Ideological Lifeboats 1

This is a printed version of a a 13 minute radio talk I gave on 'Ockham's Razor', under the title 'Profile of a Post-Modern Outsider', which was broadcast by the Australian Broadcasting Commission on August 13th 2006

by Christopher Nagle

(Introduction by Robyn Williams) And now for something completely
different, as John Cleese used to say in Monty Python. What would an
Asperger’s Ockham’s Razor sound like? Many brilliantly
talented artists, from the pianist Glenn Gould to perhaps
the writer J D Salinger, have been put in this category.
Christopher Nagle puts himself there—and he does so to
give a blast against consumerism writ large, the
postmodern society as a gigantic supermarket selling 24/7
and filling every space there is. Hold on to your sofa, here
comes Christopher Nagle.


Post-Modernity is not just an aesthetic of fragmentation
or intellectual deconstruction. It is an emerging
transitional period in which modern institutions and ways
of life become damaged, dysfunctional, defensive and
eventually defeated. In such a time, as it becomes more
turbulent and insecure, individuals and eventually entire
populations must move on into uncertain and probably
hazardous journeys into the future.

Post-Moderns would assert that much of the platform for this
is already in place and that we are now living in the latter days of
modern times. To have such a bleakly divergent view in the face of a
culture of overwhelmingly sunny optimism and marketed
enthusiasm requires more than an ordinary sense of
disgruntlement and eccentricity. It really helps to have a
lifetime of outsidership under your belt: the earlier the
start, the better the chances of escaping the immense
gravitational pull of the dominant consciousness.

My career as an outsider started early in life. By the time
I was five, I was already showing signs of not being quite
as others are. My social behavior was often inappropriate
and this had a way of both annoying my peers and
worrying my parents. As family and acquaintances got to
know me better, they recognized this as incompetence
rather than willful selfishness or malice. At school I became
adept at absorbing the punishment of my peers and then
gratefully accepting their eventual forgiveness.

Over fifty years later my wife noticed an internet site
that discussed Asperger’s Syndrome, which is a distant
relative of autism. Suffers are poor listeners and
empathizes. They are worse readers of communicative
subtext and body language. They can tend to verbosity
and lecturing, are a bit mono and spend a lot of time in
their own heads. At last I could put a name to my disease;
a syndrome no less!

What is more, this syndrome isn’t all bad news. Some of
the world’s greatest philosophers, scientists, inventors,
entrepreneurs, poets, artists and spiritual pilgrims have
been fellow suffers. Whilst one could speculate that many
of the not-so-Great-Ones veered unhappily from loose
cannon to ineffectual introvert, at least there was hope for
me still.


As a first cohort baby-boomer in the England of the
1950s, I experienced what was to turn out to be the
twilight of the Judaic-Christian society. Its loosening grip
still left vivid and indelible marks upon me. It was as
different from the later consumerist culture as could be
possible in a Westernized society. It was a densely
ritualized, strictly disciplined and hierarchical world. It was
certain about what it stood for, was possessed of a stern
moral toughness and didn’t accept excuses or give second
chances to those who crossed it. No one questioned its
authority or its right to be severe if it thought it necessary.

The boarding primary school I went to ran much as it
would have done in my grandfathers’ day. By the middle
1960s that world was all but swept away. When the
headmaster of my Australian secondary grammar school
rather foolishly tried to assert this institution was
dedicated to turning out Young Christian Gentlemen,
there was an embarrassing round of titters and guffaws.

For a great many of my generation, not only had the notion of
being a gentleman become quaintly old fashioned, but so
had our religious beliefs. I went to considerable lengths to
try and resurrect mine, but to no avail. They no longer
seemed either emotionally compelling or intellectually
plausible. This was not a problem in my later teens, as I was
far too bent on bathing in an exuberant mixture of study,
sex, popular culture and the politics of the Vietnam War.
However, as a character I was now rootless in the same way
as a cut flower sitting in water. The bad news took a while
to arrive.

In early 1966 I headed off to Melbourne University to
enroll in the Law Faculty. On the tram going there I met a
just-finished fourth year law student who was about to start
his Articles. We got to talking. By the time I had stepped
off at Tin Pan Alley, I was convinced that if my tram
acquaintance was anything to go by, four years in the
Melbourne Law School would turn me into as much of a
pompous anachronism as he was. I fled.

Instead, I trained to be a historian because I wanted to understand
the frames and fabrics that assembled and unfolded our future out of
our past. This made it a more hazardous adventure than
the law, whose parameters were much more safely defined.
What I later realized I was really looking for were spiritual
roots fertilized by visions not of a familiar and comfortable
past that was irretrievably gone, but a future that would
have to be created.

Despite having a serious go at trying to make Marxism
do the job, I found it couldn’t paper over the seeping sense
of existential vacuum. It was as if I lived in a world that
kept itself frenetically busy by overproducing and
consuming mainly junk, so that it would never have to look
into itself. In so doing we were subjecting ourselves to
forces that were so voracious, it was as if we were riding an
industrial tiger that we could neither afford to get off nor
stay on for much longer, except at a terrible price, either
way.

The corollary of that was that the production and
consumption treadmill was accelerating well beyond the
safety parameters of biological systems, in ways that would
suggest severe obesity or cancer rather than healthy
growth. And while the physical infrastructure of the First
World states was in reasonable shape, it seemed to me that
its consumerist culture, the city of its imagination and
existential heartland, was being trashed and looted into a
software version of a Third World shanty town.

However, the world didn’t crash and burn: I did.

It was only decades later that I realized that I had become
clinically depressed. I didn’t go to doctors. Instead I worked for a
couple of years as a laborer on seismic firing lines, railway
construction projects and oil platforms.

One day I crashed an explosives truck with 200–300
kilograms of gelignite and a box of detonators on board.
They didn’t explode. This remarkable piece of dumb luck
gave rise to the absurd conceit that I had been spared for
something, which was to find revelation and redemption,
even if it took the rest of my life. And while this worthy
intention did nothing to save me from the consequences of
my later errors and foolishness, it never dimmed.

As my life went by, I fitted in as best I could to meet my
responsibilities and get what satisfactions I could. I never
completely embraced the world I found myself in, partly
because I couldn’t and partly because I didn’t want to.
However, what I continued to do was meditate on that
world to create an overview of what I was going through
and how it and I had got there. I assembled both a personal
and potentially collective ‘ride out’ strategy for what I felt
that overview was pointing to.


After a hiatus that lasted into the 1950s, war production
that had been geared for struggle between military
machines transformed itself into a production war fought
between marketing machines. These were able to replicate
wartime ordinance attrition and labor mobilization rates
on a now protracted basis and portray this as exciting,
inevitable, progressive and overwhelmingly normal.

Unlike the much more dramatic and bellicose Cultural
Revolution in the China of the later 1960s, the politics of
Production Warfare quietly disappeared into the structure,
volume, density and character of an unprecedented surge
in the supply of products and services. It left hardly any
disturbance on the surface of public consciousness to give
away just how virulent, radical and totalitarian it was. And
while Mao’s crudely old-fashioned version quite quickly
ran out of steam, in the West the juggernaut rolled on.

I had a vision of production warfare whereby the
traditionally differentiated forces of peacetime production
and wartime destruction were fused into one
unprecedentedly brutal force. Whether it destroyed by
deliberate attack, unintended collateral damage, or
dreadfully unfortunate friendly fire didn’t matter. Whether
the sites of damage were in the economic and biological
hardware or psychological and cultural software didn’t
matter either. As with Tolkien’s rings of power, what
mattered was that the machinery of our productivity was
so powerful, aggressive and absolutist in its claims upon
the world, anyone, anything, anywhere near it was
corrupted and/or damaged by it.

Protracted Production Warfare means cross generational
assaults on population by an exploding
armamentarium of increasingly sophisticated, more rapidly
expendable and elaborately targeted ordinance. Up to a
third generation of ‘Consumerbabe’ veterans of this warfare
is now in the lines and routinely soaking up its punishing
firepower.

As each successive generation of these troops
becomes more rigorously trained than the last, they are
ever more hardened to rapid and convulsive change. The
discomfort, pain and wounds it causes are anesthetized in
product and service solutions. For the troops, memories of
civilian life fade, for warfare is all there is. Their vision of
life narrows to a vanishing point. They simply live and die
to have their buttons pressed.

Just because their command system is private rather
than state-sponsored does not mean they are not as
totalitarian as their fascist and communist forebears. Just
because they do not display the same obvious in-your-face
belligerence doesn’t mean they are any less destroyers of
themselves and everything they touch.

As in the great wars of the past, ‘non-essential’ domestic
and community construction and maintenance are
suspended for the war effort. In the short run, pre-war
traditions could carry on until the war was over. With
protracted war, as this mechanism is used up, asset
stripping starts. The fat and sinew of domestic and
community life are thrown into the furnaces of the war
effort. The delivery of the intimacy and discipline that
constructs us as high net worth characters is inhibited,
degraded and finally removed in favor of the
blandishments of marketing; a regime as impersonal,
narrow and inadequate as any of the totalitarian systems it
has replaced.

The unkindest cut of all is that the philosophy of The
Enlightenment, which really was benign and promised
much, has been colonized to both streamline and mask this
process. As a young man and teacher, I invested much
energy and hope in the possibility of liberation. What I
learned, the hard way, as is my wont, is that without
knowledge, maturity of judgment, a secure character and a
steady sense of restraint, liberty becomes a cruel joke; an
icon for a dis-empowering loss of control and vulnerability
to consciousness manipulation.

Rights, which are the fulcrum of our democratic and
humanist culture, cannot exist in a vacuum. They are
underpinned by obligations which can be complex and
onerous. In the absence of this essential discipline, rights
turn into indulgences. Indulgence corrupts honest moral
dialogue into excuse making and rationalizing. In the
context of a marketing structure that systematically
indulges its customers, the culture of rights becomes a
travesty that stalls the reproduction of responsible adult
behavior.

Thus, over time, adolescence replaces
adulthood as a cultural norm. This has delivered
unprecedented opportunity to leverage and prey upon
mass populations of permanently immature, unstable and
under-constructed people.

Escape from this is nearly impossible, for all the roads
out have been turned into consumerist dreams that loop
straight back into the mouth of the tiger. More, our
children, the newest model ‘Consumerbabelets’, have
already been taken from us by the Pied Pipers of Cool.
They are far too entranced by the music to have any
interest in eluding the Piper’s cloying grasp.

The new totalitarians have won beyond the wildest
dreams of their predecessors. Protest is just another niche
market. Nothing less than similar absolutism can stand up
to it, which is why Muslim fanatics are the only real
opposition left standing.


This thesis is so at odds with conventional ‘common
sense’ and so dark in its sentiments, many listeners might
be forgiven for thinking that it is more a reflection on the
writer than his subject. I am not immune to this and suffer
doubt.

Am I an Asperger lost in the seductive poetry of his
thoughts? Could the cultural displacement that I
experienced with the loss of my religious roots prejudice
my judgment? Can depression at an impressionable period
of one’s life keep inspiring negative behavior for the rest
of it?

All of the above are possibilities, but they are the ones
that make me an outsider and enable me to articulate the
perhaps otherwise un-sayable. The world is already very
amply supplied by insiders whose reasonable, balanced
and orthodox judgments reinforce the overwhelming
status quo.

Negativity is not necessarily a vice just because
the dominant culture repels it in favor of institutionalized
megalomania and hubris. I recovered from my bout of
depression several decades ago, but the analysis that
contributed to it steadily became more damning as it
became clearer and more comprehensive. And yes, I lost
my religious roots, but they taught me enough to know
just how impoverishing the worship of goods and services
is.

Islamic fundamentalism, self-doubt and intellectual
defiance aside, in all likelihood the beast will just keep
bloating and metastasizing until its host tissues turn feral
and/or collapse.

However, out of the wreckage of a
Post-Modern era is the possibility of a reconstruction
project that might recapitalize ecological, cultural and
existential infrastructure. Its aim would be to sustain us
through perilous times by building solid communities of
resilient, resourceful and fully developed adult human
beings. It would involve broadening our understanding of
how we create and build wealth, run industry and envision
enterprise.

The great teacher who suggested that we do not live by
bread alone was trying to redefine wealth and our
understanding of what a good life is.

As the Western Roman Empire declined, this message increasingly
appealed to a people being progressively stripped of their
institutionally ordered affluence and security. As they
embraced it, they gave to it their imperial organizational
genius, which propelled an obscure Jewish cult onto the
world stage. I believe something analogous will happen in
our world not too far down the track. It will bring us a very
modern kind of revelation and redemption that will be as
overwhelming for us as Christianity was for the Roman
world.


Christopher Nagle is a writer who lives in Grantville, Victoria;
lucky he escaped doing law

The author gave a second talk in February 2007 that is stored here as 'Ideological Lifeboats 2'.