The Meno – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reads Plato through the Lens of the History of Psychology

Psychoanalysis of Philosophy text, Contemporary interpretation of Plato, Socrates, Meno

The Meno is a reasonably short Platonic dialogue that was my initial exposure to Socrates in my first year of college.  I have used this dialogue to introduce various groups to Plato, including a book club I belonged to many years ago.  The Meno includes a classic demonstration of the Socratic method with Socrates helping Meno's slave boy to “recollect” the solution to a geometry problem.  The frustration of the Socratic method is vividly described by Meno himself who calls Socrates a stingray for paralyzing him with his unrelenting questioning – leaving him in a state of not knowing what he once thought he knew.

But it is not just Meno that can feel paralyzed, but the reader can too – at least this one did as a freshman and for a long time after that.  By the end of the dialogue, I had lost track of the argument – it just felt argumentative.  Having Anytus join the dialogue at the end seems appropriate, as Anytus was apparently the Athenian who recommended that Socrates be put to death – and while I was not frustrated enough to actually kill someone, it felt like I was.

The dialogue is ostensibly based on the question that Meno asks, “Is Virtue (and some translate this as excellence) teachable.”  And Socrates immediately begins the confusion by asking Meno how we can know if something can be taught before we know what it is, so he asks Meno to define Virtue – and we are off to the races when Meno begins to define a variety of virtues – the virtue of a woman (including to be submissive to her husband), a child, an elderly person, a free man and a slave and Socrates clarifies that he wants to know about virtue itself – as a unitary concept.

So, I assigned this dialogue to my History of Psychology course because it demonstrates that Philosophers in general, and Plato in particular, are attending to issues that are quite psychological in nature.  Among other things, Socrates talks about sensation and perception when he offers an analogy to Meno about how to define Virtue as a unitary concept in the way that you define the edges of a perceived object.  When pushed on this by Meno, he ties the boundaries of an object to color.  This feels, to me, like a proto- Gestalt Psychological approach to sensation and perception.  Defining the limits of something by where the color changes is, indeed, one of the principles that the Gestaltists used to determine how we distinguish different objects from each other.

More peripherally, there is a section of the dialogue that involves Socrates bulldozing Meno about people really only wanting the good.  In fact, of course, people sometimes want things that aren’t good.  They want power simply to exercise it.  They often desire things that they know are bad despite knowing they are bad.  And, as a clinical psychologist, I am aware of masochism as a phenomenon.  I think that Plato may have been helping us see something about Meno – that he wasn’t really very – what we would call today – psychologically minded or sophisticated.

Meno’s opening question is, centrally, a psychological one.  And I think it ends up being the central question of the dialogue – “How do we teach another person something.”  In this case, how do we teach Meno (and Anytus) what virtue is, and how do we teach Meno's slave boy geometry?

The drama of the dialogue, I think, hinges around Meno’s essential inability to learn.  We are frustrated by Socrates because his interlocutor is not playing along with him, so he can’t teach him.  And we end up feeling, along with Anytus, that he is unnecessarily goading him rather than genuinely engaging with him.  But I think that Socrates tries to teach Meno, but he doesn’t have a willing, awake and curious partner, so the dialogue goes off the rails.  Plato, then, is trying, in presenting a dialogue that doesn’t go anywhere, to teach the reader something important.

The slave boy, unlike his master, Meno, takes the suggestions that Socrates offers and answers him genuinely and directly – including telling him when he is confused.  Socrates helps him figure out the square root of four – not hard – we all know that two times two is four.  But then he teaches the slave boy to construct a line that is the length of the square root of eight.  This is difficult.  The number – and I think this is important – is irrational.  We could figure it until the end of time and not get to the last digit, just like pi.  But it can be constructed and the slave boy does it.  In the analogy virtue – like the square root of eight – is not rational and cannot be written down as a number – though it can be demonstrated – it can be shown.

Now Socrates also pulls a fast one here.  He claims that the slave boy figures out the solution on his own – or more precisely, that he “recollects” it from a previous life.  But that’s not quite what happens.  Socrates constructs the line – he actually draws it - or calls attention to it – and the slave boy acknowledges that it would make sense to pursue that as a hypothetical after two previous hypotheses have been proven wrong.  Then he and the slave boy prove that the proposed line is, in fact, the square root of eight. 

So the slave boy doesn’t really recollect anything.  He takes some cues, follows them, and then determines their veracity.  He engages in a dialogue and then uses reason to ascertain that this guess is accurate.  A nice piece of learning and teaching.  That Meno takes this as a proof of the theory of reincarnation is, I think, a clue to us, the readers, that Meno is not as engaged in this dialogue as the slave boy is.

If Meno’s slave boy is smarter than Meno – and the slave boy has no education while Meno has the best education of the day – is the message here that birth does not necessarily bestow intelligence?  In this case, it is a particular kind of intelligence – it is the intelligence of having curiosity – and the intelligence of having the ability to ascertain whether something that has been proposed is, indeed, the case.  This may be a modern reading, but I think Socrates is suggesting exactly the opposite of the recollection theory – he is proposing that we have not inherited something divine from a previous life – but that we are variably equipped, regardless of station – to learn.  And learning means acquiring new knowledge – not remembering anything.  Another and perhaps more sensible conclusion is that the teaching of the day has not helped Meno.  He would have been better off not to have had the stultifying teaching he had.  He should have been taught by Socrates when he was younger, before memorizing what others think stultified him.

So if we agree that Meno is not as smart as his slave boy – meaning that he is not as curious and not as willing a partner - can we agree that he is not as virtuous?  The end of the dialogue ends up being a kind of proof by counter example where many virtuous fathers don’t teach their children virtue and no one is offering to teach virtue, so it must not be teachable.  I think that virtue – like psychotherapy – may be best taught to a receptive audience. 

I snuck the psychotherapy piece in there.  The best predictor of therapeutic outcome has to do with variables related to the patient not the therapist.  As long as a therapist is competently providing a treatment that makes sense – the kind of therapy that is provided or the kind of therapist doesn’t have much impact.  What has an impact is that the client is prepared to make changes and has the ability to do so.  Plato may be trying to make this case, but I think it is actually mine.  I think it more likely that Plato is saying that the other teachers have dulled Meno’s capacity to think.

Meno demonstrates, over and over in this dialogue, that he does not have what it takes to learn from Socrates.  Unfortunately, when we simply follow along, reading the way that we would read a typical philosophical tract, we will be unteachable, too (It is embarrassing how long and how many readings it took me to figure this out about this dialogue – I must be just barely teachable…).  Plato is encouraging us to become active readers – to question what is being said in the dialogue – to read this as theater, not simply as a description of “things as they are”.  We need to be awake and aware to learn – it is not a passive process.

So, is virtue or excellence teachable?  This doesn’t prove things one way or the other.  What we know is that if someone is not teachable they won’t learn – whether that is virtue or something else.  At one point, Meno and Socrates agree that virtue is knowledge – but I’m not so sure that I agree with them about this.  I think that what they are asking is whether someone is able to muster what is needed for a particular situation at a particular moment – and I think that is a very interesting question – one that I don’t have a ready answer for.

Might psychotherapy help with that?  I think that we hope that a treatment like psychoanalysis would do that.  I think there is some evidence that people who have undergone psychoanalysis engage in their lives more deeply.  The data I have is a bit of a stretch, but people who have had a psychoanalysis have fewer absentee days than people treated using other types of treatment and those who have not been treated.

Closer to home, one of the advantages of my own psychoanalysis was that I was able to speak in a variety of settings with less anxiety.  It’s not that I was an overtly anxious thinker before – in a fact I used to act quite a bit on stage.  But when I was talking without a script, I would frequently become self-conscious in ways that would interfere with my being able to think clearly – to handle a given situation in the best way possible.

Don’t get me wrong – I still screw up, a lot!  So I’m not sure that I would qualify as one of Socrates’ or Meno’s virtuous guys.  Though I also think that, if Meno had been more cooperative, he might have discovered that Socrates disagreed with him about the virtue of the slave and the housewife, etc., on a very fundamental level.  I think that what Socrates may have been driving at – and again I’m not sure of it because it is such a modern reading – is that we are all first and foremost human and that our virtue is defined in relation to our being human – rather than in relation to our station or role in life.  We either are or are not virtuous human beings.  On the other hand, I think he could be saying that if we are open and have a good teacher, we can learn new things. 

I think that Plato crafted this dialogue to show the astute reader that Meno – and perhaps more importantly Anytus – are NOT virtuous people.  The two of them didn’t get or understand Socrates at all.  This dialogue, then, may have been a very critical description of Anytus – something that it was not safe to do unless it was highly coded (for obvious reasons - if Anytus could have Socrates killed, he could do the same with Plato).  So Plato is throwing some shade here – and the astute reader, I think, can decode it and recognize that the fault – dear Anytus – lies not in our teachers, but in our failure to appreciate them.  Unless, of course, we need to have teachers who keep us awake…

Perhaps I like the first message because it lets me off the hook.  If it’s the second, I am going to have to up my game – my students do occasionally drift off…

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Madam Secretary - Seasons 1 & 2 give us a new view of executive functioning.

Madam Secretary, the CBS series about an imaginary Secretary of State, presented itself as the one last binge watch to be squeezed in before the beginning of the school year.  After watching series created Netflix and HBO that are much shorter, a network binge proved more daunting.  With over twenty episodes per season, we only got through the first two seasons before we reached the time limit – I may or may not report on subsequent seasons as time and interest permit.

Madam Secretary is a continuing effort to use television dramas to better understand the federal government.  The reluctant son asked me to rate this relative to the previous ones (he was invited to binge with us, but chose not to participate, even though he is interested in going into government some day - maybe he just didn't want to hang with the O.G.'s).  I continue to believe that The West Wing is the best of the bunch, though it is not without problems.  I liked House of Cards more than The Newsroom until National Politics got wackier than this crazy show and one of its stars went down in flames. 

Madam Secretary does a nice job of describing aspects of the work of one of the important cabinet positions – but the first two seasons have some serious flaws that leave it at the bottom of this heap.  That said, I have learned a lot about the functioning of the Department of State and how it interacts with Defense – and a great deal about the power of the president and the executive branch to affect our functioning in the world.  All of which is sobering when we have a president who was probably as unfamiliar as I with all of this at the beginning of his presidency and one who, by many accounts, displayed a lack of interest in learning about it.  It is also important, and I will talk more about this later, that this is a dramatization, and I don't know how factual it is.  I feel a little like I am a citizen of Elizabeth the I's England, learning about how my country works by watching Shakespearean plays. 

Just as the President knew very little about State and other executive offices when he took office, Elizabeth McCord (Played by Téa Leoni) had not been groomed for the position nor was she angling for it.  A former CIA operative who worked under the President when was the Chief CIA officer, McCord had settled into a role teaching politics at UVA with her husband, Henry (Tim Daly), a professor of religious studies at UVA who, in his former life, was a marine fighter pilot.  McCord inherits the office of Secretary of State when the former Secretary of State dies (we learn in the first season that he was assassinated) in office.  She learns on the job, with her staff being inherited rather than hired by her.  Her chief of staff (played by Bebe Neuwirth, one of my all-time favorite wacky actresses who plays this role straight) has dedicated her life to the State Department and the rest of the crew is rounded out by a diplomat, a speech writer, a publicist – all in various stages of their careers – and her personal assistant – dapper man of uncertain sexual orientation.  The device of having her learn on the job is not as well exploited as it might be to help us learn - and not hiring her staff (a la Seven Samurai and its many imitators) could have been done, but we get to know them quickly enough.

Meanwhile, at home, Elizabeth and Henry have three children, a daughter who drops out of college at the beginning of the first season, and a son and daughter in high school.  The impact of the transition from having parents teaching in the local university to having one of them be one of the most powerful and influential people in the world is one of the many threads in this series.  It should be apparent, with all of the characters introduced thus far (and I haven’t included the President, his Chief of Staff and heads of other executive offices – not to mention sundry representatives and senators) that the number of subplots to manage by the writing staff (Barbara Hall is one of the main writers, a producer, and responsible for keeping the whole thing on track) are considerable. 

The structure of the series through the first two seasons is to have a major overarching plot that covers the season and then to have particular urgent problems that arise within each episode that need to be resolved.  These get wound around the development of the sub-characters and the building of understanding of the family, the office, and the office of the President.  It is a complex and ambitious undertaking that the writers have taken on, and I laud them for that – and, for the most part, the writing is crisp, the acting is well done, and there is an urgency to the arc and a likeability of the characters as well as enough cliff hangers that it makes for good binge watching – even if the seasons are long.

The problems, though, are also significant.  Especially in the first season, the characters are very two dimensional.  Madam Secretary is just about perfect in her role.  Every week she is confronted with some new crisis that threatens to end civilization as we know it, and she, MacGyver-like, with bailing wire and a bit of chewing gum, figures out how to come up with an out of the box solution to an insoluble problem.  While this allows for sampling various aspects of the responsibilities of the State Department, it feels formulaic – right down to starting many of the episodes with an individual in peril who becomes known to the secretary who, in turn, drops everything to fix the person's problem.  While this makes for good television, it probably, in so far as it happens at all, happens at various places in the state department rather than at the top.  That said, one of the most orienting things I read about becoming the chair of my department was a statement that said something like – “If you are the kind of person who likes coming to work and having a set agenda and going through and checking things off, this probably isn’t the job for you.”  A lot of my work involved putting out whatever fires cropped up on whatever days.

I think that we struggle with reconciling global issues with the individual constantly on a political stage and in our personal lives.  Presidents are famous for bringing the cop who brought somebody to justice to stand up during the state of the nation and represent all of our first responders.   I think that the whole idea of a community - of a city and then of a state and a nation - grows from our sense of family - from feeling connected to those that we care about intimately.  The teeming hordes are hard to empathize with - and it has been very hard for us as a culture to translate numbers into meaningful emotional reactions to what is going on as the result of the use of, for instance, too much paper.  So a story about an individual person - or, in the case of the book The Overstory - about an individual tree, can be more moving than talking about thousands of people - or trees - dying. 

As much as I get that the days of executives get derailed by the crisis of the moment, I do hope that our executives are also working over the course of time to craft long term strategies, not just reactive responses to crises.  Shouldn’t we be thinking about how to manage the distribution of automatic weapons (I realize this is a domestic issue, but it is very salient this week) on an ongoing basis rather than simply in the wake of this week’s mass shooting?  The closest that Madam Secretary gets to this is the background story about the assassination in the first season and a story involving nuclear weapons and terrorism in the second.  There is very little reference to a set of principles - except in the form of various moral codes that emerge from Henry McCord's encyclopedic knowledge of world religions.

One of the problems with the backstories is that while they tie together the individual episodes – each of which is fraught with danger - they don’t provide respite from that danger.  Especially when binge watched, this show, despite being toned down for network TV, has a powerful impact on my dreaming life, with lots of dreams about calamitous situations – my own life, filled with its dramas (and the dramas in the lives of my patients) get a boost of oomph from my watching this show.  Elizabeth and then Henry have to go to treatment for PTSD, but I feel like I have to return to the couch for a tune up after too many episodes back to back.  Even though I know it is manipulative, real emotions are evoked by each of these melodramatic episodes.

The family backstory is filled with its own drama.  Stevie, the eldest daughter is, a bit like Madam Secretary herself, very much her own person, and she gets into perilous work and romantic relationships and manages to provide complications at home.  Ali, the middle daughter, gets a bit lost in the shuffle, which creates its own problems, and Jason, the anarchist younger son (and a not very likable character) bring his own complications - like exposing the dean of the Quaker school to be part Nazi.  Part of the issue in the first season that gets better in the second is that Henry is just too damn perfect.  I feel woefully inadequate in comparison to him.  He is supportive, does what needs doing around the house, takes care of the kids, teaches, writes a book, and stays on an even keel while his wife is solving the problems of the world at all hours of the day and night.  When I acknowledged my concerns about not living up to the standard that he sets as a husband to the reluctant wife, she gave me a partial pass, acknowledging that it is an unrealistic standard that he sets and acknowledging that she, herself, is no Elizabeth.

In the second season, the home life gets a little more real as both parents display their parenting and partnering flaws and the strains between them emerge more clearly.  In addition, both Elizabeth and Henry’s families of origin are on display.  Elizabeth comes from a background of protestant privilege, on the one hand, and deprivation on the other as her parents died when she was young.  Henry comes from a Catholic working class background – his father was a union organizer in Pennsylvania and their ability to partner and support each other across moderately wide ethnic divides – seems both less fantasy laden and also more authentic - though they are still unrealistically supportive of the others engagement with the foibles of their family.  That said, they become more likable with their vulnerabilities and shortcomings on display.

The final part of the show is the interactions among the members of the executive branch and between them and emissaries from other nations.  I continue to be amazed at the ability of Hamilton and our other founding fathers to craft a constitution that allowed a government they designed to morph and change and yet use the same basic elements to handle the level of complication in our current world.  I suppose the metaphor here would be the ability of our minds to develop across our lives into the complex entities that they need to be in order to manage the myriad duties and responsibilities that our modern lives entail – duties that could hardly have been foreseen by the Darwinian environment that selected us to become the organisms that we are.

In both the case of the government and of our own minds, we have the capacity to know and not know what it is that we are about.  Within the office, the specialized skills of the staff, while they overlap a lot, seem like the aptitudes that we can call up to deal with different situations.  We are, as individuals, consistent between interactions, but also organized differently when we talk with the boss versus when we talk with those who work for us, versus when we talk to our kids, versus when we putty that window that got broken when we were moving furniture last weekend.  But we also have the ability for the right hand not to know what the left hand is doing.  We keep things hidden from ourselves – the consequences of our actions – otherwise we might not act at all.  We can also over ruminate on our actions, and paralyze ourselves as we realize what we have done.  Or, like Madam Secretary, we can get swept into the next vortex without really having taken the time to appreciate what has happened just a second ago.

Also, like the mind, our government is not an isolated object.  The government interacts with other governments as we interact with other people.  The shadow player in this series is China – the player that seems always to be threatening us and holds the winning cards.  But the interactions with other "lesser" countries also seem to play out in such a way that the US is always on the losing end of every bargain – but we know that is not the case.  We are the dominant superpower.  I think we imagine ourselves to be the helpers and supporters of the world, but we certainly profit from the use of the rest of the world’s resources and labor.  And yet we seem, in most of the interactions portrayed, to be getting the short end of the stick and to secure what we do on sheer talent and ingenuity.

I think this describes our functioning as people – social psychologists point out that we have a self-serving bias.  We imagine that what we have accomplished we have done by hard work – what we have failed at has been due to bad luck.  Interestingly, we make the exact opposite attributions for others – when they do well it is because of good luck, but when they fail it is because they haven’t tried hard enough. 

But I think there is another issue at play in this series – and in all of the series about the federal government that were mentioned at the beginning.  Despite the multiple characters and subplots, the complications of this series are child’s play compared to how complex the actual state department is and the issues that are dealt with there and at the employee’s homes – on a daily basis, in much the same way that every character depicted on stage or screen is simple compared to the complexities involved in the psychological functioning of any actual, living person (thank God the actors are people and bring their own personalities to the parts that they play).

As brilliant as our founding fathers were, it is incredible that so much power – the power to determine the shaping of the planet and whether humans and many other organisms live or die – is concentrated in the hands of so few people.   It is sobering to realize how much we depend on the good will and hard work of a very few people.  At the same time, it is also the case that the organic entities that support those few decision makers are huge – and the complexity of the organic whole that we are can’t be represented.

The end of the second season is very nicely done – it calls attention to the tension between the few and the many – and emphasizes that, in an era when many of us are looking to be widely known, much of the most important work is being done by people who labor in the dark, in anonymity.  I am aware of the irony involved in posting anonymously in the hope of having my voice heard.  Analytic work, by its very nature, involves supporting the efforts of others to know their own minds so they can use them effectively to make the world a better place.  It is like being a mechanic for a race car driver or the executive assistant to the secretary of state – we are here to help others engage in their lives in a more fruitful fashion.

Addendum:
OK, so I have gone on to watch the first show of the third season and the centerpiece of it is to rework our foreign policy in a way that is consistent with our ideals as a country.  This leads to havoc on the campaign trail, but I trust that this will be addressed, because I know there are more seasons.  My question is, if the networks can air something that has a long run and has enough popular support to keep it on the air in a prime time slot - not hidden in some online niche - and it is presenting a radical middle course alternative that is ecologically conscious and politically responsible, why do our two parties seem to have so much trouble doing this?  Why does appealing to the base seem to mean appealing to the baser instincts?  As a psychoanalyst, I know how Freud would answer, that we are made up of baser instincts - but as a reluctant analyst, I would hope that our higher functions could outweigh those base instincts in the voting booth.

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1984 – Big Brother is Watching…

George Orwell’s 1984 was published in 1949.  In about 1973 I read this dystopian vision as a required ninth grade book.  I was somewhat convinced that this was a prophecy that could still come true.  It felt like the clock was ticking – but I also wondered what would happen to the book after we passed the date?  Would it fall out of favor?  Would people breathe a sigh of relief and move on?  Reading it in 2019, when it is still referenced, I am finding out a lot about my earlier self, the immediate post-war political scene, and something about the way that humans are built – and I’m learning something about our current culture.

By borrowing the book from the reluctant son, I also learned something about him - he read it two years ago as a required book when he was a senior in high school.  Inside, he had created his own depiction of Big Brother, which I have included below.

First, my ninth grade self.  It is interesting what I remember – also, I think, what I didn’t get or couldn’t understand.  They say that Shakespeare is wasted on young people – and sometimes I don’t think I’ll live long enough to get him, and I think I didn’t get one of the two big chunks of this book as a kid.  I don’t think I understood the political aspect – which is weird because I think it is the easier – and more problematic part of the book.  I think that I focused more on the psychological chunk.

Oh, I got it that there were three mega-countries that were always at war with each other.  And that war was a way of maintaining a perpetual state of ennui as well as siphoning off the resources that could have gone to improving the lives of the citizens.  And this part seems quite modern- prescient even.  Aren’t we always at war and doesn’t the arms buildup under republican administrations create deficits that prevent democratic administrations from putting social service programs into place?  But the standard of living that we enjoy is way beyond anything depicted in 1984.

What I didn’t get is that Orwell conceived of the world as having classes of people and that these classes were essentially different groups with essentially different capabilities and motivational systems.  Not sure how I missed this – it’s there in black and white – but the ruling class is really the only group that has feelings and thoughts that are worth managing and confronting.  This class, in turn, was divided in two.  The top tier - 2% of the population - really ran things.  The next tier - 18% or so the population - did their bidding as the white collar workers of the world, making the paper flow that kept things running.  Now I think 1984’s culture is, at least marginally, a meritocracy – people have to pass some kind of aptitude test to make it into the ruling class – where they will be watched and broken down – all while doing meaningless work – some reward for their ability to do well on tests.  But the utter dismissal of the proles – the working class – was a shock to me.

On some level it shouldn’t have been.  The working class has largely been dismissed by the British class system and Orwell is writing about his own Britain as he imagines it into the future.  I think he is also wrestling with the fascination with fascists that led to Russia, Germany, and Italy falling under the sway of totalitarian dictators who were supported by, from his position, unthinking masses.  I think there is a similar concern about the current move towards nationalism that is occurring around the world.  I also think, though, that we do a disservice to people when we dismiss them as a class.  Over time, I think they will reassert themselves and we will discover their humanity.  I would that Orwell had been able to do that, though I think it would have made this book infinitely more complex and we might have lost the central and most compelling part of it – Orwell’s psychology of oppression.  If, for a moment, we dismiss the proles as irrelevant, and see the struggle between the top two classes, with Winston Smith, the hero of the story, belonging to the relatively privileged but outer ring, we may get a better sense of that oppression.

I remember vividly room 101 and I even remembered what it held for Winston.  I was most appalled that it held what he feared – but that thing, as far as I could tell, was not something that he had ever uttered as a fear.  Big Brother – who is embodied in all those people working for state – but especially the ministry of Love – was able to watch the citizens so closely that they knew them – perhaps even better than they knew themselves.  Big Brother could read people's thoughts - including the content of them.

OK, I’m going to jump ahead of myself here, because the watching of Big Brother is the aspect of this book that I think is called to mind when it is referred to in contemporary culture.  Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Apple have more facts about us – they are able to track us much more closely – than Big Brother could possibly have done.  It was possible to get away from him (and we can get away from our phones for minutes, sometimes even hours at a time).  But today, even more insidiously than being watched for our capitalistic value, the NSA can tap into the same networks and can follow our every move for governmental – Big Brotherly – motives, if we are really of that much interest to them.

In sixth grade, I had gone on a trip to Washington with the School Patrol, a now antiquated group of kids that were nominated by their teachers to protect other kids on the walk to school by holding flags out into the road to stop oncoming traffic while they crossed.  As a reward for this unpaid before and after school work, we took a train to D.C. and toured multiple sites – including the F.B.I. building.  The feds wanted to finger print us.  I refused to be finger printed.  What if I wanted to commit a crime some day?

I think that modern surveillance (not to mention DNA evidence) is likely having a huge impact on criminal convictions and therefore on criminal behavior.  If home video systems become ubiquitous, what will happen to the rate of robberies?  Alibis are hard to create when your phone puts you at the scene of the crime and a security camera has a picture of you as well.  And the criminal world of 1984 has nothing to do with burglaries or even murders.  It has to do with thoughtcrime.  Thinking things that aren’t allowed.  And that these crimes can be observed and so must be guarded against so that we become incredibly unfree in our actions - we must do the best we can to hide what we are thinking and feeling - is what is truly terrifying about 1984.

If I was terrified that I would not have the freedom to commit a crime some day, how much worse must it have been to think that my thoughts could be crimes?  Now, this has gone on for a long time, of course.  The Christian tradition has focused on sins of “thought, word and deed” and we certainly feel guilty for craven thoughts that we have.  But there is a sense of inevitability to them.  We will sin, and we will repent.  In 1984, we will cease to have these thoughts entirely - they are too dangerous and repentance is not acceptable - the only thing that is acceptable is believing what we don't believe.

I know that I did not get that this book suggests that we could be shaped, or bent, or warped into having only thoughts that were approved of – and that we could be changed from being essentially recalcitrant to pliable extensions of the state’s wish and, indeed, need to be served.  I didn’t understand that this was what Big Brother expected and what Winston – our hero who, despite all the danger – who dared to do what was forbidden - ultimately caved to.

There are two tools that Orwell proposed could facilitate this.  The first tool was torture.  This is a clumsy and complicated tool – complicated in ways that I will explain in a moment.  The second tool is language.  If you can control language, Orwell implicitly maintains, you can control thought.  Until language is perfected, however, which will take a while – and I think he leaves open the possibility that it might never happen - torture is the tool that is available to you.

The State (Big Brother) wants your allegiance.  The greatest thoughtcrime that you can commit, then, is to love anything other than the state.  On the periphery in the plot are the ways in which the state destroys the bonds between parents and children – primarily by making the children the agents of the state who are even more keenly able to discover the ways that the parents – including by loving the children – betray the state – and the state - and even the parents - support the kids turning their parents over when this happens.

I think this is a weak link in the argument.  I think that Orwell doesn’t get the attachment between a parent and a child – and vice versa.  I find myself wondering if he, like our own John Bowlby who wrote about children’s attachment, was packed off to boarding school at six years of age (A quick search reveals that he didn’t go to boarding school until he was nine – and that his one child was adopted and never very close to his father, especially after Orwell’s wife died early in the child’s life – after which the child was raised by Orwell’s sister.  More surprisingly, Orwell spent a great deal of time researching, living with, and writing about the proletariat – especially the miners of England.  How could he dismiss them as a class?  But we have left that topic…).

More convincingly, Orwell writes about romantic love as a threat to the state.  Winston’s love for Julia, which is a vividly described romantic interlude (he is officially married to a woman he hasn’t seen in years) ends when they are discovered by the thought police.  Throughout the period of being tortured by the thought police, he does not betray his love for Julia, despite truly horrific conditions that change his appearance and standing as a human being.  It is his experience in room 101 that breaks him of this attachment and leads him to become a docile lover of Big Brother.

This horrifying aspect of the book is something that I don’t remember.  I don’t know if, as Freud might suggest, I have repressed it because it was so traumatic, but my gut feeling is that I just didn’t get it.  I think I was overwhelmed by the time I got to that point in the book and I was more enthralled by the mechanics of room 101 and the ability of the police to infer what one’s greatest fear was so that I completely missed the central point – that in the face of our greatest fear we are willing to sell ourselves out and become a shell of who we were - to become subjects of the state instead of individuals with our own subjectivity.

Perhaps I didn’t get it because, on some very deep level, I didn’t buy it.  I don’t buy it now.  That’s not to say that this wouldn’t happen – and that I wouldn’t sell out what is most dear to me to avoid that which I fear the most (and if you think I’m going to tell you what my biggest fear is, you have another think coming!).  But I think that I want to deny that can be destroyed in this way.  Ultimately I think we are more likely to be coerced, as Winston was, and, indeed, the entire population was, into a surface compliance with the culture.

Part of the implicit concern that Orwell expresses about the potential to keep the population under control is expressed in the relationship between Winston and his torturer – O’Brien.  O’Brien is one of the inner circle – one of the 2%.  Winston catches his eye and realizes – knows in his bones – that O’Brien is committing thoughtcrimes.  On the one hand, and this is never discussed, O’Brien could be advertising that - pretending that he is a thoughtcriminal - to catch those who are committing thoughtcrimes.  But I think O’Brien, who might be masquerading as one committing thoughtcrimes, actually is a thoughtcriminal – and must of necessity be one in his work as a torturer.  He has to understand the minds of those he catches and tortures and he has to think like them in order to torture those thoughts out of them.  The state both is and is not solid in its denial of the reality of the world.

Winston’s day job is to rewrite history on a daily basis as the facts of the present dictate changes to what has occurred before.  If the ministry of plenty has forecast something that doesn’t come to pass, the history of what was forecast has to be rewritten.  O’Brien knows – in fact he educates Winston – in the history of what has happened.  Through torture he teaches Winston doublethink – to both know and not know something at the same time and to choose to believe in that which didn’t happen.  To willfully repress, if you will.

This is a complex and inefficient system of controlling people’s minds.  It is also fraught with difficulty.  The O’Briens of the world have to be kept happy lest they swing to the dark side, a side that they are constantly in contact with.  The long term plan is to subject the people through changing language.  If there aren’t words to express ideas and feelings, those ideas and feelings can’t exist is the underlying logic of this process.

Orwell loves words.  He uses words in this book that I had never heard.  He describes Winston, when he steals out of London to be with Julia in the countryside, as etiolated – a word that is used to describe asparagus and celery when they are kept from sunlight and become unnaturally white.  And he creates words – thoughtcrime is one, but doublespeak, another, is accepted by my spellchecker as an English language word. 

Psychoanalysis is essentially a linguistic undertaking.  It is reliant on the ways in which the associations between ideas - but frequently between words - betrays layers of meaning - helping the Big Brother analyst help the analysand appreciate that he or she has engaged in a pun that has meaning.  To simplify language would be to take away an essential tool that is useful when people are collaboratively engaged in understanding the complicated workings of one's own mind.

The language Orwell, the lover of language, crafts is one that removes excess words.  There should be only one word where there are now two, or three or four.  And these words should not allow for the exquisite ability to – and here’s the question – articulate our thoughts and feelings – to put them into words – as opposed to our words producing our thoughts and feelings.  I think that Orwell imagines the latter – but I think, in fact, that we may not be able to realize fine differences and shades of meaning in thoughts and feelings until we can name them – but I don’t that prevents us from being able to distinguish, for instance, between teal and turquoise.  If we only had blue, we would still perceive a difference – and we would use adjectives – something that the language of totalitarianism would limit.  But I think that we are hardwired to make these distinctions and therefore, I hope, to overthrow the limits that totalitarianism would impose on us.  I think we have created language to express our feelings - not that language has evolved as our feelings have (though, actually, likely both have happened).

I think Orwell is in agreement with my reservation about his system.  Even though the ciphers are working on the twelfth edition of the dictionary, the language is not in broad use, even among those in the inner circle.  I think that Orwell realizes – as much as he wants to warn us – that what he is proposing is a violent suppression of the human condition.  In the afterward to the reluctant son's edition, written by Erich Fromm, who has written a great deal about our ambivalent relationship to freedom, Fromm makes the point that we feel freedom to be a burden and can be pulled towards the relief of being free from freedom, as it were.  He is applying what he, as an analyst realizes – that people, when asked to freely associate, resist that.  We want to know what to say – and perhaps even more fundamentally what to think and what to feel.  When we are not told this, we feel unease.  Orwell presents a vision of a world in which we are deprived of that unease – and it is replaced by terror.  Better the devil you know….

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Pavarotti – Ordinary tragedy is not always operatic

Pavarotti, the new documentary by Ron Howard, was not well- reviewed and so didn’t make it to the top of the movies for date night list for the reluctant wife and me this summer, even though the rest of the movie world has felt like pretty slim pickings.  But we decided, on a particularly bleak movie weekend, to brave it.  I’m glad we did – though I might have preferred to wait for it on video – some of the other audience members seem to have thought it was already being screened in their living room so they chatted about their memories of the big events and, worse, sang along with the best arias – out of tune.  I really felt that the advantages of a good screen and great audio were somewhat wasted.

Luciano Pavarotti was born with a great voice and he studied the art of singing as a tenor.  This film does a nice job of filling in a little bit about what that means without becoming too technical or preachy.  Pavarotti became an opera star for the masses, and this film follows in that tradition.  And it is a tradition that was established long before Pavarotti – the film starts with a grainy video of Pavarotti going upriver in the Amazon to an perform – unannounced – in an opera house that Caruso performed in on one of his many world tours.  And Pavarotti clearly desires to, quite literally, follow in his footsteps as he sings to an almost entirely empty house just to say that he has filled the house that Caruso did with sound.

Pavarotti’s father was a baker and tenor in Modena, a small Italian town not far from Florence.  He has inherited there the mantle of the renaissance, which continues to flow from and support the growth of the individual spirit throughout the world – and Pavarotti’s life oddly mirrors that flowering – and some of its decay – or sprouting new wings and losing its way.

Pavarotti only came to realize himself as a great tenor after he already was one.  And he seems to have kept some of his boyish charm and a great deal of his fear of being out of place as he developed wings that took him far from his roots.  Many of the criticisms of this film include aspects of his character that are not highlighted here – that he failed to show up for performances at the Chicago Opera almost as frequently as he performed there.  That he failed to live up to his promise.  That he failed to learn how to read music.

I think this film allows Pavarotti’s failings to be read between the lines.  It is a celebration of him, but there is also a fair amount of appreciation for his failure to have stayed within the lines of a career.  Instead, he seems to have strayed away – to have been seduced by a variety of sirens.

First and foremost, Pavarotti was seduced by the siren of fame.  He shifted from a primarily operatic career – and we could see this as a career where he would have been performing for the moneyed and cultured elite – using his talents to keep alive a tradition of emotional expression that they would have enjoyed in their cloistered spaces – where all the trappings of wealth are dripping from the walls and ceilings.  And he would have been a kind of lightning rod for emotional experience - a kind of vicarious bringer of catharsis to those who, one might argue, need it most as they have to live lives that are regimented enough to be able to dress for the opera...

Instead, Pavarotti was lured by a Rock and Roll promoter to sing to the masses – to become a rock star.  Which he did.  He sang in outdoor concerts that attracted tens of thousands - including the reluctant wife and her BFFB (Best Friend From Birth) who saw him and the two other tenors perform in the old Detroit Tigers stadium.  And what attracted those who came, over the course of his lifetime – 10 million people – was more than just his phrasing of classical arias – though that was part of it – but his bigger than life persona – a persona that is poignantly portrayed here of a gregarious, happy man who is also tremendously needy and insecure.  Someone who says, before he performs, that we are going on stage to die. 

So Pavarotti’s second siren is that his neediness and ability draws people to him, including Princess Diana and Bono, and he joins the ranks of the transcendent stars – the people who, in the wake of Elvis – have a worldwide following.  But he makes use of this in interesting ways.  He travels to China where he both performs and teaches.  He starts to invite rock and roll stars to an annual event in Modena where they perform and raise money for causes – most all involving children.  And he shows up – much like Princess Diana – to connect with these children.  To fold them into his bigger than life persona.

The third siren, that of women, is one that is treated with a kind of protestant discomfort which I find a bit odd in this movie about a Catholic man.  Yes, Pavarotti had affairs.  How can you imagine that he did not?  He was a needy guy, with the voice, who spent most of his time far from home – pining for it – making pasta everywhere, but also pining for the contact – the intimate contact – of home.  That he had the two long time lovers that were interviewed – and I’m sure there were others who were not so long term – but that he had positive and ongoing relationships with two women is, I think, healthy - though they were both younger than he and dependent on him.  But he was devoted to them.  What was a problem in Catholic Italy was that he sued for divorce in order to marry one of his mistresses, I think, more than that he had dalliances.  While the women may have been disgusted, the eldest reluctant stepdaughter's experiences as student in Italy suggest that the men would have been cheering him on. 

In one of the revealing moments of the film, an older record executive tells of his first foray as a much younger man, into the world of being a record exec.  He was charged with confronting Pavarotti about the fact that he was not living up to his recording contract – he was recording for another label – the label owned by his wife.  Pavarotti asked the young exec if everything was OK.  The exec said no.  He said that Pavarotti had signed an exclusive agreement with Decca records.  Pavarotti wanted to know what exclusive meant.  After the exec explained it, Pavarotti’s response was, “Life is too short.”

Now the particular problem was solved by having Decca buy Pavarotti’s wife’s record company from her.  But the issue of exclusivity is one that is central but not attended to in a direct way through the rest of the film, though a red thread connects it to the elements in Pavarotti’s life.  He fails in fidelity to his wife, to the record company, but also to the Operatic community.  By doing this, he brings into his life regrets – chiefly about the schism that is created with his wife, but especially with his three daughters from the first marriage.  It is clear that he loves these girls and now women deeply.  He also creates a rift with the operatic community.

Finally, he uses his gift to take operatic arias to the masses – in addition to the 10 million who see him live, he sells 100 million records.  Wow.  And he teaches others how to sing.  But he does not take Opera to the masses, he takes himself – and the arias that he lifts out of context - and he promotes himself as a Rock and Roll star.  He doesn’t explain how the arias work – he doesn’t bring opera to life – he connects with his fans through his voice.  He provides catharsis for all.  And the masses become familiar with “Nessum Dorma” through him – and this leads, perhaps, to an unknown cell phone salesman in the UK performing that work on Britain’s Got Talent and bringing the house down – but it doesn’t lead the masses into the opera houses, nor does it lead to a proliferation of opera beyond the traditional venues.  Even though Pavarotti performed on the first live opera television show, beamed from the Met, it wasn’t something that “took”.  His solo performances were much more engaging and watched.

The film talked about Pavarotti losing focus – and this is, I think, what I mean by his losing fidelity.  He lost track of what brought him to the party – and he found the party so enticing that it was hard to keep on top of it – to use his position in the broadest way to organize his life rather than to be organized by it.  Bono, whom Pavarotti pestered into becoming a friend, characterized his later performances, which were marked by vocal breaks – not as the signs of a diminished capacity to sing, but as bringing his lived experience into the opera house to play the parts not just by being able to sing them, but by having lived them.  Bono was, in a weird way, echoing the eldest reluctant stepdaughter who has maintained that scars are souvenirs of life.

Pavarotti’s tragic end was not that he was shot, nor that he was poisoned or stabbed, but that he was hospitalized with cancer.  He was able to connect with all of this family members at the end of his life, and there is some solace in the realization of his having been loved as well as having loved - not just broadly, but intimately and closely, by mistresses, a wife, and four daughters.  My own protestant complaint about his lack of fidelity – something that has interfered in some of the analyses that I have conducted – becomes a judgement of his character – that he is not able to retain fidelity of character.

 

I think my criticism of Pavarotti’s character is harsh, though I think there is some truth to it.  I think it is harsh because his character was exposed to forces that were profoundly and powerfully disruptive.  He was adored by millions, travelling far from his home base – both in Modena and in the operatic scene – and he expressed his love in the life that was too short for him – for any of us – in the best way that circumstances allowed.  The critics would have had Howard take a more critical position regarding Pavarotti.  I, at least, was able to see, in the film itself, the person whose fidelity cracked.  I was also able to deeply empathize with his experience of his life becoming dearer as the room left to live it became shorter.  I found this, despite my fellow audience members, to be a deeply moving and instructive film.

  Bravo!

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