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Escape from the iron cage of alienation appears to be impossible: You’ll never think of a way out, because it’s thinking that locks you in.
Unless you discover a different way to think.
Or rather, rediscover. Humans have always practiced multiple ways of thinking. It’s only recently that we’ve come to assume that to think means to think rationally. We still have non-rational mental states of course, like emotions, intuitions, dreams, or inspirations. But we understand them by “making sense” of them: by converting them to rational thoughts.
We even assume that art must be interpreted rationally. We only understand a painting, a book, a movie, or a song if we know what it’s “about,” its “deeper meaning” — the meaning that can be stated rationally.
Susan Sontag saw this assumption taking over people’s minds back in 1964. She described it in her essay “Against Interpretation:”
In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.
Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world—in order to set up a shadow world of “meanings.”
Put another way, by interpreting everything, we drag it into the iron cage.
Often, interpretation happens even before a work is created: Many artists now assume their art must have a meaning that can be explained, so they’ll design to spec. How many interviews have you heard with, say, a writer or film-maker, in which the main question is some version of, “What‘s your work about?” and the answer is something like “I’m exploring issues of gender and power,” or something?
Sontag saw this coming too: art created to satisfy a theory, art that you appreciate by decoding it: This stands for that and this stands for that.
[I]n the notes that Elia Kazan published on his production of A Streetcar Named Desire, it becomes clear that, in order to direct the play, Kazan had to discover that Stanley Kowalski represented the sensual and vengeful barbarism that was engulfing our culture, while Blanche Du Bois was Western civilization… Tennessee Williams’ forceful psychological melodrama now became intelligible: it was about something…
Since Sontag wrote those words, rationality has become ever more dominant over art, and over ever more of life.
Even a concerted attempt to overthrow this dominance has instead ended up making it much worse. That would be postmodern critical theory. Theory promises to liberate our minds from rationality, which it defines as inherently oppressive. By doing that it’s supposed to solve the problem of alienation. But as I argue in previous chapters, Theory itself is hyper-rational. And in practice it can be extremely alienating.
You get samples of that when you hear the word “Latino” replaced by “Latinx,“ “homeless” replaced by “unhoused,” or “criminal” replaced by “justice-involved person.” There’s a Theory-based argument for those replacements based on social justice. But in each of them, rationality strips a word of its poetry. And so we’re alienated from every cultural and emotional resonance that word carried, and left with only the strictly rational meaning.
“Homeless” is tragic. “Unhoused” is a bureaucratic category. You may know a sadly beautiful song by Paul Simon and Ladysmith Black Mambazo on the album Graceland. Imagine if that song were called “Unhoused.”
Theorists thought they were destroying the iron cage once and for all. But they ended up building a new one that’s smaller.
They were still thinking in the same, rationalistic, alienated way they were trying to escape. They were just doing it a lot harder.
So what would thinking differently be like? It doesn’t mean abolishing rational thinking. It does mean learning what it’s like to think in nonrational ways. The arts have traditionally been a means of doing that, and they still can be.
I first learned it from music. I still apply what I learned in everything I do, no matter how far afield.
My first career was as a guitarist, songwriter, and producer. I wouldn’t be able to do that work, or at least be any good at it, if I hadn’t learned how to think non-rationally — including in a way that’s about as non-rational as it gets: I had to learn how to recognize when I was in the presence of soul.
Soul makes no sense. How would you measure it? If you’re in a recording studio, you’re surrounded by hundreds of displays, each measuring important data, like amplitude, frequency, or distortion. But there’s no such thing as a soul meter. And yet good musicians know instantly when music has soul and when it doesn’t.
In place of a meter, they use their forearms: if there’s soul, you get chicken skin. It’s what the great guitarist Ry Cooder was talking about when he named one of his albums Chicken Skin Music. it’s the same thing that happens if you think you’ve seen a ghost.
Or there may be other physical manifestations of soul, like your hair standing up, your butt moving, or tears springing from your eyes.
You don’t have to believe there’s literally a metaphysical spirit in the music, although plenty of musicians do. But whatever soul is, you do have to recognize and acknowledge it, or you won’t be good at your job. I mean in the most practical, nuts and bolts sense. People get hired and fired based on this.
Assuming, that is, the job is making soulful music. Plenty of people make soulless music too, and now AI offers the world an endless supply.
When I was a young guitar player, I was focused on figuring music out, rationally. And it seemed to work for a while — I learned a lot of theory and I could play a lot of notes. But then bands I was playing in needed me to learn how to play some reggae songs. I thought that looked almost too easy. Most reggae songs have simple chords and melodies and what appears to be a simple rhythm. The typical rhythm guitar part looks so simple that I thought I was going to be bored playing it.
But I could not play reggae guitar. Theoretically, I was doing something easy exactly right: play the chord on the upbeat. But I could hear that I sounded bad. What I was playing had no soul.
So, rationally enough, I tried to figure out why that was. I sat down with a Bob Marley and the Wailers record and a drum machine. A drum machine will play, with perfect accuracy, any rhythm you program into it. I planned to use my drum machine to figure out what was going on.
If you’ve studied any music theory, you know that in Western music, almost all rhythms are based on the number 2 or the number 3.
That makes those rhythms easy to program into a drum machine.
But in a lot of music that has soul — including what we call soul music — the rhythm exists somewhere between two and three — and there’s no standard way of quantifying exactly where that is. This is especially true of reggae. If you try to program it by the numbers into a drum machine, what you hear back will not be reggae. It will have no soul.
Which is what I heard coming out of my drum machine: reggae played by a robot.
So I set the machine aside and just listened to the Wailers, over and over and over, trying to play along. That turned out to be the key.
Now I started to learn. I kept failing, but gradually I failed less badly. Then I got it right for just a moment. I didn’t know it rationally; I felt it. And once I could feel it, I could feel it again, and begin to appreciate that the Wailers’ rhythm section, playing what I’d thought were such easy parts, were masters of skills I hadn’t known existed.
The Wailers were stretching time in a way that you can analyze rationally, but will never understand that way. You can only understand it by feeling it — but this doesn’t mean you aren’t thinking. Feeling can be the medium for a different kind of thinking.
In this kind of thinking, musical time isn’t something you’re counting. It feels like something you’re floating in, while also shaping. You’re not so much playing the notes as the silence between the notes.
I know how mystical that sounds, maybe like hooey.
It’s not literally true, of course. But it is a kind of truth.
A great band like the Wailers is playing in perfect but fluid synchrony from one moment to the next. This requires a very high level of thought that isn’t rational thought. If they started thinking rationally about what they were doing, the groove would probably fall apart. The soul would disappear.
You don’t have to just trust me on this; you can find plenty of interviews with far better players than I am saying more or less the same thing, although they find it hard to express. It isn’t just because the words are hard to find. Ultimately the words can’t be found. Musicians have a reputation for being inarticulate. But a great musician is among the most articulate people in the world — in a language without words.
And the people listening to their music can be moved by it, even if they think they don’t know anything about music.
It feels magical, but you don’t have to believe that it literally is magic. It’s rational to believe that musicians are having experiences that can only be perceived with parts of your mind, and body, that are different from the parts that handle rational thought. And evidence for that is starting to show up in brain scans.
But with or without such evidence, you can’t have the actual experiences by thinking rationally about them. You can master all of Music theory without being able to make any music
That happens within a different form of awareness.
If this still sounds too mystical, let’s use a scientific metaphor: spaces. As physicists tell us, the three-dimensional space we seem to live in is just one way of perceiving reality. Einstein defined four-dimensional spacetime. In string theory, space may have 10, 11, or 21 dimensions.
Space metaphors are used are used in the arts, too. Visual artists often think within various color spaces. RGB space, for example, has three dimensions: red, green, and blue.
In musical space, the dimensions include time, pitch, timbre, and loudness. Within that space, musicians communicate with great nuance and precision, but not in ways that can be translated into rational statements. The meaning of musical communication is made within the music, and is complete there.
If you try to put that meaning into words, it disappears. You move it from a space where it exists to one where it doesn’t.
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was one of the 20th century’s most influential thinkers on logic and language. But in two of his most famous remarks, he expressed deep truths about what’s beyond logic and language.
The first is “If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.”
The lion is in a different reality from ours. Experiences in one may be inexpressible in the other, or may not even happen.
My second Wittgenstein quote is, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” He didn’t mean such things don’t exist. They may very well exist, but outside the language we’re using.
Still, the assumption remains widespread: to think is to think in words, rationally. That’s often true, but if you think it’s always true, I’d say you’re in the iron cage.
I wouldn’t have thought about it that way at the time, but I was planted squarely in the iron cage, hunched over my drum machine all those years ago.
The music I was trying to make helped me escape: not by thinking my way out, but by learning to think in a different way.
I don’t think alienated liberals need to learn music, although it couldn’t hurt. But I do think the way out for them is the same.
Find the next chapter here.