Recall that Hitler did not change any laws to implement his ‘final solution’ that became the Holocaust. He wrote nothing down, never publicly announced his plans, and his orders to his highest henchmen were given orally in secret meetings which were not recorded. He told the German people lies about where the Jews were being relocated to and built walls around the extermination devices he deployed in the death camps so that nobody could see in.
The lie of Marcel’s spirit of abstraction begins in resentment for which there is abundance in Dick’s work. This resentment eventually becomes like the Nazi’s final solution, first for the remaining Jews and then Africans.
How did Hitler and his henchmen do this? Marcel explained. In order for me to agree to war with other peoples or other counties I must “lose all awareness of the individual reality of the being whom I may be led to destroy.” I make them non-persons and believe this even with evidence that contradicts this abstraction. Make their real and human faces disappear. You abstract yourself into the victor, the good person, the superior person first. Then you must convert the target other into an abstraction, something not personal, not human.
Okay, but not everyone in Germany bought into Nazism, the war, or demonizing the Jews. Yet, the message found its target in those who had been harmed by the depression and those for whom resentment could be elevated to a fever pitch by the pitch of brilliant salespersons and orators—the Nazis and their propaganda machine. “Boycott the Jews” on posters in 1933 began the process of dehumanizing the Jews by blaming them for everything.
How Could Victors Be Victims?
How were German people then and in Dick’s story now victims of the spirt of abstraction? While hyperinflation in 1920s Germany was real, the cause had many sources such as war reparations, worldwide depression, and inept government. What the Nazis realized is that they could use the spirit of abstraction to produce a kind of disease of the intelligence. This disease of the intelligence eliminates logic for the emotional response of resentment to a target, any convenient target that the Nazis could get people to focus on.
Wyndam-Matson in the Man in the High Castle novel and the purveyor of a counterfeit Colt 44 and false provenance explains the process. He tells love interest Rita about how he makes the story more valuable than the merchandise: “Sure. And I know which it is. You see my point. It’s all a big racket; they’re playing it on themselves. I mean, a gun goes through a famous battle, like the Meuse-Argonne, and it’s the same as if it hadn’t, unless you know. It’s in here.” He tapped his head. “In the mind, not the gun.” I can make you believe anything with the right story if you have a mind to want to believe. I manufacture the target for your resentment.
To foster the depths of resentment to the target other also requires the making the German race superior as the Nazis defined it. Jews and the Allies from World War I were perfect targets to get economically depressed Germans to begin to resent both and then to declare war on both.
Not in America
That was Germany before and during the war. Even if we lost the war, as the fictional The Man in the High Castle proposes, surely, we proud Americans would not succumb to the spirit of abstraction. Remember, our nation was founded in the new idea of freedom for all.
Ahem. Our spirit of abstraction began in slavery. We fought a Civil War to end that abstraction as did the Allies to end the Nazi abstraction of subjugation and Holocaust.
While Lincoln emancipated the slaves in 1863, we were not through with abstracting African Americans. Many southern states declared segregation to be law of the land at the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s, which was just another abstraction to retain whiteness’s primacy over blackness.
In what came to be known as Booker T. Washington’s 1895 Atlanta Compromise Speech, few remember how he called for the southern states to recognize how industrious African Americans are and how they could contribute to the economy if given the chance. All the southern whites heard was his line, “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”
Southern whites knew they were superior. In the South, it was the dominant rhetoric. It is no wonder then that whites could only hear a great black leader declare that their own sprit of abstraction, segregation, was a good thing, the right thing. They also heard that this same abstraction was endorsed by all black men and women through their leader, Booker T. Washington. How could one person and one person alone, someone who never held any elected office, become the sworn and authoritative voice of an entire race? Even the later Dr. Martin Luther King did not claim such authority.
Just one year After the Atlanta compromise speech, in 1896, the US Supreme court decided Plessy v. Ferguson. Homer Plessy was one-eighth black and sat in a white railroad coach. He was removed and jailed. When he sued, he argued that his reputation had been damaged and that whiteness is a form of property giving him right of action or inheritance. He normally could pass for being white. He was like Baynes or Fink in The Man in the High Castle, a person who had to disguise his identity to gain the same rights as others who had the property of privilege, whiteness. Plessy had to acknowledge the lie to try to overcome segregation’s deprecation of blackness before whiteness—in the spirit of abstraction.
US Supreme Court Chief Justice Brown took up Plessy’s property argument and said:
Conceding this to be so, for the purposes of this case, we are unable to see how this statute deprives him of, or in any way affects his right to, such property. If he be a white man, and assigned to a colored coach, he may have his action for damages against the company for being deprived of his so-called ‘property’. Upon the other hand, if he be a colored man, and be so assigned, he has been deprived of no property, since he is not lawfully entitled to the reputation of being a white man.
This case cemented segregation into our system of justice for the next sixty years. It also gave credibility to the notion that whiteness is property and is something to value.
Abraham Lincoln reinvigorated the notion of the proud heritage of the people of the United States during the American civil war in his 1863 Gettysburg Address: “Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
This does not sound like the birth of a nation mired in the spirit of abstraction. Yet, the Constitution did not outlaw slavery. A slave was declared to be three-fifths of a person to determine the number of congresspersons for each state. Plessy asked the Supreme Court how this could still be so, and rather than consider the now defunct value of the black person in terms of congressional representation, the court plumbed further into the depth of race itself to abstract primacy for the color white over the color black.
War in Peace
Abstraction, Marcel agreed, is a necessary mental operation to help us achieve our goals and purposes. When we isolate and give arbitrary primacy and the reverse, we become victims of the spirit of abstraction. Primacy isn’t only the placing of Aryans before all other races, it is the arbitrary use of the I Ching (the book of changes) in The Man in the High Castle to determine future action without proper reflection. It is both the resentment and acceptance of the hegemony derived from war.
It is a peace derived from war said Marcel, “but which contains war in a latent condition.” Dick leaves us fighting the war now called peace and we are never sure who won. However, as Marcel explained, if peace is derived from the idea of war then there is always war, and peace is only an aspect of war. Dick never assumes the war is over because its peace is never certain and it remains undecided who won, if anyone did. Peace and war become intertwined lies that bleed in and out of society and the characters who live the lie. As Hitler said the day before he invaded Poland on false pretenses, “The victor will not be asked whether he told the truth.” Will you ask? Will you question the abstraction?
Dick introduces
this mysterious novel called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. It is an alternative history to Dick’s own alternative history of The Man in the High Castle. Will you see through the alternate reality that the pundits and politicians are spinning to look for your own grasshopper lying heavy? At the end of the Man in the High Castle novel Juliana (Frink’s wife) says that the purported author Hawthorne Abendsen has not written The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. The oracle has, and that oracle is the I Ching. The I Ching is the truth teller that Germany and Japan lost the war.
Hawthorne explains that yes, he lived in a high castle once, but in a drunken moment decided that his elevator was the vehicle to take him to heaven and Jesus. He moved out of the high castle. He feared the truth about death, the afterlife, and even what the I Ching had told him to write. Just who can we believe? Who owns the truth? Certainly it isn’t the Nazis for they have created a mythical world that cannot be sustained. Their clinging to power in the face of an alternate truth is not the answer. They have abstracted so much from reality that reality has been bent to where it is unrecognizable.
Dick didn’t ask us to believe in the alternate reality but to question it in our daily lives. Race, religion, gender, uniforms are all abstractions that do not define the person. If we can reverse the abstraction and ask about the person inside, we will see that the lie has been perpetrated—not only the abstracted other, but the target of that abstraction.
The believer in the spirit of abstraction’s disease of the intelligence has become the victim, the victim of manipulation. To whose benefit is the abstraction? Not you who have been duped by the spirit of abstraction; it benefits only those in power to help them get and keep that power.
21
After Death It Can Get Worse
SAM DIRECTOR
Imagine you’re an author who wrote many famous science-fiction books. Unfortunately, you recently died. Sorry about that.
After you died, a producer decided to make a TV adaptation of one of your books. Your writing is almost impossible to adapt literally to the screen, so this producer instructed the screenwriters to make big changes to your original work. The show’s a big hit, but it looks significantly different from your book.
In changing your work without your permission, did this TV producer harm you? And, did he harm you even though you’re dead? Well, I guess it’s pretty hard for you to answer those questions . . . because you’re dead.
This fake story about you (unless you really are a famous science-fiction author who went through this experience) is a true story about Philip K. Dick. The Man in the High Castle is one in a long series of screen adaptations based on Dick’s work. In fact, Dick is the second most adapted fiction writer for the screen (after Stephen King).
Dick died before any of these adaptions were released, and many of them, including The Man in the High Castle, make big changes to Dick’s original works. Were Dick alive and his consent obtained before these changes were made, we would not view these alterations as morally suspect, because the author himself would have consented to them. But the alterations to The Man in the High Castle and many other adaptions were made after Dick’s death and without his consent.
By altering his work without his permission, have the creators of The Man in the High Castle TV adaptation harmed Philip K. Dick? This seems like a strange question to ask; surely, people can’t be harmed after they die! If someone were to spit on my grave, that wouldn’t be very nice, but it couldn’t harm me, because I wouldn’t exist anymore. Right?
Well, some philosophers disagree and have defended the idea of posthumous harm.
What Is Harm?
What does it mean to harm someone? Most philosophers agree that the correct theory of harm is the counter-factual theory of harm. This theory holds that actions harm people if those actions make people worse uff than they otherwise would have been.
In the original book version of The Man in the High Castle, Mr. Tagomi kills two German agents in order to defend General Tedeki and Mr. Baynes. Because he’s a Buddhist and believes that no life should be taken, Tagomi is deeply distressed by this experience, and his entire sense of purpose appears to be uprooted. According to the counter-factual theory of harm, Tagomi has been harmed, because, if he had not killed these agents, he would not have experienced this psychological trauma. He would be better off if he had not killed these men. Killing these men harmed him.
Harmed After I Die? How Does That Work?
A posthumous harm is a harm done to a person after that person’s death. This sounds pretty strange. If an act harms me by making me worse off than I would have been otherwise, and if death means that I don’t exist anymore, how can I be made any worse off than just not existing? The Ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus put the point pretty well in his Letter to Menoeceus:
When death comes, then we do not exist. It does not then concern either the living or the dead, since for the former it is not, and the latter are no more. (pp. 30–31)
The Man in the High Castle supposes that Franklin D. Roosevelt was assassinated before World War II began. If FDR were alive to see the Allies lose the war, this would have been a great harm to him, because his deepest efforts for victory would have failed. But, in the world of The Man in the High Castle, FDR is dead when the Allies lose the war. So, it would be pretty strange to say that FDR could be harmed by the Allies losing. Because he’s dead, he doesn’t exist anymore, and it’s hard to see how he could be harmed while not existing.
Why We Might Believe in Harm After Death
Some philosophers have appealed to intuition to support the idea that you can be harmed after you’re dead. For philosophers, an intuition is much more than a gut feeling or a hunch.
When Juliana has a feeling that Joe is hiding something important from her, this is a hunch and not an intuition. An intuition is something stronger; although there are different definitions of “intuition,” most philosophers agree that an intuition is a judgment which we don’t need evidence in order to believe and which just seems to be true when we think about it. When I think about the claim, “Pleasure is better than pain,” it just seems to be true, and I don’t need evidence in order to believe it.
The case for the possibility of posthumous harm is based on the intuition that a person can be harmed by an event in her lifetime that thwarts her interests, even if she never discovers that this thwarting has occurred, and even if her subjective experience of her life is unaffected by it. While I’m still alive, I can be harmed by something even if I never find out that it has happened and even if it doesn’t actually affect my experience of my life.
Not convinced? Well, take the case of slander. As the philosopher Douglas Portmore says, “it seems that the slandering of your reputation can be harmful to you even if you never become aware of it, even if you never experience any change in how others act around you, even if you never feel any less respected as a result of the defamation.” If it turned out that all of your friends were very nice to you in person but were saying terrible things about you behind your back, it seems like you would be better off if they weren’t gossiping about you. Because this gossip makes you worse off, it harms you, even though you don’t know about it.
Consider the character Robert Childan. In the book version of The Man in the High Castle, it’s suggested that some of Childan’s merchandise in his Americana antiques stores is counterfeit. In this alternate San Francisco there is a booming industry producing counterfeit American antiques, many of which have likely been sold to Childan. For a person whose entire career is based on the authenticity of his goods, the fact that he has counterfeits in his inventory is deeply threatening to Childan. Childan, for much of the book, knows nothing of this. It seems true that, even when he didn’t know about any of this, Childan was still harmed by the counterfeits in his inventory.
Joe (Cinnadella in the book, Blake in the show) lies to Juliana (Frink in the book, Crain in the show). In both the book and the show, Joe is a Nazi operative who lies to Juliana a
bout who he is, even engaging in a sort of romance with her. It seems clear that Juliana has been harmed by this deception, even before she finds out about it. She has sex with a man who lied about his identity and with whom she would not have had sex had she known his real identity! Also, she was used without her consent as a part of an assassination plot. All of this is clearly harmful to Juliana, even while she doesn’t know that these things are happening to her.
Why do we think that the examples just mentioned involve harm being done to people without their knowledge? We generally think that the thwarting of our desires is harmful to us. If you thwart my desire to do something, this means that you have prevented me, against my will, from fulfilling this desire. It’s safe to say that, if my desires are fulfilled, this is good for me, and if my desires are thwarted, this is bad for me.
Admittedly, you may have desires which it is not good for you to fulfill, like a desire to eat a thousand hot dogs or to kill a million people. In the TV version of The Man in the High Castle, Joe Smith desires to kill members of the Resistance. It would not be good if Joe fulfilled this desire.
But, assuming that desires are within the bounds of morality and not physically harmful, it seems true that the fulfillment of my desires is good for me and that, if I am prevented from fulfilling my desires, this is bad for me. If something’s bad for me, then it makes me worse off than I otherwise would be, which means that it harms me. If my desires are thwarted, then this harms me. And, it doesn’t seem to make any difference whether or not I know that this has happened. Either way, I am harmed.
In Childan’s case, he doesn’t just want to believe that his merchandise is authentic; he desires that his merchandise in fact be authentic. The fact that some of his inventory is counterfeit means that his desire for authentic merchandise has been thwarted. And, since the thwarting of his desires is harmful to him, even if he doesn’t know that it has happened, then he has been harmed by the fact that his merchandise is counterfeit.
The Man in the High Castle and Philosophy Page 22
