Whew!
I knew it!
Understanding life is really a lot simpler than it seems.
The trick is to make up a story that explains everything.
This past week we suffered an extreme tragedy. Fort Hood, Texas, is our largest military base. From here the First Cavalry, the "A" Team, the troops we send in first after the Marines and the Navy and Air Force take their shots, the Boots on the Ground, the "Go team," is headquartered here.
These are the troops, the men and women, of all races, creeds and colors who protect you and me.
We'll do anything to protect them.
Well, the Army did do everything it could. It took an enlistee out of high school, sent him to college, taught him to be a doctor and then a psychiatrist. His job was to look after troops experiencing extreme psychological malaise after returning from war.
Unfortunately, he became confused, crazed in fact, and went berserk, killing thirteen on the base and shooting many more, forty-one, all told, before being himself shot down by a civilian (female) police officer responding to the shooting.
Bizarre? Of course.
Mind boggling? Even moreso.
Here's the Army doing all it seemingly could to protect the troops and the watchdog goes berserk.
If I were the Army, I'd be tearing my hear and gnashing my teeth in frustration.
"But we did everything..." I can hear it saying.
"We'll have to learn the lesson and do more, for that's the Army way," I hear that too.
The Army is one of the few American institutions that actually pays attention to what it did today, and yesterday, to learn what it can for tomorrow. This is not a bloodless process, intramurally.
See the new Neil Sheehan book about the Cold War, based on the life of Bernard Schriever, the man behind the ICBM in the nuclear arms race with the thankfully former Soviet Union, "A Fiery Peace in a Cold War" (Random House, 2009).
It is difficult for us to stop fighting the last war and to imagine the next. That's what Schriever, who did fight the last war, did. Lot's of bureaucratic infighting, with Congressional approval. Ultimately a decision has to be made. This decision is a matter of life or death.
How do we make these decisions?
We tell stories. We tell THE story, the one that seems most true as compared with the others. We look forward, not back, we hope.
***
These stories we tell about ourselves, to explain ourselves to ourselves. What kind of stories are they?
Some call them myths. Others call it our 'cosmology,' our story of ourself.
Is there only one story?
No, there are many, one for each of our human cultures, from Paris to New Guinea.
Here's what Levi-Strauss had to say about that:
In any society, he maintained, “the purpose of a myth is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction.” As he saw it, the human mind tends to organize thought and culture around binary opposites, and to try to resolve the resulting tension through the creative act of mythmaking.
I like that.
Who are our creative mythmakers?
The Supreme Court?
Our poets?
Playwrights?
Authors?
Cartoonists?
Law professors? (Doubtful)
Seers? Witch-doctors?
When we speak of climbing to the next higher level of generality, aren't we talking in some sense of reaching for a new myth? I'm not so sure, but I'm not ready to rule it out.
The massacre at Ft. Hood brought the story of Oedipus Rex to mind. The tale, by Sophocles, is based on the myth that the king and queen of Thebes had been foretold that their son would grow up to kill his father and marry his mother. Whoa! Where did Sophocles come up with a tale like that? Where does his mind dwell?
So the king and queen, to avoid this fate, hand the baby off to a courtier to expose and die on a mountain top. The courtier, taking pity on the baby, hands him to a shepherd who raise him. On the road to Thebes, twenty years later, there's an armed encounter following a quarrel in which the young man, Oedipus, kills the old man, who, it turns out, was the king, unbeknownst to the younger man, his son, who proceeds to the city, enters the palace, and eventually marries the widowed queen, his mother.
Fate was not fooled for one instant. Every move played into the hands of Fate. The more the parents tried to avoid their alleged fate, the more they ensured its enactment into reality. Really. This is too much.
Yet, with the Army, it seems to have happened.
Back to square one.
Below is an article on Levi-Strauss, the analyzer of myth, who passed away last week.
Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Two-Part Harmonies
Millions of words have been written trying to explain or apply the theories of the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss since the publication of his work “Structural Anthropology” in 1958. More than a few of the resulting texts in disciplines as varied as sociology and philosophy are dense, turgid and jargon ridden, or so the complaint goes. But Mr. Lévi-Strauss himself could be simple, direct and elegant when he wanted to be. Structuralism, he once said, is simply “the search for unsuspected harmonies” across cultures.
In fact, his life’s work was dedicated to detecting and codifying what he believed to be the underlying structures common to all societies. Working among Amerindian tribes in the Amazon and elsewhere from the 1930s onward, he found those harmonies to be especially manifest in mythology. In any society, he maintained, “the purpose of a myth is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction.”
As he saw it, the human mind tends to organize thought and culture around binary opposites, and to try to resolve the resulting tension through the creative act of mythmaking. Here are four pairs that, explicitly or implicitly, are important in the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who died a little over a week ago just shy of 101.
THE RAW AND THE COOKED “Raw” and “cooked” are shorthand terms meant to differentiate what is found in nature from what is a product of human culture. That dichotomy, Mr. Lévi-Strauss believed, exists in all human societies. Part of what makes us human, however, is our need to reconcile those opposites, to find a balance between raw and cooked. But where is the dividing line between nature, which is emotional and instinctive, and culture, which is based on rules and conventions? In a metaphoric sense, a cook is a kind of mediator between those realms, transforming an object originally from the natural world into an item fit for human consumption. So by “cooked,” Mr. Lévi-Strauss means anything that is socialized from its natural state. Yes, the definition of what is considered edible varies from one society or religious group to another. But all have binary structures that separate the raw and the cooked, the fresh and the rotten, the moist and the dry or burned.
THE TINKERER AND THE ENGINEER In “The Savage Mind” (1962), Mr. Lévi-Strauss proposes a distinction between modes of conception, design and manufacture. The “tinkerer” or “artisan,” two possible renderings of the somewhat ambiguous French word that he used, “bricoleur,” works mainly with his hands, using materials that already exist, which he tries to put together in different ways. The “engineer,” in contrast, is a proto-scientist. He has a more abstract mental universe, which allows him to invent tools, devices or materials and transcend the boundaries that society imposes. Though both the tinkerer and the engineer face comparable obstacles, they navigate them in dissimilar fashion, with the tinkerer being more typical of the approach of “the savage mind.” One way is spontaneous, the other methodical. “A truly scientific analysis must be real, simplifying and explanatory,” Mr. Lévi-Strauss wrote, while the tinkerer is confined to a more narrow and immediate focus.
THE I AND THE WE Mr. Lévi-Strauss was loath to accept the notion of “us versus them,” because it didn’t conform to his belief in societies’ shared structures. Instead, he often focused on the distinction between “I” and “we.” In looking at kinship patterns, for example, especially among the Amerindian peoples who provided much of his research material, he was more attentive to the rules governing relationships between different family groups than the roles of the individuals making up those families. Examining both Oedipus and Amerindian myths, Mr. Lévi-Strauss suggests that the universal incest taboo is the way human societies resolve the opposing dangers of excessive love and hatred for close blood relations. He also rejected one of the fundamental features of Western thought: seeing individual self-expression as the height of creativity. Because he was so interested in mythmaking, a collective process that occurs incrementally over time, he favored the notion of a communal approach to making culture, writing in “Tristes Tropiques,” “The I is hateful.”
THE LANGUAGE AND THE WORD From the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, Mr. Lévi-Strauss borrowed the distinction between “langue” (tongue, or language) and “parole” (word), and then gave it a twist. The tongue, the underlying system of language, is something “belonging to a reversible time,” Mr. Lévi-Strauss wrote, outside a particular moment. A word, in contrast, is a specific utterance that, once expressed, cannot be reversed. Think of a piece of sheet music: it can be read or played from left to right, from one page to another, in a horizontal, linear fashion leading to a coda, a definite conclusion. That is “parole.” Or it can be studied vertically, in hopes of discerning harmony and other structural relationships between the notes in the treble and bass clefs. That is what Mr. Lévi-Strauss considered “langue.”
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