Shadow Pride
A shot from Kurosawa's *The Bad Sleep Well*
Cutting to the chase:
Maybe it's Shadow Pride that leads to right wing arrogance and overreach.
In "The Old People", a short story by Faulker, a young man named Ike McCaslin kills his first deer and his psychopomp smears the deer's blood on Ike's face, initiating him out of kitsch and into the realities of the carnivorous diet and other realities.
What do neoliberal and MAGA fathers tell their children at bedtime?
Until a certain age kids are innately idealistic and fair minded, identifying with the cuddly animals they eat, and thereby at odds with their carnivorous diet, so Mom and Dad offer some equivalent of the gold decor in the White House--kitsch.
But then there's the hunt. The little boys are initiated. It's a game. It's bloody. Kids generally adapt and get with the program.
Eventually human blood is shed in feuds and battles.
There's nothing fair about it. There are winners and losers, and your neoliberal dad will make sure you're not left behind, little ones.
In the US, dirt poor subsistence libertarians identify with the hunters and neoliberal hegemons.
It's in this sense that the US manages to preserve the feudal values that Thomas Mann defended in his *Reflections of an Unpolitical Man*. The US is the place to be if you love feudalism. By now, the US is far more feudal than the EU. The US has slipped back into southern honor and jim crow to a degree that is utterly offensive to Europeans.
See also the film, *The Bad Sleep Well*. Kurosawa gets corporate feudalism.
The right sees liberals as sugar-coaters. The right feels it right and good to let the underclasses sweat it out. It's a reality no less brutal than being a carnivore.
They hated the New Deal, feeling it stifled business.
No, it didn't. Business thrived. Unbridled greed, unregulated or de-regulated always leads to disasters.
I'll take this moment to repeat the story of my 9-year-old father ready to gleefully announce to his Republican mother that FDR had died, thinking she'd be overjoyed. She found her in tears. She'd gotten used to him.
Frustrating, but the neoliberal fathers are not even wrong--ultimately, nothing adds up. Queen Elizabeth the first made a comment about sex, saying that there's no squaring it (where did I read this?). And we should think of Steinbeck's cinematic cuts to insects doing their pheromone things. I remember such in "The Pearl".
There are
childish liberals who never assimilate the shadow, I suppose,
but there are also
prideful conservatives who think they are the only ones who confront the shadow; they allow themselves to hold that all liberals are naive. They indulge in shadow pride.
No
There is a sweet spot in reasonable regulation of business -- the indispensable kinds of regulation without which we get the inefficiencies that made the corrupt American south dirt poor throughout Jim Crow era. Jim Crow now back on a national scale.
I could not have come up with the theory of shadow pride without reading TE Hulme's "A Tory Philosophy". Hulme's shadow pride is in his embrace of original sin, a concept I understand, but my late father and his Dawkins/Hitchens brethren despise because, true enough, such has been used by the church to manipulate and subjugate. That rot is now in overdrive. My son & I tried ot explain it to him, but he just couldn't choke it down. Out of respect for my father, I'm humble about original sin. Hulme strikes me as a bit proud.
Find a beautiful and witty example of chastened Shadow Pride in Djuna Barnes' short story "Aller et Retour". A broken mother takes the train south to Marseilles, thinking she has an ally -- a shadow companion -- in her very intelligent daughter (she's mastered her mother's dark tropes), but the daughter is not really broken. In fact, she's betrothed and set to live a happy normal life. Mother cuts short her visit. "What a waste", says the mother to herself on the train back north.
My sense of original sin is not so biblical. It's more in line with RD Laing and his *divided self*, or Sir Thomas Browne, who famously described humans as "that great and true Amphibium—whose nature is disposed to live... not only in sea and land, but in Leviathan and in Christ" -- Religio Medici (1643). Or pick your literary source. Parsifal. Or the Lurianic *breaking of the vessls*, beloved of Harold Bloom. I spoke with Mario Davidovsy about the breaking of the vessels. It's a deeper, more refined take on the expulsion from the garden. For me, catasphrophe is the gift that keeps on giving, a font of meaning. THIS: it has a holographic quality; slice open a portion of the noosphere and one sees such breakages running through the cross section. Borges would say it's everywhere and nowhere. That the church lorded it over its flock is not so interesting to me. For the moment I'm in no danger of being burned for heresy.
Hulme says he believes in original sin.I acknowledge it.I see it. For me its a gnossis. This can be gleaned from Harold Bloom's work. It's something that is seen which cannot be un-seen.
Another anecdote about my father.
He was briefly a protege of University of Pennsylvania psychologist Ross Speck and as such he hosted RD Laing when Laing came to the Univeristy of Pennsylvania. He gave up psychology after being convinced that this crowd was nuts.
Hulme, Hobbes, Burckhardt, and some of the Roman experts on tyranny that Burckhardt studied will all insist that humans cannot change. We find mention of "the identity of man" in these writers. Any suggestion that humans are perfectible is considered idle romanticism.
The lasting center of historical reflections is the concrete man, acting and being acted upon, striving and suffereing, the eternal man identical in his changing disguises.
-- Albert Salomon in his essay, "Crisis,, History, and the Image of Man", outlining Burckhardt's position.
I still don't know where I stand with regard to this pillar of conservative thinking. I agree with Hulme about origianl sin, but when it comes to right wing overreach I suspect pathological Shadow Pride is in play and I think of anthropoligical studies where tyrannical leaders are stoned and dismembered. Right wing overreachers need to be disciplined. There's nothing romantic about that. Eventually we see them hanging upside down.
William Anderson
I compose, play plucked instruments, run ensembles, produce concerts, and advocate for new music, I soaked up contemporary American music for 30 years, working directly with composers from all over the map. In the last 20 years I began composing works that draw on that experience, with a particular concern for finding a coherent way to make reconciling musics that were sealed off from one another. How to make embarrassingly simple and charming music work with the most complex musical modalities? Tipping in this direction has made me aware of the dangers of grasping too firmly onto any one notion.
I've come to Macherey's vision that our shadow (what we're *not*) is radiantly present in our work. So it's perfectly reasonable to *love everything*. We're imbricated. --
**The true necessity of the text manifests itself in the fact that not a word of it can be changed and nothing can be added, even though it appears at each moment as though a new topic could be chosen, an alternative narrative selected. But it is precisely this ceaseless shadowy presence of other possible phrases which could be pronounced, this ineradicable sense that things could have been other than they are, which enforces the constraining necessity of the text we actually have before us.**--Macherey