A10: Notes to lecture one:
Wednesday, Sept. 4, 2024
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IqkhhSycc4
R.E.M. “Losing my Religion” from the album “Out of Time” (1991)
So many problems in our world. People clamor for answers. And yet, a central tenet of this
course is the following:
--what we need is not more answers, but better questions.
To understand who we are now we must search for how we began—.
So here are two important, interrelated concepts: SYNCHRONIC and DIACHRONIC
The primary use of these two terms came about in the study of linguistics.
A synchronic approach to a word would look at its meaning at a specific point in time, without
considering its historical context, or how it has changed over the years, decades, or even
centuries.
A diachronic approach examines the evolution and development of a language over time.
-Just as with words, concepts and constructs also have, simultaneously,
-a synchronic (how we understand them now) and
-a diachronic (how this meaning has differed in times past).
-The two terms can be used to create an x/y axis (shout out to science majors!) such that we can
map out this simultaneity:
-what it means now
-in relation to what it has meant in the past).
But Humanities is not Science. It makes no claim to be able to determine the objective, the
empirical, the data point. It concerns itself with the curve of an emotion, the sense of ourselves,
and how that sensibility impacts upon our sense of others, and the world around us. Constructs
such as “the self” or “identity” or what it means to “be” are presented
synchronically/diachronically in the plot of a novel, the imagery of a poem, the conflict of a
drama, the satiric turn of a comedy.
--The twentieth Century has been called both “The Age of Anxiety”
and, beginning with the renaissance in the 16th century, also “The
Age of Science”
and this class proposes the two are intimately related, indeed,
inextricable.
The time prior to the Renaissance is understood as “The Age of Faith”
The vertical/sacred/faith/(soul) axis is akin to the diachronic (significance
with reference to the historical, even the eternal)
The horizontal/secular/science/(self) axis is akin to the synchronic
(significance only in relation to “now”)
The difference between faith and science is the difference between
-assuming God knows—more than you can possibly know (faith)
And the scientific method which discovers what we know—more and more all the time (science)
The shift from faith to science is also a shift from
SOUL to SELF.
The SOUL is conceived of as the spark of divinity within you. It is diachronic, eternal. When
you are assailed by doubt, you look to the care of your soul which reassures you of a certitude
not in this world, but a transcental
certitude—incorruptible, absolute (or absoulute). The soul does not “know” anything—but
believes that (faith) God knows all . To “lose your soul” then is to lose contact with God and ,
thus, be lost altogether. This concept is crucial in our first novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray.
The SELF is attuned to the secular, to the scientific method, to discovery on this Earth, and in
this time. As such, it is SYNCHRONIC, always “advancing”. Imagine teaching a class on
Chemistry of Physics using a textbook from one hundred years ago—what even would be the
point? At best, it would suggest a history of Science, but would not be deemed at all
“scientific”—at least, not any more: Before chemistry, there was alchemy; before astronomy,
there was astrology; before physics, there was magic. Because literature is about the human
condition and sensibility, I can begin this literature class with a text 130 years old—and it is still
up to date! Or I could begin with Hamlet—500 years ago—or Beowulf –1000 years ago! Your
day-to-day life is SYNCHRONIC, but your humanity is DIACHRONIC. And your daily
experience is somewhere on the x/y axis: daily life/humanity.
-Apps do so many things; but what do any of them mean? Google calls up so much information,
but where is wisdom? ChatGPT can rearrange internet information into a coherent paragraph,
but what is the point? Tinder calls up an endless sea of faces to meet, but why are so many, so
lonely? TS Eliot gave us a clue when he wrote, in 1910, “we prepare a face to meet the faces
that we meet” (“The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock”).
-If our prepared face, meets another prepared face, who has met whom? Has there really been a
meeting at all? In a time of unprecedented media access to anything and everyone, why is there
this anxious feeling of being lonely, isolated, disconnected? This anxiety manifests in a
multiplicity of ways:
-fear of “missing out” (complete with its own acronym, FOMO)
-fear of being judged/shamed
-fear of not being “good enough”
-fear of being left out, ignored, overlooked
-fear of being “found out” (impostor syndrome)
What the items of this incomplete list have in common is that the ‘fear” has no clearly
identifiable source. The “fear,” in other words, is not fear, but anxiety. The difference
between the two is that fear has an identifiable source, anxiety does not. But you might say “I
know what I am afraid of. I am afraid of doing badly on the midterm”. But why are you afraid?
It has nothing to do with the midterm. It is just that you have set up “doing well on the midterm”
as the “thing” that will appease all your more general anxieties. And so it will—for a day or
two--. And then, like a sandcastle, it will crumble and become part of the shore again,
powerless to hold back, or stand up against, the continuous motion of wave after wave of
anxiety. We seek ways to stabilize how we experience ourselves now (synchronic) in relation to
all that has gone before (diachronic). Paradoxically, to “be” is also to be in a constant state of
flux.
Many of you are coming of age in a time where billions of dollars are being spent to try and “fix”
a data point for you, to tell you “who you are,” (influence you) so you can be persuaded to buy
something. Go into Shopper’s Drug Mart-- and stand anywhere. The ocean of products around
you are existential “data points,” each one offering to fix the flux that is an ineradicable part of
“being”. Why, for example, are there fifty or more brands of shampoo? Shampoo is soap that
you put in your hair. But that is not how shampoo is sold. It is sold as a point of orientation for
you, something you can place at the center, and then build “yourself” around:
You don’t have enough things to worry about—now you have to add to it: “it’s been at least a
week-- and no one has sniffed my hair. What is wrong with me?”
For this guy, his anxieties (“doubts”) take the form of an ever-present water-dragon. Thank
goodness there is a shampoo for that. But you know what makes me anxious? Being told I
could be “the world’s number one,” but I am not-- because there is something missing, I don’t
have what it takes, I’m a loser. These are the synchronic messages in these ads, about who you
are “now” (and notice, they impose upon you what you “mean,” under the pretense of “seeing it
in you”). Where is the diachronic? In this case, it is present in the implicit gender constructions.
The “woman” is told to be anxious if she does not attract male attention (appearance). And to be
reassured if she does. The man is told to be “anxious” about whether or not he has “what it
takes” (performance), and reassured the product will (but how, exactly) “clear the doubts”.
But has it always been this way? Were there fifty brands of shampoo in the Renaissance? Of
course not. So, no one was anxious? Of course they were. What we now call the “self” is the
modern reconstruction of what we once understood as the “soul”. As I mentioned already, the
soul represented that part of you that meant God knew who you were. When anxious, ask God
(pray). And now? When anxious, use an advertised product (pay). The time before “The Age
of Anxiety/Science” can be seen, in retrospect, as an “Age of Faith”. But whether it is faith or
science, conflict still revolves around belief (related to religion) in an age of Faith, and “selfesteem” (related to the market/economics) in an age of Science: both are systems that provide
orientation for us in what would otherwise be a perpetually bewildering world. The movement
from the soul to the self resulted in: a dramatic increase in empirical knowledge of the here and
now, but at the cost of A
LOSS OF TRANSCENDENTAL CERTITUDE.
Self-knowledge eclipses the soul’s presumption of an inviolable eternal truth—it is this very
moment that is immortalized in the story from The Book of Genesis where first Eve, then Adam,
ate the fruit from the tree of knowledge—defying God’s commandment. As a result, they were
expelled from The Garden of Eden, a place where everything was known for them by God
(faith), to the ‘fallen” world, where they would just have to try and figure it out for themselves
(science).
The diachronic—our understanding of ourselves in relation to the eternal-- is a shape-shifter—if
lost in one form (faith), it morphs into another (anxiety). A recent New York Times bestseller,
entitled The Anxious Generation, charts the most recent shape-shift:
The same book is marketed with two different covers; each presents the same phenomena—
feeling lonely and overwhelmed-- in inverted form. The girl is inundated with countless emojis;
the little astronaut is lost among myriad stars. The author, Jonathan Haidt, argues that “playbased childhood” began to decline in the 1980s, and how it was finally wiped out by the arrival
of the "smart phone-based childhood" beginning in the early 2010s.
Haidt presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which this "great re-wiring of childhood" has
interfered with children's social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep
deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison,
and perfectionism.
-In a diachronic motion, we will trace this back much further—to William Wordsworth’s 1802
poem “The World is Too Much With Us” where Wordsworth is already dismayed and anxious
about the world of bewildering array of “things for sale” being made available by the machinery
of what we now know as the First Industrial Revolution:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
(a “boon” is a timely blessing that appears helpful; but here, according to Wordsworth, this
“boon” is “sordid”— immoral, dishonest, even as it presents itself to us as a timely blessing)
Here, more than two hundred years ago, Wordsworth’s insight is not so different from Haidt’s in
The Anxious Generation. What Haidt regrets as having been lost-- a “play-based childhood”--
Wordsworth laments as a lost “nature-based childhood”. In the former case, the mechanical
inventions of the Industrial revolution helped bring about this change, in the latter (our age) it
has been the technological inventions and innovations of the social media revolution. What gets
obscured in both instances is what I called earlier “the curve of an emotion”—that ineffable
aspect of our being that exceeds and defies all attempts to label it, fix it, commercialize it, or
profit from it.
Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) presents, as its point of departure, the
fateful moment when a handsome charming young man (Dorian Gray, 18 years old), who
nonetheless has doubts about himself, has those doubts aggravated by a man named Lord
Henry. We might compress Lord Henry’s general philosophy as follows: “of course people treat
you well now, Dorian, but only because of your charm and good looks. Make the most of it,
because when you are old, people will have no use for you, and will take no further interest in
you”.
As it happens, while listening to Lord Henry, Dorian is having his portrait pained by an artist
named Basil Hallward. Basil paints Dorian’s portrait repeatedly because, for him, Dorian seems
a type of perfection, and is therefore a compelling subject for his art. The truth is Basil is
frightened of his own feelings. Indeed, even in painting Dorian, he is afraid people will look at
his art and see into his (Basil’s) soul. In a moment of panic, Dorian performs what can be seen
as the modern equivalent of a very old story: he offers to sell his soul, in return for eternal youth:
he wishes for his face to remain beautiful forever, even as the portrait of that face grows older—
And he does so because the bored and self-involved Lord Henry has convinced him of the truth
of his central and hidden anxiety (behind the face he prepares, for the faces that he meets): That
he is valuable only to the extent that he appears pleasing to others. For this reason, and this
reason only, others will endeavor to please him. Therefore, according to Lord Henry, the sole
goal of life is to seek pleasurable sensation. Everything becomes transactional. Everyone who
fails in this can be labelled a ‘sucker” and “a loser”.
“Love thy neighbor as thyself” becomes “what’s in it for me?”
Although The Picture of Dorian Gray was written in 1893, well before Facebook, it is not hard
to imagine that Dorian, had he been alive in our time, would have posted “selfies,” on instagram
or snapchat or tik-tok with a frequency that would give “influencers” on the internet, a run for
their money. But virtual popularity, especially if we judge from the high percentage of
celebrities in Drug Rehab, seems to deepen loneliness, not alleviate it.
-In LORD HENRY’S WORLD, a world where sensation is substituted
for significance, innumerable forms of addiction replace the
stability once sought for in rituals and traditions.
-Addiction is doing the same thing over and over to hide from yourself (Dorian will become an
inveterate user of opium);
-ritual, on the other hand, is doing something over and over to learn more about yourself.
There is overlap: addictions contain rituals, and a ritual that once helped might devolve into
addictive behavior. From a distance, they look like the same thing, but the difference takes
place somewhere between avoiding and understanding. Lord Henry’s influence is fatal to Dorian
because just at the point where he might have begun to understand, he was ushered into a
lifestyle devoted to distraction and avoidance.
Lord Henry is cynical about the modern age, and what he regards as the foolishness, and
irrelevance, of acting with principle or observing moral guidelines. And yet, he is not wrong in
his reasons for adopting this attitude. For example, at one point he says: “Nowadays, we know
the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
A price does not reflect the intrinsic worth of anything, it reflects what people seem to be willing
to pay for it. We can determine the price of a bottle of shampoo, but the advertisements will
attempt to present that price as something of value and worth, something you “cannot afford” to
go without. A person who owns a Honda and one who owns a Mercedes can certainly point to a
price differential—but what does this tell us of their values, of what they deem worthwhile?
Nothing. But price is such a visible quantifier it is east to confuse it with value. We might say
price is SYNCHRONIC—what something seems worth here and now.
But value is DIACHRONIC, taking into account the past, thereby helping to contextualize one’s
idea of the future. As money becomes more virtual, intrinsic value—as opposed to market
value (price)-- becomes harder to discern, and our feelings of authenticity become more
attenuated and our interest in “the moment” becomes more intense. Intrinsic value can be
correlated with wisdom, which is the ability to know when, and how, to forego short-terms gains
in favor of long-term goals, and observe consistent principles about what you see as right and
wrong. The poet William Blake, writing in 1800 (around the same time as Wordsworth)
proclaimed:
Wisdom is sold in the desolate marketplace where none come to buy/
And in the withered field where the farmer plows for bread in vain
Confidence comes from success, but wisdom comes from failure.
In The Age of Anxiety, we are terrified of failure. Our anxiety ceaselessly looks for reassurance.
The young Dorian Gray (around 18) is at the peak of this feeling. He is the grandson of a selfish
aristocrat who conspired to have his father killed because he found him unworthy to be his
daughter’s husband. He hired a skilled swordsmen to concoct a scene where he pretended to be
insulted so that he could insist on a duel, and promptly killed Dorian’s father. As a result, the
daughter (Dorian’s mother) sickened and died. The grandfather, now stricken with grief and
remorse, could no longer bear the sight of Dorian, who now served as a reminder of his
conspiracy to commit murder, and gave Dorian’s care over to a nanny, banishing them both to a
playroom in the top room of the estate, to keep them out of his sight.
In a sinister, obscure manner, and to his ultimate misfortune, Dorian’s wish to stay charming
while the portrait ages comes true-- a wish for which he declared “for that, I would sell my very
soul” (the traditional bargain with the devil) . And that, of course, is the catch. Any bargain
with the Devil will have, somewhere in the fine print, a key element of deception. It is true that
Dorian stops aging. His increasingly reckless pursuit of sensations, and nothing else, makes no
impression on his looks or his charm him-- even as numerous people who are drawn into the
wake of this furious pursuit end up dissipated and wrecked (one now spends his life in an opium
den, for example, two others, his former friend Campbell, and Sibyl Vane a girl he proposed to
and then dumped, commit suicide).
The portrait, on the other hand, with each of Dorian’s
callous acts, grows older and more wretched looking.
Given that all who loved him were killed and he himself banished, it is entirely fitting that
Dorian, increasingly horrified, banishes the portrait to the same room where he was forced to
spend his childhood-- it is severe emotional neglect in his childhood, after all, that has left him
helpless when exposed to Lord Henry’s cynical philosophy that there is nothing of value about
him except that his looks charm and please other people. Noone has ever helped Dorian learn to
appreciate himself, for himself. As a result, he feels he is no more than what other people tell
him he is. That is all very well while he is handsome and charming, but it spells disaster for
when he is older. The reality is: Lord Henry does not persuade him to this point of view, he
confirms the deepest fear Dorian already has. Indeed, Lord Henry is both surprised and
delighted that Dorian so readily, and so completely, becomes for him a sort of “experiment,”
someone influenced by him to such an extent he will act out in real life what are actually no
more than Lord Henry’s vivid but rather shallow philosophy.
Were Dorian Gray in our midst today, no doubt he would anxiously count the number of “likes”
he has elicited via his social media posts; for him, to be, is to be seen. As a result, he cannot
attain wisdom for himself, nor assign value to his experience. The “curse” of his deal with the
Devil is that, although he is free of anxiety—this also means he is cut-off from generating any
meaning in his life, beyond immediate gratification and sensation. We might say he is trapped in
a perpetual SYNCHRONIC moment—an eternally empty moment where there can be neither
accumulation nor empathy, nor sympathy, nor compassion. The SYNCHRONIC, severed from
the DIACHRONIC, is meaningless.
When one is addicted to pursue sensation perpetually, and
nothing else, one locks into the SYNCHRONIC. It is experience, ritual, connection, failure,
grief and joy which form the DIACHRONIC background against which our life takes on
meaning and value, in regards to ourself, other people, our environment, and our responsibility
to and for the future. The corollary of “the age of anxiety” is to also find ourselves in “the age of
addiction”—alcohol, nicotine (vaping), marijuana, Xanax, cocaine, valium, methamphetamine
(immortalized in the TV series Breaking Bad), Vicodin, fentanyl, heroin (a by-product of
opium—Dorian’s “drug of choice”), ketamine, ecstasy, oxycontin—and this is just a short-list of
the substances. We have 24 hour hotlines offering help for addictions to gambling, casual sex,
gaming, shopping, shoplifting, hoarding, pornography, overeating, cutting, bulimia, anorexia.
One of the hallmarks of addiction is, over time, the substances or activities create changes in
your brain chemistry where the behavior or substance become necessary just to feel ok. You
then become desensitized to its effect which, in turn, requires you to seek more and more of the
same activity/substance even as it continues to offer less and less effect. As we will note
throughout this class, this downward spiral is not unique to a debilitating addiction. It is woven
into the fabric of everyday MODERN life. If you glance back at the ads I already posted here,
you will see they insist: “regardless of what you have now, it is not enough”. Similar to Lord
Henry, they urge you to think less of yourself . . . . so you will require the product more.