, was assassinated by a German Jew in Paris. It was this event that got the Nazi leadership thinking about the final solution.

The Kristallnacht was an example of real, old-fashioned barbarism. But it’s crucial to understand that most Germans were appalled by it and, furthermore, that the pogrom was not a spontaneous eruption of violence on behalf of the public. It was initiated by the authorities and carried out by the SA and the SS. Even then, some leaders and members of the SS refused to take part.

The Nazi leadership understood that the persecution of the Jews did not have public support and this is why the holocaust was not carried out as an act of overt barbarism but was hidden away behind the cloak of civility. It’s for this reason that many Germans at the time were unaware of the holocaust, and even refused to believe it had happened later on when the war was over.

Even the German Jews fell into this trap. This is what White shows us in his novel. It forms the core of Himmelfarb’s backstory. By the time of the Kristallnacht, many German Jews had realised what the Nazis were about and had left the country. Many more would leave after the pogrom. The ones who didn’t, including Himmelfarb, were in denial. They still couldn’t believe it was actually happening.

White shows us this psychology via Himmelfarb’s journey to the concentration camp in Poland. The transportation happens on a normal commuter train. This simple fact alone lifts the spirits of the passengers. We’re not in a cattle cart, they note. Something must have happened. Some kind of deal must have been done. International pressure had been brought to bear on the Nazis. We must be being taken to a neutral country. Maybe to Palestine.

Like the Kristallnacht, the cattle carts were outward expressions of barbarism. The commuter train, on the other hand, represents civilisation. The passengers on the train see civilisation around them and assume that they are still living in a civilised country. The horrific tragedy was that many still believed that all the way up until the gassing because things were orderly, civilised. Queues were formed. There was a place to hang your clothes. You were about to take a shower. Surely nobody would bother to give you a shower before killing you?

All these things are symbols. They are symbols of civilisation. But symbols are just pointers. These symbols had pointed to civilisation all the way up until the time when they didn’t. They were no longer pointing to civilisation for the passengers on that train.

In order to understand that, you needed to reorder your conception of the world. You needed to be able to see beyond surface appearance and activate your higher mental faculties. It required you to no longer trust your own eyes when they tell you that what you see is civilisation. This was no small task. It meant understanding that the very society you lived in was not what you thought it was. If all this sounds familiar, it’s because we faced exactly the same thing in the last three years. Structurally, formally, archetypally, the corona event was barbarism. But most people did not see it because it was presented with the facade of civilisation.

When the corona hysteria was in full swing, there were videos of actual holocaust survivors speaking at protests comparing the lockdowns and other measures to Nazi Germany. While writing this post, I spent a good 5 minutes trying to find one of those videos but the first several pages of search results are filled with, you guessed it, news articles denouncing the comparison to the holocaust. How strange and how sad that the internet has now devolved to the state where you can find the denunciation of an event but not the event being denounced. Even the internet is now an upside-down world where the truth is the opposite of what you are told. Even the internet is becoming barbaric.

The denunciation of the holocaust comparison does make sense from the utilitarian point of view, of course. Millions of people died in the holocaust. The lockdowns might have caused some deaths, but nowhere near that number. Ergo, the holocaust was morally worse.

Even if you accept this as true, the fact is that the structure is still there. The underlying form has not altered. Therefore, there is nothing to stop it all happening again. That was White’s point. We must address the underlying barbarism. But the challenge is that the barbarism does not primarily manifest in the material world (yet). It is, for want of a better word, spiritual barbarism.

The barbarism we are talking about is not violence or cruelty. In fact, in the world of the Devouring Mother, it takes the opposite form of excessive care. The barbarism we are concerned with is ignorance, obliviousness. This is the barbarism that White was referring to and is the opposite of what I have previously called Sophia, wisdom.

The characters who mock crucify Himmelfarb are genuinely oblivious. In their ignorance, they hang a Jewish man who escaped from the holocaust from a tree on Passover. They hang a man who has come to Australia looking to start a new life. They do so out of ignorance. It’s that ignorance that is the barbarism. It’s the same barbarism that was present in Nazi Germany with people who were just “doing their job” or just “following orders”.

When this ignorance manifests in some large scale social event, it’s easy to feel powerless or to feel that only some heroic effort can stop such things from happening. So, we look around for some leader who can take care of it for us. White’s point is the same point made by Dostoevsky. These problems might seem large and abstract, but they grow out of the soil of everyday life. Therefore, they can and should be addressed at the everyday level.

I mentioned last week that the artist, Dubbo, is the only one who understands what was happening to Himmelfarb but he fails to intervene. Actually, there is one other character who fails to act and that is the other Jewish immigrant in the story, Rosetree. It is their failure to act that allows the mock crucifixion to happen. To paraphrase the saying, all that is required for barbarism to occur is for people who know better to do nothing.

It doesn’t matter that this is some seemingly random thing that happens one day in a small nowhere town in Australia. Large atrocities grow out of the small. Several hundred people died in the Kristallnacht. Several millions died in the holocaust. The one led to the other. That is another problem with utilitarianism. It extrapolates to the future linearly. To extrapolate to the future properly, you must understand the underlying structure and that requires an understanding of symbolism.

But, again, all this can seem too detached and abstract. The beauty of the novel is that it brings all these considerations together in one. It connects the abstract, symbolic meanings back to everyday life. The key point that both White and Dostoevsky make is that the power to change this is within everyone’s grasp. It starts from everyday life. To do what is right every day is what is needed.

If any of the characters in Riders in the Chariot had simply gotten to know Himmelfarb as a real person, the mock crucifixion could never have happened because you don’t do that to somebody you know and have some basic level of care for. The base level of empathy needed to prevent such things from happening is shared by (almost) all of us. It’s when that empathy goes missing that we become disconnected from each other. And just like a lack of empathy at the everyday level can give rise to large scale outbreaks of barbarism, so the re-discovery of empathy at the everyday level leads to the higher forms of empathy implied by the concept of Sophia.

It’s for this reason that the Jews had to be segregated away in ghettoes before being physically removed to remote concentration camps. They had to be physically separated from those who could empathise with them. Is it a coincidence that we were physically separated from each other during corona? When people come together they interact as human beings and natural empathy works like it should. That is the starting point. That’s how simple the answer is (although, simple is not the same as easy).

The same message was conveyed in what is surely one of the most moving scenes ever shown on television and proof that television has not always been vacuous nonsense. The mathematician Jacob Bronowski, himself a Polish Jew whose parents had moved to England before the Nazis took power, walks into a pond at Auschwitz. He was presenting a set piece for the TV series The Ascent of Man, but his final address to the camera was apparently completely improvised and off script. His words speak for themselves. 50 years later “science” was once again used as a cover for barbarism; for ignorance. We still face these same problems.

Here is the full scene.

It might seem strange to start a review of Riders in the Chariot with a discussion about the philosophical doctrine of Utilitarianism. There is nothing explicit about the subject in the novel. But what Riders in the Chariot is about is post-war Australia, the country I have previously called the most bourgeois on the planet. Utilitarianism is the morality of the bourgeois. It is the largely unspoken and therefore unchallenged dogma of materialism and if there was one thing Patrick White despised and hoped to change about Australia, it was our materialism and, by implication, our utilitarianism.

Many people could recite the most basic formula of Utilitarianism: the greatest good for the greatest number. Utilitarianism is a form of what is sometimes called consequentialism which just means that the ethical value of actions should be judged by their consequences. If you, purely by accident, blundered your way into creating the greatest good for the greatest number, your action is deemed of higher value than if, with the best of intentions, you failed to create anything good.

Now, of course, Utilitarianism is a big topic and there are numerous sub-variants which are attempts to answer the objections made to the doctrine. Probably the main objection has always been that Utilitarianism implies that killing an innocent is justified if it saves the lives of others. This is one of those classic arguments that always seems confined to university faculties at universities and can usually be counted on to draw the cynical response that it’s “just semantics” and “nobody would ever have to make that decision in real life.”

Well, during the last three years, exactly these kinds of decisions were made. To take just one of the more egregious examples, here in Australia two infants in South Australia needed to be flown interstate for life saving surgery but were denied because the borders were closed due to covid. They died. The justification given, not just by politicians but by everyday people on social media, was the utilitarian one: we couldn’t risk the lives of multiple other people who might get infected with a virus. The greatest good for the greatest number.

(This raises the other main objection to Utilitarianism which is that it must rely on speculative reasoning. We can only predict more people will die based on some model. But we can never know for sure because, despite what many people apparently believe, we are not God and we do not control the future).

The death of those children was a low point even for the corona hysteria and is, in my opinion, one of the lowest points in this nation’s history. Combined with the countless other episodes of people being denied urgent medical care, the elderly residents of nursing homes left without care for days because one of the staff tested positive and all the staff were placed in quarantine, the people unable to be at the side of loved ones who were on their death bed, the daily cases of police brutality, or any of the other innumerable indignities and absurdities, for the first time ever I found myself being ashamed to call myself an Australian.  

Now that the insanity is over, there are people who want to apply the utilitarian framework to criticise the lockdowns on the basis that “they did more harm than good”. I suspect that’s true. But this is also just a model that is, ultimately, unprovable. And within that model, the deaths of two children are nothing more than a statistic; just a number in the “deaths that didn’t need to happen” column. When innocents have died, it seems self-evidently wrong to be bickering over whose model is more accurate.

At the opposite end of the spectrum from Utilitarianism is what we can generically call Judeo-Christian ethics but particularly that espoused by the philosopher I mentioned a couple of posts ago, Soren Kierkegaard. For Kierkegaard, the consequences of an action are irrelevant. Every individual stands before God in sin. The judgement of an action is its accordance with the individual conscience; a person’s relationship to God.

It is this idea, usually presented in less extreme form, which grounds the Christian concept of the inherent dignity of the individual or, as it is stated in the US constitution, every person is endowed by their creator with inalienable rights and no earthly government gets to take them away.  

Australians do not have rights enshrined in a constitution. The best we have is that we are a signatory to the UN charter of human rights; a charter which we violated in numerous ways over the last three years. Our former Prime Minister had the audacity to stand before the UN last year and remind the world that not only did Australia help write the human rights charter but we put our words into action.

Has Morrison ever read the charter? The second paragraph begins: “Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind…” A more concise summary of the last three years in Australia could scarcely be written. In the same week that Morrison spoke, police were firing rubber bullets on unarmed Australian citizens on the streets of Melbourne, just one of the countless barbarous acts committed during corona that should have, but apparently mostly have not, outraged our national conscience.

Why would the Prime Minister choose just this time to make reference to a charter his government contravened? Surely his speechwriter could find something else to talk about which was not so blatantly and obviously and shamefully hypocritical. In the normal course of politics, we would just assume Morrison was lying or obfuscating or gaslighting for some ulterior reasons. But a speech to the UN is purely symbolic.

So, I think the most likely answer is simply that Morrison and his speechwriter were oblivious. And they were oblivious in exactly the way that Patrick White shows in Riders in the Chariot. The problem lies in Australian culture. White intended his novel to be a wake-up call, or maybe a wake up club over the head with a cricket bat, to Australia and Australian culture. Clearly we haven’t got the message yet. So, what better time to reiterate that message than after the last 3 years of mindlessness and madness.

All the great authors and all the great artists of the modern western tradition are individualists in the sense that they are concerned with the individual and how the everyday life of a single person links symbolically to the life of the nation or even to the life of the entire world, universe or whatever you want to call it. I read Riders in the Chariot immediately after The Brothers Karamazov. Both books are concerned with the average person; in fact, the less-than-average person; the losers, the criminals, the shunned and the neglected.

I think it’s quite accurate to say that Dostoevsky is a masculine writer while White is a feminine one. This plays out in numerous ways. Dostoevsky’s heroes are men. White’s heroes are women. Dostoevsky’s main tools as a storyteller are dialogue and action. White’s main tools are introspection and metaphorical/symbolic perception. The crescendo in The Brothers Karamazov is driven by the dramatic events that preceded it. The crescendo in Riders in the Chariot is driven by the depth of our understanding of each character’s internal state based on the lives they have led i.e. empathy.

In comparison to the other of White’s works that I have reviewed, Voss, Riders in the Chariot is a much smoother read. In Voss, White continually overturns our understanding of what is going on. He forces us to re-evaluate everything at each major turning point in the story. This gives the plot of the novel a roughed-edged, jagged feel which is mirrored in the prose style which seems excessively verbose and florid. In Riders in the Chariot, the first three quarters of the book are devoted to presenting wonderfully intricate character studies. We learn in great detail about the biographies of four people who have all ended up, by the vicissitudes of fate, in the fictional nowhere town of Sarsaparilla located (I think) near Sydney.

First is Mary Hare. She is an old woman living in an old-fashioned country estate built by her dead father. The estate, called Xanadu (yes, it’s a stately pleasure dome), sits on the edge of Sarsaparilla; the post war suburban Australia encroaching ever so slowly on the pretensions of the old Victorian aristocracy.

Mary, although now an old woman, is mentally still a child. She talks to the trees and the animals. She can barely keep herself clothed and fed and lives on money sent from a relative in Europe. In archetypal terms, she is the Innocent or perhaps even the pre-Innocent. As she herself says, she “has no mind” but lives directly in experience. We see a parallel here with The Brothers Karamazov where Alyosha is the eternal Innocent.

The second rider in the chariot is Mordecai Himmelfarb, a Jewish refugee. White takes us back through Himmelfarb’s life as a German Jew. We see the tensions between his religious faith represented by his mother and the enticements of modern rationalism represented by his father. The latter wins out. Himmelfarb becomes a professor and finds himself in a comfortable bourgeois existence with the high status accorded to the role of scholar in pre-war Germany.

Himmelfarb serves in the first world war then returns to his comfortable life. But it doesn’t stay comfortable for very long. Despite the warning signs and even direct pleas from friends and colleagues, Himmelfarb remains in Germany as the Nazis take over and even as he is gradually stripped of his job, his wealth and eventually (almost) his life. Having lost his wife in the Kristallnacht, Himmelfarb ends up in a concentration camp in Poland but escapes the gas chamber at the last minute through blind luck (or is it divine intervention). He manages to flee to Palestine from where he decides to travel to Australia to live, still racked with guilt over his failure to save his wife and broken by the horrors of the holocaust.

Alf Dubbo is the third rider. A half-caste aboriginal born to a prostitute in a park on the edge of a country town, Dubbo is adopted by a pastor and his sister who give him a classical education, including Latin lessons. Dubbo is a natural artist but his talents are stifled by the pastor’s sister until the pastor himself intervenes to briefly allow Dubbo the chance to exercise his gift. Painting becomes the one certainty in Dubbo’s life as he floats around the country taking odd jobs, eventually winding up in Sarsaparilla working in the same sweatshop as Himmelfarb.

Finally, there is Mrs Godbold, who immigrated from Britain as a youth and became a servant in an aristocratic household. She ends up marrying a wife-beater, a situation she puts up with due to her deep Christian faith and her desire to redeem her husband. But he is beyond redemption and she ends up alone raising their numerous children in a tin shed on the outskirts of Sarsaparilla where she renders assistance to each of the other main characters, at different times nursing them through various illness and injury.

There is very little real-time plot action for the first three quarters of the book. With breathtaking virtuosity, White paints us intimate character portraits of each the four main characters; the riders of the chariot theme being a reference to the biblical passage were God approaches Ezekiel in a chariot.

What separates Patrick White from literary modernism and its grandchild, literary fiction, is this: his characters are real human beings and he makes us care about them. So much of modern literature and modern art, by contrast, is anti-human. To the extent that characters are even presented to us at all by modern writers, we get the distinct impression that the author hates or at least couldn’t care less about them. They are caricatures in the service of ideology. But all great art is about individuals and art is the opposite of ideology.

With such precision, delicacy and tenderness does White present the biographies of each of the four riders in the chariot that we almost forget that these people are what would, by the standards of bourgeois society, be called losers. We know their life histories, but to an objective observer in the post-war world of Sarsaparilla, Mary Hare is now a crazy old woman, the kind who wanders around in tattered clothing muttering incoherently. Himmelfarb is a late middle-aged recluse living in a ramshackle house. His very face is repulsive to those who accidentally catch sight of it. Dubbo is a sickly alcoholic who hangs around the local whorehouse getting drunk. Mrs Godbold is a single mother who lives in a tin shed while her young children run around screaming and getting into mischief.

If we lived in a big city, these are the kinds of people we would barely notice on our way from one appointment to the next. In a country town, where geography and demographics demand that we cannot avoid them, such people become outcasts and the subject of gossip and innuendo. The Brothers Karamazov takes place in a small town too. Both Dostoevsky and White knew that the big cities were for the worship of mammon. It’s the big cities where utilitarianism and materialism belong. Big cities facilitate forgetfulness. In a small town, there’s too much space and too much time. The objects of conscience have a nasty habit of crawling out of the shadows of consciousness and interrupting your holiday preparations or putting you off your dinner.

The main themes of Riders in the Chariot are almost identical to the other works of White that I’ve read. We have the male “hero” who represents European civilisation transplanted into Australia. He is either already dead, as in the case of Mary Hare’s father, or will die during the course of the novel as in Voss or Mr Roxburgh in Fringe of Leaves. The death symbolises, among other things, the death of reason and law seen in two world wars (and, I might add, in the last three years). But another way to look at that is the challenge to re-discover reason by re-integrating Necessity and Possibility as was the case with Alyosha dealing with Zosima’s death in Karamazov.

Until that is done, you are without a “father”. Without the father, the society of post-war Australia is the extension of the mindless materialism that was already there in the Victorian era. In Voss, we had Mr Bonner, the curtain retailer. In Riders in the Chariot, we have the local sweatshop factory, amusingly titled Brighta Bicycle Lamps, run by another Jewish immigrant but one who is desperately trying to forget the horrors he has escaped, Mr Rosetree (a clumsy attempt at assimilation because Rosetree, translated from the German Rosenbaum, is not a native surname in English).

Because of the similarity of the themes, almost all of the points I made about Voss in my post on that book are valid for Riders in the Chariot. But whereas Voss is cryptic, jagged and subtle, Riders in the Chariot is a giant hammer blow. The smoothness of writing in the first three quarters of the book seems purposely designed to prepare us for the scene that the book is famous for. White sets it up so intricately that, when it begins to unwind, the sense of sheer inevitability makes us sick in our stomach.

In order to understand the scene, there are two more characters to introduce and this is where the book took on added personal meaning for myself because the antagonists, the “bad guys”, to our four riders in the chariot are none other than two Devouring Mothers in the form of Mrs Flack and Mrs Jolley, both of whom also live in Sarsaparilla.  

It’s probably only because once you notice something you start to see it everywhere, but I feel as though I’ve been bumping into Devouring Mothers everywhere in the last year or so; not so much in person, but through other people’s stories. It seems that every second person has a story about a Devouring Mother, whether it be their own mother or somebody they know.

If Devouring Mothers are so widespread, why do we almost never hear about them in the general culture? Part of the reason is because, at least prior to the age of the Karen, the Devouring Mother was restricted to the home and the home is private. Unless you get access to the home directly through kinship or friendship, you wouldn’t have any reason to find out whether or not a Devouring Mother is hiding there. And even if you did, you’d have to know what signs to look for. Thinking back, I realise a couple of good friends of mine from high school had Devouring Mothers. At the time, I knew something was weird but I couldn’t have explained it any further than that. And, even if I could, what am I gonna say? “Dude, I think your mum’s got narcissistic personality disorder.”

So, it’s symbolically and literally accurate that in Riders in the Chariot the two Devouring Mothers, Mrs Jolley and Mrs Flack, are almost never seen outside of the home. It is from the home of Mrs Flack that they devise and strategise and gossip and plot. It is the Jew, Himmelfarb, who has caught Mrs Flack’s attention in particular for she is a Church Lady and a racist (open racism was still common in the immediate post-war years in Australia as in many other countries).  Mrs Flack has a young nephew, Blue, who works at Brighta Bicycle Lamps with Himmelfarb. He is her eyes and ears as she milks her unwitting informant via a weekly steak dinner. But Blue will become much more than an informant as the scene for which Riders in the Chariot is famous unfolds.

The understated precision with which White sets up that scene is a thing of beauty. I wonder how many people reading the book nowadays, including Australians who have been raised in big cities, would be able to see it coming. You probably have to have lived in small town Australia and you probably have to have worked in what would now be considered an old-fashioned blue collar job to have the requisite background understanding.

The blue collar factory jobs at the time were the domain of men. What sort of men? Mostly, men who had never matured beyond the schoolyard and were proud not to have done so. This was the era of the cultural cringe in Australia and its corresponding anti-intellectual ethic. To pretend to learning and knowledge of any kind was to draw the mockery of your workmates and that mockery could very easily turn to physical violence especially after a few beers at the pub after work.

And so the dramatic scene unfolds like one of those huge and intricate domino runs, as inevitable as any law of nature. Himmelfarb is a Jew and a German. In his earlier life, he was a distinguished professor. He does not socialise with the other workers in the factory. Therefore, he has no mates; nobody who will stick up for him when the time comes. He is The Other.

In a big city, he would simply be invisible. But not in a small town and especially not when the Devouring Mothers are at work. Mrs Flack has been priming her brainless nephew, Blue, with some nonsense about how the Jews killed Jesus (it is kind of true, giving her plausible deniability later on). “And there’s a Jew working in your factory, isn’t there?” You can just hear her saying it and you can just hear the gears of Blue’s mind turning as he realises the possibility to have a little fun (“blue” is Australian slang for “fight” as in “they’re having a blue”).

The dominos are all in place and it just needs a trigger. The trigger is that it’s the day before Good Friday. Things can get extra rowdy on such a day as people’s spirits rise in anticipation of a long weekend. But then Blue and several of his workmates win the lottery. Instead of working, they decide to spend some of their winnings at the local pub across the road from the factory. By mid-morning, they’re full as a goog (sorry, couldn’t help another bit of Australian slang. This one means “drunk as a skunk”) and Blue decides it’s time to have that bit of fun.

The bit of fun involves some improvised workplace bullying. Again, it’s the sort of thing that would happen all the time in that era. Himmelfarb is cornered. It’s the first time he and Blue have ever spoken. But Blue doesn’t really have anything say. He mumbles something about Jews and Jesus and that’s enough of a justification.

How does a mob decide what to do? Instinct. That’s what Mrs Flack has already told us earlier in the book. By definition, a mob must reduce the individuality of its members down to the lowest common denominator. The greatest good for the greatest number is the morality of the mob. If an innocent must be sacrificed along the way, so be it.

It’s the day before Good Friday. We’ve got a mob, we’ve got a Jew and we’ve got the concept of Jesus. How else could it go but a mock crucifixion? Himmelfarb is dragged outside to the nearest thing approximating a cross, a large tree, where he is strung up, thankfully not with nails.

It’s the part that comes next that is the real hammer blow. Everybody has stood around and watched the spectacle unfold with varying degrees of relish or uneasiness as suits their character. But nobody has lifted a finger to intervene. The artist, Dubbo, is the only one who is genuinely horrified but he cannot bring himself to do anything. Why is he horrified? Because, as an artist, he is the only one among the blue collar workers who takes symbolism seriously and who can see the horrific meaning before his eyes. As a human, he is also the only one at the factory who has interacted with Himmelfarb at a personal level.

When, finally, the factory foreman, who has allowed the boys to have their fun, comes out to put an end to the show, it’s with a smile and a laugh. Boys will be boys (note that it’s not men will be men. A man is whatever he is. A boy is whatever the other boys are). He helps Himmelfarb down from the tree with a couple of others and explains to the Jew that it’s all been a joke, just a bit of fun before the holidays. Himmelfarb’s lunch box is retrieved and he’s given the rest of the day off. Everybody else just goes back to work telling themselves that it really was a joke. And, anyway, no harm’s been done. Himmelfarb walks away by himself with a scratch or two, but nothing that won’t heal. From a Utilitarian point of view, there is no moral problem.

I mentioned in a past review that the story of Voss quite explicitly featured the Jungian concepts of the anima and the animus. One of the useful things about the anima/animus concept is that it gives us a way to talk about the masculine and the feminine and the gradations of development that exist. Himmelfarb equates to the second highest form of the masculine animus. He is the professor; the sage. But only in shadow form because he is a broken man. He makes no effort to impart his knowledge but takes up a job in a factory where he gets reduced down to the level of Blue who is the lowest form of the masculine, little more than a body, and just a puppet for his Devouring Mother aunt who need only whisper in his ear and he dances on her strings.

Like Voss, Riders in the Chariot is primarily about the feminine. In Voss, White had shown us the feminine in the highest form of Sophia, Laura Trevelyan. But Laura Trevelyan is absent from the town of Sarsaparilla. Sophia is wisdom. It is about the understanding of symbols. More importantly, Sophia is about understanding people as individuals. Mock crucifying a Jew on Passover, on the day before Good Friday, is symbolically about as horrific as it gets in a nominally Christian country. Mock crucifying a man who has just escaped the holocaust take it to a whole different level. Like I said, White clearly intended this as a hammer blow rather than the subtle intricacy of Voss.

The key point is that none of the people involved know any of this. They are oblivious, mindless. They might call themselves Christians, but they have never been taught how to interpret Christian symbolism. And they know nothing about Himmelfarb as a person either. He is “just that Jew”, nothing more. For them it really is just a joke and Jesus’ words “forgive them, father, for they know not what they do” are directly applicable. In order for it to be something more than a joke, they would need to have activated their conscience. Some have and it gives them an uneasy feeling that they can’t define. Most haven’t. They simply don’t know. The two who do know are Mary Hare and Mrs Godbold. They will tend to Himmelfarb as the modern Mary Magdalene and Salome.

Riders in the Chariot is about what happens in a culture when Sophia is missing. Nothing matters. Nothing means anything. Everything becomes a joke. Anything is allowed to happen and is then judged by its materialist consequences rather than its symbolic/psychological/spiritual meaning. Winning the lottery is just as worthwhile as getting rich through hard work and endeavour because the result is the same. Therefore, the moral worth is the same.

In Jungian terms, when the positive form of the archetype is absent, the shadow form takes its place. Sophia is absent in Sarsaparilla. The Devouring Mother is not. Mrs Flack and Mrs Jolley are there to fill the void. After the incident with Himmelfarb, they finally show their faces in the street to see the results of their handiwork. White has Mary Hare, the Innocent, who had befriended Himmelfarb earlier in the book, run up to them and scream in their faces “you are the devils!”

Given the subtlety of the novel leading up to that moment, this scene felt to me unnecessarily explicit. But, actually, the whole remainder of the book is spent with White spelling out the meanings of the text in far more overt terms than than he did in Voss. I would have preferred him not to do so. But I think by the time he wrote Riders in the Chariot, White was already frustrated that his earlier novels had not been understood. So, he spells it out as clearly as he can. Riders in the Chariot can be seen as his literary version of a bomb and he wanted the explosion to be as big as possible. He wanted to scream at Australia “this is what you are!”

He was right. And we still are.

There is a lot less racism now in Australia. Workplace bullying has been all but gotten rid of. But, archetypally, very little has changed. The higher forms of the masculine are absent and we still completely lack Sophia. For that reason, if he were alive, I don’t think White would have found anything surprising in what happened the last three years. The Devouring Mothers still run Australia; Mrs Flack and Mrs Jolley. And they will continue to do so until we reconnect with Sophia and rediscover wisdom and true meaning.

Several months ago, when there was a mini-panic in the middle of winter with threats of electricity blackouts in eastern Australia, I wrote a couple of posts on the Australian electricity market (this and this). The blackout threats are something I have been expecting for some time as Australia has continued to add intermittent power sources (solar and wind) to the electricity grid. Not surprisingly, they came in winter when the days are short and the sun has a nasty habit of hiding itself behind clouds instead of shining on solar panels.

In the end, there were no widescale blackouts, but the Australian energy bureaucracy’s own guidance is that blackouts will become a problem perhaps as early as 2025. That will be a problem for the future. Right now, the political problem is price as the retail price of electricity continues to rise in Australia as in most other countries. This political pressure has triggered what might just be a paradigm shift in Australian politics, so I thought I would take a post to sketch out what that might look like.

The question about whether renewable energy is cheaper than other forms of energy generation is one of those topics that arouses heated debate. I don’t claim to know for sure what the answer is and the reason is because electricity generation is, in the language of the old school systems thinking that I like to use to analyse such problems, a medium number system. Medium number systems display organised complexity and can be distinguished from the organised simplicity of systems like Newtonian planetary physics and unorganised complexity eg. behaviour of gas in a container.

When trying to understand medium number systems, our culture loves to create models. Whenever you see a headline “experts say…” or “studies have shown….” that means somebody constructed a model. The problem with modelling medium number systems is that you can’t reduce the variables enough to get calculable, reliable results. Therefore, any model you create, even if it seems to correlate to empirical data over some time period, can be wrong (in fact, will be wrong, but might be useful).

Some argue that it’s still better to create the model. Maybe. But a model can give you a false sense of security and certainty. The approach I prefer is the heuristic-based approach where you apply many different heuristics to the problem knowing that they are fallible but trusting that the combination of perspectives can give insight into what is going on. This approach requires a level of humility that doesn’t gel well with our culture. We prefer to be certainly and heroically wrong than just a little bit more right than wrong.

When trying to understand the medium number system that is the Australian electricity market, one of the heuristics to use is the history heuristic. That’s the approach I took in the first of my posts some months ago.

The ultra-short version of that history is this: Australia built a large grid in the post war years that ran almost entirely on coal. Because Australia has huge, economically extractable coal reserves, we enjoyed almost the cheapest electricity in the western world up until the early 90s. Then we jumped on board the neoliberal agenda which required the privatisation of the electricity grid. We were told this would reduce prices through the wonders of the free market. Starting in the mid-2000s, we began adding solar and wind generation at scale. We were told this would reduce prices as renewables were now the cheapest form of electricity generation.

Either way, the price should have gone down. That’s what we were told. Here’s what actually happened.

What has gone wrong? There are two main suspects under investigation.

First hypothesis: Crooked capitalists are screwing over the public like they always do. The privatisation in the early 90s is the cause of the price rise.

Second hypothesis: Renewables are not really as cheap as we’re told. The increase in solar and wind generating sources has driven the price increases.

It’s possible to create models to justify either of these hypotheses. There has definitely been gold plating of the transmission system and weird behaviour from electricity retailers which lends support to hypothesis 1. On the other hand, the enormous spending on extra transmission lines in recent years was necessary in order to hook remote solar and wind generation into the grid. This would be evidence for evidence for hypothesis 2.

From a systems theory point of view, both the privatisation of the grid and the renewable energy push of the 2000s have one thing in common: they have made the system far more complex. When we’re talking about whole systems, complexity comes at a cost. Without knowing any of the underlying details, we can surmise that a system that is more complex is less efficient. To get the same output, you’ll need to increase the input (of energy and $$).

The privatisation of the system in the mid 90s added complexity to the organisational structure of the system. Up until 1990, the electricity system here in Victoria was a single entity known as the SEC. This entity handled everything about the system including generation and retail. The privatisation reforms got rid of the SEC and split the system into four separate sectors: generation, transmission (high voltage), distribution (low voltage), retail.

Complexity always comes at a cost. In relation to organisational complexity, one of those costs is regulation. Private enterprises that run for profit are going to maximise their profit and will be tempted to do so at the expense of the common good. All of history teaches us that. If you introduce more profit seeking players into a system, there is going to be more chance for corruption. To combat that, you’ll need to spend more money on regulation (bureaucratic departments, lawyer fees, court resources). That’s one extra cost.

Another extra cost is the communication overhead. More nodes in the system means more points where communication can break down. This can be mitigated by introducing information technologies. But software comes with its own complexities. More importantly, software is expensive. It is an extra cost that you now need to pay to run a more complex system.

The addition of renewables since the mid-2000s has also added significant complexity to the system. Rather than a few enormous coal fired power stations, you now have a solar farm here, a wind farm there, a hydro over there, an Elon Musk battery over there. You’ve got numerous small-scale sources providing highly variable amounts of energy. That variability needs to be balanced out to keep the grid up. What happens when that doesn’t happen? You get blackouts. And then you get court cases and fines. In other words, more cost. (On a positive note, it does keep a few hungry lawyers off the streets).

This has only worked so far because of the massive redundancy built into the original grid. But at some point it will no longer work and that’s why the energy bureaucracy is already predicting increased blackout risk. Think of it like a diesel car. You can add a certain amount of gasoline to the fuel mix and the car will still run. If you keep increasing the gasoline in the mix, however, eventually the car will breakdown. The car was not designed to run on gasoline and our electricity grid was not designed to run on renewables.

So, I would expect that both privatisation and renewables have caused the price of electricity to go up. The difference is that all the cost from privatisation should already be baked into the system while the cost of extra renewables (the complexity cost) is increasing as more renewables get added to the system.

Well, it looks like we may actually get a clearer picture which of the two hypotheses is correct because the price increases have now created enough political pressure that there has been a big development in energy policy in Australia in recent months. In both NSW and Victoria, Australia’s two most populous states, the left-wing Labor parties have begun using rhetoric that explicitly blames privatisation for the cost spikes in electricity. Here in Victoria, the government announced a plan to directly fund generation and even get a government-owned SEC back into the retail game.

This is pretty big news. The privatisation agenda was a core plank of neoliberalism. If this rhetoric turns into reality, this starts to look like the official end of neoliberalism in Australia.

Of course, for now the measures are small and the choice of rhetoric looks opportunistic. Greedy capitalists always make a useful scapegoat and politicians desperately need a scapegoat given that they have been caught with their pants down now that the electricity price refuses to do what they promise. It’s also true that the whole renewables push is a core component of the Save the Planet™ ideology which won Labor the last election. The choice between blaming capitalists or blaming renewables and undermining that ideology is a politically obvious one.

What is interesting from an Australian political point of view is that this new rhetoric gives the Labor Party a way to ideologically service its core demographic of inner city intelligentsia/bleeding hearts while also capturing the demographic which is currently up-for-grabs: the outer suburban working class. Labor can promise it has a plan to cut prices, which will appeal to the working class, while also Saving the Planet™ which is the main concern of the inner city types.

By contrast, the Liberal-National coalition looks set to try and jump on board the nuclear bandwagon. I don’t expect that will be a winning strategy. Thus, Labor might accidentally find a way to become a populist party in the years ahead and they’ll do so by returning to their roots of bashing capitalists.

This fits my broader prediction that Australia will revert to our social democracy roots as things get tough in the next decades. Neoliberalism was always a bad fit here. It was only really adopted to appease the bankers who run the US empire. As the US empire continues to decline in the years ahead, Australia should get more leeway to choose its own path and I expect we’ll revert back to what once worked.

Ultimately, none of this will solve the electricity price problem, however. The only thing that will bring prices down is to reduce complexity in the system. A full return to government control would do that. One way it might play out is that a crisis of some kind, almost certainly large scale blackouts, could see governments, who would already own a substantial part of the system by then, buy out the remaining private players and the whole thing will revert to government control.

If hypothesis 2 is right (as I suspect it is), the price will still not come down because of the fundamentally complex nature of renewables and the associated complexity tax they impose on the system. At some point, possibly a few decades from now but maybe as early as the end of this decade depending on how things play out, a decision will have to be made whether Australia wants to have a permanent 24/7 electricity supply or whether we want to continue the renewable dream.

If we choose the former, there are still enormous coal reserves at our disposal conveniently located right next to existing transmission lines. Will government fund the construction of new coal plants? It would not surprise me in the slightest. And Save the Planet™ will go up in a puff of coal-powered smoke.

Here is a question: what is the difference between not being able to do something and not wanting to do something?

In the normal course of events, the distinction is unproblematic. We know what it’s like to be frustrated because we want to do something but don’t have the skills to do it properly. We know what it’s like not to be able to do something, to learn how to do it (through will) and then to be able to do it. We know what it’s like to stop doing something because we don’t want to do it anymore. And we know what it’s like to want to stop doing something but to do it anyway cos we have to.

These are all easily understandable situations where we have a clear conscious understanding of what is going on. What about situations that are less clear? Let me give an extended example from a strange occasion in my life which was the first time I started wondering about the question.

The background to the story here is that I used to play a lot of music and got pretty heavily into recording and audio engineering. I was playing in a rock band with a couple of mates and we had just found a new drummer. It wasn’t my choice to have him in the band as I could see he wasn’t very good, but I was outvoted. It didn’t matter much. We were just playing the odd gig. And the new guy seemed like he would be fun to have around even if he wasn’t particularly good at drumming.

At the time, I had a small studio I was using for recording and we were working on an EP for the band. I invited the drummer to come over and do a recording session. It would help him to learn the songs and let me get some practice recording his kit. He thought it was a good idea and we set up a time on a Sunday afternoon.

The scene is a familiar one to anybody who has done music recording: the drummer has his drum kit set up and a pair of headphones on. I’m sitting at the computer and my job is simply to press the record button at which point the track begins playing through the headphones and the drummer plays along. Everybody else in the band had recorded their part of the song, so it’s just the drummer filling in his parts. Think of it like karaoke for drummers.

From the very first take, a pattern established itself. The song would start, the drummer would begin playing along and it took usually about 15-20 seconds before he would get out of sync against the backing track. We’d stop and start over. Sometimes I played back the recording to him so he could listen to where he had gone off the rails.

The drummer had seemed like an upbeat and outgoing kind of guy in the short time I’d known him. He’d been in a good mood when he arrived at the studio for what was supposed to be a fun and relaxed thing to do over a couple of beers on a Sunday afternoon. That’s the way it started but he quickly became frustrated at his inability to play in time with the song. I had been doing audio recording long enough by this point to know that it was a good idea to keep the energy up. I reassured him that there was no pressure; that this was all just for fun; that I would delete all the tracks afterwards; that the main purpose here was just for him to learn the songs; all the things audio engineers learn to do to keep musicians motivated.

Nevertheless, the mood of the drummer continued to worsen. I was waiting for him to just say he didn’t want to do it anymore. But what happened was weirder. After less than 30 minutes of trying to play against the backing tracks, he ripped off his headphones and angrily proclaimed that “this wasn’t rock’n’roll. Rock’n’roll is not supposed to be played to a metronome”.

So, I could have disagreed with his statement but it was already a weird thing to complain about since the whole reason we were at the studio was so the drummer could play along to backing tracks and he knew that’s what he would be doing. So, I just nodded along and said some more things designed to lighten the mood. I suggested we take a short break and we went outside for a while.

When we returned, it took only a couple of minutes for an even weirder thing to happen: after another failed attempt to play along, the drummer started to say he was feeling sick. A few failed attempts more and he removed his headphones and said that it would be best to call it a day as he was probably coming down with a flu. So, that’s what we did. Just a few weeks later, the drummer had left the band.

To come back to the original question I posed at the start of this post: what is the difference between not being able to do something and not wanting to do it.

The drummer was unable to play along to a metronome. That was clear. The big advantage of a metronome and the reason why it’s such a valuable tool for aspiring instrumentalists is because it provides an objective standard to measure yourself against. The metronome makes it clear that the statement “you are unable to play to a metronome” is objectively true. I had enough experience with recording by the time this incident happened to know that most people would simply acknowledge this fact. They would say something like “this isn’t working. Let’s call it a day and I’ll go home and practice to a metronome.”

The drummer did not acknowledge the fact. His first response was a weird kind of moral objection: “it is not right to play rock’n’roll to a metronome”. His second response was to feel sick. On this second point, it’s worth noting the possibility that it might have just been an excuse. In Australian slang, this is called chucking a sickie. It’s a way to get off work. But that didn’t make sense in this context. We were not at work. He didn’t need to come up with an excuse. He could have just said he wasn’t enjoying it and didn’t want to do it anymore. Worst case scenario, he could quit a band that he’d only been in for about a week.

In hindsight, what I realise was happening was that the drummer’s pride was under attack. He was ashamed to say that he wasn’t able to play to the metronome and the weird moralising and sudden illness were a cover for that shame.

What got me thinking again about the drummer incident recently was reading the novel I’ve been talking about in the last several posts, The Brothers Karamazov. Pride and shame play a huge role in the novel and there are multiple scenes in the book which are exactly analogous to my drummer incident. There are the characters who are up on their moral high horse but their moral indignation is always a flimsy veneer for various emotional states, including shame. The weird moralising of the drummer was just like that.

On the subject of sudden illness, Dostoevsky several times refers to doctors and medicine in a mocking tone, something I can appreciate after witnessing the last two and a half years of behaviour from the medical establishment. But whenever a character in the book falls suddenly ill, it’s always because they are under emotional or, to put it in more accurate terms, existential stress. It’s sounds hyperbolic, but that’s exactly what was happening with the drummer in my story.

The topic of moral transgressions and their emotional ramifications leading to sudden illness is practically a cliche of 19^th century literature where it was usually referred to as “brain fever”. It almost always happened to aristocratic female characters. The woman who finds herself morally compromised, usually involving some love interest that would be considered incredibly tame by modern standards, ends up fainting on the couch and then taking to her bed. Some hapless doctor is sent for and he will proclaim that he hasn’t the faintest idea what the problem is as the woman seems physically fine. None of the other characters know what’s going on either, but we the reader know.

This leads to a variation on the question from the start of the post: are you really (physically) sick or is it in your mind?

After you’ve been doing powerlifting for a time, you learn to lift weights that are heavy enough to be dangerous. (This is why you should always powerlift with a club or an experienced friend). When you walk into the gym to try and squat twice your body weight for the first time, you are rightfully nervous. You start thinking about what will happen if things go wrong. Perhaps your mind will start playing tricks on you. You might start feeling a little nauseous and it’s as if a little voice in your head was saying “you don’t really need to do this. Better go home and get some rest. You might be coming down with a flu.”

I suspect that the reason why the main demographic that was sceptical even at the height of the initial corona hysteria was professional athletes and gym junkies and the reason is that both groups have had long practice of learning to tell the difference between being physically sick/injured and being tricked by the mind.

As I have noted in previous posts, it is not a coincidence that all these psychological complexities started to come out in the 19^th century among the upper classes in Europe as this was the time when the subconscious was being discovered. We see it in Schopenhauer’s concept of the will, we see it in 19^th century literature and later on in Freud and Jung who made their living tending to exactly the kind of women who suffered from “brain fever”.

“…there is no dialectical specification appropriate to the transition from having understood something to doing it.”

Let’s summarise my drummer story again from the Kierkegaardian perspective. The drummer “understood” that it was a good idea to practice along to the backing tracks. He was enthusiastic enough about the idea to agree to spend a Sunday afternoon doing it. The question is what happened next to change his mind.

Kierkegaard introduces the idea from Socrates that understanding and ethics are identical. That is, a person who understood what was right would do what was right. To do wrong meant that you didn’t understand. This leads to a weird explanation for the drummer’s behaviour. It would mean he understood at the start of the practice session that it was good to practice but then he forgot the truth halfway through. In that case, the correct approach to remedy the problem would be to have a Socratic dialogue to lead him back to a correct understanding.

The problem, of course, was that the drummer was not arguing rationally. If he had turned around and said that he didn’t think practising was a good idea, then we could have had a rational, Socratic dialogue about the matter. But he didn’t. Instead, he made some arbitrary moral argument and then became sick. There is, as far as I know, no dialogue in Plato where one of Socrates’ interlocutors suddenly becomes sick and has to retire from the scene. The issue of the subconscious is not present in Greek philosophy. You either consciously understand or you don’t. If you don’t, then you need to be made to consciously understand through dialectic.

Kierkegaard’s explanation introduces the concept of will. By will he means what Freud and Jung would later call the subconscious/unconscious. The conscious mind is the understanding. The subconscious is the will. The question then becomes: how do you know when somebody is acting by understanding (consciousness) or by will (subconsciousness)?

Did the drummer no longer want (will) to continue with the practice? The answer is clearly: yes. Was he consciously aware that he didn’t want to continue? Did he understand why in his conscious mind? The strange answer is: probably not.

The objective nature of the metronome was making the drummer look bad. It was showing up his defects as a musician. This introduces emotions such as shame and these emotions affect the understanding. The distinction between conscious understanding and subconscious will is not binary like Socrates assumed. We have differing amounts of conscious understanding even about the contents of our own minds and our understanding can change over time. If a person does not understand his own mind, how can anybody else understand it?

The idea that somebody else can understand is the basis for psychoanalysis. Within the modern psychological framework following Freud and Jung, we might attribute the drummer’s behaviour to complexes or psychoses. We might frame them as psychological illness and we would put the drummer on the couch and ask him how he felt when it turned out he couldn’t play along to a metronome. We might hypothesise that the metronome triggered an inferiority complex he had had because his parents did pay him enough attention as a child, or whatever.

When such things happen in real life with somebody you know, it’s not funny. It’s confusing and perplexing. For Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard, it’s more than that. Their frame is an ethico-religious one entailing an interpretation of the Christian doctrine using the concepts of conscience, despair and sin. According to this way of looking at it, the understanding/consciousness/conscience is the good while the “will” represents the lower parts of the psyche. To allow the lower parts of the psyche to triumph over the good by clouding the understanding is to sin.

 “…sin does not consist in man’s not having understood what is right, but in his not wanting to understand it, and in his unwillingness to do what is right.”

Socrates would say that the drummer no longer understood what was right when he gave up and left the practice session. Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky would say that he did not want to want to understand what was right. He gave in to base desires. He sinned.

Within our modern utilitarian morality where we judge events by their consequences, this all sounds like a storm in a teacup. No damage was done by the drummer calling it quits. Nobody was hurt. Therefore, there is no moral issue. But for Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard, it’s exactly these moments which are telling because once you have given in to the subconscious it will become a habit and you deviate further from the path of the good one small step at a time. Note that this is literally true for a drummer who does not want to practice to a metronome. Their chances of becoming a good drummer are vanishingly small.

The Brothers Karamazov is full of examples of people deviating from the good and the differing levels of consciousness each character has about it. Some characters never consciously realise what is going on even with their own behaviour. Their conscious mind (conscience) no longer even understands the good. The more noble characters are in a struggle which is the struggle between knowing what is good and being unable to achieve it. This struggle is what Kierkegaard called the Sickness Unto Death, a metaphor which is particularly poignant after the events of the last three years. We immediately look for material causes for all illness but Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard imply that a great deal of illness is really spiritual.

Nowadays, with the Christian religion in seemingly terminal decline and the Dostoevskyan/Kierkegaardian interpretation even less well known, we have slipped back to a choice between the ancient Greek understanding of these issues or a modern psychological interpretation. We can laugh a Socratic laughter at the irrationality of the world or we can say that people are “crazy” or “insane”. Such epithets are hurled about by the thousands on the internet every single day but are also present in the mass formation psychosis explanation for corona, for example.

Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard would say that the underlying cause is ethico-religious: we have lost our understanding of the good. We have done so because we have given in to base desires i.e. the will. They are surely correct to some extent. Just look at the complete lack of ethical behaviour over the last three years; the rampant lying, gaslighting and manipulation every day in the public discourse; the use of force to silence dissent; the censorship; the weaponisation of the financial system. It all speaks to a lack of ethical understanding. If God (the good) doesn’t exist, everything is permitted.

Although this manifests most conspicuously at the level of politics, for Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard it was fundamentally an individual problem. We choose the fog of rational abstractions, we indulge in cheap moral grandstanding and we put blind faith in party politics precisely because we have lost track of our self. The answer is to return to the self and rediscover the good at the individual level. It’s not a glamourous task. There’s nothing heroic about it. It won’t win you any likes on social media. But without it you’ll be forever tilting at windmills.

In the last few posts, I’ve talked in rather highfalutin’ terms about the meaning of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. In this post, I’m going to metaphorically bring it down to earth and try and draw a correspondence between one of the main themes of the novel and fruit and vegetable gardening. How is this possible, I hear you cry. Read on to find out.

Two of most poignant scenes in Karamazov feature an embrace of the earth. Firstly, near the start of the novel, the Elder Zosima bows down before Dmitri and touches his forehead on the ground in front of him. Secondly, when Alyosha has his spiritual revelation beneath the stars of a clear night sky, he embraces the earth and kisses the ground.

“The mystery of the earth was one with the mystery of the stars…”

The advice Zosima gives to Alyosha in Karamazov is very similar to the advice that Icarus failed to heed in the old myth. There must be a balance between the earth and the stars. Even the greatest spiritual teacher must kiss the ground every now and then. Although monks throughout history have tended the earth alongside their spiritual practices, in the monastery of 19^th century Russia presented in Karamazov, the priests live by the charity of the townsfolk. They are disconnected from the earth. Thus, Zosima instructs Alyosha to leave the monastery, a place of god worship (the stars), and go into the world (the earth).

Looking at the state of western society these days, I don’t think there’s any question that we have become disconnected from the earth. This is not just a metaphorical observation. Our lack of humility goes hand in hand with a lack of actual contact with humus. I’m not talking about kissing the ground (although a little smooch every now and then never hurt anyone). I’m talking about just everyday hands in soil.

Humility has traditionally been associated with the lower classes because for most of history the lower classes worked with humus. “He came from humble origins” means his family worked the earth. Almost all humans for almost all of history did so. Only the rich avoided the job (we’ll come to that subject later). As western society got richer and richer, the first thing anybody did was stop working the earth. And now we have a humility problem. It would be ironic, except is makes perfect sense and is one of the oldest themes of religion, literature and philosophy.

In philosophical terms, the stars vs earth contrast maps onto the classical distinction between Imagination and Actuality. We think of Imagination as the ability to visualise things in the mind. But the philosophical conception is wider and sees Imagination as the storehouse of the mental models we have about the world including cultural scripts and stories, myths, religious notions, scientific theories etc.

When I invoke the story of Icarus and you understand that story, we are tiptoeing through the tulips in the fields of Imagination; fluttering like butterflies on gusts of fancy; soaring like eagles through….well, you get the picture.

The decadent form of Imagination is Fantasy. The word fantasy comes from the Greek (phantasia) but had already picked up a negative connotation in old English to mean something like “illusion”.

I did; I saw him dead,
Breathless and bleeding on the ground. Art
thou alive?
Or is it fantasy that plays upon our eyesight?
I prithee, speak; we will not trust our eyes
Without our ears: thou art not what thou seem’st.

Henry IV

The Imagination and Reality must be in harmony. Your eyes do their job of seeing what is in front of them and your Imagination does its job of embracing Possibility, where Possibility includes the potential interpretations of what you see according to the mental models you have cultivated: religious, spiritual, psychological, scientific etc.

Fantasy is what happens when the Imagination is untethered from reality. Just like the monks in the monastery in Karamazov, modern western society is disconnected from the earth and by extension from the real. Millions of people sit around in corporate offices, boardrooms, university faculties, government departments or just at home on the couch in front of the television. All of this activity takes place in the Imagination. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that unless it’s not balanced by reality. And that’s exactly our problem.

It’s still hard to believe how much our society has become detached from reality. But it’s true and it’s true in the highest office in the land as much as in the local supermarket (arguably more in the former than the latter). We are living in Fantasy land in a philosophical and psychological sense.

In philosophy, another way to talk about reality is the concept of Necessity which is juxtaposed with Possibility. Part of the reason why death has always been central to the big questions of philosophy and theology is because death is the ultimate Necessity. No amount of Imagination can make death go away. For that reason, death can seem to destroy Possibility.

One way to react is to heroic acceptance and this is called fatalism. The most vocal proponents of fatalism in modern society are our scientific materialist atheists who are always very eager to remind us that the universe doesn’t give a damn about us.

Another way to react to the problem of death is to dissociate and escape into Fantasy. This is the more common approach in modern society. Our highly dysfunctional relationship to death in the modern West is directly related to our escape into Fantasy. We make sure death happens elsewhere where we don’t have to see it. That’s the point of nursing homes and also one of the main reasons for hospitals. About 9 out of 10 people will die in a nursing home or hospital these days.

It’s no coincidence, then, that in Karamazov Alyosha’s spiritual crisis is triggered by the death of Zosima, which doesn’t take place in a nursing home or hospital but in the monastery for all to see. Alyosha must come to terms with Necessity and find a way to accept it without losing Possibility. To do otherwise is to fall into the trap of escaping into Fantasy through pleasure (Dmitri) or embracing a completely fatalistic view of the world where Necessity is all there is (Ivan).

OK, but these are topics I’ve dealt with in past posts and I said I was going to relate all this to fruit and vegetable gardening. Why? One of the reasons is because fruit and vegetable gardening is humble. Given the scale of the problems facing the west, it seems mad to think that vegetable gardening could make any difference. But that’s the whole point. We are told that only grand heroic plans can “save the planet”. That’s just more hubris. If what we need is humility then why not go direct to the soil.

But fruit and vegetable gardening, it seems to me, is also a tonic for some of the other problems we face. Let me give a personal example of how gardening relates to the concepts of Imagination (Possibility) and Necessity we have just been talking about.

By the time I noticed the aphid problem last year, the damage had already been done and so I had a substandard apple harvest. But now aphids have become part of my Imagination, my mental model of the garden, and so as the trees have come into leaf this spring here in Australia I have been keeping an eye out and, sure enough, the ants and aphids have returned for Season 2. Hey, I didn’t ask for a sequel, mofos. Well, it’s game on this time. Now that I’ve caught them early, I can do something about it and hopefully ensure that I get that batch of juicy apples that exists in my Imagination.

Fruit and vegetable gardening brings us literally into contact with the earth but more importantly it brings us into contact with reality and forces us to accept Necessity. If you want your apples, you’re gonna have to work for ‘em. And even if you give up and say it’s not worth the effort, you have still faced Necessity and you’re no longer living in Fantasy.

So, gardening is applied philosophy. Cool, eh? But there’s another aspect to gardening that relates back to Karamazov. Recall that the Grand Inquisitor chided Jesus for not providing bread. The provision of bread creates dependency and dependency creates anxiety because bread once given can be taken away. This is part of what is behind the background anxiety that is a pervasive aspect of modern western culture. People understand at some level that they are completely dependent on “the system”.

By historical standards, we are extremely dependent. For almost all of history, the average person provided for themselves to a very large extent. We, on the other hand, provide almost nothing for ourselves. It’s not uncommon now to find people who cannot even cook. For this reason, the act of providing yourself with the basic necessity of food has a liberating, even rebellious, feeling to it in the modern world.

But doing gardening is a cure for anxiety in another sense. There are no middlemen involved; no politics; no culture wars; no gaslighting; no social media trolls. It’s just you and the laws of nature. Unlike social norms, the laws of nature don’t change, at least not in a timeframe meaningful for us as individuals. So, the interaction with the realm of Necessity can give the feeling of standing on solid ground to those who have lived their whole life in the hall of mirrors that is the modern culture wars.

This fact would have seemed absurd to almost all people throughout history. For a great deal of history, the main problem was an excess of Necessity which seemed to extinguish all Possibility and gave life a permanently pessimistic overtone. We suffer from the opposite: an excess of Possibility which gives life a disorienting and hallucinogenic overtone. Whatever else can be said about them, aphids are honest. They are not trying to trick you. They just wanna eat your apple tree.

Do a search for the word wealth and you’ll get pictures like the one above: money. But money is not wealth. The word wealth is related to the word health as are weal and heal. The etymology of these words goes back to concepts of wholeness, happiness and holiness. Money, on the other hand, is about riches and the word rich has its etymology in the concepts of status and rank. The ruler manages the coin of the realm. Spoiler alert: the house always wins.

Can you be wealthy if you’re anxious at your dependence on a system you have no control over? Can you be wealthy if you are living in Fantasy with no contact with reality? I don’t think so. But, in a more pragmatic sense, at this time of high inflation where the price of food has gone up substantially, when you walk into your backyard and grab some things to cook dinner with, your reality has not changed. Governments can print money as much as they like, whatever the price of food, the value stays the same. That’s a perspective that fruit and vegetable gardening can provide.

Having this perspective grounds the ideological Fantasy world of modern politics and brings it back to reality. The things that matter – health/wealth – are priceless. The financial system and the political system should be there to facilitate the attainment of those things. But it’s clear that the current political and financial systems are there to rob you of wealth and health. More specifically, they encourage you to chase riches as a proxy for wealth.

A fourth and final point. As I noted in my Age of the Orphan series, the word learning is etymologically related to the word path/track in many different cultures. To walk the path of learning is to connect to the earth. It is to bring the Imagination into harmony with Necessity as the potential becomes the actual.

Again, we have lost this sense in the modern world. We think learning is a scholarly activity. You go to school or university to learn then you go into the “real world” to do. But this is the whole problem of Ivan Karamazov as I discussed in the last post. New ideas must be tried against Necessity. Only then does learning happen. Anything else is Fantasy. When you test yourself against the world, you feel like you’re standing on solid ground and this is the opposite of anxiety.

Can fruit and vegetable gardening save the world? It sounds ridiculous and that’s the beauty of it. Certainly, nobody will accuse you of hubris. They might think you’re mad. But a little madness, a little excess of positive Imagination, is what is required right now. One way or another we’re going to need to reconnect with the earth. The only question is whether we do it voluntarily or not.

Buddha was a prince who renounced his life of privilege and went and sat under a tree to meditate. St Francis of Assisi was a wealthy dandy, the equivalent of a modern hipster, who gave his fine clothes to a beggar and went wondering in the forest. Jesus was the son of God and also a carpenter. The mystery of the stars must be balanced by the mystery of the earth.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go and check on my apple tree.