The writing that follows (below) is based on an article for the Journal of Archetypal Studies (v2 released Dec 2012) but continues to expand and develop on Culturesmith beyond what appeared for publication. The PDF of my Dec 2012 article is available above, but please consider purchasing the journal in its entirety by clicking the image here.
Being driven by the blues involves the kind of metaphorical cutting that goes along with losses, loss of momentum, of love, and of life, especially when tempting fantasies of escape arise. When Eddie “Son” House performs “Death Letter Blues,” the words “hurry, hurry; the gal you love is dead”[i] do not evoke the endless churning hurry of progress but of the stomach anticipating the conclusion that is foregone. The stomach knows through experience that a drop is coming and not an escape from consequences.
Human beings in the midst of pain have created strategies for dealing with suffering. Widow’s walks on the rooftops of seaside towns, for instance, may be seen as architectural poems in tribute to the fascinating, compelling, and profoundly other depths and deaths of the vast sea. In the eye of loss, the sea mirrors the extensive sky that thinly veils the endless mystery and deadly vacuum of space in which the Earth is barely a speck. These are azure mysteries that can evoke ecological levels of psychological reality, which lead to wonder and awe but, in this consumptive age, also kill optimism and innocence. At the wake for eco-systemic optimism one may hear the lamentation and earthy pleasures of the blues, and the queen of all these suffering strategies is grief. Grief’s realm is Soul/Psyche, her gravestone-grey standard is bruised with black and blue, and Bluevolution is her song of corpse washing—the sound of the future spiraling down the drain.
In A Blue Fire, Thomas Moore attributes to James Hillman an “embrace of depression and pathology [which] paradoxically leads to a psychology beyond health and normalcy, toward a cultural sensibility where soulfulness and beauty are the standards.”[ii] A black and blue soul doesn’t need convincing that some of the Big Ideas by which contemporary culture lives need to die. Humanity may truly evolve into a more nuanced understanding that can deal with dying and so encourage living; however, the promise of tomorrow must ring hollow all the way from the hospital, through the wake, to the grave in order for Hope to have any credibility.
Evolution pretends it is not a myth, a powerful worldview-shaping-narrative. Bluevolution is its under-side, the otherwise submerged part of the story in which the imaginative construction of evolutionary ideas becomes visible and a compulsive belief in the inherent goodness of Progress is exposed. Tracing the story of the dissolution happening at this metaphorical depth is a blue volution, a turning and twisting like the spiral that forms a shell, dropping into a center that is cold in its clarity and not comforting. Bluevolution is explicitly a myth that sets Progress aside from evolution in order to change by weeping instead, making and marking a cultural shift that values grief and scrapes away deadly ideological growths so that one need not pretend to be eternally fit in order to seem to deserve a future. In this way, evolution is unwrapped, laid out, and washed.
Bluevolution has to do with maturing into relationship with death and practicing endings in a way that values regret and knows the surrender of innocence. The question Bluevolution asks today is: What needs to die? Grief might reply, “the equation of continuance and growth with improvement—of Evolution with Progress.” Make no mistake: Progress is essential given the proper context and scope. Bluevolution moderates evolution’s progressive sense and gives back the sacrificial reality that always accompanies both evolution and progress.
Biological evolution applies at the level of entire species over geological timeframes, but its themes have been applied to create the idea that individuals, or classes of persons, may be singled out as unfit and human evolutionary progress served by discouraging them. This may be a covert and unexpressed position, but it is the unconscious elements of Evolution’s marriage to Progress that seem to become the most pervasive, deceptive, and destructive. Progressive ideas about Evolution are too often too simple. While a blue voice will not tell the whole story either, it brings out the often silenced underside of a conversation between private interest and public good that is couched in progressive terms. There follows the expectation of endless growth, which makes possible worldwide industry-driven climate change and the nationalization, and then globalization, of ecocidal corporatocracy. Slower, less growth-oriented, communitarian voices are underrepresented to the point of being made mute.
Only authentic scope and familiarity with limitation allow for real hope to begin again. Living in blue volutions can eventually free up energy for direct action toward beneficial change, but it does not guarantee this outcome. Available “blue fire”[i] from the experience of loss, anger, uncertainty, and the sudden knowledge that anything can change, can fuel the creation of communities that serve and support a life of civic freedom rather than desperation, and politics with humility and therefore integrity. Blue planning for the future has the potential to give children the message that being human is mixed and naturally ambivalent; that it involves legitimate suffering, is potentially sublime, and can awaken beauty and creativity in both individuals and groups. This is counter-cultural because the world is suffering a mass anesthetic[ii] unconsciousness that mutes Soul, the naturally dark imagination that is other/ autonomous, often far from the positivity widely associated with health. Perhaps this numbness has to do with trauma and the shock of global changes in the context of privilege and entitlement.
[i]James Hillman and Thomas Moore, A Blue Fire: Selected Writings (New York: Harper, 1989).
On either side of the contemporary debate about the alleged “epidemic of depression,”[i] for instance, there are positivistic responses which try to return to what was, improving things by offering true/false analyses of opposed studies without seeing through to the mythic figures speaking through scientific sounding words like “normal” and “disorder.” A subtext throughout suggests that either there is or isn’t an epidemic of the blues which should be repaired promptly with drugs and therapy.
Alternately, sympathetic doctors and bathetic patients should stop over-reporting and making such a fuss. Both cheer up and shut up are progressive responses, however. There seems to be hesitation before suggesting that people around the world[ii] might be angry and grieving the death of their familiar ways of living and dreams for the future, and that they will likely continue to do so until they are done or dead, self-help books and compelling entertainments notwithstanding. Bluevolution involves pointing out that rictus grins do not excise cultural tumors. Feminist democratic socialist writer Barbara Ehrenreich observed something similar in her experience with cancer and the modern myth of Positivity:
Whether repressed feelings are themselves harmful, as many psychologists claim, I'm not so sure, but without question there is a problem when positive thinking “fails” and the cancer spreads or eludes treatment. Then the patient can only blame herself: she is not being positive enough; possibly it was her negative attitude that brought on the disease in the first place.
I, at least, was saved from this additional burden by my persistent anger—which would have been even stronger if I had suspected, as I do now, that my cancer wasiatrogenic, that is, caused by the medical profession. When I was diagnosed, I had been takinghormonereplacementtherapy for almost eight years, prescribed by doctors who avowed it would prevent heart disease, dementia, and bone loss. Further studies revealed in 2002 thatHRTincreasestheriskofbreastcancer, and, as the number of women taking it dropped sharply in the wake of this news, so did the incidence of breast cancer. So bad science may have produced the cancer in the first place, just as the bad science of positive thinking plagued me throughout my illness.
Breast cancer, I can now report, did not make me prettier or stronger, more feminine or spiritual. What it gave me, if you want to call this a “gift,” was a very personal, agonizing encounter with an ideological force in American culture that I had not been aware of before—one that encourages us to deny reality, submit cheerfully to misfortune and blame only ourselves for our fate.[iii]
When one may depend on the inevitability of scientific advance, industrial efficiencies and pharmaceuticals, among other bootstrap rescues, what need is there of tolerating the embarrassment and discomfort of deeper inquiry? Within industrialism’s legacy and the progress of climate change, mass-produced violence, the pervasive depths of depression, anxiety, failure, and accompanying denial, a species-survival necessity seems to be coming to consciousness. Bluevolution is the story of this emerging necessity. To be clear, the way of Grief is not the New Positivity, a new-and-improved cure (better than ever before) which conveys a more efficient and clinically verifiable power to triumph over suffering. Such an approach would be more of the poison that is killing us—the progressive fantasy that All Will Be Well.
What does the body politic do, for instance, when it is suddenly, viscerally, reminded of mortality via images of the limbs and lives of a generation of young soldiers blown from their bodies in order to pursue a war based on very public, as yet unpunished fraud? What happens when, as a direct consequence, the financial future of nations is ripped off as well? The Center for Positive Psychology FAQ offers this:
As long as there is suffering in the world, how can we justify devoting time and resources to positive psychology? Isn’t human suffering more important than well being?
Research has shown that one way to help suffering people is to focus on the building of strengths. Major strides in prevention have come largely by building strengths. Prevention researchers have discovered that there are strengths that act as buffers against mental illness: courage, future mindedness, optimism, faith, work ethic, hope, honesty, perseverance, and the capacity for flow and insight, to name several.[iv]
From the point of view of the positivist, the question might be no more nuanced than: Isn’t human suffering more important than well-being? To the person suffering the loss of species, of beloved people and places to war and poverty, of innocence, the singular focus on affirmation, the “building [of] strengths,” and the making of “major strides” are an obvious part of the problem. “Future mindedness” may not fit for parents grieving their children, wounded warriors, evicted homeowners, and other persons living through the unforgiving depredations of histories and ghosts ignored. Colleague, Jason Sugg,[v] provided an essential reminder that positive psychology is inherently a psychology of the privileged. Putting out of one’s mind the world’s travails implies having the privilege of being able to distance oneself from those travails.
[i] “Jonah Lehrer, the editor of Mind Matters, asked Allan Horwitz, professor of sociology at Rutgers University, and Jerome Wakefield, professor of social work at New York University, a few questions about their recent book, The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Illness.” Jonah Lehrer, Allan Horwitz, and Jerome Wakefield, “Is There Really an Epidemic of Depression? Scientific American”, December 4, 2008, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=really-an-epidemic-of-depression&print=true.
[ii]“According to the World Health Organization, depression is now the fifth leading cause of death and disability in the world, while ischemic heart disease trails in sixth place. Fatalities occur most dramatically through suicide, but even the mild form of depression - called dysthemia and characterised by an inability to experience pleasure - can kill by increasing a person's vulnerability to serious somatic illnesses such as cancer and heart disease. Far from being an affliction of the famous and successful, we now know that the disease strikes the poor more often than the rich, and women more commonly than men.” Barbara Ehrenreich, “How We Learned to Stop Having Fun,” The Guardian, April 2, 2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2007/apr/02/healthandwellbeing.books.
Even though my predominantly European forbearers included sharecroppers, my body knows very little of suffering compared to those who bore the load of laboring as slaves in industry’s progressive shadow. I was not born into the front lines of class warfare and did not inherit the marks of dwelling in our culture’s underworld for generations. I know in my bones what is blue through loss and death, but also through the lens of my and my family’s privilege and belief in the American myth of Progress.
Privilege does not make me exempt from walking and learning the dark paths of suffering; a privileged upbringing puts on me a burden of authenticity. I learned and continue to learn that the blues that are real originate in and are true to experience itself and do not leap to reframe losses as gains. “Authenticity” suggests to me an obligation to suffer and recover with a critical eye on tendencies toward self-inflation. This critical suffering is for the sake of my own future but also that of my family and the portion of the world on which I have an effect. It may be that Bluevolution offers the possibility of tomorrows and a modest reconstruction of daily life that is authentic, inspiring, and within human scope.
Perhaps an amount of time equal to that in triumphalism and getting on with my life might be better spent dropping onto the dirt floor of humanity’s history and weeping, washing the bodies of the dead, and lamenting injustice until the halls of power ring with the ache of it. This is not a typically Progressive response, but it is a real one and might help shape a more nuanced sense of making progress. It could be revolutionary in its contribution to the sanity of those who are alive today. It might represent an evolution in understanding the human condition. If that is the aim, however, it probably makes sense first to return, in search of depth and nuance, to the moment of the most dramatic shift in the way “evolution” has come to be understood.
In 1859 Charles Darwin’s timely insight was that, over geological lengths of time, all life on Earth descends from a singular shared ancestry. He suggested as well that the continuing process of descent is subject to the modifications of natural (happening in nature) selection influenced by reproductive fitness, as opposed to artificial breeding choices made by design. In his widely tested and accepted scientific model, any creature with traits better suited to successful reproduction randomly passes on traits that make for greater reproductive fitness, making for more creatures with those traits, and so on.
Many of Darwin's colleagues, friends, and relatives adopted his themes, interpreted his scientific conclusions in terms of more general and already popular evolutionary themes, and expanded the lot beyond the realm of science in several speculative directions which immediately provided reminders of the ways in which evolutionary ideas are problematic. Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, created what became the much-lauded eugenics that made mass murder and sterilizations seem sensible to some. Herbert Spencer, a colleague who wrote about evolution before Darwin, and coined the phrase “survival of the fittest,” which Darwin later adopted, decided that the principles of evolution applied just as well over much shorter periods of time to social systems. Thanks to Spencer the phrase “social Darwinism” has become a part of evolutionary mythology. The embrace of Spencer’s economic god reveals Evolution, Industry, Progress, and Profit in the same metaphorical bed in a way that undergirds the creation of the system and mythology of eternal Corporations.[i] A more compassionate interpreter of Darwin’s themes, Thomas Huxley, decided that Darwin's findings supported and justified atheistic materialism and advocated the replacement of existing institutional religions by making a religion of humanism. Each theorist used ideas associated with biological evolution to make progress toward their idea of an improved human race, all the while laying more groundwork for the future continually built by the industrial mind.
[i] The myth of corporate personhood is itself an extensive topic with its own literature but, at least legally, it’s origin is traceable to a Supreme Court decision. “Under the designation of "person" there is no doubt that a private corporation is included [in the Fourteenth Amendment]. Such corporations are merely associations of individuals united for a special purpose and permitted to do business under a particular name and have a succession of members without dissolution.” “Pembina Consolidated Silver Mining Co. V. Pennsylvania - 125 U.S. 181 (1888).” Justia US Supreme Court Center, n.d. http://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/125/181/case.html. Pembina Consolidated Silver Mining Co. speaks with voice of Spencer’s god, making economic abstractions (corporations) in its own image: human-seeming, because they contain persons, but less humane in complete devotion to the growth of economic profit and also immortal ("without dissolution").
The blues in contemporary society often have to do with the rough and ill-advised wedding of evolutionary themes to the causes of Progress. Improvement and change are obviously related, as the former is not possible without the latter, but assuming, for instance, that constantly pushing forward will result in improvement, even in being more likely to survive, shortchanges the complexity of lived experience. Unreflective belief in evolutionary ideas, or evolutionism, presupposes belief in evolution as progress and seems to give permission to encourage specialized traits whose exclusive value is to make reproduction more likely. Perhaps the corporations-as-legal-people device, which, ironically, emerged from the legislation to recognize slaves as persons, stands unconsciously on the mythological ground of evolutionism. If corporations are creatures, perhaps that accounts for evolution’s conjunction with progress spawning corporate industries designed to pursue reproduction (be fruitful and multiply—profit and grow) above all other values. What hand did this have in creating the efficient reproduction of the industrial myths (in this case, mechanisms of mind)? Was this responsible for climate change, globalization’s shadow, and other triggers of the human suffering in progress in what Steve Lerner calls Sacrifice Zones?[i] In the mechanical evolutionary mind, the sacrifice of fellow human beings to corporate profit and even the death of entire species, potentially including our own, becomes collateral damage measured against the reproductive gains to be secured. Humans have been sacrificing other humans since long before the birth of corporations and profit-making evolutionary thinking, but never before has so vast and inexorable a social machine been created to encourage this process.
Alongside this biocidal reality, it can be argued that the evolution of industrialism has provided benefits in the potential for a better quality of life for more people. This is probably true in wealthy nations where there is the possibility of healthcare, even while true preventative (health rather than triage) care is out of reach for most. Even in the most powerful countries, medical attention is often needed to address the health problems that result from the modern industrial lifestyle and environment itself. “Benefits of Industrialism” is often deployed as a rhetorical strategy created to mask growing human costs.[ii] It also must be said that industrial developments make possible the wider circulation of the words you are now reading, and the instructive discomfort of exposure to unfamiliar worldviews due to changes in travel and information technology. But even those who have escaped the factories in this generation have not freed the Psyche/Soul of contemporary people from the grip of the factorial imagination.
There are benefits which accrue to those in a position to take advantage of the structures of industrialism, people able to distance themselves from reminders of the blues, but they will not be celebrated here as they have more than enough ideological momentum. Ex-pastor and war correspondent, Chris Hedges, nostalgically moralizes along these lines while in conversation with Bill Moyers,
more attention needs be paid to the notion that the corporate value of greed is good. I mean, these deformed values have sort of seeped down within the society at large. And they’re corporate values, they’re not American values . . . American values were effectively destroyed by Madison Avenue when, after world war one, it began to instill consumption as a kind of inner compulsion. But old values of thrift, of self-effacement, or hard work were replaced with this cult of the “self,” this hedonism. And in that sense, you know, we have become complicit, because we’ve accepted this as a kind of natural law. And the acceptance of this kind of behavior, and even the celebration of it, is going to ultimately trigger our demise. Not only as a culture, not only as a country, but finally as a species that exists, you know, on planet Earth.[iii]
There never was an America truly free of “greed is good,” but it is often the we used to be better than this fiction that helps resurface and valorize humane values. Certainly, the contemporary era has multiplied the archetypal nature of greed by immortalizing it in corporate ubiquity.
[i] Lerner, Steve. Sacrifice Zones: The Front Lines of Toxic Chemical Exposure in the United States. First ed. The MIT Press, 2010.
[ii] "The concept of quality of life emerged in the 1970s as an important new outcome for health care. This paper identifies three independent arenas in which quality of life served as a powerful rhetorical device which was invoked for ‘solving’ major social and medical problems and dilemmas. In the following years, practical quality of life tools were increasingly developed but, it is argued, the perceived value of measuring quality of life was created and sustained by its role as a ‘rhetorical solution’ to an independent set of policy problems. Social Theory & Health (2004) 2, 361–371. doi:10.1057/palgrave.sth.8700038.” Quoted in David Armstrong and Deborah Caldwell, “Origins of the Concept of Quality of Life in Health Care: A Rhetorical Solution to a Political Problem,” Social Theory & Health 2, no. 4 (November 2004): 1.
Bluevolution means attending darker, compulsive images of the industrial shadow, the mismanagement of culture-manufacturing mythologies (“to instill consumption as a kind of inner compulsion”) that normalize the abhorrent as a cost of doing business. Tracking the cost-benefit calculation that devalues living beings is the stuff of the blues, but in the light of abhorrent images treated as normal it is easier to see the ongoing need to exhume, identify, wash, and bury for good images capable of holding on to belief despite being rotten. Exhumation begins by way of imagination and metaphor. In the fifth chapter of Building a Global Civic Culture: Education for an Interdependent World, Elise Boulding surveys “different kinds of literacies, and particularly [refers] to the lack of 'image literacy' or familiarity with imaging, as a characteristic of industrial societies.” She suggests “nurturing the capacity to image . . . as a way out of the trap of apathetic technological dependency.”[i] Many years before, this is the spirit with which Fritz Lang and Thea Von Harbou used their 1927 expressionist science-fiction film Metropolis to vividly represent as “Moloch” the devouring demon in industrial mythology. Bringing metaphorical realities closer to the surface of consciousness can also bring one closer to literal activism, perhaps political revolution driven what appears on TV, cinema, and computer screens every day: our slavery to comfort, thoughtless fearful institutionalized habits, casual savagery, and what I fear to be a growing addiction to terror. Bluevolution involves imaginative work with demons, death, gods, and other big ideas because they can change psychology and mythology in parallel. Some shift like this happened to Darwin.
Darwin was aware that his work would impact psychologies and mythologies, but he may not have known that, during the course of his work, his own theology would change. While he watched themes from his work alter cultural narratives of belief and practice, he too moved from being a potential clergyman to being an agnostic.[ii] As noted by Peters and Hewlett, in 1851 Darwin’s 10-year old daughter died of tuberculosis. It was this direct experience with grief that darkened his psychological landscape and likely changed his way of believing. In the midst of this significant grief Darwin’s worldview shifted.[iii] What was left of his acceptance of an institutional god-image fell apart and something more complicated emerged that reflected his actual experience. In the experience of the central figure of Evolution is the key turning that marks the central contribution of Bluevolution. I believe that, this time, it will be the kind of grief that changed Darwin that will again change contemporary society.
As with Darwin, soulful responses may arise on the path of grief with healing potential to salve the problems unreflective belief has caused. Where evolution has become evolutionism, innocence must be lost before we can abandon systems heretofore allowed to continue under the assumption that continuance alone will produce improvements. Where Evolutionism is paired, for instance, with the work ethic and Puritanical never give up of the Christianity observed by Max Weber,[iv] it is hard to pay sufficient attention to those who have, are, or will be giving up life as they have known it: the foreign, the ill, the dying, and the dead.
[i]Elise Boulding, Building a Global Civic Culture: Education for an Interdependent World (Syracuse University Press, 1990), 107.
[ii]Peters and Hewlett, Can You Believe in God and Evolution?, 20.
[iv] Max Weber frames Progress’ economics religiously, as the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and reproduces the Ferdinand Kürnberger critique, Picture of American Culture, as “the supposed confession of faith of the Yankee”: "That is the spirit of capitalism [. . .] Kürnberger sums up in the words, ‘They make tallow out of cattle and money out of men.’ The peculiarity of this philosophy of avarice appears to be the ideal of the honest man of recognized credit, and above all the idea of a duty of the individual toward the increase of his capital, which is assumed as an end in itself. Truly what is here preached is not simply a means of making one’s way in the world, but a peculiar ethic. The infraction of its rules is treated not as foolishness but as a forgetfulness of duty. That is the essence of the matter. It is not mere business astuteness [. . .] it is an ethos." Max Weber, Peter R. Baehr, and Gordon C. Wells, The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism and Other Writings (Penguin, 2002), 51.
The just keep making progress of evolutionism is matched by the dramatically inflated this will never end of grief. Like shouldering a friend’s casket and trudging toward finality, long-term image-shifting can seem Augean or Sisyphusian. Especially when trying to comprehend cultural life and death dilemmas involving pandemics, wars, and habitual hubris, the blues involved seem heavier than any mortals can hope to shift. The deadening feel of eternal drudgery that can accompany grief, especially when repressed, can carry even more weight than the fear of losing what is essential, resulting in a dramatic but arrested stasis. A grieving inflation and self-absorption accompanies the feelings of having suffered injustice that often accompany loss. Then this swelling subsides; there is something rather straightforward and un-operatic about simple continuance. Individuals cease but stories continue.
Short of the dubious relief of suicide, one does simply keep going, but not cheerfully. Given time, it is very likely that the sense, particulars, or contours of the stories which make up daily life will become provocative again in some respect. Bluevolution shares this straightforward aspect but in the way that one knows how familiar stories go, by drawing attention to the characters and tropes and wondering about what might happen next. Without struggling much beyond the level of nursery rhyme wisdom, life can move on knowing no more than that nothing good comes of ignoring what you know about how familiar story patterns turn out. Roles played and the genre of a piece give a good sense of potential futures, allowing differentiation between what works in a given narrative environment and what does not, as well as noting elements which do not seem to belong or follow.
In apocalyptic Christian stories, for instance, traditional notions of death and resurrection are very different from the Too Big to Fail trope in use by many nations that call themselves Christian. This becomes actively disjunctive in the national narrative of the United States, where most political figures must be believably Christian in order to get elected, because the expressed ideal model of leadership is not bailed out at the expense of the middle and working classes. He resists state control and undergoes the torture, death, tomb, and (depending on the tradition) descent into hell before transitioning into a new state of being. This collision of narratives may be behind accusations of election-cycle religiosity and reveal a difference between Christianity and “Christianism.” The latter involves the unreflective adoption and valorization of select, often conveniently self-supportive, metaphors borrowed from Christianity without the attendant, problematic, self-sacrificial, and power-challenging, social justice narrative at the core of the Christ stories. Christianism trades the work of a self-sacrificial God for a paean to personal triumph and a never-say-die spirit. This is too truncated to match the recurring suffering in human experience. It is a kind of hack-and-swap operation carried out by slicing out the frontal lobe and half of a heart from an ancient myth to power a more recently manufactured body of stories. The point, however, is not so much to critique the Frankenstein’s Monster of Christianism as to illustrate how Bluevolution addresses patchwork dilemmas through sympathetic attention to genre. Rather than dressing the monster in top hat and tails and trying to see if he can dance his way to the Oval Office, for instance, instead make horror movies and satires. Follow the downward impulse back into imagination and mythologizing.
As Hedges observes, our way of life is killing us. Faced with this reality, a maturing imagination must respond. As Campbell and Moyers observed in The Power of Myth, the belief systems that support it are dead.[i] As these dead worldviews seem to continue to stir, I would call them undead and go dig up connections between no-longer-vital images of society and the upwelling of fascination with zombie and vampire myths, as well as the resurrection of old comic book situations as new cinema . Even political systems once configured to build democratic polity seem to be leaning toward the more exploitative and parasitic. Tired beliefs trotted out for cynical political advantage have run their course and now shuffle on, undead, beside elephantine institutional corpses, beaten to death with the jawbone of an ass and reeking with rot. No measure of patriotic perfume and election-year cosmetics will improve a systemic dearth of principled leadership. The resulting literal and metaphorical cancer of environmental poisoning and alleged economic collapse continues to be suffered by bodies both physical and politic. Ehrenreich again:
Exhortations to think positively—to see the glass half full, even when it lies shattered on the floor—are not restricted to the pink ribbon culture. A few years after my treatment, I ventured out into another realm of personal calamity—the world of laid-off white-collar workers. At the networking groups, boot camps and motivational sessions available to the unemployed, I found unanimous advice to abjure anger and “negativity” in favour of an upbeat, even grateful approach to one's immediate crisis. People who had been laid off from their jobs and were spiraling down toward poverty were told to see their condition as an “opportunity” to be embraced. Here, too, the promised outcome was a kind of “cure”: by being positive, a person might not only feel better during his or her job search, but actually bring it to a faster, happier conclusion.[ii]
The god of positivity that dogs Ehrenreich, and obscures negativity through society as a whole, could use a dose of death on the cross or the hanging endured by Odin or Innana. As has been suggested, it is not belief itself that needs to die but metaphorical idolatry—mistaking neatly packaged god-images for Divinity—preferring the singular (monotheistic), manageable (given the correct scripture, tribe, and social program), and either abstract (Out There) or personal (In Here) over the mysteries of complex systems with epic timeframes and species-level consequences.
Evolution’s problem relates to belief in science, rather than the practice of science, and is again zombie-like, in so far as they are portrayed as being like sheep, lacking individual volition. Belief in science forwards the idea that data must be given (rather than excavated by hand) first, followed by the feeling that one holds the truth at last. This idea seems to preclude action; we must wait for permission to step out of the way of the oncoming train of mass violence and ecocide. Why not demand a new social agreement; refrain from chewing rhetorically on each other’s heads and forge an ongoing, imagination-based relationship with ignorance due to complexity? Perhaps a more depressing, blue ethic is required, keeping the certainties of death before one daily.
[i] J. Campbell and B.D. Moyers, The Power of Myth (New York: Doubleday, 1988). Pages 39-41.
The comic book is also a legitimate metaphor for over-simplification for the purpose of innocent entertainment. The best graphic novels (and videos, T.V., and cinema) now demonstrate that the intention to entertain simply does not preclude the problematic and horrifying. The images and stories on the page and screen are visible too behind the choices both children and adults make. Treating images too simply is part of the denial that contributes to adults not understanding or being able to respond to very real and potentially explosive dilemmas. Put another way, even if one remains suspicious of the dark imagination, it is difficult to look at the industry generated by the Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter franchises and argue that comic book notions of heroism, evil, evolution, apocalypse and power do not change the world.
Within this theme of violence and notions of progress, let’s consider an off-the page incident. Due to his planning and execution of the latest mass murders in Colorado, James Holmes is now infamous. Unless additional facts regarding conspiracy and accomplices are sufficiently validated, his name alone will be associated with "the worst mass shooting in the U.S. since the Nov. 5, 2009, attack at Fort Hood, Texas, [wherein] an Army psychiatrist was charged with killing 13 soldiers and civilians and wounding more than two dozen others."[i] The Toledo Blade went on to report the following:
As the new Batman movie played on the screen, a gunman dressed in black and wearing a helmet, body armor and a gas mask stepped through a side door. At first he was just a silhouette, taken by some in the audience for a stunt that was part of one of the summer's most highly anticipated films. But then, authorities said, he threw gas canisters that filled the packed suburban Denver theater with smoke, and, in the confusing haze between Hollywood fantasy and terrifying reality, opened fire as people screamed and dove for cover. At least 12 people were killed and 59 wounded in one of the deadliest mass shootings in recent U.S. history.[ii]
It is a common practice to characterize violence like this as “senseless.” This is becoming a more and more serious mistake. Some might say that, as an academic psychologist, I should probably be more reserved and scientific, clearly separating facts from opinion in discussing the tragedy before wielding even a poetically diagnostic pen. However, it is images that hold together the cultural complex through which horrors like this are interpreted. This process demands dirt-flying-over-the-shoulder excavation, and racing on foot to trace where their power comes from and wherever their convictions reach, just in case more understanding might become available to those with a mandate to prevent events like this from happening in the future.
The mythologies from which killers emerge can be studied and thought through as bids to shape and control cultural narrative, penetrating patterns that put lives in danger. This is Bluevolution in the world, slowing things down to a grieving pace, and taking the reins of the cart of interpretation out of the hands of progressive helpers, media promoters, and away from the criminal attempting to control perception through infamy. This will not be a reduction of a horrible crime to comic book significance, but may end up being a fable about failures of imagination due at least in part to comic book notions. There may even be a temptation to over-simplify this analysis itself into caricatures and comforting conclusions, reading-in a causal diagnosis and configuring ways to make progress on a solution. For instance, it is true to say that effective gun control and attention to ammunition purchases would go a long way in reducing the epidemic of mass civilian violence in the United States. The world beyond the United States has demonstrated this for quite some time.[i] It is also true that cessation of international munitions manufacture and sales would impair the ability of states to make war on their own people and their neighbors. It is likely not true to say that a diagnosis of psychosis or a spate of new legislation will make for less violence, in any combination of countries. Where the status quo in place can shift, it is the shared narrative of the people who keep the status quo in place which can make it shift. As a result, mass domestic and international violence is likely to continue until we blue the stories behind it.
New Yorker blogger, John Cassidy, suggests that “as long as his name and his heinous acts live on in the public consciousness, there may be some chance of reform. Admittedly, it’s a slim chance . . . but that’s better than nothing.”[ii] I agree with Cassidy that chances are indeed slim, but not that a slim chance is better than nothing. Very few people know Holmes well, and the full truth about the crimes of July 20th may never be uncovered, but what is accessible is the series of cultural patterns into which any “Holmes” fits, transformed into “The Shooter.” What matters is that sense be established in working with possibilities—the images and beliefs that make actions like this possible. Then one may make better sense of mass violence and not get stuck, as Aurora Fire Chief Mike Garcia does with “I just don't want the shameless and senseless act of one man to make this difficult for families to move on . . . Go out. See a movie. Go out into your city. Don't be afraid.”[iii] Instead, don't move on. Don't go to the mall. Stay home and think about what makes this possible beyond “the shameless and senseless act of one man.”
[i]Ezra Klein, “Six Facts About Guns, Violence, and Gun Control | Wonkblog,” The Washington Post, July 23, 2012, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/07/23/six-facts-about-guns-violence-and-gun-control/?print=1.On his Washington Post “Wonkblog” Ezra Klein writes: Kieran Healy, a sociologist at Duke University, made this graph of “deaths due to assault” in the United States and other developed countries. We are a clear outlier. As Healy writes, “The most striking features of the data are (1) how much more violent the U.S. is than other OECD countries (except possibly Estonia and Mexico, not shown here), and (2) the degree of change—and recently, decline—there has been in the U.S. time series considered by itself.” … The Harvard Injury Control Research Center assessed the literature on guns and homicide and found that there’s substantial evidence that indicates more guns means more murders. This holds true whether you’re looking at different countries or different state., Citations here. (http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/research/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-and-death/index.html)
Let us turn to transparent speculation about a well-known role, The Shooter, rather than the man whom we do not know. The public knows how mass murderers are portrayed, and tends to leap with both feet into the rushing narrative river sensationalism creates. This puts communities needing to recover at risk of accepting and perpetuating mythologies in which mass murder makes sense. If Holmes-the-soon-to-be-ex-graduate-student can draw people into seeing him as The Shooter by literally shooting people, then he can distract his own and other’s attention from the anger and sadness of the characters underneath—be they The Boy Falling Apart or some other variant. The Shooter must shoot and cannot really be blamed. It is not The Boy’s fault if the story goes this way. The public follows perpetrators into denial of responsibility by taking refuge in semi-conscious stock characterization. The community of victims and witnesses might instead deploy archetypal psychologies to work metaphorically with the black and blue feelings that naturally follow. We forget the names of shooters, as Cassidy observes, but it is because as individuals they are eventually and inexorably cliché to everyone beyond those who knew the victims; because we can thereby cover over the complexity of the system that regularizes mass murder in order to comfort ourselves and “move on.”
From the point of view of an imagined potential murderer, why struggle along, broken, when apotheosis into a universally recognized power role, The Shooter, is possible? Why not act out and make concrete the homicidal impulses with which human beings are afflicted? Perhaps perpetrators move from destructive feelings and imagining mass murder, at least in part, because of solipsistic literalism in the face of natural human limitedness: I cannot make things work out in the way I would prefer, therefore hope is a hoax and I can do as I please. From the outside, one can see this as being little better than plastic action-figure thinking, seizing power and attention by acting out in predictable ways, becoming a caricature by attempting to avoid what feels like restriction to human capacity.
If you like, consider all that is before you as fiction, just as an exercise, and put to the side the idea that psychology thinks of itself as a science. Imagine instead, that psychology is about what its name indicates, psyche's logic or soul sense, and remember that scientific-sounding thought-devices are from an ill-fitting genre when it comes to relating to or understanding something as metaphorical as “soul.” The apparent cultural pandemic of violence is a soul issue, always part of humanity but never before seen on this scale (when measured by body count or media coverage). It is revealed through study of the patterns and stories we inherit, live in, and perpetuate, rather than being attributable to brain dysfunction and diagnosed away into isolated incidents by madmen who may be dismissed as aberrations. Why do we repeat ineffectual reactions to mass criminality? Hedges offers this answer:
Bureaucrats . . . . cannot think on their own. They cannot challenge assumptions or structures. They cannot intellectually or emotionally recognize that the system might implode. And so they do what Napoleon warned was the worst mistake a general could make—paint an imaginary picture of a situation and accept it as real. But we blithely ignore reality along with them. The mania for a happy ending blinds us. We do not want to believe what we see. It is too depressing. So we all retreat into collective self-delusion . . . Blaise Pascal wrote in Pensées, “We run heedlessly into the abyss after putting something in front of us to stop us from seeing it.”[i]
As Hannah Arendt noted of AdolfEichmann, he was “neither perverted nor sadistic, that [he and others like him] were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.”[ii]
Imagine: it is in what gets called normal where “senseless” murderous behavior moves blithely. Human beings are profoundly self-fictionalizing, but those who thrust themselves into the public eye are doubly so. The Eichmanns and Holmeses of the world are recognizable by their fixation on the story of themselves they adopt. Events like these make more sense if you learn how mythologies work by tracking through the darker side of humanity by way of acknowledged fictions. The story being crafted around and by this murderer is driven by narrative causality (that's how things work in stories) to set him on the path to being a Supervillain.
Journalists quote sources in law enforcement, saying that the murders were planned for months. Let’s open that plan up a bit and have a look at the story from an imaginal perspective. The Shooter fantasizes while preparing to booby-trap his apartment in a sophisticated while ordering
3,000 rounds of handgun ammunition, 3,000 rounds for an assault rifle and 350 shells for a 12-gauge shotgun—an amount of firepower that costs roughly $3,000 at the online sites—in the four months before the shooting, according to the police. It was pretty much as easy as ordering a book from Amazon.[i]
Here we could imagine aspects of The Shooter: The Shooter as hunter, as defender, as enthusiast. Such roles are near at hand; however, they do not find congruence in the event of this incident; they are false flags. It is The Villain who is the character on display. Official and unofficial reports suggest that Holmes’ orange hair is a tribute in dye to The Joker character from the world of The Batman, and that he identified himself as The Joker to police. Cartoon themes are firmly established and fantasy is explicitly drawn into our consideration. Continuing to his Adult Friend Finder profile, it becomes clear that The Joker fetish is part of his fantasy sexual life as well.
Holmes surrendered to the police rather mildly, by all reports, which has fuelled speculation about government and other conspiracies. Whatever the reason, the result is that he was not killed and is now participating in the next phases of what he surely knew would happen. Holmes has calculated, wanting to be The Evil Genius. One police officer suggested “Phase Two” involved the explosion of his apartment to kill law enforcement officers, but Holmes clearly thought better of that and notified law enforcement of the danger. Instead, Phase Two has become a predictably sensational trial. If this actually were a comic book or graphic novel (soon to be made into a blockbuster movie), the neuro-science prodigy too advanced to be held back by conventional doctoral work would next undergo a chrysalis period in prison. Death Row would add even more infamous credibility. Then he would slip by the justice of the state either through escape or by the insanity defense. Through threat, bribery, or inexplicable parole, he would become free again to commit more specific and grandiose crimes. That’s how it works in comic books, at any rate.
In all likelihood the possible perpetrator-imagined triumphalist ending will not materialize, become literal, in response to Holmes having literalized his murder fantasies. The ritual enactment of the mythological shift was begun, but begins to look like a misunderstanding of sympathetic magic (ritual actions over here create parallel changes over there). Holmes’s behavior will most likely result in a diagnosis of mental illness rather than in the evolution of superhuman power to change things. In the end, his actions propel the survivors, families, and friends “through Hell,” but not in a way that will make a massive difference. The individual criminal will not progress in his evolution toward becoming The Supervillain; Society will not wake from culture-wide numbing as a result of his actions. That may not have been his fantasy, but some mass murders are carried out in the name of helping people wake up to the dire nature of their circumstances.
Stories of mass murder relate to Bluevolution where simplistic fantasies of change create extreme action, reaction, and numb inertia by turns. Evolution and Progress are often salvation fantasies of a literal and heavenly utopia and, as such, are much more likely to end in various kinds of hell. River bottom crossroads is where the blues live and where one may find responses to such questions. The swirling of the Stygian waters through which the underworld is perceived may be clichéd or may be revolutionary, but they are by definition uncomfortable and not in the control of the one who descends. Hillman gives a sense of the bluevoluted application of this descent in The Dream and the Underworld, re-visioning a psychology “of dreams that tries to keep a sense of underworld always present in our work with them.”[i] By Underworld Hillman always also means Death.
New beginnings won’t be possible until this vortex of “underworld always present in our work” reaches bottom and we get more than a little uncomfortable there, the old ways of doing business-as-usual having gone down the drain. Says Hillman, “the dream may not be envisaged either as a message to be deciphered for the dayworld (Freud) or as a compensation to it (Jung).”[ii] Once you spiral down the river of corpses into the world that makes The Shooter possible, you realize that there is no silver bullet to bring back up and load in a literal gun for the killing of the problem. What needs to die is the denial of the dark and the careless literalization of metaphors. Then gun laws can get some actual traction and the practicalities of the courts can take their course without so much prurient sensationalism. The story won’t end anymore anywhere in the vicinity of what a Shooter would imagine.
[i] James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld (HarperCollins, 1979). Pages 3
When the still living victim or witness returns to the surface and daily life of a story transformed, it can be with a deeper understanding from having made the descent. Grief can lead to clear-eyed readiness, and purposeful nonviolence with death at your side. Perhaps, tired of mindless fear or having sought training to respond well under pressure, everyone on the next airplane or in the next theater will rush the next Shooter and fewer people will die. Perhaps some other way of changing the story happens. What would evolution into the bluer part of the human experience look like if the next chapter of preparation for violence were written by elders who know suffering, death, compassion, and had outgrown the titillations of the sexy terror fantasies that sprawl across our consciousness, Congress, and infotainment screens?
Images of revolutions like the one Bluevolution suggests bind beginnings and endings with an awareness of narrative causality, but they also preserve ambiguity. Images of endings move us toward new beginnings and vice versa because story patterns have no discrete first version or terminus. Many people hope, for instance, that the mass murder that had taken place only nights ago, as I began to write this, will spur new gun control legislation and spell an end to easy access to the industrial tools of warfare, at least on Main Street USA. The political consensus seems to be that no such change would have been forthcoming in an election year, if ever. A new feeling of safety for some represents an end of the right to bear arms to others, thereby fueling spending that ends the dream of fewer guns on our streets. How to parse these images in social, political, environmental, psychological, and religious realms? The “record-breaking” slaughter in a Colorado cinema has launched once more all-too-familiar fantasies of social apocalypse from which guns seem essential to defend ourselves. Meanwhile, international corporate-sponsored carnage continues to be visited upon Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as popular revolutionary movements in other parts of the Middle East. Perhaps it is possible to read this swell and crush of overlapping mythologies of conflict in a way that can make some sense and position a citizen to make some choices in the near future. If there is an evolution of thinking that can lead to this revolutionary sense-making, I suggest that it will come from under the usual world, from Soul, from death and grief.
Evolution, even in its Progressive sense, is a full spectrum mythology, with both agreeable and disagreeable aspects. “Full spectrum” here means archetypal, both connected to some history and sense experience to which a vast majority of human beings can relate and extending into any associated idea with which the imagination can make a connection and, thereby, meaning. Fully imagined, even Grief needs a progressive sense to be able to get over itself when the time is ripe. The task of Bluevolution is to say that too much emphasis on moving forward and up blinds the eye of consciousness to grief's necessity, a length of time determined by its own nature, and depth of understanding. We have too much of Progress' idea of evolution, and need a bluer point of view with a self-consciously mythological rather than a knee-jerk utopian ideal. Our flocks of ideas about progress need to evolve, to experience a massive die-off in such a way that the selected traits that emerge make our survival more rather than less likely. This is a death of deadly ideas so that literal people die less frequently at the hands of other people.
It is time to evolve, in the general sense, by applying a blues-based underworld sense in order to change how we believe and deal with difficult mythologies. Evolutionary belief, like all Big Ideas, may no longer masquerade for political advantage as either fact or fiction. It is a non-literal mixture of both, and must include an acceptance that personal and political choices are moved by partly conscious belief, adherence to persistent cultural narratives, wrapping in one inextricable knot reason, psyche/ology, and myth/ology. Especially in a crisis, forthcoming transitions and endings are better, more deeply understood in terms of archetypal narrative that speaks to the motivating imagination with which soul psychology is concerned. There we hear from what is dying, missing, failing, what makes one blue, as in soul music and soulful reflection, more than by way of the inflated and upward straining, progressive spirit.
Where, when, and how to intervene is an immediate concern which must be engaged by conscious participation in myth and culture-making. Whether or not to forgive, admit culpability, and seek forgiveness will be a retrospective project. Withal, it is clear from ongoing global collapses that elites no longer know what they are doing when it comes to making progress/improvements, or have become almost eager to sacrifice the many for the few and take refuge in consolidating even more desperate control, frequently thrusting the possibility of sustainable community into the altar fire of self-interest.
Grief is a black and blue alternative to mutually assured self-destruction that is archetypal in nature. It is beyond description to hold the dead infant of treasured hopes in one’s arms and truly give up on what seemed so bright, but anyone who has lost an imagined future to death can gain access to an otherwise unfamiliar watery edge. There, the turning of fate drop-twists the spirit into a hidden underside. This turning drives awareness to a center that has essential information about the depth and complexity of life and of human experience, such that denial of the consequences of living in myth simply cannot be sustained no matter the pressure to continue functioning as usual. The blue water swirling about the corpse of what we had hoped has the power to wash away our resistance to the changes that can eventually give new life in a new shape.
Bluevolution then is a behavior-changing recognition of the spiraling down into legitimate grief over the passing of the mechano-industrial utopian mythology in which contemporary humanity lives. We now know, or are coming to know, that All will not be Well with ongoing global economic growth, easy access to assault rifles and bulk munitions, increased material consumption of fossil fuel-based products, greater defense spending for international conflicts, and greater manufactured efficiency. Our shared consciousness, as revealed by Media, is attending the virtual school of Survivor, Lemony Snicket, and Lost so as not to suffer blindly any more “failures of imagination” as the world our grandparents knew falls apart.We are preparing for disappointments and they continue coming, one after another, growing each generation into an adulthood of death and hardship, as we let go of the things that we treasured but which now are killing us as a species. This is the end, but of what precisely remains to be imagined. Not until we have fully imagined, lived, and grieved The End will New Beginnings sprout.
These are embedded in each relevant card and gathered once more here In order of appearance.
James Hillman and Thomas Moore, A Blue Fire: Selected Writings (New York: Harper, 1989). Page 11
James Hillman and Thomas Moore, A Blue Fire: Selected Writings (New York: Harper, 1989).
Ibid. Page 143
“Jonah Lehrer, the editor of Mind Matters, asked Allan Horwitz, professor of sociology at Rutgers University, and Jerome Wakefield, professor of social work at New York University, a few questions about their recent book, The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Illness.” Jonah Lehrer, Allan Horwitz, and Jerome Wakefield, “Is There Really an Epidemic of Depression? Scientific American”, December 4, 2008, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=really-an-epidemic-of-depression&print=true.
“According to the World Health Organization, depression is now the fifth leading cause of death and disability in the world, while ischemic heart disease trails in sixth place. Fatalities occur most dramatically through suicide, but even the mild form of depression - called dysthemia and characterised by an inability to experience pleasure - can kill by increasing a person's vulnerability to serious somatic illnesses such as cancer and heart disease. Far from being an affliction of the famous and successful, we now know that the disease strikes the poor more often than the rich, and women more commonly than men.” Barbara Ehrenreich, “How We Learned to Stop Having Fun,” The Guardian, April 2, 2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2007/apr/02/healthandwellbeing.books.
The myth of corporate personhood is itself an extensive topic with its own literature but, at least legally, it’s origin is traceable to a Supreme Court decision. “Under the designation of "person" there is no doubt that a private corporation is included [in the Fourteenth Amendment]. Such corporations are merely associations of individuals united for a special purpose and permitted to do business under a particular name and have a succession of members without dissolution.” “Pembina Consolidated Silver Mining Co. V. Pennsylvania - 125 U.S. 181 (1888).” Justia US Supreme Court Center, n.d. http://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/125/181/case.html. Pembina Consolidated Silver Mining Co. speaks with voice of Spencer’s god, making economic abstractions (corporations) in its own image: human-seeming, because they contain persons, but less humane in complete devotion to the growth of economic profit and also immortal ("without dissolution").
Lerner, Steve. Sacrifice Zones: The Front Lines of Toxic Chemical Exposure in the United States. First ed. The MIT Press, 2010.
"The concept of quality of life emerged in the 1970s as an important new outcome for health care. This paper identifies three independent arenas in which quality of life served as a powerful rhetorical device which was invoked for ‘solving’ major social and medical problems and dilemmas. In the following years, practical quality of life tools were increasingly developed but, it is argued, the perceived value of measuring quality of life was created and sustained by its role as a ‘rhetorical solution’ to an independent set of policy problems. Social Theory & Health (2004) 2, 361–371. doi:10.1057/palgrave.sth.8700038.” Quoted in David Armstrong and Deborah Caldwell, “Origins of the Concept of Quality of Life in Health Care: A Rhetorical Solution to a Political Problem,” Social Theory & Health 2, no. 4 (November 2004): 1
Elise Boulding, Building a Global Civic Culture: Education for an Interdependent World (Syracuse University Press, 1990), 107.
Peters and Hewlett, Can You Believe in God and Evolution?, 20.
Ibid., 21.
Max Weber frames Progress’ economics religiously, as the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and reproduces the Ferdinand Kürnberger critique, Picture of American Culture, as “the supposed confession of faith of the Yankee”: "That is the spirit of capitalism [. . .] Kürnberger sums up in the words, ‘They make tallow out of cattle and money out of men.’ The peculiarity of this philosophy of avarice appears to be the ideal of the honest man of recognized credit, and above all the idea of a duty of the individual toward the increase of his capital, which is assumed as an end in itself. Truly what is here preached is not simply a means of making one’s way in the world, but a peculiar ethic. The infraction of its rules is treated not as foolishness but as a forgetfulness of duty. That is the essence of the matter. It is not mere business astuteness [. . .] it is an ethos." Max Weber, Peter R. Baehr, and Gordon C. Wells, The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism and Other Writings (Penguin, 2002), 51.
J. Campbell and B.D. Moyers, The Power of Myth (New York: Doubleday, 1988). Pages 39-41.
Ezra Klein, “Six Facts About Guns, Violence, and Gun Control | Wonkblog,” The Washington Post, July 23, 2012, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/07/23/six-facts-about-guns-violence-and-gun-control/?print=1.On his Washington Post “Wonkblog” Ezra Klein writes: Kieran Healy, a sociologist at Duke University, made this graph of “deaths due to assault” in the United States and other developed countries. We are a clear outlier. As Healy writes, “The most striking features of the data are (1) how much more violent the U.S. is than other OECD countries (except possibly Estonia and Mexico, not shown here), and (2) the degree of change—and recently, decline—there has been in the U.S. time series considered by itself.” … The Harvard Injury Control Research Center assessed the literature on guns and homicide and found that there’s substantial evidence that indicates more guns means more murders. This holds true whether you’re looking at different countries or different state., Citations here. (http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/research/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-and-death/index.html)
James Holmes is now infamous. Unless additional facts come to light regarding conspiracy and accomplices, he will be known for killing the most people ever to become casualties in a mass shooting in the United States. The Toledo Blade reported the following:
As the new Batman movie played on the screen, a gunman dressed in black and wearing a helmet, body armor and a gas mask stepped through a side door. At first he was just a silhouette, taken by some in the audience for a stunt that was part of one of the summer's most highly anticipated films. But then, authorities said, he threw gas canisters that filled the packed suburban Denver theater with smoke, and, in the confusing haze between Hollywood fantasy and terrifying reality, opened fire as people screamed and dove for cover. At least 12 people were killed and 59 wounded in one of the deadliest mass shootings in recent U.S. history. (1)
It is common practice to characterize violence like this as senseless, but this is becoming a more and more serious mistake. Some might say that, as an academic psychologist, I should probably be more reserved and scientific, clearly separating fact from opinion in discussing the tragedy before wielding a diagnostic pen. But that will not do here. Instead, the images that hold together the cultural complex that makes tragedies like this possible demand dirt-flying-over-the-shoulder excavation. The mythologies from which killers emerge may be and must be studied and thought through so that patterns that put us in danger may be made clear, independent of the individuals who attempt to own them through infamy.
It doesn't even matter for the purposes of this investigation to determine if he was acting alone or a pawn of some other individual or group. What matters is that sense be established in working with possibilities--the images and beliefs that make actions like this possible. Then one may make better sense of mass violence and not get stuck, as Aurora Fire Chief Mike Garcia does with "I just don't want the shameless and senseless act of one man to make this difficult for families to move on...Go out. See a movie. Go out into your city. Don't be afraid."(2) Instead, don't move on. Don't go to the mall. Stay home and think about what makes this possible.
If you like, consider all that is before you as fiction and put to the side the idea that psychology can be scientific. Imagine instead, that psychology is about what its name indicates, psyche's logic or soul sense, and remember that scientific-sounding devices have a very poor track record relating to or understanding soul. The rising cultural pandemic of violence, of which this slaughter is a part, is a soul issue. It is revealed through study of the patterns and stories we inherited, live in, and perpetuate, rather than being attributable to brain dysfunction and diagnosed away into isolated incidents by madmen who may dismissed as aberrations.
Understanding fictions like those driving The Shooter requires fictional tools wielded by people with mad mythological skills, capable of digging up all that metaphors can mean, rather than searching for tidy comforts to put an end to grief. That is not how grief works. Chris Cuomo of ABC News' Good Morning America program, insists that "one of the few messages that we can pull out of a tragedy like this,...that helps us move forward together, [is] that recognition that we have to appreciate life because you never know what will happen next."(3) I suggest that there are many messages to pull from this wreckage and that events like these make obvious sense if you are not only a mythologist but also fascinated by the darker side of humanity, fictions, and how things work, which is to say, a geek. Any mytho-geek can tell you that the story being crafted around, and perhaps by this Shooter is driven by narrative causality ("That's how things work in stories") to set him on the path to being a Supervillain.
More to come...Watch this page (lower right edge) to hear about updates
Please add to the discussion below, or update what you have already submitted by double clicking any simple text while signed in.
All rights reserved to original source and author(s). Reproduced here in reduced form under fair use for educational purposes. Copyright and Permissions
