“Cosmic Connections” by Charles Taylor

In this philosophical treatise, Taylor uses the lens of Romantic poetry to describe the human desire for a cosmic connection with the objects of nature and the world at large, as well as humanities place within it, across time and space. Taylor posits, “The human being is a microcosm, in which the order of the cosmos is repeated in miniature…. We need to understand the larger order to know ourselves, but we explore this order through the hints that we find in ourselves.” Taylor describes the tensions within modern society, “Our freedom required that we develop the powers of abstract reasoning, which objectifies our world, and obscures some of its meanings for us. This enabled us to develop a consciousness of radical autonomy…. But our complete fulfillment comes in a recovery of this contact on a higher level, integrating our gains of reason and freedom. This completes our self-realization…. The Romantic appropriation of these Renaissance theories moves the emphasis away from knowledge (scientia, episteme), in the sense of a clear, self-conscious (or self-aware) grasp of reality; it moves it away also from the kind of knowledge which enables control; it focuses rather on the experience of connection.” 

Taylor describes a realm of life that he refers to as the interspace, “the space of interaction between us and the world.” He continues, “Our attitude in the modern world toward earlier societies who saw themselves as living in an enchanted universe, where animals have souls, and sacred spaces emanate power, is generally one of dismissive condescension. These poor people were just deluded, projecting all sorts of wild features onto a dead, neutral universe. Once we grasp the independent status of the interspace, we can see that this condescension is misplaced…. We will not be ready to accept these earlier world views as literal truths, but we can now recognize them as earlier attempts to grapple with issues that we are not that good at dealing with, the more so in that many of us want to deny that they exist.”

Finally, Taylor invokes the concept of reenchantment with the cosmic powers alive throughout nature. “Post-Romantic poetry is a response to modern, particularly post-Enlightenment, disenchantment, in a broad sense. This broad sense covers more than the removal of magic forces and powers from the world (the original etymological sense of Entzauberung); it also can extend to a picture of the universe as the realm of mechanical causation, without intrinsic human meaning. Much of this poetry, and art in general, can be seen as an attempt to “reenchant” the cosmos.” Taylor concludes, “The “landscapes” of meaning we live by are never fully explicable by features of the world beyond our experience but have to be explained and justified hermeneutically. Many of the crucial meanings that our world has for us are only identifiable in what I have called here the “interspace.””

“Madame Bovary” by Gustave Flaubert (translated by Lydia Davis)

Flaubert’s most famous novel leaves a bad taste in the reader’s mouth. There are simply no characters worth rooting for and plenty of capricious, short-sighted, and disgusting behavior to last a lifetime. The eponymous character, Emma, is narcissistic and vain, bordering on evil. “The fact was, she no longer hid her scorn for anything, or anyone; and she would sometimes express singular opinions, condemning what was generally approved, and commending perverse or immoral things.” The bane in her life was her husband, Charles, the village doctor. “What exasperated her was that Charles seemed unaware of her suffering. His conviction that he was making her happy seemed an idiotic insult, and his certainty of this, ingratitude…. She wished Charles would beat her, so that she could more justly detest him, avenge herself.”

To that end, Madame Bovary’s first consummated adulterous affair was with Rodolphe, the countryside rake. ““Why, don’t you know,” he said, “there are souls who endure endless torment? They are driven now to dream, now to action, to experience the purest passions, then the most extreme joys, and so they hurl themselves into every sort of fantasy, every sort of folly.” The affair fizzles out, as could only be expected. “Emma was like all other mistresses; and the charm of novelty, slipping off gradually like a piece of clothing, revealed in its nakedness the eternal monotony of passion.” Madame Bovary, to the end, was consumed by a selfish imagination, devoid of all reality, “Ah! if only, in the freshness of her beauty, before the defilement of marriage and the disillusionment of adultery, she could have rested her life upon some great, solid heart, then virtue, tenderness, desire, and duty would all have joined together, and she would never have descended from such lofty felicity. But that happiness, no doubt, was a lie imagined in despair of all desire. She now knew the pettiness of the passions which art exaggerated.”

“The Art of Not Being Governed” by James C. Scott

Scott is a political science and anthropology professor at Yale, specializing in agrarian studies. This book focuses on Zomia, a land-space in Southeast Asia as big as Europe, spanning seven countries and over a hundred million peoples of various ethnic and linguistic groupings. It is a world in the periphery and anathema to all government.  The people within it have defied all attempts to make it legible, accessible, assessable, and taxable. 

The modern state has strived for administrative, economic, and cultural standardization. To that end, it has particularly sought legibility in forms of production. In Southeast Asia that has meant irrigated rice agriculture on permanent fields. “Living within the state meant, virtually by definition, taxes, conscription, corvee labor, and, for most, a condition of servitude; these conditions were at the core of the state’s strategic and military advantages.” Agriculture was determined to benefit the state machine. “Wet rice is, to be sure, more productive per unit of land than shifting cultivation. It is, however, typically less productive per unit of labor.” In an area where arable land was bountiful, but labor was scarce, this only made sense from a legibility standpoint. “Shifting cultivation was a fiscally sterile form a agriculture: diverse, dispersed, hard to monitor, hard to tax or confiscate. Swiddeners were themselves dispersed, hard to monitor, hard to collect for corvee labor or conscription.”

Throughout Southeast Asian history the most important trade goods were slaves, “the human capital who formed the working capital of any successful state.” Where arable land was plentiful what was needed was manpower to cultivate it. As Richard O’Conner put it, “effective strength often came down to a polity’s core, not the realm’s total size or wealth.” Wars in Southeast Asia were therefore, not about killing the enemy, but were slave raids on massive scale to steal manpower and take it back to your own state core to cultivate your lands. Wet rice cultivation maximizes the food supply within easy reach of that state core. “Grain, after all, grows aboveground, and it typically and predictably ripens at roughly the same time. The tax collector can survey the crop in the field as it ripens and calculate in advance the probable yield. Most important of all, if the army and/or the tax collector arrive on the scene when the crop is ripe, they can confiscate as much of the crop as they wish. Grain then, compared with root crops, is both legible to the state and relatively appropriable. Compared to other foodstuffs, grain is also relatively easy to transport, has a fairly high value per unit of weight and volume, and stores for relatively long periods with less spoilage…. Uniformity in the field, in turn, produced a social and cultural uniformity expressed in family structure, the value of child labor and fertility, diet, building styles, agricultural ritual, and market exchange. A society shaped powerfully by monoculture was easier to monitor, assess, and tax than one shaped by agricultural diversity.” 

States had a huge incentive to incorporate disparate peoples into their core. That meant taking people of different ethnic, cultural, and religious persuasions and subsuming them into the monolithic state. Easy assimilation, intermarriage, and social mobility were the norm. Identity was a matter more of performance and adaptability to the state regime more so than genealogy. The Hinduization of the monarch instituted an ideology that provided a ritual umbrella to the claims that the strongman had divine authority, rather than just being temporally powerful. “Sanskritic forms staked a claim to participation in a transethnic, transregional, and indeed, transhistorical civilization." It gave institutionalism and permanence to rule that had previously been based on a cult of personality and personal skill at warfare and leadership. 

On the periphery to state control there was always ungoverned land. This land was “home to fugitive, mobile populations whose modes of subsistence- foraging, hunting, shifting cultivation, fishing, pastoralism- were fundamentally intractable to state appropriation." These shatter zones, on the edges, were geographically inaccessible and had a vast diversity of ethnicities and languages within them. These areas were “locations of very high friction- swamps, marshes, ravines, rugged mountains, heaths, deserts- even though they may be quite close to the state core as the crow flies, [they] are likely to remain relatively inaccessible, and thus zones of political and cultural difference.” In Southeast Asia that often meant climbing higher and higher vertically to areas that were both easier to defend and were inhospitable to wet rice cultivation. Foraging at subsistence levels was an extreme measure. Small, scattered, unobtrusive plots of banana or root vegetables was preferred. Crops were chosen based on their quickness to maturity, the little care needed, and their relative indestructibility. Human groupings tended to be small enough to escape the arm of the state, but large enough to defend against slave raiding parties and to protect plots from wild animals and birds. “Cultivars that cannot be stored long without spoiling such as fresh fruits and vegetables, or that have low value per unit weight and volume, such as most gourds, rootcrops, and tubers, will not repay the efforts of the tax gatherer. In general, roots and tubers such as yams, sweet potatoes, potatoes, and cassava/manioc/yucca are nearly appropriation proof. After they ripen, they can be safely left in the ground for up to two years and dup up piecemeal as needed. There is thus no granary to plunder.” Stateless societies were, therefore, widely dispersed and physically mobile, able to fission into new and smaller units as needed, able to forage, hunt and gather when required, were highly egalitarian in social units, and were located in terrain that made them far from the state core in friction, if not in distance.

The peoples of the hills were not left behind by civilization. Most made a conscious decision to escape the reach of the state, joining a small indigenous population already there. As the state expanded further and further, those who wished to escape, in turn, pushed themselves further into the hills, away from the orbit of state control. “Their subsistence routines, their social organization, their physical dispersal, and many elements of their culture, far from being the archaic traits of a people left behind, are purposefully crafted both to thwart incorporation into nearby states and to minimize the likelihood that statelike concentrations of power will arise among them.” Joining the peoples in the hills were often those who had led failed rebellions against the state, those who were members of a religious schism or prophetic cult, those who were escaping diseased areas ravaged by epidemics, those who were slaves, outlaws, and criminals escaping punishment, and those who simply wanted more autonomy or were too poor to pay taxes. “Whenever a society or part of a society elects to evade incorporation or appropriation, it moves to simpler, smaller, and more dispersed social units…. The most appropriation-resistant social structures- though they also impede collective action of any kind- are acephalous (“headless”) small aggregates of households.” These hill peoples, far from being too primitive to write, often chose to discard their written language traditions. Literacy in the valleys was the providence of an elite- the royalty, the state bureaucracy, the clergy, and, most importantly, the tax man. It was also fixed history, where as the oral traditions of the hills allowed for flexibility and adaptability as situations and alliances changed on the ground. New foundation myths and oral traditions could transform and help legitimize evolving social structures. To that end, ethnicity was an amphibious term, with tribes and individuals shifting their cultures depending on the time and place they found themselves trapped in. Instead of the individual having an ethnicity, Richard O’Conner suggested that in Zomia, “where people change ethnicity and locality rather frequently, we might better say that an ethnicity has a people.” There were no distinct cultural borders, but an amorphous continuum, which shifted as situations dictated. “The interflow of genes, ideas, and languages has been so intensive and multidirectional as to render futile any attempt to delineate the various ‘peoples’ in terms of completely distinct bundles of geographical, linguistic, biological, or cultural-historical features.” Tribes did not exist so much on the ground as they were human constructs to make the people seem more legible from the outside. The stateless zones were defined by heterarchy- social and economic complexity, without a formal unified hierarchy. Scott, in closing, maintains that “hill peoples are not pre- anything. In fact, they are better understood as post-irrigated rice, postsedentary, postsubject, and perhaps even postliterate.”

“Missing Out- In Praise of the Unlived Life” by Adam Phillips

In this collection of essays Phillips mulls over one’s parallel life- the unlived life. He claims, “our lives are defined by loss, but loss of what might have been; loss, that is, of things never experienced.” These missed opportunities or forks in the road never really leave us. They are forever lodged in our brains as comparisons of and reference points to our actual lives. “In our unlived lives we are rather more transgressive than we tend to be in our lived lives.” Are these unlived lives the lives we really wanted to have? And when we interact with others, we are not only interacting with their pasts, but with the pasts they might have had- their own alternate possibilities. “Each member of a couple…. is always having a relationship, wittingly or unwittingly, with their partner’s unlived lives; their initial and initiating relationship is between what they assume are their potential selves.” 

Phillips begins by writing “On Frustration”. We do not always get what we want. What we want is often something that only another person can give (or so we think). “If someone can satisfy you they can frustrate you. Only someone who gives you satisfaction can give you frustration…. To fall in love is to be reminded of a frustration that you didn’t know you had.” In the end, this dependence on others and on the outside world to relieve one’s desire is bound to cause frustration. “Perhaps we are permanently enraged, taking revenge on ourselves for not being sufficient for ourselves, and taking revenge on others for never giving us quite what we want.”

Phillips’ second essay is “On Not Getting It”. “We might consider what it would be to live a life in which getting it is not always the point, in which there is nothing, to all intents and purposes, to get…. Getting it, as a project or a supposed achievement, can itself sometimes be an avoidance; an avoidance, say, of our solitariness or our singularity or our unhostile interest and uninterest in other people.”

Phillips’ next essay is “On Getting Away with It”. “The child’s first successful lie against the parents is his first moment of independence.” But when did getting away with it become such a good thing? “What is it like to live in a culture in which the thing people like to say is, ‘I got away with it’, in which this is a boast?” And do we ever truly get away with it anyhow? “The mind, at least in the Freudian story, is also the place where, as Hamlet remarks, no one ever gets away with anything. What Lacan calls ‘the obscene super-ego’ is far more scrupulous in its attentions, and more brutal in its punishments, than external authority can ever be.” Truly getting away with it means not feeling guilty- a culture where the sociopath is idealized, where “the clever would displace the pious.”

Phillips’ next essay is “On Getting Out of It”. But do we ever know what exactly we are getting out of? “Perhaps more often than we realize, we live as if we know more about the experiences we don’t have than about the experiences we do have.” If only I had done this, that, and the other, things would have turned out this way for sure. But these unlived experiences are often the bar by which we judge our lived lives. “It is not unusual, say, for each member of a couple to know exactly what is missing in their partner; and to know, by the same token, how their lives would be different, that is, so much better, if their partner would change in particular ways.”

Phillips closes with an essay “On Satisfaction”. The question is if we can ever be satisfied? If the answer is no, is the reason because what we think will be satisfactions when only wishes are not really satisfactions when lived in reality? Or is it because we have substituted out our real wants for what is available to us in actual life? “How do you know what your desire is? Is it that which makes you feel guilty when you betray it; not when you betray someone else, but when you betray yourself; indeed, for Lacan self-betrayal, the self-betrayal of giving up one’s desire, is the source of guilt.” The only life we can truly draw experiences from is our lived life. “What we learn from experience is that experience keeps stripping us of dearly held beliefs, about ourselves and others. We can’t afford to live as though certain things are true about ourselves. Our satisfactions have to be realigned.” Life interferes with our beliefs. Phillips finishes with an appendix “On Acting Madness.” It is important to remember, “when we think of the lives we may have led, there are lives we are relieved to have missed out on” too.