On Pizza, Foucault, and the Trojan War

There's a joke that circles the internet from time to time. It goes "When you ask someone their name, you're asking what noise you should make to get their attention" or "Isn't it weird that when you read a book, what you're doing is staring at stained wood pulp and hallucinating vividly?" Better yet, let me pull in the XKCD version (pictured right).

With apologies to Mr. Munroe, that alt text gives the game away. You see he has to cheat to keep it sounding awful. Why are the vegetables grease-soaked? If you're keeping ingredients separate, you've got to keep the grease apart from the vegetables. If you're putting them together, you ought to describe it as pizza. I'm tearing this joke apart because a great many modern ideas use the same formula for less funny results.

Why do you do what you do? Sigmund Freud figured you were a mass of complexes and neuroses, largely deriving your actions from motivations hidden in the unconscious parts of your mind, which in turn are organized around the procreative urge. Put it another way: "Isn't it weird that St. George slaying the dragon and rescuing the maiden fair was enacting a courtship ritual to marginally increase his mating chances as had been programmed into him by a million generations of natural selection?"

If the only thing you ever think about is the individual ingredients, you never see pizza. If you trace every impulse back to the urge to rut, you can't ever see things like heroism, elegance, honor, chivalry, grace, or even common courtesy.

There aren't many Freudians around these days, but there are plenty of other ideas that work along those fundamental lines. "The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles." Recognize that voice? It's Karl Marx, opening the Communist Manifesto. Forget for a moment every other objection to Communism, focus on that starting point. If every interaction between men is an economic one, then you'll only ever see economic motivations for anything. Let me show you how that looks:

The white page can be overwritten, and white light may be broken. -Saruman

In which case it is no longer white. And he who breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom. -Gandalf, who's never operated a supercollider.

I recently listened to a lecture about the Civil War. Incidental to the main point, the park ranger casually asserted the Trojan War was fought over control of the Dardanelles and the trade routes. Wait, hold on. For the sake of argument, assume the Helen of Troy bit is a bit of post-hoc rationalization, that there was no entangling treaty that forced the Greeks to defend Menelaus' right, and that even Herodotus's idea that it was a series of punitive raids that spiraled out of control is misguided. In short, assume everyone in antiquity was straight up lying about it. You've still got the option of two civilizations on opposite sides of the Aegean wrestling for dominance, a political conflict. The only way you get to the Dardanelles as the primary motivation is if you assume the primary motivation must and can only be economic. I'd like to ask that park ranger what he thinks slavery had to do with causing the Civil War. If the Trojan war was economic in nature, so was freeing the slaves.

You'll find that elsewhere too. I have a study bible with an introduction to the book of Joshua that tells me their theory of the conquest of Canaan. They say it was a slave revolt that pushed in and displaced some of the local tribes. You don't derive that from the text of Joshua or the traditions of the Church. You have to import a theory of history, one that explains all of history as that of class conflict.

Let's examine another idea: systemic racism. The modern race critic has the answer to every question, and that answer is racism. The details merely need to be worked out. Mostly how well the white man hides his misdeeds. The theory precludes normal human interactions between races; it's always microaggressions and power struggle. Mind you, I believe there can be such a thing as systemic racism. The trouble is that people who complain of it most never bother to prove it's actually there.

That power struggle, by the way. That comes from Michel Foucault. He's the deconstructionist (fancy that) who thinks that all language is a power struggle. That's nonsense, of course, but I really don't know how he got out of the faculty lounge with something that stupid. Let me pull up a quote:

C.S. Lewis, The Pilgrim's Regress You must ask them whether any reasoning is valid or not. If they say no, then their own doctrines, being reached by reasoning, fall to the ground. If they say yes, then they will have to examine your arguments and refute them on their merits: for if some reasoning is valid, for all they know, your bit of reasoning may be one of the valid bits.

Lewis was arguing with Freudians (much more common in his day), but the form of the counterargument remains relevant. If all language is a power struggle, then Foucault's assertion can't mean anything fundamentally true; he's merely making a move in the power struggle. You may disbelieve him for no better reason than to deny him the victory. He has no recourse to prove his point because any supporting reasons are themselves moves in the power struggle.

Have you noticed anything connecting all these ideas? Summarize them all with a single word. Freud thought the fundamental motivation was lust. Jung, breaking with Freud, thought it came from the fear of death. (I haven't talked about Jung because, in this sense, it's a repeat of Freud. Both had useful ideas. Both are wrong about fundamental causes.) In a word, cowardice. Marx thought it was greed, the race warriors cry racism, and Foucault thinks it's domination. Not one of those is a good thing.

The reason they all work that way is that they're all using a simple cheat. It's easier to convince someone he's doing something wrong than that he's doing something right. The path to Wisdom is littered with hard truths, beginning with the realization that you're not already there. You have to train yourself to accept the truth, no matter how difficult it is. The important thing to remember is that it's the truth part that's important, not that truth must be difficult. It's not wise to accept a difficult mistake instead of an easy truth. Perhaps I should explain this with a parable.

Suppose a young lady is wondering about her suitor. She's rather rich, so she's keen to figure out if he's marrying her for her money. Then one day she sees him giving money to a beggar. Is it genuine? If he's really a generous soul she can marry him without worry. If he knows she's watching, though, then he might be trying to trick her. The fact that any suitor might be mercenary does not imply that every suitor is only in it for the money. If she concludes every man is mercenary, she'll die unhappy as an old maid. The fact that this conclusion is less happy than the possibility of love does not imply that it's true.

There's another idea that's all too popular these days, one that I'll call Chemical Materialism. When you come right down to it - greed, or lust, or power - those are still human terms, dealing with intangible motivations. Take a diagram of a human brain and point to me the part where greed is stored. You can't. All that you have is atoms. Chemistry. Neurons and neurotransmitters. All these things are emergent properties of the complex chemical reaction going on in our brain, that thing we call 'life.' This is a belief shared by far too many people in this day and age.

Okay, assume that everything is atoms, that the laws of physics are the only real meaning in the universe, and everything from Pizza to St. George to Fort Sumter is an emergent property boiling up out of the chaotic soup of chemical reactions. To that I ask, "Why not feel alcohol about it?"

If the only thing that exists is a chemical reaction, then the only thing that exists is a chemical reaction. There's literally no reason not to drink yourself to death. Your subjective experience of drunkenness has no more or less meaning than the happiness you get through accomplishment, love, or anger. Work for the betterment of the human race? Why? It's just a chemical reaction. Murder the innocent? What does a chemical reaction care if another reaction starts or stops? Self-preservation? Chemicals that aren't reacting have no more or less meaning than chemicals that are.

You can't deny that anything has meaning and then still say that some things have meaning any more than Michel Foucault can use reason to prove that all reason is, in fact, a power struggle.

One more thought before I wrap this sucker up: What happens to a story when you cut it up into its essential elements? Each character, each conflict, each interaction neatly labelled and stuck through with a pin. You can put it together again, shuffle it a bit to remove the obvious details, and come out with a new story. Only it lacks heart. You've gotta have heart. Every so often you'll see a movie come through and take Hollywood by surprise. Then you'll see a dozen knock-offs that mimic the original but somehow miss the point. Why? Because they lack heart.

"Only an Auditor would take a picture apart [molecule by molecule] to see what made it the work of art." Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time.

I'm being a bit cagey, refusing to define 'heart' or explain how it works. That's on purpose. Art is and remains one of the great mysteries of the human condition. Unless it's all chemical reactions. I can't tell you what makes one work of art work while another one doesn't, only that copying a story by writing a similar one with all the same constituent elements doesn't work. Unless it does. That's another thing about art; sometimes a hack churning out product will spin straw into gold. All I know is that slavish adherence to a plan doesn't work.

Once you start noticing people mistaking pizza for ingredients, you'll see it everywhere. If people are only their component parts, then trans surgeries are possible. If there's something inherent to male and female that's ineffable, more than chromosomes and naughty bits, then those operations are doomed to failure. If a nation is only a collection of people, then swapping out some people for other people can't fundamentally change the nation. And patriotism is meaningless because any other collection of people is also a collection of people. And yeah, names are more than the sounds you grunt out to identify someone or something.

Finally, a note of caution. Sometimes ideas really can be split into component parts. The motion of a piston is nothing more than the sum of the atoms within. Assuming everyone is motivated by money is a great place to start if you're a private detective. And even if not everything is ruled by sex, I wouldn't trust every guy who crosses your path. More than that, people are complex and self-contradictory. Understanding what underpins some of their arguments might not help you deal with them. "You only say that because" will always get you into trouble, because people always have multiple motivations for saying anything, and nobody thanks you for pointing out the least creditable ones.

The important thing to remember is that breaking things down into their fundamental bits destroys something important along the way. Go ahead. Have some pizza. Don't worry too much if the vegetables are grease-soaked.

*Meaning no disrespect to the ranger. The line was incidental to the main point he was making; I would have been surprised if he took the time to mount a defense of it, or even thought about it much at all. Still, it rubbed me wrong.