Ex Post Facto

Reading: Curtis White, The Spirit of Disobedience (Sausalito: PoliPointPress, 2007), 69-119.

This book is a work of criticism, and, as such, it forces us to confront ugliness. But White clearly also intends it as a work of hope. (Ignoring ugliness, surrendering to it, is an act of despair — which in the Christian tradition has often been called an “unpardonable sin.”) In calling us to imagine an alternative future to the one promised (threatened?) by consumer capitalism, White may seem to be tilting at windmills. As Wendell Berry once argued, however, “Hope lives in the means, not the end.” (See his essay “Discipline and Hope,” in A Continuous Harmony.) Berry later elaborated: “Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one’s own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.” (See “A Poem of Difficult Hope” in What are People For?) White’s “spirit of disobedience” means not only not acquiescing but also self-consciously building an alternative.

In chapter 3, “Confessions of a Holy Whore,” White addresses “The difficulty of finding a political ‘outside’ innocent of complicity,” given the uncanny ability of the system to “internalize” and “digest” dissent (73). White explores the films of Rainer Fassbinder as an attempt to create this “outside,” which could then serve as a springboard for promoting an alternate world. He also confesses, as the title suggests, that he is a holy whore himself, implicated in the very system that he critiques (78). As in earlier chapters, White here dishes out criticism aplenty of both liberals and conservatives in America. His larger point is that both parties of our two-party system are servants to “the one great Party of Business” (85), which is to say that they are bound in the worst way to preserving the “spiritually bankrupt” status quo (81). The reigning order, White suggests, knows one rule: “the Market Knows Best” (93). It is the order of industrial (and presumably post-industrial) capitalism, which brings us the “strip mine” and the “strip mall,” and which is engaged in long process of making the world over in its image. In the last several pages of this chapter, White proposes his ethical alternative to the enfeebled “Golden Rule” — he enjoins us to imagine and create an alternative vision of the future.

In the 4th and title chapter of his book, White pulls together his plea for disobedience. Here, he maps out the complex relationships among Christianity, Enlightenment, capitalism, Marxism, and “Imagination” in American culture. I’ll attempt to encapsulate his criticism, but it needs unpacking: Americans have been distracted by a red herring binarism, the alleged contest between Christianity and Enlightenment. Meanwhile, the deathly spirit of capitalism has virtually won the field. Marxist-Leninism has not proven out as a viable alternative (it’s worth discussing why). Surveying the mess, White proposes a third way, a third principle that might rescue the best qualities of Christianity and Enlightenment. This third way is what White — drawing on William Blake and Ralph Waldo Emerson — calls “Imagination” (104).

Imagination for White is essentially the spiritual. It’s the creative power of humanity to make (and remake) the world in which we live. He does not map out a new world vision for us, but he does urge us to start creating alternatives that will allow us “a return to the fundamentals of being human” (113). In the spirit of two of his intellectual models, Henry David Thoreau and John Ruskin, White proposes a “new fundamentalism” centered on the question: “What does it mean to be a human being?” (113). One thing it means, surely, is to be alive, and thus in his epilogue, White writes of our need to be loyal to life (161).

I queried White about his use of the word spiritual, and he provided a very provocative response:

I mean intuition in … the Emersonian context.  What I’ve been trying to describe is a synthesis of the American Transcendentalist and the American Pragmatist traditions.  That’s what it comes down to.  By this description, Nietzsche was the purest American, an idea I like a lot (especially given his own fondness for Emersonian individualism.)  A homemade sublime.  Intuition is first the recognition of the falsity of the world you happen to have been born into, of the pastiche of reassuring lies that we’re asked to live in. It is, second, the recognition that this is not reason for despair or nihilism but for claiming your right to make, both individually and socially, your own world.  Every artist worthy of the name understands this.  Which is why Nietzsche and Emerson honored them above all others.  They have essentially opted on what William James called “the American bitch Goddess, success.”  They prefer a wealth that is spiritual.  Nietzsche had a vision of Jesus and it was this, “We are all the sons and daughters of God.  Live like it.” — Curtis White, email to David Voelker, 12/8/07

When prompted, White confirmed for me that his understanding of the spiritual was decidedly unsupernatural, but with a twist. He sense of the spiritual, he said, was:

Absolutely not supernatural, but with the good sense to be respectfully in awe at the miracle of being, as per the deists, Voltaire et al.  (Voltaire, another of Nietzshe’s favorites.)  — Curtis White, email to David Voelker, 12/10/07

This sense of awe or reverence of life, then, seems to be White’s starting point for imagining an alternative to the status quo. Rather than stopping with this point, however, White concludes his book with a series of interviews about time, home, and food — three of the fundamentals that he connects to being human. Although I don’t have time to discuss these interviews here, I think that they are an important part of the book, because they illustrate that what White is calling for is within reach.

As I see it, the concluding chapters of the book raise several key questions:

1. Why is White so hard on the liberal and conservative punditcracy? Why does he find them harmful?
2. What is the problem with corporate capitalism? Why has White made it the chief villain of his book? Are his criticisms justified?
3. In the end, what does White seem to think of the political left and its guiding philosophy of Marxism?
4. What is White’s positive or hopeful vision of the future? Does it have anything in common with the pragmatic and transcendental traditions that we have studied? Is it satisfying?

— D. Voelker

Reading: Curtis White, The Spirit of Disobedience: Resisting the Charms of Fake Politics, Mindless Consumption, and the Culture of Total Work (Sausalito: PoliPointPress, 2007), 19-68.

This selection of White’s book includes two chapters, which I will take up separately.

In chapter 2, “Imagination Dead Imagine,” White begins to formulate a “spirit of disobedience” by looking at the spiritual role of art. Over the course of the chapter, he considers four main artistic expressions, including the film Office Space, the novel The Da Vinci Code, Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, and the film Brokeback Mountain. Interesting, while he defends Hamlet and Brokeback as authentic art, he condemns Office Space and the Code as betrayals of art. The latter two works, in fact, White sees as representative of a “self-disciplining” or self censorship, which is another way to say that they are sell-outs (21). He chose these two contemporary blockbusters for criticism, however, because they both exhibit a certain subversive potential, which he pretty persuasively argues that they betray. I want to save a more detailed dicussion of his criticism for class, but it’s worth noting that White uses Office Space to elucidate “our” fear-hate relationship with what he calls the “corporate life-world” (24), and he uses the Code as a way to point to our spiritual impoverishment. His criticism of these two works (and his positive analyses of Hamlet and Brokeback) plays a key role in his larger critique of American culture. In short, we should pay attention to what White is saying about good art and fraudulent art.

Chapter 3, “Beyond the Golden Rule,” is a more trying chapter to read — especially if one doesn’t share White’s hostility toward the status quo — because he shifts from a critique of our culture’s art to our overall way of life. Although White unleashes attacks here on Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, U.S. foreign policy, and Wal-Mart, it’s important to note that the chapter is not in any simple way a liberal screed or rant. Yes, White’s targets in the chapter are common subjects of liberal criticism, but he uses the chapter to make a larger point that transcends the liberal-conservative divide. In a nutshell, he is arguing that the Golden Rule of Christianity is “unavailable to us in the present” (27). The various segments of this argument deserve consideration, but he introduces one concept that seems central to the chapter and the book: the idea of “radical evil” (48).

These two chapters leave us with a great deal to discuss, so let me close by raising just a few of questions.

1. Why does White see Office Space and The Da Vinci Code as betrayals? What do they betray?
2. How does White define real art? How does art fit with his larger concept of disobedience?
3. What does White mean by “radical evil,” and how does the concept play into his argument about the current inaccessibility of the Golden Rule?

— D. Voelker

Reading: Curtis White, The Spirit of Disobedience: Resisting the Charms of Fake Politics, Mindless Consumption, and the Culture of Total Work (Sausalito: PoliPointPress, 2007), 1-18.

(By way of introduction to the book, see also my brief interview of Curtis White.)

Curtis White, writer and Distinguished Professor of English at Illinois State University, begins this provocative work of criticism with a couple of questions about “purportedly secular liberalism, confidently established in the powers of Reason.” He asks: “Is [secular liberalism] really so free of the religious prejudices and superstition it has always claimed to despise? Has it no need for the spiritual?” (2). White seems to be writing primarily for a “liberal” — that is to say, progressive — audience, but he quickly challenges common liberal assumptions regarding the role of Reason in creating a better society. Reason, he suggests, boils down to a tool through which society extorts obedience from its members (9). Reason has become a cult, or an idol, that stifles not only thought but also creativity and justice. He thus offers this book as a reflection on the “spirit of disobedience” — a spirit that he sees in early Christianity, among other places.

White is not the first of the authors we’ve read in this course to question the conventions of allegedly rational (or scientific) discourse. In the “Will to Believe,” for instance, William James argued that the practice of science rested in part on faith, including the faith that science is worth pursuing because it yields a certain kind of truth. Likewise, Reinhold Niebuhr contended in “Truth in Myths” that secularists often smuggle faith into their worldviews in the form of an unwarranted belief in progress. Notably, neither James nor Niebuhr meant that science was illegitimate because of its reliance on these faiths. Instead, they meant to defend the right of religious and ethical thinkers (and believers) to likewise rest upon first principles that could not be empirically proven to be true.

White, I think, fits into this tradition of challenging those who would claim that science and rationality yield the only legitimate form of knowledge. He does so, as I mentioned above, by denying that Reason is a neutral tool for obtaining objective truth. There is also a pragmatic element of his rejoinder to Reason. He calls disobedience a form of “world making.” In defining “the spirit of disobedience,” he writes of “reclaiming” the world “in the name of that most exasperated human quality, creativity” (18). And what are the sources of this creativity? White refers to “an intuitive understanding of the good,” which he sees as ultimately spiritual in nature (17). Here, he sounds like an heir not only of William James but also of the Transcendentalists, about whom he writes favorably in this book.

By situating White’s book within these larger discussions of science, rationality, religion, and ethics, I do not at all mean to suggest that he is simply a latter-day James or Thoreau. On the contrary, I think that White takes us into relatively new territory when he suggests that “the Golden Rule is for complex reasons no longer functional or available in our society” (17). As we move ahead in the book, we will have an opportunity to assess that claim and to see what White proposes that we do about it.

— D. Voelker

Note: Curtis White generously agreed to answer a few questions that I posed about his book, The Spirit of Disobedience (2007), which my students are about to tackle. He responded to these questions via email on 23 Nov. 2007. — D. Voelker

DV: At the end of The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don’t Think for Themselves (2003), you suggest that imagination and art have an important role to play in changing the world. Can you reiterate your point, briefly?

CW: My feeling about my life and the culture around it has always been that I am/we are vulnerable to the “automatic.” To stay alive is to want to reinvent yourself at every moment. In this sense I am nothing more than Nietzsche’s boy. This culture kills eros. Nietzsche’s Dionysus reasserts it not through “sex” but through the impulse to make your own world. Fascism is the fascination of the already thoroughly digested and automated. Being free from that is a spiritual, artistic and political act.

DV: Throughout this book, you draw on various intellectual, spiritual, and artistic traditions from the past. What role do you suppose that history might play in helping us to live good lives in the present?

CW: If nothing else, it allows you the reader/audience to immerse yourself in one of Nietzsche’s “free spirits.” When I listen to Beethoven (or Radiohead), I think, “This is alive in a way that we should all seek to be alive.” It allows for a depth of spirit and emotion that our “administered” reality does not. Consider Theodor Adorno’s maxim: “Life does not live.” The job of artists (who, after all, are nothing more than humanity’s proxy) is to live. That always also means resistance of the status quo.

DV: You’ve written favorably about Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club and the pragmatic tradition that he elucidates. Do you think that you drew on that pragmatic tradition for this book?

CW: What I like about the pragmatists is the Americanness of feeling that we get to make up our own world. A homemade world. A primitive world, perhaps, but richly alive. Our “cussedness.” Not a European world. But what has happened instead, beginning in the late 19th century, is that we got “incorporated.” Literally, taken within something that has essentially digested us. You can call it capitalism or corporations or fascism. It’s the administered life in education, work and church and even in our most private lives.

DV: It seems to me that disobedience is a deeply personal and potentially lonely stance. Is there some danger that disobedience can lead to misanthropy or despair?

CW: Yes. I accuse myself of both those things all the time. But it is the inevitable consequence of saying “I will not be dead in my own life” while no one else around you seems to think much about it (or so it seems) and every institution seems bent on a world of death (ranging from boredom to poverty to oppression to literal planetary destruction: all at work at present for anyone who refuses to be comforted by lies).

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