I learned much during my ten months in Chile, and not just about music. The contrast between the beauty and the brutality that people are capable of was inescapable. The social power people invest in music became a permanent part of my thinking. Notable for its absence in the time after the coup was the nueva canción (new song) folk music movement. Urban musicians had taken rural traditional music and transformed it into inspirational expressions calling for human dignity, equality and compassion. The military regime outlawed it, and it disappeared entirely from the public Chilean soundscape. Overnight, peñas—gathering places for nueva canción musicians and fans—became a thing of the past. It was risky to play or even possess instruments such as the quena flute or the charango guitar because of their association with the socialist movement.
Dan Sheehy – Smithsonian Musicologist
The term ‘harmony’ is heard more and more in the vernacular of the 21st century “intellectual.” It seems that we are all, in some way, searching for more harmony in our lives, whether that be externally with our personal relationships or internally with our thoughts and feelings. Curiously, in spite of the recent focus on balance and general well-being, it is little realized that our brain is in constant conflict with itself. For quite some time, evidence has suggested that the two hemispheres that compose our brains are not the best of friends despite being roommates in our skull. This discordance manifests itself through a series individual and social behaviors which have also been thoroughly studied by psychologists and neurologists. The argument I’d like to make in this article is that music offers us a lens to reflect upon the veracity of the apparent ‘harmony’ and social stability that we believe ourselves to be in. It is my belief that the right-left brain hemispheric relationship has fallen out of balance, and by analysis the treatment of musicians and their music, the disjointed, sociological imbalance of logical thought versus empirical intuition comes into higher resolution. Systematic persecution of musicians by totalitarian regimes is a staple of 20th century history, yet to take this as just another regularity of history would be to miss an important insight into human psychology and sociology.
To make the point of an existent disharmony between the hemispheres, it’s important to lay out some key details of the relationship between the two actors. For some personal clarification on the physiology and basic dynamics, I pulled from the work of Dr Iain McGilchrist (known here on out as DM). In his book, The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, DM theorizes that the divided brain needs to have some evolutionary reason for existing. “In order to survive, we have to be able to do two things at once. We need to be able to focus on something that we’ve prioritized […] and at the same time, we need a wide open attention.” Being diametrically opposite in nature, these essential but contrasting tasks therefore need to be kept apart because “you cant really do [these two] things at once.” So it seems that the division of tasks is both necessary for evolution, and also necessarily creates two distinct information centers in the brain. Conflict arises not from the existence of the two hemispheres themselves, but from the necessity for them to communicate with each other. According to DM, while it is true to say that our cerebral hemispheres cooperate with each other, the ‘West’ as a civilization has certainly preferred one hemisphere over the other. “Our current civilization is in the hands [of our collective] left brain, who, although gifted in many ways, functions as an ambitious regional bureaucrat with personal interests at heart.”
Left brained regional ‘bureaucracy’ is revealed more clearly with an examination of how the hemispheres cooperate to achieve the shared goal of organism survival. Contrary to common sense, communication across the hemispheres is based off of inhibition rather than stimulation. It is hard to imagine a productive conversation in which everyone involved seeks to mute the other, but it’s in this fashion that the hemispheres work with each other. “The ultimate aim is to inhibit, rather than to stimulate, things from happening in the opposite sphere.” The corpus callosum, a central structure in the brain that can be thought of as the trans-cerebral highway connecting these two centers, allows such inhibitory processes to unfold. Damage to this structure often reduces the efficacy of said inhibitory mechanisms. ‘Split brain’ patients are victims of this type of injury. They experience a drastic shift in personality and also lots of difficulty in making any type of sense of their world. In a more protracted and methodical manner, the left brain, according to DM, has come to dominate inter cerebral communication to such a point that today the effects of such ‘authoritarianism’ have left us disconnected almost entirely from our right brain.
The split brain: A tale of two halves
What valence does an imbalance as such hold for us, and why should we concern ourselves with this observation? On the phenomenological side, the implications are significant. Returning back a moment to the evolutionary significance of cerebral division and necessity for separate computational processes, one of the most true statements about reality is that it’s infinitely complex. Our mental software and limited senses are simply too crude for us to function and survive using a framework that tries to understand the world and its mysteries in their true profundity. Therefore, representations of the world are instrumental for both our understanding and manipulation of it. It is on this premise that obstruction based communication becomes crucial, as increased mental stimulation, in addition to what we already experience, would be counterproductive. Our reality comes into existence through a substantial amount of “filtering” which falls under the domain of the left brain. More concisely, the left hemisphere “narrows down the way we think about things to a merely rationalistic set of propositions” On the contrary, the right hemisphere acts in an opposite manner, framing experience along ‘synthetic, intuitive, and ancient” lines.
While this bifurcated relationship between the two sides is natural, there is reason for concern when these two ‘personalities’ fall out of balance with another. Especially in our society, where so much reverence is given to ‘rationality’. Am I making an argument against reason? In a certain sense that is what I am doing, but not with the position that logic and rational thought is bad. After all, that would be illogical. I am saying that rational thinking should not function as the “be all, end all’ for the mysteries of the world. The inherent complexity of being demands inexorably that you craft “a map [of the world] that does not have all the true richness and detail of the world”. The left hemisphere plays a key role here, not only in acting as a dimmer switch but also because representational thinking transforms itself into manipulative thinking. Reason, I would argue, is a precursor to the recognition that a conscious being “can become powerful through manipulation […] everything in the world seems to break down into machines that can be created or structures that can be built.” Our unrivaled propensity for environmental manipulation is both a great evolutionary advantage, and also the strongest argument western philosophers, politicians, and intellectuals have used to laud the merits of pure reason and logic. Emotion and intuition have been the laughing stock of ‘intellectuals’ for centuries, and the devaluation of the right hemisphere has left us believing that our rationality is the only tool we need for success. It is exactly this type of mentality that demonstrates our blindness, because as DM says, “[the left hemisphere] thinks it knows it all […] it over values its own ability. It takes us away from the presence of things in all their rich complexity to a useful and simplified representation.” Basically, while rational thinking is incredibly useful for narrowing down our inputs to a level that makes the environment intelligible, we become seduced by the ways in which we can observe and describe the world. And in the act of portraying reality, concern for the character and nature of the observable world around us is lost. The imbalance as a whole can be likened to our obsession with observing the natural world in ever greater detail without truly looking for the purpose of its existence. After all, do we really know why music exist? Sure, there are complex theories and logical rules that describe even the most technical aspects of acoustics, harmonics, and dynamics but none I would argue are phenomenological, right hemisphere based. It is for this reason that we know more about music through intuition than reason. The danger with such an imbalance is that we forget that “the world as it is has its own shape, value, meaning, and so on. [For centuries] we have crowded it out with our own plans, thoughts, and beliefs.”
It’s more than fair at this point to be wondering “yeah okay, but who cares? What’s the real harm in being too left-brained?” Well it turns out that this imbalance, which manifests itself in physiology as well as personality, creeps into the collective ‘social mind’ as well. One not need look much further than the modern anthropological treatment of myth and ancient culture to see how little value is given to holistic and ‘analog’ world-views. For a period of time that dwarfs the current reign of ‘Western’ thought, cultures all over the globe were certain of the fact that human existence had fundamental, universal, and objective interpretations. The striking similarity of myths and symbols across time is powerful evidence of such a right brained belief. The world is massively complicated, but there are practical components latent human intuition that can help one navigate and understand the human experience in a very different way than logic can. However, rationalism has eroded the prestige of this symbolic logic to such a great extent that today it is the unquestionable dogma of the day. ‘Scientific reasoning’, as it is often termed, came onto the scene as man’s greatest tool for understanding the natural world, and in a certain respect, much advancement has been made with this method of thinking. Yet, fundamentally lacking from our modern implementation of rationality is the recognition that any scientific description or theory will depend largely on our point of view and our interests. As such, all rational schema we use to define our surroundings are based on certain personal biases which impede the creation of a ‘final’ or unquestionable theory. In the words of Austrian philosopher Karl popper (hereon out referenced as KP) “the way of science is paved with discarded theories which were once declared self-evident.” As ‘heady’ as rationality can seems, the truths it proposes about the universe still have to pass the test of pragmatism.
Popper perhaps did more than any other 20th century contemporary to reform scientific thinking, and to him, logical reasoning could be best described by comparison with a searchlight. It is the researcher who decides where to focus the light of discovery. The determination to seek the truth does not compensate for the ‘disappointing ability of science to unveil all [of life’s] mysteries.” As I see it, this is an excellent allegory of the left-right hemisphere relationship. On the one hand, analytic methods have to be used for us to gain some functional notion of the world. Equally important is the constant realization that any rationale we implement is merely an attempt to translate our intuitions about the unknowable world in a systematic and understandable fashion. In this way, the left hemisphere is held in check by the experiential knowledge of the right brain. KP believed that the counter position of rational theory with empirical observation was fundamental for scientific research. For example, the fact that some or even all of society believes firmly in a certain truth and cannot conceive of its falsity is no evidence of its veracity. A rationalist attitude, in its healthiest form, is the ‘awareness of one’s limitations, the intellectual modesty of those who know how often they err…the realization that we must not expect too much from reason.”
Popper’s critique of the efficacy of rationality serves, in my opinion, to elevate the importance of objectivity as an antithesis to subjectivity. Once again, physiological imbalances in the brain that give preference to subjective interpretations are played out in society as well. Turning his intellectual focus to politics during World War II, KP sought to decode the sociological chaos of the day in his work The Open Society and Its Enemies. How had it come to be that most ‘utopian’ political dogmas of the day passed without criticism, especially when such purported social truths were lacking any semblance of objective validity? Put simply, How had rationality migrated so far from reality and failed so completely in curbing social strife? Curiously, KP found the same malady that plagued scientific theory at work in the political sphere. “In history, no less than science, we cannot avoid a point of view…the belief that we can must lend to self deception and to lack of critical care”. In the same manner that scientific rationality should be put through a crucible of empirical pragmatism, so too should our conception of history. It is on this basis of being ‘unquestionable’ that objectivity and subjectivity become unhinged. The era in which KP lived saw a popularization of ‘historical doctrine’ and a consequent emphasis on ‘being on the right said of history’. Implicit in this belief was the idea that history acts as the sole judge of a state’s success, and therefore propagandist lying and distortion of the truth is permissible to achieve the goal of being immortalized in history as ‘great men’. Pausing to reflect on this notion for a few seconds, however, reveals the limitations of such thinking. “There is no [one] history of mankind, there is only an indefinite number of all kinds of aspects of human life” and what we commonly think of as ‘history’ is nothing other than a recounting of the transformations of political power. This version has been elevated to serve ingenuously as the official version of global history. In picking apart this ideology, we see that the failure to acknowledge our ‘point of view’ is a biased, subjective methodology that ends up disregarding objectivity as something of value. As KP puts it, such a view of ‘historicism’ blinds us to the truth that ‘history has no meaning’ and that that ‘we do not depend on any historical necessity to create the future.”
Summarizing quickly here, blindness to the fallacy of rationalism, on a personal level, originates from physiological and cultural origins. The follow up question is: how does this behavior come to not only represent itself in a larger social context, but also grow to become the unquestionable dogma of an entire civilization? For it is not self evident that such a habit of mind could naturally come to dominate the social conscious of everyone. For KP, it is a problem that is rooted in the very foundation of the West, Specifically, the substantial reverence given to Platonic philosophy is one of the main culprits. “What a moment of human smallness” KP writes “this idea of the [Platonic] philosopher king. What a contrast between it and [the thoughts of] Socrates, who warned the statesman against the danger of being dazzled by his own power, excellence, and wisdom” Self infatuation with one’s own abilities to the level of intoxication is a behavior universally observed across nation states, political leaders, family heads, and even in the heads of everyday people. Self inoculation from the reality of our frailness and ignorance, what equates to a muting of the right hemisphere, is a valuable tool from an evolutionary stance, but can be corrupted and used as a tool in conjunction with political motivations. This occurs both on a personal and social level. Over reliance on reason and rationality with out questioning its objectivity veracity is a substantial threat to an open society, especially when such ideologies serve as reason for imposing and maintaining hierarchies of power. To KP, Plato, (whose seminal work The Republic can be also translated as ‘The State’) is not recognized as a major conspirator against democratic questioning of authority nor one of the creators of the belief in a ‘divine order’ of historical progression. “Instead of showing his hostility to reason, [Plato] charmed all intellectuals…with his demand that the learned should rule. Although arguing against justice he convinced all righteous men that he was its advocate.”
Whenever, therefore, people are deceived and form opinions wide of the truth, it is clear that the error has slid into their minds through the medium of certain resemblances to that truth.
Socrates
It’s from these two camps of behavioral dogma (blind rationalism on the one hand, and vain historicism on the other) that utopian idealism arises. At face value, it may be hard for one to take issue with such motivations for progress toward a world of love and beauty. However, pushing society toward a more ‘natural state’ has resulted in not some higher form of civilization, but rather a descent into beastliness. “Of all political ideals, that of making the people happy is perhaps the most dangerous one” KP writes. “It claims to plan rationality for the whole society, although we do not possess anything like the factual knowledge which would be necessary to make good such an ambitious claim.” In reality, any sweeping change, for better or worse, has practical consequences that are impossible to calculate in the present moment. The 20th century is full of examples of countries whose quest for a ‘divine state’ resulted in the death of millions at the hand its own officials. Such devastating consequences should come as no surprise because latent in every utopian thought is the seed of an imminent dystopia. While this may seem paradoxical, the guarantee of providing the greatest amount of happiness to the greatest number of people depends on two very precarious factors. The first being the power structure that will enforce social change, and the second being what these figures define as happiness. The perfect, dream community of the ruling class may look, and often does look, starkly different from that of the every day citizen. It therefore follows that those in control of a society who are dead set on a utopian future will invariably impose their set of ‘higher values’ on others. Often times, with the conviction that doing so will save the souls of the common man. However, even with the best intentions of making heaven on earth, “utopian social engineering only succeeds in making it a hell – that hell which man alone prepares for his fellow-men.” When reason and historical destiny are used as validation for societal changes in the name of progress, chaos and disorder are guaranteed to follow because progress, much like happiness, success and all the other ‘feel-good’ words, cannot be measured at all, if not subjectively. My conception of ‘happiness’ is my own map of what gives me a sense of satisfaction, and although your map may be similar, it is certainly not the same as mine nor would it be 100% mutually compatible. Now multiply this by several million times and that gives you an idea of the impractically of making all citizens of a society happy. Herein lies the rapaciousness of dogmatic, logical thought that KP warned against: morals become politicized by those that hold the power to do so. What are used as indicators of social well being are based in the subjective experience of these select few, yet the imposition of radical change is always justified with the ‘reason’ that benefits will be felt by everyone. As a counter, wouldn’t it be more practical to strive for a society where the goal is for all citizens to suffer the least amount possible? Suffering is substantially more objective than happiness, and is a much better barometer for social health. The state of happiness is a mystery that has evaded the greatest thinkers for eons, while there is no feeling more certain or recognizable than that of suffering.
It is curious that state-prescribed happiness results, quite often, in widespread suffering. I don’t think it’s wrong to say that we all believe we know what brings us happiness, and also how we can go about making others happy. Yet, to me, this seems like yet another sign of the cerebral imbalance which sees the left hemisphere narcissistically drunk on its own abilities. At a certain point, we all come to realize that a ‘representation’ of happiness is not a substitute for the real thing, and although we are in situations where there’s ‘no reason to not be happy’ we often find ourselves quite anguished. And while it appears rather banal to correlate some personal phenomenon within our skull to a pernicious sociological defect, it’s in reading some of Plato’s works where the warnings of KP begin to gain significant traction. From Plato: “The greatest principle of all is that nobody should be without a leader. Nor should the mind of anybody be habituated to letting him do anything at all on his on his own initiative […] For example, he should get up, or more, or wash, or take his meals only if he has been told to do so […] He should teach his soul, by long habit, never to dream of acting independently, and to become utterly incapable of it.”
What stands in opposition to the autocratic nature of the left hemisphere, of course, is the right hemisphere. Many phenomena that are experienced by the right hemisphere cannot be communicated verbally because one; all of speaking ability resides in the left brain and two; because the left brain is unable to comprehend the incoming information. Mystical and religious experiences, many emotions, art and music are all perceived and processed by the right hemisphere. Describing these phenomena, as we all know, always falls short of what we feel in those moments. Even those with a gift for descriptive communication, such as poets or writers for example, feel the futility of words. If we metaphorize society as the brain, I’d put musicians, artists and poets in the right hemisphere and governmental institutions on the left. In a healthy relationship, those connected with the more mysterious aspects of life are crucial in holing accountable those in power. This is done through communicating with the rest of the citizens certain intuitive truths, or fundamentally universal aspects of the human experience that reason can never elucidate. In turn, the ruling parties map out social norms with consideration given to the state of socio-cultural and these revealed, intuitive truths brought about by those that are connected with creative endeavors. I believe it is the case that totalitarian ideology clearly shows this neurological imbalance, due to the inhibitory and hostile nature that autocratic governments demonstrate toward musicians. For any regime that holds similar beliefs to those of Plato which I stated above, empowerment of the soul and independent thinking serve as kryptonite to the whole structure. As music has the power to profoundly unite and inspire people, and also the tricky characteristic of being beyond rational diagnosis, it is viewed by the powers that be as a weapon. Those who wield such power at their disposable become threats. On a smaller scale, you experience this conflict of interest everyday with your ego. The left brain spins narratives and reasons for your thoughts and behaviors despite the fact that a substantial part of your day-to-day experience is governed by your right hemisphere. Unfortunately, false narratives are concocted by governments and used as verification for social repression. The rise of the Chilean dictatorship which lead to the torture and murder of prominent native musician Victor Jara, to me, should have been an alarm signalling that our collective obsession with rationalistic, concept-based thinking, had turned evolutionary harmful and should have been put in balance.
First off, for those that do not know, there was a series of military dictators that came to power in Central America with the assistance of the US. During the Cold War, you could say that US diplomacy had a representation of the world which believed potential communist threats to be everywhere in the western hemisphere. The mere existence of ‘People’s Parties’ in Central and South America was enough reasoning for the US to meddle in not only foreign elections, but also to seed and support coup d’etats. The intent was to overthrow any Communist allied leader, if one were to be elected in a country on our side of the world. It so happened that in Chile in 1970, a long time liberal politician by the name of Salvador Allende was elected president in a three way run off election. More importantly, however, was his political affiliation with Unidad Popular, and also the fact that in winning the Chilean presidency in 1970, Allende became the first democratically elected socialist leader. With a plan to restore nobility and dignity to the poor and unfortunate, Allende believed strongly in the merits of a democratically social state, and the potential it had to resolve the social problems Chile was facing at the time. And yet, from the first day that Allende was declared the new president of Chile (which, by the way, had held fair democratic elections for more than 128 years until that point) the Nixon-era CIA conspired to tamper with Chilean politics in hopes of damaging the efficacy of Allende’s agenda.
Now, one must keep in mind a few things. First, this was not some novel diplomatic behavior on behalf of the the US. Paranoiac politics was the core motivation behind the Vietnam war, US supported clandestine military rebellions in Africa and the Middle East, as well as the events that unfolded in our own hemisphere. Speaking of hemispheres, I find it more than ironic that the US is geographically located in the western, or left hemisphere, and that the foreign policy ethos was almost pattern left brain behavior. In any case, what happened in Chile was not a unique circumstance, nor was it the last time such political subversion happened on our account. Second, there was a musical movement sweeping through all of South America well before the election of Allende in 1970. Known as ‘Nueva Canción’ it was found, in large measure, by Chilean artist Violetta Parra. While the movement had iterations in other countries, in particular those countries that shared the same high desert plateau as Chile, central to the movement’s essence was the honest and accurate documentation of traditional Chilean culture. At the time that Parra first started to take a serious interest in the life of rural Chileans, many of the popular songs offered an idyllic portrait of rural Chile. One in which those in the country were happy and content with their ‘pastoral’ situation. In reality, the struggle of the rural Chilean lacked any romance or charm, and Parra saw an injustice in denying that truth from being told. Her intent was to bring to the public attention the honest and objective truth of the problems that many Chileans faced, not just those folks in the countryside. Her means for transmitting such truths was through folklore, with music as a key focal point. From classical Chilean music, art, poetry, even clothing, Parra spent her entire life working to give substance to ‘Nueva Canción’ and to make its impact felt for the greater good of the common person in Chile, as well as others across South America.
Violetta Parra’s tragic death by suicide in 1967 predated the aforementioned Chilean election by some three years. Yet, by that time, Allende’s party, Unidad Popular, had embraced and aligned itself with the powerful movement founded decades earlier. Approximately 6 years after Parra’s death, however, Nueva Canción was also abruptly silenced. On September 11th, 1973, Chilean armed forces attacked several of its own buildings in a military rebellion that led to the suicide of Allende and the installation of Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet, who had been a part of the Chilean military high brass for years, was the key conspirator in the coup d’etat and maintained close positive relations with the Nixon-era and Reagan-era CIA administration as well. Once in power, Pinochet ruled as a military dictator for over 2 decades and aggressively engaged in the torture and assassination of any political opponents. With the help of the US all the while, the Pinochet administration carried out persecution and executions of known or suspected socialist sympathizers all throughout the western hemisphere. There were even assassinations of Chilean politicians in the US. The material on this is as detailed as it is disgusting, and I suggest you do some further research on your own. However, just to give you an idea of the terror that gripped Chile during those year, the Pinochet regime led to the death, disappearance and dislocation of over 1 million Chileans. That equates to roughly 10% of the total population at the time.
Chilean democracy is a conquest by all of the people. It is neither the work nor the gift of the exploiting classes, and it will be defended by those who, with sacrifices accumulated over generations, have imposed it . . . With a tranquil conscience . . . I sustain that never before has Chile had a more democratic government than that over which I have the honor to preside . . . I solemnly reiterate my decision to develop democracy and a state of law to their ultimate consequences . . . Parliament has made itself a bastion against the transformations . . . and has done everything it can to perturb the functioning of the finances and of the institutions, sterilizing all creative initiatives.
President Salvador Allende in response to Chamber of Deputies’ claims that he intended to violate the Constitution and establish a totalitarian system.
Directly after the terrorist events of Sept. 11, musicians and artists that were known supporters of Allende and active in the Neva Canción movement were hunted and killed. The most emblematic of all cases of such oppression was that of Victor Jara. Considered to be the among the most popular Chilean and South American musicians of the era, Jara was tortured, murdered and then displayed in the street in front of Chile Stadium a week after authoritarian take-over. At the time, Jara was both a strong supporter Allende’s party, Unidad Popular, and had also contributed heavily to the continuation of Nueva Canción in Chile. In 1957, Jara had the opportunity to meet with Parra in Santiago, and the two discussed the importance of not only revitalizing Chilean heritage through the avenues of music, theater, and poetry, but also the necessity to adapt Chilean folkloric culture for the modern citizen. It was not enough to merely reproduce rural material in some sort of mechanistic, half-hearted fashion. Both saw the importance for new cultural works to be composed rather than duplicated. From this meeting until his death, Jara took strongly to the task that Parra had given him, and he gradually moved away from his adolescent love of theater to musical composition and social activism. At the time of Allende’s election, Jara had become a popular voice in the fight for social equality, both nationally and abroad. Being an admirer of Che Guevara, Jara visited both Cuba and the Soviet Union in the 1960’s and joined the Communist party shortly thereafter. Such associations with socialist actors were damning to Jara’s life after the Chilean Army took control of Chile in 1973. He not only had a talent for songwriting and a passion for many social causes that ran in contrast to US diplomatic ideology, but he was a charismatic performer and speaker. No matter the occasion or medium of performance, he always looked to spread the message of peace and boost morale. This magnetic character he kept until his death, even through the days of torture he endured. First hand accounts of other refugees interned with Jara speak both to his resolve, and also the brutality with which he was treated. After receiving beatings and physical threats for days, Jara’s hands then were broken and he was asked cruelly to play guitar for all the political prisoners interned at Chile Stadium. With the totality of the stadium watching, guards and military personnel included, Jara began to sing ‘Venceremos’ a song of Nueva Canción that speaks of the unbreakable spirit of the Chilean People. Shortly after, he was executed, and so too was the spirit of Nueva Canción. Any musicians that identified with the movement sought exile as political refugees and dropped, in the interest of self preservation, their efforts to enact social change.
My guitar is not for the rich
Verse from Venceremos by Victor Jara
no, nothing like that.
My song is of the ladder
we are building to reach the stars.
For a song has meaning
when it beats in the veins
of a man who will die singing,
truthfully singing his song.
With all this said, my motive is not to lay blame on the US or Pinochet, although I think that it is extremely evident that evil and egoism permeated the fundamental beliefs of both parties. To point fingers, would be to miss a key insight. That being; the Chilean democracy descended into totalitarianism for precisely the reasons that KP warned against. When a government suppresses its people’s effort to express their objective reality and instead impose its own social model is when the ‘map’ of society no longer accurately portrays the ‘territory’ of those who compose it. When those critical of the status quo are represented as dangerous sympathizers is a certain sign of impending chaos. The events that occurred in Chile proved unquestionably that, on both the social and individual level, logical thought became corrupt to such a degree that extermination of those that threatened the ‘map’ was the only way to maintain stability in that representation of reality. However, it’s hard to overlook the fact that communist governments of the era had their own excess of misery and violence, and that there was, perhaps, some real threat in the growth of like-minded parties in South America. One need not look further at the pathological misery carried out by the Soviet Union to understand that reason can serve as an instrument of terror on all sides of the political and ideological spectrum. It is more than unfortunate, in my view, that Nueva Canción became so tightly connected with political ideology. Yet, it seems that such connections were enacted as a form of surreptitious sabotage by those outside the movement, and even outside the happenings Chilean society itself. It is clear that Jara and many others fought, first and foremost, for social equality, as many of the lyrics of Nueva Canción works focus explicitly on common themes including fairness, justice, and dignity. The overt promotion of socialism as a political solution takes very much a back seat, even considering Jara’s association to Unidad Popular and his visits to other communist countries. It appears to me that associations between improving human welfare and the supposed imposition of a subversive communist authority that would call the shots behind the scene was another symptom of an unhealthy belief in rational and logical doctrine. In any case, music was certainly viewed and used as a potential weapon and powerful social organizer throughout this period in history. Pinochet himself took hostage of Los Huasos Quincheros, a popular Chilean band at the time that also performed folkloric-inspired songs, and used them to create propaganda in favor of his tyrannical regime.
What is worth remembering from the Chilean coup, among other ideas I’ve already touched upon and others that lay outside the scope of this article, is the role of the musician as a check on such power structures and social ‘map makers’. The cohesive and mysterious aspects of music, especially that of the type felt in songs from Nueva Canción, or the blues, or other protest songs from different countries, never was and never will be understood logically. Physiological structures within the brain prevent this from happening. The left hemisphere does not like to be confronted with the unknown, or anything that does not fit into its model of the world, while the right hemisphere deals directly with this realm. Not surprisingly, most of the ‘artistic’ centers in the brain are located on the right side, and the principle language center resides on the left. Therefore, there is an intuitive nature to music that falls outside the comprehensive and expressive abilities of the left brain. In parallel with KP’s idea of a non-existent ‘true’ version of history, there is no ‘correct’ interpretation of music or ‘complete’ analysis of its broad scale impacts. All this, to the left brain, (and by comparison, those that are heavily logical or representational) is bad news. Something with a degree of uncertainty so profound is unsupported, and therefore must be restructured so as to mesh with the current mental paradigm. Within one’s own conscious, this war of concepts is occurring constantly, yet I believe that we only witness the implications of one side winning when the battle is transferred to the interpersonal realm.
It is often said that history is written by the victors, and reflecting on this proverb in light of the theme of this article, I have a hard time arguing against its validity Nonetheless, it strikes me that despite its ubiquity in our everyday conversations, the pernicious ramifications of this saying go mostly unnoticed. What is to be accepted as the universally ‘correct’ version of the past and present? To whom do the important decision of the future belong? How can we trust that those with such responsibilities are earnestly taking into account our versions of the world in which we live? For me, these questions are best contemplated through geographic symbolism, hence my heavy reliance on the map metaphor. What seems to be the central uncertainty then is not whether or not we map our our reality, but the resolution with which we make our maps, the scrutiny to which we subject them, and the trust we give to those that make societal maps by which we all are obligated to abide. A lesson from this article, for me, is that an inaccurate map causes more suffering that an absent one. Why? Because inaccuracy betray the inherent purpose of a map, which is to provide as high resolution a representation as possible of the territory which one finds themselves in. Maps with false information, and even more the case when details are consciously falsified, leave is with an incorrect idea of how the world is, or how it could potentially be. Music awakens us to the reality that we really don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes with most, if not all, of that which we experience in our life. As such, it is the role of the musician and the music he plays to serve as the software update, or map editor, that which forces us to continually revise and question how we are interacting with the world. “What is the need for such auditing”, you might ask? Well, as Jordan Peterson believes, uncontested worshiping of the rational mind “makes you prone to totalitarian ideology [because] the rational mind always falls in love with its own creations”
How hard it is to sing
Estadio Chile – Final poem written by Victor Jara while he was interned by the Chilean military.
when I must sing of horror.
Horror which I am living,
horror which I am dying.
To see myself among so much
and so many moments of infinity
in which silence and screams
are the end of my song.
My concluding thoughts: Music, which has fundamentally a right brain creation and interpretation, exists in certain tension with reason and logic, which are of left brain origin. The intuitive and indescribable aspects of music, or those that, according to Geoffrey Latham, make it “the vernacular of the human soul”, turn more and more threatening to left-brained maps and representations of the world as they are taken as unquestionable truths. This is, in part, due to the fact that the nature of music is impervious to rational analysis and description. Why do we like some types of music and not others? How is it that music can unite us around common causes and create some of the strongest memories of our lives? Logic serves up nothing of value in the face of such provocations. Therefore, in an imbalance that skews left brained pushes musicians into the role of both threat and canary in the coal mine. Their social status and treatment is an indication of disorder and hostility in the social and personal psyche. It therefore follows that in deficit of a moral counterbalance, which can only come from a right brained, holistic view of the world, the representative world created by the left brain turns dystopian. In this scenario, the treatment of musicians and their music becomes a symbol for the disregard of human welfare. To end, I’d like to leave you with a question: When should the reason of a few take precedent over the well-being of many, and is this not the unsolvable puzzle at the heart of democracy?
“The capacity of the rational mind to deceive, manipulate, scheme, trick, falsify, minimize, mislead, betray, prevaricate, deny, omit, rationalize, bias, exaggerate and obscure is so endless, so remarkable, that centuries of pre-scientific thought, concentrating on clarifying the nature of moral endeavor, regarded it as positively demonic. This is not because of rationality itself, as a process. That process can produce clarity and progress. It is because rationality is subject to the single worst temptation—to raise what it knows now to the status of an absolute.”
Jordan Peterson