Satisfaction

Lane recently contended in comments:

You go to the Apple store and you really want that new Steve Jobs gadget. (Steve Jobs is one of my pagan gods) You pay $300 for the object that has a production cost of $50. The $250 difference is the sacrifice at the altar of Apple.

And that new Apple gadget makes you SOOOOOO happy! If you allow it to, even transcendently so. Literally carrying you over and beyond the woes of the flesh.

Lane is extending a current line of Dave Hickey’s that he likes, about the virtues and rewards of paganism:

Paganism works. You want proof? Try a week or two of self-flagellation; then a week or two of constant prayer; then slip into a nice Armani jacket, pick up a perfect guitar, play the intro to “Stairway to Heaven” (or whatever you can play) while perusing a calm blue painting by John McLaughlin. I rest my case. So let’s just admit that all the world’s major religions are well past their productive prime in their ability to build, create and civilize. Today, they are malignant, meddling tribes in the fury of their decline. For individual Americans, religion is just a lifestyle decision whose occasion rarely rises to the metaphysical. What do your friends do? Is there anything else to do? Do you, my dear, prefer your husband in overalls, Zegna or a Speedo? Do you, sir, prefer your wife in a burkha, a prairie dress or in a bikini on a jet ski? And do you, my child, honestly find more joy in religious ecstasy than in Miley-mania? Does anyone prefer worshiping an anthropomorphic hologram to ogling pictures of nifty objects and attractive people in magazines? Is Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Sikh, Hindu or Buddhist virtue really superior to common decency, great art, great sex and good business? You have a choice. The options are out there.

Now, Hickey’s doing several things in this essay, and I don’t want to be unfair. For one, he’s arguing that we’re already pretty thoroughly pagan in America these days, and I think that by Hickey’s own definition he’s pretty much right.

But Hickey is doing more than providing an anthropological report on our civilization. Although he cloaks it in descriptive assertion, he’s also making a normative argument, that what he describes as paganism is a good thing, an ethical and fulfilling structure for our public and private lives.

There’s a part of this argument that’s wildly appealing, as Hickey always is. “Most of us worship the beauty of all that lives and breathes, and all of us, one would hope, unify our souls and bodies in the ecstasy of dancing. These guilty pleasures lack nothing to be redeemed but the power of our belief in them.” Who would turn this down? Let’s all embrace our paganism.

The other day I was in SoHo, on a mission to buy an armband case thingie for my new iPhone so I could listen to podcasts while I work out at the gym without worrying about dropping my new gadget. New York is one of the world’s great cities, but it has very few spaces that make it easy to see and be seen as part of a modern, commercial metropolis. If you’ve ever been to Vienna, you know what I mean: inside the inner ring, there’s a network of old streets lined with broad sidewalks, with fine cafés and restaurants spilling out and musicians playing Mozart as people eat and drink and stroll and watch each other.

In New York, the nearest equivalent to the Viennese promenade is world-class shopping, and SoHo is one of the prime loci — you hear as many Europeans as Jerseyites. But the sidewalks are narrow and crowded, there are too many cars, and personally I always feel rushed and unwelcome when I’m shopping in SoHo. This might be because I don’t just shop in New York; I live here, albeit in a part of town with a somewhat different vibe. There’s a sharp contrast between the life I’ve constructed for myself here, in a relatively quiet neighborhood, hanging out in bars and restaurants and parks that are fairly unlikely to be on must-visit lists for visitors from Frankfurt or London, and the high-end, “world-class” New York of exclusive boutiques and the fulfillment of consumer desire.

Speaking of consumer desire, my iPhone. Lane promised me transcendent happiness. It’s certainly a nice gadget, and I’m enjoying it. It brings me pleasure. But happiness?

There are at least two problems with the idea, which I think Hickey is pushing, that happiness can come (in part) from the acquisition of consumer goods. One is a problem that Aristotle faced up to: if happiness depends on the acquisition of certain material goods, then happiness is only attainable by people of a certain economic class. “Slip into a nice Armani jacket, pick up a perfect guitar, play the intro to ‘Stairway to Heaven’ (or whatever you can play) while perusing a calm blue painting by John McLaughlin.”

Aristotle admitted that happiness was in fact only available to people of certain means. This might be true, descriptively, although cross-cultural studies suggest that the poor can be quite happy and the rich are often quite miserable. In any case, how closely should we embrace an account of happiness that tells people that for real fulfillment in life they must win a lottery of birth and talent that places them within the tiny percentage of humanity whose rapacious use of resources now threatens to render the planet virtually uninhabitable?

Perhaps a more troubling issue with Hickey’s pagan account of happiness is the contingency of the very desires that the goods are meant to fulfill. An Armani jacket is nothing to me without a whole apparatus of promotion telling me that “Armani” is a famous name, that stars wear Armani to the Oscars, that I will be a better person (a person of more refined taste and sensibility) if I wear Armani, etc. The Apple products that bring me pleasure do so largely because they are designed in a way that I have been taught to find pleasing and advertising in a way that I am mostly powerless to resist. In unquestioningly allowing these things to please us, as Hickey urges, we cede control of our own desires to the great system of consumer capitalism, and that feels a lot like ceding a key part of our humanity. Ad men and spinmasters stand in for wisdom and judgment.

I admit to more than a little discomfort with shopping, and maybe that sours me on Hickey’s cheerleading for paganism. Shopping makes me feel empty. So what of the well-dressed hordes on SoHo’s crowded sidewalks, smiling and striking poses as they clutch their bags full of recent acquisitions? They are either quite different from me and actually find happiness in getting and spending, or they deceive us with their smiles, hiding something empty inside. I can’t tell which. A third possibility: if Hickey’s right, the problem lies with my own failure to get with the program.

What worries me most about Hickey is that he leaves us with no place from which to be dissatisfied with the excesses of consumer culture, including the big, beautiful art market and including our train-wreck of a country, our farce of a democracy. “The founders of this republic built the refined residue of Rome’s pagan republic into the infrastructure of American governance with obvious effects on the shape and conduct of our lives.” Well, yeah. Look around and keep telling me that’s a good thing.

27 responses to “Satisfaction”

  1. lane says:

    “Excellent! . . .”

  2. Scotty says:

    “So what of the well-dressed hordes on SoHo’s crowded sidewalks, smiling and striking poses as they clutch their bags full of recent acquisitions? They are either quite different from me and actually find happiness in getting and spending, or they deceive us with their smiles, hiding something empty inside. I can’t tell which.”

    Are you sure that you can’t tell which, Dave?

  3. Dave says:

    Their glossy lipsticks and high cheeckbones render them impenetrable to my powers of discernment. Or maybe it’s the Armani jackets. Or the Botox.

  4. Scotty says:

    I think you’re too busy looking at the perfect, yoga-sculpted behinds to notice the deep sorrow in their eyes.

  5. Dave says:

    It’s true: I find myself wondering, can you really be unhappy with an ass like that?

  6. I stumble every time I read it over the word “pagan” here, which seems to me like it is being mis-used. Seems like in the last decade or two, when I hear people use that word they are generally talking about a religion or form of mysticism based loosely on pre-Christian traditions in Northern Europe mixed with pre-Columbian traditions in the New World. But I think Hickey and Lane are talking more about something akin to secular hedonism?

  7. Dave says:

    I think they’re talking about the Hellenized world most of all — think of the milieu of Lucius Apuleius’ The Golden Ass.

  8. lane says:

    ok let me see if i can fill this in a little, based on my own gut feelings.

    dave hickey was raised by a saxaphonist father and communist mother, hard core bohemians. no religion what so ever. but as i’ve read his writing, ideas like “faith” and “hope” come up again and again. somewhere in all that he says “NOT having faith, is NOT an option”

    this goes to our discussion here about “do we need religion?” mainly PB, Dave and myself, the buscuits section.

    Are we hardwired to have this ideas to help us survive? these ideas that get co-opted by religion.

    Hickey lived half his life as a freelance writer. Freelancing, self-employment, involves constant negotiation with the unknown. You simply can’t exisit without the “faith” that the phone will ring with another assignment. And you can’t make it ring, no more than you can control the weather.

    In the essay “Pagans” linked above, Hickey refutes the idea of “Secular” culture, as something dreamed up by religious people who want to scare people into believing. In the language of my provincial religion it was called “The World” (Don’t be “worldly!” Live in fear of people in “The World”)

    So in Pagans yes he proposes that it is the material stuff of life that makes us happy. A new basket, a new arrowhead, a new i-pod. Not the mythology under it.

    And that “religious” people don’t have any claim on “internal” happiness. Non-religious people do to.

    Anyway, I don’t type as fluently as Dave, but I hope cumulatively, I’m making my point.

  9. g.a. says:

    This is the kind of discussion that keeps me coming back to the Whatsit. Well, this and the playlists.

    I haven’t read a lot of Hickey (well, nothing really beyond the linked essay) so I don’t know if he deals with this problem elsewhere, but what’s bugging me about this discussion is a failure to distinguish between an appreciation for beautiful objects and full-blown wallowing in commercial culture. You can take “pagan” pleasure in art objects without purchasing them, and you can take “pagan” pleasure in a well-cooked meal made from fine ingredients. Maybe the latter does require you to fork over some serious cash at Whole Foods, even, and maybe spending that money on food is part of what makes you feel special. But it seems qualitatively different from buying stuff like iPods or cars or clothes, because “consumption” in this case actually brings physical nourishment.

    Another explanation for why buying things makes you feel good is available in the work of the cultural historian Jackson Lears, especially in these books. A shrewd historian of consumer culture, he develops a useful concept “therapeutic consumption” or “consumer therapy” — I can’t remember which phrase he uses exactly — in relation to a shift in Protestant culture around the turn of the twentieth century … a shift from Christian salvation to consumer salvation, buying things to feel better about your miserable life instead of turning to Jesus to make you feel better. He also relates this shift to a moment when Protestants (especially liberal Protestants) begin to accommodate art in ways they had typically regarded with disdain as too “Catholic,” so I think there’s something valuable here for Hickey and his argument. (See Lears’s first book for more on the Protestant Catholic thing.) I just feel slightly uncomfortable making crass consumerism into modern religion. It’s clear a lot of Americans, even the really religious ones, do this already, but is it to be celebrated? Put on a plane with appreciating the good things of the world in ways that don’t feed the capitalist monster?

  10. g.a. says:

    I think I have a comment in moderation. Who tends to such things?

  11. g.a. says:

    There it is. Thank you.

  12. g.a. says:

    “Four in a row?” You ask.

    Re-reading Dave I see that he already filed the objections I made, and more eloquently than I managed. I guess all that talk of iPhones distracted me. Or maybe I just wanted to bust out the Lears and throw it into the mix. In any case, good discussion.

    Of Hickey’s other work what would you recommend?

  13. Natasha says:

    Such a good post! I thought about it when Lane originally introduced Hickey’s view of Paganism, and later, when I read the full article. I didn’t want to comment, because I was not sure where Lane was coming from on this matter, and why he was so interested in Paganism.

    Hickey’s article was awesome and, actually, pretty sarcastic with respect to consumerism; however, had little to do with Paganism. While there is a lot of good literature out there about the basics of Paganism, it is impossible to understand the essence of it, unless a person is initiated and practices. If one is initiated, he/she should very well know that the most important aspects are secret and forbidden to be written down. They are passed on during initiations along with the power lines. Hickey’s perspective leads me to believe that he either never practiced or belonged to a coven, or he is purposely trying to mislead the unaware readers, which Pagans sometimes do for various purposes. It is a Pagan belief that the accumulation of stuff burdens the spirit, as it requires a high concentration of energy on things, which are not sacred. However, one can do as she/he pleases with harm to none.

    As far as money…money does not make you happy, however, it provides the convenience, recourses, and comfort for a person to be able to concentrate on what makes one happy, rather than constantly concentrating on what one can or can’t afford — that’s all. Since the goals and the weaknesses of each individual are so drastically different, it is really impossible to say whether it is right or wrong for them to have a lot of money. So, “knowing thyself” is probably the least each one of us owes to ourselves and the society.

  14. lane says:

    i love the idea that dave h. belonged to a “coven” . . . (the artworld maybe, the underground press maybe, perhaps a songwriting shop, or hotrod garage) i think in dave’s world these things count as “covens”

  15. g.a. says:

    Michael Jackson is dead. Whatever else he was, he must have been a high priest of some sort of paganism or another. Or perhaps a sacrificial lamb?

    R.I.P.

  16. Dave says:

    G.a. — thanks for the book recommendations; I can never keep up with the reading people assign me when I write half-cocked posts here.

    Lane — So Hickey says we need something, and he’s not happy with Christianity. Fair enough. My criticism, and this actually goes to a lot of stuff Hickey says about democracy, too, in Air Guitar, is that he gets so carried away with his shockingly! counterintuitive! praise of materialism and consumerism that he doesn’t bother to develop any way of critiquing the cultural or personal results of consumerism — in fact, he wants to undermine any such critique.

  17. Adriana says:

    I just learned that the production cost of an iPhone is actually $175, and that AT&T buys the phones for something like $600 and sells it to us for $2-300. They do this because (for now, anyway) when you buy an iPhone you have to sign away your life and first born to AT&T, so they make a ton of money off of you in the long run.

    I’m not sure how that fits into this discussion, but if I weren’t so tired I’m sure it would have some pertinent meaning.

    Anyway, I feel uncomfortable with making anti-consumerism a religion.

  18. Hey Dave, you know what I was just thinking would be really cool? A Monome iPhone app, is what.

  19. g.a. says:

    Excerpts from the Times obit. Is this a guide to the (pagan?) world we live in or is it an outline for a new DeLillo novel? You decide:

    As a solo performer, Mr. Jackson ushered in the age of pop as a global product — not to mention an age of spectacle and pop culture celebrity. He became more character than singer: his sequined glove, his whitened face, his moonwalk dance move became embedded in the cultural firmament.

    Impromptu vigils broke out around the world, from Portland, Ore., where fans organized a one-gloved bike ride (“glittery costumes strongly encouraged”) to Hong Kong, where fans gathered with candles and sang his songs.

    In Los Angeles, hundreds of fans — some chanting Mr. Jackson’s name, some doing the “Thriller” dance — descended on the hospital and on the hillside house where he was staying.

    Jeremy Vargas, 38, hoisted his wife, Erica Renaud, 38, on his shoulders and they danced and bopped to “Man in the Mirror” playing from an onlooker’s iPod connected to external speakers — the boom boxes of Mr. Jackson’s heyday long past their day.

    “I am in shock and awe,” said Ms. Renaud, who was visiting from Red Hook, Brooklyn, with her family. “He was like a family member to me.”

    In Gary, Ind., hundreds of people descended upon the squat clapboard house were Mr. Jackson spent his earliest years. There were tears, loud wails, and quiet prayers as old neighbors joined hands with people who had driven in from Chicago and other nearby towns to pay their respects.

    “Just continue to glorify the man, Lord,” said Ida Boyd-King, a local pastor who led the crowd in prayer.

    “He has always been a source of pride for Gary, even though he wasn’t around much,” she said. “The older person, that’s not the Michael we knew. We knew the little bitty boy with the big Afro and the brown skin. That’s how I’ll always remember Michael.”

    After 14 weeks of such testimony and seven days of deliberations, the jury returned not-guilty verdicts on all 14 counts against Mr. Jackson: four charges of child molesting, one charge of attempted child molesting, one conspiracy charge and eight possible counts of providing alcohol to minors. Conviction could have brought Mr. Jackson 20 years in prison. Instead, he walked away a free man to try to reclaim a career that at the time had already been in decline for years.

    After his trial, Mr. Jackson largely left the United States for Bahrain, the island nation in the Persian Gulf, where he was the guest of Sheik Abdullah, a son of the ruler of the country, King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa. Mr. Jackson would never return to live at his ranch. Instead he remained in Bahrain, Dubai and Ireland for the next several years, managing his increasingly unstable finances. He remained an avid shopper, however, and was spotted at shopping malls in the black robes and veils traditionally worn by Bahraini women.

  20. lane says:

    well sure, i don’t worship at the temple of micheal jackson, but some do . . . an i have stopped in for a dance now and again.

    the gods are eccentric to be sure . . . commanding abraham to kill his kid and all . . .

  21. I don’t really have an opinion on Paganism or consumerism right now, but I’m commenting because I enjoy Dave’s eloquency. You sure can string together a coherent thought well, Dave. It’s a mini-version of dense philosophy texts, without making me fall asleep.

    Good words, Dave. Nice flow.

  22. Natasha says:

    “When one creates phantoms for oneself, one puts vampires into the world, and one must nourish these children of a voluntary nightmare with one’s blood, one’s life, one’s intelligence, and one’s reason, without ever satisfying them.”
    – Eliphas Levi, Histoire de le Magie.

  23. G. Smiley says:

    “There are at least two problems with the idea, which I think Hickey is pushing, that happiness can come (in part) from the acquisition of consumer goods. One is a problem that Aristotle faced up to: if happiness depends on the acquisition of certain material goods, then happiness is only attainable by people of a certain economic class.”

    The ancient pagans had a solution to this problem. it was called “slavery.”

    “Perhaps a more troubling issue with Hickey’s pagan account of happiness is the contingency of the very desires that the goods are meant to fulfill.”

    The ancients had a solution for this one, too: stop trying to be happy. Hickey is an amateur pagan living in a post-Christian world — a world whose sensuality is made possible, ultimately, by the distant Catholic past. The ancient pagans, who were veterans of being pagan in a pagan world, were fatalistic, stoic, otherworldly types. Consider that Socrates (who said that the goal of philosophy was learning how to die) was the fountainhead of Greek paganism in its heyday. They knew how to party, but their worldview was pretty dour.

    “Paganism works. You want proof? Try a week or two of self-flagellation; then a week or two of constant prayer; then slip into a nice Armani jacket, pick up a perfect guitar, play the intro to “Stairway to Heaven” (or whatever you can play) while perusing a calm blue painting by John McLaughlin”

    Mr. Hickey, may I invite you to consider the case of G. K. Chesterton. A passionate Catholic and a sensualist, who considered it his religious duty to sing the praises of beer often and loudly.

    The sensualism of today is made possible by the advent of Christanity, which, confronted by a pagan world that denied the goodness of the body with scandalous news. God had a body… and He drank wine.

  24. the advent of Christanity . . .that denied the goodness of the body . . .

  25. Natasha says:

    25: “The ancient pagans had a solution to this problem. it was called “slavery.””

    What does it mean? Are referring to the Egyptian pharaohs, and if so, what exactly do they have to do with Paganism (aside from their magical practices, which drastically differed from the Pagan practices by the very foundation of their spiritual believes). How does it philosophically relate to Aristotle? How does “slavery” provide an answer to Aristotle’s statement?

    Who are “the ancients”? “The ancient pagans, who were veterans of being pagan in a pagan world were fatalistic, stoic, otherworldly types”?

    With all the respect, Fatalism is a doctrine based on the belief in the powerlessness of our nature and the higher affixed providence of the future events. “Stoic” comes from the Latin word “stoicus” – avowedly unconcerned with emotion, pain, or gratification. You might be referring to Spartans, but not Pagans here.

    Why would Hickey need to consider Chesterton? And what does an oenophile God have to do with this discussion?