Roger Albert

Why do 99% of movies follow the same formula?

~ Roger JG Albert

Why do 99% of movies follow the same formula?

Because they address our most basic anxieties, our fear of death and our drive to deny it.  Denial of death is what I call a meta-institution. That means an institution (defined by Veblen as a crystallized habit of thought or life) that is globally dominant and pervasive. No place, country, society, culture or whatever group is immune.  We all create and nurture death-denying institutions. Sometimes they involve religion, sometimes not. Business is as good at death denial as religion is. There is no way that the film industry can escape our basic drive to deny death.

Death doesn’t necessarily mean what happens to you when your brain and body stop functioning. It can mean poverty or social death and isolation. In this sense death denies us the good life but leaves us, zombie-like, to live out our physical lives with not much of anything interesting to experience or for which to look forward.

The film industry barters in death, social or physical, worldly or eternal. So, you’ll often see a person die in movies but generally that’s considered a sacrifice for the survival of our favourite death-denying meta-institution, the one that promises us eternal life of one kind or another. The hero, that person or group that personifies the triumph over death, occasionally dies in a movie, but always with the proviso that what they’ve fought and died for lives on. From war movies to romantic comedies, the formula is always the same as is the outcome. Of course there is a lot of variation in how the formula plays out and how long an individual movie spends on any particular part of the formula, but that doesn’t negate the existence of the formula itself.

Triumph over complacency, attack from various quarters (earthly or otherwise), disease, rejection, isolation, poverty, or what-have-you, is the bread and butter of the film industry.

Want to produce a blockbuster movie? This is what you gotta do.

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 2 Comments

The  eight part formula you must follow if you want to create a blockbuster movie.

Create a world where there is nothing much going on (at least for a short time). It may be a purely internal world. It may be on a space ship. It may be under the sea. It may be a battlefield, on POTUS’s airplane, in small town USA, wherever. It doesn’t matter much what kind of world you create. Set it in the past, present or mythical future, or a mix of all three (Terminator). Everybody is going about their business and although it’s not essential that everybody be happy, they should at least be leading fairly straightforward lives even if they’re in prison or on a planet penal colony in the Andromeda galaxy. In fact, their lives may be a shitpot, but that doesn’t matter as long as there isn’t much going on. Play innocuous music in this part.Terminator

Have something dire happen in your world. Shit happens so make it happen. It might be the world coming to an end, a dam busting, a war, a famine, running out of water, going crazy, an alien attack, a whoever attack, needing to tell your parents that you’re gay, having a spouse cheat on you or die, go to jail, get out of jail, having your superpowers sapped by some evil genius, having disreputable people move next door. You get the idea. Get the big Japanese drums going. Big music has to happen here unless your movie is about coming out of the closet or unrequited love (Her), then you can play Adele.

The poor helpless schmucks in your world are at a loss for what to do (Dirty Dancing). Don’t make it easy for them, it would make a silly movie to do that. Make them suffer.  Some might even die because of what happens in 2 above, but that’s not important. The important characters must live. This is where you make sure people know that traditional leadership has failed schmuck world. The mayor is an ass, the boss absconds with the cash, the adults dismiss any action and seem to just want to lie down and die. Things look very bad, very bad indeed.

Then make the situation really bad, so bad that the world is coming to an end. Don’t pull any punches here (Mad Max). Sadness is great here. Lots of sadness, mayhem, bad shit. There’s no logical expectation of survival for the good guy(s).

But, aha! all is not lost! One special, kind of a nobody schmuck gives a speech to rally the troops, or ‘digs down deep’ to find the courage to do something. He or she or both or even a group become(s) the hero(es). This is the defining moment in your movie. Don’t blow it. Don’t get maudlin or sappy.

The schmucks get organized. Watch out bad guys. Training often happens at this point and equipment is gathered to take on the enemy. Play upbeat music in this part and keep dialogue at a minimum.

The climax. Very important. You need a climax where the good and bad are caught in deadly battle. This has got to be good. No holding back here. Time is of the essence. It’s preferable if someone dies here especially the villain unless you’re planning a sequel. It may be that you just knock off one of your lead character’s many personalities, that can be fun). Whatever happens you need resolution here.

The dénouement. This is when all the action is done, people are back to ‘normal’ or at least they know what’s up and the imminent danger has passed.  The good triumph although sometimes it’s hard because there’s a ‘bad’ guy acting good (Unforgiven).  Explanations happen at this stage. We have to know about Darth Vader after all. We can all go home knowing the world is set to right, at least until the sequel.

Unforgiven*

I challenge you to name a movie that doesn’t follow this formula. Well maybe one or the other of Wes Anderson’s movies or some obscure low-budget indie effort.

So why are movies so formulaic? I address that in my next post. Stay tuned.

This formula also happens in TV shows, even sitcoms. Professional sports tries to emulate this formula as much as it can, not always successfully although it does try hard to create the us/them dichotomy culminating in ‘real’ rivalries (Canucks and Flames).

  • images from IMBd

No, I’m not a grammar nazi, but damn it!

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 5 Comments

Alright, I know that language evolves and that contemporary expressions and idioms displace older ways of communicating using language. Still, some words and terms currently in use are just illogical, never mind that they’re not in conformity with the rules of the language.

I know, I know, rules are made to be broken but damn we insist on misusing some words so consistently and wrongly that we need to give our collective heads a shake. 

I want to give you just a few examples of the more egregious misuses of language so that maybe you, at least YOU, will not fall into the pit of folly and ever misuse these words again. 

First, a tenant is someone to whom you rent a house or an apartment. A tenet is a principle, belief or dogma generally held to be true by a group of people, an organization, movement or profession. A tenet of the Catholic faith is the three aspects of God, Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Get it? The Catholic church may rent out apartments and spaces here and there in which case they would have tenants to go along with their many tenets. The difference between the two words is minimal if you look at the letters involved, but maximal if you consider their meanings.

I’ve experienced professionals, using overhead projectors and powerpoint presentations use tenant when they meant to use tenet. Not cool folks! Don’t do it! Ever!

Here’s another one of my very favourites: storey and story.

You could tell a story to someone while standing on the second storey balcony of your apartment, but don’t get the two mixed up.

Damn, I’ve seen architects use story when they meant to use storey once too often. They should know better. People in general use story when they mean storey all the time. I’ve got some glaring examples, but I don’t want to embarrass the circus in question. 

Data, damn it, is a plural noun. The character on Star Trek should have been called Datum, which is the singular form of data. Now this one is becoming mainstream. People, many of them scientists, even statisticians who really should know better, now commonly use data when they actually mean to use datum, but never the other way around. How often have you heard: “the data tells us blah, blah, blah…” It should be the data tell us. Truth be told, most people don’t even know the word datum exists, but that’s what five years of studying Latin got me. Got that one? Let’s move on to a couple more examples like it.

Media is a plural noun but is generally used as a singular noun.  The singular form of media is, wait for it… medium! Television and radio are communications media. The internet is another medium of communication. Please avoid using the phrase: “the media delivered the news today that it was not interested in how to use the word, medium, not even on the national news.” Well, you can use that phrase, but you get my drift.

Same goes for continua, continuum, agenda and agendum. Yes, I know that the world is changing, blah, blah, blah. It doesn’t mean I have to like it. 

The use of the word quality without qualification drives me crazy. No, you don’t sell quality cars, you either sell high quality, midlin quality or, frankly, poor quality cars. Got that? Stop telling me you sell quality anything. You don’t! Even college administrators get this wrong, some even deliberately!

Read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Persig, for God’s sake. It’s all about quality.

Alright that’s enough. I’ve got a cold and I think ranting helps me clear my sinuses. Thanks for indulging me, but I’ll be back!

By the way, post your own pet peeves when it comes to the misuse of language in response to this, on Facebook, Twitter, or even on here, WordPress. 

Want to be safe? Maybe we need to let Syrians in and keep Americans out.

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 5 Comments

I didn’t really want to do this, but I can’t help myself. When I see people advocating shutting down our borders to Syrian refugees I see red. 

As I’ve pointed out in previous posts, there are many historical precedents for receiving refugees and if you want to ‘google’ it, check out how many immigrants, many of them refugees, were brought to Canada from 1896 to 1914. Millions. Not 25,000. Millions! In 1913 and 14, 400,000 or so each year. These people came here from all over Europe, many escaping the tension just before the 1st World War. Many settled in the West. The immigration minister of the time, Clifford Sifton recognized the need for people to come to this country to build it. He gave them land and tools. I’m convinced the paltry number of Syrian refugees we plan on taking in will also enrich this country but we also need to help them. They have been completely impoverished and devastated. Of course not all of them are angels, but neither are all of us.

But closing our borders? Well I could argue that closing our borders to Americans would probably be much more logical than blocking 
Syrians. Why, all Americans have guns don’t you know, murders happen all the time in the US, mass murders are frequent. There’s no way of assuring ourselves that Americans we let in aren’t murderers or child rapers at the least. Our security and safety are in jeopardy! If we’re going to close our borders, we should start with Americans. 

But, you know, Canada has its own murderers and high order miscreants. Women are not safe in this country especially in their own homes. We have our own people ‘terrorizing’ us. We live a few doors down from a ‘legal’  marijuana grow op. Recently I was talking to a young man living on an adjacent property and he decided to move his young family away because the jerk running the grow-op had threatened him telling him to stay away from the grow-op because he has a gun, you know. Gee, Mexico could very well prevent Canadians from coming down because you never know if one of them might be another Paul Bernardo!

Boy, we have all kinds or reasons to be afraid for our safety. Just have to drive the Malahat to be clear on that or live in some of our neighbourhoods such as the Downtown East Side or be homeless. We don’t need hypothetical reasons for being fearful like the fear of Syrian refugees, most of them highly traumatized children and their mothers. 

Of course some people specialize in hatred and fear. Chicken Little is alive and well. ‘The sky is falling.” We don’t need to heed their baseless and ridiculous arguments. 

We live in one of the safest countries in the world and it will stay that way with or without Syrian refugees. We can make it so, but not by being bowed by fear.

Carry on, Justin!

Don’t get me started on Syrian refugee refuseniks!

~ Roger JG Albert

For the moment I will allow  that this is a democratic country and people have a right to their opinions no matter how ‘out there’ they might be.

Yes, I understand  that the current federal government was elected with less than a 40% majority and yes, I know that the Conservatives would take a very different approach to the issue of refugees.

Yes, I’ve had a look at what it takes to become a refugee to Canada from Syria and I’m sure that all those women and children are potential ‘terrorists’ but let me tell you that if my neighbourhood was bombed to smithereens like many in Aleppo as shown in this SANA image, I would be looking to get my ass out of there pronto. And if I didn’t get a helping hand to get out of there and resettle instead of rotting in a camp somewhere in Jordan or Turkey, I might just consider a career with ISIS.

Put yourself in the shoes of the average Syrian and you may get a little sympathy for what they’re going through. If you believe that they’re all terrorists, there is nothing for me to say to you.

Yes, the odd miscreant may slip  through the immigration dragnet and come to Canada to later rob a grocery store, but that’s to be expected of any population. We have our own homegrown miscreants of course, quite a few of them, and they’re not all petty crooks and jail fodder. I’m confident the Syrian refugees will not add at all to the quota of miscreants we already have.

Most refugees don’t want to be refugees. They would much rather go back to their homes. But just look at the photo above and tell me what there is  to return to.

So, please stop with the fear-mongering. Stephen Harper is gone and we don’t have to be afraid anymore of Muslims under our beds waiting to slit our throats as soon as we fall asleep or some terrorist suicide bomber blowing herself up in downtown Cumberland. We never did have to be afraid of those things.

Make no mistake, there’s no 100% guarantee of your safety. There never has been and  there never will be. One thing for certain is that women in this country are in more danger in their own homes via domestic violence than they will ever be at the hands of a Syrian refugee.

One thing though, if Syrian president Assad should ever apply for refugee status, we need to deny it. We already have enough assholes here.

 

Refugees are us.

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 3 Comments

It’s interesting how opinions are so polarized over the issue of accepting refugees into Canada. Not surprising, just interesting. Generally the more conservative among us are overwhelmingly dead set against accepting refugees and sometimes even legitimate immigrants. They fear that their cherished institutions will be undermined and  that their neighbourhoods will become unsafe or at least unwelcoming because of all ‘those people’ speaking a foreign language, wearing different clothes and putting up weird ‘churches’. The more liberal among us see the value of accepting refugees often arguing that refugees tend to enrich their chosen country and not endanger it. No matter what political stripe you paint yourself with, there is no doubt that accepting refugees is always a challenge. 

From a liberal perspective, Canada has a very spotty record when it comes to refugees and conservatives often have a blind spot when it comes to the history of migrations into this country. There have been a number of more or less major refugee/migrant movements into this country over the centuries, others that required people to leave Canada and some that required movement within the country but still qualify as refugee crises in my opinion. 

One of the first was the internal refugee crisis perpetrated by the French colonial government pre-1763 in this part of the world when they created refugee camps for indigenous people, forcing them out of the Québec forests and into camps that were eventually called reservations and bribing them to adopt Christianity. 

In the mid-18th Century, the British forced many thousands of Acadians into exile to Louisiana eventually creating the Cajun culture there. Of course Louisiana was a French colony at the time and probably welcomed their brothers and sisters from the north. Nevertheless, the Acadians were refugees. 

The United Empire Loyalists during the war of independence in the United States in the late 18th Century were essentially refugees from the conflict down south. Many Ontarians today are the descendants of the Loyalists. They may want to forget that they are descendants of refugees. 

The Irish famine in the mid-19th Century created a huge refugee problem for the colony that was eventually to become 
Canada. The Irish were thought to be crude and illiterate and entirely unacceptable as future residents of Canada. The Americans looked on with horror at the influx of Irish refugees into the U.S. citing their crudity, their brutishness and their loose sexual mores. Many of the descendants of the Irish refugee/migrants of that time are now fully integrated into Québec society, many speaking only French. In Boston, the Irish came to have a lot of influence, many becoming police officers. Still, a dangerous, unsightly lot by all accounts. 

Before the advent of the 20th Century, indigenous people all over North America were forced into refugee camps and marched all over the place to ensure that they would be out of the way of settlement and the exploitation of resources. 

In my next post I tackle Canada’s shameful record in the 20th Century with regard to the acceptance of refugees and migrants from Asia and Europe. It seems we react out of fear of people we don’t know and with whom we don’t share language and culture. Instead of seeing the power and potential of population diversity we have often reacted with anger and fear at the influx of ‘strangers.’  However, the truth is that many of us are the descendants of refugees, whether we know it or not, like it or not.

How fragile our egos can be (even for a successful university professor).

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 9 Comments

This is the fourth post relating to the Ernest Becker Legacy conference held at SFU in early October. However,this last post relates only tangentially to the conference and more to a situation that arose after the opening talk by Sheldon Solomon on Friday evening, October 2nd.

After Solomon’s talk there was time to mingle and have a glass of wine. There were a number of familiar faces in the crowd, some from my time as a student and instructor at SFU during the 1970s and early 80s, some from the Ernest Becker Foundation and some conference attendees were my former students or acquaintances. One couple that stood out for me was a long retired professor in the Sociology and Anthropology Department at SFU and his wife. I hadn’t seen him in ages, but I recognized him immediately. I’ll leave his name out of this because it’s irrelevant and I would not want to embarrass him in the slightest. I remember taking one of his course and found him to be a competent enough teacher. He produced a number of monographs and I expect his research was much more important to him than his teaching, but that’s pure speculation on my part. I certainly have the utmost respect for him.

In any case, we soon found ourselves chatting over a glass of wine. I doubt if he remembered me although he said he did. It’s true that I was in the department for many years as an undergrad then as a grad student so it’s possible he did remember me. In any case, this conference was about Becker and I expected he wanted to talk to me about Becker’s work at SFU or about his own work. He didn’t. In fact, he seemed anxious for someone to listen to his complaint about Becker, to hear his story of how nasty a character Becker really was. I found this astounding because this conference was really a Becker love-in and not essentially a critical venue with regard to Becker’s work. Why would this esteemed, highly regarded professor, with a good publishing record of his own, bother to come to a conference to listen to nice things being said about a person he loathed?

As he recalled the story, it turns out that in the early 1970s when Becker was still active doing research and what not, he was keen on having as much time as possible to engage in study and writing. He was interested in getting some relief from teaching. This professor to which I’ve been referring was in some kind of administrative position at the time and Becker approached him with his plan for a reduced teaching load. Apparently that meeting did not go well and Becker, according to this professor, was rude and belligerent, to the point where the professor’s ego was severely threatened. He took this perceived attack on his ego very personally.

The reason I bring this up is not to pass judgment on Becker or on the professor in question. It’s to point out how long a slight to the ego can affect us, how long we can carry it around and allow it to sour our thoughts. I’m talking about a period of at least 40 years between when this professor felt slighted by Becker and his recounting it to me (although any willing ear would have done) at a conference dedicated to Becker’s legacy as if it had all happened just last week. Why?

Well, for one explanation we can turn to Becker’s own work. In Escape from Evil, Becker makes it clear that any attack on our ego can mean that we fail to qualify for immortality, that somehow we are unworthy of eternal life. An attack on our individual egos or on our collective egos as embedded in our social and cultural institutions can result in diminishment and reduced qualification for the meaning in life we so desperately seek. This is not doing Becker’s argument justice, so I would suggest reading Becker yourself to get the full story if you wish.

However, the power of an attack on the ego can be devastating, as I think I illustrated here especially if it’s left unresolved. Furthermore, I don’t think that this situation is idiosyncratic. The kind of reaction I’ve illustrated here to being threatened resides deep in our unconscious minds and leaves us unsettled, cautious and wary, as individuals and as societies. In other posts on this blog I’ve addressed the issue of how we defend our egos by linguistic means, by the use of the indefinite ‘you’. I’ll be writing more about the ‘indefinite you’ again soon.

A third post relating to the Ernest Becker Legacy conference held at SFU earlier this month.

~ Roger JG Albert

As promised this is the third post of my ruminations about the Becker conference.

[A sad aside: I took my time with this post because my trusty MacBook Pro that I bought in early 2011 decided life was not worth living anymore and pulled the plug on itself. So what to do? Buy another computer of course. Maybe later. What I did instead was pull the hard drive out of it and put it in its own stand-alone case. Now I can boot it from Carolyn’s computer just like it was my own aside from a few little glitches. It’s very slow though because it has to run through a USB port, We’ll fix that by increasing the ram in Carolyn’s computer and get it a new battery while we’re at it. Now Carolyn and I have to share a computer, sort of. I’m actually typing this on an old PowerBook G4 I had in my studio for pulling up photos for painting. It can’t handle a lot of new software including Chrome and Firefox, but it’s better than nothing and I can get my mail and do this. So that’s good. It won’t be good for the Cumberland Forest Society’s Trivia Night in a couple of weeks – I’m the quiz master and we need to drive a projector with new software. For that we’ll need my (ah..Carolyn’s) MacBook Pro with its new ram and battery. I actually amazed myself by how much I grieved over the loss of my computer. Thankfully, I was able to salvage it’s brain even if I had to let its heart go.]

I’ll restrict my comments here to the presentation by Andrew Feldmár. It was on Sunday morning, the last presentation of the conference. To be honest, I was a little hung over at the time but that was probably appropriate given the content of the  presentation. So Feldmár was a very popular professor in the psychology department at SFU for many years. He was there when I was first a student at SFU in 1972. I didn’t take any courses from him. I was kind of anti-psychology at the time. I’m much less so now. In fact, even at the time I read a lot of psychology and psycho-analytical writing. Still, it was generally reading on the critical side. I understand that psychology has its place in the world, but my perspective and that of a lot of my fellow grad students was that psychology’s focus on the individual was an ideological bow to the individualism characteristic of capitalism, the basic target of our collective criticism. Even more, we considered psychiatry, specifically, as an extension of the police in modern society, persecuting anyone not ‘towing the line’ of modern capitalist institutions. Feldmár shared our critique of psychiatry although I didn’t know that at the time.

In fact, Feldmár worked with one of the most famous critics of psychiatry, R.D. Laing, who worked in Britain and conducted a lot of experiments on the ontology of schizophrenia and other ‘mental illnesses’. Laing was a most impressive guy who virtually pissed off the entire body of psychiatry at the time. I’ve recently been re-reading his The Divided Self and continue to be impressed by his work. Of course, his ‘colleagues’ considered him a brash, arrogant rebel. All the more reason I would read his work. Laing as well as Thomas Szasz and others more recent like Peter Breggin argue that schizophrenia arises in certain individuals because of a confluence of genetic/biological predispositions and family dynamics. They argue that families and ‘society’ create schizophrenia and that it is not a disease per se, but is a dynamic set of relationships that become intolerable to the ‘patient’, In other words, families create schizophrenics, not an idea very popular with the families of schizophrenics. To be clear, Laing and Szasz did not feel that the families of schizophrenics were in any way malevolent, except in the sense that the people with the power in the family, generally the parents, would stand on very strict behavioural parameters for their children not allowing their children to develop their own sense of self and self-determination. Asking the parents of schizophrenics why they thought their children became ‘ill’, they determined that to a large extent, the parents felt that they had absolutely no responsibility for it arguing that they had provided their children with all the best life could offer them including love and acceptance.

In fact, the situation in the family, Laing finds, is highly complex, and is founded on a series of contradictory behaviours expected of the children by their parents. So how would Laing endeavour to ‘cure’ schizophrenia? Well, Laing used LSD very successfully to ‘shake up’ the patient in a way that allowed them to see their situation from a different perspective. A recent CBC Ideas program notes that using LSD in therapy resulted in a 50 to 90% success rate for certain ‘problems’ such as alcoholism and other mental illnesses. Andrew Feldmár, in his talk, discussed the use of psychedelic drugs in therapy and how successful it’s been in Laing’s experience and his own. Of course the ‘establishment’ opposition to the use of psychedelic drugs pretty much made the practice illegal and illegitimate although there’s been somewhat of a revival lately. Feldmár is a large part of this revival in his current work and hearing about it firsthand was amazing to say the least.

However, I don’t believe that Feldmár’s presentation lived up to its title, A Laingian/Psychedelic/Therapeutic Perspective on “The Denial of Death”. I don’t recall Feldmár talking a lot about Becker although Becker definitely leaned heavily on Laing and Szasz in the psychological aspects of his work. I would have appreciated a more direct outline of how Becker uses Laing and Szasz in his work. Becker never mentions psychedelics and therapy that I know of. I have to go back and look as some of his earlier works. I’ve focussed much more on Becker’s later works, The Denial of Death and Escape From Evil, for my own purposes. Like I said, I was a little hung over on Sunday morning, October 4th, when Feldmár made his presentation. If I’m misrepresenting him in any way here, I’d be happy to hear about it.

By the way, I’ve decided to write one more post on this topic. It’s not about the conference directly, but about an interaction I had with an old professor of mine and one of Becker’s colleagues at SFU. That will come next week.

Follow up on yesterday’s post on the Ernest Becker Legacy Conference at SFU

~ Roger JG Albert

In my last post I mentioned some of the conference speakers, among them Sheldon Solomon and Jack Martin. I quite enjoyed both of their talks which together summarized Ernest Becker’s thought and his biography. To generalize beyond caution, I dare say that every one of us is an ever changing individual confluence of experiences, actions, achievements, ideas, values, etc., bounded by a sac of flesh and bone and  wrapped in a social weave of interdependencies. Solomon and Martin ‘gave’ us the confluence that was Ernest Becker in as much complexity as was possible in a short time.* Of course, the conference title implied that Ernest Becker’s legacy would be the focus of discussion. In Becker’s case the legacy in question refers to the range of ways and means his ideas have informed those of others who have followed him. It’s what he left behind for others to use and build upon. That’s a staggering amount of information, ideas and insights to put it mildly. 

Most people who have used Becker’s work have focussed on this or that aspect of it. There’s too much of substance in Becker’s work spread over too many disciplines, making it close to a unified theory of social and biological life on a grand scale, to use the whole thing as a starting point for further analysis. We can gnaw away at the details and go from there, but it’s most difficult to follow Becker on the grand scale of things. A person would have to share his confluence of influences at the very least. I mean, he described his last book as a synthesis of Marx and Freud. Well, who is competent to judge whether or not he actually did that? Someone who at least shares his reading list and sees the world in ways that he did. Was he referring just to Marx and Freud or were these two names rallying terms for a huge number of writers and authorities that he also used? His Freud also included Rank, Jung (to a lesser extent), Adler, Brown, Jones and many others. His Marx included Frankfurt School types, the more humanistic Marxists like Fromm. In fact, I don’t see a lot of classical Marxism in Becker’s work so he must not have meant Marx,  but Marx-ists.  Becker’s confluence is complex and massive and  hardly matches anyone else’s so I think that we literally cannot follow Becker in the entirety of his thought. In fact, a prerequisite for reasonable commentary on Becker’s overarching thought, I  think, is a familiarity with the bulk of his reading list. You’ll need a few years to get through it.  You’ll also need an openness to his interpretation. 

I’ve already written that people have settled on aspects of Becker’s work to elaborate. It’s probably safer and necessary to do that in any case as I have just argued. So, we come to David Loy, a very nice man if I’ve ever met one, a Buddhist scholar, an activist one by all accounts. Google his name. He’s written a few books. His talk was interesting, but not so much for me because I just don’t easily go to ‘religious’ places in my thinking. Of course I’m probably doing Loy an injustice and I wouldn’t want to do that. Still, I probably wouldn’t read any of his work but I would love to sit and watch a beautiful sunset with him.

Larry Green was another of the conference speakers and a big part of the organizing crew. I have so much respect for all of the organizers and the participants in this conference and Larry is right up there. He earned my respect for whatever that’s worth (I have no illusions about the insignificant space I take up on this planet, so what would he do with my respect? I do not mean this in any kind of self-deprecating way.). He is a long time psychotherapist (44 years) and teaches the odd course at City University Canada. The blurb in the conference document states “His contribution will focus on alternatives to “in-group” identification as a source of ontological security.” That’s a tall order. Becker’s discussion of the moiety in Escape From Evil would be enough to scare me away from suggesting an alternative to how things have been organized socially on this planet for thousands of years with people dividing themselves into competing groups all the better to prove how wonderful and worthy a winning group is in its barter with the gods for immortality. For me, the problem is that Green is focussed on individual accommodation to life on this planet and not on the overall ontological issues around  group formation and social conflict. But that’s not meant to be a criticism, just a problem for me…as a sociologist who taught Canadian history, French, Anthropology and Sociology at a freshman level. Notice, there’s no Psychology in there. That doesn’t mean that I don’t have the utmost respect for a number of psychologists, psychoanalysts and even psychiatrists (one even still living). I just don’t follow them around into theory very far. I’m too much of a social evolutionist and Marxist for that.

Speaking of Marxists, Brad Hornick was one of the speakers. He used his time to talk about his own life and what he thought was necessary for the creation of social change great enough to reverse the insane course we’re on destroying the planet as fast as we can. Becker, in the closing paragraphs of Escape From Evil mentioned that if we could come up with a new immortality project, say one that was aimed at climate change, that we could just change the course of history and maybe save ourselves in the process. I don’t think he was all that confident if would happen, but he threw that in as a possibility. Hornick argued that capitalism has to go in order for any positive advances can be made to this planet’s climate. Commodity fetishism is not going to allow us to easily let go of our obsession with possessing goods, so we have to get rid of commodity fetishism. Frankly, I don’t hold out a lot of hope for humanity, but Hornick isn’t giving up and I respect him for that. He’s a grad student at SFU in my old S&A department there. I wish him all the best. It’s a tough row he’s decided to hoe. I doubt if many people at the conference had any idea of what he was talking about but it may have challenged them a little and prodded them to think of how Becker’s work can be used to address some of the fundamental social issues of our time. 

The last speaker I  took in during the conference was Andrew Feldmár. I’ll save my comments on him for tomorrow. I’ll also discuss briefly a couple of other speakers not yet mentioned. Tomorrow it is.

 

  • Confluence means flowing together, as in rivers and such things. The idea of a person as a confluence, that is, the sum total of ideas, values, experiences, influences, etc., all come together in a sac of flesh and bone surrounded by, interweaving and interdependent with others in a social maelstrom came to me in the shower the other day. It’s what accounts for what we call our individuality. No two people share perfectly the same set of ideas, values, experiences, etc., but some of us  overlap in those areas and we form communities on the basis of those overlaps (sometimes voluntarily, sometimes by accident or necessity, sometimes by circumstance).
  • I could not have come up with this idea if I had not read widely in sociology and other related disciplines. It’s only on the basis of my reading list that I can even conceive of such strange things. Some of you may shudder a bit while reading this as you try to make sense of it from the point of view of your own confluence. The more you read the same kinds of ideas I did (and do) and share the same class background, etc., the more you may be able to parse my meaning. Very few people on the planet share my reading list or yours for that matter, that is if you have a reading list. Most people don’t. That in itself is neither here nor there. I can say though that having an extensive reading list in certain disciplines is definitely not a prerequisite for a happy life. In fact it can complicate life beyond salvage resulting in an inability to enjoy the simple things. But aren’t I getting serious now? Time to lighten up a bit. 
  • © Roger J.G. Albert 2015

Life is like that: staving off dementia

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 9 Comments

I haven’t posted on this site for some time because my life has taken me into other directions for a time now.  For instance, I’ve had physical injuries to consider and pain is my constant reminder of my humanity.  It also limits my mobility since some of the pain I’m experiencing is in my right knee.  The pain makes it difficult for me to walk any distance.  I also tore a rotator cuff and that’s a bummer.  Still waiting to see an orthopaedic surgeon on that one.  Yet, I’m happy to report, things are improving. The pain is becoming manageable and I’m taking fewer meds than I have been.  I’m trying to cut out some of my meds altogether but I’m no martyr so if the pain gets intense again, I’ll be right back there gobbling pills.  I’ve tried physiotherapy – different kinds – but the pain is not from muscular injury but rather from connective tissue damage so working on my muscles has limited effect, at least that’s what I think.  Besides, all that stuff is expensive and I don’t have a limitless pot of money to play with.  Still, things are moving along.

I’ve been able to help Carolyn in the yard putting railings on the stairs, etc., in preparation for the garden show we were featured in this past July 27th.  I love my woodworking shop and have been spending lots of time in there. The garden show was fun, but leading up to it was hard work and required lots of meds and rest times for me to carry on.  Maybe I’ll post pictures here soon of what we’ve been doing. Strangely, I’ve been indifferent towards painting and drawing recently although I’m now feeling the stirrings and I’ve picked up the coloured pencils again.  I have a painting that needs finishing. I’ve been thinking about it a lot and planning how to tackle the next set of challenges with it, but I have time coming up so I’ll get back to it soon.  Doing portraits for some people is easy but I have to work at it.  That’s part of the fun of it.  I’m also working up to doing some sculpture in wood.  I need to get my tools sharpened and that in itself is a challenge.  I need to get lessons on how to do that quickly and easily.

All this to say I haven’t been spending a lot of time posting on this blog.  I have been thinking about what I want to do with the blog, but I have lots of doubt whether or not any of this is worth anything.  It’s not as if I have nothing to say, it’s whether anyone is listening that is the issue and what difference it might make one way or another.  It may be that I use this blog to work out issues I’m thinking about with regard to politics, social action, evolution, economics and such things just for the challenge of getting my ideas straight. It might just help stave off dementia as I get older.  At least that’s what I want to believe.