Compared to What

There are more than one versions of the jazz composition Compared to What.  My favorite is the live version performed by Les McCann, Eddie Harris and others at the 1969 Montreux Jazz Festival.  I wish I could say I was there for the performance, obviously because in that case I would have been there for the performance (I'm not sure how or why "wish I could say" came to be used in this manner).  It's a great performance of a great song.

Judging from the lyrics, the song is a social commentary of the kind popular in the late 1960s, which as far as jazz is concerned may have been unusual even then.  Jazz isn't commentary; at least not commentary in the form of comment.  The comments made expressly in the song are rather interesting though, at least to me.  "Tryin' to make it real compared to what?"  Compared to what, indeed.

Real, compared to what?  It may be a philosophical question, of the kind debated no doubt futilely over the years.  What is real?  What does it mean to be real?  The question "compared to what?" should be asked whenever such "questions" are raised, at least for the purpose of determining what is actually being asked--if anything.  It isn't clear to me anything is being asked if that question is asked in response to the question being asked.  Real compared to a dream?  Real compared to a hallucination?  To make a comparison one must be able to compare one thing with another.  We already know there is a difference, so it's foolish to act or think as if there is none.

Consider what Wild Bill James is saying in the quote appearing at the head of this post.  The use of the words "ought to be" is interesting to me.  Why does he assume we should be what he claims we have the ability to be?  Assume he's right, and we have these resources we fail to use.  Who's to say we can use them to their fullest extent?  If we can, who's to say that we should?  Perhaps we don't for a perfectly good reason.  Perhaps we wouldn't be recognizably human if we did.  

Such a quote (like the quote referring to truth's or an idea's "cash value") suggests that James may have been the American thinker some say he was (in the sense that Bertrand Russell thought the Pragmatists were typically American because they were concerned with what works, not with what is true).  James seems to be complaining that we aren't as productive as we could be.  Just think of what we could accomplish if we tried hard to do as much as we can!  Shoes for industry!  Shoes for the dead! (Does anyone remember the Firesign Theatre?)

Well, he may have meant something like that, but I would guess he refers more to the human condition than human potential.  James was more psychologist than philosopher--some would say, of course, that he was more a novelist than either a psychologist or philosopher.  He said that what we experienced in life was in the nature of a blooming, buzzing confusion, if memory serves.  Dewey made the same sort of point, though in a less felicitous way, when he wrote that we only think when we encounter problems, otherwise living almost automatically, by habit.

Perhaps Compared to What the song wonders just what it meant to say in 1969 that one was trying to make it real.  Real, compared to the president's war, to preachers preaching, to old ladies and their dogs, etc.?  Remeber when people said such things as "I'm trying to find the real me"?  As if they were not what they were.  The unfortunate fact is that all of it was real, just as all of it is real now.  Perhaps we can make it, ourselves, our lives better.  But we're real and other persons and things are real, not dreams or hallucinations, no matter that we are or they are good or bad.