2011.06.28 — Beyond Fate by Margeret Visser — finished

Begun 2011.05.26.
Margaret Visser.
Beyond Fate,
Toronto: House of Anansi Press Inc.
ISBN 0887846793

☆☆☆☆☆ out of ☆☆☆☆☆.

Margaret Visser's premise is an excellent one, which is that we as citizens of a 'free' society are using that freedom to choose to revert back to being victimized by fate. We don't call it fate. Instead we have with encouragement from the media, economic experts and the like, chosen to call it 'globalization' or 'technoloighy' or 'meaninglessness.'

After having so thoroughly enjoyed Visser's Much Depends On Dinner, I confess to having been a little disappointed with the first lecture. I wrestled with what I didn't like, and I tentatively think that I found that her style of oral presentation had not translated well to the written word. A bit too repetitive, and a few too many returns to the opening theme.

But her ideas, and the philosophical and linguistic associations and cultural meaning she discusses are genuinely interesting. For example, Visser examines how the Greek (and hence Roman) thinking was rooted in fate via the ideals of honour/shame, place/revenge, and how that zeitgeist imprisons the citizenry in a status quo concomitantly with endless cycles of honour saving revenge. (See Begun 2011.05.26 for a look at Greek fatalism.)

Visser articulates the idea with the image of a line contrasted against the closed line (circle). By the end of the book she has tied the idea very well to present practices and habits of thought.

An example of one of these interesting and important points she makes in the first lecture is the role that Christian beliefs founded in Judaism had in breaking the trap of the shame/revenge cycle:

An important aspect of the Christian revolution was a new resolve to break out of the ancient Greek and Roman view that human beings are in thrall to fate. Christianity's roots in Judaism provided it with a perennially powerful story about hope and freedom: that of the Exodus, or Way Out. The picture is of a journey of a people out of bondage to liberation. The journey took time, forty years — the number forty being a Jewish symbol for enough time, "the time it takes." This epic of liberation from captivity — through vision, determination, trust, and agreement to obey God's law — is a radical alternative to fatalistic thinking, to believing that the way things are is necessarily how they must continue to be. The biblical account of the Exodus made linear time, rather than cyclical time, a foundational metaphor for the West, and hence for any society influenced by the cultures of the West. Implicit in it is the concept of progress: human beings are able to free themselves, to learn, to achieve enlightenment. The road metaphor is kept but its meaning changed(20-1)

The second lecture, 'Fate and Furies' redeems the book. It is simply brilliant but not as good as the third lecture, 'Free Fall.' Visser articulates the difference between shame and guilt and why knowing the difference is important. Shame is conferred onto the person by the society — it requires an audience. Guilt, on the other hand, is felt by the individual, and is invisible to the society. This is important, Visser argues, because shame demands a revenge in order to recover the lost honour, whereas guilt demands self knowledge and repentance. It also allows for, but does not demand, forgiveness. The former binds the person to his or her fate, whereas the latter allows for the individual to change and grow. Guilt, repentance and forgiveness empowers the individual to move beyond his/her own failings and to redeem his or herself, i.e. to grow, independently of how the society sees that person. Fate does not allow for that, and Visser effectively argues that we are societally reverting to fate language, fateful thinking, and feelings of being imprisoned by forces beyond our abilities.

From 'Fate and Furies:'

An honour system is communal, close, warm — even fiery. It insists on selfless loyalty to all those defined as being one's own. Individualism, on the other hand, can often feel cold and lonely. It seems at times to undermine every attempt at community. In an individualistic society, the very same diagram as that of the jigsaw we referred to earlier lies behind many metaphors for social patterning. Only here what is being said by the diagram tends to be that each area, each life, is complete in itself, separated from all the others, responsible for itself. Impingement upon others is discouraged, and the invasion of one's own privacy is experienced as an outrage. The image is like the one we looked at earlier, of a table set for dinner. Or a demand that others — especially strangers, of course — should not nudge or pat me too often, or stand too close while speaking to me, or sit down right next to me when I was hoping to be all alone on the beach. Individualism tends not only to protect but to isolate; it can trap people behind the walls that separate each person from every other.

What individualism demands — just as the whole point of guilt is the possibility of forgiveness that it offers — is for people to feel safe enough, ready and willing and free enough, to open up those protective barriers in order to notice, take care of, and finally love other people, even those not felt to be immediately rewarding or appealing. The outstanding characteristic of Christianity is its placing the highest value of all on love, not only for one's family or group, but for everyone — including people who do things like chew with their mouths open. This insistence that love is greater than all the other virtues was, in the context of classical culture at the time of Christianity's beginnings, a revolutionary notion, since it appeared to downplay bravery, loyalty, honesty, obedience, dignity, and all the other ideals of ancient Rome. One of the social or structural reasons for the Christian insistence on love was the immense push that the new religion simultaneously gave to individualism. Without the transcendence love provides, individualism becomes a prison. Individualism requires transcendence so that the "walls," so wisely and carefully raised in order to shelter the individual from incursions by others, can remain — but be surmountable, for higher ends (49-50).

I highly recommend this book, even though the first lecture is a tad hard to get through. Her concerns about a strong return to fatalism is I think, well founded and well argued.

Near the end of the book, she astutely links 'boredom' with exacerbating fatalistic thinking and actions. And she proffers an antidote to the drift towards powerlessness! And no, not just affirming mantras of power and adequacy:

Escape from fatalism and its twin warders, boredom and embarrassment, begins simply with consciousness — with paying attention. To be disinterested — that is, to be interested in things in and for themselves, and not because of possible profits for yourself — and especially to pay attention to what is supposed to be boring or taken for granted, is to begin to effect a minor revolution, another word for which is 'conversion.' Notice immediately that paying attention is an action: we are free to do it — or to turn away(143).

She elaborates three other actions and another state of mind as tools to combat fatalism in thought and action. (But I find it very evocative that her first action is what Cesar Milan tries to teach his dog owners: to be fully aware of their actions and their dogs real needs.)

2011.05.26 — Beyond Fate by Margaret Visser: Begun

Margaret Visser.
Beyond Fate,
Toronto: House of Anansi Press Inc.
ISBN 0887846793

This book has begun in a good, but not great manner. I thoroughly enjoyed Visser's Much Depends On Dinner and The Gift of Thanks. What I'm finding is that the text in this book is too literally a transcription of the oral lectures from which it derives. Visser's manner of oral presentation does not transcribe well to the written word. Briefly, so far — 20 pages — it strikes me that it would benefit from some editing.

Visser - Photo with Permission from John MacDonald

Nevertheless, Visser's argument and ideas are interesting and challenging. For example, she begins with by looking at "time-lines" with an examination of how our language predicates (is predicated by?) the notion of a beginning, middle and end with no going backwards. She makes an interesting link to how our pictorial methods of representing time, such as a line, also create straight and narrow thinking, a rigidity when it comes to accepting too easily what is perhaps something not really fated but that is instead an opportunity to exercise personal creativity in overcoming an ostensible destiny.

Here's a short extract showing the role the Greeks had in linking fate to geometry:

Ancient Greeks thought a great deal about fate, and when they did, the metaphors they used to think with were often spatial, indeed geometrical. The Greeks were obsessed with geometry. Among the first traces of them that we possess are their pots in the style called Geometric, after its most obvious characteristic, the geometrical patterns drawn on the curved clay surfaces.

Several hundred years later, by which time Greek thinkers — leaning heavily upon mathematical interpretations of religious ideas and religious interpretations of mathematics — had permanently altered the intellectual history of the world, we find Plato writing over the gateway to his Academy, "Let no one enter here who does not know geometry." Fate, for them, was a spatial and diagrammatic idea from the beginning. It was a gigantic blueprint, a "design" laid out in advance. A tendency to lean on linear metaphors continues both to inspire and to haunt our imaginations today. We need think only of the signs of the zodiac and their interpretation in astrology, or of palmistry, the reading of people's characters and fates from the lines on the palms of their hands. Geometrical metaphors in general can predispose us, when we are being careless, to cage up our vision and fail to let go of fatalism. I'll be giving in the course of this book lots of modern examples of the fatal diagram.

In traditional poetry, a person's life has often been imagined as a line representing time: a thread spun by the gods, by fate, or by the three Fates. In Greek, the names of these relentless mythical crones were Clotho (Spinner), Lachesis (Allotment), and Atropos (Not to be Turned Aside). They indicated past, present, and future: the past as already spun and purely linear; the present an intersection, station, or point marked out upon the line; the future as what you think you can control but cannot, Roman, Scandinavian, and Germanic mythologies also knew three Fates. They spun or braided the ropes of events in world history. They also made individual fates for human beings, in parallel with a life, the thread starting at its beginning and being snipped off when the time came to die. Or the fate was complete from the beginning, and it remained only for the person to travel his or her allotted span, the "road" of life. The three witches in Macbeth are versions of the Fates.

deviantart 3 witches

Shakespeare, however, insists on his characters' free will: the riddling fiends mislead, but they never force decisions.

What the myths of fate express is the sense we all have at times that we are not in charge; that events, rules, and systems act upon us, or make us act, in ways not of our choosing. It is entirely right that we should realize this, but we have to discriminate between what is in fact changeable and what is not. The diagram metaphor — its very clarity, its self-evidence — leans heavily on the side of inalterability, of the hopelessness of change (11-2 my emphasis).

We'll see how it goes.

It is interesting to me, in a way, to pick this book up while reading Chomsky. He is fighting to wake up American's to their not being fated to ignorance and manufactured consent for brutal hegemony.

And I'm reminded of something Linda McQuaig said in an interview or panel discussion many years ago.

Paraphrased she pointed out that when it comes to fighting inflation, the press argue that we are powerful and will win the fight by tightening our belts, reducing our expectations and accepting diminished social benefits in our brave struggle against succumbing to the ignoble fate of bankruptcy. She added that when it comes to issues of reduced corporate taxation, unemployment and the social costs of free trade and 'globalization,' however, they become flaccid apologists who vociferously argue that we are helpless to these 'natural' economic forces and to accept them as it is our fate.

The Gift of Thanks: Begun 2009.05.22

Margaret Visser

The Gift of Thanks: The Roots, Persistence, and Paradoxical Meanings of a Social Ritual.

Toronto: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. 2008.

ISBN: 978-0-00-200788-7

Began May 9, 2009.

[YtbF]

Stumbled into this book in the New Westminster Public Library's shelf of new acquisitions. I almost did not pick it up, because I have too many books

already on the go — as usual — and there is too much going on in my work and home lives. But her book

Much Depends on Dinner is one of the great examinations of contemporary society, and I have been remiss in reading her other books. It is looking great.

Did you know that saying 'Thank you' too often is taken as being insincere in some countries?

... until recently ... [social] researchers' underlying assumptions were that nothing exists but force, necessity, chance, and battles for advantage. It followed, of course, that genuine altruism could not exist. There is nothing, the wisdom went, to suggest human beings are in any respect superior to animals. We are a living species like any other, in no way better than, and merely different in certain respects from, say, birds or lizards.

However, many scientists seem at last to be awakening from a long, cold dream, a censored consciousness that insisted, among other things, that freedom was a mere hallucination. It is beginning to be acceptable again to notice that a gulf separates human cultures from those of other species, that a richness and even a uniqueness exists that should not be underestimated and remains to be accounted for. Merlin Donald points out how utterly different it is to remember having seen something, as apes do, and actively seek to retrieve a memory, as human beings do. Even in childhood, human beings go on not only to remember but to reflect on many events and to imagine others. They learn. They rehearse and deliberately refine their skills and responses. And this is to say nothing of speaking, reading, writing, calculating, inventing, theorizing — and rethinking inadequate theories....

Though it is indisputable that we gradually evolved through chance mutation and natural selection, Donald reminds us that when we began reading and writing a mere five thousand years ago, there can have been no genetic change involved: there simply was not enough time. What had involved instead — and with astounding and gathering speed — was culture. Now, the great difference between natural selection and culture is that where genetic variation is random, culture is systematic, and shot through with intentionality (33-34).

2009.05.18

I loved that Visser has managed to bring into the discussion a strong questioning of the validity of our accepted understandings of the history of the origins of economic activity. Society, perhaps even culture, existed long before economic activity did&mdashat least as we currently understand the idea 'economy.'

And I also am happy to see a strong swipe at the too easy acceptability of social darwinism. And that is what I am going to cite, now:

It was Marcel Mauss, the nephew of Emile Durkheim (one of the founders of sociology), who was responsible for formulating the question of Giving Back in such a manner that it became for most of the past century a problem for endless academic reflection and discussion. A new relevance has been discovered recently in his book, Essai sur le don (1925), retranslated into English as The Gift (1992), because Mauss seems to oppose aspects of Social Darwinism. For the notion walks again, "philosophically creaking but technically shining," as Mary Douglas puts it, that "the survival of the fittest" applies to human social life just as much as it does to the evolution of the species. Douglas feels that Mauss can help us make a counterattack upon the intellectual suppositions of Social Darwinism.

Marcel Mauss (1872-1950) lived at a moment of imminent change in Western social history, and he did not like what he saw coming. He was an anti-Utilitarian, who especially hated cold-hearted calculation of profit alone, and the privileging of individualism over social interaction. (His name is honoured today by the acronym of a French institute called M.A.U.S.S., Mouvement Anti-Utilitariste dans les Sciences Sociales.) As modern people often do when they want to solve their own social problems, he turned for help to what was known&mdashor thought to be known&mdashabout ancient societies and pre-modern societies. He felt that if only we could forget all our philosophizing and analyzing and categorizing, putting all things "back into the melting pot once more," we might achieve a state of wholeness and be happier for it.

Before Exchange [trade-for-profit and financial markets], says Mauss, was the Gift, and not vice versa. This was his first revolutionary proposition, which he derived from the anthropological fieldwork of others. Pre-modern peoples did not live by barter, as had previously been believed, but by gifts and counter-gifts. What in our culture would be commercial exchange was effected by these people through bringing gifts to others, who always gave gifts in return. Give and Return were not, as we imagine or wish them to be in our own culture, free and voluntary acts. Three obligations always obtained: Give, Receive, Reciprocate.

For a gift economy human beings later substituted exchange on the basis of contracts, which stipulated in advance what the price of a commodity would be. The invention of the externally valued, impersonal abstraction that is money made such contracts possible. [I would rephrase this to say that it was the desire to exchange the contracts themselves that would have motivated the formation of impersonal money.] And the contract was underwritten by law: if you did not pay for your commodities, you would be punished by an external agency in accordance with clear, impersonal laws. A gift economy, on the other hand, had no written contracts, no written laws. The gift system existed for a very long time before there was any writing. And it has nothing to do with money: it was flourishing well before money was invented. But always, in these systems, people who had received gifts gave gifts in return. What made them do so, if there were no laws to enforce reciprocity? [This reminds me of Jung's observation about our being barbaric and needing laws from without to enforce 'proper' social behaviour! Was money and contract law/language a devolution? Well, this could open an interesting philosophical argument, which I am going to skip for now, but which I will undoubtedly think about.]

Having shown that gift economies preceded contract systems, Mauss went on to universalize the rules he found in these 'societies of the Gift.' There is, he claims, not only in these societies but also in our own, no such thing as a free gift. There are, rather, three unspoken but mysteriously binding obligations: to give, to receive, and to reciprocate. And the most puzzling of these is the obligation to give back. For his astonishing explanation of the power that invariably underwrites this last obligation, Mauss relied upon a single Maori informant named Tamati Ranapiri, who was asked by the anthropologist Elsdon Best in 1909 to clarify for him the meaning of the Maori term hau. "I will speak to you about the hau," began Ranapiri, and proceeded to explain that it was "the spirit of the gift." It was that which caused utu, or reciprocity. If utu did not take place, then serious harm, even death, might come to the refractory person who had received a gift. The spirit of the object itself would take revenge.

People in societies like that of the Maori, said Mauss, did not distinguish, as we do, between givers and gifts. Things given away carried with them something of the self of the giver, and this piece of the giver's self demanded to be returned. Gifts always remained the possession, in some sense, of the giver....

Best's informant Ranapiri never claimed that the Maori hau actually uttered words, but the idea of anxious gifts complaining is found in other anthropological texts adduced by Mauss, where gifts have names, personalities, souls, histories, and desires. Copper objects given away in the American Northwest potlatches were said to 'groan' and 'grumble,' demanding to leave their present owners when they felt it was right to do so (71-73).

Sometimes Visser's writing nears poetry, a feature of writing I love when done well. I have emphasized her at her poetical best:

An essential characteristic of a good deal of gift-giving is its ritual dimension. We accompany the gift with quasi-ritual words spoken, gestures and manner, facial expressions. We communicate messages through the medium of gifts, and just as people speaking need not be aware of the grammar they are using, we follow the abstract rules of gift-giving even though we seldom analyze what they are. Language is explanatory as an object cannot be, but a present remains present as a sentence spoken cannot (114 my emphasis).

Wasn't that both interesting and beautifully written?