I’m watching American Gods, and of course it is absurdly violent, and intentionally transgressive. He copied Garp, but the blowjob in the graveyard was new. So too the reverse birth of a Stereotypical White Male (SWM).
They reference, accurately, the Nordic practice of offering human sacrifices to Odin, Woden, Wotan, namesake of Wednesday. They would be hung from trees, where they died from strangulation. Our method of hanging is vastly kinder than the old practices.
In doing so, they reference sacrificial violence more generally. There is something in this sort of thing like a car accident, where many of us don’t want to look but still find it oddly fascinating. I was tempted to turn it off, then thought “well, let’s see where it goes.”
I have violence in me, of course. We all do. I need to understand it, to get to its root. And with violence of this sort, there is this crawling in the belly, this visceral something, which is qualitatively different from my workaday world. It is something fascinating and horrible. This is the darkness which dwells in all our bellies.
And I thought “I need to understand my culture, where it is.” And obviously media of this sort both reflects latent tastes, and creates them. Everything over time has gotten more violent, more explicit, more ugly.
I think this speaks to two things. First, it speaks to the sanitization of our world. In our society, we rarely encounter death. We do our best not to think about it. But then of course it spills everywhere into our popular culture. If you look at recently hugely popular shows, they were very violent, and filled with death: Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, the Sopranos. (or so I hear: I have read about them, but not watched them for the very reason that this sort of violence is injurious. Still, I need to Grok this at a soul level, so I am going to watch the first season of this show, then give it up.)
Ironically, perhaps, I watched a play last night dealing with the Islamic practice of washing dead bodies before they are buried. It is intended to be a gentle practice, which allows the souls of the dead to present themselves to God as clean and pure. It is an act of love, and a ritual role which some Muslims play, often over many generations.
And it dealt more or less directly with all the death and bloodshed in Iraq, much of which we were directly or indirectly responsible for. We certainly supported Saddam in his war with Iran, and we certainly armed him. And it seems we knew he would use gas weapons, which we may well have sold him: https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/08/26/exclusive-cia-files-prove-america-helped-saddam-as-he-gassed-iran/
And I think we all need to remember how much death and destruction happened to the Iraqis during the sanctions, during the second war, and during the large scale Islamist atrocities which happened first in the 2005-2008 timeframe roughly, then again under ISIS, which Obama in my view certainly armed and trained, knowing most of them were hard core radicals.
I watched the first ten minutes of the movie Pompei last night also, where Roman soldiers massacre a group of rebelling Celts, then enslave one small boy who survives to fight as a gladiator. He is eventually brought to Rome.
There is an interesting parallel between the Romans, who lived in wealth and affluence largely unaware, or at least uncaring, about what their troops were doing far away, and modern Americans. We do a lot of nasty shit all around the world.
Here is the thing: the anti-Americanism among the Left tends to favor war mongers, because the rhetoric used to oppose our wars is rooted in the belief that America is evil, and our system foundationally unjust. This, of course, is a lie. And people who see this as a lie react by reflexively supporting our wars. I did, certainly. Fuck these people, I said, we have the right to defend our legitimate national interests.
The middle, though, is gone. What alone will help to prevent these things are people on both sides willing to do rational, honest calculus, where we do not abjure our right to protect our nation, but also do not reflexively support wars in places far from home, where our soldiers kill and die for reasons which–if we REALLY stop and think about it–are not directly tied in any meaningful way to our true national security.
To my mind, respecting and loving our troops means giving them only meaningful missions, only asking them to risk and die and kill, for truly legitimate reasons.
I am not sure, even now, what would have happened if we had not invaded Iraq. Saddam clearly had nuclear ambitions, and he clearly had aggressive intent. Could and would we have contained him without the invasion? If he had gotten them, would that necessarily have represented an existential threat to the US? I don’t know. No one does. But we need to remember all the people we killed in this process. This is the least we can do. As Lao Tzu taught 2,500 years ago, even military victories should be mourned as a funeral.
Perhaps counter-intuitively, the anti-war faction would do the most to gain traction if it rejected its reflexive anti-Americanism.
The second point I wanted to make was a sense I have that ritual murder, ritual violence, is the expression of the action of the amygdala. It is the answer to the chronic overactivation of the fight or flight instinct, and that of shame.
In college and graduate school, I became fascinated by sacrifice, and very interested in the work of Rene Girard, who talked about this a great deal. What does it mean, for example, in a Jewish context, to take a sheep without flaw, bring it up on an altar, say a prayer, and then slit the sheep’s throat, allowing its blood to stain the altar? Nearly every nation of antiquity did this. The Romans, the Greeks, the Celts, and as far as I know, the Africans and Asians. Many tribes in the Americas practiced human sacrifice, including the Inca and the Aztecs and perhaps even those who lived in Chaco Canyon.
My feeling is that such sacrifice becomes necessary socially when a culture is highly conformist and governed by fear of being different. It is not natural to suppress your natural instincts, your natural joy, your own unique way of being. Individualism, in this sense, is the antithesis of the sacrificial instinct.
But when you live in fear, you live in rage, and you live in shame. All go together, neurologically. Perhaps I might call this the Satanic Triumvirate. When we hurt, you want to hurt. When you feel pain, you want to deal pain. This is the primitive part of our psyche. When you feel shame, you want others to feel shame. You want to lash out. To keep group solidarity, you have to engineer regular intervals in which this instinct can find expression, and ideally you want that expression to reinvigorate group solidarity. Ritual group sacrifice serves this purpose, sociologically.
America, today, seems to be in a spasm of Conformism. Not everyone should be alike. Not everyone should experience the same conditioned responses, exactly, in reaction to the same conditioned stimuli. We are being manipulated, by whom and to what exact purpose other than power, it is hard to say.
The opposite of this process is silence and listening. All of us need to be alone sometimes, and we need to make contact with our bodies, which is the root of who we are, our literal embodiment.
I myself am often overwhelmed by what I feel and see and sense. I am a pool of water in a ceaselessly churning land. And I am still two thirds dissociated. To keep moving in the direction of awareness, there can be no path but learning to digest experience very ably and quickly.
In a radical shift from this dire description, I will offer a very healthy meditation, an accompaniment to the first set of Kum Nye lessons. If everyone did this every day, we would all be better for it. We would begin remembering who we are, and this chronic fear, shame and anger would subside.
May this nourish you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGvd9u1nt3I&list=PL75C38908CCDB5476
Edit: And I will note this post is outwardly at odds with my last. But I am not rejecting war, and I am not rejecting violence. When dealing with violence of others, sometimes violence in return is the only viable solution. What I am saying, though is that we all need to listen more. Being willing to listen does not mean giving in, and if only one side is listening, then peace does not stand a chance, but particularly for those on the Left who think all good resides on their side, and their side alone, I would ask: in the end, are you REALLY willing to give peace a chance?