On October 22 of 1883, Frederick Douglass attended a civil rights meeting in Washington D.C. where he observed a disturbing pattern of hatred that disempowered Americans showed toward their Black countrymen: “Perhaps no class of our fellow citizens has carried this prejudice against color to a point more extreme and dangerous than have our Catholic Irish fellow citizens, and yet no people on the face of the earth have been more relentlessly persecuted and oppressed on account of race and religion than the Irish people.”
Douglass singled out Irish immigrants, but the phenomenon he noticed was not unique to this group. What he condemned was the all-too-common failure of civic imagination – the reluctance to acknowledge a shared humanity and reach out to the oppressed still struggling to gain full citizenship in a society plagued with prejudice and injustice.
This pattern has persisted over time and is now evident in the anti-gay stance taken by the Frederick Douglass Foundation. According to Clarence Henderson, head of the North Carolina chapter of this conservative African American organization, “there’s no comparison” between the LGBTQ fight for gay rights and the African Americans’ struggle for civil liberties. “How many gays or lesbians were lynched?” asks Henderson. “There is a difference between what a human being is and what a human being does.”
This is from a man who in 1960 defied the authorities by refusing to vacate the Whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro. Over half a century later, he became a leader in the organization that filed the amicus brief with the Supreme Court in support of the White bakery owner’s right to snub a Black couple looking to buy a wedding cake.We need your support to bring the kind of analyses and information Tikkun provides. Click Here to make a tax-deductible contribution.
The ambivalence toward gays among African Americans has deep roots. When Martin Luther King Jr. was tipped off about Bayard Rustin’s openly gay lifestyle, he distanced himself from the fellow civil rights leader and kept him at bay for several years. As did Roy Wilkins who prevailed on his colleagues at NAACP to render Rustin invisible in the 1963 March on Washington.
In his autobiography, W. E. B. Du Bois gave a moving testimony about his own struggle with the issue: “A young man [Augustus Granville Dill], long my disciple and student, then my co-helper and successor to part of my work, was suddenly arrested for molesting men in public places. I had before that time no conception of homosexuality. I had never understood the tragedy of Oscar Wilde. I dismissed my co-worker forthwith, and spent heavy days regretting my act.”
We should be careful to distinguish the deficit of civic imagination from the surfeit of bigotry driven by a hatred toward people on account of their membership in a supposedly inferior class. Yet freedom fighters are known to harbor strong prejudices, juxtapose their political identities to those of lesser tribes, and insist on the superiority of their constitutional claims.
Susan B. Anthony, a women’s right pioneer and a committed abolitionist, turned against her longtime ally Frederick Douglas when he backed the 15th Amendment enfranchising Black men before White women. Speaking at the 1869 American Equal Rights Association’s meeting, Ms. Anthony declared: “The old anti-slavery school say women must stand back and wait until the negroes shall be recognized. But we say, if you will not give the whole loaf of suffrage to the entire people give it to the most intelligent first. If intelligence, justice, and morality are to have precedence in the Government, let the question of woman be brought up first and that of the negro last.”
A few decades later, Alice Pole expressed a similar sentiment when she bristled at the prospect of Black and White suffragists marching side by side in the 1913 Women Suffrage Parade: “As far as I can see, we must have a white procession, or a Negro procession, or no procession at all.”
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s bias was blunter still. An ardent feminist and the acclaimed author of Women and Economics, she inveighed against immigrants inundating American cities. Her attitude toward Jews was unabashedly racist, as she alleged in her autobiography that “one third of the inhabitants of New York now are Jews” and predicted “the rapidly descending extinction of our nation, superseded by other nations who will soon completely outnumber us.”
As these examples attest, being marginalized is no guarantee that one will be sensitive to the needs of minorities further down the totem pole, or that exclusionary practices would not infect the victorious liberation movement. The tension brewing within the LGBTQ community is the latest manifestation of this pattern.
Midway through the 1990s, transgender activists began to join forces with the organizations advocating for the rights of gay, lesbians, and bisexual people on the assumption that their shared interests and the political clout of the LGB community would help advance the trans agenda. Now the alliance shows strain, as the transgender and transexual activists discover that their priorities aren’t always aligned with the coalition partners.
Several activists writing for the inaugural issue of Transgender Quarterly sounded alarm about the fact that “more and more gender-normative, economically and racially privileged, coupled, and metropolitan gays and lesbians are crossing into the mainstream” (Heather Love). Ana Cristina Marques recently published a paper where she spotted the “radical trans-exclusionary feminist attacks on transgender people” which, her research showed, could make transgender people feel unwelcome in the spaces patronized by gays and lesbians.
The issues dividing the advocates for these group are complex, the most salient ones being the traditional gender binary and the embodiment challenges stemming from sex-reassignment, neither of which riles gay and lesbians the way they can disrupt the lives of transgender folk. But these issues are serious enough for students of gender and trans rights advocates like Susan Stryker and Zein Muribo to contend that “LGBT privileges the expression of sexual identity over gender identity,” that “listing ‘T’ with ‘LGB’ – and at the end, no less – locates transgender as an orientation,” and that “although the inclusion of transgender alongside lesbian, gay, and bisexual opened up new political alliances across these groups, it also closed off possibilities for coalitions with different political groups – such as activists fighting for immigrant rights who face concerns over documentation that are similar to those of transgender people.”
I will not go into the nascent friction between the transgender and queer advocates over who better represents the marginalized people, the friction that threatens to further weaken the LGBTQ coalition. The point is that we need to rethink what we mean by “identity” and “alliance” if we want to fend off the more destructive implications of identity politics.
Identity is not a fixed quality, a visible attribute manifesting itself in predictable fashion across space and time. It is an ongoing accomplishment, a project we undertake to realign our actions, feelings, and words in response to competing possibilities for enselfment. Contrary to popular belief, self-identity has more to do with what one does than with what one is. It is always tested by our rival commitments which are bound to clash on occasion and muddle our allegiances.
The competing demands on our civic imagination remind us that alliances we form are not sacrosanct, that cliques, groups, and classes we belong to are not entities safeguarded by border patrols but emergent social fields whose gravitational pull is bound to breed ambivalence – a mark of emotional intelligence pervading moral life.
Nor should the exercise of civic imagination be limited to human targets. What about animal rights, living creatures subject to vivisection for the benefit of humankind? Maybe it’s time to phase out Premarin, the estrogen-based drug (used by transgender people among others) which is extracted from the urine of mares forcibly impregnated and kept for months in cramped stalls. And is it too fanciful to extend civic imagination to the planet earth whose depth we plunder and whose habitats we methodically destroy?
So, before we cast a jaundiced eye at the civil rights fighters of yore who were not as woke as we are, we should check our own privileges and reach out to those who fair worse than we are.
Bayard Rustin lived as an openly gay man long before society acknowledged his right to do so. The year he died, in1987, he stated: “Twenty-five, 30 years ago, the barometer of human rights in the United States were black people. That is no longer true. The barometer for judging the character of people in regard to human rights is now those who consider themselves gay, homosexual, lesbian.”
Not everybody is blessed with the clear-sightedness and audacity of Bayard Rustin. It took years for Barack Obama to evolve on the issue of marriage equality before he summoned his valor and got onboard. There is room for all of us to evolve. And keep evolving, as we practice civic imagination and reach across political divides.
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Dmitri N. Shalin is professor of sociology and director of the UNLV Center for Democratic Culture. Dr. Shalin is coordinator of Justice & Democracy Forum series, editor of the Social Health of Nevada Report, co-director of the International Biography Initiative and Erving Goffman Archives, and organizer of international forums on Russian politics and culture. His research interests and publications are in the areas of pragmatism, emotional intelligence, autobiographical discourse, democratic culture, and Russian society.
Event on April 18, 2021: Releasing the Hidden Splendour workshop facilitated by Richard Hartnett, H.W., M. and Rick Thomas, H.W., M. will be held on Sunday, April 18 at 3 p.m. Pacific time. Open to all students of RHS.
On April 9th, 2021 Mercury is conjunct Chiron at 9° Aries.
Mercury conjunct Chiron is an opportunity to take a close look at our wounds, and discover their hidden treasure. When we have a Chiron transit, the gift is ALWAYS found in unlikely places: deep inside the wound.
Chiron is known as the “Wounded Healer”.
Wounded Healer is a metaphor initially used by Carl Jung to describe therapists that want to become therapists PRECISELY because of a personal wound they are continuously trying – but are unable – to heal.
This unhealed wound draws them to people who share the same wound.
However, Carl Jung (and later, other psychologists and scientists) also discovered that unless we heal our wound, we cannot truly help others. We will, at best, sympathize with the wounded.
We will, at best, hold space and give others the opportunity to explore their wound from different angles.
However, a wounded healer also risks projecting their personal wounding process onto others, and ultimately, giving bad healing advice.
Unless we heal ourselves first, we just don’t know what works and what doesn’t.
You want business advice from people who have successful businesses, not from people who are eager to help (but lack experience). You want legal help from lawyers who have a track record of winning cases (and not just a passion for helping their clients).
You want nutrition advice from people in good health. And you want healing from someone who has healed themselves first.
Coming back to Chiron. Chiron is not ‘just’ a Wounded being trying to figure things out.
If we go back to the Greek myth, we learn that Chiron was a wise centaur that HAS figured things out, becoming the greatest teacher and healer of his time.
Unlike other Centaurus, who were untamed and troublemakers, Chiron was wise and level-headed.
Chiron has reconciled his animal nature with his divine nature, taking the best of these two worlds, and becoming a holistic teacher and healer.
Chiron And Wholistic Healing
How did that happen? What made Chiron different?
Chiron was born half-man, half-horse. Disgusted by his appearance, his mother abandons him at birth. This was Chiron’s primal wound – the wound of rejection.
Thankfully, Apollo (the Greek counterpart of the Sun) adopts Chiron and teaches him ‘Solar’ skills, such as prophecy and poetry.
This, combined with Chiron’s half-horse a.k.a animal and instinctual nature, gave Chiron a unique advantage, and helped him become a revered and respected teacher.
He understood both the workings of nature and the workings of the divine, and became a Whole-istic healer.
IMPORTANT: If Chiron was not abandoned at birth, he couldn’t have been adopted by Apollo, and he wouldn’t have had the chance to bridge the gap from nature to spirit. This initial abandonment, this initial wound, was precisely what made Chiron so special.
Our Chiron wound is the “initial condition” – what we need to not only accept, but also integrate, and use as a catalyst for growth.
Chironic healing is not just the process of finding relief from pain – it is the process of reconciling what is otherwise incompatible or unacceptable within ourselves.
When we bridge these two otherwise conflicting worlds, we ‘heal’, and discover our unique gift.
The Chiron wound is that quality you have that is initially seen as “unacceptable” because it is odd, non-ordinary or goes against the social norms. How can a horse also be a man? How can a man also be a horse? How can a black person have light skin? How can a boy behave like a girl?
But it is precisely this reconciliation of these opposing natures that not only ‘heals’ our wound, but also becomes our unique advantage, our ‘value proposition’, our greatest gift.
Mercury Conjunct Chiron – Becoming Aware Of What Hurts
Let’s come back to Mercury conjunct Chiron.
Any Chiron transit will stir the Chironic process we described.
With Mercury, it’s words, thoughts, and memories that will trigger our old wounds and hurts.
When Mercury is conjunct Chiron, we often recall some hurtful things someone has said to us. Parents or siblings that bullied us, teachers that undermined our self-confidence, colleagues or peers that made us feel odd or inadequate.
Mercury helps us “see” and understand what is otherwise difficult to grasp. When Mercury is conjunct Chiron, we can finally acknowledge our primal Chiron wound of inadequacy.
Chiron Healing Approaches
Let’s say you stuttered as a child, and your colleagues bullied you.
What do we do when these hurtful memories resurface? Most of the time, we take one of the following two approaches:
1) the most ineffective approach: the memory is so hurtful, that you reject it, and choose not to process it. You numb it down, either by thinking of something else, or by consuming substances. Even yoga and meditation, otherwise excellent practices, can do more harm than good when used to numb down our wounds.
2) less ineffective, but with no true growth potential: you process the emotion, but try to convince yourself that there is nothing wrong: “My voice is beautiful”. Or “It doesn’t matter if I stutter, I also have many other qualities, nobody’s perfect”. Or “Bullying says everything about the bully, not about me. I am so over it”.
However, there is another way to deal with the wound: you not only acknowledge these past hurts, but also seek the treasure behind them.
If it still bothers you, chances are there is something in there that requires your attention.
If it’s still there, it means it has already influenced your life in a profound way.
In your attempts to overcome the ‘handicap’, you have found alternative ways of dealing with it, and developed some skills you would not have otherwise developed.
Perhaps your awareness of your stuttering made you pay extra attention to what you say, and as a result, your communication is now more clear and articulate.
Research has shown that people who stutter are more aware of the mistakes they make (not only in speech), and are ALSO more eager to correct their mistakes. This makes them perfectionists, which is a great skill especially in professions that require error-free operations, e.g. medicine or engineering.
Sometimes the link between the wound and the gift is quite obvious: the child who stutters eventually becomes a singer or a communication expert.
Other times the link is less obvious: the child who stutters later becomes a great aviation engineer, thanks to their discipline and attention to detail.
Mercury Conjunct Chiron – The Gift Inside The Wound
The gift inside the wound may not be very obvious at first, but a Mercury-Chiron transit is one of the best opportunities to become aware of the relationship between the wound and the gift.
When we have a Chiron transit, healing the wound doesn’t only mean finding relief from pain – it means digging into the wound until we find the deeper meaning behind it.
If there is something about yourself that is still bothering you, chances are there is a gift there to be unveiled. A potential that is yet to materialize. That wound is the KEY to something much greater. That wound will continue to bug you until you recognize the gift behind it.
Mercury rules over our communication – not only our communication with other people, but also with ourselves.
That voice inside your head (which we call thoughts), is nothing else but Mercury having a conversation with you. It is Mercury trying to tell you something, trying to get your attention on something that needs to be understood at a deeper level.
Mercury brings clarity. With Mercury conjunct Chiron, it is easier to articulate and acknowledge the wound, and most importantly, to become aware of the gift inside the wound.
Bowdoin College In the aftermath of the January 6 attack on the Capitol, the College is presenting a series of discussions with leading experts on the current state and future prospects for American democracy. Timothy Snyder is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. He specializes in the history of fascism in twentieth-century Europe. He is the author of On Tyranny, described by The Washington Post as “a slim book that fits alongside your pocket Constitution and feels only slightly less vital,” and published an essay in The New York Times titled “The American Abyss” about the sources and meanings of the January 6 insurrection. Moderated by Page Herrlinger, associate professor of history.
After losing an ugly congressional race last year, Denver Riggleman is leading a charge against the conspiracy-mongering coursing through his party. He doesn’t have many allies.
Denver Riggleman, a Republican former congressman from Virginia, recounted trying last summer to warn his colleagues that the QAnon conspiracy theory was dangerous.Credit…Matt Eich for The New York Times
It was Oct. 2, on the floor of the House of Representatives, and he rose as one of only two Republicans in the chamber to speak in favor of a resolution denouncing QAnon. Mr. Riggleman, a freshman congressman from Virginia, had his own personal experiences with fringe ideas, both as a target of them and as a curious observer of the power they hold over true believers. He saw a dangerous movement becoming more intertwined with his party, and worried that it was only growing thanks to words of encouragement from President Donald J. Trump.
“Will we stand up and condemn a dangerous, dehumanizing and convoluted conspiracy theory that the F.B.I. has assessed with high confidence is very likely to motivate some domestic extremists?” asked Mr. Riggleman, a former Air Force intelligence officer. “We should not be playing with fire.”
Six months later, conspiracy theories like QAnon remain a threat that most Republicans would rather ignore than confront, and Mr. Riggleman is out of office. But he is ever more determined to try to expose disinformation from the far right that is swaying legions in the Republican base to believe in a false reality.
Mr. Riggleman is a living example of the political price of falling out of lock step with the hard right. He lost a G.O.P. primary race last June after he officiated at the wedding of a gay couple. And once he started calling out QAnon, whose followers believe that a satanic network of child molesters runs the Democratic Party, he received death threats and was attacked as a traitor, including by members of his own family.
The undoing of Mr. Riggleman — and now his unlikely crusade — is revealing about a dimension of conservative politics today. The fight against radicalism within the G.O.P. is a deeply lonely one, waged mostly by Republicans like him who are no longer in office, and by the small handful of elected officials who have decided that they are willing to speak up even if it means that they, too, could be headed for an early retirement.
“I’ve been telling people: ‘You don’t understand. This is getting worse, not better,’” Mr. Riggleman said, sitting on a stool at his family bar one recent afternoon. “People are angry. And they’re angry at the truth tellers.”
Mr. Riggleman, 51, is now back home in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, where he and his wife run the bar and a distillery. And for his next move in a career that has included jobs at the National Security Agency and founding a military contracting business, he is working with a group of other experts to shine a light on what he calls the “social disease” of disinformation.
His experience with the issues and emotions at work is both professional and personal. He was so intrigued by false belief systems that he self-published a book about the myth of Bigfoot and the people who are unshakably devoted to it.
Mr. Riggleman is working with a group of other experts to shine a light on what he calls the “social disease” of disinformation.Credit…Matt Eich for The New York Times
Mr. Riggleman, who first ran and won in 2018 after the Republican incumbent in his district retired, joined the arch-conservative Freedom Caucus and was endorsed by Mr. Trump.
Now he says it “gives me shivers” to be called a Republican. He hopes to show that there is still a way to beat back the lies and false beliefs that have spread from the fringe to the mainstream. It is a heavy lift, and one that depends on overcoming two strong impulses: politicians’ fear of losing elections and people’s reluctance to accept that they were taken in by a lie.
Mr. Riggleman summarized his conversations with the 70 percent of House Republicans he said were privately appalled at the former president’s conduct but wouldn’t dare speak out.
“‘We couldn’t do that in our district. We would lose,’” he said. “That’s it. It’s that simple.”
Stocky, fast-talking and inexhaustibly curious, the former congressman is now working for a group of prominent experts and academics at the Network Contagion Research Institute, which studies the spread of disinformation in American politics and how to thwart it. The group has undertaken several extensive investigations into how extremists have used propaganda and faked information to sow division over some of the most contentious issues of the day, like the coronavirus pandemic and police violence.
Their reports have also given lawmakers a better understanding of the QAnon belief system and other radical ideologies that helped fuel the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Mr. Riggleman said he had written one report about the involvement of far-right militants and white supremacist groups in the attack specifically at the request of a Republican member who needed help convincing colleagues that far-left groups were not the culprits.
Getting lawmakers to see radical movements like QAnon as a threat has been difficult. Joel Finkelstein, the director of the Network Contagion Research Institute, said that in June, when the group tried to sound the alarm on QAnon to members of Congress, Mr. Riggleman was the only one who responded with a sense of urgency and agreed to help.
“We were screaming it from the rooftops,” Mr. Finkelstein said. “We said: ‘This is going to be a problem. They’re growing increasingly militant in their conspiracies.’” When the institute’s members spoke to Mr. Riggleman, he said, “We showed him our data and he said, ‘Holy moly.’”
Far from a theoretical or overblown concern, disinformation and its role in perpetuating false beliefs about Mr. Trump’s election loss and its aftermath are problems that some Republicans believe could cripple their party if left ignored.
In a sign of how widespread these conspiracy theories are, a recent poll from Suffolk University and USA Today found that 58 percent of Trump voters wrongly believed the storming of the Capitol was mostly inspired by far-left radicals associated with antifa and involved only a few Trump supporters.
“There was a troika of us who said, ‘This is going to a bad place,’” said Paul Mitchell, who represented Michigan in the House for two terms before retiring early this year in frustration. He said he had watched as members dismissed Mr. Riggleman, despite his experience in intelligence. “There weren’t many people who gave a damn what your expertise was,” Mr. Mitchell said. “It was inconsequential compared to the talking points.”ImageBob Good defeated Mr. Riggleman in a state Republican Party convention in June.Credit…Amy Friedenberger/The Roanoke Times, via Associated Press
Mr. Riggleman’s loss last summer in a closely held party convention allowed him to be more outspoken. The winner, Representative Bob Good, is a former associate athletic director at Liberty University who took issue with Mr. Riggleman’s officiation at the gay wedding and called him “out of step” with the party’s base.
And as Mr. Riggleman kept it up and spoke out more aggressively against Mr. Trump after the election, his fight got lonelier.
“I had a colleague of mine pat me on the shoulder and say: ‘Denver, you’re just too paranoid. You’re killing yourself for the rest of your life politically by going after the big man like this,’” Mr. Riggleman recalled.
When he returned to Virginia for good in January, he said he sometimes felt just as isolated. Family members, former constituents and patrons at the distillery insisted that the election had been stolen from Mr. Trump. And they couldn’t be talked out of it, no matter how hard he tried.
He recalled a recent conversation with one couple he is friends with that he said was especially exasperating.
“I go over stats,” he said. “I go over figures. I go over the 50 states, how that actually works. How machines that aren’t connected are very hard to hack. How you’d have to pay off hundreds of thousands of people to do this.”
“Did not convince them,” he added.
Other friends of his, some of whom are also members of the growing group of former Republican lawmakers now publicly criticizing Mr. Trump, said that many conservative politicians saw no incentive in trying to dispel disinformation even when they know it’s false.
“What some of these guys have told me privately is it’s still kind of self-preservation,” said Joe Walsh, a former congressman from Illinois who ran a short-lived primary campaign against Mr. Trump last year. “‘I want to hang onto the gig. And this is a fever, it will break.’”
That is mistaken, Mr. Walsh said, because he sees no breaking the spell Mr. Trump has over Republican voters anytime soon. “It’s done, and it was done a few years ago,” he said.
Mr. Riggleman, who is contemplating a run for governor in Virginia and is writing a book about his experience with the dark side of Republican politics, sees a way forward in his experience with Bigfoot. The sasquatch was how many people first learned about him as a politician, after an opponent accused him of harboring a fascination with “Bigfoot erotica,” in 2018.
“I do not dabble in monster porn,” he retorts in his book, “Bigfoot … It’s Complicated,” which he based in part on a trip he took in 2004 on a Bigfoot expedition.ImageMr. Riggleman paid $2,000 to go on a Bigfoot expedition with his wife in 2004.Credit…Matt Eich for The New York Times
The book is full of passages that, if pulled out and scrubbed of references to the mythical creature, could be describing politics in 2021.
Mr. Riggleman quotes one true believer explaining why he is absolutely convinced Bigfoot is real, even though he has never seen it. In an answer that could have come straight from the lips of someone defending the myth that Mr. Trump actually won the 2020 election, the man says matter-of-factly: “Evidence is overwhelming. Check out the internet. All kinds of sightings and facts.”
At another point, Mr. Riggleman describes a conversation he had with someone who asked if he really thought that all the people claiming to have seen Bigfoot over the years were liars. “I don’t think that,” Mr. Riggleman responds. “I do believe that people see what they want to see.”
He did find one way to crack the Bigfoot false belief system: telling true believers that they were being ripped off to the tune of hundreds or thousands of dollars to go on expeditions where they would never actually see the creature.
“They got very angry,” he said. But eventually, some started to come around.
BBC Subscribe and ? to OFFICIAL BBC YouTube ? https://bit.ly/2IXqEIn Stream original BBC programmes FIRST on BBC iPlayer ? https://bbc.in/2J18jYJ With a million species at risk of extinction, Sir David Attenborough explores how this crisis of biodiversity has consequences for us all, threatening food and water security, undermining our ability to control our climate and even putting us at greater risk of pandemic diseases. Extinction is now happening up to 100 times faster than the natural evolutionary rate, but the issue is about more than the loss of individual species. Everything in the natural world is connected in networks that support the whole of life on earth, including us, and we are losing many of the benefits that nature provides to us. The loss of insects is threatening the pollination of crops, while the loss of biodiversity in the soil also threatens plants growth. Plants underpin many of the things that we need, and yet one in four is now threatened with extinction. Last year, a UN report identified the key drivers of biodiversity loss, including overfishing, climate change and pollution. But the single biggest driver of biodiversity loss is the destruction of natural habitats. Seventy-five per cent of Earth’s land surface (where not covered by ice) has been changed by humans, much of it for agriculture, and as consumers we may unwittingly be contributing towards the loss of species through what we buy in the supermarket. Our destructive relationship with the natural world isn’t just putting the ecosystems that we rely on at risk. Human activities like the trade in animals and the destruction of habitats drive the emergence of diseases. Disease ecologists believe that if we continue on this pathway, this year’s pandemic will not be a one-off event. Extinction: The Facts | BBC #BBC #BBCExtinctionTheFacts #BBCiPlayer All our TV channels and S4C are available to watch live through BBC iPlayer, although some programmes may not be available to stream online due to rights. If you would like to read more on what types of programmes are available to watch live, check the ‘Are all programmes that are broadcast available on BBC iPlayer?’ FAQ ? https://bbc.in/2m8ks6v.
Warning: this film features rapidly flashing images that can be distressing to photosensitive viewers.
10 August 2020 (aeon.co)
It is the task of the enlightened not only to ascend to learning and to see the good but to be willing to descend again to those prisoners and to share their troubles and their honours, whether they are worth having or not. And this they must do, even with the prospect of death. – Plato’s Republic, Book 7
Plato’s allegory of the cave thought-experiment ponders the experience of prisoners shackled in a cave from birth, only able to see the shadows of objects projected onto a wall. The text then traces the journey of a prisoner who is set free from the cave, given the opportunity to experience reality in the glow of the Sun and, upon returning to the cave, is met with laughter by the other prisoners, who think him a fool for struggling to readjust to his old existence. A simple story yielding complex commentaries on the nature of reality and wisdom, Plato’s timeless allegory is built into the foundations of modern philosophy and, more than two millennia later, still stirs debate. Carried by a rich narration from Orson Welles, this rarely seen 1973 animated adaptation of Plato’s words populates the tale with haunting human figures, bringing retro-surreal life to the parable.
is a theatre, film and television actor living in New York City. Some of his notable performances feature in the HBO TV series John Adams (2008), the Showtime TV series Billions (2016-), and the films American Splendor (2003) and Sideways (2004).
When I performed in the play The Iceman Cometh (1946) by Eugene O’Neill,I played a character who stands up near the end and pours his heart out on stage. My character was almost like a messenger in a Greek tragedy but, instead of describing some nightmarish battle, he had to recount the horror of his own failures and the regrets of his life. It was an intense, emotionally draining experience, and I had to do it night after night. Each night I wondered if I could do it again, but somehow the energy of the room, the other actors and the story itself helped me to dial in some deep emotional frequency from my own history. It feels like you’re a shaman because you kind of lose yourself and channel something. And that activates deep emotions in the audience, too. So there’s a weird connection – I’m losing myself, and the audience is losing themselves. Then we come down together, having shared something powerful. – Paul Giamatti
Like other artists, the actor is a kind of shaman. If the audience is lucky, we go with this emotional magician to other worlds and other versions of ourselves. Our enchantment or immersion into another world is not just theoretical, but sensory and emotional. How do actor and audience achieve this shared mysterious transportation? This shared ritual draws upon a kind of sixth sense, the imagination. The actor’s imagination has gone into emotional territories of intense feeling before us. Now they guide us like a psychopomp into those emotional territories by recreating them in front of us.
Aristotle called this imaginative power phantasia. We might mistakenly think that phantasia is just for artists and entertainers, a rare and special talent, but it’s actually a cognitive faculty that functions in all human beings. The actor might guide us, but it’s our own imagination that enables us to immerse fully into the story. If we activate our power of phantasia, we voluntarily summon up the real emotions we see on stage: fear, anxiety, rage, love and more. In waking life, we see this voluntary phantasia at work but, for many of us, the richest experience of phantasia comes in sleep, when the involuntary imagination awakes in the form of dreams.
In The Descent of Man (1871), Charles Darwin writes:
The Imagination is one of the highest prerogatives of man. By this faculty he unites, independently of the will, former images and ideas, and thus creates brilliant and novel results … Dreaming gives us the best notion of this power; as Jean Paul [Richter] … says, ‘The dream is an involuntary art of poetry.’
The dreaming brain isn’t aware that the monster chasing us is unreal. During REM sleep, your body is turned off by the temporary paralysis of sleep atonia, but your limbic brain is running hot. In waking life, the limbic system is responsible for many of the basic mammalian survival aspects of our existence: emotions, attention and focus, and is deeply involved in the fight-or-flight response to danger. The dreaming brain isn’t just faking a battle but actually fighting one in our neuroendocrine axis. That’s why we sometimes wake up sweating with our heart racing. The involuntary imagination of dreaming creates an episode of emotional reality – not sham emotions. The same is true in the theatre, the movie, the novel. We’re really stirred by the St Crispin’s Day speech in William Shakespeare’s Henry V, really terrified by Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Pit and the Pendulum (1842), and really haunted by Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker (1979).
The intensity of these emotions is not just felt by the audience. For an actor, embodying a scene with another actor – who reveals, say, a deep vulnerability from losing a child – can mean that a scripted fiction enacted by two strangers on a stage actually bonds the actors themselves in real intimacy long after the play or film is over. Like in a dream, the limbic mind experiences art as real. An actor or writer embodies the deepest traumas and joys of life so the audience can experience them vicariously. Acting (and other collective artistic work) can be a kind of mainlining of intimacy, and the audience partakes of this intimacy too.
There’s a lot of subtle embodied communication going on. There’s an intense awareness between the actors themselves, and between the audience and actors – especially in theatre. The most obvious feedback happens in comedies of course, because you can hear the laughs or the lack of them. But much more subtle stuff is happening too. Once, when I was playing Hamlet, there was an early scene with the Player King. His prop beard was slowly falling off his face – unbeknown to him – just as I was saying a line about beards. And there was this amazing energy in the whole place from the collective recognition that we were all playing in a play, but also a play that knows it’s a play. And sometimes when something goes wrong on stage – like a mistake, or a prop thing – it actually brings in a fresh energy by breaking the normal patterns, and everyone becomes more present in the room.
At other times, the emotional awareness is more intimate. Once I was playing the husband opposite the actor Kathryn Hahn in a scene where another character is inadvertently saying something insulting to her, and she doesn’t know what to say in response, and I’m trying to sort of cover it over, and then we just share this quiet moment together as we listen to the other character continue talking. They shot the scene many times, but then after one particular take we both looked at each other and said: ‘Wow, I really felt that one.’ And I think the authenticity of these kinds of connections can shine through to observers. For example, I think that was the take the director eventually used as well.
To prepare a role, the actor must function as an empathy sponge: they work to ingest and ingurgitate all the social nuances of power, vulnerability, hope and despair. This is a sensory osmosis – the actor must cultivate this like a sixth-sense organ. It happens ‘in the dark’ of the mind so to speak, beneath the radar of conscious thinking.
Nor does this rely on direct observations of human behaviour alone. According to the extended mind theory, humans offload much of who they are into the environment. The philosophers David Chalmers and Andy Clark argue that our minds don’t reside exclusively in our brains or bodies, but extend out into the physical environment (in diaries, maps, calculators and now smartphones, etc). Consequently, you can learn a great deal about someone by spending time in their home – not deducing facts like Sherlock Holmes, but absorbing subtle understandings of character, taste, temperament and life history. When an actor prepares to play a historical figure, he might find deep insights in the extended mind – the written record, the physical environs, the clothing and so on. A small detail can turn the key and open up a real ‘visitation’ from the past.
When I played President John Adams in the 2008 miniseries for HBO, I studied many historical records, but the key that helped me find his character was an amazing compilation of his health complaints. Someone had culled all his letters for any references to his health, and produced this giant record of elaborate and hypochondriacal health complaints. The man was a wreck with digestive problems, toothaches, headaches, bowel troubles and more. After manic periods of high energy, he would ‘take to his bed’ for a couple of weeks. In reading all this, I began to see how to play the everyday John Adams.
This capacity to get inside the emotional landscape of another person draws on a deep, evolutionary cognitive ability, a way of absorbing or reading what the psychologist James J Gibson called ‘affordances’. Gibson’s affordances can be understood as all the things that surround an organism in their environment, with potential to be understood, grasped and exploited. An affordance is relational: it depends on the ecological relationship between the animal and its lifeworld, rather than having an objective value. A freshly baked baguette is to a baker a proud symbol of her art; to the hungry child, it’s a meal; to the assistant at the boulangerie, an object to be arranged in the window. An affordance has meaning depending where you stand, and much of our grasp of affordances runs beneath conscious analysis. For social mammals, including humans, many of the affordances in our environment are social in nature, and thus we spend a huge amount of perceptual energy in processing signals of behaviour, demeanour and emotion from our fellows, much of which never surfaces to our conscious mind.
For Plato, the imagination produces only illusion. For Aristotle, it’s a necessary ingredient to knowledge
A chimpanzee, for example, sees the posture of the new guy as dominant – the dominance and subordinance exist in the real-time relationship between the two animals’ bodies and behaviours. The chimp doesn’t need to reason about the relationship, because the perception itself contains a great deal of information and prediction about status, disposition, character and possible behaviours. Stage actors ‘read the room’ in a similar way to our primate cousins reading their social world of dominance. A lifetime of subconsciously reading rooms (reading people) gives artists a rich palette of insights, feelings and behaviours. Unlike other animals, humans use phantasia to expand these affordances and create alternative behaviours – alternative realities – in the real-time present, as well as in the future. We take social affordances from our existing lifeworlds and spin new worlds out of them. That is the power of phantasia, but also, as we will see, its danger.
Some people think that the imagination is just a frivolous fantasy-making ability. For Plato, the imagination produces only illusion, which distracts from reality, itself apprehended by reason. The artist is concerned with producing images, which are merely shadows, reflecting, like a mirror, the surface of things, while Truth lies beyond the sensory world. In the Republic, Plato places imagery and art low on the ladder of knowledge and metaphysics, although ironically he tells us this in an imaginary allegory of the cave story.
By contrast, Aristotle saw imagination as a necessary ingredient to knowledge. Memory is a repository of images and events, but imagination (phantasia) calls up, unites and combines those memories into tools for judgment and decision-making. Imagination constructs alternative scenarios from the raw data of empirical senses, and then our rational faculties can evaluate them and use them to make moral choices, or predict social behaviours, or even build better scientific theories. For Aristotle, phantasia (which comes from the Greek word for ‘light’), is as important to knowledge as light is to seeing. Although Aristotle was careful to distinguish phantasia from the ordinary five senses, because it can occur without any stimulus from outside, we could understand phantasia as a kind of sixth sense, shared by humans and many animals, a way to know the world, to which humans return in dreams. Here, Aristotle is thinking of imagination as something like the involuntary process; the associational mashups of dreams, the subconscious tracking of affordances, the conditioned memories we use to evaluate and make sense of our experience. When we bring this process under executive control – that is, when we harness it to our waking, speculative and creative mind – we transform the involuntary imagination to voluntary, and this ‘phantasia 2.0’ is unique to humans. Perhaps a chimpanzee might dream of a hippo it once saw, but only a Walt Disney can bring the hippo to mind whenever he wants, dress it in a tutu in his mind’s eye, draw it, animate it dancing, and release it as a film called Fantasia (1940).
Contemporary science of the mind sides with Aristotle, not Plato. Phantasia is adaptive and helps us know others and ourselves better. Art is not just great for therapeutic emotional management and catharsis, but also produces knowledge, generating new ways of understanding and manipulating the world. Contemporary neurocognitive theory argues that the mind is a ‘prediction processor’. It builds mental models of the world, and tests predictions, always updating the model to reduce future errors. These cognitive processes are not possible without the imaginative faculty. The imagination helps us create possible futures (new architecture, medical breakthroughs, new political possibilities) but also helps us model other minds.
When art is good – when the acting and the script are on point, or a character in a novel is nuanced – the audience actually learns more about human behaviour than real-life observation provides. This is because the interior of the character is articulated in art, whereas it remains submerged in real social interaction.
We are, then, running a constant ‘simulator’ in our own minds, whether we’re consciously aware of it or not. Because of this involuntary sixth sense, we seem to know things without having figured them out. The dark processing (reading affordances, absorbing impressions from the extended minds around us, involuntarily combining narratives in headspace, and just simulating things) serves up ‘reality’ to us without revealing its hand in the construction. The mind is always incubating an alternative or supplemental reality. Our experience is always imagination-laden. Yet the vivid, and often unconscious, nature of this cognitive process isn’t always enriching. If imagination is an involuntary creative act of cognition before downstream rationality uses it, it can also be dangerous.
Without properly understanding imagination’s role in cognition, our views can present themselves to us as straightforward, accurate assessments of the world. People who disagree with us seem just ‘irrational’ (bad at weighing evidence and logic) or crazy. But once we take account of the imaginative layer of mind (the filtering and modelling we do between the raw data and the reasoned conclusions or beliefs), we see that the world itself really is different for the atheist as opposed to the Christian; the Republican as opposed to the Democrat; the rationalist versus the QAnon devotee.
The legal scholars Cass R Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule argue that conspiracy theories arise when people suffer from a ‘crippled’ knowledge base because they have ‘limited’ informational sources. If you watch only one news network, or get your ‘facts’ from a crank website or radio show with no peer review, then you’re going to be highly susceptible to conspiracy and this will likely be exacerbated if you received limited school instruction in logic and critical thinking in your formal education. Thus, the answer to conspiracy theories is more education and more rational weighing of information sources.
Conspiracy theories aren’t, however, just the result of alternative ‘information sources’ or limited information – we’re all awash in information. Rather, a potent conspiracy is a narrative arc in which the believer is a heroic character. Phantasia is a potent ingredient here. The persuasiveness of imagination consists in its embodied quality – the conspiratorial mind feels and sees itself as a protagonist in a drama. A dramatic story such as the QAnon theory is reinforced by a charismatic leader (politician/actor/clergy/celebrity), creating a phantasia layer that feels real, just as the dream feels real to the limbic system and the movie feels real to the audience member.
No wonder then that conspiracy theorists like to dress up. The conspiracy-minded Trump supporters who smashed into the Capitol Building in Washington, DC in January 2021 included half-naked ‘Ur-Americans’ with painted faces and buffalo headdresses, carrying signs that said ‘Q Sent Me’. A charismatic leader is like the shaman/actor on stage. They have ‘gone before’ into the embodied belief, they evoke the emotions, they involve the watcher/audience so intensely that everybody gets deeply invested. The insurrectionists in their dress-up costumes at the Capitol are less like actors and more like fully immersed audience members. The insurrection was a kind of malevolent cosplay convention in which superfans who had intensely internalised the narratives themselves took over the stage, only the ‘convention’ in this case was at the Capitol. Obviously, this makes them no less dangerous, because their guns are not props, and mob violence is wildly contagious.
Can we turn that awesome power of imagination toward humanising ourselves and others?
Our phantasia is not just ‘in our heads’ but actually extended and distributed into our environment. Just as the actor changes into costume and transforms into a new persona, so too the jingoist drapes himself in flags and paraphernalia becoming a new persona – one that feels righteous and empowered, in this case, to do violence. There is ‘magic’ in the accoutrement. Anthropologists and social psychologists have long recognised the unique dynamics in ritual adornment and behaviour. Ritualised collective imaginings help to produce what the French sociologist Émile Durkheim in 1912 called ‘collective effervescence’ – a feeling state or force that excites individuals and unifies them into a group. It’s a similar phenomenon in political crowds, religious ceremonies, music concerts and theatre experiences.
In our current climate of partisan paranoia, we’ve all ramped up imaginative demonisation of the other. This leaves us vulnerable to dark imaginings. The Chinese American philosophical geographer Yi-Fu Tuan states it plainly in his bookLandscapes of Fear (2013): ‘If we had less imagination, we would feel more secure.’ Yes, there are real threats and enemies out there, but not as many as our active imagination produces. Alas, we can’t stop fantasticating if it’s the root of human cognition, and we wouldn’t want to give it up if we could. But can we turn that awesome power of imagination toward humanising ourselves and others?
Imagination recruits our natural empathy system and can amplify it. We see fear or joy in another person’s face, and we catch it like an emotional contagion. The actor has made a career of this natural human ability to recreate another’s feelings and perspectives within one’s self. Properly cultivated, this emotional mimicry can become ethical care, and art and artists play a crucial role in this cultivation.
I have played some sinister characters doing some ethically dubious things in dark storylines. I’m not someone who thinks art must be ‘moral’ per se. A lot of art with really overt moral pretensions is usually pretty bad art. Having said that, we could be making better use of the imagination, making genuinely smart and nuanced characters. A lot of contemporary entertainment seems to me to have lazy renderings of characters. There’s a kind of shorthand going on: a character beats up someone in one scene, then kisses his mom in the next to show complexity and ambiguity, but it all feels too simple and easy sometimes.
There’s a lot of contempt and cynicism in contemporary entertainment. The characters are contemptuous and cynical, and the impulses creating the characters are too. And there’s contempt for the audience: just give them crud. That’s always been a problem; I sound like an old-man moral scold. I’m all for the occasional mindless, nihilistic narrative, but the imagination is a hugely powerful tool and therefore weapon: if you’re gonna go morally dark or ambiguous, you’re gonna lacerate people, you better know why you are. You better be damn good at what you do, like HermanMelville good. It’s oddly easy to crank out something risky and edgy, we all think we know what that is, but most of it doesn’t really risk anything important, make real critiques of injustice or power. For sure: there’s really good stuff out there. But a lot of it’s weak, masquerading, performing its importance.
It’s really difficult to be ‘true’ as in ‘authentic’. Believe me, I know, I’m shooting for it myself and frequently missing the mark. It’s difficult to show how real friendships form or end, how real grief is processed, real horror and pain are inflicted and borne, so on.
You gotta be careful with the imagination. It matters how it’s wielded. There’s a lot of opportunity for critique, but hope too.
Acting is like a ‘laboratory of identity’ because the actor gets to try on many different selves. Some of them are sinister and some saintly, with all points in between. The movie industry and the arts generally are also large-scale laboratories of identity for audiences. Such power carries some responsibility. But all of us have this power of phantasia – in fact we can’t escape it – so it’s on all of us to be better actors and even directors of our stories, individual and shared.
To read more about the imagination, visit the Poiesis section on Psyche, a digital magazine from Aeon that illuminates the human condition through psychology, philosophical understanding and the arts.
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