Our Panoptean Times?

I am not by any means a philosopher, let alone an expert on Nietzsche. Be that as it may, I believe I have read enough about the Saxonian master to appreciate his disdain for the stultifying influence of dichotomous thinking. As the work of a true visionary, Nietzsche’s tearing-down of essentialized binaries prefigures recent critiques of structuralism: internal life is not made up of unequivocal categories, like fixed stars; it comprises shifting constellations of meaning, shaped by human struggles.

It was recently suggested to me that myth might be a Dionysian cure to present-day Apollonian excesses.

While not without merit, this claim presents a certain number of problems. It suggests myth is primarily Dionysian, and assumes that Western societies are predominantly Apollonian. I wish to suggest an alternate narrative, and perhaps recommend another god to represent our era.

Given the Nietzschean rejection of many conventional dichotomies, it is telling that he should conjure the brothers Dionysus and Apollo to explain art and the world. It is probable Nietzsche believed eternal myth would carry more weight and authority than most conventional concepts of criticism.

The suggestion that myth is Dionysian -- spontaneous, intuitive -- is somewhat undermined by Nietzsche’s invocation of the divine pair for the purposes of criticism. Nietzsche instrumentalizes myth in order to draw fine distinctions, to engage in analytical discourse. Mythic concepts lend themselves to this exercise and so they are intuitively grasped, but very little about this intertextual approach is spontaneous. As Nietzsche is not the first to resort to myth in this manner, one might suspect he is taking a stance against Plato's -- his nemesis -- or else contradicting religionists who offer up less sophisticated readings of myth as the basis of their morals.

If myth or mythopoeia can be used to clarify language and experience, it is possibly because it precedes both epistemologically. It seems we are heuristically better suited to extrapolate lexica from narratives than from other lexica. It is something of an aporia that symbols are intuitions at the basis of our systems of meaning which nevertheless require methodical discourse in order to be made intelligible. Myth is both Dionysian and Apollonian, or possibly neither.

Everyday experience provides ample evidence giving the lie to the assumption that our Western societies are governed by the Apollonian principle (i.e.: rationality, analysis). To be sure, we tend to value methodical thinking over spontaneity under most circumstances, but we are not always aware of our own motivations, nor even particularly consistent at applying the strictest standards of rationality. Advertisers know very well that we do not often consume rationally: their art is to create situations in which we might relax our standards, shrug off the rational pressure to examine our options critically, and direct our aspirations according to non-utilitarian principles. Advertising may not dictate all of economic behaviour -- consumerism may not define us entirely -- but it seems unlikely that the omnipresence of marketing messages does not condition us very significantly.

I surmise the greater part of our decisions concern our consumption in one way or another; at least some of these decisions are swayed by advertising narratives which flout Apollonian ideas. To the extent that we are consumers, we are not, therefore, Apollonian. But consumerism is merely one indication to the effect that Western societies are only superficially rational; there are other signs, like our reluctance to investigate information which contradicts our self-serving narratives of citizenship, race, and gender.

But if we are not Apollonian, what are we? I do not purport to have Nietzsche’s talent for mythological metaphor, but I do have a suggestion. If I am to draw any conclusion from my study of McLuhan’s observations, it is that we have become Panoptean (after Aργος Πανόπτης, the thousand-eyed shepherd) insofar as we are over-informed. The contemporary human is awash in an ocean of competing signals, her senses hyper-extended to the point of taking her own omnividence in stride. The consequence of this condition on the individual and collective psyche is panic; this is evidenced not only in the tone of round-the-clock newscasts but also in the overwhelmingly contrarian attitude of popular online discourse. Intellectually, the tendency of the contemporary media environment is to keep us always in the frantic state of fight-or-flight, or else charging us to proclaim grievous loss, like the voice out of Palodes.

Fight Club

It must be added to the "list of novels I did not like," not because it is poorly written or uninteresting (quite the contrary) but because I feel strongly that ...

1. ... there are many acceptable ways to be a person, and/or a man, and/or fatherless;

2. ... there are at least as many legitimate ways to be free.

One can choose to be completely determined by history or not -- a cynical corporate whore or not -- a raving, Chaos-worshipping urban savage or not. One is free to do what one can with oneself, to love others and oneself. Maximum smashism is not the only -- nor necessarily the most exalted -- mode of being.

Angry folk will inevitably read some kind of hypermasculinist gospel into Fight Club even though the book does not make any unequivocal claim to that effect, and so: I can't completely like Fight Club, because there are still angry folk who read books, and I wouldn't want to endorse their interpretation.

A Week of Reviews, part I: John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs

Throughout the summer months I’ve wandered through numerous books, and so I have half a mind to lazily bask in the warm glow of erudition without shedding any light of my own. Alas, one does not so easily escape conscience, and so I find myself obligated to write reviews for your edification, oh my beloved readers. and so: please read on.

Getting through all twenty-some hours of my recording of John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs was an enterprise of several months, begun in earnest in April, halted throughout the months of June and July, resumed and ended in early August. I should mention that I gave the work a thorough aural perusal, recapitulating several minutes every time listening resumed, and so in total it is likely that I listened – or at the very least, heard – the Book of Martyrs twice, and by the end I had become passably well acquainted with Foxe’s elegant prose (which is beautifully delivered by Nadia May). Be that as it may, this reading was insufficient, barely enough to catch a glimmer of the resplendent, bloody tapestry which Foxe passionately weaves out of facts, fables and a fiery zeal verging on madness. Martyrology is a complex subject – and very hermetic to the profane – though precious and unexpected lessons may be derived from it.

John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs was first printed in 1563, while Europe still reeked with the blood of major persecutions, and subsequently extended so that the history of Western Christianity is accounted for, from John the Baptist all the way to the first American missionaries to Burma in the 1820s. The work is itself a piece of bookmaking history – its early editions included lavish woodcut illustrations which were fairly new at the time, and subsequent printings put several celebrated authors and illustrators to contribution. It is an evolved piece of literature, four centuries in the making – and still a good seller in this cynical age.

... which is a wonder, really, because it is not as though John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs is good history by contemporary standards. The authors’ agenda is not only palpable: it is blaring. Catholicism is routinely demonized and its adherents are all made to sound like credulous cretins, even though Foxe’s accounts of the earliest martyrs all depend on the rather fanciful Catholic hagiographies (I remember with particular fondness the account of the martyrdom of Polycarp). The use of images, the sacraments and the cult of the saints are all given only the tersest and most inarticulate dismissal, and time and again the persecutions are cited as proof of the errors of Catholic doctrines; factors such as worldly motives, or the persecutions orchestrated by the Protestants themselves, are wholly ignored. The persecutors are always in league with the devil, the persecuted are always righteous and sheep-like in their innocence, and the moderates who let fear sway them one way or another are always damned.

And so, the entire book – its history, its philosophy and its theology – is biased. Be that as it may, I have nothing but praise for it. It is so remarkably, entirely human, revealing that the story of Christianity’s progression is not, as one might have hoped, the legend of a persecuted few overcoming adversity and triumphing in the Truth. The story of Christianity is rather the gruesome tale of the first Christians being persecuted by the Romans and, having escaped that, beginning to persecute their own – with divisions in the Protestant churches also leading to murder, and changes in secular power time and again overturning the foundations of religious institution.

Christianity as we know it today was until the Enlightenment (and even some time afterwards) constantly watered with the blood of martyrs, which from antiquity flowed plentiful. This is the first lesson which the Book teaches – one which the reader knew perhaps, intuitively, before reading a full account of the tortures of the condemned – though it is much more impactful following Foxe’s poetic illustration.

The second lesson is a lesson in humility. There is a kind of courage which by and large has been lost – the courage to believe so strongly as to surrender life over mere doctrinal minutia. For what harm is there in praying to saints? At worst it is a meaningless gesture. But the devout Protestant will see it as taking away from the reverence due to G-D (as though love were reduced from being shared between more recipients. Christians ought to know better – love is increased rather than diminished the more it is given). I have forgotten how many points of contention have driven the persecutions – there were so many that they all blur together, eluding solid conceptual grasp. This is a lesson in humility, therefore, in that very few contemporary readers could boast of believing anything – anything at all – so strongly as the martyrs did. It is an epistemological feat beyond the grasp of our intellectual sophistication.

The Book also has a third lesson also: an illustration of the strength of human resolve. For not only where the martyrs willing to give up their lives over doctrinal trifles – for this is understandable, seeing the conditions in which many of them lived – they were also willing to go on living when the opportunity presented itself. One does not read the Book of Martyrs for very long without thinking “had it been me, I would have given up a long time ago and died from sheer exhaustion.” The account of missionary work in Burma is singularly eloquent in that respect.

For this, and for other reasons also, I recommend this work to everyone. If you are foreign to Christianity, it will provide you with an interesting portrait of both its extremes; if you are Protestant, it will give you a good impression of the rich and diverse history of that movement; if you are Catholic, it will serve as a lesson in the doctrines of your separated brethren, and also as a sobering account of the least palatable doings of the Church.