October 24, 2001 Appeared in Consumers,
Commodities, and Consumption
The Home Front
Eugene Halton
Fascist fundamentalist Islam is the
immediate first front in the war underway. What horror! To incinerate thousands
of people to prove some worthless ideology: The evil of mad idealism. It will
not respond to reason, it needs to be confronted by
military force. For this reason the U.S. and allied response will be brutal
reasonableness, killing as much of the infrastructure as possible. When the
al-Qaida terrorists and Taliban government of Afghanistan are destroyed, it
will not end terrorism, it will not likely bring a democratic government into
being, but in serving notice that enabling mass murderers is unacceptable, it
will serve self-protection in that sense.
But it is a
dangerous course, not only for mistaken targets, but for maintaining civil
liberties internally. Today there are two fronts: Islamic fundamentalists and
their unholy war on America, and our own American automatism, our
auto-brainwashing by machines, the being reduced to no
more than a ghost in the machine living from the neck up.
The first front is
seeking to kill American and selected other bodies. The second front has
been working for some time already to kill the American soul, and is part of a
larger globalizing automatism whose goal is to kill soul, to kill the
spontaneous life through which we are human. As D. H. Lawrence put it:
“That which is lovely to the automatic process
is hateful to the spontaneous soul.
The wakeful living soul fears automatism as it fears
death: death being automatic.”
The September 11 highjackers
represent one example of this automatism: honed calculating abilities, capable
of successfully scouting airline system ruts,
including operating the machines. Preprogrammed souls, following rules of the
indoctrination documents they carried, instructions which
required close calculation and which repeatedly warned against spontaneous feeling.
These mass murderers were guided drones following guided missives.
One of the sad horrors that emerged
from the World Trade Center Massacre is that workers who were exiting on the
stairs heard over loudspeakers that they could return to their offices. A
number continued to exit, a number returned to their offices. Those who
listened to their immediate fears, to their gut reaction, lived; those who
listened instead to the disastrous message, to anxieties about “being
correct,”
about not losing their jobs, lived from their necks up, automatically, and
sadly, died.
Calculating, moving humans deprived
of the spontaneous soul represent successful implantations of the megamechanical matrix of modern life. Though the modern mechanical-scientific
world-view supposedly eliminated “goal”
or purpose from nature, in reality it retained it as a crypto-religious system
requirement: the goal of perfecting the modern megamachine
by progressively replacing the human elements of the system.
But
consider the American subset, already infiltrated and colonized by Megatechnic America. The proliferation of techno-devices
and the massive infrastructures associated with them in the past fifty years–especially
nuclear bombs, televisions, and autos–radically mechanized the American soul.
These things bespeak the Invisible Dictator which has
already made human beings an endangered--and endangering--species.
The ever-increasing automatism
manifests in the obesity epidemic, which spread in the ‘90s,
as the Journal of the American Medical Association put it, “with
the speed and dispersion characteristic of a communicable disease epidemic.”
Now antiobiotics have been abused
by the meat industry in ways humans are beginning to pay for. But who would have thought that Americans would conduct
biological warfare on ourselves, using fat as the weapon!
But
effective weapon it is, a very good weapon to lower awareness, to keep the
potato on the couch, reduced to button pushing through the mirage of “EAT
ME”
images and commercial soul-seductions. The Couch Potato is perhaps the
penultimate perverse perfection of the sedentary creature brought into being
through agriculture and civilization.
Home cooking less while eating more,
the automated American is also underslept and underwalked, overworked and overspent, for these
deprivations enhance compliance and reduced awareness. Aware, autonomous
citizens do not possess the compliance capabilities of unaware, automatic
consumers, “couched” in
the hypnotic visage of the electro-Tele-Medusa.
The post-democratic consumption
creature is the antithesis of the democratic citizen. To return to normal
consumption addiction, as suggested by Vice-President Dick Cheney and other
government officials, is no response to this crisis.
Automated, unaware consciousness, conditioned by the
stimulus-response/pleasure-pain matrix, is intrinsically depressing.
Awareness, no matter how painful the
reality of which one becomes aware, is intrinsically satisfying, and is rooted
in self-originated experience. More awareness is what Americans need to fight
both fronts, and especially a general arousal of visceral awareness that
democracy itself has also been under siege from within, lulled into the false
security that techno-machines could provide security, happiness, and a life.
Only full-bodied awareness, rooted in self-originated experience and the
purposes it engenders, can provide a means to democratic life. Consumption
itself, to be healthy, must be rooted in acts of awareness and not of
dependency, seduction, and addiction.
This introduces
one of the great challenges we face today, it seems to
me. How might the all-powerful, global Corporate
Empire be transformed to face and attune itself to organic limitations–limitations
of the earth’s
bounty, of self-responsible societies and spontaneous selves? If it can’t,
then there is nothing to be said, and it shouldn’t take more
than 25 years for this globally, electronically, virally, economically, and
spiritually interconnected world to collapse from its excesses as the
World Trade Center did in a single day. But to deny
that it is also a human entity, however dehumanizing, seems to me to surrender
to the myth of the machine as some alien thing that is not also a human social
organization. That is an alienated view of the machine, in my opinion. No
matter how dehumanizing, corporations and machines remain human social
organizations.
Corporation means a “bodying,”
an “incarnation,” a
group of people with a charter to act as an individual. Some say that one
can’t
reason with a corporation, as though it were like an inevitable disease.
But one can
heal a flu through the body’s
own resources.
The transformation to
trans-national, franchising, globalizing corporate structures shows how
corporations can transform relatively quickly, albeit in the direction of
unlimited expansion.
The transformation of the USA in a few decades to an
increasingly de-localized franchised, corporate malled
society shows how a society can rapidly transform itself, albeit in the
direction of unlimited expansion.
A strange Jewish virus infects the all-powerful Roman empire
with the power of the powerless. Hah! Any Roman patrician would laugh at the
futility of such an idea. Just a few centuries later that virus has
Christianized the Roman empire.
Two stone-cutters–Socrates
and Jesus–powerless
in political force, powerful in presence, convicts sentenced to death by their
respective cities, changed the world with the words they bodied forth, with
words that evaporated into air even as stones they cut are probably still
existent today, words that found form after their deaths in writings by those
who learned from them.
In one of my last meetings with one of my teachers, Lewis Mumford–though 94 and
mostly debilitated by dementia–his
eyes briefly fired up, and he smiled and said, while making a circling with his
finger, that yes, there is always hope, otherwise the whole thing would just
keep going round and round.
Or take another convict, in prison for his beliefs
that human decency can be a world-transforming power. Two months later he addressed his nation on New Year’s Day 1990 as
the President of Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel. This too is
our modern civilization:
“It
is my profound conviction that we have to release from the sphere of private
whim such forces as a natural, unique and unrepeatable experience of the world,
an elementary sense of justice, the ability to see things as others do, a sense
of transcendental responsibility, archetypal wisdom, good taste, courage,
compassion and faith in the importance of particular measures that do not
aspire to be a universal key to salvation. Such forces must be
rehabilitated....Things must once more be given a
chance to present themselves as they are, to be perceived in their individuality.”
After the World Trade Center collapse, we need to remember the variety of faces
that corporate America can take, faces that included working class janitors, firemen, and police as well as stock traders, a melange of different races, religions, and nationalities.
Corporate America needs to remember its human faces, if it is to recall its
human form.
Whatever gets built on that site should not replicate
the megatechnic giantism of
the twin megaliths but should present the human faces of a human community of
work: somehow a combined "village" of buildings and monument, as
powerful as Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial, honeycombed with verbal or
visual vignettes of the lives of the victims.
Let the center of world trade be a visible symbol of human bodily experience, a
home front, a place where the human heart is palpable,
where the limits of death are tangible, where the fragile joy of being alive is
an inescapable element of awareness of the business of life.
See
Lewis Mumford's critique of the World Trade Center from 1970, when it was
just being built