More on Smarm

Speaking of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde . . . .¹

I'd like to add a bit to Tom Scocca's essay “On Smarm” (on Gawker.com) from the point of view of metaphorical thinking.² Here's how Scocca characterizes the social phenomenon of smarm:
“Smarm is a kind of performance—an assumption of the forms of seriousness, of virtue, of constructiveness, without the substance. Smarm is concerned with appropriateness and with tone. . . . the major themes or attitudes of smarm [include] the scolding, the gestures at inclusiveness, the appeal to virtue and maturity. . . . It expresses one agenda, while actually pursuing a different one. It is a kind of moral and ethical misdirection.”

I feel like I understand smarm pretty well. I grew up in its culture; I see it all around me even now. In some ways, it is the very fabric of society, which is why (as I explained in an earlier post) I have learned to prefer the hammock to the canopy.³ It is essentially conservative; it passes its users off as cultured and thus superior. The liberal economist Paul Krugman has often used his blog on NYTimes.com to discuss the great need of the super-rich to be respected, their insistence on good manners by others toward them, their need to be not questioned. Here's a recent example: “They [plutocrats] can and all too often do surround themselves with courtiers who tell them what they want to hear. . . . They're accustomed to being treated with deference, not just by the people they hire but by politicians who want their campaign contributions.” And yet, because their money insulates them from the reality most of us live in and also gives them so much power, they develop “political and economic views that combine paranoia and megalomania.”⁴ Hence, the danger.

Thinking metaphorically, however, has given me some new insights into the problem of smarm. Let me tell you of one of my own experiences with it, as an example. I was once pressed to lead a group that I had only recently joined. The group had just come through some rending experiences (before my arrival), which had reduced the size of the group and left a fair amount of bad vibes. I will take on leadership positions when it's helpful, but I much prefer to be a thinker in the background. I liked the people in this group for the most part and no one else seemed able or willing to do the job, so I accepted the role. Shortly after I did so, great problems among members of the group arose again. One person decided to leave the group but wanted to speak to the group openly first. I thought this was a good idea, considering that old issues were still obviously simmering and affecting the group negatively. I believe that it is better (more constructive) to be honest than to be polite, when possible. This person showed me a written copy of what he wanted to say, and I told him to go ahead with speaking out his ideas at our next meeting.

Well, his hurt and negative feelings were not appreciated by the group. One woman in the group said to me later, “Obviously, none of that should have been said at all.” I took this to be a critique of my leadership, and I very much disagreed with that word “obviously” but there was no opportunity to discuss this. Not long afterwards, the previous leader of the group (a woman I felt very warm towards) strongly suggested that I should move on to another group—I was no longer wanted there. I had broken the facade of smarm, or had allowed it to be broken, so I no longer had any place in the group. There was no discussion of why I made the decision I did to let that member speak openly; there was absolutely no consideration that maybe there was some virtue to that decision; there was no open discussion among members. I had apparently committed a great sin and was simply encouraged to leave.

It seems that the group needed to preserve a facade of friendliness and happiness at all costs and that that facade was much more important than any real group or individual experience. As Scocca has put it, the smarmer “is disgusted and wounded by it all. To say nothing of disappointed that the [truth-tellers] should have betrayed the promise of a more civil world.” In my experience, women tend to be much more smarmy than men, and I have throughout my life felt a great deal of pressure, as a woman, to falsely support certain groups (starting with family) even when they have caused me much unhappiness and had problems that really needed to be addressed. It has been a clear message throughout my life: the well-being of the group should be more important in your life than your own individual well-being. Perhaps I would have been better prepared for this experience if I had previously understood consciously what Scocca has expressed: “The evasion of disputes is a defining tactic of smarm. Smarm . . . insists that the audience accept the priors it has been given.” In other words, a group implicitly defines its own reality, which all its members have to accept or no longer remain in the group. The problem here, of course, is that smarm thus allows for no growth or creativity. Also, since I was so newly a member of the group, I did not understand the “priors” of the group very well or the nature of the troubles it had been having. 
 
Anyway, what happened with this group, what happens with smarm generally, is that an abstract concept is given great priority over concrete realities. Any real fact that doesn't fit the abstract self-understanding of the group must be ignored or even punished. As Scocca has said, “A disagreeable attitude is one thing, but a disagreeable fact is much worse.” I find Scocca's theory that “Smarm hopes to fill the cultural or political or religious void left by the collapse of authority, undermined by modernity and post-modernity” very interesting and quite possibly true. But anytime abstract goals are given precedence over individual experience and thus cause individual suffering, those abstract goals must be questioned lest they lean toward the inhumane.

I do agree with Scocca that smarm, or the preference of the abstract over the concrete, is a serious problem in our society and in our world. And that's why I write this blog—to ask again and again that we at least balance the abstract with the concrete, if not give preference to the concrete. Giving preference to the concrete might mean overdoing generosity (thus conservative concerns about welfare, etc.), but giving preference to the abstract can create monsters, like Dr. Jekyll, the creator and enabler of Mr. Hyde.

1See my previous post “Fear of the Deep,” from 2/14/2014.

2http://gawker.com/on-smarm-1476594977

3See my earlier post “Hammock & Canopy,” 12/6/2013.

4http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/27/opinion/krugman-paranoia-of-the-plutocrats.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Fear of the Deep

Consider this simple, archetypal situation. A child has been put to bed, the lights dimmed or turned off in her bedroom, but soon she cries out for her parents, convinced there is a monster under the bed. Her rational, capable parents come in, shine a light under the bed, and assure their daughter that there is no monster under there. Often, the child is not convinced.
 
And there's good reason she should not be. She will soon fall asleep, down into the unconscious realm of the mind, and indeed there are often scary things there that surface in images and dreams. Her parents, as they visit her, are creatures of the lighted rational world; they reassure with reason, which does not apply in this deeper, darker place. The child must enter this realm on her own and learn to navigate it—or, as far too many of us do, to suppress it.

Personally, I do not believe space is the last frontier—that's just a matter of developing technology to cover more ground, same as the old kind of exploring. The really important, mostly unexplored frontier is the mind, primarily the unconscious mind. Exploring the unconscious mind requires a whole different set of tools, and it is primarily artists who produce the most helpful results. When I was teaching modern literature for honors students at a university in the New York City area a decade or so ago, those students told me that they had been taught in a psychology course that there is no such thing as an unconscious mind. (All the students in the course agreed they were taught this.) I am quite aware that Sigmund Freud and many of his theories are in great disfavor with many psychologists currently, but to throw away—to deny—the unconscious mind?   Wow. 
 
That put me in a quandary. As a professional and as a person, I considered that particular piece of information presented as fact in a psychology course to be highly irresponsible on the part of the professor, if not in fact propaganda rather than objective information. Also, I was teaching an honors course in modern literature, and the great modern authors took the unconscious mind for granted and often spoke openly about it. (I would, of course, argue that the great writers have been dealing with the unconscious mind for long, long before Freud named it and discussed it in a quasi-scientific sense.) One student in that class became quite assertive in resisting everything I had to say about these authors because I was focusing so much on the unconscious mind, which he had on authority did not exist. Eventually, I could only see his desperate resistance as very strong denial covering fear.  But why?

This particular student was rather religious; he sang in the university choir, and this was a university with a religious affiliation. Religion, of course, offers a more external view of what occurs in the unconscious mind—the devil, etc. Religion often consoles us that we can handle everything in the conscious, daylight world of reason; so, too, does science. Most humans seem to prefer external explanation (the parent shining the flashlight under the bed) to internal exploration.   Again, why?

Well, it seems that partly we are afraid of our own bestial origins and the animal instincts that still do sometimes obtrude from the unconscious mind; partly we are afraid of the unknown; partly we are afraid of what often seems like emotional chaos, uncontrolled by reason, welling up from the unconscious mind. Both religion and science have taught us not to trust unbridled emotion or instinct—that we are most noble when most conscious and rational. And yet we spend about a third of our lives unconscious. There must be a reason for that, even beyond the regeneration of cells. It seems to me that denial of the unconscious mind is dangerous, for by not learning how to deal with it we are all the more helpless when it does assert itself in a negative manner. Also, the most beautiful things culture offers (poetry, music, art) arise from the unconscious mind; it is a place of beauty and not just horror. William Blake, for example, argued for a “Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” a union of the conscious and rational with the unconscious and irrational—that is when we are really most whole and not denying an important (energetic and creative) part of ourselves.¹ That's metaphorical thinking.

A couple of recent articles give me hope that we are making some progress as a society in recognizing the need and value of such a marriage. Marina Warner has published two essays on the monsters in old maps in the New York Review of Books.² She notes, on the one hand, the interesting association of fact and fancy: “. . . in many ways maps and monsters would appear antithetical: maps are about measurement and evidence; they attempt to document a real world out there in an objective way with empirical tools tested over time; by contrast, monsters are fantasies, mostly sparked by terrors, but sometimes born of desiring curiosity, too.” Maps, in other words, are products of our rational minds; they are an important effort in our quest to control our environment, or at least to know best how to deal with it. But monsters are symbols of our ignorance and thus of what we fear. We can laugh and dismiss them as fantasies, or we can take them seriously as messages from the unconscious mind.

Warner implicitly equates the oceans these map-monsters come from with the unconscious mind:
“Monsters still fascinate precisely because they express what might lie beyond the light of common day [or reason]. . . . The ocean swirls in a condition of mythopoeic duality: it is there, it covers two thirds of the world [much as unconsciousness during sleep makes up one third of human life], it is navigable and palpable and visible, but at the same time, unfathomable, stretching down in lightless space and into the back water abysm of time where every fantasy can be incubated.” [Comments in brackets are mine.]

The unconscious mind, also, has its depths: in its shallower realms we can sometimes laugh at one of our Freudian slips; in its deeper realms we can be taken over by delusions, cravings, irrationality, incoherence. We do not know everything in the unconscious mind, as we do not know everything in the ocean. But sometimes we throw a line into the sea and pull up a nourishing fish or throw a line of inquiry into the unconscious mind and bring up an image or a memory that helps us to understand some situation in our lives. (See W.B. Yeats's poem “The Song of Wandering Aengus,” in my first blog post of 25 January 2012.) The metaphor of the sea representing the unconscious mind is a helpful map; it show us that the latter, like the former (the abstract idea like the concrete image), is vast and mostly unexplored and thus sometimes scary, but also that it can be the source of beauty and nourishment. It also shows us that some people are better trained and more able to get good stuff out of it than others.³

I've always had a liking for the Middle Ages of Western culture. I'm sure it was a horrible time to be alive, physically, but in their art the people of that time had a better understanding of symbolism and what it tell us about our own minds than we have now, I believe. Perhaps it was the fact of their everyday vulnerability and suffering that allowed their acceptance and partial understanding of other realms of ignorance and lack of control, like the symbols of the unconscious mind. Once science began to be the more dominant mode of understanding the world, we began to lose our capacity to understand symbolically, metaphorically—except for the artists. Since the Renaissance, we humans have striven mightily to organize our world, to make it comprehensible to ourselves and to some extent controllable by ourselves. (We see this even in the social media today.) But when something is gained, something is lost, as Tim Parks has written lately, also in the New York Review of Books:⁴
 
“What we have then is a propensity in modern life to substitute cataloguing and recording for actual doing, to create for ourselves an illusion of responsible action by endlessly multiplying the work, so-called, that precedes and—in the rare cases where it actually occurs—follows responsible action. . . . life is transformed into a series of categories, made more mental, more a matter of words and intellect; we revel in the mind's ability to possess the world in language, rather than to inhabit or change it. . . . [this is] the desire for a control that stands off from participation, and perhaps substitutes for it: the desire to turn the world into words, page numbers, segments.”

Think the bird watcher who wants to tick off the specimen on his life list more than to watch it; think the scientists who tag representatives of virtually every living creature on this earth; think the tourists who spend more time taking pictures of themselves in strange places than in exploring those places. An American Indian once commented that Western science wants more to learn about things than to learn from things.   I think that is very true—^{and not just of scientists.   We often treat other things and even at times other people as objects rather than fellow subjects with their own integrity, like ourselves.5}

So, what happens when we are too successful in protecting ourselves from the unknown? Well, here's one thing that can happen: Ethan Couch, a sixteen-year-old who (while driving drunk) killed four pedestrians on a sidewalk in Texas and was sentenced to probation; his lawyer argued that Couch was not fully responsible for his actions because he suffered from “affluenza.” One account of the case in the New York Times revealed that Ethan Couch lives in a gated community (the community controls who can enter it) and that he lives in “his father's heavily gated home.”⁶ Clearly, these are people who have little capacity to think symbolically. I assume this family was relatively successful in warding off dangerous people from the outside, but in doing so they overlooked and thus enabled internal dangers. 
 
The author of the Times article on the case observes: “. . . millions of affluent—typically white—Americans choose to live in communities whose primary raison d'etre is to afford their residents a pampered escape, a chance to withdraw from the barbarians at the gate and from every external reality imaginable. . . The case of Ethan Couch . . . is a metaphor for the dark side of suburban cosmology, for every other barricaded enclave . . . places that, if not entirely above the law, are somehow removed from it.” 
I take issue with the writer's use of the term “suburban” in this context; I have spent most of my life in suburbia and never witnessed a situation like this. I spent most of my childhood on a street on which there were no fences; on which the lawns of every house ran into each other, making up a big playground for the kids; on which the houses were all for the most part open to anyone at any time. It was a truly open community in that sense. But I agree with everything else this author says. When we close ourselves off from things, we have no opportunity to learn from those different things and thus diminish ourselves. Even more, when we define all danger as being from outside, then we open the gates to the dangers inside. A child who has had little contact with different outsiders will not feel much empathy for them and perhaps will not have as much internal resistance to harming them.

The external gates in the community Ethan Couch grew up in symbolize a dangerous restriction. The external gates led the inhabitants to be not so vigilant of what dangers can arise from the inside. If there is danger outside, there is also danger inside. Life is metaphorical. What we experience is in part who we are, and the more we restrict what we come into contact with, the more we starve and sicken and contort ourselves, psychologically.

Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence, has a new book called Focus. I haven't had the opportunity to read this book yet, though I intend to because of a very interesting review by Nicholas Carr.⁷ According to Carr, Goleman discusses two poles of mental attention: “When we're too attentive, we fall victim to tunnel vision. The mind narrows. When attention is absent, we lose control of our thoughts. We turn into scatterbrains.” Goleman advocates a middle ground called “open awareness,” which allows for movement between the two poles:
“All forms of attention . . . arise from the interplay between two very different parts of the brain. The older, lower brain, working largely outside of consciousness, constantly monitors the signals coming in from the senses. Acting as a warning system, it alerts us to shifts in our surroundings, pains in our body, memories of worrying events. Such bottom-up attention, as neuroscientists call it, is impulsive, uncontrolled and often commanded by fear and other raw emotions. The alerts that stream from the lower brain are so visceral that, when they pop into the conscious mind, they're hard to resist.”
(This is part of the unconscious mind that so many people fear.)

“Working to control all these primitive impulses is the neocortex, the brain's more recently evolved outer layer. The source of voluntary, or 'top-down,' attention, the neocortex's executive-control circuitry is what enables us to screen out distractions and focus our mind on a single task or train of thought. . . . 'Top-down wiring' . . . 'adds talents like self-awareness and reflection, deliberation and planning to our mind's repertoire.' As we go through the day, the direction and steadiness of our mental gaze are shaped by the 'continual dance' between the top-down and bottom-up systems of attention.”
(That's good metaphorical thinking, if we let it happen.)

Trying to live only in the rational world may well produce a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde situation, where the worst parts of the unconscious mind are denied but also thereby indulged, as with Ethan Couch. Marina Warner, in her essays on old maps, refers to another pair of light and dark characters in literature: Prospero the magician and Caliban the creature (who is mistaken once for a fish monster) in Shakespeare's The Tempest; and she notes that Prospero says of Caliban at the end of the play, “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mind.” Prosper is done with the abstract realm of magic; he has broken his staff and thrown his book into the sea. At the same time he acknowledges his responsibility for the realm of the dark, ignorant, and scary. Prospero is healing, becoming more whole. Warner then links The Tempest to a modern play, Fishkin Trousers by Elizabeth Kuti, which deals with an old English legend about a monster man from the sea. This play, Warner argues,
“. . . takes up the challenge that the monster from the sea sets us in modern times, when the ignorance he figures is no longer epistemological but ethical, and does not belong to him as much as to his tormentors: scientific overreach, as well as cruelty, exclusion, intolerance. The monstrousness of the monsters can still show us dangers, from the sea and from ourselves.”

The rational and socially admired Dr. Jekyll is really more to blame for problems from the dark side than the ignorant, bestial Mr. Hyde—precisely because of the failure of the former to acknowledge and attend to the latter.

1Available online at http://www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/work.xq?workid=mhh

2“Here Be Monsters,” 19 December 2013: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/dec/19/here-be-monsters/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=December+3+2013&utm_content=December+3+2013+CID_0f499f28b68d7642ed57c93bf0bc9c06&utm_source=Email%20marketing%20software&utm_term=Here%20Be%20Monsters

“Maps and Monsters,” 3 January 2014: http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/gallery/2014/jan/03/maps-monsters/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=January+14+2014&utm_content=January+14+2014+CID_0991eadabd8de430a36bfbbdb42de0a9&utm_source=Email%20marketing%20software&utm_term=Maps%20and%20Monsters

3It has been said that the psychoanalyst C. G. Jung told the artist James Joyce (regarding Joyce's schizophrenic daughter, Lucia) that some people, like Joyce himself, can dive into the unconscious mind (which Jung compared to a body of water) and reemerge safely, while others, like Lucia, fall into the unconscious mind and get lost there, not finding the way back. Wikipedia has a note on this in its biography of James Joyce.

4“Literature and Bureaucracy,” 2 December 13: http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/dec/02/literature-and-bureaucracy/

5Many sources online depict this native American sentiment.

6James McAuley, “The Affluenza Society,” New York Times online, 22 December 2013: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/23/opinion/the-affluenza-society.html

7“Attention Must Be Paid,” New York Times online, 1 November 2013: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/books/review/focus-by-daniel-goleman.html?emc=eta1

The long quote that follows is Carr occasionally quoting Goleman.

Lessons from Antaeus

One more quick post. If you are interested in my argument about metaphorical thinking and agree that we are endangering ourselves by trusting too much in the abstract and losing contact with the natural, the physical—please read Simon Critchley's recent piece in The Stone series of the New York Times, “The Dangers of Certainty: A Lesson from Auschwitz”:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/02/the-dangers-of-certainty/?emc=eta1
And, as Critchley requests, please watch the whole video that is embedded in the essay (not long).