Author: Meng-hu

Asceticism frightens and repels modern humanity. Yet the original definition of asceticism is simply “self-discipline,” as in the ancient Greek sense of physical exercise and endurance, pursued for the sake of athletic achievement. To transfer this intensity of practice to psychological and spiritual pursuits is what repels moderns. Physical feats are much admired as sports and warfare. Physical self-discipline is far less of interest to most. Even more so is asceticism as rightly understood today.

The modern connotation of asceticism originates in Edward Gibbon’s sarcastic portrayal of the desert hermits of early Christianity. Gibbon’s portrait of deprivation, self-destruction and morbid fanaticism intended to contrast with refined and comfortable Enlightenment sophistication — his own, a corpulent, gouty, smug ease, disdainful of labor and physical exertion, apology for a civilization built on slavery and empire. The effect has lingered in an explosion of obesity, degenerative diseases, consumer technology, and the destruction of nature rampant today.

An asceticism that scorns modern values is therefore, by this understanding, disruptive, subversive, and revolutionary. Historical asceticism was a blatant rejection of the world and its values, but especially a rejection of Gibbon’s world (as it existed contemporaneously in the Roman Empire), and those who continually recreate and maintain it even today. Hair-shirts, sleep deprivation, and self-flagellation represent an extreme of asceticism. But so do specialized military training, sports doping, or even extreme sports endangering life and health. In contrast, fasting and abstaining from animal products is entirely therapeutic and highly ethical and serve as an antidonte to modern food habits.

The excesses of asceticism, East or West, were checked not by the religious orders or clergy but by the mystics, who knew that true ascetisicm lies in the mind, not the body. The young Shakyamuni went from worldliness to the extreme asceticism that he believed would purge the worldliness and its accretions lingering in him — a logical process if it concerned only the body. But his realization that the mind and not simply the body is the true objet of self-discipline led the Buddha to the middle way. The middle way is only “middle” in its assumption of mechanisms and disciplines, a conjunction of rigor and peace, of effort and simplicity, of balance — not in the Western sense of middle as compromise, vacillation, and mediocrity.

Asceticism is renunciation without loss of value, simplicity without loss of grace, solitude without loss of identity. It empties out the vessel as its content withers or evaporates. We do not cling to the disappearing content but retain the bowl itself, which is the vessel of self. The rest is that which others, including culture, have used to fill the vessel.

Historical asceticism is not a Greek form of self-discipline where reason is invoked as an arbitrator between warring factions. Eastern asceticism shifted from the priestly caste to the sadhus, whose emphasis on austerities was clearly more efficacious than prayer and ritual. In the West, Christianity’s historical focus on the turmoil of the body was due to the rationalism embedded in externals: liturgy, recitations, the absence of physical labor, fresh air, and the commication with nature that the medieval hermits restored. No rationalism is needed for the soul finely honed by meditation, nature, observation of self, and sloughing off of the ego.

Asceticism does not juggle the worldly and the transcendent, as if it had to leave the body in order to seek out the divine, as if the divine were not embedded in nature itself, which is the world without us. The mystic (and the solitary) never leave this seatedness, this grounding in temporality and the evanescent. They simply become part of it, do not fight it as the Greek connotation of asceticism suggests. Instead, they abide right through it, in the process discarding the pleasures and temptations of the world that make him or her appear to be practicing techniques, practicing asceticism. The practice simply becomes living itself.

Bernie Krause, author of The Great Animal Orchestra, is an affable personality and elegant writer full of anecdotes to share with a sympathetic audience. Officially he is a musician transitioned to audio engineer. Sound, he says, is “my mentor.” Over the years he moved from creating Hollywood movie music to the search for natural soundscapes, and this fine book tells his story, though the title suggests it is only about animal sounds when it is really much more.

Three basic types of sound are geophony, biophony, and anthrophony. Geophony is sound generated by the earth: wind, water, thunder, earth movements, typically. Biophony is sound of animal life: buzzing, howling, roaring, chirping, singing. Anthrophony is sound generated by humans, “the cause of most noise” from the point of view of the planet.

In turn, anthrophony falls into four categories of sound: electromechanical, physiological, controlled, and incidental. Electromechanical sounds are generated by technology, from tools to transport to appliances, all representing byproducts of industrial and technological civilization, all relentlessly coming to dominate our daily environs. There are fewer and fewer places on the earth that are not within encroachment of electromechanical sound. The hallmark of civilization ought to be music, dramatic speech, poetry and song. But, alas, for modern times it is machines.

In contrast, our physiological sounds are modest: talking, sneezing, coughing, breathing. Similarly, our controlled sounds can largely be managed: music, performances, incidental sounds like our footsteps, door-knocking, our rustling clothes.

Anthrophony, writes Krause, is noise largely because it is an acoustic event that “clashes with expectation.” We will never really get used to the constant purr of a computer, the roar of a jet, the idling of a truck, the claxon or siren of an emergency vehicle. Our physiology certainly does not, even when we tell ourselves it is simply modern life. John Cage went so far as to call the urban cacophony of the city music, as much as any other contrivance of human beings. But Krause knows better, distinguishing control as that which is still within the purview of the individual.

But in nature, where places without anthrophony are fast disappearing, anthrophony changes environment as radically as the human presence of technology appears — from obscure humming radio frequencies with presumed but less documented effects on animals, to the wholesale disruption of habitats as precursors to human destruction through mining, burning, demolition, deforestation, and fishing.

Krause refers to R. Murray Schafer’s assessment that “humans like to make noise to remind themselves that they are not alone (and to remind others, with whom they may have only a passing relationship, that they exist).” Sometimes this noise we make is desirable and we call it acoustic “information.” Sometimes it is not and we call it “uncorrelated acoustic debris.” Increasing evidence shows that undesirable or irrelevant sound or noise interferes with cognition, learning, concentration, and ultimately, with behavior. Surely there is a correlation between the increase of industrial and technological noise and the feverish desire of modern society for more — not less — anthrophony. Not only in media but from restless individuals to proponents of social and virtual networks and ideologies of control and production, the louder the noise the greater the imagined power.

Krause ably documents the identification of sound and the loss of silence and stillness (50% of the sites he once recorded as free of anthrophony are now lost, left only in his archive). The essential shift of modern civilization away from the past, away from nature, can be documented via sounds. Noise is civilization, and the history of noise is the history of civilization.

Krause concludes with a moving passage from a Nez Perce elder, which ends:

I wander alone only in the higher mountains
And the heads of the streams all the way through.
I’m never down anywhere where it’s civilized country.
I’m way up in the wilderness.
Years to come people will lose their only child
And they’ll have the feeling just like I have: sad.
And that’s why these days we are that way.
Sadness comes to us.

The late Thomas Berry (1914-2009) tried desperately to bridge the scriptural religions of the West (specifically Christianity) with an ecological or environmental spirituality. He was at times eloquent in describing the origins and nature of the chasm, the identity of modern enlightenment views of nature with those of he scriptural religions, the character of the ecological crisis resulting from a rapacity and consumption that views nature as an object to exploit.

But Berry fell short of fully comprehending the late awakening of Western humanity to what it has done to the world of nature:

In traditional Christian thought, creation is generally presented as part of the teaching on “God in himself and in relation to his creation.” But this metaphysical, biblical, medieval, and theological context for understanding creation is not especially helpful in understanding the creation of the Earth and of the universe, as presented in scientific textbooks of Art or life sciences. …

While Berry here identifies the origins of Western thought (he elsewhere adds the Enlightenment), he only says that its categories of thinking are “not especially helpful.” He does not explain why it should have thrived and conquered and remained the vehicle for discussion, the lingua franca of Western thought even as it reshapes itself as critique. He does not explain what drove (and still drives) this mode of thinking, how it propels all of the values and institutions of modernism, how it overtakes the very structures of thought, let alone the technology and social discourse.

Not merely unhelpful, this mode is demonstrably inimical, but tightly-bound to culture so that no logical gaps occur and no ethical gaps are possible, although Berry and others wish it otherwise. So tightly does it bind thought that even the self-conscious Western thinker cannot escape the paradox of believing that new revisionist ways of thinking about the same things will promote a reform, a solution. Hence, Berry hoped that such new theorizing would perform a breakthrough:

This new narrative enables us to enter into the deep mystery of creation with a new depth of understanding. It is our human version of the story that is told by every leaf on every tree, by the wind that blows across the fields in the evening, by the butterfly in its journey south to its winter habitat, by the mountains and rivers of all the continents of the Earth.

A lyric passage, but it does not show exactly what the objects of nature will teach Western observers — or, rather, what Westerners will in fact learn, despite having had centuries to do so, and especially now that the time left is dwindling so quickly and the effects loom irreversibly.

Nature teaches indigenous peoples, but only because their consciousness never renounced organic embeddedness with their natural habitat. Nature teaches Eastern thinkers because they are rooted in philosophy that extends back to and originates in natural philosophy and expression versus dependence on human reason. (Even Easterners like Krishnamurti overemphasize reason and logic in attempting to “improve” Eastern modalities of thought.) But the building materials for a Westerner are already inadequate, broken, and inaccessible, and cannot use the same categories and structures that got us here in the first place.

Alternatives to a disciplined natural philosophy based on ethics but also emotion and taking into account what we know today of culture and technology have not fully matured in the West, or the East given the character of the problems. Alternatives may include nature philosophies of Jungian or Gnostic or phenomenological exploration. And there are the literal applications of living simply that have no particular philosophical apparatus attached to them, if that is possible. But any effort at this point is likely to be contrived, manufactured, thought-out, hampered by culture and its vocabulary, even a philosophy of solitude that would reunite the human being with its source, however we define it, or however we don’t define it.

In a poignant passage of her last letter to Father Perrin, Simone Weil expresses “an absurd hypothesis”: that if she were to die without serious sin but find herself fallen into hell, she would not or could not blame God, who had always extended his infinite mercy to her in her earthly life.

Weil had already proposed that obedience must reconcile one to infinite acceptance. She makes a human analogy: a mother’s loves for her child is infinite and that joy is everything, and all else is “superfluous.” Yet that mother cannot infinitely safeguard her child from accident, circumstance, danger, or destruction. Thus, in the hypothesis, God’s love and mercy is everything, is infinite. Yet God does not intervene. The only relevant fact is God’s love. “The rest is the affair of God alone and does not concern us.”

There are complex themes to Weil’s simple hypothesis, but these were the sorts of statements to her correspondent Father Perrin that reinforced her simultaneous attraction and repulsion to Catholicism. Here God’s capacity to express mercy is thwarted, and God’s ability to intervene in the universe is unmasked.

But the “absurd” hypothesis is not incompatible with theological speculation; it is, however, completely at odds with the fragile premises of the churchmen about what God is. Infinite is the condemnation of one in hell, and irreducible is the universal order that condemns the given soul to hell. Weil only takes that premise to its logical or “absurd” conclusion, that God can condemn one to hell for no apparent reason (like Kafka’s antihero in “The Trial”) and one will have to accept that it is for something one did but does not remember or cannot deny not matter how absurd. Another possibility (which is perhaps emblematic of Weil’s whole life) is that the condemned stands in the place of others — not as Christ does in saving humanity and himself, but as the poor and ignorant condemned one who lives and dies in vain in the unconscious quest to save others if not himself.

What sort of love and mercy is this, let alone the proposition that it constitutes “infinite” love and mercy? Weil gives the churchmen the backdoor psychological (but not theological) solution: that obedience overrides logic, reasonableness, or discernment. Obedience is an infinitely compelling necessity in theology. Obedience overrides mystery — the usual kindness given to absurd or illogical or unreasonable behavior on the part of God. And obedience overrides love, or rather reciprocated love, like that of the child toward its parent. How many children really do not love their parent, given the complex of instincts and urges and identity frustrations that plague childhood? Obey but not necessarily love.

Obedience, together with poverty and chastity, became the third virtue of the cenobite, but must necessarily be transformed by the solitary or religious hermit because obedience is clearly presented by the church as a way of frustrating will, reason, and logic, even love.

Weil has exposed this flaw at the heart of Christian theology. And yet she resolves nothing theological, for the dilemma remains even for non-believers. Rather than God, we may say that the universe nurtures us with infinite love and mercy (like the mother’s love for a child). Over the course of millions of years, the universe labors to create us, specifically us. And in the end, the universe casts us into old age, infirmity, suffering, and death — our earthly hell. And we have no choice but to obey. The non-believer cannot even pray to hope to enter heaven instead of hell, cannot pray for mercy or solicit God’s love, for these have all been exhausted in creating the conscious creature that is a human being. And like the existential coreligionist, the non-believer joins his side in sighing, “Why?”

So Simone Weil, infinitely conscious of her solitude, strikes the reverberating chord that shatters the hope and acquiescence of belief. We have no choice but to obey, meaning that we have no choice but to accept our fate, however “absurd.”

What a gadfly was Simone Weil, even to the last moments of her young life, rabidly ethical and ascetic, rivaling any believers’ piety, outdoing many a comfortable saint.

I feel that it is necessary and ordained that I should be alone, a stranger and an exile in relation to every human circle without exception.

Travel always disrupts a form of identity. Animals always prosper in a given habitat even when they must rove within it, but humans contrive annoyance at stability within a habitat and long to drift here and there, in search of adventure, discovery, or idle curiosity.

The appeal of travel is ubiquitous. Homer’s The Odyssey is a perennial favorite of writers ancient and modern. The classic embodies adventure within an acknowledged requirement or inevitability of returning home to stability, identity, domestication. The adventures are tantalizing because we know that the hero, after pleasure, will return to a warm fire or dry shelter, there to savor memories. This is the masculine dream that mingles rakishness with the hearth, reconciles the raging and final denouement of both hormones and instincts.

An Asian tale postulates a question put to a Tibetan yogi: “How do you get enlightenment?” “Leave your country,” the yogi replies. Bodhidharma left India for China, and Japanese sages left Japan for China (but returned). How many emigrants have imagined a promised land, from the Hebrews of Egypt to those journeying from Europe to America, or some version in history even since? But is the yogi’s reply true?

A few sociologists postulate that the genetic makeup of emigrants and adventurers leans toward the same material rapacity, the getting-rich, the finding of gold, the embodied crusader, explorer, mercenary, or risk-taking financier. All live with the goal of movement, change, and progress, a value that came to embody virtually every scientific and social paradigm throughout the last five centuries. Even the average person is eager to see new things while savagely defending their narrow world view.

Perhaps the hunter-gatherer instinct survives in this ironic way. Primitivism extols the virtues of the untrammeled and uncivilized, making the point that, after all, look at to what brink of collapse and extinction technological civilization has brought us. But is this remark not the primitivist’s very weakness? — to have projected the wandering, adventurer’s restlessness onto what evolved from their eventual weariness as civilization. The hunter-gatherer bequeathed aimless extermination (several species were probably hunted to extinction by them), ever in search of new prey, to modern civilization.

The historical agriculturalist or peasant does not trust travel, or even the inhabitants beyond the mountain within their purview. Their distrust is not founded on animosity but is more akin to the animal’s instinct to maintain its habitat, knowing subconsciously that change can be irrevocable, that the place where one is presently situated can be the universe. Not that the typical peasant will articulate this, any more than the animal will. Nor will the adventurer reduce his restlessness to mere genetics, though he has clearly lost touch with the present and with nature itself.

Travel by bus or train (not on a fast and mindless jet akin to the fictional time machine) in a distant or foreign land. A sense of wonder may well up, translated now into a sense of amusement, alienation, bewilderment, or fear, according to vicissitudes of life that now prompt the travel. Comfortable people project a sense of extension, like the happy child who accompanies the parent without fear as long as the parent is within sight. Perhaps the pilgrim will be focused on a specific goal, regardless of circumstances. But the less comfortable may sense the inherent restlessness that strange sites project, a sudden rootlessness, a not-belonging. This feeling is deeper than the heroic adventurism of Odysseus.

The experience is not merely of being out of habitat or without a home. The experience can encapsulate a rootlessness embedded within life itself, within the universe, where everything ought to be home, everywhere ought to be habitat, at least to humans no longer “mere” animals, no longer dependent on the mechanics of life but on the mind’s ability to abstract ways of living. But except for the adventurer and the comfortable — and for the modern mind — this sleight of hand about being a citizen of the universe cannot hold up. We have failed to transcend our animal nature, failed to get to that point of consciousness that does not need anything, less a home. But in the name of ideology we insist, and in the name of progress destroy our very habitat.

The restless try to cheat the ill feeling, and many succeed, often at the expense of others who suffer at the hands of the hunting-preying instinct of the mobile. But the restlessness, which is rooted in religion but contradicts nature (which, however, we will never appropriate) is not a failure of evolution. It is only a continuity of animal being, added to which is the wound of consciousness. Our destiny is to always feel this restlessness, to always long for a habitat that is familiar, congenial, recognizable.

The biochemist Leslie Orgel once remarked that “we have no way of knowing anything about the possibility of life in the Cosmos. It could be everywhere, or we could be alone.” But physicist Enrico Fermi put the question more colorfully. If aliens had visited the Earth, he asked, then “Where is everybody?”

In fact, however, American scientists via the government agency NASA spent decades and considerable funds creating spacecraft (probes) to seek out imagined distant civilizations. The project intended to reveal information about Earth and elicit reciprocity. These enthusiasts created the SETI project, abetted by science fiction and UFO interests. The famous Carl Sagan helped develop the now self-deprecating Pioneer plaque, wherein was revealed the DNA of Earthlings, their solar address, and an etching showing that Adam and Eve were astrophysicists. A few years later, on a Voyager probe, grainy and unimpressive (by modern standards) images of plants, animals, and earth objects were added, plus the famous Golden Record, a long play record complete with stylus and phonograph, containing representative Earth music: Beethoven, Mozart, Chuck Berry. In space, we are frozen in time, and any recipient extraterrestrial will wonder what, really, we were thinking as a civilization.

John Gribbin’s book Alone in the Universe is not about philosophy but astronomy, and the quotes of Orgel and Fermi (but not the details about Sagan’s NASA input) are his. The book neatly refutes the cherished late 20th-century myth about extraterrestrial intelligence and the ambitious projects it spawned. Converted to more powerful telescopes, a fraction of that money would have yielded information about gases, liquids, metals, temperatures — the real foundation of information about life. The 1970s-80s obsession with extraterritoriality was the zeitgeist of the Cold War.

Gribbin’s telling evidence starts with the Milky Way, where, in fact, only about 10% of the stars are in the Galactic Habitable Zone, that Goldilocks region of favorable safety (from shooting objects), metals, and evolutionary space and time. Everywhere else in the known universe are fainter stars, hence lower metalicities for sustaining life.

Then one moves to the Solar Habitable Zone, finding liquid water, essential to life as we know it. Here temperatures must be just right (zero to 50 Celsius) — Venus is too hot and Mars too cold. Next comes the Continuously Habitable Zone of Earth, where circular versus elliptical orbit turns out to be crucial. The Sun is 95% less massive and more bright (hence more stable) than 75% of the other stars we know of in the Milky Way, which are red dwarfs already dying, or unstable binaries.

The relationship between Earth and moon is critical because it further stabilizes orbit and gravity, while the Earth itself comprises a magnetosphere via plate tectonics, something absent from virtually all the potential planets of the galaxy. Earth has a strong metallic core, which is hot but both sustains the spectrum of temperatures on its surface and maintains the Earth’s favorable tilt. This balance of elements further includes a cycle of greenhouses gases that sustains the environment that evolved life and human beings on its surface.

Thus the Gaia theory of scientist James Lovelock posited that life on the planet sustains the ongoing cycle, and the ongoing cycle sustains life. Disruptions like the Cambrian Explosion, however, show that this precarious balance is easily disrupted even on Earth, a process which never even evolves (let alone gets disrupted) on other galactic bodies. Life itself is, as Grbbfin puts it, an “extraordinarily rare event.” We are the interplay of extinction and balance, having evolved as the result of a “string of coincidences.” We have been on the planet a short time under the most favorable conditions, conditions never likely to evolve again. Our own doing, as technological civilization threatens the precious balance.

“The biggest threat to technological civilization,” notes Gribbin, “seems to be technological civilization …” assuming that global war does not do us in first. The next biggest long-term threat is an impact from space (Gribbin discussed what past and possible impacts these are or may be). Volcanism is another threat. One may add that with Fukushima, one can see a convergence of such threats quite possible, if not probable. With global climate change, the threat now gives decades left to the fast-receding balance.

So the conclusion that the stars are silent and that we are alone in the universe is not a difficult one to make. This conclusion only makes the book’s subtitle (“Why Our Planet is Unique”) a more urgent notion to reflect upon, for the reasons we are here, says Gribbin, “form a chain so improbable” that the chance of another civilization anywhere in the Milky Way or beyond is “vanishingly small.”

In both Hinduism and Buddhism, a kalpa is an eon of time — 4 billion years or 16 billion years, depending on the tradition. We now know that that is long time, enjoying a better sense of time from modern physics and astronomy. But even the traditional calculation could not fathom the complexity of the universe except to say — as says the Dalai Lama among others — that to be born a human being is the rarest event in the universe. And so it is. Thus realization that we are “alone in the universe” becomes a mirror to our solitary lives in society, culture, and what was called “the world.” And so we are.

To “live in the moment” has become trite advice in popular thinking, a kind of doublethink motivated by guilt, regret, or nostalgia. One looks back years and wonders why, at moments of imagined happiness, one did not devise methods of perpetuating the circumstances of that moment, of making them a permanent part of one’s life. What a trick that would have been!

But the effort would have been futile because we cannot craft the circumstances again, cannot freeze time. Saunter through the streets of an old home town, especially around the countryside, the farms, the factories, the railyards, the routes into the city’s heart, where everything was unloaded or disembarked, bought and sold. The ugliness one failed to notice in the bliss of youth is now glaring and repulsive. It is not that nothing good has survived but that consciousness tells us bluntly that it was always this way, always ugly.

Everything is part of a built-in evanescence, only we assign levels of solidity to our experiences and their settings. Age deteriorates the solidness, and shadows of fog and noise eat away at the structures of the past. Soon, like a rushing stream, time has carried away all the circumstances of a past moment we had painstakingly identified and assembled to our imagining. Or how could something be remembered favorably, yet gone away, while that which is dead or lifeless lives on wretchedly? Wretched memories, regrets, sorrows. All of this is clearly the stuff of art, which is a deliberate contrivance of memory, not reality. Hence the attraction of art, of art for its own sake since it cannot impact anything anymore.

We interpret the past from the content of the present. Our present adriftness is as misjudged as was the adriftness of the past. At least the past adriftness was ignorance, and it is well to remind oneself of that. But the present adriftness is but the consciousness of evanescence. And evanescence is but ignorance of a future reminiscence, something no yet occurred.

The trite advice of living in the present bites us. The present is the ignorant accumulation of past circumstances, or, rather, the effect and result of circumstances now gone, causes no longer here, but their effects lingering, seeping into the fabric of time and rending it slowly, inexorably. The only moment in which one can live does not remain; it is quickly scattered, just as the past on which we seize has been scattered but our distorted memory of it remains.

The present is but the present for a moment. In another moment, and then another, the present is gone. Like a candle’s flame, the light is destined to extinguish itself, destined to soon be the past. Memory, even nostalgia, lingers for a reason — because it is all that we can pretend to control, because we still need the light of the candle. As soon as we realize that we will lose that light shortly, panicking, one jumps into that rarefied shell of the mind that is memory, clinging there against the present. For that present, if it can be perpetuated, made to be free of content, insult, bad thoughts, memories, sounds — we understand it at once to be the only moment in which one can live.

Among salient points in Susan Cain’s book Quiet: the Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking) are 1) personality type in US culture was changed from rural agrarian-based values to values championed by urbanization and technology; 2) that introversion is not a failed extroversion but a distinct psychological reactivity that can be studied and objectified; and 3) introverts need to find a zone that best safeguards creativity and imagination in a world where the Extrovert Ideal (the West) is dominant.

Cain pleads the case for tolerance of introversion in society, workplace, and schooling because introvert qualities can better foster important social functions of creative and critical thinking, detail orientation, thoughtfulness and reflective forethought.

But the book’s summary of how introversion was eclipsed in the US by extroversion, from a culture of values such as integrity and character to a culture valuing salesmanship and glibness, can be made more robust. The shift was essentially that of capital’s triumph and the personality type needed to enforce this victory, first domestically through advertizing and fostering of consumption, then globally over the markets of the East where introvert cultures had to be overthrown. The process of imperialism and globalization hollowed out the dominant classes in the East in order to replace them with Westernized functionaries. The East was taken out of the East and replaced with the West. What Europe, especially Britain — succeeded by the US — did to India, China, Japan, and to Central and West Asian lands in an effort to dominant and force them to consume Western values takes on a new cultural perspective when considered from the view of cultural personality. In the US, the process was more baldly domestic because it was not foreign but familiar.

In this light, what can be expected of the hope that the dominant cultural personality of extroversion will accommodate introvert values or personality types? If the whole consumerist modern culture is oblivious to the fouling and destruction of nature and resources for the sake of control, what will change? Cain herself notes that when extroverts engage in risky behavior and the result is clear failure or destruction, they not only do not back off but accelerate the destructiveness, being “geared to respond” rather than accustomed to forethought and conscience. And that is the quintessence of what is happening today, with modern advanced cultures (of the West, or simply Westernized) accelerating self-destructive behavior — in finance, environment, war.

These observations are clearly corroborated by psychologist Robert Hare, who has studied psychopathy for decades. By definition, psychopathy is ruthless and egoistic behavior that excludes empathy in the desire for control, what might be ultimately considered behavior “geared to respond” in the most subjective and destructive ways. Unlike stereotypical versions of psychopaths being serial killers, psychopaths are cool, social, functional, and successful. Psychopaths effectively present a set of behaviors that are recognizable as aggressive in breaking rules, codes, and ethical expectations, but not necessarily criminal or illegal in what they do. They are often the culture’s heroes.

In Hare’s pioneering 1993 book Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us presented the characteristics of psychopathy. The important conclusion Hare made is not only to narrowly refine the characteristics of psychopathy but to observe them on a larger social scale. Hare followed up this applied analysis in his 2006 book Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work, the basis of the intriguing 2009 documentary film I Am Fishead, with the startling opening lines (spoken by Peter Coyote):

Imagine that the most handsome charismatic person stares you straight in the eye and says: “You’re special. You look good. And you’re good at what you do.” He seems to know just what you like. He reads your innermost thoughts, and you feel like you’ve discovered a soul mate, a deep intimacy. You’re experiencing one of those rare fleeting moments that makes life worth living. Ah! Before you know it you’re involved in a deep personal bond … with a psychopath.

The film examines corporate settings for psychopathic behavior, and finds it, easily. But despite apologists who might consider such behavior exceptional, the corporate sector is the engine of modern culture, and its values must thrive on a degree of psychopathy that is cultural, let alone those flagship leaders within who spawn crime, corruption, control, power, war, and psychopathy. Susan Cain discovered the heart of personality in briefly talking to students at Harvard Business School. When she explained to them the topic of her research, they told her: “There are no introverts here.”

So the expectation that culture and society will in any way accommodate the introvert is extremely unlikely. Better for introverts to follow the rest of popular advice and find a safe niche in which to be creative.

The content of psychopathy applied to a cultural setting is also confirmed by the historian Morris Berman, who popularizes the subject of US society and culture, his most recent book being Why America Failed. In some ways, Berman’s reliance on anecdotal cases of ignorance on the part of Americans has been well covered by critics and comedians. For example, the ignorance of American high school students who do not know the name of their first president or of what country the US revolted against is familiar. A medieval audience or a contemporary one in poverty might have been and is the same intellectually. The point must be that the powerful do not necessarily want an educated populace, a populace to question, reason, criticize and express moral indignation. Ignorance becomes a cultural introversion without any of the virtues. Such a structure is necessary for the execution of a psychopathic policy inimical to the needs of others. A seamless explanation emerges, an indictment as much of the lack of values as of the dangerous potentials of misunderstood or ignored personality types and their effects on humanity. The introvert and the solitary need not abide in waiting for society to change; the evidence is everywhere that it does not.

Music is the most evanescent of arts because, by its very nature as sound, is an auditory experience that requires memory, retention, and feeling. Unlike a painting or sculpture or even the contents of a book, which require vision (vision accounts for 80% of our cognitive sense learning — and are solid objects variously interpreted — music can be heard but must be reproduced immediately afterwards to confirm the musical experience, let alone the pleasure or positive sensation experienced. Audiobooks are a substitute for vision, not the equivalent of the listening of anthropological and preliterate times.

Of the other senses little need be said. Our olfactory sense (our sense of smell) is a vestige of evolution and only serves to warn against injurious or foul gases or bacteria. This sense seldom rewards the average person who is not sensitive at least to the fragrance of a flower or herb. Our sense of taste similarly keeps us willing to eat but offers only passing pleasures. So works of music have a hard time not in getting our attention but in keeping it in our minds.

To the solitary or the purist, music is a grave challenge not because it is the creation or contrivance of another mind or personality, and not only because sounds of all origins are always competing with one another for authenticity. Music is a human creation yet not capable of restatement as an idea. One can talk about its effects but not reproduce it (the music) very effectively, especially that of an ensemble or orchestra. Unlike a painting or book, music emerges from a Pandora’s box. We must allow it to overwhelm us for the moment, to dominate the mental faculty, and to ring in our ears with themes and phrases and motifs — for days on end if we make the wrong choice of music or fail to put it in its place in our daily lives.

To successfully carry an idea or sentiment, music must be the vehicle of something else, something higher, more sublime, or on the other hand, more raw and emotionally primitive. This duality is not so forceful in objects of the vision because these are mental reproductions and remain static. They require that we assign emotions to them, that we be “pre-sensitive” to them. We can control their impact on our minds. Music is spectacle or accompanies spectacles, from entertainment to war. Spectacles are not sustainable ideas or emotions, do not sustain thought or reflection but directly affect the spirit, saturating the cruder aspects of what might be called the “id.”

Music can accompany the two faces of human endeavor — whipping up a martial frenzy or delicately interpreting the heavenly spheres. In between, music can pander to a variety of nuances, but always through human emotions and projections of positive or sordid. This plasticity of music is present but less obvious in painting or even writing, where the object lies static and lifeless unless a visitor sees merit or is willing to read doggedly and be inspired intellectually. The arts are often hijacked for the purpose of advancing a raw emotion or contrived idea. They often have little to do with reality and nature, even when we intend to express them as such. Books, paintings, and posters can try to conjure feelings, but music has a physiological function that can bypass the intellect.

Thus a typical painting depends on visual satisfaction but remains ocular and does not reverberate in our minds until the associations with ideas begins. A book remains short of a cognitive experience in its complexity, especially if it fails to move us to reflect and merely thrills us for the time of reading. We need critics to convince us of a painting’s value and scholars to interpret the place of a given book in the history of similar ones. These experiences are second-hand or even more hands removed.

But with some knowledge, skill, talent, or interest in music, a new part of human sensory faculties can emerge or be elicited, bypassing the mere visual or intellectual and striking directly at a mood, an atmosphere, a brooding or lightness, depending on the music taken seriously. Some sort of music moves somebody somewhere.

Perhaps this volatility of music is why Nietzsche revolted so strongly against Wagner’s primordial music of tragedy, death, and redemption, which militated against the ego-optimism of Nietzsche’s youthful mindset. Not so much the music was Nietzsche’s source of offense but the person and ideas of the composer. He knew the grandiosity of the music made it artistically difficult to refute as art, less dismiss. He transferred his resentment to the composer himself.

This transference is the perennial debate of art: Is the object of art to be held accountable for its creator’s flaws? Should we judge art ad hominum? In Turin in 1888, just short of his breakdown, Nietzsche wrote to a friend of the marvels of Bizet’s Carmen, in contrast to the heavy-handed Wagner. He makes the analogy of debilitated senses, the plea of weak eyes against glare — a utilitarian complaint for a moment of rest sought, not a music critic’s case but one weary and impatient with weighty themes. A little light music was called for. Different works of art have their appropriate times and moods.

Yet Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Nietzsche are all passionately engaged with music as a tropos of aesthetics and philosophizing. They reach different conclusions, of course, and put music to different ends. Whether any given listener can endure the theory and will merely judge the music by their own preferences, dispensing with the critic’s futile interventions, shows us the subjectivity of music, especially when considering its popularization. Music today is largely utilitarian in being written to provoke a particular class of consumer to feel a particular subset of emotions. The phenomenon of the spectacle has become ubiquitous. Music is now the audio background to our humdrum daily lives and the places we frequent. With technology, more of it can be manufactured, separating us more and more from philosophy and aesthetics, more and more from silence and the authentic sounds of nature.

The Sky Turns is a 2003 documentary film by Mercedes Alvarez. The director revisits Aldealseñor in northern Spain, the village of her birth 30 years before, reduced now to 14 elderly residents. Alvarez’s well-crafted film places the village into the grand context of time, history, seasons and cycles. The countryside still reveals the relics of dinosaurs; it was the historic seat of ancient Numancia, where the Celtiberians resisted the Roman invaders until the end; the medieval castle was built by Arabs; technology and poverty left the village virtually abandoned save for the hearty few, including tenacious shepherds, but returns its ugly face in the erection of gigantic windmills to blot the hilltop vistas and speed electricity to the far-away cities.

A painter losing his eyesight is Alvarez’s metaphor for not just the village but for life itself. Each resident has become what the Spanish writer Azorin called the filosofo pequeño, the small, or humble philosopher, reflecting on life with a mix of stoicism and Unamuno’s tragic sense. They never speak loudly, never argue, are never in a hurry. They sun themselves in the plaza, where a 500-year old oak tree died, and itemize who still or no longer delivers food to the village: the bread man, the produce man, the fishmonger. A young couple drives their little car into the village square long enough to plaster posters for the upcoming election, music blaring discordantly from their rooftop speakers, and then zoom off, the silence palpably restored. A professor leads a tour group among the ruins of Roman villas, describing the history of the Celtiberians of Numancia. A hillside shepherd who seldom comes down to the village tells a companion that he was born among his flock and will die alone with it. The painter matter-of-factually studies the sky and the village landscapes with the aid of others’ eyes and a telescope’s lens of his own. The handful of men who are most closely followed by Alvarez look up at the night sky and reflect how for thousands of years people have stared at the same moon and stars.

The viewer appreciates the evocative images and stoic reportage of the filmmaker, neither sentimental nor giving in to sentiments of progress, hope, or social criticism. The sense of cycles is enhanced by scenes of spring flowers in fields, clear skies and green fields of summer with crickets chirping and winds blowing about, of autumn with heavy rains, darkening skies, and leafless tree, of winter snow, fireplaces, and echoing rooms casting dark shadows.

Juxtaposition reveals the sense of time: the old men tending the graveyard converse reflectively on how they thought they would be there long ago; dinosaur fossils and the projection of an imagined dinosaur is followed by gigantic modern cranes scarring the landscape to erect the menacing windmills; refurbishing of the ancient castle and tower as a tourist hotel, with the villagers remarking that it is for the rich, that no one will want to go there, and that a bathroom for each guestroom is excessive. At the film’s end, the painter works on a canvas for what may be his final painting, which is the final scene of the film.

Throughout the film, the sky turns, the wind in the clouds remains ubiquitous, and gives the film its structural metaphor. A hushed, reflective pace leads the viewer from scene to scene, negotiated by the seasons, like a set of tableau in a museum, except that the museum, however small, is a microcosm for life, for aesthetics, for the natural course of things.

An accompanying short film can be viewed before or after the feature. “Five Elements for a Universe: Ideas bout Landscape” helpfully reveals (or confirms, if viewed after the feature) some of the filmmaker’s aesthetic principles. The five elements are:

1. “Something called ‘place’.”
   Cities all look alike, but the landscape of the countryside is the universe, a universe.
2. “Things come from afar.”
   Memory, language, name, signs, all come from somewhere else. Even inhabitants, visitors, come from elsewhere. Living things walked here, and still do, and the landscape is eminently walkable, and can only be known by walking it.
3. “Time always returns.”
   Leafless trees in fog, geese crying out, a lone dog barking, the wind blowing — all signs of autumn entering winter. But then spring returns, sunlight and birds, green fields and sunny brightness. Everything returns; it doesn’t go away, it just starts over. Everything is a beginning. “There is no progress; there is no history.” Only metamorphosis, transformation.
4. “Words.”
   Words always return, telling the stories that have already been told and will always be repeated. This section has few words, but is primarily compositions of especially eloquent photos of the area’s past, and evocative images of the camera gazing at the landscape, the sky, and capturing the sounds of nature.
5. “Silence is necessary.”
   Words are spoken, with intended meaning, but the true interpretation belongs in the silence that surrounds the words and the land. “Only in cities is silence feared. No one could stand that the endless river of information, images, and sounds should stop. Silence is necessary. This place, this universe, surrounded by silence when we gaze at it, shows us its indifference in the face of our small and great tragedies. It doesn’t change its course. Only memory resists the silence of nature. As long as someone remembers, everything comes back again. But memory requires silence.”