Photo by Zach Reiner
“If you knock out the pillars of a sacred order, at the primal level such a change is experienced by people as a deep and lasting trauma, whether they know it or not.”
–Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: the Unmaking of Humanity
In Freud’s own vision, the psyche wasn’t built for bliss but for something more equivocal—ordinary unhappiness [as opposed to neurotic misery]
–Anna Ballan, Freud in the Age of Therapy-Speak, The Hedgehog Review
Neurosis and creation… spring from the same soil
–Ibid.
“Things come to the poor that can’t get to the door of the rich… It is a great privilege to be poor,—one that no man ever coveted, and but a very few have sought to retain, but yet one that many have learned to prize. You must not…. imagine it as a virtue; it is but a privilege, and one that, like other privileges, may be terribly misused.”
–George MacDonald, The Princess and Curdie (1883), a children’s fantasy novel
Defending humanity? A grand-sounding idea, but how, actually, do we get behind it? Do we think about all those people deserving compassion – the indigenous, the victims of racist oppression, the colonized, LGBTQ people? Is it them we can strenuously, passionately defend? But something is missing in this picture. What about our white, liberal, resource-consuming, giant carbon footprint, globe-trotting selfie-taking selves? We who inherited the wonders-filled empire built upon the backs of enslaved people on land ripped off from Native people, left to us by the Dead White Men we hate?
Defending humanity without including myself in it? – what does that even mean? Is it too egoistical of white, liberal, secular, top-of-the-heap me to include myself in humanity that’s worth saving? Too “undemocratic?” This question, to me, gets to the heart of the liberal quagmire, to its fecklessness. The only conscious concept we (I include myself) can have of the good, it seems, is good for others. We do not see that leaving oneself out of what must be defended is the biggest ego trip of all! We cannot see where polite modesty, tolerance, and putting oppressed others first has gotten us. It’s all phony baloney. It is based not in genuine respect and esteem for the other, but in personal worthlessness, in servile egos that have adapted to worshipping the reality we’re given without any effort whatsoever on our part, as if it were God. And this, all in the name of not serving any God, or any master!
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The invitation to speak at the Utica Unitarian-Universalist church I received a few months ago requested I speak as a “radical business owner.” While I would not have called our coffeeshop that existed in Utica for 22 years radical, still the use of that term made me feel seen, not all that usual in my post-Cafe Domenico life in Utica, so, a little grateful, I accepted. And I got thinking about radicalism, and why it wasn’t quite the right word to describe our business or its offshoot, The Other Side arts space.
Radicalism in politics is generally understood to mean going to the root (from Latin “radix,”) of the social economic problem – i.e., capitalism – and thus calling for extreme, or revolutionary change against slower, reformist kinds of change. The problem with radicalism, even for those of us who agree capitalism is the problem, is very few people – that illustrious roster of heroes who’ve stood for truth and the common good, often martyrs, excepted – are inclined to take up radical activism. This was so even before these days of militarized police and jailings – not to mention shootings – of peaceful protesters. Many of us want a normal, family-centered life in the old way, familiar routines, being useful in some way, not a life on the lam from the F.B.I.
Not to take anything away from the heroism of activist heroes, or, on the other hand, to say that numbers are important. We can of course blame the attainment of bourgeois well-being for the widespread passivity on the left in the face of increasing and alarming threats to humanity and our earthly home; there is truth to this, hunger being spur to rebellion. Or, we can see that traditional radical activism, though it takes seriously the evil of capitalism, may be looking at the wrong “root.” Perhaps, instead of the roots of the problem we should be concerned with the roots of our shared humanity in cultures, cultures that are, and have always been “tied down by, and to, things solid, timeless and…lasting” (Kingsnorth), i.e., rooted! Maybe we are experiencing a different starvation, that of our souls, starved of cultural nourishment. If we were to feel that hunger, would we be on to something hearts could feel passion for, and would passionately defend?
For a very long time, influenced by imaginative thinkers like archetypal psychologist Carl G. Jung and mythologist Joseph Campbell, and most crucially, due to my own experience, I have taken it seriously that heroism is a universal call. Its call is not exclusively to some “geniuses,” but issues from the soul in every man and woman. The ‘call,’ I judge, is not first to challenge capitalism or rightwing extremists on the streets or in Congress, or even to redistribute the wealth, though I am as excited as anyone by what Mayor Mamdani is doing in NYC (i.e., with free childcare, etc.).
For liberals, we who benefit most from the economy as it is, and whose political stands of the moment are tempered by our privilege, the radical call is different. It is to regain the ground from which humanity can be defended by taking up the very personal struggle to achieve the fullness of one’s singular humanity. This very different, sort of “monastic” activism can only build, with patience and temerity and faith, from the ground up and will, by its nature, change what “activism” is. The process of dehumanization did not begin with the invention of the Internet. But the looming threat of human replacement by machine now seems a culmination, in the West, of our not acting to defend humanity, of ordinary peoples’ constant giving way to the mesmerizing siren song of progress. It was only a matter of time before those in whom we have entrusted our salvation, the techno-wizards – would provide a solution for the problems that have perpetually dogged humanity, keeping us predictably imperfect, error-prone, capable of horrific brutality.
It’s now or never if we will make the determination if humanity is worth saving. The crisis is real. It presents an opportunity for those of us who do not – for whatever reason – participate in radical activism. That is, for me, and others like me, radical activism will only be generated at “the root of my being.” It has to be in defense of something personally real for me. It has to be that thing that is something I would die for. Like many mothers, I can say rather automatically I would sacrifice my life for my children, an animal level instinct. But what about at the level of that which distinguishes me as a human being? I have found there is one thing alone I can say I would die for; that is the truth of knowing I am loved in my humanity.
For sure, in this matter of the heart I speak of a transcendent, metaphysical truth, completely unverifiable, esoteric, perhaps evidence of my weakness, unquestionably a sign of my vulnerability. As a basis for moral judgment thisknowing one is loved is related to, but not the same as, the truth popular in the liberal world that we are “part of the interdependent web.” Other than virtually, via Internet, the latter, euphonious truth is mostly not lived out. That is, if it were, if we lived with our awareness constantly on the common good, our nation would not be sucking up the vast majority of the world’s resources, contributing the most to global warming; we would not be living alienated and lonely lives (in)secure in the arms of bourgeois reality. If it were lived out, people would choose limitations, we would bring our way of life down to the sustainable, to “poverty,” to some form of “in-commonness.” Bourgeois attainments – TV and shopping and travel! – would no longer be the ultimate comfort. How radical is that?
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This “roots radicalism” could conceivably catch on, be a viable a movement on the secular left (though a paradoxical one, moving backward instead of forward, conservatively). It regains the passion, but not the dangerous mob appeal of a call to MAGA, or its related blood-and-soil Aryan nostalgia looking to a fuehrer to save ‘the people.’ A back-to-the-roots movement could happen, that is, if liberals can get out of their own way and allow in themselves the depth movetoward reclaiming and restoring their human roots. That movement is, partly, the kind of settling, and self-limitation in commitment to place and relationships over time made famous by Wendell Berry. It is, certainly, a relearning of human skills of cultivating, building and maintaining, a kind of voluntary poverty that is not simply “anti-progress.” It is not about women going back to enslavement in biological necessity! Or about being anti-science. But it must reach from the level of doing, where so much of what we “know” is second hand, a matter of agreement within our preferred social milieu, into the level of being, to the need of the very soul to feel safe and protected, that will, in its turn, gives one one’s own knowing.
‘Roots radicalism’ depends upon restoration of imagination’s place in consciousness for proper orientation in this life, a place it had throughout most of human history. In the world that’s had its sacred order knocked out, the bottomline feeling of unsafety will never be met socially, even among people working for shared purpose. It comes, fundamentally, in personal relationship with the Unconscious – i.e., with one’s own darkness, the spiritual crisis that gives imagination its humanity-supportive role. Herein lie the (sacred, metaphysical) roots of culture – a relationship with depth – and height- that can come with acknowledging the authority of that imaginative voice in the soul. Freud’s work opened that perilous descent (katabasis) into depth by means of the psychotherapeutic encounter. It made “ordinary unhappiness” possible (though not easy!) by continuous mental effort. One could live with less – with “poverty. ” That is, “things come to the poor that do not come to the door of the rich.
However, denial is so powerful, and so largely tacitly supported, transformational psychotherapy is rarely taken up except when an individual’s pain makes them desperate (and they have the money, or the insurance coverage, to pay for it). Thus most people remain ignorant of knowing that the way opened via one’s pain fits the term “redemptive.”
In fact, many of us have no way of knowing our pain is authentically pain! Not even dignifiable as suffering! It’s too easy to think of one’s pain as “ I’m just depressed while everyone else seems happier.” When acute, it can be treated with pharmaceuticals. As well, the semblance of psycho-spiritual knowledge can be had by more convenient means, such as self-diagnosis, and the essentially shallow world of online wisdom-sharing and influencing. Apparently even the psychotherapeutic profession that owes its existence to Freud, avoids use of talk therapy (in 2005, only 11% of therapists used it in their practice, according to Bruce Levine, in Counterpunch 7/10/26)!
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Our Cafe was a this-world embodiment of “roots radicalism,” a realization of the sacrality of place. Since its loss I struggle to regain my inward balance. For 22 years, I took its protective space for granted. Assaulted by constant news of bombing, wars, immigrant arrests, and with a share of domestic troubles, not to mention hazardous air quality caused by Canadian wildfires, I’m back struggling with the sorting out of powerful feelings that originated in traumaand are still there in my wounded soul. Only gradually, with great difficulty, since I partake of few of the distractions that keep so many people going in the “machine-syntonic” way, am I able to block the neurotic attribution of blame to myself, or, perhaps worse, nurse resentments. And to be clear, resentments against Trump are no less neurotic than any other kind!
I divulge personal information only to show this embarrassing, unworthy struggle with “the neurotic repetition” has valid basis in the experience of trauma. And, equally, it is preoccupation with self. It supports neither positive egoic projects, a la Mamdani, nor the alive soul. For us traumatized people, neuroses are the essence of being unfree, “the endless repetition of the mistake that mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.” (D.H. Lawrence). To be simply able to “love and work” in Freud’s famous formula, is not a simple matter! It is heroic challenge. And it has great moral consequence for one’s existence in liberal reality. Where denial of trauma is common, but the depth work that brings one back to “the soil of creation” is rare, we exist in a desolate, frightening, atomized horizontal context fit for machines, not for human beings. No wonder we are averse to opening that door to personal trauma! But with trauma left buried in the unconscious, the ego is free to make its preferred distinctions, at worst easily yielding to prejudice and hatred, at “best,” serving the liberal good that’s not good enough to build our lives in defiance of the Machine.
At this “senior” point in my life, to experience the saving awareness of being seen and loved “in the perspective of Eternity” demands of me now mostly that I use my “God-like” creativity consciously. That is, despite the 10 million misgivings my ego assaults me with, despite the urgency of the global moment and the multiple threats to human beings and the earth calling for radical response, the demand of the soul is that I practice an art that is my own, that I connect subversively in this way with the truth of my real freedom. It does not change my personal reality, that is confining beyond what I bargained for. But in allowing me to remember, in the act of creating, the discovery of my alive soul – I am provided with a reality unshakably counter to that of confinement; the equal truth that I am free, the wisdom in“ordinary unhappiness” can be attained.
