My sheep got her head stuck in a Guinness box...[on John Berger's 'stranger who stays']
Disoriented, f***ed up moderns and the strangers who come and stay - to live in their minds rent free, forever.
We had a small upset at Church this week. A friend came. She’s protestant. She went up for communion, and didn’t understand as I whispered to her about taking a blessing. The priest asked if she was Catholic — when she wasn’t declined to give her communion. She was very emotional and embarrassed, and didn’t understand because: “God loves everyone the same, and you can have communion at our Church…..why isn’t it the same”. Anyway she left early and was very upset. It was a normal kind of mix up. In the end I zipped round after Church and dragged her down to a bespoke distillery and we had a couple of cocktails. Dutifully picking up my wife on the way down to meet us, her husband did manage to capture a moment of ridiculous small-holding comedy. One of our sheep had got its head stuck in an old Guinness box. My wife wants be to add that the sheep was fine, it was an accident, we love our sheep etc… but it was funny. Anyway, the video reveal, when they appeared at the gin palace, was sufficient to get everyone laughing and, I suppose, into the mood for counting blessings — the major one being our friendship.
Who says God doesn’t have a sense of humour. All mended — at least in terms of the closest of relationships between our families. I tried half-heartedly to explain the Catechism and to defend our young priest but in the end let it pass. I doubt she will come back — which my wife thinks is a loss to the Church. Trent Horn would intone — correctly probably — that we have to balance the joy and opportunity of potential new catechumens with a gentle but stubborn defence of orthodoxy and tradition. But on the other hand, it’s difficult to imagine Jesus sending anyone away. The reading yesterday was the parable of the Prodigal son. I suppose that the older brother’s legalism and pre-occupation with rules could be read as a critique of the boundary policing of the Church. I’m don’t have a sufficiently sophisticated understanding of theology or Church history to comment.
I do know that I didn’t sleep last night. Partly this kerfuffle. Partly the endless balls that we are juggling: the threat of job loss; older teens; financial problems; cars breaking down; too many animals to look after; a prospective garage renovation that is taking me way beyond my DIY comfort zone; the nagging awareness of my minor but cumulative daily sins; a deep longing to be near my family in England; books that I am not reading (and time wasted on social media); trees that needs chopping down; a field that needs fencing; a body can no longer deal with much by way of exercise; being overweight; knowing that my Lent sacrifices just went to pot this year; wanting to be in England, but conscious that Europe is in real trouble and communal violence is probably inevitable, and knowing, also, that my kids are much more likely to find decent marriages and have children over here in North America (where there are still pockets of Christian culture). And then there is the never-ending politics. I frequently give in to the temptation to be angry, resentful and hopeless about the mindless, secular, woke, horrible liberal culture that surrounds me; that hems me in both at work and in my community, and that prevents me from expressing myself. Perhaps most of all there is an ever-present feeling of total and utter weariness. I know my wife is tired — in a way that she couldn’t have imagined 10 years ago. We are both exhausted. How do her parents, who are in their 80s, manage to carry on? They work, and worry….and her mum sleeps every afternoon. But still — how is it possible to carry on like this, juggling, worrying, not sleeping, for another 30 years?
Chronic ambivalence
So all this was pounding my mind at 3.00 am this morning. And it occurred to me that, yet again, my wife is probably right. Yeh… I don’t get enough physical exercise. But also she points to the fact that I find it very hard to live in and appreciate the present. The weather is disgusting at the moment — so I haven’t felt like stretching my arms and revelling in the glory of Creation. But more sociologically — in the modern world, as has often been observed, we are caught between fight and flight, in a constant state of psychological ambivalence. Yes I live in the countryside away from anyone except my family. But I’m online 24/7. I interact with relative strangers all day. And in this sense my experience is prototypically modern.
As hunter-gatherers and later as place-bound tribesmen or rural peasants, our lives were intensely social but in limited face-to face settings in which encounters with strangers were rare and fleeting. At such moments, the natural algorithms of human behaviour lean towards two decision points. Firstly, is this ‘friend or foe.’ If friend — someone who can be enveloped in the full psychological matrix of trust and social conviviality — then the business of the day could continue. If ‘foe’ — then, the second decision point kicks in: fight or flight. In our deep past, whatever ensued from that point was likely to be brief and intense.
Strangers who stay are a different category. In small, face-to-face communities, the stranger is deeply disturbing and category-mixing — a possible threat in the way described by Mary Douglas in Purity and Danger. A stranger may be a prospective enemy or a friend — their status has yet to be determined. Until that determination has been made, the inevitable response is a kind of ambivalence. The ‘freeze’ response stands somewhere between fight/flight on the one hand and friend on the other. Physiologically, the symptoms of such psychological uncertainty are stress, adrenaline formation and the build up of lactic acid. In other words, all the while that pleasantries are being exchanged and rituals of welcome and accommodation are regulating and monitoring social tension — in the background, the body is preparing for possible flight or fight.
Human beings are unprepared by our evolutionary biology to live in cities. The ‘Dunbar number’ puts the number of people with whom an average person can sustain relationships at around 150. So the fact that it’s possible to fill a football stadium with 100000 people without mass murder (or at least not often, and excluding Manchester United /City Derbies) — is a small miracle. That the majority of the world lives in cities of millions of people is just extraordinary — a testament to the plasticity of human personality and culture.
Culture, personality and mind
But such plasticity doesn’t come cheap. City living involves, by definition, living in perpetuity with strangers: the kind of strangers who, as John Berger observed, don’t go away. Norbert Elias’s On the Process of Civilization was published in German in Switzerland in 1939 — just after he escaped from Hitler’s Reich, and shortly before his parents died in Auschwitz. The market for books in German by Jewish refugees was in a bit of a trough at the time. After a spell of internment, Elias took menial research assistantship in the UK and didn’t get a regular teaching job until the 1950s in Leicester. Anyway his remarkable book languished in obscurity, only really coming to the fore in the 1980s — which is a shame because it is one of the most illuminating texts ever written about the modern condition.
Observing the steady decline, over a period of a thousand years, in levels of interpersonal violence within Western societies, Elias conducted a detailed study in the plasticity of the human personality. His account of ‘civilizing processes’ links the external constraints associated with the formation of effective and centralized nation states, the growing complexity of transactional market relations and structures of extended interdependency between relative strangers — people who may not ever come into personal contact. The internalization of external constraints through systematic and directional processes of socialization created an overwhelming psychic habitus that was completely different from any previous society. Elias was clear that advanced complex societies were unprecedented in the degree of such internalized restraint. But the mechanism — the jockeying link between what he later called the ‘triad of controls’ was as old as humanity. The controls in question — controls over nature, social controls over others and internal psychological controls — operate in all human cultures, qua humanity. Thus, for instance, in the primordial domestication of fire (see Goudsbom’s book Fire and Civilization, 1992):
Environmental controls: fire made early hominids invulnerable to large predators at night; it allowed the processing of food sources previously unavailable (‘cooking’); and it facilitated the large scale transformation of the environment to foster landscapes and ecologies favourable to hominid hunting and settlement.
Social controls: to live with fire — especially when ignition was an irregular, sometimes miraculous process that could not be depended upon — involved a social division of labour. Some people had to hunt, some to process food and look after children, some to tend the fire and keep it going, and some to collect fuel. As anyone who has tried it will know — keeping a fire going for months in a cold climate is a mammoth task (even with a chainsaw, a truck or just regular deliveries of logs). Fire culture involves cooperation, social pressure and social control — often as simple as kids being directed to certain tasks.
Psychological controls: for kids growing up in such a fire culture, especially where keeping a fire going is literally a matter of life and death, the heavy social pressure, combined with sanctions for failure or negligence, means that normal socialization came to involve the creation of a super-ego or psychic habitus very attuned to the ‘manners’ and group citizenship demanded by the fire culture.
As with all technologies, the new capabilities that accompanied the domestication of fire engendered new structures of dependency. The pattern of socialization intimated in (3) became universal. Once there had been a time when no hominid group had fire. As soon as one group had mastered the new technology, and generated a new technics— patterns of social and psychological organization — to match, then competing groups had a choice: follow suite or disappear from the human story. And that is what happened. Within a short period, all humans had fire. Both the technology and the technics had become a universal aspect of the human condition.
The same pattern can be observed with every development in human culture. Any technology is accompanied by a distinctive technics, by a changed relation to the environment and by more differentiated and stringent processes of psychological formation. This is why the Indigenous tribal societies described with such poignancy in Grenada TV’s The Disappearing World in the1970s can’t be ‘saved.’ Any contact with the modern world is transformative. As Walter Ong and Alexander Luria showed, literacy in particular transforms human cognition. It creates a different kind of brain and personality. Uncontacted tribes can be allowed to persist — at the discretion of the industrial world. But they cannot continue to develop, in their own right, as an autonomous branch of human endeavour. This is the ugly truth of culture, personality and social change — a truth that was catalogued so well by Jared Diamond in Guns Germs and Steel.
Anyway to cut a long story short, ongoing since our domestication of fire — civilization has repeated this iteration of advancing environmental, social and psychological controls, on a loop ever since. Continuities not withstanding, the spurt of civilization associated with modernity has been extraordinary in both scope and extent.
Create an individual vessel and then choose: redemption or madness
The idea of the bounded sovereign individual, that we take for granted about ourselves, is not universal, nor straightforwardly prescribed by our phylogeny. It is rather a potential that has unfolded in the context of ever more complex societies, themselves made possible by the massive increase in the throughput of energy and materials. Descarte’s ‘thinking statue’ — the cogito ergo sum — spoke not to humanity in general but to an incipient modern man, the product of high energy, high complexity market societies just coming into being in the cities of Northern Europe.
In many ways this ‘invention of the individual’ has been realization of the potential inherent in the Judeo-Christian Imago Dei. Complementing Elias’s secular and scientific account in a strange way, Owen Barfield showed how monotheism required a gradual ‘withdrawal of participation.’ This process of withdrawal turned first of all on a gap opening up between the living, subjective, interior, spiritual world and dead, objective material reality. The joy in the initial chapters of Barfield’s magnum opus — Saving the Appearances — is in his philological exploration of the changing meaning of every day words. His account turns on the parsing out and separation of these internal and external valances. It takes an act of enormous imagination to get inside the mind of a participative culture in which this separation hasn’t happened — in which ‘wind’ ‘spirit’ and ‘ghost’ exist in a state of indivisible simultaneity without any hint of metaphorical distance.
From a theological perspective, this interiorization and separation of a distinctive ‘I’ can be seen as a necessary unfolding of the potential that God disclosed when he revealed himself to Moses in the burning bush. To really appreciate and be recognized by ‘I am who I am’, human beings have to coalesce into the ‘I’ — the internal image of God, that is implicit within them. This ‘coalescing of the I’ is what Barfield referred to as the ‘withdrawal from the participating consciousness.’
The end result of this process of separation has been the kind of distinctively modern interiorization — the consolidation of a separate, hermetically sealed, divisible and ostensibly sovereign modern subject that we take so much of granted that we find it difficult to ‘unthink’. As Walter Ong showed, the process has been greatly accelerated by writing and literacy. But with Elias, this potential, as a function of psychological habitus formation, is immanent in the entire trajectory of human development. The boundedness and integrity of the self has advanced in lockstep with each phase of increased per capita energy flows and social complexity, and each advance in the differentiation and scope of the super ego.
It’s an odd consequence of this line of thought that some version of civilization or modernity — with all that individuation and complexity — was necessary condition for the fuller unfolding of our relation to God. I’m not sure what I make of that, or if I believe it. It is certainly implicit in Barfield’s notion of participation and withdrawal — although he holds up the prospect of ‘final participation’: a condition of re-emergence in the holistic integrity of the cosmos, of God, of the interior and exterior, subjective and objective, or I and they. Such final participation is paradoxical in the same way as the Trinity itself — evoking both the separation and boundary necessary for the sustaining of any ‘I’, but the porosity and dissolving integration also that must be concomitant of any truly immersive, participative, oceanic ‘we’.
The tragedy of modernity is a consequence of this process of withdrawal and interiorization not so much as going too far, but losing touch with its source in God. Withdrawal of participation, in Barfield’s sense, then creates the kind of alienated, secular individuation that has been described by every sociologist of modernity ever since.
However, even when we have faith in God and we seek actively, daily to connect with the divine through faith, prayer, ritual and the sacrament of confession — it seems that interior turmoil is an unavoidable aspect of the modern condition. I’m happier since I converted to Catholicism, and calmer and more able to ride the storm. But often, the voice in my head is not the small voice of calm — but the crazy billiard ball zinging round the chaotic architecture of my mind like demented squirrel. I can’t find peace. I have questions that my deceased mother can never answer. I have perpetual feelings of inconsequential failure in my work life. Anxiety about the children never goes away. And my response is usually to start frenetically planning future projects. I am, as my wife always says, all about the plan — the unfinished project. I always have dozens of books in process, DIY projects on the go, speculative spreadsheets, possibilities, means of escape. I’m about as far from Saintly surrender as is possible.
For John Berger modernity was a kind of exile defined by the experience of living always with strangers who never leave. The experience of being an ex-pat is one I know well. Never quite Canadian enough to feel truly ‘at home’, nevertheless when I’m back in England, I feel equally if not more estranged. Things have a habit of changing behind your back. Children, sisters, parents get older, and we get older too. This is partly what Barfield was getting at. The process of withdrawal of participation is painful. It involves a necessary alienation — a permanent sense of not being at home. My state of nearly constant agitation — despite our rural and familial situation — is almost entirely because of the relative strangers who inhabit my head rent free. Even when I’m out tending the sheep — those I read and engage with on Substack, on Facebook, on Youtube, vicariously through my sister’s liberal friends, ranters, ravers, reflectors, revanchists, rebels, the ridiculous and the random — are always there, popping up, demanding my attention and engaging in the least-small kind of talk.
The prospective state of ‘final participation‘ that Barfield dangles — will involve an ability to to embrace every stranger — potentially all of humanity — without losing any degree of complicity or the sense of being ‘at home’. Final participation would involve a kind of infinitely cosmopolitan, and infinitely communitarian hygge — or a modernity without exile, urbanity without strangers. And it would also engender a the kind of inner voice of calm that is driven out by the noise, anxiety and ambivalence — the spiritual homelessness and exile — of modern life.
References
Barfield, O. (1988). Saving the appearances : a study in idolatry. Wesleyan.
Barfield, O. (2012). History, Guilt, Method. Owen Barfield Literary Estate.
Elias, N. (2010). The society of individuals. In The society of individuals. University College Dublin Press.
Macfarlane, Alan. (1979). The origins of English individualism : the family, property, and social transition. Blackwell.
Ong, W. (2002). Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. Routledge-Falmer.
Siedentop, L. (2014). Inventing the individual : the origins of Western liberalism. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Taylor, C. (1992). Sources of the Self: The making of the modern identity. Harvard University Press.
