A Vacation in Chaos

Part One of Five

We live a double life, civilized in scientific and technical matters, wild and primitive in the things of the soul. That we are no longer conscious of being primitive, makes our tamed kind of wildness all the more dangerous. – Hans Von Hentig

To really understand our stubborn and increasingly dangerous attachment to the myth of American Innocence, we must become familiar with our heritage of what I call the paranoid imagination, which combines eternal vigilance, relentless anxiety and literalistic religion with contempt for the erotic and tolerance for sadistic treatment of the weak or marginalized. Why these last two features? Because what we will not allow ourselves to desire becomes a vector of judgment, fear and hatred of those people and groups whom we perceive as being willing to enact those desires.

Another characteristic of the paranoid imagination is our obsessive voyeurism. We like to watch, and we especially like to watch our heroes, those who embody our highest ideals and punish our villains – those who invert those ideals. American life, popular culture and politics reveal an endless litany of fascination with the so-called violent and sexually unrestrained behavior of “the Other.” And we seem to like nothing better than seeing the Other suffering for their moral transgressions. I write about the paranoid imagination in greater detail in Chapter Seven of my book, Madness at the Gates of the City: The Myth of American Innocence.

Archetypal psychology suggests that every curse has a corresponding blessing. Very often, below our traumatic fear and contempt for the Other lies envy, and even deeper below that is the universal drive to achieve authentic psychological integration. This is the source of both the great longing and of the worst terror of millions of Americans who carry the formidable burden of our Puritan heritage.

Denying our unacceptable fantasies, we condemn them to the deep unconscious, to the dark regions of the mythological underworld. We identify ourselves and our nation as cultured, hard-working, peaceful, rational, Apollonian and, above all, innocent of all evil intentions. This is the essence of white privilege: the willingness to acknowledge those desires not in ourselves but only in people of color across the world, whom we define as primitive, Dionysian, lazy, dangerously irrational and (this is the core of the projection) unable or unwilling to restrain their impulses.

Another fundamental aspect of American Innocence is the myth of progress, which I address in Chapter Nine. We believe that we must keep moving upwards and onwards, or risk re-gressing. But a lifetime of pushing ourselves to conform and achieve has its costs. Hence the universal appeal of periodically – and safely – trans-gressing conventional moral and behavioral standards. We see this theme in the common film trope (beginning as early as Charlie Caplin and Marx Brothers films) of sticking it to our bosses, teachers and social superiors. This is clearly one of the attractions, by the way, of Trumpus rallies (I’ve invented this word to remind all of us that Trump serves the myth of innocence by enacting it for all of us, and in that sense, we are all Trump-us).

The terrible personal and cultural strain of repressing one’s emotions and fantasies – of delaying gratification, of tamping down our passions, of pursuing advancement in the relentless rat race of capitalism, of putting up with ignorant managers, stupid priests and sadistic bureaucracies – always threatens to burst out past our internal censors into consciousness and wreak havoc with convention. This is one of the reasons why many traditional societies such as ancient and modern Greece, institutionalized regular periods of carnival (carnaval in Latin America), to literally blow off the excess steam before it causes an explosive “return of the repressed.” Chapters Four and Ten of my book explore this theme in greater detail.

One of carnival’s universal features is the wearing of masks. Masking has many functions, including both hiding one’s identity (and unruly or transgressive behavior) from others, and allowing one to temporarily inhabit a different personality (the word persona means mask), social class or gender.

The body knows all this, and the body understands metaphors and mythic images, even if the mind does not. As Carl Jung wrote, the gods never died; they went underground and resurfaced as illness in the body, in the body politic and in the soul of the world. Dionysus, the god of wine, drunkenness, madness, intensity and masks, constantly lurks at the edges and boundaries of our rational and predictable lives, beckoning us, for our own good, to take an occasional walk on the wild side. But we typically settle only for the minimum, the toxic mimic of the real thing, allowing Dionysus and the other divinities into American life in ways that keep ourselves barely alive yet hungry for real nutrition. Like the mythic Tantalos in Hades, we are tantalized, dimly perceiving the soul’s food almost within reach. But our eating muscles – our capacities for thinking mythologically – have atrophied, even as our need grows. Calling it “poor-quality Dionysus”, psychologist Robert Johnson saw this as the defining characteristic of our age:

… we hear a screech of brakes and a crash…Cold chills go up and down our spine; we say, “How awful!” – and run outside to see the accident. This is poor-quality Dionysus …what happens to a basic human drive that has not been lived out for nearly four thousand years.

This need to experience intensity and ecstasy is both personal and collective. Chapter Ten is an extended discussion of what I call five styles of poor-quality Dionysus. This is how we unconsciously search for what anthropologist Victor Turner called communitas, the group experience of liminal space, where social and ego boundaries relax and people sense that “everyone’s in this together.” It may occur spontaneously in situations such as shared grief, the funerals of major celebrities, religious pilgrimage, rock concerts, club dancing, sports venues, horror movies (Alfred Hitchcock offered his audiences the opportunity to “dip their toes in the cold water of fear”) and, most recently, right-wing political spectacles. It lies behind Marx’s vision of the classless society and other utopias in which men drop their perpetual competition for status. Communitas is the social and ritual space of transformation, when we can potentially drop an immature, outdated or dysfunctional identity and invite the possibility of becoming who we were meant to be.

If there ever was a time in the modern history of our country when we were all in this together, this is the moment. – Bernie Sanders, 3/12/20

A twisted form of communitas also occurs (see below) when we go to war, and when a large-scale environmental disaster or pandemic threatens the entire community.

If we were honest, we’d admit to a sense of relief and possibly even festivity when disaster (“against the stars”) hits, because it often brings a refreshing sense of potency, community and purpose. Both the problem and the response become clear. We skip work and speak intimately with neighbors we normally ignore. Something important has grabbed our attention: the opportunity to relax our painfully rigid social boundaries. Dionysus Lusios, the Loosener, has arrived in his non-alcoholic form, getting us drunk with excitement and temporarily unifying us. “I” becomes “we”. Something overrules my conditioning against any cooperation that doesn’t serve my personal interests; I’m glad, in more ways than one, to help.

At other times, we come together spontaneously in groups and create disasters. When conflict threatens to dissolve a community, spontaneous and irrational mob violence may erupt against some persons or minority groups. The American tradition of lynch mobs is one of our worst examples.

The community may find that this sudden war of all against one has delivered them from the war of each against all. The sacrifice of the scapegoat may lead to a sudden, if temporary peace.

In Violence and the Sacred, René Girard described the buildup of reciprocal violence and anarchy that precedes this resolution as a “sacrificial crisis.” In order that full-blown sacrificial crises need not repeat, writes Charles Eisenstein, an institution arose that is nearly universal across human societies: the festival. In the absence of authentic festivals, however, the pent-up need erupts in spontaneous quasi-festivals. One name for such a festival is a riot. In a riot, as in an authentic festival, prevailing norms of conduct are upended. Boundaries and taboos around private property, trespassing, use of streets and public spaces, etc. dissolve for the duration of the “festival.”

In The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow acknowledge a long debate

…over whether the most apparently subversive popular festivals were really as subversive as they seem, or if they are really conservative, allowing common folk a chance to blow off a little steam and give vent to their baser instincts before returning to everyday habits of obedience…(but) what’s really important…is that they kept the old spark of political self-consciousness alive. They allowed people to imagine that other arrangements are feasible …Medieval authorities were keenly aware that most peasant revolts or urban insurrections would begin precisely during such ritual moments.

But we cannot institutionalize authentic communitas. We can only discover it, briefly enter it and eventually lose it, because it is a very temporary gift of Dionysus. And, since few of our modern attempts to create it result in significant initiatory change, we endlessly repeat our attempts to achieve ecstasy and turn them into addictions. Whether we find a brief hint of it with fentanyl or in church, or forget ourselves in a bar fight, the haunting sense of loneliness inevitably returns.

Increasingly, we have only second-hand experience of communitas. “To go from a job you don’t like,” wrote Michael Ventura (way back in 1986), “to watching a screen on which others live more intensely than you…is American life…” Electronic media have become our immediate environment – not the land, not people, but images of the land and people. For four generations now, tens of millions have retreated from social engagement to spend their evenings alone or with their spouses in front of a television or computer, or in taverns dominated by the ubiquitous TV. And in only one generation, we’ve become all too familiar with the image (in coffeehouses and waiting rooms, on trains, at bus stops, in high school and college lecture halls) of people staring at their smart phones rather than speaking to each other. But we instantly, intuitively remember how diminished our lives have become when we hear these words of Rumi:

RUN from everything that’s comfortable and profitable!

We have set aside certain very specific places to briefly escape this life (perhaps half-life would be more appropriate). As I wrote here, for three hundred years in New Orleans (one of the very few American cities, along with Santa Fe and San Francisco, that were originally settled by Spanish Catholics), Mardi Gras has served this function for an America whose value system has refused to allow the mind to connect joyfully with the body. Because of this dilemma, Protestant America is filled with a longing that rarely achieves even temporary satisfaction, except through the brief, communal sense of innocence achieved in fundamentalist religion – and vicarious violence: we like to watch.

For a minority (usually men), watching is insufficient, and the vacation in chaos can be a brief erotic visit to a “red light district”. These can be officially regulated in places such as Nevada, Amsterdam or Japan, where police once drew red lines on city maps to indicate the legal boundaries of such districts. More commonly, at least in urban America, they remain illegal but unofficially tolerated, and the real function of the police is to “maintain order”, a euphemism for keeping all such activity associated with “the Other” away from affluent, white neighborhoods. Perhaps part of the attraction is the possibility of experiencing – or watching – violence.

But every day, current events present opportunities to take an honest look at what we have allowed our lives to become, to acknowledge that we have hardly begun to understand the catastrophic consequences of our unwillingness to confront our national darkness. James Hillman said:

The more innocence you have, the more violence you constellate. And you can’t get rid of violence by returning to innocence. You just repeat a cycle…These are deep themes of our culture…We came with innocence in mind…But our movements were filled with violence. The earth of the United States is filled with (the) blood of what we killed in order to make it our paradise…Other peoples are always aware of what’s in the soil. But innocence keeps us from even looking at it…From the Greek perspective, what’s in the soil is constantly looking at you…They would call it “blood guilt.”

Read Part Two here.