The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of

Dreams play an important role in psychological theory, not so much as subjects in their own right, as because they seem to validate the unconscious (or subconscious) mind, wherein dreams allegedly originate. This entity, which underlies our conscious will, is supposedly built into the personality of the individual. Even though dream content is no longer given the importance it once had (in Freudianism, for example), dreams themselves help to justify the overall psychological point of view about what explains human behavior: the interaction between the unconscious and conscious minds.

But where dreams originate would seem to depend on when we dream. In other words, dreaming while we are asleep proves that the unconscious mind really exists. Many studies, most of them devoted to exploring the phenomenon of “REM” sleep, seem to indicate that this is so. Of course, all of them depend on awakening the sleeping subject in order to determine if dreaming was actually occurring, since only the conscious mind can communicate with the outside world. But this limitation makes it impossible to establish whether or not dreaming occurs in a different location than the unconscious.

Sleep is a coma-like state which differs from death mainly in that we can be roused from it. This similarity to death is what caused mankind to resist notions of the unconscious. Dreams, like the visions of prophecy, were thought to be packaged and delivered to the dreamer from without – from divine sources, mainly. It defied common sense that the sleep coma could be capable of assembling the characters, the narrative, the heart-pounding drama of a dream.

There are psychologists who reject all talk of “mind” as ephemera. But radical behaviorism -- the notion that people are just stimulus-response mechanisms – “machines made out of meat” -- lies at the bottom of a cliff over which most psychologists would not like to jump. They would prefer not to have their discipline limited to studying rats in a maze.

Since we can’t know if dreams originate in the “ether” of our unconscious minds, we must accept the alternative hypothesis, no matter how unlikely: dreams are artifacts of our conscious minds. In fact, it would appear that dreams are our conscious minds, reassembling themselves from out of the “buzzing confusion” of our internal physiological stimuli and the external irritations of the outside world. They are products of our present but we “remember” them as past events and so situate them in our sleep.

This explanation of where dreams come from gives us no new explanation of their narrative content. That matter still rests with the poets, artists, social scientists, and even psychologists. All it does is blow way the myth of the unconscious mind. And it leaves the biggest mystery of all – the origin of self-consciousness – still unanswered.

Tripping the Light Fantastic

The great French mathematician Fermat developed “the principle of least time” for light, which treats light as though it had intentionality. I learned this after attending an online lecture given by Laurence M. Krauss based on his book Quantum Man, which deals with the life of Richard Feynmann. A link to the lecture:

http://event.on24.com/r.htm?e=407099&s=1&k=BC20BF6F9619688234E72B368E78BE4C

We all remember from High School Physics our teacher demonstrating the refraction of light by showing how a glass of water could make a pencil appear to bend, or break in half. The light, he explained, is trying to find the path through the diffraction medium which entails the least amount of work. What we’re seeing in this bent pencil is merely the result of this principle.

Fermat saw something in addition. Somehow, the light beam knows before it even enters the water what its correct path will be! The instant it reaches the medium, its path alters. How can it know this, even before it plunges in, and takes the necessary readings, so to speak? Fermat saw, hundreds of years before Einstein, that it was not light which was bending, but time itself. 

How about that.

Science ignores the implications of this shocking fact, even more than it ignores analogous implications in quantum physics, and contents itself with merely carrying out the resulting equations in the practical realm. I’ll have more to say on this subject in the future, when I’ve bent myself back into shape.

In the Middle

Lionel Trilling wrote an excellent novel entitled “The Middle of the Journey.” I wish he had picked a different title, because it suits perfectly a notion which recently struck me with the force of a “revelation.”

I’ve been reading secular treatments of the history of the Jews, and as I made my way through accounts of the Exodus,  I realized that Judaism differs from every other faith in a way that -- I think –  no one else has ever noticed. Judaism is the only religion that experiences its central revelation “in the middle of the journey” rather than at the beginning! All the others follow Weber’s scenario of “beginning at the beginning,” with a charismatic prophet alone in the desert undergoing a transformative experience, attracting a few followers, and starting from there.

Ours has its preliminary revelations, to be sure, and a thousand years of history in which to narrate them, but not its crucial formative experience – the Sinaitic – until this “prehistory” has exhausted its possibilities. At that point we are given the Torah. We see God. We proceed to nationhood. The “we” is of course a collective of thousands of families. And that is key. Those thousands witnessed Providence with their own eyes. The experience was a shared one, not the solipsistic mystical trance of a virtuoso. It had to be, for a mob to be transformed into tribes, and eventually into a nation.

That is why the Sinaitic revelation, our fundamental formative experience, had to come in the middle of the journey, rather than in the beginning. It had to be the property of a people rather than of a mystic and his few followers, so it would be an eyewitness reality rather than a mere faith, thus generating a historical narrative rather than a myth.

Am I right that no one else has noticed this “middleness” of Judaism’s story? Food for thought on Passover.

Palin's Comeback

It’s hard to imagine Mitt Romney’s current ascendancy in the GOP not tugging Sarah Palin into a comeback. Against President Obama, he’s a loser on several counts. The Arabs are in no position to escalate the price of oil to $150 or more, the way they did against Bush and McCain, thereby sabotaging Obama’s Presidency. Romney’s weird Mormon heritage (full of anti-black racism, by the way) will work against him, and who knows what polygamous connections lurk in his or his relatives’ closets? Worst of all, his liberal record is guaranteed to trigger a third-party rebellion among the Party’s fiery Tea Party activists, already frustrated at being relegated to 2^nd-place media status by Obama’s anti-Wall Street guerillas. A split like that would sink a Romney candidacy.

So hang tight, Sarah Palin. They need you more than you need them.

Chesterton on Renan on Judaism

G.K. Chesterton quotes (from memory) Ernest Renan, the great French Biblical scholar: “But the trace of Israel will be eternal. She it was who alone among the tyrannies of antiquity, raised her voice for the helpless, the oppressed, the forgotten.”

Did Renan really say it?

Chesterton is known in British literary history as more than a little anti-Semitic. Yet he approvingly quotes Renan making this philosemitic remark. What brought about Chesterton’s shift? Or have we been misjudging the wonderful author of The Man Who Was Thursday and the Father Brown series?

Is the substance of Renan’s putative remark true? Is Judaism the only religious tradition of antiquity that “raised her voice for the helpless, the oppressed, the forgotten?” Surely there must be others. (We exclude Christianity and Islam only because they are not religions of antiquity, but branches of Judaism.) Was it not Marx himself who said “Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering.  Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.” 

Just more evidence that Marx’s theory of religion was wrong.

Alger Hiss

What Alger Knew

by Tom A. Milstein

Jan. 4, 2012

Hiss maintained [his innocence], defiant against the evidence, long after most men gave up hope that he might be innocent… The source of that defiance is the last and deepest mystery about Alger Hiss.

Murray Kempton

Part of Our Time, 1955

Alger Hiss committed grave sins against his country. He delivered large quantities of secret State Department information to the Soviets, even while under consideration for the position of Secretary of State.

Considering the overwhelming evidence of his betrayals, it is difficult to understand his perverse refusal to accept responsibility for them. When he died, virtually no one was left to justify what he did. For most, the opening of the Soviet archives obliterated the last few doubts about his guilt – except, apparently, in his own mind. He could easily have availed himself of the climate of forgiveness that arose after the fall of the Soviet Union – an event which he outlived – allowing himself to be portrayed as a “premature anti-fascist” or a well-intentioned supporter of the “Great Experiment,” or simply overly devoted to the cause of world peace. But this he never did. Instead, he denied the espionage charges to the very end of his life, and so died as he lived – apparently, a smirking knave.

Even his accuser, Whittaker Chambers, could not fathom Hiss’ smug equanimity, and concluded that he must indeed be a dedicated Communist, proof against all evidence of Stalin’s perfidy, akin to the Rosenbergs in his defiant convictions. But what baffled Chambers was his own intimate familiarity with his former friend’s character, which, he knew, ran far deeper than that of the shallow Rosenbergs. Moreover, unlike the Rosenbergs, Hiss had the benefit of all the disillusioning revelations that followed the tyrant’s death. His equanimity was truly the “last and deepest mystery” about the man.

Chambers considered this mystery to be a religious one. Most commentators consider it a psychological matter: “Who knows what shadows lurk in the mind of man?,” etc. If the question is religious, as Chambers believed, then the answer is surely annihilative to his religious views, for Hiss upheld his antinomian passion just as strongly as Chambers did his love of Christ, which makes Hiss into the Devil, which Chambers knew him not to be. If the question is psychological, then maybe Hiss was a clever lunatic, schizophrenic, or perhaps psychopathic. But he was a closely studied man, and there is no evidence for a clinical diagnosis.

That leaves the beast which is always slouching toward Bethlehem, politics. What were Hiss’ politics? His Communist internationalism, if that’s what it was, could not have withstood the downfall of the Soviet Union. But he believed in something, a something which undergirded his New Deal commitment and which carried him through the unpleasantness of his later life.

After Hiss’s conviction for perjury, Dean Acheson notoriously stated "I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss.” Here we have a clue to Hiss’ politics. Acheson was certainly not motivated by any personal affection for the man. Something higher was obviously at stake. What did they share? Some thought the two men should have shared a jail cell. But it was belief, not conspiracy, that united them. That common belief sent one of them to prison and the other to the American pantheon.

Belief in America made the one a hero -- and the other a pariah.

Both of them kept quiet after Hiss was imprisoned. Acheson must have been grateful for that silence. Quiet patriotism, the most powerful of political beliefs. But political beliefs require programs. What patriotic program of action could these two men have shared? It was simply what America did: vanquish the world.

Acheson, and Hiss, and others, took the responsibility for what we Americans still deny. We embraced the Soviet Union, not just as our ally against Nazism, but in a partnership against Europe, which, when World War II ended, we proceeded to cut in half. The Iron Curtain which Churchill bewailed, like all boundaries, had two sides. One side legitimated ours and the other theirs. We pretended this was inadvertent and unpremeditated, “an accident of war,” but in fact it was our great national Crusade, to eliminate Europe’s power and autonomy. Russia Sovietized Eastern Europe and we Americanized the Western remainder. After that the Cold War could begin.

Concern over what the Cold War might turn into led Earl Browder, disgraced former head of the Communist Party USA, into a remarkable 1949 debate in which he was eviscerated by Max Shachtman, theoretician of Left-wing American anti-Communism. Browder, in an aside from his usual apologetics for Stalinist totalitarianism, presented an unusual program for Soviet-American peaceful coexistence, as an aside from his usual apologetics for Stalinist totalitarianism. No one paid the slightest attention to his doctrinal hiccup after Shachtman’s pyrotechnic demolition.

Browder’s program – on a different plane altogether from the familiar Party slogan of “Peaceful Coexistence” – invoked American history as its raison d’être. He actually cited the Constitutionally-mandated balance of power between the free states of the North and the slave states of the South, and the compromises which made it possible, in order to justify a similar bipolar sharing of global hegemony between East and West. Vile as were these compromises, he defended them as statesmanlike solutions to the problem of creating a new Republic capable of defending a New World against European encroachment.

Browder was cagey about who was who in his comparison. Stalinists would of course consider their system the free one, and the West a regime of (capitalist) slavery. Americans would believe the opposite. Constructive ambiguity, no doubt. What is noteworthy about Browder’s notion is that he supplied an American paradigm for peaceful coexistence, a framework which not only justified their past cooperation against the common enemy of the past, Europe, but also, looking forward, against war between them.

In this halcyon future, one side would no doubt absorb the other, more or less peacefully. This is of course what happened. All Browder seemed to be saying is that no war need intervene. We could learn from our own horrible Civil War the cost of placing principle above compromise. “And so the war did not come,” he might have paraphrased Lincoln. (Thank the poor Rosenbergs, barbequed for supplying Stalin with the nuclear secrets he needed to establish deterrence and hold up his end of the balance of power!)

I believe Hiss was working to enact Browder’s program. Actually, it was probably the opposite. At any rate, Acheson and the rest of the “soft on Communism” crowd in the Democratic party, together with their Eastern Establishment Republican fellow-travelers, dedicated to “Containment” rather than “Liberation,” steered the nation into a Cold War which spared the world a third global conflagration and left us with the rather less apocalyptic problems of the 21^st century.

All of them deserve our thanks.