Culture and Consumption

Gabriel R. Ricci

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351312943
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

This is the thirty-first volume in Religion and Public Life, formerly This World, a series on religion and public affairs. This ongoing series seeks to provide a wide-ranging forum for differing views on religious and ethical considerations. The essays grouped together in Culture and Consumption discuss the phenomenon of consumption, an identifiable and pervasive feature of American culture that distinguishes it from other national cultures. The lead article provides an insight into the long-standing pattern of consumption that has been progressively elevated into social policy in America. This is a balanced analysis of the history of the consumption cultural ethos beginning with the undermining of the Native American Culture and ending with Wilsonian Liberal-Internationalism and the demise of the moral authority of organized labor. This commercialization of culture has always competed with the funding vision of a dispassionate social order in which custom, deferential politics, and continuation of traditional hierarchal values would be the constitutional agenda. Another contributor argues that the emergence of the democratic-consumer state in America was anticipated in de Tocqueville's observation that "in democracies nothing has brighter luster than commercea." Other contributor essays treat issues such as the New Class and the consumer state; technology's triumph at the expense of the social and natural worlds; and argue against the materialist perspective in addiction. Culture and Consumption includes the following major contributions: "The Dialectic of Consumption: Materialism and Social Control" by David Brown; "Religion, Social Science and the Ironies of Parasitic Modernity" by Guy Alchon; The Dilemma of Hypermodernity" by Mark Wegierski; "Toward an Epistemology of Addiction" by Leonard Kaplan and Vince Rinella. Also included are book reviews by Martha Davis and Conrad Kanagy. In a concluding essay, Gabriel Ricci reviews Jerome Bruner's The Culture of Education. Culture and Consumption is part of an annual survey of religion and public life that provides relevant information and ideas about significant issues of the day.

Addiction and Consciousness: The Banality of Transcendence and Degradation

Leonard V. Kaplan and Vince Rinella

Addiction and World View

Addiction and alcoholism have historically been examined not only from cultural and sociological perspectives, but more recently, from the vantage point of psychoanalysis and neurophysiology/psychology. Such examinations have yielded little in the way of understanding the addict’s career, motivation, or experience. To view addiction as a form of tension reduction, conflict resolution, or regression to oceanic feelings (to choose but three common Freudian perspectives), is not only to dilute the richness and complexity of the addictive experience, but is also to examine such phenomena from a necessarily tendentious point of view. Even Jungian psychology, with its emphasis on individuation and its willingness to appropriate the symbolic and metaphorical meanings of subjective experience commits one to examine addictions within the confines of a self-referential system.

Current emphasis on neurophysiological and neuropsychological dimensions of the addictive experience simply reinforce the materialist’s conviction that mind is just an epiphenomenal effect of the brain, that seemingly brute mass of nerve tissue supporting what we quaintly call “consciousness.” Needless to say, such a materialist perspective is less than heuristic in terms of providing opportunities to explore the subjective meaning of addiction with reference to other potential discourses.

A more helpful position has been articulated by John Searle in his work The Rediscovery of the Mind.¹ Searle reaffirms the truth that we all have inner-subjective qualitative states of consciousness, and we have intrinsically intentional mental states such as beliefs and desires, intentions and perceptions. His “simple solution” to the “mind-body problem” and the problem of consciousness is that mental phenomena are caused by neurophysiological processes in the brain and are themselves features of the brain; consciousness is simply a biological feature of the brain, alongside other biological systems like photo-synthesis, digestion and mitosis.² Searle parts company with the typical materialist by insisting that each of us accesses these phenomena in a first-person subjective way and that the subjective, introspective angle on consciousness— not the third person point of view—is the very mark of consciousness. Consequently, he argues, that because many (cognitive) scientists focus their attention on the question of intelligence, which they presume to have objective, impersonal criteria which makes it observable to all competent observers, they do not quite treat mental events as real. Searle’s answer to the proliferation of reductionism in cognitive science is anchored in his conception of causally emergent system features which explains the link between mental features and physical properties of the brain. His antireductionism is captured in his customary use of the analogy of the relationship of H₂O molecules in their liquid state to their lattice-structured state when in the form of ice. Consciousness is thus conceived as an emergent property of the brain in the sense in which liquidity is a property of H₂O molecules and ice is an emergent state of water molecules in liquid form.³

It is important to reemphasize mind as the logical underpinning of any epistemological inquiry in order to avoid the reductionistic and distorting pitfalls of wedding oneself to one discourse without reference to the subjective felt experience of alcoholics and addicts. Similarly, by refocusing on mind as opposed to psychology, psychoanalysis, or neurophysiology, it becomes more profitable to examine the underpinnings of addiction without reference to specific terminology and definitions which may be theory laden.

Moreover, such a perspective will allow us to discuss addiction as either a subjective, or “in vitro” phenomenon without reference to definitions related to physiological dependence, psychological dependence, or the particular neuro-physiological or epiphenomenal effects of different classes of licit or illicit substances. While the subjective experience or mainline heroin use may certainly be experienced differently than the snorting or crack cocaine or the ingestion of vast amounts of alcohol on a daily basis, the vectors underlying an alteration in consciousness may, in fact, be broad enough, to explain these various addictive behaviors.

It is our working hypothesis that addiction, like a wealth of other behaviors, is a reaction to modern scientific thinking and that drug and alcohol abuse are ways, among many others, of reducing the pain associated with and produced by enlightenment consciousness. In fact, Descartes’s extreme dualism, which Searle and others attempt to correct, resulted in the common consensus that the material world can be described objectively, without reference to the human observer. Combined with the Newtonian notion that the universe, having once been created, will continue to function as a machine and could be described and understood in those terms leads to a view of relentless necessity which precludes any metaphysical comfort, to borrow a phrase from Nietzsche.

In addition, rigid adherence to the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm has denied any metapsychological comfort to the addict or alcoholic. That is to say, this paradigm inappropriately applied the medical model to a variety of areas that fall outside the compass of the disease model, areas which may be more usefully viewed as problems of living, epistemology, or even consciousness expansion. The image of the universe created by Western science has been generally mistaken for an accurate and comprehensive description of reality. The result of this bias demands perceptual and cognitive congruence with the Newtonian-Cartesian world for mental health and “normalcy.” Indeed, any deviations from this “accurate perception of reality” have been seen as indications of psychopathology, and in our present context, non-ordinary states of consciousness. Certainly those experienced by addicts or alcoholics, with a few exceptions, have been generally considered to be symptomatic of mental disorders. As Grof notes, the very term “altered states of consciousness” clearly suggests that they represent distortions or bastardized versions of the correct perception of “objective reality.”⁴

Under such circumstances, it would appear absurd to presume that such altered states have any epistemological, religious, or gnoseological relevance, or that these unusual states of mind have any intrinsic therapeutic value. Again, the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm essentially prevents one from inquiring into the function of an addiction or asking about the meaning of an addiction, particularly if metaphors will bring us closest to the actual experience of the addict or alcoholic.

We propose that all addiction is a way of life and a way of dealing with difficulty, or gaining metaphysical comfort. As Donald J. Ottenberg notes in Addiction as Metaphor,

Addiction is a means of living as well as a means of escape. The escape may be from tension, fear, anger, inadequacy, or from the grinding insult of poverty and depression. Addiction is a means of feeling normal and acceptable, even if only temporarily. Addiction is a means of achieving in fantasy what cannot be attained in reality. Addiction is a means of adjustment to reality which may be frightening or overpowering, unyielding, threatening, or destroying. Addiction provides a coping mechanism in a world that is too difficult or too alien and, most important, it’s a bridge to other people, a way of breaking out of unendurable isolation to achieve human contact.⁵

As we have noted, scientific thinking in modern medicine, psychiatry, and psychology are a direct extension of the seventeenth-century Newtonian-Cartesian model of the universe. However, since twentieth-century physics has transcended this way of viewing reality, profound changes are occurring in psychiatry, psychology, epistemology, and other disciplines that are its direct descendants. Quantum-relativity physics, along with developments in cybernetics, information theory, systems theory, and the theory of logical types have provided the most convincing and radical critiques of the mechanistic world view. As Boaventura de Sousa Santos makes clear in his writings, the postmodern universe is a unified and indivisible web of events and relationships and its parts represent different aspects and patterns of one integral process of unimaginable complexity.⁶ Postmodern physics appears far more like a system of thought processes than clockwork.

It is more important to note that this new postmodern view of the universe contains at least two implications with regard to the epistemology of addiction. First, as a mirror of the addictive state which may often be equated with transcendent consciousness, it provides some “manoeuver room” for metaphysical comfort and may influence the behavior and attitudes of the postmodern addict or alcoholic. Second, insofar as this new view of the universe is compatible with nondeterministic a-logical states of mystical and other altered forms of consciousness, it provides some explanation for the motives and impulses underlying the addict’s quest for transcendence or metaphysical comfort.

Philosophically, Richard Rorty’s view of the self is similar to the postmodern world view reflected by quantum physics. Rorty, that is, describes the self as a tissue of contingent relations, a web which stretches backward and forwards through past and future time (not a formed unified present self-contained substance, something capable of being seen steadily and whole).⁷

The personal reports of heroin addicts compiled in the seminal work, The Road to H, reflect the fact that addicts do, indeed, experience themselves as “a tissue of contingent relations.”⁸ As Isadore Schein, the book’s senior author notes, heroin addiction serves three purposes, all of which serve to consolidate and shore up these strands of selfhood. First, it gives the person an individual identity. That is, he is no longer nobody, since he is an addict. Second, it gives him or her a group identity, since any addict automatically joins a strong and extensive subculture. Third, it provides him or her with work since addiction is a full-time job. From our point of view, the attempt to reconstitute the self as a unified and present self-contained substance via drug or alcohol abuse, is obviously a false solution to the discomfort or anxiety attendant to post-Newtonian-Cartesian consciousness. That is, such an attempt brings the addict back to an integral enmeshment in the Newtonian-Cartesian world which he or she initially sought to escape. This, by the way, seems true irrespective of one’s personality (or psychiatric diagnosis) or the drug of choice used to shore-up the self. While depressed addicts may choose a euphoria producing substance and the manic addict may choose a sedative substance (alcohol having the unique capacity to provide both “ups and downs” depending on the amount of the drug consumed) the reconstituted self becomes once again enslaved by the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm and seeks repeated escape from this initial discomfort. In many ways this is what a number of commentators have been implying, and it is to these commentators we would like to turn for a more detailed view of addiction from an epistemological viewpoint.

Modes of Consciousness

The late Warren Lehman, professor of law and self-confessed recovering alcoholic, perhaps understood the epistemology of addiction better than most. Evidence for this claim is found in an extraordinary paper entitled “Alcoholism, Moral Responsibility and Freedom” which he delivered at the International Congress of Law and Mental Health in Montreal in 1988.⁹ Lehman’s thesis, briefly stated, is that

people drink and do drugs because their lives are painful…. They are hurt because they try to live their lives according to an idea of self regulation that doesn’t fit our nature as human beings. The pain produced by the resulting dissonance is one for which alcohol is a sovereign remedy.

With reference to our previous discussion and Professor Lehman’s emphasis on self-regulation, it is interesting to note that the Newtonian-Cartesian world view reifies the self (e.g., I think, therefore I am). In addition, the Freudian notion of ego, a logical consequence of this reification of the self, is characterized primarily as a self regulator, mediating between the seething cauldron of the id and the tyrannical demands of the super-ego.

Lehman’s model of the psyche is valuable because it directs us to a third and substance-free possibility which is consonant with a number of other philosophical currents. Lehman posits that all addiction is an attempt to live in what he refers to as Mode A, rather then Mode B consciousness. Mode B, in this model, is very much a reflection of the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm in that it stresses control, prediction, a self-aware ago, categorical thinking, and the cavalier dismissal of feeling as largely irrelevant to the human project.

The hallmark of Mode A, on the other hand, is the lack of ego-awareness and self-consciousness wherein one is completely and literally absorbed in what one is doing. Lehman posits that Mode A is primary and continuously at work and that when we are in Mode B, the activity of Mode A continues. The activity of Mode B, however, is secondary and discontinuous, and he notes that this distinction corresponds to a large degree to Freud’s between primary and secondary processes. While Lehman cites Levy-Bruhl’s work on tribal society as describing people who live primarily in Mode A, it is also interesting to examine the developmental issue physiologically as well as sociologically or anthropologically, and in this regard, Julian Jayne’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind is instructive.¹⁰ Jaynes, for example, locates the amalgamating of admonitory experience by “heard voices” of the gods in a right hemisphere area corresponding to Wernicke’s area. These admonitory experiences are similar to functional “automatic” activities such as bicycle riding, or playing the piano and, in fact, are very similar to what Lehman describes as Mode A experiences. From a developmental point of view, of course, primary process, Mode A activity and right hemisphere functioning all precede left brain functioning characterized primarily by the development of language abilities. For Jaynes, Lehman, and others, Mode A activity also has religious implications which we will return to at a later point in our discussion.

At any rate, particularly in Western culture, the conscious reasoning of Mode B commonly overrides and ignores Mode A. The irony, of course, is that while control is a hallmark of Mode B consciousness, its exercise does not allow one to control either one’s drinking, drug use, or one’s life world. As Lehman notes, this leads to “unassuageable guilt” such that Mode A , “out beyond the horizon of conscio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyrigth
• Contents
• Introduction
• The Dialectic of Consumption: Materialism and Social Control in American History
• A More Lasting Subversion—Mary van Kleeck and the Decorous Insurgency of the Social Christian Woman
• The Dilemma of Hypermodernity
• Addiction and Consciousness: The Banality of Transcendence and Degradation
• Bookends
• Contributors