Tag Archives: demagoguery

Will a Fish Ever Learn To See Water?

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David Foster Wallace was a noted novelist of the late 20th,  early 21st  century who delivered a commencement address at Kenyon College in 2005 entitled, “This is Water.”  The title was a reference to the famous quip, “To ask someone to see reality is like asking a fish to see water.”  Wallace used this address to explore the way in which education is usually designed only to reinforce the prevailing reality, i.e. “world order,” and not so much about teaching a young person to think. Wallace encouraged his audience to consider the value of “thinking about one’s thinking” and that failure to do so would be risking spending one’s life as a cog in the machine-like grid-work of a pre-existing socio-cultural matrix.

Wallace knew that meta-cognition was a necessary dimension of human consciousness without which one would be subject to manipulation by the whims and fancies of everyday human discourse, in modern times certainly including the media.  Without maturity in thought one is inclined to be readily influenced by manipulation, susceptible to a demagogue who knows that many people will believe anything if they hear it frequently enough. The demagogue does not to need intrinsic value to what he is purveying in his speeches, he only needs to have some lesser-value…maybe only a self-serving one…as he realizes it will find currency in many minds if they hear it repeatedly and with great fervor.

To state an obvious truth, thinking is a good thing.  To be “human” we must be capable of at least a rudimentary capacity to think and therefore engage in the world.  Without critical thinking to some minimal degree, we will be in the position that Emily Dickinson described as, “a mind to near itself to see distinctly.”  In that event, we will not be actually thinking but will be passively “thought” by a prevailing vein of thought we have found comfortable, living out the prediction of W. H. Auden, “We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.”

Here is an excerpt from the Wallace address:

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

Woody Allen: “The Heart Wants What it Wants”

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Allen said this in response to criticism of his marriage to his step-daughter in 1997. He was very astute, perhaps more than he realized as the declaration merely meant, “I want what I want and I don’t have to explain it to anyone!”  He realized that marrying your own step-daughter was, at least…shall we say “awkward”; but, the desire of his heart prevailed.

The heart is easily misunderstood as we are taught by our culture to look at life superficially, including our own life…and even our “heart.”  I’m reminded of sermon fodder from my youth, “The heart is desperately wicked and deceitful above all things.  Who can know it?”  My adult interpretation of this verse from Jeremiah is, “The heart is really complicated, so much so that, ‘Who can know it?’  The complications of the heart include good and bad impulses, even ‘desperately wicked’ ones which this same heart will not allow us to be conscious of.”  But what we are not conscious of will manifest itself in our attitude and behavior though we will always “be human” and fail to acknowledge this.

On its deepest level, the heart is a rapacious monster wanting only what it wants.  Most of the time this black hole is assuaged by the process of symbolization, i.e. “sublimation”, so that instead of complete satisfaction of our wants we will settle for “some” of our wants which will allow us to live in a world populated by persons who have made the same bargain with the reptilian brain.  History has given us many examples of persons who could not accept this bargain, most of which are noted for acts of brutality which have led to imprisonment or execution.  This people have said with their behavior, “I want stuff and I will go to any end to get it.”  On the platform of world history, demagogues like Adolph Hitler come to mind.  He wanted power; he wanted to control the whole world, and would go to all ends to accomplish this goal.  Fortunately, humankind intervened and stopped him though not before millions of lives had been snuffed out by his rapacity.  England had a chance to set a limit in 1938 but the appeasement policy of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain demonstrated that people like Hitler cannot be reasoned with. Less than a year later Hitler brazenly disregarded his agreement with Chamberlain and marched into Czechoslovakia.

The heart is the wellspring of life.  It is the source of all the beauty that we see in humankind; but it is also the source of all the ugliness.  Poet Ranier Rilke noted this ambivalence, telling us, “The heart has its beastly little treasures.”  At times it is necessary to give attention to this “beastliness,” individually and collectively, to allow the beauty to find expression. But if the “ugliness” is not acknowledged, and addressed consciously, it will prevail usually under the guise of some “noble” announced intention.