Your Neck Is the Problem

3 minutes

As nearly as I can tell, what’s gone wrong with the world lies somewhere in the region of the neck. Probably you thought it was located elsewhere; the head, the heart, or, given the times, further south. But whatever lies south of the heart is rather strongly influenced by it, as is the brain by its flow of blood. The heart, in turn, is regulated by the imperious brain. The two centers of life are mutually dependent — like an old couple. So the neck, being the thing that joins brain to chest, must be the problem.

Somewhere Wittgenstein, critiquing a passage of Augustine, made the point that the connection between words and things is not always a one-for-one representation. Some words like “dog” fitted Augustine’s conception of language, but others, like “there” do not. They are inherently relational. A images of a man’s head gently resting on a woman’s lap (or on a pike,) of a heart beating (or in the hand of some Aztec priest) have immediate symbolic import. But a neck, floating in space, would be as initially obscure as it was (ultimately) unsettling.

If I recall, Wittgenstein suggests we think of some mechanical device, like the break pedal on a car and its connecting apparatus. By itself, a raised flat surface and some wire does not suggest much. In a sense, it doesn’t mean much. Only in the context of an automobile, where it serves a coordinating function, does it take on meaning. But the same structure might be differently employed, and so take a different meaning. So it is with relational words, and so it is with relations in general. They are dependent, and yet everything depends on them.

One more example will suffice. In ontogeny, the development of a life form from cell to fully grown creature, each cell has the same library of instructions. You can find Encyclopedia of Frog in the frog’s eyes as well as its skin. As it grows from embryo to a cute amphibian, each cell goes off and specializes, picking one doom among millions, and yet, like a rapper, never forgetting where it came from.

But the amazing thing about life is how the interrelations of the cells and organs (and species, and biospheres) conform themselves to a larger idea. It would be extraordinary enough to watch all the articles in Britannica (there, I dated myself) write themselves. But to also arrange themselves by topic and volume, as if each knew the whole idea of which it was a part, is pure magic. And it is in this whole spell, as much as in the magical components themselves, that life, and wisdom, consist.

We moderns have lost this formal-relational idea. The symptoms of this loss show in everything from politics, to philosophy, to sports, to our lives together. The glory of the modern world — the astounding success of various forms of hyperspecialization — is also its folly. Modern athletes are certainly the greatest and most accomplished the world has ever seen; and sports is an ugly, all-encompassing religion. Modern parents are the most attentive, empathic parents in historical memory; and modern parents are suffocating, obsessive worry-warts who ruin the magic of childhood. Both sexes are now free to pursue happiness and love to a degree never before possible; and the rancor and distrust between us, and even alienation from one’s natal sex, have never been greater. Modern economies produce on a scale that dwarfs every previous age; and yet the ancients and medievals somehow found time and money for festival and for rest, while we can’t manage to find enough of either. Some of our modern poetry — the work of T.S. Elliot and Wallace Stevens (in my opinion) — is among the most technically impressive the world has ever seen, and yet there is, in general, so much banality in the arts that the thing itself — once a source of succor and education to common man — has become, for him, a kind of joke; for his betters, a sort of private gnosis.

I am not condemning the modern world. I oppose those who only complain that the modern world has lost so many good things, as if that were the main fact about it. The good is still there; it’s simply an occult property now, something you must dig up from a thousand places, yet still powerful enough to strike you at random moment. There is too much goodness and beauty in the modern world to condemn it. And prophecies of doom and gloom are impractical. By definition, they have no future. They’re also parlor games, the refuge of those with the privilege to exempt themselves from the working world, but without the guts to take exemption to the heroic level of an Elijah, where it would actually be wholesome.

In my opinion, it’s always better to take the good you find, when you find it. The real problem for us is that taking the good is insufficient. After you find a dollop of virtue, you need to put it somewhere. Good things do not exist only in relation to themselves, but in relation to other good things; justice to mercy; the head to the heart. That balance, more than mere discovery and use, has always been the goal of the sciences, and of sports; of the arts, and of philosophy; of any of the nobler religions. Every true wisdom consists in putting good things into the proper balances and tensions with each other. The head and the heart, even properly assembled, aren’t enough. We need the neck.

But how do we find it? In the next post, I provide a sketch of the answer.

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