Ping Pong 53: The To and Fro of Choice
Perhaps, the rubric ran, there was another way to respond to the Second World War, and the technological world which the underpinned it. Perhaps, the rubric ran, it was less about the direct manifestation of evil and more about the problem of meaning after a collapse in faith in God. God was after all the supreme guarantor of lives and souls. If one accepted that there was a God, then one could very easily understand that one’s life too has a pattern and a form. ‘God wanted’ you to do this or that. But without a god, the problem was how then does one stop oneself going mad? For one is welded into the one life, with the one body and the one set of experiences for there are both too many options and too few open. There are too many because there can be no clear template for what one is or how one should live. Come what may, one could and perhaps should always be elsewhere and doing something else. A Deep nausea of additional lives haunts one’s very nature therefore. One must choose but every choice actually restricts further (as it closes down other options), and does so without mercy or let up. On the other side this welter of choice is of course made all the more ironic because one is always caught up within the biological necessity of life and the absolute death. One might need to build a life now, or might require one, and yet whatever one does and however one acts the result will be the same, one will die and that is that. One must choose or else one will have no meaningful life (one will merely exist), and yet that choice is ultimately doomed, one ends up dying all the same.
Choice appears initially therefore split in a cleft stick of two impossibles. There is too much choice, bursting out of the seams of life. Choice and other lives are everywhere. And yet on the most personal level this choice scarily seems to not matter. One might be famous or not, successful or not, one still dies. This dilemma which lies at the heart of Existentialism in effect reflects the position of affluent members of an industrial society. The middle class in such a society lose sight of the hard edge of life. For other peoples and other times the division, the double nihilism suggested here, was simply unthinkable. Choices simply could not be distinguished from death in this manner. This is because not only did individual not have to make too many choices (there was only one type of gruel or one orange wine) but also the choices which one did make, caught one up in life and death situations. To choose to plant potatoes and not grain was to risk famine; or again to choose to support one pretender to the throne was to risk ruin. Or again to choose this life partner over that one, was to be caught up in their lives for the rest of one’s own life. One’s ability to be and remain alive and one’s ability to choose, the value of the one and what happens on the other, were simply caught up in one and the same prism. One felt one’s choices mattered.
It is then the power and strength of Existentialism that it raises the problem of what happens when, as it seems to, in a Western industrialized country, the domain of choice and the domain of life move apart from each other. It is this split that in a sense is far more profound than the mere existence (or not) of God. God is and was as much an expression of the unity of choice and lives. One knew one’s choices mattered, that they really were about life or death, and had a God to express this fact. If now then these two move apart, if choices need to be thought or understood apart from life, then the space for God is occluded. Or at least it has a tendency to be.
Here however the picture becomes rather more complicated. On the personal level there are clearly a certain set of consequences to how we value the world in the light of this split. However whether there actually is a spilt or not, may be more complicated than this. While it is true on the individual level, we (or at least a subsection of us feel) that we have an opportunity to choose a life. One does not see such a clear divide on the wider level of society or even humanity. On the contrary the history of the Western world for the last hundred years or so has been a history of ‘meta-life and death choices’. One hundred years ago these choices were expressed in terms of freedom or race (one needed to defend oneself against ‘dark’ forces). Fifty years ago, one needed to defend freedom and toleration, but also one needed to prevent a nuclear holocaust, and the terrors of a third World War. Currently of course we drown under a babble of ’threats’. The most believable and significant of which is surely the environment and climate change. Here if nothing else is a schema that would seek to reconnect choice with life and death issues. To choose a variety of soapsuds is to wage war (or not) on the planet. Choice is everywhere. Choice again matters. Moreover it is worth pointing out that this last option - the threat to the environment - is a rather different type of choice than those that went before. The previous choices had always been understood (or at least had a tendency to be understood) on the level of the state. It was therefore the role of the state to provide welfare or press the nuclear button or defend freedom. Choice therefore went hand in hand with states and hierarchies. However in the case of the environment, this emphasis on the power of the state is diluted. It is not the state that will save the human, but rather individual actions. This last point of course then creates two additional problems. On the one hand, it means that the traditional leader in the life/death choice field, the states or nations are marginalized in the problem of the environment. They are likely to be ineffective at best. Or at worst they are likely (as the ’worthy’ Brown does) to invent ways that they might see as effective. Such ruses that even when they are not harmful are likely to divert concentration from those personal choices which actually create the problems in the first place (to manage pollution is therefore always a worse option than defining how to live life with less of it: Carbon trading is worse that not producing the carbon…).
However the last point then merely highlights the problem for the division between choice and life and death, and the effect that it has on individuals, or at least the effect that it has had on some individuals (the affluent middle classes). Perhaps one might characterise this effect under four distinct topics: The problem of meaning; the politics of gesture; the snobbery of education, and the defence of possibility. Each of these topics will then be considered in turn.
If death deprives life of every value in itself, the power and use of thought surely changes. The value of thought to change the world in a physical sense is devalued. One might change the world as one likes, and yet one still dies. What is more, every such choices precludes other choices one could have made. To act is therefore to actually, by a warped logic, to restrict oneself. It is far better to be a dreamer. It is far better to work in the so called ‘creative’ industries. These ‘industries’ then operate as factories for choice itself. Choice is endlessly constructed or manufactured, though new ideas or new images. Each individual is therefore given the feeling (real or illusionary) that they are someone in control over that bit of their lives which they wish to control. There are always other options open, other dreams to be had. One is never pumped out. One is never caught by the end of extra possibility or at least one is not so caught until one actually dies (and one does not really mention that).
Life is caught up therefore in the comforting pillow of options and ruses and schemes. However far one falls, however much one has failed, one always has options, always has possibilities that allow one to climb back up the ladder. No NO is final. The effect of course is that in this domain of the possible one re-invents one of the properties of God. God looks after each individual. The possible likewise if it does not actually look after the individual always allows for individual hope and the possibility that things might go right. And yet by its every nature it only does so on the most restrictive of plains. A series of possibilities is always my series of possibles. They are what I can get out of MY life (and not what you can get out of yours). Hope therefore replaces communal collective acts or devotion with private dreams and the hopes which others manufacture for us.
Once of course meaning matters more than actuality, then the type of politics which one values changes. What matters are not actual kind acts so much as the algebra of gesture. One judges others therefore on the big gestures and statements. This move is both communal and personal. In both one’s private and public life, one looks to acts which someone communicates more than those which they effect. Politics in both spheres becomes a battle of gesture. You do this, I do that, we interpret one another, and act again. Each means the other to read the signs encoded within a series of actions, and each assumes that that reading is enough. The actual world where real actions make and mar lives is therefore rather quietly excluded. Reality has no power or affect in this domain of gesturing. Why would one not after all? Individuals or states can therefore be routinely vile in their behaviour and utterly undermining in their affects and their sapping negativity, and yet one will still be expected to value them for their gestures. Even more problematically, if these gestures are few and far between they are meant to be all the more powerful and all the more significant. One might as well therefore be problematic or distinguish or one’s personal behaviour most of the time, because then ones gestures are going to matter all the more…
This move to the algebra of gesture then change who exactly one values in society. Those who are able to play the game of algebra of complex intricate gestures are the ones who become effective human beings. Those that cannot are then lost by the wayside. The affect is of course that a certain ‘creative’ and gesturing caste, comes to see itself as peculiarly dominant and peculiarly significant. What is more, all other groups have a tendency to then be judged as they relate to this group. To live as a single mother or on a so-called ‘sink estate’ is therefore to be thought of as a stereotype and related to in terms of gestures, to the middle classes.
A Deep snobbery enters in of course at this point. Everything and everybody has meaning. Those who cannot participate in the game of making more meanings are then at a great disadvantage. They will (according to the middle class rules of the game) only have the meanings they are assigned (yob, drunkard, druggie, wino, etc.). Those that do not have meanings are therefore assigned one (and despised in the process). Even more paradoxically the middle classes might well conspire with elements of any other group to invent new system or rules by which the ‘disadvantaged’ might be allowed to articulate significance to each other. This is surely what is happening with ‘celebrity culture’ and ‘Big Brother’. An alternative algebra of gesture is being given a reality. However this reality will of course only produce derision amongst the governing gesturing classes. This because this ‘plebeian’ domain lacks the fig leaf of education, an apparent erudition that typifies the middle class game. The threadbare nature of the entire enterprise is therefore revealed in fairly crude form. It is therefore opened up to be condemned out of hand, and condemned by those individuals who are only half aware that they are a party in very the much the same game…
The move to a politics of gesture or an algebra of personal possibility, in effect changes the gear-step of how a country needs to be governed. To govern is to govern in the light of the dream which individuals have about their lives. The fact then that most of these dreams are mere gestures or greedy vapid wondering is beside the point. In a democracy it is these vapid wanderings of thought that actually decide who is elected and who is not. Politics is the manipulation of just such fantasies and it would be a suicidal politician who behaved or even thought, otherwise. One needs then to govern in the light of realized and realizable personal aspirations of a large number of the people.
This last point is in a sense rather ironic. Existentialism began life as a system which allowed for individual choice. It attempted therefore to create a rubric for allowing humans choice and giving them choice in the face of the meaninglessness of actual existence. Perhaps a noble aim. But its effect is however to have stripped out all actual value or meaning within the wider political domain. Politics is mere gesture and lacks any cogency or axis for meaning to function adequately within. It becomes essentially meaningless and does so at just the point when elsewhere on the global level there is a threat that would appear to push us beyond the existential orbit. That is, there is a demand elsewhere that we reunite the domain of meaning and death (and so once again understand our lives in terms of life and death choices). It is therefore no wonder that our current crop of politicians (and their attendant Media crows) cannot easily allow for this threat. It goes against the essential and individual thread that has been one of the main tenets of post-war politics. However it is of course not the only tenet. Immediately after the War, a collective welfare state was envisaged and (in part) enacted. It is to consider this other take on the individual and the other domain of justice that infuses such a take, that the next Rant will turn.
