The Capitalist Brain (Letter to a Friend)

I've been convalescing after a small operation.. picked up a copy of Laing's The Divided Self and have been enjoying it thoroughly. It is a pity the contemporary psychiatric establishment is quickly falling prey to neuroscientific reductionism.. What a rich and wonderful world exists just through the rabbit hole, and to be banished by a few milligrams of compressed colourless powder seems almost a crime. Will all this not result in a Romantic counter-revolution? Perhaps it already has..

I think where Laird may be used as a counter-critique is in his understanding that mental illness functions within a social field, that it can never be fully removed from it. Here neurological reductionism fails miserably in that it treats merely the underlying chemical realities. Perhaps this is precisely what it wishes though.. it ensures a long and profitable future for the pharmaceutical industry along with its boot-licking cronies the reductionists. No, Laird would perhaps agree with me that this will simply not suffice. The more fundamental treatment would involve not just the brain organ, but the whole field in which the brain organ functions, i.e. society. Such a great project has already been (re) proposed and is steadily reaching its new realization. That is: The Communist Hypothesis, the little red pill for the capitalist dis-ease.

Regards

jeremy.

Babel: The City Sin

God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it...” Gen. 1:28

They said, "Come, let us build for ourselves a city, and a tower whose top will reach into heaven, and let us make for ourselves a name, otherwise we will be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth." Gen. 11:4

Despite oft repeated Sunday morning children’s lessons and sermons, the sin of Babel was not that they “tried to reach heaven” or "make a name for themselves" greater than God's. The sin of Babel was the transgression of the original commandment: “Fill the earth and subdue it.” Where Yahweh had commanded the man and woman to scatter across the face of the earth, their children did exactly the opposite: they built a city. (Notice the reason the people desired to make a name for themselves: "let us make for ourselves a name, otherwise we will be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth" (4)). The outcome of language confusion at Babel is clearly the point: “So the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of the whole earth; and they stopped building the city. Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of the whole earth; and from there the LORD scattered them abroad over the face of the whole earth” (11:8-9). The building of the tower and making of a name is clearly not the primary transgression here. It is, rather, the rejection of the commandment to fill the earth, and its fundamental manifestation in the building of a city. There is often a tumultuous relationship between Yahweh and the city in Scripture. Rarely is the city cast in a positive light, especially in the Torah. From divine destruction to countless prophecies hurled against them, cities bear the brunt of Yahweh's displeasure. At least this much is consistent.

Certainly a modern prophet in the counter-urban tradition was Paul Shepard, who in his Nature and Madness situated the city as the melting-pot of various neurotic/pathological behaviours, both attracting and creating people with mental illness. It is no surprise that Shepard was considered one of the major contributors to the ecological movement, the religion of the 20-21st century, the new opium of the masses.

This is the first in a number of personal reflections on what I consider the "urban problematic". Please join me in reflecting on the meaning of "city" today, and the potential impact such large conglomerations have on our planet and species.