The Dialogues of Catcher and Fox (1 of 3)

Hierarchy

Near the end of November, Henry Catcher, recently returned to Asheville from a fruitless stay in New York, bumped into his long-time friend Jack Fox. It happened like this.  

Henry was strolling absentmindedly down the crosswalk near Pack Square, when he saw a man crouched outside the art museum stepping studiously along the ground. The man had a piece of yellow sidewalk-chalk in his hands, and was drawing a great circle, with its perimeter touching both the front doors of the museum and the sidewalk. As he finished the circle, Henry watched him write something in all capitals in its center.  

“THE MUSEUM IS FREE TODAY”  

As the man stood up, clapping and dusting the powder from his hands, Henry immediately recognized the happy face of Jack Fox. Walking up and whacking him on the shoulder, Henry asked 

HENRY:  

            Now what on earth do you mean by this stunt, Jack?  

JACK:  

            Henry, my good man. You are back! Now: when we need philosophers in this godforsaken sellout town. You like my circle? Is it perfect?  

HENRY:

             Personally I've always liked squares more myself.  You look at a circle and it's like, "what, more curve?" At least yours isn't perfect. [pausing, looks up thinking] God circles are so pointless!

JACK:

      God circles are pointless. But, you cannot paint yourself into a corner. The whole universe is curved. But, come, let's get coffee. I have something to discuss with you.

      Jack put his arm around Henry and they walked to a cafe across the street where they could watch the vagabonds and landlords circling each other in the town square. They ordered biscuits, butter, and jam and took in the warm spring air, preparing themselves for the coming conversation.  

After a few bites both were settled and grinning.  Henry took a sip of coffee and, the hot mug hardly being lowered from his lips, asked eagerly-

HENRY: 

                So what is it you wanted to talk about? 

JACK: 

                The Order of Time.

HENRY: 

             Sounds sufficiently dramatic--what is it?  A social club?  A philosophical principle?

JACK: 

                It is a story I am working on. It involves a sect of time researchers who live both inside and outside the multiverse. They cultivate circular gardens formed around 10 concentric rings. The gardens form a network of unique meditations. The Order of Time is a non-hierarchical organization with no economic, legal, or enforcement structure. They operate in total peace without any impact on the environment except for the circular gardens. I don't know. I've been thinking of using this meditation, somehow to figure my way out of the economics of this life. Can I live outside of these hierarchies? This is what I've been thinking of while you were in New York.

      What about you? What did you learn up there? What do you think about human hierarchy? Are the two questions related in any way?

HENRY:

              The Order of Time sounds like quite a complex thing.  I'm not quite sure where to start.  But I've been interested in your thoughts on hierarchies for a while now.  

             Out in New York I came to see two problems real clearly.  One was the problem with education; the other the problem with work.  The issue with education is that so much time is wasted in memorization and testing and exactitude, even in rather inexact fields like the arts and counseling.  Vital education comes from desire and need, and the method of information-stuffing causes us to forget that.  The price of getting a credential in this country is that you become the sort of person who will do and learn what you just don't want to do and learn.  

                The trouble with work is similar.  At the base I just want to be a philosopher, writer, and counselor without having to worry about meeting a demand, a sales quota, or supervisory expectation.  I realize how absurd and childish this would sound to most people.  It sounds like a big dodge of responsibility.  But I imagine something like Plato's academy.  Maybe that is what you mean by your Order of Time.  

             Certainly these issues are connected to hierarchy.  But I wonder exactly what hierarchy is.  Is it just an organization where someone is making decisions for others?  Or an organization where material power is localized with a few people?  And I wonder is hierarchy only artificial or is it natural?  I mean, even if there were no state, some individuals would collect, build, and grow more resources than others- giving them effective hierarchical advantage.  None of this is clear to me--but I've heard you rail against hierarchy for a long time, so please sharpen the image here.   

JACK: (After taking a long sip on his coffee and looking off at the bouncing spring branches)

      You know what a hierarchy is. Everybody knows what a hierarchy is. When a person has the right to compel us to act against our consent. A boss. A master. A king. A manager. These are all hierarchical roles that express the infrastructure of human enslavement. Contained within the problem of hierarchy is the idea that we are not confident about what it is. This infects our philosophy. And, by philosophy I mean our worldview. You know what a hierarchy is almost more than any other thing you know.

      You mentioned the problem of education. This concept contains an assumption. The idea being it is necessary to prepare children for life. Their thriving will not, according to the assumed target of 'good' education, be the result of natural social processes.

      The same assumptions are found in the problem of work because it is tied directly to a hierarchy that defines its values.

      There is no meaningful distinction between natural and artificial. These are soft concepts. The question is not What is hierarchy. The question is Why hierarchy? Why do we tolerate it? Why do we submit to it? All day every day.

      I don't know why we do but I don't want to anymore.

HENRY: 

To be honest Jack I feel like I’m just starting out.  I haven’t rebelled against these things for decades like you have.  But I’m willing to take your point that hierarchy may be something so central that it’s like the air we breathe.  
Let me tell you what happens internally as I go through this.  I think “I wish I could just go ahead with Jack and a few others like us and start a new Academy, maybe this Order of Time, and devote myself fully to that project of philosophy and art.”  But then a frustration comes over me, like a clamp implanted in my jaw, as I realize that in order to do that we need money.  And meanwhile life moves on with its necessities.  So I’m left with a choice.  Either I devote myself to building a new Academy as an entrepreneur and not a philosopher, or I find a job on the market where some of my talents and interests are fulfilled, but not well.  What an absurd and awful choice.  

That is the choice: to be an entrepreneur or to be a worker.  The first binds you to the laws of demand and sales, and the second to the laws of the boss.  The hierarchy is clear in that.  So where do we find a third way, Jack? 

(Henry pauses for a moment and finds his thoughts)

And I don’t mean to be cute, but it’s interesting that you said natural and artificial are soft concepts after making just such a distinction with education.  You believe, as you say, that “natural social processes” make for a good education.  Meaning that some artifice has intervened and screwed it up.  

I’d like to figure out why we submit to hierarchy.  For starters there’s clearly a lack of vision of what the alternatives are and how they would be fleshed out.  And there are degrees of hierarchy and degrees of slavery.  Certainly we are not the African slaves being shipped to America.  If the bondage isn’t too tight and the boss isn’t too ruthless then it’s a hard argument to persuade total civil unrest and revolution.  How many people do you know who are ready to make deep existential decisions rather than follow grooves and teachings and orders?  Does everyone want to be their own boss?  

JACK:

      Wow. (Jack sips at heir coffee, takes a deep breath.)

      The dichotomy between nature and artifice is not false. It is soft. It represents the question. But, let's avoid that rabbit hole for now and perhaps pick it up on another day, maybe in the winter.

      For now, let me address the beautiful material issues you frame so well. I am currently doing a study of The Communist Manifesto. It was revolutionary, at the time, to compel people to take seriously the idea that material reality contained within it counter-cultural forces that could emerge and cause radical disruption to old hierarchical structures. And, even though I don't like thinking of myself as a Marxist, or a Communist, I think it is an important human ideological development. In the same way I weep over the beauty of Michelangelo's Last Judgment, knowing that Christ is not my savior, I read the manifesto and my heart beats vigorously over the revolutionary zeal.

      In a way, I see my Order of Time as a collection of humanists all over the world who understand how to handle the explosive idols of human history with robotic clarity and scientific rigor. It is an intellectual martial art.

      Why? Because, like you put it, we need to find the 3rd way? I see a similar 'softness' in the distinction between an entrepreneur and an employee of a system. They are two forms of subservience to the larger monetary system, a mathematical orchestration of human value that does not maintain human equality as a fundamental theorem of its postulates. I might say here that none of this is natural, but you would see the softness in me saying so. The deeper thing is that none of this makes us happy. The work is directly connected to inefficiencies directly connected to conflict that is directly connected to destruction. And, it is all being automated into system dynamics threatening the entire human species.

      This idea you brought up, that there are levels of slavery and that somehow, we are more privileged than those aboard the slave ships of old is a post-modern coping mechanism. By post-modern I mean it is hyper-local detachment from the known actual prisons that are proliferating all over the globe. We are, if we maintain our privilege, the ones responsible, in historical terms. There are people suffering all over the world from this lack of a way out of the hierarchy that performs this 'clamped jaw' you mentioned. I would suggest the suffering is connected. Underneath our own privileged anxieties and resentments about our soft enslavement is the knowledge of the hard enslavement that compels us to avoid the taboos of the hierarchy.

      I've gone on too long, but I want to draw in the net. As you said, I've been fighting this fight for decades. And, recently I've seen the spaces I once used to protect myself disappearing. There is a new rigidity taking a hold of the world. It is possible the science of imprisonment has yielded new methods for those who have been profiting from it for years. I say all this to say that not only does one NOT need to be an entrepreneur to be an artist or creative, but perhaps every time an artist did they were wrong to do so. I think of this as a non-hierarchical postulate.

HENRY:

             Damn Jack.  I think I see what you mean about the totality of the work.  Fighting a relatively soft local slavery still helps to reduce hard global slavery because the two are bound up in one destiny.  

             The material issues are exactly what plague me.  For example, I want an Academy, I don't want a global network of intellectuals chatting.  Well I do want that- but it does nothing materially.  It means we converse in our spare time meanwhile the systems continue to bulldoze our primary time.  

             Forgive me for the tone, but I'm mad with impatience.  So- I like that in the Communist Manifesto you see the promise of material counter-cultural forces.  Maybe the issue is that I'm trying to juggle two problems at once (god that's bad juggling): the issue of securing a free Academy for artists and philosophers and the issue of general economic hierarchy.  What you seem to have locked in on is that the solution to problem 1, or the special case of the arts, is dependent on problem 2, or the general case.

             In which case we are led to revolution.  Which I must say is not as fun as founding an Academy.  Well.  I'm curious about two things then.  What's a new vision to replace hierarchy?  And how do we get started today?

JACK:

      (Jack looked up at the trees letting the sun soak into heir face, and took a long deep breath before speaking)

      I don't know, Henry. But, I'm glad you are here.

HENRY:

             And here I was, thinking I could get a clear answer from you!  But I'm glad to have you around too.  Well, we can pick it up another time Jack.  I know it will be heavy on both our minds.  

(Henry rose to leave) 

I’ll see you soon, amigo.  Don't be a square!  

JACK:

      Wait, Henry! Do not in your haste mistake what is a very clear answer for an evasive one. Please, sit.

      You are asking the ultimate question, the question of whether or not you will be secure if you venture out of the economic system into which you were born, because, as you have become aware, there is an antagonism between it and your own creative impulses.

      To that question I cannot claim to have an answer. Many have died on burning pyres before us who have dared to poke at the eyes of those looking down on them. Some bravely, some begging in despair and pain.

      It is scary. I know. We are in the same boat. But, we should not confuse a creative problem for an economic one. The building of an academy should not be characterized as distinct from revolutionary activity. What else is an academy built for but because the necessary research for human progress is not already being done somewhere?

      I know, like myself, you wish to enjoy this life in the exploration of your imaginative powers. But, again, revolutionary artmaking has no inherent restriction on creativity if you conclude that such a revolution is necessary. That is the real question here. I cannot answer that for you.

      I know that I believe the autonomous nature of our networks are squeezing down pretty damn tight on people all over the world. And, I know a lot of people are losing hope, and their minds.

      And, I feel strongly that artists are not well-placed to solve the problem in economic terms. Even though they have been trained to believe they should. I have tried to make the argument that such thinking interferes with the end goals of direct engagement with the public, which is one of those other lost values of the creative class.

      Everywhere I have gone I have argued for human solidarity and the elimination of economic and class-based inequality. And, in almost every group I've done this I've been pushed to the margins of the game. Dismissed as idealistic, simplistic, naive, weak, silly, soft, etc.

      So, when a young man like you asks how to solve the economic problem of being a radical thinker in a society addicted to products, and the idolatry of personality, what can I say but 'I don't know.' Every few years I have to reinvent a survival strategy, and it is getting harder.

      Times are lean, Henry, and those years we spent luxuriating in our studios might not return for some time. But, that is not just the case for us. That will be the case for many like us. So, there is very real work ahead in the securing of whatever it is we recognize to be our special insights. And, those are getting harder to be clear on too. I suspect the growth and expansion of anxiety, war, and strife is ahead, much to my dissatisfaction. But, we have been given the divine gift of creativity, and in that gift comes a set of ethical responsibilities that transcend our own security, as hard as that is to have to say.

      Take heart, the adventure ahead is the biggest of all time. And, we won't get through it without testing our courage dramatically. So, be careful not to let your impatience hinder the enjoyment of these well-baked treats.

      (Jack points to the muffin on the table, and smiles)

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If you are interested in this work and would like to help form an Asheville community of spiritually motivated artists and philosophers disconnected from private economic motive, contact kramerflesmih@yahoo.com