Hi, Lizard – sorry, mate, this just won’t do. I’m referring to your “goats and aliens” piece in which you flag the notion that alienated people “might have a positive function as the existential scapegoats of society”. I think this notion is self-contradictory and that your argument makes a logical—or, rather, illogical—leap when you switch from a subjective perspective to that of a hypothetical “disinterested observer”. You gloss over fundamental ambiguities, such as whether alienation is a psychological or philosophical condition, and you end up proposing a synthetic answer to an empirical question (which is rather suspect, if it’s meant to be the result of disinterested observation).

I’ll reference your points and make observations about each one.

1. “What has occurred to me…is that people like us—alienated people—might have a positive function as the existential scapegoats of society.

The whole point of being alienated is that you’re on the margins of society or completely outside it. You have no relationship with society and no function within it, other than to submit to its demands—which, being alienated, you can’t in all conscience do.

2. The idea came to me during a weekend spent struggling with some familiar demons…. So, let’s take a step back and look at this from a broader perspective—not my subjective point of view alone, but that of a disinterested observer assessing society in the round.

This seems very convenient. How can you simply switch perspective like that? There is an emotional cost to being alienated, and it usually involves being anxious, isolated, angry and depressed. These are chronic ailments, not a temporary excursion such as a “weekend struggling with some familiar demons”.

Weekends at The Lizard’s

This is a structural shift in your argument from the psychological to the philosophical, which you fail to acknowledge. More importantly, there is a much wider question as to whether alienation is a psychological or philosophical condition, or both, but you ignore it. I don’t necessarily expect you to answer the question (has anyone, yet?) but you could at least point to it and note the ambiguity it creates.

3. Let’s assume that this observer subscribes to your Alienation Theory of History and sees our society and its existential discontents as the consequence, ultimately, of the human crisis that occurred when the hunter-gatherer lifestyle gradually gave way to settled, urban life.… In real time, with the toing and froing between these opposite poles possibly resembling a sort of Hegelian dialectic, this society might even appear to be (from the outside) a self-compensating system.

This is another structural shift, in which you evoke an external construct (the Alienation Theory of History) arbitrarily, adding a synthetic dimension to what you have otherwise presented as an empirical proposition. You’re now discussing alienation, or purporting to do so, while drawing on knowledge acquired through relationships. Hardly a purist’s position, and one that is surely fundamentally self-contradictory!

I’ll quote the rest of your piece from this point in full.

4. I find this idea rather interesting. What if our agonising and writing about the human condition is not just the private malady we’ve always considered it to be, but also the way in which society makes up for its materialistic excesses, even if this arrangement isn’t officially recognised and those who are perpetrating the excesses don’t give a fig about us.   [ Perhaps, like the scapegoats of the Old Testament, our role is to atone for the sins of others? We suffer to make up for the fact that they don’t.  [There are dangers implicit in this idea, of course: we should be wary of developing a Messiah complex. But it’s positive in the sense that it gives us some social context and provides a link between us and those who, in their preoccupation with material concerns, are oblivious to us and the wider meaning of their lives.

The contradiction is blatant here: you’ve squared the circle, inserted a round peg into a square hole; you’ve imagined the alienated as having a place in society. Worse than that, you’ve assigned them a subservient role. Have you considered the political implications of this? Very often it’s the outsiders who initiate change and progress; what you’re proposing here is an essentially conservative model in which the alienated, whether they’re being critical of the status quo or collaborative with it, are basically serving it. Your conversation has morphed miraculously from being about the individual and the human condition to being about institutions, and the relationship between them. You’re no longer talking about alienation, for Christ’s sake—you’re talking about Church and State!!!

I mean, SERIOUSLY???

Love,

Simon.

Pic: Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, Alexandre Louis Leloir (1865)

Dear Stranger – your seven types of alienation seem reasonable. I haven’t been able to think of any others; will let you know when I do. What has occurred to me recently, however, is that people like us—alienated people—might have a positive function as the existential scapegoats of society.

Agnus Dei: the Scapegoat, by James Tissot

The idea came to me during a weekend spent struggling with some familiar demons. I was bemoaning the fact that my religious and sheltered childhood had hard-wired me to believe, as a default position, that the spiritual is more real than (and superior to) the material. This is the core assumption of most poets, lunatics, romantics and religious fanatics. I never had the financial resources, social support network or mental deficiency that would allow me to indulge such fancies, of course; I had to make my own way in the world and take it on in all its gross materialism.

But my upbringing disqualified me from any meaningful worldly success—the kind that results in complete, or at least sufficient, financial independence. That was the cause of my anger and depression. I felt, as I often do, that my parents had entered me in the School egg-and-spoon race and then, just before the starting gun, decided to amputate one of my legs. There are many, many people worse off than me, of course, but this is the way in which, and the extent to which, I feel frustrated with my lot.

And I am not alone. There are so many of us. We are almost a discrete social class, but most of the time we are barely visible. When we are noticed, we are usually dismissed as fringe-dwellers.

So, let’s take a step back and look at this from a broader perspective—not my subjective point of view alone, but that of a disinterested observer assessing society in the round.

Let’s assume that this observer subscribes to your Alienation Theory of History and sees our society and its existential discontents as the consequence, ultimately, of the human crisis that occurred when the hunter-gatherer lifestyle gradually gave way to settled, urban life. Society now, with the materialistically adept in charge and the spiritually adept forever on the back foot, might look like the logical outcome of such an historical evolution. In real time, with the toing and froing between these opposite poles possibly resembling a sort of Hegelian dialectic, this society might even appear to be (from the outside) a self-compensating system.

I find this idea rather interesting. What if our agonising and writing about the human condition is not just the private malady we’ve always considered it to be, but also the way in which society makes up for its materialistic excesses, even if this arrangement isn’t officially recognised and those who are perpetrating the excesses don’t give a fig about us?

Perhaps, like the scapegoats of the Old Testament, our role is to atone for the sins of others? We suffer to make up for the fact that they don’t.

There are dangers implicit in this idea, of course: we should be wary of developing a Messiah complex. But it’s positive in the sense that it gives us some social context and provides a link between us and those who, in their preoccupation with material concerns, are oblivious to us and the wider meaning of their lives.

Best,

Lizard.

Just putting this out there. Anyone agree with this list? I aimed at seven because it’s a satisfying number and has some literary precedence (“Seven Types of Ambiguity”, etc.). Are there more? What remedies would you propose?

1. Social

An inability to identify with “mainstream” values and a sense of being disconnected from the broad mass of people. Possible cause: insufficient socialisation when young.

2. Economic

Lack of creative or personal satisfaction in one’s working life; the oppression of needing to work for purely material reasons, absent of any moral value or purpose. Possible cause: lack of suitable employment opportunities, lack of capital (which would make self-employment an option), lack of appropriate education, training or skills.

3. Cultural

Culture: the values and modes of expression that are distinctive to a group of people. Cultural alienation may occur when two or more culturally distinctive groups of people inhabit the same location, but their values and modes of expression are not commonly shared and tend to divide rather than unite them. Causes: historical conquest (English language in Wales, for example), multiculturalism etc.

4. Personal

The sense of dislocation and alienation that can follow a change of consciousness triggered by an epiphany or some other event that changes one’s view or understanding of the world, usually in the direction of disillusionment. The self feels trapped and isolated in a reality which appears to be irremediably fragmented, and which offers no obvious escape. Possible cause: a traumatic, life-changing experience – for example, death of a loved one, parental divorce, end of a relationship, loss of faith etc.

5. Interpersonal

Alienation that occurs between people – individuals and/or groups. Can be one-sided or mutual. Possible causes: breach of trust (real or perceived), atavistic anxiety (engineered by a populist politician turning one part of society against another, for example).

6. Intellectual

Intellectual alienation: the “two cultures” syndrome and the notion of left-brain, right- brain dichotomy. Possible causes: originating (theoretically) in the primal Neolithic alienation and exacerbated by the increasingly specialised nature of work since the industrial revolution.   A contrast to the “Renaissance man” model.

7. Creative

The separation of a person from the source of his/her creativity. The sources of creativity can be many, varied and complex, including local environment, traditional ideas and community values, forms of creative stimulation (books, paintings etc.), the means of creative production, personal freedom, the opportunity to engage with the creative areas of one’s consciousness (i.e. time, peace and quiet to meditate, reflect, read etc.). Possible causes: relocation, exposure to new and challenging world views/values; any breach in the sense of continuity or cohesiveness in one’s life.

Picture sources or credits: carejoy.com, Cornell Press, JTM Signs, Edvard Munch, Palgrave Macmillan, Picasso, Tommy Huynh

Cheers,

The Stranger.

Dear Stranger – this is a very belated reply to your helpful discussion of, in your words, the “two…extremes” of the human condition, pagan egoism and civilised alienation. I think that’s a fair description of the polarity I felt after my Nimbin experience. The reason I’m writing now is that I’ve been motivated to do so by a recent incident which has helped me to put things in a deeper perspective.

As you know, I promoted the wedding anniversary song “Can’t Stand the Heat” on Facebook earlier this month, to coincide with Valentine’s Day. It did well, with more than 2,000 hits on Soundcloud and 1,500 likes, 54 comments and 284 shares on FB. For reasons I don’t quite understand, nearly all the responses were from South Africa, although I had also targeted Australia, New Zealand, the US and UK in the campaign. I can only assume there was some sort of bias in the FB algorithm; either that, or South Africans are a lot more romantic and sentimental than the rest of the English-speaking world. Personally, I incline toward the algorithm theory.

Now, here’s the thing: the (overwhelmingly positive) comments were mostly about the love that people felt for their long-term (and, in some cases, deceased) wives, husbands or partners (I was targeting a 30 to 65+ age demographic). It was a privilege to receive from absolute strangers open and emotional comments about an intimate matter of such importance to them. It reminded me of the familiar phrase and film title, “Intimate Strangers”, which neatly captures the tension between the intimacy of the comments I received and the fact that they were from people unknown to me. This polarity between intimacy and stranger-ness seemed to carry an echo of your ego-alien polarity.

And another echo: the one implicit in the words “Universal Stranger”—most of us are unknown to our fellow humans, but we all share a common or universal humanity.

This begins to look like what you call the middle way or the space between: a sense of half-connectedness with humanity in general, which is both forced upon us by the alienating effects of modern society and yet also made possible by the technology which is so much a part of that society. Conceptually, it looks like a paradox, but it lies behind what, for many of us, is a psychological truth: And then that voice said/You’ll always live/Between the Whirlpool and the Worm. (“Black Wave”)

Thanks for the insight. All I need to do now is figure out how to apply it in a practical way each day.

Cheers,

Rody.

Hi, Rody – so you see yourself poised to make a choice between pagan spirituality and “civilised” (presumably secular?) values, and possibly some mixture of the two. Let’s think this through.

My approach, as you know, is to go back to basics and consult the Alienation Theory of History. The dichotomy you describe is analogous to that between the hunter-gatherer (pagan spirituality) and agrarian settler (civilised values). I won’t dwell on this point too much; I mention it mainly to create a broader sense of context.

Having done so, let me reference certain characteristics associated with each state, based on other people’s historical observations and my own personal experience. I shall single out one each: egoism in the case of pagan spirituality and alienation in the case of civilised values.

The spirituality of the pagan is spontaneous and creative. There is a subjective element: the pagan feels a personal affinity to the deity. If it’s mediated at all, it’s mediated by charismatic individuals (priests, druids etc.) rather than by highly developed and literate institutions. In such a culture, the personal and ecstatic mix freely. Solipsism is never more than a step away. (I’m simplifying and generalising, obviously, but don’t stop me now….)

“Civilised values” evolve over time but a constant theme is the individual’s relationship with the state. This is the core of The Epic of Gilgamesh: for Gilgamesh to become a good king, he had to experience love, loss, grief and acceptance of death. His building of the wall at the end of the story marks the transition, but his labours convey no sense of spiritual vitality: he is reconciled but alienated, too.

Build that wall, Gil (Source: www.baruch.cuny.edu)

The simple egoism of ordinary people is a given. It has its roots in prehistory but is visible everywhere in our consumer-driven, celebrity-led society. If you immerse yourself in your pagan spiritual impulse, you risk losing yourself to your ego, and giving yourself up to extreme subjectivity.

As for the alternative, I believe that some degree of alienation is the price we pay for being part of a civilised society. At the most basic level, it means being able to subordinate one’s own impulses to the greater good. At the extreme, of course, it could mean losing yourself entirely, and enabling the abstractions and mechanisms of the world to corrode and even dissolve your sense of self.

I’m inclined to think there’s a middle way: rather than choose one over the other, stake out some neutral space for yourself between them, where egoism on one side and alienation on the other become the boundaries within which you can be your own man.

You may not need much to be free and fulfilled in that small world: common sense, love, decency, self-respect and respect for others would be, I imagine, a good start. It’s a humble way to live, but (to my mind, at least) it has the attraction of being independent from those two invidious extremes of the human condition.

Does that help?

Stranger.

Dear Stranger,

Further to my Nimbin roots festival review of September 28, I’ve been thinking about the experience from a deeply personal perspective. Like most people on this blog, I’m trying to figure out where I belong in the general scheme of things. In my case, this questioning arises from youthful experience of relocation and alienation, which resulted in my feeling “cut off” from my creative roots—the land and the people of my childhood. At Nimbin, I glimpsed the possibility of reconnecting to them.

Only reconnect (Source: Nimbin Roots Festival FB page)

Nimbin of course is on the opposite side of the planet to where I was born but, as I noted in the piece, there are similarities between the town (drug culture aside) and where I grew up: a relatively small community with a retail economy set in a rural environment. This and the vibe that was everywhere that weekend revived in me a sense of creative possibility I hadn’t felt since I began writing music and poetry in my teens.

The question is, how do I respond to this or build on it? Do I immerse myself in the pagan spirituality that the Nimbin hippie culture represents, or do I draw on it as material for a broader creative enterprise which also addresses more “civilised” or conventional values?

I feel as though I’m at a crossroads here.

Sincerely,

Rody.

Hi, Lizard – you received some interesting comments among the 2,737 Facebook likes for your item about The Book of Genesis (see last blog, below), and not all of them of the “Repent and accept Jesus” variety.  I was particularly intrigued with the discussion about the ancient snake-worshiping cult and its possible links to the Genesis story and to the snake incident in The Epic of Gilgamesh. One can only imagine how deeply these archetypes lie in the history of story-telling. It almost persuades me that there might be something to Jung’s idea of the collective consciousness after all.

I’m not a fan of populism, and I think its resurgence is an opportunity to reassert the importance of a trustee class and, in Britain and Australia, the continuing relevance of the monarchy.

Thank you, too, for referencing the Alienation Theory of History. The older I get, the more I find this theory—the idea that the roots of human alienation run back to the Neolithic—helpful in regaining some perspective on the ceaseless flux of daily life. It enables me to imagine that the flux and confusion can be characterised as the result of tension between pre-agrarian and post-agrarian traditions which, arguably, continues to resonate in our contemporary culture because (as you point out) such traditions began relatively recently in the timeline of our socio-intellectual evolution.

“The roots of human alienation….” Cliché or not, it’s still a powerful image.

It’s possible to visualise this tension in various ways. I see one aspect of it as arising from the relationship between constitutional monarchy and democracy, in Britain and Australia particularly. The tension in this relationship (much of it synthetic, in my view) seems to be growing. Just so we’re clear, I am a democrat, although a conservative one who believes that the monarchy and democracy can, and should, co-exist happily and to their mutual benefit. I am not star-struck about the British monarchy or any other, however. I believe that any stable and successful country needs a strong trustee class—people who exist above politics and who, through their personal values and public duty, embody their country’s character, history and traditions. It doesn’t need to be a monarchy but the British monarchy is all this and more. Nobody in their right minds, still less a patriot, would willingly entrust their country’s soul to a former politician or bureaucrat (Brexit is proof that many people share a similar view). Unless and until we find a better alternative trustee class to the British monarchy (and I can’t think what that might be) it should stay in place.

Gawd bless yer, Ma’am

What the monarchy (and, indeed, any credible trustee class) represents to me is an idea of social relationships based on human values such as trust, morality, loyalty, mutual care and compassion. This is in direct and absolute contrast to the values one encounters, and which are expected of one, every day in modern democratic society. There, relationships are essentially contractual, self-interested and short term. Indeed, as the Alienation Theory of History proposes, the movement towards these lesser values has been the overall direction of our social development since the Neolithic. Among modern historical examples, one need think only of the 16^th century enclosure movement in England and, in the 19^th century, the increasing use of legislation to regulate human behaviour (much of it necessary to extend the franchise and limit social evils such as child labour, etc.). Morality became less and less the governing principle of life, being superseded by technicalities.

This complex of shallow social democratic values is a source of alienation to me (and others) and I locate my sense of belonging in the traditional relationship that still exists (almost exclusively outside cities these days, in rural communities) between ordinary people and the trustee class. The social democratic microcosm belongs to a shallow self-serving bourgeois elite which, as the election of Donald Trump as US president last year showed, is losing its grip. I’m not a fan of populism, and I think its resurgence is an opportunity to reassert the importance of a trustee class and, in Britain and Australia, the continuing relevance of the monarchy. The internal corrosion of our cultural institutions by the fascist green left provides another opportunity.

Isn’t it strange how reflections like this should be set in train by a free-thinking meditation on the Book of Genesis?

Sincerely,

The Stranger

Rody – you asked me to expand on my ideas about Genesis, as discussed during our well lubricated lunch with Ms Drysdale some weeks ago. As you will recall, they’re more about Adam and Eve and the Fall than any other part of the book. They’re not particularly well informed or thought through, so consider them not so much as opinions but more as speculations to which I would welcome your intelligent and critical response.

Firstly, let me make clear that I, like you, do not take the Bible literally or believe in the supernatural. I do regard the Bible, however, as important source literature, not only for understanding key aspects of Western history, but also for helpful insights into the human condition. Like all great literature, it’s a repository of profound psychological truths.

Insights into the human condition (Alltime 10s, YouTube)

My starting point in thinking about this subject is to remind myself of the historical perspective. As my favourite historian J. M. Roberts points out, humans have existed more than 20 times longer than the civilisations they have created (indeed, as the picture below reminds us, not all of today’s humans are “civilised”). That alone is a clue to understanding much about the human condition: civilisation occurs relatively recently in our development, and we’re still getting the hang of it. In this I subscribe to the Stranger’s Alienation Theory of History: that alienation has been a permanent structural feature of settled societies since they began, its origin traceable back to the Neolithic and the emergence of agrarianism alongside the established hunter-gatherer mode of existence—a major divergence in the human lifestyle, and a new and more polarising cause of social and cultural estrangement. (This is all theory, remember.)

We’re all still trying to get the hang of civilisation…. (© Gleison Miranda/FUNAI/www.uncontactedtribes.org)

Using this idea as a lens through which to read Genesis, the story can be interpreted as a symbolic account of this primeval disruption (with which, surely, our own highly disrupted age can find some sympathy). Adam and Eve are foragers in a pristine environment which, I’m tempted to think, might be a poetic evocation of the landscapes left by the retreating Ice Ages, as remembered in the oral traditions of stories handed down since prehistory (I tend to get a little carried away on points like this, so please be patient). There’s a (no doubt tenuous) school of thought that suggests one of the drivers of agrarian settlement was the discovery of the pleasures to be derived from ingesting fermented fruit, and the application of this discovery to religious rituals. The Genesis story links the Fall to a change of consciousness in Adam and Eve, which occurred after they ate the forbidden fruit; perhaps that change of consciousness is analogous to that which occurs after drinking too much alcohol! Again, this is fanciful speculation on my part, but I note that a recurring theme for Roberts is the extent to which human history – or at least the story of human development – is the story of our changing (or growing) consciousness. According to Genesis, a change in consciousness caused humanity’s downfall.

Changed consciousness (Masaccio’s Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise)

On this reading, the Fall represents the loss of human connection with the natural environment because of the growth of settled communities and the challenge they represented to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle in terms of territorial claims, religious beliefs and cultural values. It’s worth noting in this context that Genesis was written, according to Wikipedia, “either just before or during the Babylonian exile of the 6^th century BC, and the Priestly final edition was made late in the Exilic period soon after”. For the Jews in exile, the tale might have been a way of rationalising and “owning” their alienation in a great foreign city. Like the 40 years in the wilderness, the experience was formative: some important identifying characteristics of Jewish culture, such as the observance of the Sabbath, were established during this period.

Adam and Eve left Eden and went to the land of Nod—a Hebrew word for “wandering” or “wander”. They became the eternal outsiders – the first Universal Strangers, perhaps?

Regards,

Lizard

Dear Rody – I’ve been thinking more about your note on meditation and Esse and I guess it raises the broader issue about the relationship between Esse and religion. As you know, I don’t see Esse as a religion and would be appalled to think that it could become one, but I am interested in the potential for existing religions to add it (somehow) to their world view. I haven’t really thought about this, but I offer here some preliminary ideas.

The link lies in the Judaeo-Christian idea of sacrifice—the ritual of atonement through which the relationship between man and God can be (re)established.

Esse sees the various religions as a branch of human creativity, and I think that the religions we have would appeal to people far more than Esse as vehicles for spiritual expression and fulfilment, because of the symbolism and traditions that they embody—attributes that would be so much more effective in engaging people’s senses and affections than the abstract and, let’s face it, arid nature of Esse.  It’s the idea of religion as essentially a creative pursuit which helps us to maintain a rational perspective on it, and this rationality is (or attempts to be) consistent with the rationality that the Esse concept claims for itself.

[This underlines idea that Esse is potentially most useful in the secular sphere, as a positive statement about God and a counter-narrative to theocratic zealots who claim that nihilism lies at the core of the capitalist-democratic project.]

So, looked at from this rational/creative perspective, how does religion or the faith experience line up alongside your quasi-mystical take on Esse? I’m going to come at this from a liberal Anglican Christian point of view.

In the Old Testament, it was goats…

The first thing to note is that, in my personal experience, trying to exercise Christian devotion to Esse rather than to the traditional theistic God doesn’t work on a creative level. For the devotion to mean anything, it must embrace the anthropomorphic fallacy of theism (symbolism and traditions etc,; see above): the relationship with God through Christ has to be seen as a personal one (again I’m speaking for myself). This is where the creativity or “willing suspension of disbelief” comes in. But what’s the link, relationship or point of transition between this and the real world?

I think it lies in the Judaeo-Christian idea of sacrifice—the ritual of atonement through which the relationship between man and God can be (re)established. In the Old Testament, it involved goats; in the New Testament, it’s the Crucifixion.  Here, it’s the sacrifice of reason to enable the creative engagement in faith. Like the other forms of sacrifice, it can take a sacramental form: the Eucharist, for example, sends us out into the world to be a “living sacrifice” to God.

The more I think about this the more powerful the idea seems to be, and the more it seems to offer a sane adjustment between the secular world and spiritual experience.

This doesn’t answer the broader question about how religions might relate to Esse but, for now, I’m enjoying the sense of balance that it’s restored to my life.

Stranger.

[Pic – The Scapegoat by William Holman Hunt, 1854]

Thanks, Rody; interesting (I can only guess at what the physical side effect might have been). As to the role of meditation in Esse, it’s not something I’ve really thought about, but I imagine it would raise all sorts of questions about the relationship between neurology and cognition, and what influence our neurological processes might have on our cognitive ones.

Have you thought about that?

Cheers,

Stranger