basmanroselaw

David Brooks's Three Essential Propositions

2012-02-08T21:28:00.000-08:00

1. Consciousness is the tip of the iceberg of our minds, beneath it the lurking massive, unseen and unknown unconscious, overwhelmingly more formative in our reasoning and judgments than anything else.

2. Emotion is integral to intelligence. It allows us to weigh, assess and value the claims and factors we need to account for in reaching opinions, judgments and conclusions.

3. The gaze of others is formative in our conduct.

Poetry

2012-02-06T18:12:00.000-08:00

Poetry is the form of literature with the highest correlation between what is said and how it is said.

Fata Hamas Unity

2012-02-06T14:26:00.000-08:00

Jonathan Tobin/Contentions/2,6,2012

In a ceremony broadcast live across the Middle East, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process was formally buried. The event, which formalized the unity pact between the Fatah Party and its Hamas rival, marked the formation of a new Palestinian Authority government in which both factions would share power. PA President Mahmoud Abbas will also assume the role of prime minister, ousting Salam Fayyad, the pro-peace and development technocrat who had earned the trust of the West for his efforts to build the Palestinian economy and enforce the rule of law. But Fayyad’s role in the PA is now over, as is, apparently, Abbas’s pretense that he, too, favored peace and development.

There will be those apologists for the Palestinians who will say unity was necessary for peace and even claim this means Hamas is abandoning violence. But they will be either lying or deceiving themselves. Hamas’s goal of Israel’s destruction is unchanged as is, it should be noted, that of their erstwhile Fatah enemies. By signing the pact and now making it a reality, Abbas has for all intents and purposes torn up the Oslo Peace Accords, signed with such hope on the White House Lawn in September 1993.

Oslo required the Palestinians to give up violence and dedicate themselves to peace and establishing a civil society in exchange for rule over the West Bank and Gaza and the implicit promise of independence. This PLO leader Yasir Arafat did not do. He nurtured terrorists among his own ranks even as he jealously guarded his power against rivals like Hamas. The choice for the Palestinians was clear. Their leaders could act to wipe out those who opposed peace and therefore seal a plan of coexistence with Israel or they could fail to do so and condemn both peoples to another generation or more of conflict. Arafat, who was offered an independent state in the West Bank, Gaza and a share of Jerusalem in 2000 and 2001, refused to accept it, and instead chose another round of conflict via the terrorist war of attrition known as the second intifada.

Abbas, his successor, turned down another such offer in 2008. Since then, he has refused to negotiate with Israel and has now preferred the embrace of the Islamists of Hamas to that of the West and Israel from whom he could have won independence and peace. While belief in the peace process has been the stuff of fantasy for many years, the consummation of the Fatah-Hamas marriage of convenience marks the formal burial of the idea that the Palestinians had any interest in peace with Israel.

The talk of Hamas changing from an Islamist terrorist group committed to Israel’s destruction and the murder of its Jewish population into a non-violent political group is as genuine as the similar rationalizations that were put forward in the 1990s for Arafat. Bringing Hamas into the PA government means an end to all pretense of hope for peace. There were, after all, never any real differences between the two on the ultimate objective of eliminating Israel. Fatah was no more capable of signing a peace deal that recognized the legitimacy of a Jewish state, no matter where its borders were drawn, than Hamas. The influence of the Islamists will now spread from Gaza to the West Bank, renewing the threat of terrorism from that region that Israel’s security fence had largely eliminated.

The Palestinians are counting on both the Europeans and the Obama administration to bend to their desires and keep Western aid flowing to the PA. They believe the West is so committed to its illusions about Palestinian moderation that they will flout their own laws that forbid the transfer of funds to terror groups and those governments they have infiltrated. They also hope the knee-jerk impulse to blame Israel for everything that happens in the Middle East will overwhelm common sense and create a new push for Israeli concessions to the Fatah-Hamas government.

No doubt there will be plenty of support for such a policy from so-called realists and other veteran peace processers who would compromise their own principles rather than admit they were wrong about the Palestinian desire for peace.

Obama has been the most pro-Palestinian of any American president. But his efforts to help them have been rewarded with the same contempt that more pro-Israel administrations have gotten from the PA. If Obama has a shred of common sense or dignity left, he will make it clear to the Palestinians that they have effectively cut themselves off from American aid and a path to independence. Anything else would constitute a U.S. repudiation of Oslo. If Abbas chooses peace with Hamas over peace with Israel then he must be made to understand he will pay a high price for this decision.

On Charles Murray: Coming Apart

2012-02-03T13:09:00.000-08:00

Heather Wilhelm/RealClearBooks/February 3, 2012

Americans, the saying goes, don't like to talk about class -- but they certainly enjoy reading about it. They also love to see how they stack up against their peers.

One of the most notorious and snobby books on the topic, Paul Fussell's Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, capitalizes on this repressed American passion with its "Living Room Scale," which measures social class based on your décor. A worn Oriental rug will earn you eight points; a new one (and, by extension, new money) will lower your score. A ceiling 10 feet or higher is good; the presence of Reader's Digest, framed diplomas, or "any work of art depicting cowboys" (sorry, pardners) is not.

Charles Murray, the prominent political scientist, doesn't shy away from awkward subjects -- he's best known for The Bell Curve, which stirred up a progressive hornet's nest in the mid-1990s -- and he tackles the charged issue of class in his new and important book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. America, Murray writes, "is coming apart at the seams -- not ethnic seams, but the seams of class." Culture, not money, divides the new upper and lower classes, which live in increasingly different worlds: one rarefied, walled-off, and at the helm of the country; the other dysfunctional, adrift, and hapless when it comes to the game of life.

Tracking white Americans to avoid blurring trends with race and ethnicity, the numbers Murray presents are startling: In the new upper class, which amounts to about 20 percent of the country, out-of-wedlock births are rare: around 6-8 percent. For the more dysfunctional working class, which accounts for around 30 percent of the country, the number is mind-boggling: 42-48 percent. The numbers also turn a few stereotypes on their heads: In the lower working class, for instance, the rate of church attendance has dropped at nearly double the rate as that of the supposedly secularized elite.

America's working class, Coming Apart argues, has increasingly forsaken traditional values like marriage, religion, industriousness, and honesty -- and, as a result, it is rotting from within. Happiness levels are down; participation in the labor force is down; television watching (an average of 35 hours a week) is up.

Elites, meanwhile, have quietly embraced traditional values, segregated into upper-class residential enclaves, and largely lost touch with the realities of those who haven't. Murray sees this as ominous, particularly for public policy. "This growing isolation" of the elites, he writes, "has been accompanied by growing ignorance about the country over which they have so much power."

While he declines to rate the rug in your living room, Murray does include a quiz to determine your upper-class street cred: "How Thick Is Your Bubble?" It's rather entertaining, delving into your NASCAR knowledge, hard-knocks childhood stories, and more, but I actually think it could be shortened into one question: Do you become horrified when you enter a Wal-Mart, not just because of an alarming selection of T-shirts with dramatic white wolves howling in a lightning storm airbrushed on them (also a staple at truck stops), but because of America's raging obesity problem? Done, done, and done. (If you have never entered a Wal-Mart, well then, we're also done.)

And here we get to an odd anthropological trait of the new upper class: a rather contradictory mix of high-level snobbery and quasi-religious "nonjudgmentalism." Your typical elite enjoys saying snooty things about cultural middle America (Obama's infamous "clinging to guns and religion" comment, for instance, or David Carr of the New York Times spouting off about "low-sloping foreheads" in "the middle places" of America). But when it comes to judging things like, say, rampant divorce, or having children out of wedlock, or being on welfare while also having children out of wedlock (just writing that, by the way, feels terribly judgmental) the new upper-classers tend to bite their tongues.

"Nonjudgmentalism is one of the more baffling features of the new-upper-class culture," Murray writes. "If you are of a conspiratorial cast of mind, nonjudgmentalism looks suspiciously like the new upper class keeping the good stuff to itself. The new upper class knows the secret to maximizing the chances of leading a happy life, but it refuses to let anyone else in on the secret." Ultimately, he argues, the key to American success will be the willingness of the upper class to preach what they practice when it comes to marriage, children, religion, work, and more. But first, members of the upper class have to believe that their values actually matter -- and to understand why they do.

Coming Apart is a must-read for many reasons, but its main value comes from its insistence on drilling down beyond materialism. In a book ostensibly about class, Murray spends much of his time exploring the things that really matter in life, fighting against the presumption that we're here to merely pass our days as pleasantly as possible.

"If we ask what are the domains through which human beings achieve deep satisfactions in life -- achieve happiness," Murray writes, "the answer is that there are just four: Family, vocation, community, and faith." The advancement of the welfare state, he argues, results in the slow gutting of these domains, as well as personal responsibility, which are "the institutions through which people live satisfying lives." This cultural disintegration has had a disastrous human cost for the working class. It's a cost that many in the new upper class don't experience or understand.

Unfortunately, in today's political landscape, the idea that government "help" can sap human virtue is a radical concept. "Those in the new upper class who don't care about politics don't mind the drift toward the European model," Murray points out, "because paying taxes is a cheap price for a quiet conscience -- much cheaper than actually having to get involved in the lives of their fellow citizens."

Even the American political right, often caricatured as welfare-bashers, can fall into this trap: Republican front-runner and much-maligned rich guy Mitt Romney recently stepped in it by declaring he wasn't worried about the very poor, because, well, "we have a very ample safety net." Ah, then! Nothing to worry about. Everything's fine!

Murray ends his book with a bit of optimism, confident that "the more we learn about how human beings work at the deepest genetic and neural levels, the more that many age-old ways of thinking about human nature will be vindicated." A more accurate understanding of human nature, he argues, would lead to an understanding of the importance of traditional values and virtues -- for everyone, not just the new upper class -- and a restoration of the American experiment.

I hope he's right, but I'm a bit skeptical. In the pages of Coming Apart, we often find Murray bending over backward to explain obvious points, either to avoid offending his more sensitive readers (or to make sure no one thinks he's a racist). But certain facts -- say, that some people are smarter than other people, or that smart people who marry each other tend to have smart children -- tend to infuriate a certain sector of the population, polite explanation or no.

In another instance, Murray points out that children clearly do the best with two married, biological parents, but also acknowledges that "I know of no other set of important findings that are as broadly accepted by social scientists who follow the technical literature, liberal as well as conservative, and yet are so resolutely ignored by network news programs, editorial writers for major newspapers, and politicians of both major political parties."

Some of this stems from good intentions: People don't want to make struggling single moms or divorced parents feel worse than they already do. Much of this comes, as do many of the building blocks of hyper-progressive politics, from plain old wishful thinking. And some of it stems from a subtle hostility toward the idea of universal virtues existing at all.

"Discussing solutions is secondary to this book, just as understanding causes is secondary," Murray writes. "The important thing is to look unblinkingly at the problem." That task alone, it seems, is more than a big enough challenge for today.

The Last Man

2012-01-24T22:34:00.000-08:00

Last man

From Wikipedia,

The last man is a term used by the philosopher Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra to describe the antithesis of the imagined superior being, the Übermensch, whose imminent appearance is heralded by Zarathustra.

The last man is tired of life, takes no risks, and seeks only comfort and security.
The last man's primary appearance is in "Zarathustra's Prologue." After having unsuccessfully attempted to get the populace to accept the Übermensch as the goal of society, Zarathustra confronts them with a goal so disgusting that he assumes that it will revolt them.

The last man is the goal that European civilization has apparently set for itself. The lives of the last men are comfortable. There is no longer a distinction between ruler and ruled, let alone political exploitation.

Social conflict is minimized.

Nietzsche said that the society of the last man would be too barren to support the growth of great individuals. The last man is possible only by mankind's having bred an apathetic creature who has no great passion or commitment, who is unable to dream, who merely earns his living and keeps warm. The last men claim to have discovered happiness, but blink every time they say so.

The last man, Nietzsche predicted, would be one response to nihilism. But the full implications of the death of God had yet to unfold. As he said, "the event itself is far too great, too distant, too remote from the multitude's capacity for comprehension even for the tidings of it to be thought of as having arrived as yet.

One Criticism of Shame

2012-01-24T14:03:00.000-08:00

I think Shame one of the best movies of 2011.

But I think it's marred.

Brandon is a sex addict, with, therefore, an uncontrollable need for sexual release in whatever form. But, at the end, his sister's attempted suicide seems emotionally to unlock him. He is tender and loving with her at her hospital bed side. He, then, a lone figure, self brought to his knees, has an emotional outburst at some New York river side, a kind of expiation, as though with that expiation he allows love and emotion and tenderness in to crack the cocoon of his insular coldness.

The last scene is ambiguous.

The same married blonde from the first subway ride at the movie’s beginning now on the last ride beckons to him again with her eyes and face and then gets out of her seat to stand up invitingly, expecting him to join her, to rub up against her. But we have no evidence of his responsiveness to her. He seems to sit blankly as though resisting his previous impulse toward her. Then the screen grows blank; and then the movie ends and we don't know whether his new unlocked self is sufficient to surmount his addiction.

We don’t know whether, that is to say, Brandon has achieved, through his experience with his sister, some measure of self transcendence by way of gaining some measure of emotional wholeness, which will allow him to resist the demands of his addiction--the addiction which has so imprisoned him.

This final ambiguous ending seems pat and contrived in my view and cuts against and diminishes what throughout the movie had been a rather unrelenting, remorseless, unflinching and unsentimental presentation of his addiction.

In a word, the ending, however left irresolute, is, given the thrust what has gone before, a flinch.

There is a further point to be made given Shame’s ending.

It is in the nature of addiction, as I understand it, that emotional wholeness or unblocking is no "cure" for it: there is no cure, as I understand it, for addiction, only the imposition of one's will on impelling need through the hard establishing of conditions allowing the will to prevail one day at a time. I'm not aware that the proposition that there is no cure for addiction varies depending on the addiction. If this is correct, then the implication in Shame that Brandon's recovery of some measure of emotional wholeness of itself may get him past his addiction seems muddled to me and informs what I see as the movie's ending being too pat even in its irresolution

Fred Siegel on Netzche

2012-01-22T21:40:00.001-08:00

FRED SIEGEL

Nietzsche on Eggshells// City Journal

A new book on the philosopher’s American reception soft-pedals his dark influence.

20 January 2012

American Nietzsche: a History of an Icon and His Ideas, by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen (University of Chicago, 464 pp., $30)

Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s American Nietzsche is a 464-page footnote to Allan Bloom’s comment in The Closing of the American Mind that American readings of the German philosopher have produced “nihilism with a happy ending.” Her sense of Nietzsche is based heavily on the writings of the German-born Princeton scholar Walter Kaufmann, famed for softening the philospher of the übermensch’s writings. Like the apologists for jihad who portray it as an internal quest for purification, advocates for Nietzsche acrobatically rope off his praise for war and cruelty as matters of spiritual struggle.

Ratner-Rosenhagen begins with an examination of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s enormous influence. Emerson’s assertion that “permanence is but a word of degrees” becomes in Nietzsche’s writing what later thinkers would call perspectivism, the view that no firm footing exists for asserting the truth or falsity of any particular claim. Or, in Nietzsche’s words, “truths are illusions we have forgotten are illusions.” Presenting herself as an historian of the reception of ideas, Ratner-Rosenhagen traces the adoption of perspectivism in twentieth-century America. Perspectivism, she rightly notes—first as turn-of-the-century pragmatism and today in the form of postmodernism—has been central to the liberal critique of American ideals.

Ratner-Rosenhagen’s principles of selection seem askew. She discusses the plays of George Bernard Shaw, including Man and Superman, only in passing. But Shaw’s plays were one of the primary means through which Americans came to know of Nietzsche’s ideas. Instead, she devotes an entire chapter to letters from obscure Americans to Nietzsche and to his sister Elizabeth Forster-Nietzsche, who became the keeper of the Nietzschean flame after her brother’s death in 1900.

The book is stronger when it deals with Nietzsche’s influence on major figures such as H.L. Mencken and Randolph Bourne, both of whom devoted themselves to freeing the country from the strictures of Victorian morality and denouncing the American effort in World War I. “No author,” writes Ratner-Rosenhagen, “did more to establish the persona of Frederick Nietzsche in America than H.L. Mencken.” Indeed, Mencken was Nietzsche’s first American popularizer. The sage of Baltimore followed his 1908 book, The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, written when he was only 28, with The Gist of Nietzsche, a collection of the German’s aphorisms, in 1910, and a translation of The Anti-Christ, published in the aftermath of World War I. Mencken, Ratner-Rosenhagen notes, told a friend that his denunciations of American life and culture “were plainly based on Nietzsche; without him, I’d never have come to them.”

Ratner-Rosenhagen complains that in the postwar period, the Nietzsche once celebrated by radicals such as Max Eastman and Margaret Sanger as a “crusader for truth, a debunker of superstition, and an iconoclast who placed conscience above convention” was now seen as “the martial ideal of imperial Germany.” But in her own version of Kaufmann’s softening, she insists—ignoring or failing to read Mencken’s writings on Nietzsche and World War I—that “there is not a straight trajectory from. . . Mencken’s aristocratic. . . Übermensch to the image of the Übermensch as a menace to democracy during the war.” She’s wrong.

Writing for The Atlantic in “The Mailed Fist and Its Prophet,” Mencken celebrated Nietzsche as the inspiration for the new Germany, which was “contemptuous of weakness.” Mencken wrote that Germany was a “hard” nation with no patience for politics, because it was governed by the superior men of its “superbly efficient ruling caste.” “Germany,” he concluded, “becomes Nietzsche; Nietzsche becomes Germany.” Mencken approvingly quotes Nietzsche to the effect that “the weak and the botched must perish. . . . I tell you that a good war hallows every cause.”

Surely, in writing a book on Nietzsche’s reception in America, Ratner-Rosenhagen is duty-bound to respond to Conor Cruise O’Brien’s well-regarded 1970 New York Review of Books essay, “The Gentle Nietzscheans.” Yet she ignores this, too. O’Brien tellingly quotes from Nietzsche’s posthumously published The Will to Power on the “annihilation of decaying races.” “The great majority of men,” Nietzsche wrote, “have no right to existence, but are a misfortune to higher men. . . . There are also peoples that are failures.” This was an argument that appealed to supporters of eugenics as well as to the Nazis. Walter Kaufmann explained it away by noting that Nietzsche hadn’t mentioned the Jews and Poles directly.

Moving into the contemporary era, Ratner-Rosenhagen cites, apparently without irony, the postmodernist literary critic Paul de Man and the Black Panther Huey Newton as examples of people who put Nietzsche to good use in liberating, respectively, literature and African-Americans from outdated prejudices. She declines to mention de Man’s collaboration with the Nazis during World War II. As for Newton, who thought of himself as a superman of sorts, the question is: did he murder three innocents? Or was it four, or five?

The book closes with a sympathetic discussion of the philosopher Richard Rorty’s attempt to reconcile pragmatism’s emphasis on political practicality with Nietzsche’s concern with states of being rather than outcomes. Rorty embraces the Nietzschean absence of truth as socially liberating—but advertisers and politicians find the absence of truth liberating, too. Trapped in his own perspectivist logic, Rorty invokes the sense of empathy, “the inspirational value” derived from reading great novels, as the basis for his intellectual and political viewpoints.

In Ratner-Rosenhagen’s sunny reading, Americans have managed to rope off Nietzsche’s anti-democratic, aristocratic radicalism while embracing his perspectivism, all without doing damage to the body politic. But as we’ve unfortunately become a far more hierarchical and unequal society, it’s difficult to see how that judgment can hold. The absence of commonly held truths is all too compatible with a less democratic society dominated by an aristocracy of the successful and politically connected. They’re only too happy to manufacture their own truths.

Fred Siegel, a contributing editor of City Journal, is scholar in residence at St. Francis College in Brooklyn.

On David Brooks's The Social Animal

2012-01-22T18:57:00.000-08:00

Philosophy Is Here to Stay

Benjamin Storey/ January 2012, The New Atlantis,

Hairdressing is among the occupations most closely correlated with happiness. Women’s sexual tastes vary widely with culture and education, while men want the same things regardless of religion, education level, or the influence of culture. Introspection makes you depressed. In one study, babies as young as eight months seem to care about justice.

Such striking findings from cognitive and social science show up on almost every page of David Brooks’s new book The Social Animal, and make it a consistently illuminating read. The book’s novelistic form is pleasing, too: the informative gems from science are melded into the stories of two characters, Harold and Erica, who, while not great literary creations, are real enough to care about. In the moral and political counsel it offers, the book seems sensible as well: Success in marriage matters far more to our happiness than income level or professional status. Government cannot deal with poverty effectively without attempting to change the culture of poor communities. Terrorism should not be understood as a response to poverty, but as a nihilistic expression of a longing for purity common among young men “caught in the no-man’s-land between the ancient and modern.”

But all the arresting data, all the comic-sociological observations, all the insightful meditations on the moral struggles of everyday life are not the main point of The Social Animal. That main point is the momentous claim Brooks made most clearly in a New Yorker article adapted from the book: “Brain science helps fill the hole left by the atrophy of theology and philosophy.” On the authority of brain science, Brooks settles old philosophic quarrels, declaring that “the French Enlightenment, which emphasized reason, loses; the British Enlightenment, which emphasized sentiments, wins.” He compares the cognitive revolution to the most momentous occasions in the history of Western thought: “just as Galileo ‘removed the earth from its privileged position at the center of the universe,’ so this intellectual revolution [in brain science] removes the conscious mind from its privileged place at the center of human behavior.” In politics, Brooks wants to see that “the new knowledge about our true makeup is integrated more fully into the world of public policy.” If cognitive science can fill the hole left by the atrophy of philosophy and theology; if it can vindicate some philosophies and discredit others; if it can relocate the center of human self-understanding; and if our public policy makers should look to it for guidance, then the unmistakable implication is that we should defer to it as our highest intellectual, moral, and political authority. A new sheriff, it seems, is in town.

The Social Animal, then, is an argument for a new kind of scientism. Interestingly, Brooks himself criticizes scientism in the book. Expanding on Irving Kristol’s remark that scientism is the “elephantiasis of reason,” Brooks explains that scientism entails “taking the principles of rational inquiry, stretching them without limit, and excluding any factor that doesn’t fit the formulas.” Brooks attacks the scientism of the French Revolutionaries, who “brutalized ... society in the name of beginning the world anew on rational grounds,” of Frederick Taylor-inspired corporate managers who tried to turn human workers into “hyper-efficient cogs,” and of rationalist urban planners who destroyed old neighborhoods and the valuable social networks they contained so as to put efficient but anonymous housing projects in their place. At present, Brooks sees this scientism embodied in a public policy consensus that accepts “the shallow social-science model of human behavior,” interpreting us as rational, self-interested actors who respond predictably to material incentives. Against this form of scientism, Brooks uses the findings of the cognitive revolution to emphasize the dominance of the unconscious mind, which, he writes, is “most of the mind,” and which frequently causes us to behave in ways that make no sense from a rational, self-interested perspective. He wants us to see just how much of ourselves is anything but rational.

Brooks is no doubt correct to believe that the model of man as a rational self-interested actor who behaves in ways that can be explained in mathematical terms is a gross oversimplification of our nature. But by attempting to elevate the cognitive sciences to the status of a new Galileo, Brooks merely replaces one form of scientism with another: the economists, with their demand curves, are out; the neuroscientists, with their brain scans, are in. Treating emotional and social animals as rational self-interested actors is one way to stretch the principles of rational inquiry beyond their limits; treating us as social and emotional animals who are nonetheless fully intelligible to the scientific method is another. To truly avoid scientism, Brooks would need to articulate the limits of science in general and cognitive science in particular. But one will find no consideration of the limits of science in The Social Animal. While Brooks draws on philosophers, poets, and theologians in his book, he never allows them or anyone else to say to science: “hitherto shalt thou come, but no further.” In spite of Brooks’s celebration of “epistemological modesty,” there is nothing epistemologically modest about this book.

But can science — cognitive or otherwise — really bear the weight of so much authority? Can it really tell us what we need to know in order to live well? Does science really answer the questions asked by philosophy and theology? Can any science that defines itself in terms of the rigor of its methods really see the human phenomena in all their complexity, as philosophers, theologians, and poets aim to do? Can there really be a science of love, happiness, and nobility — the distinctly human concerns to which The Social Animal purports to speak? Can science really address the question of our origin, our end, and our place in the whole without which any knowledge of ourselves would be radically incomplete?

To answer these questions, we need to look at the scientific findings Brooks reports in The Social Animal from a perspective that does not take the authority of science for granted and is open to aspects of human experience that might be invisible to a methodical science bent on identifying the efficient causes of things.

Let us begin with love. When Harold and Erica first fall in love, Brooks invites us to look “inside Harold’s brain” to see love as it appears to the eye of the cognitive scientist. One method scientists use to understand love is to put a patient in a brain scanner, show the patient a photo of his or her beloved, and watch which areas of the brain “light up” in response to this stimulus. Such a method might tell us something, but its understanding of love will plainly be partial: any halfway-competent Don Juan knows that love loves a beach, a bottle of wine, and a sunset. One’s ardor might be dampened by the syringes, medical scrubs, and electrodes of the laboratory, distorting the very phenomenon the scientist seeks to study. Experimental science that seeks quantifiable results can perhaps grasp those aspects of an experience such as love that will submit to the apparatus of experimentation and permit of quantification, but the rest of that experience, and in particular the whole of that experience, will remain the domain of philosophers and poets.

Next, consider happiness. Brooks cites extensively from social-scientific happiness research, which is conducted “mostly by asking people if they are happy and then correlating their answers with other features of their lives.” Brooks acknowledges that this method “seems flimsy,” but argues that its results are “surprisingly stable and reliable.” The stability of the results, however, does not address the fundamental flimsiness of the method in question: the problem is not that one cannot establish a stable pattern of correlation between self-reported happiness and other aspects of life. The problem is the difficulty of measuring the correlation between self-reported happiness and actual happiness: the willingness to call oneself happy when asked by a researcher could be as much a sign of self-deception, vanity, or vapidity as it is of actual happiness. And to speak accurately of one’s own happiness, one would have to know what happiness is. As Brooks admits, this is “a subject of fierce debate among the experts,” which is no surprise, because any answer to the question of happiness depends on comprehensive reflection on the whole of human experience and aspiration, such as one finds in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Such reflection may be the work of a lifetime.

With respect to nobility, Brooks speaks to the distinctly human concern with the noble in a fascinating passage on thumos, the ancient Greek word for “spiritedness,” which he uses in the broader meaning of “ambition” — as he puts it, “the desire to have people recognize your existence, not only now but for all time.” Brooks is clearly cognizant of the power of thumos for explaining human behavior, but has little to say about the explosive question upon which the notion of thumos opens, as Socrates pointed out long ago: What should we recognize? What deserves to be celebrated as human virtue so excellent that it should never be forgotten? What, in short, truly deserves to be called noble? Is it the warrior’s courage and martial prowess? The statesman’s capacity for superintending the political whole and leading it to greatness? Or is it the philosopher’s unstinting dedication to understanding the truth about justice, human nature, and happiness, and his willingness to live in the light of that truth? On the questions of what human activities are most worthy of respect, of which human exemplars should command our admiration and emulation, cognitive research is necessarily silent. While it might find some way to analyze respect — perhaps scanning our brains while we look at photos of Lincoln — when it comes to deciding what is respectable, the question is unintelligible from the point of view of the necessary relations of cause and effect which science studies.

Finally, we must consider a curious lacuna in The Social Animal: the question of our place in the whole. Brooks occasionally refers to evolutionary explanations for our preferences and predilections. For example, he notes that “evolutionary psychologists argue that people everywhere prefer paintings that correspond to the African savanna, where humanity emerged.” He has little to say, however, about the mechanism thought to be at the root of evolution itself: a brutal struggle for genetic survival — “Nature, red in tooth and claw,” in Tennyson’s words. If that is the fundamental truth of our being, then happiness, so central to Brooks’s argument, is a delusion: nature makes us what we are and it wants the species to evolve, without the slightest concern for the happiness of individuals.

Evolution’s account of the nature of nature, though pitiless, at least speaks to the philosophic question of the character of the whole within which we find ourselves. Beyond this natural question, however, looms the theological question of the origins of the natural whole — the question of who, or what, is God. God makes an occasional appearance in The Social Animal, as when Harold reflects on his soul on the day of his death:

The brain was physical meat, but out of the billions of energy pulses emerged spirit and soul. There must be some supreme creative energy, he thought, that can take love and turn it into synapses and then take a population of synapses and turn it into love. The hand of God must be there.

This passage nicely encapsulates how science’s account of the brain as “physical meat” can be compatible with an affirmation of spirit or soul. But even should we accept Brooks’s argument for the compatibility of soul and synapse, and Harold’s musing that “the hand of God” must be responsible for the enlivening of matter with spirit, we arrive only at the beginning of the theological questions: Why would God do such a thing? What kind of a God is God, anyway? Is God the God of love and mercy we know from the Gospels? Is God the radically mysterious and terrifying God who speaks to Job from the whirlwind? Or is God the God of the philosophers — not a person, and above concern with human affairs? Answers to such questions are, of course, intractably elusive. However, we cannot understand ourselves without at least attempting to face them, because the answers to them are dispositive for how we understand our place in the world, our happiness, and our end.

These are the questions about which we have become grossly inarticulate because of the undeniable atrophy of philosophy and theology from which Brooks begins. But our science recused itself from even asking such questions at its inception in the seventeenth century, when it narrowed its purview to the world of efficient causality, and thereby attained the precision and predictive power from which it derives its technical prowess and public authority. Insofar as the truly fundamental questions are questions about wholes — from the question of a happy human life as a whole to the question of the nature and origin of the world as a whole — science, which, in the words of Francis Bacon, requires a method “which shall analyse experience and take it to pieces,” cannot tackle such questions without ceasing to be what it is. (Recent scientific talk of “emergent systems” — where, as Brooks puts it, “different elements come together and produce something that is greater than the sum of their parts” — implicitly acknowledges that the world contains phenomena that do not permit of the precise causal explanation that makes science science.) For all of the empirical precision it derives from its methods, unless science is supplemented and corrected with the holistic reflections characteristic of theology and philosophy, it is and will remain humanistically and cosmologically naïve.

None of this means that the striking findings Brooks reports from cognitive and social science are irrelevant to the question of how we should live, and Brooks should be praised for making so many new insights available to non-scientists. But his presentation of cognitive science as the decisive voice on these questions encourages our already deep-seated habit of passive deference to scientific authority, and implicitly encourages the further atrophy of philosophy and theology Brooks laments by suggesting that science can replace them.

One sometimes wonders whether Brooks is aware that he cedes too much ground to scientism. A striking passage in the middle of The Social Animal suggests that he might be. Erica has started a consulting firm, hoping to use what she learned about the importance of culture from her childhood and in college to help businesses match their marketing to the cultural predilections of their customers. She finds, however, that her insights on culture get no traction with business executives, who are not attentive to the language of culture. She therefore reluctantly decides to present her work in the language of behavioral economics, which sounds, at least, like “rigorous, tough-minded science.” “Her clients,” Brooks writes, “respected science” — particularly behavioral economics, which is “hot and in demand” — and Erica yields to the predilections of her audience. One cannot help but wonder if a similar calculation took place in the mind of David Brooks. Neuroscience is hot and in demand; Edmund Burke and Alexander Hamilton, the deepest sources of Brooks’s political philosophy, are not.

In truth, the vision of human life presented in The Social Animal is a vision drawn from an enormous variety of sources, humanistic as well as scientific. Henry Adams-esque musings on the spirit of the Middle Ages and Allan Bloom-ite ruminations on love and friendship are so commingled with the findings of cognitive science that the book’s humanistic sources often seem at least as important as its scientific ones. Perhaps Brooks exaggerates the novelty and authority of the findings of the “cognitive revolution” to help some old insights find a wider audience in our pop-science-addled age.

Authorial responsibility, however, requires minding the difference between taking stock of the prejudice of one’s audience as a rhetorical starting point and reinforcing those prejudices. Brooks rarely if ever questions the findings of cognitive or social scientists in The Social Animal. It was not always thus; as recently as in On Paradise Drive (2004), Brooks was willing to counter a Gallup poll that reported that “96 percent of teenagers said they got along with their parents” with a demur based on his own experience: “I’m not sure families are quite that healthy.” He reported that “college students talk about prudential sex — the kind you have for leisure without any of that romantic Sturm und Drang, as a normal part of life,” but again demurred in his own voice that “many of them are lying.” One wishes that that David Brooks had been at the switch when the happiness researchers told him that hairdressers were among the happiest people in the world. If he had been, we might have gained from science without being asked to leave our judgment behind.

If, however, we set aside Brooks’s puffed-up claims on behalf of the cognitive revolution, we can begin to see the true merits of his book. The Social Animal is an astonishing feat of research, and rescues countless important discoveries about our nature from the purgatory of specialist literature. Brooks puts this research in the service of a sensible and humane teaching about moral and political life, alternately highly serious and gently comic. His novelistic imagining of the inner lives of Harold and Erica takes us inside the struggle to be moral when our will and reason are of limited power; to find work that “absorbs all [our] abilities” and satisfies our desire for recognition without being subsumed by it; to make the sacrifices necessary to truly care for another human being and unite with that person in love; and to face death with the consolation that our conduct and character have been a serious response to the demands life makes of us.

While the story of Harold and Erica has been criticized as lacking in the high drama that is the stuff of great novels, The Social Animal doesn’t pretend to be a great novel. Instead, Brooks imagines his characters facing the kind of moral dilemmas his readers are likely to experience: the tension between work and family, the temptations of booze and boredom-induced adultery, the struggle to focus one’s attention and really think while surrounded by “the normal data smog of cyber-connected life.” Brooks has a powerful grasp of how his professional-class readers live and think, and I saw much of myself in the mirror of the book.

Insofar as there is a little bit of Harold and Erica in each of us, The Social Animal can thus help us to know ourselves — an effort in which we can use all the help we can get. But help is one thing, and authority another. On the question of ourselves, we can have philosophers, theologians, poets, and, yes, scientists, for our companions and conversation partners. But the question, in the end, should — must — rest with us.

Benjamin Storey is an assistant professor of political science at Furman University.

On Niall Ferguson's Civilization

2012-01-18T16:35:00.001-08:00

“Civilization: The West and the Rest,” by Niall Ferguson

By Steven Pearlstein, Published: January 13, 2012, WAPO

Niall Ferguson doesn’t hide the fact that he means for his latest work of meta-history to take its place on the global bookshelf next to the rise-and-fall works of Edward Gibbon, Kenneth Clark, Francis Fukuyama, Jared Diamond, Samuel P. Huntington and Paul Kennedy. “Civilization” tackles the big questions: What is a civilization? Why do they decline? Why, for the past 500 years, have Europe and the United States dominated everyone else? And — here’s the payoff — is the West now destined to take a back seat to Asia?

Surely there was nothing foreordained about the West’s economic, scientific, cultural or military superiority, as Ferguson reminds us. At various times, the Chinese, Aztec and Ottoman civilizations boasted the world’s highest standards of living, the best infrastructure, the fiercest armies, the largest cities, the most productive fields, the longest lifespans, the deepest understanding of the natural world, the best technology, the wisest rulers.

And yet beginning in about 1500, it was Europe, led by England, that began to pull ahead, to break out of the Malthusian trap that, up to that point, had sentenced most of humanity to short lives lived in poverty. Ferguson’s thesis — not entirely original — is that Europe’s success came not as the result of any natural advantages but because it was able to develop just the right mix of political, legal and social institutions that made it resilient enough to withstand the inevitable plagues, natural disasters, failed leaders or just plain bad luck.

The book, ostensibly, is organized around what Ferguson considers the six most vital of those institutional arrangements:

Competition, meaning a decentralization of power among nations and within them, necessary to create the right environment for capitalism;

Science, whose discoveries laid the basis not only for the Industrial Revolution but also for overwhelming military advantage;

Property rights, which provided a framework for the rule of law and laid the foundation for shared political and economic power;

Medicine, which led to a dramatic rise in life expectancy;

A consumer focus to economic life that fueled demand for modern industrial products; and

A work ethic that provided a moral framework for savings, investment and hard toil.

This topic and this structure play to Ferguson’s skills as an economic historian known for the breadth of his knowledge, the clarity and pithiness of his prose, and the originality of his analysis. His knack is for translating academic history into accessible concepts and concrete examples, setting them in the grand sweep of history and making them relevant to our present-day circumstances.

Always the intellectual provocateur, Ferguson also means to challenge the insidious dogma, now ascendant on university campuses, that holds that the “triumph of the West” was nothing more than a self-centered fiction concocted by European and American scholars to justify centuries of brutal colonialism and oppression. And while he stops short of arguing that the West’s decline is inevitable, he warns that it has become a real possibility that could unfold rather quickly.

While the basic outline of Ferguson’s argument is sound, the book itself is something of a disappointment. It reveals the strains on an ambitious academic who has churned out nine books in 13 years, all while hosting five series for British television, holding down two appointments at Harvard — one in the history department and one at the business school — and part-time fellowships at Stanford and Oxford, and writing a regular column for Newsweek. For the past eight years, he has also been working on a biography of Henry Kissinger.

The result of this prodigious over-scheduling is a book that is a mishmash of disconnected and sometimes contradictory riffs held together by faulty logic, inapt metaphors and clever turns of phrase. Instead of presenting himself as the well-read and widely traveled polymath he genuinely is, Ferguson comes off as an intellectual showoff who couldn’t be bothered to edit his own ideas.

The chapter on science, for example, opens with the rout of the Ottoman armies from the gates of Vienna in 1683 after they had laid siege to the capital of the Hapsburg empire. Ferguson wants us to ponder how the application of science to weaponry provided the West with a crucial military advantage over the rest of the world. Yet despite his entertaining stroll through the court of Frederick the Great, a lengthy discourse on the military precision of the Prussian army and a brief history of the secularization of Turkey in the 20th century, it’s hard to recall what the point is. Surely it is not the connection between science and weaponry, inasmuch as there is but a single passing reference to Napoleon-era howitzers.

In the chapter on property rights, Ferguson contrasts the different approaches taken by England and Spain toward their colonies in the New World. For England, North America became not only a source of raw materials, but a place where thousands of politically enfranchised citizens could go to stake a claim to land and begin moving up the social and economic ladder. In the Spanish south, by comparison, where there was a single-minded focus on extracting gold, silver and other natural resources, it was hardly surprising that almost all the land was held by the king, with most of the work done by subjugated natives and slaves imported from Africa.

Having made his point, convincingly, Ferguson can’t resist embarking on a long, rambling discourse on different rates of miscegenation in the United States and Brazil, complete with bar charts on the differing racial makeup of the two societies. What lesson this holds for the success of a civilization remains a mystery.

Even more bizarre is the chapter on the role of medicine in the rise of the West, in which Ferguson manages to pretty much avoid the subject of health care almost entirely. Instead, he hops from Napoleon to the revolution of 1848 to France’s management of its colonies in Africa. In his mind, this leads naturally to an exposition of Germany’s experiments with eugenics in its African colonies, from which a direct line must therefore be drawn to Nazi genocide in Eastern Europe. It was no mere coincidence, Ferguson assures us, that Hermann Goering, Hitler’s confidante and the head of the Nazi Luftwaffe, was the son of the German high commissioner in southwest Africa.

Ah, so that explains it!

In the chapter on work, Ferguson claims that the primary cause of Europe’s declining work ethic is the decline in Europe’s religious faith, which at one point he appears to blame on John Lennon. And applying the same logic, drawn from the sociologist Max Weber, he argues that the seeds of China’s economic miracle were planted by generations of Protestant missionaries who taught the Chinese the value of literacy, thrift and hard work. He even has a map to prove it.

The high point of “Civilization” may the chapter on the importance of consumers in fostering economic progress — something that Marx never foresaw, Henry Ford never forgot, Hitler and Stalin never understood, and Japan and China came to embrace. “Perhaps the greatest mystery in the entire Cold War,” Ferguson writes, “is why the [Soviet Union] could not manage to produce a decent pair of blue jeans.” But even this line of inquiry is badly muddied. I have no idea whether it is true, as Ferguson asserts with great authority, that the research into body sizes done by the uniform division of the U.S. military during World War II laid the foundation for the boom in off-the-rack clothing in the postwar period, but it’s the kind of anecdote that is a Ferguson specialty and tends to underpin his analysis.

Ferguson’s take-away is that if there is a threat to the West’s continued dominance in the world, it comes not from China or Islam, but from ourselves — from our lack of knowledge of history and our lack of faith in the civilization we inherited. It’s a powerful theme and a great ending, alas, for a book that is still to be written.

Steven Pearlstein is a Washington Post business and economics columnist and the Robinson professor of public and international affairs at George Mason University.

Obama's Recess Appointments

2012-01-15T10:08:00.000-08:00

The OLC Opinion on Recess Appointments

MICHAEL MCCONNELL | JANUARY 12, 2012 | 8:33 PM

On January 10, I published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal stating that I could see no plausible legal argument to support President Obama’s recent recess appointments to the Consumer Financial Protection Board and the National Labor Relations Board. I noted that the Administration had not relied on any opinion from the Office of Legal Counsel, and inferred that it must not have obtained such an opinion. http://www.advancingafreesociety.org/2012/01/10/democrats-and-executive-outreach/

Today, January 12, 2012, the Administration released an Office of Legal Counsel opinion, dated January 6, opining that the recess appointments were constitutional. The Opinion concludes that the pro forma sessions of the Senate conducted every three days during the December and January holiday are not sufficiently substantive to interrupt a Senate recess, meaning that the Senate was in recess from December 17 well into January.

I compliment the Administration for releasing the opinion, while still wondering what was their reason was for delay. It is reassuring that in this instance the Administration followed proper legal channels before taking a controversial constitutional position at odds with recent precedent (precedent established in 2007 by Senate Democrats, including then-Senator Obama).

I have not had time to give careful study to the 23-page OLC Opinion, but my preliminary reaction is not to be convinced. The Opinion makes arguments that are not frivolous, but it seems to me the counterarguments are more powerful.

In particular, the Opinion places enormous weight on the fact that the Senate’s resolution providing for pro forma sessions declared that there would be “no business conducted.” There are two problems with this, as a legal matter. First, as the Opinion concedes, the important question is whether at these sessions the Senate is “capable” of exercising its constitutional functions – not whether, on any particular occasion, it has chosen not to do so.

Second, in actual fact the Senate has conducted major business during these sessions, including passing the payroll tax holiday extension during a pro forma session on December 23. The Opinion weakly responds that, notwithstanding this evidence of actual practice, the President “may properly rely on the public pronouncements of the Senate that it will not conduct business.” It is hard to see why the Senate’s stated intention not to do business takes legal and constitutional precedence over its manifest ability to do so. The President is well aware the Senate is doing business on these days, because he has signed two pieces of legislation passed during them.

More fundamentally, the Opinion creates an implausible distinction between the legal efficacy of pro forma sessions for various constitutional purposes. According to the Opinion, a pro forma session is not sufficient to interrupt a recess for purposes of the Recess Appointments Clause, but it is sufficient to satisfy the constitutional command that neither branch adjourn for more than three days without the consent of the other (Art. I, §cl. 4) and that Congress convene on January 3 unless a law has provided for a different day. There is longstanding precedent that pro forma sessions are sufficient to satisfy these constitutional requirements. Why a pro forma session would count for some purposes and not others is a mystery. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that OLC is simply fashioning rules to reach to the outcomes it wishes.

Finally, it bears mention that a great deal of the authority OLC cites in support of the President’s authority to make recess appointments during intrasession recesses in the first place – wholly apart from the pro forma issue – consists of prior executive branch pronouncements that are at odds with both the language and the history of the constitutional text. It would not be surprising if the judiciary were to reject these self-serving executive interpretations in favor of more straightforward ones. In particular, courts might rule that the Recess Appointments Clause applies only when a vacancy “happens” during a recess, as the text of Att. II, § 2, cl. 3, says, and that “the recess” of the Senate occurs only between sessions, and not (as here) in the midst of a session. The OLC Opinion acknowledges as much, when it says that the appointments face “some litigation risk.”

But the Obama Administration cannot be faulted for following longstanding executive precedent, which has been used by past Presidents both Republican and Democrat. It is only the novel arguments that I criticize here. It seems to me that the Administration is under special obligation to provide a bullet-proof legal argument when it declares invalid a strategy devised by Majority Leader Harry Reid in 2007, supported by then-Senator Barack Obama, and successfully used by them to stymie President George W. Bush’s recess appointment power. The law cannot change just because the shoe is on the other foot.

The fact that the Administration obtained an OLC opinion in advance of the appointments (the Opinion is dated two days after the appointments, but presumably it reflects the advice given to the President in advance) shows that they were not made, as initially appeared, without benefit of independent legal analysis. And the public should welcome the release of the opinion itself, so that we can know the offical legal basis for the President’s acts, rather than having to guess. On the merits, though, at least on first study, the Opinion does not have the better of the argument.

Eagleton on De Botton on the Usefulness of Atheism (Not)

2012-01-13T20:19:00.000-08:00

The novels of Graham Greene are full of reluctant Christians, men and women who would like to be rid of God but find themselves stuck with him like some lethal addiction. There are, however, reluctant atheists as well, people who long to dunk themselves in the baptismal font but can't quite bring themselves to believe. George Steiner and Roger Scruton have both been among this company at various stages of their careers. The agnostic philosopher Simon Critchley, who currently has a book in the press entitled The Faith of the Faithless, is one of a whole set of leftist thinkers today (Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben) whose work draws deeply on Christian theology. In this respect, the only thing that distinguishes them from the Pope is that they don't believe in God. It is rather like coming across a banker who doesn't believe in profit.

Such reluctant non-belief goes back a long way. Machiavelli thought religious ideas, however vacuous, were a useful way of terrorising the mob. Voltaire rejected the God of Christianity, but was anxious not to infect his servants with his own scepticism. Atheism was fine for the elite, but might breed dissent among the masses. The 18th-century Irish philosopher John Toland, who was rumoured to be the bastard son of a prostitute and a spoilt priest, clung to a "rational" religion himself, but thought the rabble should stick with their superstitions. There was one God for the rich and another for the poor. Edward Gibbon, one of the most notorious sceptics of all time, held that the religious doctrines he despised could still be socially useful. So does the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas today.

Diderot, a doyen of the French Enlightenment, wrote that the Christian gospel might have been a less gloomy affair if Jesus had fondled the breasts of the bridesmaids at Cana and caressed the buttocks of St John. Yet he, too, believed that religion was essential for social unity. Matthew Arnold feared the spread of godlessness among the Victorian working class. It could be countered, he thought, with a poeticised form of a Christianity in which he himself had long ceased to believe. The 19th-century French philosopher Auguste Comte, an out-and-out materialist, designed an ideal society complete with secular versions of God, priests, sacraments, prayer and feast days.

There is something deeply disingenuous about this whole tradition. "I don't believe myself, but it is politically prudent that you should" is the slogan of thinkers supposedly devoted to the integrity of the intellect. If the Almighty goes out of the window, how are social order and moral self-discipline to be maintained? It took the barefaced audacity of Friedrich Nietzsche to point out that if God was dead, then so was Man – or at least the conception of humanity favoured by the guardians of social order. The problem was not so much that God had inconveniently expired; it was that men and women were cravenly pretending that he was still alive, and thus refusing to revolutionise their idea of themselves.

God may be dead, but Alain de Botton's Religion for Atheists is a sign that the tradition from Voltaire to Arnold lives on. The book assumes that religious beliefs are a lot of nonsense, but that they remain indispensible to civilised existence. One wonders how this impeccably liberal author would react to being told that free speech and civil rights were all bunkum, but that they had their social uses and so shouldn't be knocked. Perhaps he might have the faintest sense of being patronised. De Botton claims that one can be an atheist while still finding religion "sporadically useful, interesting and consoling", which makes it sound rather like knocking up a bookcase when you are feeling a bit low. Since Christianity requires one, if need be, to lay down one's life for a stranger, he must have a strange idea of consolation. Like many an atheist, his theology is rather conservative and old-fashioned.

De Botton does not want people literally to believe, but he remains a latter-day Matthew Arnold, as his high Victorian language makes plain. Religion "teaches us to be polite, to honour one another, to be faithful and sober", as well as instructing us in "the charms of community". It all sounds tediously neat and civilised. This is not quite the gospel of a preacher who was tortured and executed for speaking up for justice, and who warned his comrades that if they followed his example they would meet with the same fate. In De Botton's well-manicured hands, this bloody business becomes a soothing form of spiritual therapy, able to "promote morality (and) engender a spirit of community". It is really a version of the Big Society.

Like Comte, De Botton believes in the need for a host of "consoling, subtle or just charming rituals" to restore a sense of community in a fractured society. He even envisages a new kind of restaurant in which strangers would be forced to sit together and open up their hearts to one another. There would be a Book of Agape on hand, which would instruct diners to speak to each other for prescribed lengths of time on prescribed topics. Quite how this will prevent looting and rioting is not entirely clear.

In Comtist style, De Botton also advocates secular versions of such sacred events as the Jewish Day of Atonement, the Catholic Mass and the Zen Buddhist tea ceremony. It is surprising he does not add Celtic versus Rangers. He is also keen on erecting billboards that carry moral or spiritual rather than commercial messages, perhaps (one speculates) in the style of "Leave Young Ladies Alone" or "Tortoises Have Feelings As Well". It is an oddly Orwellian vision for a self-proclaimed libertarian. Religious faith is reduced to a set of banal moral tags. We are invited to contemplate St Joseph in order to learn "how to face the trials of the workplace with a modest and uncomplaining temper". Not even the Walmart management have thought of that one. As a role model for resplendent virtue, we are offered not St Francis of Assisi but Warren Buffett.

What the book does, in short, is hijack other people's beliefs, empty them of content and redeploy them in the name of moral order, social consensus and aesthetic pleasure. It is an astonishingly impudent enterprise. It is also strikingly unoriginal. Liberal-capitalist societies, being by their nature divided, contentious places, are forever in search of a judicious dose of communitarianism to pin themselves together, and a secularised religion has long been one bogus solution on offer. The late Christopher Hitchens, who some people think is now discovering that his broadside God Is Not Great was slightly off the mark, would have scorned any such project. He did not consider that religion was a convenient fiction. He thought it was disgusting. Now there's something believers can get their teeth into …

Michael Gerson on Romney

2012-01-09T22:45:00.000-08:00

Real Clear Politics, January 10, 2011.

By Michael Gerson

WASHINGTON -- It is commonly argued that Mitt Romney has benefited from a weak Republican field, which is true. And that the attacks of his opponents have been late and diffuse. True, and true.

But the political accomplishment of Willard Mitt Romney should not be underestimated. The moderate, technocratic former governor of a liberal state is poised to secure the nomination of the most monolithically conservative Republican Party of modern history.

Some of this improbable achievement can be attributed to Romney's skills as a candidate. In 14 debates, he delivered one gaffe (the $10,000 bet) and once lost his temper (with Rick Perry) -- neither lapse particularly damaging. Under a barrage of awkward formats and dopey questions, Romney has been calm, knowledgeable and reassuring. The slickest network anchor could not have done better.

Romney is the varsity -- a far better candidate than, say, Bob Dole or John McCain. A Republican nominating process that swerved again and again toward silliness -- alternately elevating for consideration Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain -- seems ready to settle on a serious, accomplished, credible candidate. Republicans, it turns out, are choleric and fractious -- but not suicidal.

The nominating process has also revealed Romney's limitations. It would be awkward for anyone this stiff to pose as a working-class stiff, and Romney should not try. But if he gains the nomination, Romney's rival in connecting with average voters will not be Bill Clinton. It will be professor Barack Obama. Again, Romney benefits from the luck of the draw.

Romney has paired his skills with a sophisticated political strategy. His campaign team learned something from the failures of four years ago. Last time, Romney flooded the early states with money and personal attention. In Iowa, his limited return on investment made him a political punch line. This time, Romney rationed both his money and his presence -- lowering expectations and generating genuine enthusiasm when he finally arrived to campaign. When a late political opportunity presented itself -- in the form of a persistently divided Republican field -- the Romney campaign skillfully ramped up for a narrow win. Adding a victory in New Hampshire is an achievement that Ronald Reagan never managed as a challenger.

Ideology has always been Romney's main vulnerability. Running and winning in Massachusetts before running twice for the Republican presidential nomination is a process best described by biologists -- a story of adaptation and evolution.

Other candidates have naturally carried more vivid ideological messages. In the end, the intra-Republican argument has come down to Ron Paul versus Rick Santorum -- both effective spokesmen for their views. Paul, by his own description, is preaching the pure "gospel of liberty." He carries the hopes of libertarians and those who seek a return to the federal government of an 18th-century agrarian republic. Santorum stands more in the empowerment tradition of Jack Kemp or George W. Bush. On the whole, he is reconciled to the goals of modern government -- encouraging equal opportunity and care for the elderly, sick and vulnerable -- but not to the bureaucratic methods of modern government. Santorum's lot would encourage the provision of services through credits, vouchers and defined contributions.

I come down on the empowerment side of this divide. But maybe, at this moment, the Republican Party doesn't need a clear decision on its identity (which might not be possible anyway). Romney has this advantage: In supporting him, no Republican is called upon to surrender his or her deepest ideological convictions. Romney is temperamentally conservative but not particularly ideological. He reserves his enthusiasm for quantitative analysis and organizational discipline. He seems to view the cultural and philosophic debates that drive others as distractions from the real task of governing -- making systems work.

His competitors have attempted to portray Romney's ideological inconsistency over time as a character failure. It hasn't worked, mainly because Romney is a man of exemplary character -- deeply loyal to his faith, his family and his country. But he clearly places political ideology in a different category of fidelity. Like Dwight Eisenhower, Romney is a man of vague ideology and deep values. In political matters, he is empirical and pragmatic. He studies problems, assesses risks, calculates likely outcomes. Those expecting Romney to be a philosophic leader will be disappointed. He is a management consultant, and a good one.

Has the moment of the management consultant arrived in American politics? In our desperate drought of public competence, Romney has a strong case to make.

michaelgerson(at)washpost.com

The Fat Lady Has Sung?

2012-01-04T22:13:00.000-08:00

Jaco Weisberg, Slate, January 4, 2012

Is there anyone not annoyed by Mitt Romney’s narrow win in the Iowa caucus? Conservatives are disappointed because they recognize that the former Massachusetts governor, who used to be pro-choice and was for Obamacare before it was called that, is only pretending to be one of them.

Seventy-five percent of Iowa’s Republican voters wanted someone further to the right. But because their votes were divided among too many weak and weird candidates, the only moderate running in their state came out on top.
Liberals are bummed because Romney is the strongest potential challenger to President Obama.

This shows up clearly in head-to-head polls, which put Romney tied with or slightly ahead of Obama, while other Republican contenders trail by 10 points or more. It was hard for Obama campaign officials to suppress their glee last month when Newt Gingrich, the only even remotely plausible alternative to Romney, briefly ran at the head of the pack. But even they knew this was a momentary aberration.

Short of Republicans committing collective suicide by picking someone else, Democrats would like to see Romney win the nomination after a protracted, costly struggle that would deplete his financial resources, sully his image, and drag him further to the right. Today, that scenario looks less likely.

We journalists are sorriest of all, because Romney coasting to victory is a weak story. Were the press any other industry, cynicism about its self-interest in promoting marginal challengers would prevail. Local television stations (many of them owned by media conglomerates such as Slate’s owner, the Washington Post Company) count on election-year revenue bumps from political advertising in important primary states.

If the nomination contest is effectively over by, say, the time of the Michigan primary on Feb. 28, valuable money will be left on the table. But for reporters, rooting for the underdog, any underdog, is really a matter of wanting a more dramatic story. The straight-laced front-runner winning Iowa and New Hampshire before securing the nomination early on does not count as a compelling narrative. Hence the media’s pretense of taking seriously a succession of nonviable candidates with outlandish views.

Rick Santorum is not, under any circumstances, going to be the GOP nominee.
This confluence of motives amounts to an insider conspiracy to resist the obvious.

So expect to hear more and more about less and less likely alternatives to a Romney victory in the coming weeks. Jon Huntsman, the only candidate yet to enjoy a moment of popular enthusiasm, could do better than expected in New Hampshire.

Once Rick Perry joins Michele Bachmann in dropping out, conservative sentiment could coalesce around the unlikely survivor Rick Santorum.* Chris Christie could still change his mind! Anything could happen, of course, but it won’t. In the end, the GOP is overwhelmingly likely to nominate Romney because he is the most electable candidate available and at this point, no one else can beat him.

The Republican party Romney is likely to lead into battle has, however, revealed itself in a diminished state—dominated by its activist extreme, focused on irrelevancy, and deaf to reason about the country’s fiscal choices. To survive a Republican debate you are required to hold the incoherent view that the budget should be balanced immediately, taxes cut dramatically, and the major categories of spending (the military, Social Security, Medicare) left largely intact. There is no way to make these numbers add up, and the candidates do not try, relying instead on focus-group tested denunciations of Obama and abstract hostility to the ways of Washington.

Above every other issue, the candidates in Iowa pandered about how thoroughly and completely they would ban abortion. Paul, an obstetrician by training, blanketed the state with ads making the dubious claim that he once saw doctors dispose of a live baby in a trash bin. (If so, why did he not intervene?) Gingrich proposed throwing out the Constitution to defy judges who invalidate anti-abortion legislation.

In the closing days of the campaign, Perry augmented his opposition to abortion to include cases of rape or incest. Santorum toured with members of the Duggar family, who are featured in TLC reality show 19 Kids and Counting. Like the Duggars, Santorum believes contraception is “not okay.”
The notion that the Tea Party stood for something new on the American right has now dissolved in favor of a familiar range of radical, not really conservative tendencies. Iowa clarifies this factionalism by presenting it in exaggerated form.

There is juvenile libertarianism, represented by Ron Paul. There is theocratic moralism, offered in evangelical Protestant flavors by Bachmann and Perry, and in a Catholic version by Santorum. There is the idea of ideas-based politics, represented by Gingrich.

When all of these alternatives finish falling by the wayside, what will remain is the attempt to actually win a national election, represented by one Willard Mitt Romney.

Knowledge and the Internet

2012-01-03T19:52:00.000-08:00

What Lies Beneath

BY EVGENY MOROZOV SUNDAY, JANUARY 1, 2012

"Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now that the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room"

by David Weinberger

Basic Books, $14.29

Karl Popper, a towering figure in 20th century philosophy of science, firmly opposed the view that theories emerge from random observations. Once he even ridiculed a hypothetical scientist “who dedicated his life to natural science, wrote down everything he could observe, and bequeathed his priceless collection of observations to the Royal Society to be used as inductive evidence.” For Popper, “though beetles may profitably be collected, observations may not.”

David Weinberger, the author of “Too Big to Know” and a Harvard researcher, doesn’t mention Popper. But his rejoinder is easy to predict: Popper’s theory of knowledge was conditioned and constrained by the medium he used to develop it. Had Popper stopped worrying about limited paper supply and embraced today’s world of hyperlinks and infinite storage, even the most inconsequential of observations would look like knowledge to him.

Weinberger wants to be the Marshall McLuhan of knowledge management. Where McLuhan claimed that the medium shapes the reception of the message, Weinberger claims that the medium also shapes what counts as knowledge. Or, as he himself puts it, “transform the medium by which we develop, preserve, and communicate knowledge, and we transform knowledge.”

How does this happen? Weinberger argues that on the Internet facts are born “linked,” pointing to other facts and opinions. With time, other entities start linking to them, creating digital traces that can be used to scrutinize and even revise original facts.

On paper, facts look firm and reliable; online, they are always in flux. Furthermore, the Internet, unlike your local library, is infinite. Librarians choose which books to acquire; books that don’t make the cut become invisible. Not so with search engines. What they filter out doesn’t disappear — it stays in the background. New filters, Weinberger claims, don’t “filter out” but “filter forward.”

This triumph of the “networked” and the “hyperlinked” unsettles everything: facts (those who think that Barack Obama was born in Kenya also have facts), books (they are unable to contain “linked” and infinite knowledge) and even knowledge itself (it’s too obsessed with theories and consensus-seeking). Thus, “knowledge has become a network with the characteristics — for better and for worse — of the Net.”

This is an ambitious thesis. It’s also not original. “The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge,” a famous 1979 book by the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, makes a similar claim about computerization. “Along with the hegemony of computers comes a certain logic, and therefore a certain set of prescriptions determining which statements are accepted as ‘knowledge statements,’” wrote Lyotard. Weinberger doesn’t mention Lyotard by name but claims that “the Internet showed us that the postmodernists were right.”

Too bad, then, that his argument is ridden with familiar postmodernist fallacies, the chief of which is his lack of discipline in using loaded terms like “knowledge.” This term means different things in philosophy and information science; the truth of a proposition matters in the former but not necessarily in the latter. Likewise, sociologists of knowledge trace the social life of facts, often by studying how and why people come to regard certain claims as “knowledge.” The truth of such claims is often irrelevant.

For epistemologists, however, to say that “S knows that p” three conditions must be met. P must be true; S must believe that p; S must be justified in believing that p. One can’t “know” that “Barack Obama was born in Kenya” because it’s untrue. On the other hand, to “know” that “Barack Obama was born in Hawaii,” one needs to have justification. A copy of his birth certificate would do. The hyperlink nirvana has not rid us of the justification requirement. The Internet may have altered the context in which justification is obtained — one can now link to Obama’s birth certificate — but it hasn’t changed what counts as “knowledge.”

That scientific facts today are no longer persuasive on their own has less to do with our changing attitudes toward knowledge than with our changing attitudes — marked by suspicion of power, expertise and claims to neutrality — toward science as a socio-political enterprise. Postmodernists foresaw some of these changes, but Weinberger overstates their contribution. The sociology of scientific knowledge and science studies played a more consequential role. These two disciplines have posed valid challenges to traditional epistemology, but Weinberger is too impatient to position his argument within that debate, at times invoking claims from both camps but never stating his own theory of truth (thus, he can simultaneously claim that “truth will remain truth” and that “knowledge is becoming ... unthinkable without ... the network that enables it”). Such carelessness stems from Weinberger’s fixation on media and its history, a fixation that comes at the expense of engaging with other fields and disciplines studying the production of knowledge. He may be right that the notion of “objectivity” is dead in journalism. It is, however, very much alive in science.

Many of Weinberger’s other claims fall apart on closer examination. Does Hunch.com, a site that asks users hundreds of questions to predict what movies or books they might like, exemplify “a serious shift in our image of what knowledge looks like”? Hunch.com uses techniques of statistics, data mining and machine learning to turn correlations into recommendations. All of these, of course, are well-established disciplines predating the Internet. For Weinberger, the claim that “75% of people who liked ‘Mad Men’ also liked ‘Breaking Bad’” is revolutionary because, unlike Darwin’s theory of evolution, it is “theory-free.” However, such “theory-free knowledge” has a very long history. Think of census reports, surveys or marketing questionnaires. Yes, people fill in these forms online now. But is this somehow revolutionary?

Weinberger does have an annoying penchant for finding novelty in things simply because they exist online. Thus, he invokes PolitiFact.com — a prominent journalistic project that fact-checks what public figures say — to argue that the Internet is also capable of countering misinformation. What an odd choice: PolitiFact.com, as it happens, is not run from a geek’s basement. It’s run by St. Petersburg Times, a card-carrying member of the old knowledge regime. Yes, it operates online. But the claim that PolitiFact can therefore tell us something about “the Internet” is highly suspicious.

In the end, it’s hard to say what this book is about. Weinberger is too incurious to interrogate the modern state of knowledge or explain which of our current attitudes toward it are driven by the Internet and which by other social dynamics. And it’s certainly not a book about technology: Weinberger distances himself from this topic, and his shallow treatment of online filters suggests it was a wise decision. In the end, perhaps, this might be a book about the prospect of yet another digital revolution — a revolution so vague that no one would blame Weinberger if it fails to materialize.

Evgeny Morozov, a visiting scholar at Stanford University, is the author of “The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom" (PublicAffairs)

Anybody Home?

2011-12-30T05:44:00.001-08:00

Are we alone in the universe?

By Charles Krauthammer, Published: December 29

Huge excitement last week. Two Earth-size planetsfound orbiting a sun-like star less than a thousand light-years away. This comes two weeks after the stunning announcement of another planet orbiting another star at precisely the right distance — within the “habitable zone” that is not too hot and not too cold — to allow for liquid water and therefore possible life.

Unfortunately, the planets of the right size are too close to their sun, and thus too scorching hot, to permit Earth-like life. And the Goldilocks planet in the habitable zone is too large. At 2.4 times the size of Earth, it is probably gaseous, like Jupiter. No earthlings there. But it’s only a matter of time — perhaps a year or two, estimates one astronomer — before we find the right one of the right size in the right place.

And at just the right time. As the romance of manned space exploration has waned, the drive today is to find our living, thinking counterparts in the universe. For all the excitement, however, the search betrays a profound melancholy — a lonely species in a merciless universe anxiously awaits an answering voice amid utter silence.

That silence is maddening. Not just because it compounds our feeling of cosmic isolation, but because it makes no sense. As we inevitably find more and more exo-planets where intelligent life can exist, why have we found no evidence — no signals, no radio waves — that intelligent life does exist?

It’s called the Fermi Paradox, after the great physicist who once asked, “Where is everybody?” Or as was once elaborated: “All our logic, all our anti- isocentrism, assures us that we are not unique — that they must be there. And yet we do not see them.”

How many of them should there be? The Drake Equation (1961) tries to quantify the number of advanced civilizations in just our own galaxy. To simplify slightly, it’s the number of stars in the galaxy . . .

multiplied by the fraction that form planets . . .

multiplied by the average number of planets in the habitable zone . . .

multiplied by the fraction of these that give birth to life . . .

multiplied by the fraction of these that develop intelligence . . .

multiplied by the fraction of these that produce interstellar communications . . .

multiplied by the fraction of the planet’s lifetime during which such civilizations survive.

Modern satellite data, applied to the Drake Equation, suggest that the number should be very high. So why the silence? Carl Sagan (among others) thought that the answer is to be found, tragically, in the final variable: the high probability that advanced civilizations destroy themselves.

In other words, this silent universe is conveying not a flattering lesson about our uniqueness but a tragic story about our destiny. It is telling us that intelligence may be the most cursed faculty in the entire universe — an endowment not just ultimately fatal but, on the scale of cosmic time, nearly instantly so.

This is not mere theory. Look around. On the very day that astronomers rejoiced at the discovery of the two Earth-size planets, the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity urged two leading scientific journals not to publish details of lab experiments that had created a lethal and highly transmittable form of bird flu virus, lest that fateful knowledge fall into the wrong hands.

Wrong hands, human hands. This is not just the age of holy terror but also the threshold of an age of hyper-proliferation. Nuclear weapons in the hands of half-mad tyrants (North Korea) and radical apocalypticists (Iran) are only the beginning. Lethal biologic agents may soon find their way into the hands of those for whom genocidal pandemics loosed upon infidels are the royal road to redemption.

And forget the psychopaths: Why, a mere 17 years after Homo sapiens — born 200,000 years ago — discovered atomic power, those most stable and sober states, America and the Soviet Union, came within inches of mutual annihilation.

Rather than despair, however, let’s put the most hopeful face on the cosmic silence and on humanity’s own short, already baleful history with its new Promethean powers: Intelligence is a capacity so godlike, so protean that it must be contained and disciplined. This is the work of politics — understood as the ordering of society and the regulation of power to permit human flourishing while simultaneously restraining the most Hobbesian human instincts.

There could be no greater irony: For all the sublimity of art, physics, music, mathematics and other manifestations of human genius, everything depends on the mundane, frustrating, often debased vocation known as politics (and its most exacting subspecialty — statecraft). Because if we don’t get politics right, everything else risks extinction.

We grow justly weary of our politics. But we must remember this: Politics — in all its grubby, grasping, corrupt, contemptible manifestations — is sovereign in human affairs. Everything ultimately rests upon it.

Fairly or not, politics is the driver of history. It will determine whether we will live long enough to be heard one day. Out there. By them, the few — the only — who got it right.

Moral Basis For Capitalism: Roger Backhouse and Bradley Bateman

2011-12-28T20:16:00.000-08:00

'To convert the business man into the profiteer is to strike a blow at capitalism … The business man is only tolerable so long as his gains can be held to bear some relation to what, roughly and in some sense, his activities have contributed to society."

Can we create a morally acceptable form of capitalism; and if so, what would it look like? Faced with a decade of hardship apparently caused by the greed of a few, people are asking whether bankers are no more than profiteers, and whether inequality has risen too far. Even the former US treasury secretary, Lawrence Summers, and former head of the CBI Richard Lambert, have said we need to do better on inequality.

The quote above, however, comes not from anyone today but from John Maynard Keynes, in 1923, during the postwar turmoil in the financial markets. There was hyperinflation in Germany, a collapse of the Mark, chaos on the foreign exchanges as prices had gone up and down, and violent fluctuations in employment.

Like many of those who turned to communism and fascism, Keynes had strong moral objections to capitalism – but he consistently repudiated socialism, communism, and fascism, for he believed that capitalism was essential both to create high standards of living and to guarantee personal liberty. In effect he sought a capitalist revolution.

For Keynes, the sustainability of capitalism was not only a technical question but a moral question – because if capitalism is to survive, people have to believe it is a system worth supporting. His priority was to eliminate unemployment. It was also a moral priority to design an international monetary system that would reduce the chances of capitalism descending into chaos again. And to do that, economists had to grapple with difficult technical details, but their motivation was a vision of a better capitalism.

We face the same challenge today – to develop a morally acceptable form of capitalism. As Keynes feared might happen, much business is now seen as no more than profiteering. Many people object to the bonus culture of the banking system because they don't believe those bonuses are earned. We have also learned that inequality not only undermines the legitimacy of capitalism (that was Keynes's concern) but it has corrosive effects: unequal societies are unhappier, less healthy, and have more crime.

We cannot wind the clock back, but we should not be afraid to look to the past for ideas. It is hard to make a clear distinction between profiteering and legitimate business activity and yet, throughout history, there have always been limits on what can be bought and sold in the market. Perhaps the boundaries between legal and illegal activities need to be reconsidered; perhaps derivatives need to be better regulated – or simply banned from banks' portfolios. Creating a more stable banking system so that banks do not need bailouts would help maintain high employment and tackle inequality.

We can also look abroad. A decade ago it was common to look to Scandinavia or Germany and to compare their institutions with ours. Now "Anglo-Saxon" capitalism has lost its shine, perhaps we should reconsider whether we can learn, for instance, from Germany, with its system of industrial democracy and a banking system geared up to support industry, or try to find out why the gap between rich and poor is much narrower in most of Europe.

One reason for the problems we face today is that we have stopped seeing taxes as an essential institution in a capitalist economy for if taxes could be raised, especially on those who can most afford to pay them, public services would not have to be cut. We should see taxes as an integral part of a moral capitalist economy, providing health, education and social care outside the market. People should not be afraid to join Warren Buffett in saying the rich should pay more tax. The "Tobin tax" on financial transactions should not be seen as a way to raise funds for the euro, but as a tax that could help stabilise the financial system and as a "Robin Hood" tax.

Such changes need to be analysed carefully, for technical details do matter, but they need to be on the agenda: if we are to save capitalism, as we must if we want prosperity and liberty, we must face up to its moral failings. Unless we do this, we will be unable to imagine a better future, let alone work out how to achieve it.

Romney Bounces Back

2011-12-26T22:50:00.000-08:00

O Lucky Mitt

John Heileman/Dec 23, 2011/NewYork

The first votes in the Republican presidential contest were two weeks from being cast when Mitt Romney arrived in Bedford, New Hampshire, to give a speech with the same title as his campaign slogan: Believe in America.

In the fifteen minutes the address consumed, Romney declared his belief not just in America but in the notion that our founding principles are what made America the greatest nation in the history of the Earth principles that include the pursuit of happiness, which is the foundation of a society that is based on ability, not birthright.

Romney also talked about Barack Obama, who, according to Romney, sees America differently and believes in an entitlement society in which government should create equal outcomes.President Obama has reversed John Kennedy’s call for sacrifice, Romney thundered. He would have Americans now ask, What can the country do for you?’

Romney’s speech was billed by his advisers as his closing argument before the GOP nomination fight kicks off in earnest with the Iowa caucuses on January 3. But you would be forgiven for thinking it sounded more like the opening salvo in a general election. Romney drew no explicitor, really, implicitcontrasts with any of his Republican rivals, training his fire exclusively on the Democrat in the Oval Office. His focus reflected a strategy from which his campaign has rarely deviated all year long.

But it was also born of a confidence in Team Romney so deep it borders on serene: that the nomination is, if not in entirely the bag, then about to stuffed there soon.

The dynamics couldn’t be better for us, says a senior Romney strategist. I don’t see any scenario where we’re not the nominee.

At the start of December, this degree of self-assurance would have seemed not merely misplaced but a sign of mental illness. Newt Gingrich was surging, Romney was reeling, and the political-media class was predicting, with its own demented brand of amnesiac certitude, that the day of reckoning had come for Mitt’s (supposedly) fatally flawed candidacy. On the cover of Time, his face was pictured beside the half-mocking, half-pitying headline, Why Don’t They Like Me?

What a difference a month has made. At this writing a few days before Christmas, Romney has reassumed his perch in the catbird seat: level with the deflating Gingrich in the national polls, far ahead of him (and everyone else) in New Hampshire, and quite possibly on the verge of pulling out a win over the rising Ron Paul in Iowa. Romney and his people deserve much of the credit for this turn of events. But an equally large share belongs with the fact that, rather than staging a proper nominating contest, the GOP finds itself hosting what Republican strategist Alex Castellanos calls the world’s greatest clusterfuck.

In other words, Romney has had his share of unearned good fortune. And though the lack of affection for him in his party’s base might yet come back to bite him, at the moment he appears to be on the verge of proving an eternal verity of politics: Better to be lucky than loved.

The first visible sign of the Romney rebound came in the final Republican debate of the year in Sioux City, Iowa, on December 15. The national press corps had flocked to the northwest corner of the state in the expectation of a Donnybrook. But apart from the food in the filing center�from a local joint called La Juanita, whose tacos should be enough to persuade any Republican possessing taste buds to embrace the causes of amnesty and open borders�the event provided little satisfaction for reporters.

Romney, in particular, eschewed attacks on Gingrich or any of his other opponents, instead heaving brickbats at the president and massaging the right’s erogenous zones. (On Obama’s request that Iran return a downed U.S. drone: A foreign policy based on pretty please? You have got to be kidding.�) After a less than stellar showing five days earlier at the ABC News debate in Des Moines, he was back on his game.

The next morning, Romney conducted a town-hall meeting at a nearby steel plant, flashing his private-sector bona fides, and then flew off to South Carolina, where he received the coveted endorsement of the state’s governor, Nikki Haley. In the days that followed, his campaign unfurled a great many more such shows of support: from Bob Dole, Illinois senator Mark Kirk, and, for us New Yorkers, a slew of local Republican leaders. On top of that, he snared the backing of three newspapersthe Des Moines Register, the Portsmouth Herald (of New Hampshire), and the Oklahoman (the Oklahoma City daily) with widely diverse political leanings, allowing his campaign to argue for the ideological breadth of Romney’s appeal.

While Romney was gathering steam, all the other Republican candidates were chugging along in Iowa or New Hampshire�all except for Gingrich, that is. And where was he? Back at home in Virginia, watching his wife, Callista, play the French horn in the City of Fairfax Band; signing books in the Mount Vernon bookshop; and mugging for the cameras with a person dressed up as Ellis the Elephant, a character in Callista’s illustrated children’s book.

Gingrich’s bizarro campaign priorities and especially his glaring neglect of Iowa, which is critical to his prospects, raised eyebrows and brought forth harsh criticism from local and national Republicans. Apparently stung, Newt hightailed it back to the state and announced that following the examples of Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, and Rick Santorum he would crisscross Iowa on a 44-city bus tour in the days leading up to the caucuses; he also took the opportunity to chastise his rivals for the barrage of negative ads pummeling him over the Iowa airwaves. It’s candidly very disappointing,� Gingrich tut-tutted, to see some of my friends who are running who have so much negative junk to hurl at him.

Put aside the fact that, coming from Gingrich, one of the progenitors of the modern practice of scorched-earth attack politics, this complaint was pretty rich. More important is the fact that his failure to respond in an effective way to the withering assault on his character and record�by Romney’s and Perry’s super-PACS and Paul’s campaign�was almost as damaging to him as the fusillade itself.

In the space of two weeks, Gingrich saw his poll numbers in Iowa sliced in half, from the low thirties to the mid-teens, and his standing fall from first place to third or even fourth, behind Paul, Romney, and Perry. Through it all, Gingrich continued to insist that he would run a relentlessly positive� campaign, and, who knows, given the famous Iowa nice proclivities of the Hawkeye State’s electorate, the gambit might yet work. But it was also a sign of desperation, of a candidate so drastically underfunded he has no choice but to stay positive.
I don’t see any scenario where we’re not the nominee, says a senior Romney strategist.

All of which brings us back to Romney, whose available resources�between his campaign, his super-PACS, and his personal fortune�dwarf not just Gingrich’s but those of the rest of the field. All year long, the looming question for the former Massachusetts governor and his team was how they would react when faced with a mortal threat. And while the Gingrich surge turned out to be, in the words of John McCain’s 2008 chief strategist, Steve Schmidt, more of a summer squall than a Cat-5 hurricane, it was still, quoting Schmidt again, a threshold test the campaign had to pass if it’s going to win it all.

In fact, the test for Team Romney came in two partsand it passed both. The first was whether the Romney operation would and could do what was required to halt, and ideally reverse, Gingrich’s rise. In any campaign, there are moments where you need to swing the bat and club someone who is a threat,� says a senior strategist for another Republican presidential runner. �It’s easy to talk about but not every candidate or campaign is actually able to do it, and they were.

They marshaled their forces, deployed their surrogates, and spent the money necessary to cut Gingrich’s guts out. It’s a credit to their toughness.

The second test was for Romney himself: Under pressure from Gingrich, would he wet the bed? He did not. �There was that debate where Mitt stood up and said, I’m not a bomb thrower’ in reaction to Gingrich’s incendiary claim that the Palestinians are an invented people and that showed great discipline and confidence, says Castellanos, who advised Romney in his previous White House bid. There were times in 2008 when things got hairy and he went off the rails. But this time, Gingrich didn’t faze him; he didn’t hit the panic button. He’s emerged as a much stronger and more mature candidate.

Yet Romney has also benefited enormously from forces outside of his control. Given his weakness with the hard-core base and conservatives more broadly�a weakness illustrated vividly by his inability to break through a ceiling on his support in the mid-twenties in national and non�New Hampshire state polling�most analysts expected that, in time, the anti-Romney vote would consolidate around one viable alternative on the right. But, to date, that has not happened, in no small part because the available options have proved serially to be, well, somewhere between faintly and screamingly ludicrous.

�Who would’ve thought that Romney would get to this point without having a crapload of negative ads dropped on his head,� says a veteran Republican consultant. �It’s not like there’s not any material out there to work with, after all. But the other candidates have no money, so they can’t afford even to do the research, let alone pay for the airtime to really hurt him. And then, on top of that, they’re all incompetent, so they’ve wound up splitting the anti-Romney vote and opening up the door for him to win this thing real quick.

Nowhere has the fracturing of the field been more evident�and more potentially consequential�than in Iowa. In 2008, it was the coalescence of the Evangelical vote around Mike Huckabee that allowed him to whip Romney in the caucuses and in so doing effectively cripple his campaign.

This year, however, the Christian right has so far split its support among Bachmann, Gingrich, Perry, and Santorum, while at the same time no Establishment challenger to Romney exists. In such a fragmented field, it is possible, and even likely, that winning on caucus night will entail capturing less than 30 percent of the vote. (In 2008, Huckabee won with 34.) And that in turn explains why either Paul or Romney, barring a sudden efflorescence by one of the second-tier candidates after Christmas, has the highest odds of taking the prize�for while both have ceilings on their support, both also have relatively high floors, along with the organizational strength to turn out their supporters.

Either scenario is, of course, great news for Romney. A victory in Iowa by Paul would set up as Romney’s chief competitor going forward a candidate whose views are too far out of line with too much of the Republican Party for him ever to claim the GOP nomination. And a victory by Romney would send him hurtling at breakneck speed into New Hampshire and almost certain triumph there�a result that would more or less hand him the nomination before Republicans in 48 other states have even voted.

If things do indeed unfold this way, Romney will stand as unquestionably the luckiest nominee in modern Republican history�and also the most curious. For most of the year, he floated above the fray, not running for president so much as hovering over the sad and comic spectacle of his rivals’ imploding one by one.

It was enough for him to appear presidential. Enough for him to debate well. Enough for him to avoid disaster. Just as in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king, in a contest with a bunch of clowns the guy without the funny nose and floppy shoes wins the day. But before Romney and his people get too giddy, they should remember one thing: Barack Obama, for all his flaws and weaknesses, won’t be wearing any greasepaint, either.

George Will on Gingrich's Last Decade and a Half

2011-12-24T12:38:00.000-08:00

Excerpt from Will's op ed in WaPo of December 23, 2011:

In eight of the 14 years between his service in the Continental Congress and the presidency, George Washington kept busy winning the Revolutionary War. And in the 17 years between John Quincy Adams’s service in the Senate and the presidency, he was minister to Russia and to Great Britain and secretary of state. Since 1998, Gingrich has been a businessman and a historian for Freddie Mac.

Jeffrey Goldberg on the Arab Spring

2011-12-24T12:18:00.000-08:00

Bloomberg December 23, 2011

There was a time in Cairo, just a few months ago, when it was considered slightly outre to suggest that Egypt’s religious conservatives might take advantage of Hosni Mubarak’s demise to engineer their way into power.

We were told that battalions of tweeting secularists were steering this revolution, and that the people of Egypt did not want sharia, or Islamic law, to govern their lives. They simply wanted freedom. This was Selma on the Nile.

One night in a ragged, badly lit cafe just off the square, one of the revolution’s “Google kids” -- not an actual employee but someone who could plausibly be employed by Google - - explained to me how the Mubarak regime manipulated Western opinion. “They wanted you to believe that the only thing stopping the Muslim Brothers from taking over the whole country was them,” he said. “This is how they scared you. Then you gave them guns they used to kill us.”

Both statements were true. Mubarak did invoke the specter of Islamism to Western visitors; a dozen years ago he told me, “My people expect a firm hand. If we don’t lead strongly, they will turn to the mosque for leadership.” And the regime’s thugs did deploy American weaponry against the demonstrators in Tahrir Square and elsewhere in Egypt. This was America’s shame. It is also a shame -- a lesser shame, a shame of poor analysis--that the Arab Uprising went entirely unpredicted in Washington and elsewhere. To compound the shame, few people, even in the midst of the uprisings, forecast the rise of Islamist parties to power not only in Egypt but also in Tunisia, Morocco, Libya, and coming soon, inSyria, when the Assad regime finally falls.

Dignity and Respect

In many ways the Arab Uprising -- or Arab Awakening, or Arab Spring; freedom means we can call it what we want -- should thrill the American soul. Millions of Arabs, their fear of torture and persecution finally conquered by anger at the regimes that oppressed them, rose up and, in countless acts of astonishing bravery, defeated or are attempting to defeat the despots and the massive secret police apparatuses under their command. The protesters sought dignity and respect and the freedom to choose their own path, and these are things that resonate with Americans.

Then came a problem. It turns out Mubarak was right. The only thing standing between Egypt and the rise of fundamentalist Islam was … Mubarak. The path the Arab people seem to want, at least for the moment, is the path of Islam.

The big news out of Cairo late this fall was not the Muslim Brotherhood’s triumph in parliamentary elections, even though the Brotherhood-affiliated party took 37 percent of the popular vote. The main news was made by the more extreme Nour Party, which is affiliated with Egypt’s Salafists. The Salafists, who believe that the world should be made over to look as it did during the time of the Prophet Muhammad, took almost 25 percent of the popular vote. In other words, the majority of voters in the Arab world’s most populous country chose either a party whose motto is “Islam is the Solution” or a party that believes that medieval Arabia is an appropriate state model.

There have been two predictable Western responses to the rise of Islamism in Egypt and across the Arab world: panic and rationalization. Panic is self-explanatory: The Muslim Brotherhood and its more radical cousins are, generally speaking, anti-Western, anti-Semitic, hostile to Christians in their midst, and have a view of women that most Westerners find abhorrent. It is not difficult for creative minds to place the Muslim Brotherhood on a continuum that ends at al-Qaeda, even though al-Qaeda was created in part as a corrective to what Osama bin Laden & Co. viewed as the unforgivable moderation of the Brotherhood. The panic felt in some quarters is precisely what men such as Mubarak, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, and even the late-stage Muammar Qaddafi in Libya hoped to cultivate in their Western interlocutors.

Rationalizing Fundamentalism

The other predictable response among Westerners has been to rationalize the rise of Muslim fundamentalism by arguing that the Muslim Brothers and even the Salafists are not the bogeymen we think they are. Scratch a Muslim Brother, the argument goes, and you’ll find the Middle Eastern analog of a European Christian Democrat. This argument elides the misogyny and anti- Semitism of Islamists, not to mention their embrace of various baroque and pathetic conspiracy theories, including the notion that the attacks of 9/11 were plotted by the Mossad or the CIA. On the other hand, the Egyptian Brothers no longer have to look to Iran to see how Islamists govern; they can look, and are looking, toTurkey, where the ruling AKP party has come closest to maintaining a commitment to traditional Islam without turning its back on the West or completely cutting off the oxygen to liberal-minded secularists.

A set of less predictable responses to the upheaval in the Middle East would include, at the outset, a strong dose of analytical humility. No one knows how these newly empowered Muslim political parties might govern. Never having governed before, the parties themselves don’t know. There are reasons for conditional anguish: The (now contracting) economy of Egypt can’t afford to be led by people who believe “Islam is the solution,” and it certainly can’t be brought into the 21st century by leaders who want to build a bridge to the 7th. But no one has yet offered compelling proof that the Brotherhood would break Egypt’s treaty obligations or press its views through violence.

Another less predictable response might come in the form of fatalism: What will happen in the Middle East is going to happen. The crisis in the region this year was, indirectly, of America’s making: On the advice of the camp of cynics known as foreign policy realists, successive U.S. Administrations believed that the best American policy in the Middle East was to make alliance with the most amenable Arab despots, who would ensure stability. Well, stability turned out to be chimerical. The Arab masses, less interested in geopolitical stability than in dignity and free expression, have rebutted the realist argument.

Military Hangs On

All this assumes Egypt’s brutal military will actually cede power to elected parties. Either way, the outcomes won’t be determined by the U.S. The people of the Arab world are going to spend the next 10 (or 20 or 30) years deciding for themselves how they wish to be governed. It will often be messy and unpleasant, but in the end, once they complete their experiments in theocratic rule (or revert back to other forms of authoritarianism), I’m reasonably sure (as an American optimist, rather than as a fatalist) that they will turn to a type of liberal democracy informed by faith, but without the intolerance associated with fundamentalism.

This is not to say the West must ignore the Arabs as they sort out the future. The U.S. still has the ability to shape certain outcomes -- the intervention in Libya is a case in point -- and protect those who need protecting. (The aggrieved Christians of Egypt spring to mind.) And the U.S. should work more assiduously to speed Assad’s downfall in Syria, which would leave America’s main nemesis in the Middle East--Iran--without an Arab friend. The uprisings offer opportunities for the U.S. None is greater than the chance to see the Arab world find its way to freedom, if we only have the patience and fortitude to watch as it detours through fundamentalism.

Me:

Two points:

1. Some self-indictment here? Maybe Goldberg didn't see it, but I read not a few analysts, like Barry Rubin, David Frum, Marty Peretz and other unexcitable, non romantic types who predicted exactly the rise of the Brotherhood in Egypt.

2. There's no call for optimism as to the emergence of liberal democracy in about 25 years time. This kind of prediction I diagnose as self-mollification. No one knows what the next 25 years will bring, and predictions are fatuous. Let's watch and observe, hoping our governments do the best they can.

You Heard It Here First: Stylistically Mitt Romney is 2012's Al Gore

2011-12-12T14:10:00.000-08:00

As above!

Their Sex Life by A.R. Ammons

2011-12-02T23:41:00.000-08:00

Their Sex Life,

One failure on

Top of another

William Giraldi on Adam Kirsch on Lionel Trilling

2011-12-02T00:43:00.000-08:00

....What makes Trilling such a complex subject is not his outstanding intellect that insisted on complexity and pluralism, but his steadfast resistance to being pigeonholed and his seeming contradictions of character. A career academic and critic, he was also, in Barzun’s words, “the very negation of an academic critic” in his freedom from Eliotic dogmatizing and method-making. A cloistered, lifelong New Yorker who got itchy whenever he left the five boroughs, he deigned to speak for all of human society in his infamous use of “we.” An unbelieving Jew reared in a conservatively Jewish household, Trilling held that being Jewish was a social rather than religious or cultural enterprise. An apolitical citizen who walked the middle road because “between is the only honest place to be,” he was a powerfully political reader and writer who contended that literature offered badly needed political and moral instruction. And, most splitting of all, Trilling the Apollonian critic of refinement yearned to be a Dionysian artist up to his elbows in the sweet blood of creativity...

from: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/11/30/adam-kirsch-s-why-trilling-matters-reminds-us-of-power-of-reading.html

Dr. Johnson’s criterion for lasting criticism: the conversion of mere opinion into universal knowledge.

2011-12-02T00:27:00.000-08:00

Dr. Johnson’s criterion for lasting criticism: the conversion of mere opinion into universal knowledge. (William Giraldi)

Me: this is so good I had to repeat it twice.

On The Descendants

2011-11-29T15:21:00.000-08:00

Did you notice that Clooney says very early on that he specializes in real estate transactions but when later asked by his daughter what papers he's pouring over, he says he's reviewing a deposition? I don't think so: that's for litigators not real estate transaction lawyers. (The rule against perpetuities brought back memories, mind you; I got a A in estates in law school.)

I've been arguing that Clooney suffers from being a Johnny one note as an actor, which is to say, unlike for instance the great Sean Penn, Clooney can never transcend himself in his roles. Here, he breaks out, showing real emotion and tense restraint throughout the movie, culminating in his tearful goodbye to his wife, which worked. This is the best acting I've ever seen him do. I didn't find Clooney wooden either, just nicely understated.

This was a good, quiet movie, albeit predictable, that never dragged but rather had the competent feel of taking its time. Robert Forster was a winner as the cantankerous, flinty and single minded father in law. (You could imagine his daughter as a chip off the old block.) Clooney was understatedly powerful in falsely conceding his wife's fidelity, when that was so pesistently insisted on by her father.

His eldest daughter and her more complicated than expected boy friend--president of the chess club after all, whose own father had just died--came approporiately to Clooney's defence with his wife's father. And Judy Greer playing Speer's wife was really good in yelling at Elizabeth, while purporting to forgive her, for trying to take her husband away from her and break her family. I could her rage.

And Clooney was deglamorized for how pretty he is--dowdy, frumpy clothes, dowdy car for all his wealth, slouching odd walk and run. He breathed no inner charismatic fire all of a piece with, I think, him being a good looking (for sure) frumpy, high minded, middle aged guy immersed in his work and letting himself go.

You could understand his wife--apparently, like me, an extreme sports firebrand and single minded too--being dissatisfied, though Speer the real estate guy seemed somewhat of a let down of a choice by her in my books.

I knew about 2/3s of the way through that he wasn't going to sell the land. But I didn't mind that one bit, so much of a lesser part of the movie did it feel like to me.

All in all, it had a good beat and you could dance to it, and I'd give it 3 out of 5 and recommend it.

A Slight Comparison Between Camus's The Stranger and The Brothers Karamazov

2011-11-29T11:23:00.000-08:00

I must be getting older. For whatever I thought of The Stranger about 45 years ago, I've just reread it to speak with some people about it and think its theme is absurd (no pun intended) and incoherent, though the story is interesting and well written.

For example, Camus in his afterward makes a big deal about Mersault's unflinching honesty and committment to his own truths, even at the possible cost of his life--he's an atheist; nothing really matters; he has no real feelings of remorse; we all die, so what's the point. But if it doesn't matter, as the world is absurd since we all die, then what matters this unflinching integrity that has Camus likening Mersault to a kind of Algerian Christ? What is the ground for virtue; why even privilege integrity? Isn't this the very fundamental and obvious contradiction in asburdism or nihilism? It's an intellectual abstraction entirely belied by our, all people's, experience and necessarily leads to its own reductio ad absurdum.

This absurd theme of absurdity contrasts with the dashing of it--if God does not exist, all is permitted--in the climactic scene between Ivan and Smerdyakov that I've touched on before, arguing that The Brothers Karamazov has it that this evisceration of it does not need faith to anchor it, our common humanity and innate though imperfect impulses toward human sympathy will do fine.

George Eliot to Harriet Beecher Stowe on the Jewish Element in Daniel Deronda

2011-11-25T19:53:00.000-08:00

As to the Jewish element in ‘Deronda,’ I expected from first to last, in writing it, that it would create much stronger resistance, and even repulsion, than it has actually met with. But precisely because I felt that the usual attitude of Christians towards Jews is — I hardly know whether to say more impious or more stupid, when viewed in the light of their professed principles, I therefore felt urged to treat Jews with such sympathy and understanding as my nature and knowledge could attain to.

Moreover, not only towards the Jews, but towards all Oriental peoples with whom we English come in contact, a spirit of arrogance and contemptuous dictatorialness is observable which has become a national disgrace to us. There is nothing I should care more to do, if it were possible, than to rouse the imagination of men and women to a vision of human claims in those races of their fellow-men who most differ from them in customs and beliefs.

But towards the Hebrews we western people, who have been reared in Christianity, have a peculiar debt, and, whether we acknowledge it or not, a peculiar thoroughness of fellowship in religious and moral sentiment. Can anything be more disgusting than to hear people called "educated" making small jokes about eating ham, and showing themselves empty of any real knowledge as to the relation of their social and religious life to the history of the people they think themselves witty in insulting? They hardly know that Christ was a Jew.

And I find men, educated, supposing that Christ spoke Greek. To my feeling, this deadness to the history which has prepared half our world for us, this inability to find interest in any form of life that is not clad in the same coat-tails and flounces as our own, lies very close to the worst kind of irreligion.

The best that can be said of it is that it is a sign of the intellectual narrowness — in plain English, the stupidity — which is still the average mark of our culture.
“Yes, I expected more aversion than I have found. But I was happily independent in material things, and felt no temptation to accommodate my writing to any standard except that of trying to do my best in what seemed to me most needful to be done; and I sum up with the writer of the Book of Maccabees, — "If I have done well, and as befits the subject, it is what I desired; and if I have done ill, it is what I could attain unto.”

Me on Leavis on Daniel Deronda

2011-11-25T19:37:00.000-08:00

The great English critic F.R. Leavis, a high Anglican by the way, wrote a famously provocative essay on George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, itself controversial in its time—the eighteen seventies—for being the first overwhelmingly sympathetic work of English literature towards Jews.

Leavis’s argument, with which I agree just having finished the novel, is that:

1. the sections of the novel dealing with the Jewish story—Deronda’s journey to learning he’s a Jew, his evolving commitment to his Judaism and the blossoming of his relationship with the young Jewish girl he rescues from drowning herself—are bad art;

2. the sections dealing with the story of the other main character Gwendolen Harleth are the most superb in all of Eliot’s work, and particularly the presentation of her character, psychologically penetrating, complexly whole and utterly compelling in her vivacity and egotism; and

3. if the novel could excise the Jewish story save minimally to serve Gwen’ story , being titled Gwendolen Harleth instead of Daniel Deronda, it could lay claim to being a masterpiece of English literature.

On Leavis On Daniel Deronda

2011-11-25T18:13:00.000-08:00

(From an anonymous comment on the internet as slightly adapted, i.e. not mine but I adopt a lot of it.)

....I'm firmly on the side of F.R. Leavis. The problem is not that the Jewish sections are Jewish, it's that they're bad -- boring, didactic, unsubtle -- while Gwendolen's sections are some of Eliot's best work. One oughtn't to accuse Leavis of anti-Semitism by virtue of this review, but I've seen that accusation implied in other essays about Daniel Deronda, and I don't think there's any reason for it. Leavis just wanted to salvage the better half of a book that's clearly uneven.

I think the main problem with the Jewish half is that Eliot, determined philo-semite though she is, simply does not know how to write Jewish characters as if they're real people. So Mirah is a timid, saintly epitome of well-bred Jewish womanhood, despite her upbringing in the theatre, and Mordecai is practically a stereotype -- at any rate, he's firmly in the tradition of intellectual Jewish mystics.

Meanwhile, all the lower class Jewish characters are greasy, vulgar, money-grubbing, etc., and while Eliot is careful to assure us that poor urban Gentiles are vulgar as well, she never actually shows us any.

The only Jewish character who is not in some way either a philo-semitic or an anti-semitic stereotype is Deronda, and he is a terribly boring character when left to his own devices. He works best as the mysterious figure occasionally popping up in Gwendolen's life, since Gwendolen's imagination invests him with much more interest and personality than he actually has.

Meanwhile, Gwendolen is over in her half of the book, being one of the most interesting and human characters Eliot ever created, but every time you get immersed in her story you're suddenly yanked back over to the Jewish half and forced to read pages-long paragraphs about Zionism.

If Eliot had merged the two halves of her book a little more the discrepancy wouldn't be quite as obvious, but since she essentially wrote two books and joined them at the hip, it's easy to see why Leavis would be tempted to perform surgery on them.

Me: The only part of this comment I disagree with is that the presentaton of the Cohen family is more rounded and sympathetic than suggested above. And, ironically, by not being ideal types, they and Mirah's father, too, are more resonant and interesting than the idealized Jews, including Deronda.

The Nature of Will and the Difference Between Will and Wilful

2011-11-18T20:24:00.000-08:00

We so often speak of will without thinking carefully about what it means even as it is such a fundamental idea in understanding ourselves. In my own thinking about will I have ultimately conceptualized it as determination in the merging of two different ideas of determination: the singling out of something as a kind of judgment as in ...“I have determined that…” or “it is my determination that…;” and the single minded implementation of that determined judgment.

What I have in my own mind added to that conceptualization is that that determination must struggle—the more, the greater the exercise of will—against what stands in its way. Without straining against difficulty will does not operate; it doesn’t have to because it doesn't emerge. So I would add to the second meaning of determination-- "the single minded implementation of that judgment"—"against difficulty."

That addition needs refinement. Difficulty need not be external obstacles; it may inhere in the very project which is will’s object. So if a formidable man blocks my way to my destination and I need to steel myself to the difficulty of overcoming him, that is one mode of will. If my project requires great discipline in achieving it—practice, training, rehearsal, physical effort, exertion, creative effort and the like—that is another mode of will. The first may be thought of as self against the world; the second may be thought of as self against self.

These thoughts also lead me to want to distinguish between will and willful. The latter may be understood as “the unrelenting intent on having one's own way; being headstrong, obstinate; being habitually disposed to disobedience and opposition.” Determination is common to these meanings.

The dividing line between will and willful is transgression.

Will is determination in relation to accomplishment or achievement. Willful is determination in relation to what is disapprobative. If every morning I get up at 5:00 am to train for a marathon, that is an exercise of will. If in the course of my morning runs I cut through my neighbor’s flower beds after having been asked not to that is willful.

So will involves self overcoming self in doing what is difficult to a purpose; willful involves self succumbing to self in wrong doing. In this sense, will and willful are antitheses.

Lionel Trilling on Ideas vs. Thinking

2011-11-18T11:05:00.000-08:00

From The Sense of the Past, from The Liberal Imagination, the essay being written in 1942:

The "tyranny of words” became a popular phrase and is still in use, and the semanticists offer us an easier world and freedom from war if we only assert our independence from words. But nearly a century ago Dickens said, that he was tired of hearing about the “tyranny of words” (he used that phrase); he was, he said, less concerned with the way abuse us than with the way we abuse words. It is not words that make our troubles, but our own wills. Words cannot control us unless we desire to be controlled by them. And the same is true of the control of systematic ideas. We have come to believe that some ideas can betray us, others can save us. The educated classes are learning to blame ideas for our troubles rather than blaming what is a very different thing—our own bad thinking. This is the great vice of academicism, that it is concerned with ideas rather than with thinking, and nowadays the errors of the academicism do not stay in the academy; they make their way into the world, and what begins as a failure of perception among intellectual specialists finds it fulfillment in policy and action.

In time of war, when two different cultures or two extreme modifications of the same culture, confront each other, this belief in the autonomy of ideas becomes especially strong and therefore especially clear. In any modern war there is likely to be involved a conflict of ideas which is in part factitious but which is largely genuine. But this conflict of ideas, genuine as it may be, suggests to both sides the necessity of believing in the fixed immutable nature of the ideas to which each side owes allegiance. What Gods were to the ancients, ideas are to us.

Me: This seems to me to be a good account of the diffference between ideology and liberalism and ties in with Trilling's theme of the idea of liberalism as it emerges from the essays in his book, a good account of the difference between closed systems of thought which are not self questioning and open minded, dead to evidence and to argument and liberalism as paradoxically simultaneously believing and doubting.

Camus as a Jew

2011-11-08T22:19:00.000-08:00

Tablet/November 7, 2011

The question of whether Albert Camus was Jewish is, of course, absurd. Born in French Algeria 98 years ago today, he was the second child of Lucien Camus, a farm worker raised in a Protestant orphanage, and Catherine Sintes, the illiterate child of Catholic peasants from Minorca, Spain. He was given communion at the age of 11 and died an atheist at the age of 43.

Camus understood, however, that the absurd reveals deep truths about the world and our own selves. Cradled between the semi-centenary of his death in 1960 and the centenary of his birth in 1913, we might take a moment to consider the question of Camus’ ties to Judaism. They are surprisingly deep and broad, encompassing not just his own life but his political and philosophical thought as well.

Though a number of his childhood friends were Jewish, Camus was as indifferent to their particular faith as they themselves were. In republican France, Jewishness was largely a private matter; it was only when Nazi Germany buried the Republic in 1940 that Jewishness became a public matter and indifference to the fate of Jews was no longer possible—or should not have been possible.

Yet when the authoritarian regime of Vichy passed a salvo of anti-Semitic laws in 1940, most Frenchmen and -women did not blink. One of the few who did blink—in fact, doubled over in shock and revulsion—was Camus. Working for the newspaper Paris-Soir, Camus was stunned when his Jewish colleagues were fired.

In a letter to his wife Francine Faure—a native of the city of Oran, Algeria, who was very close to the local Jewish community—Camus said that he could not continue to work at the paper; any job at all in Algeria, even one on a farm, would be preferable. As for the new regime, he was merciless: “Cowardice and senility is all they have to offer. Pro-German policies, a constitution in the style of totalitarian regimes, great fear of a revolution that will not come: all of this to truckle up to an enemy who has already pulverized us and to salvage privileges which are not threatened.”

At the same time, he began to reach out to Jewish friends. To one, Irène Djian, he denounced these “despicable” laws and reassured her: “This wind cannot last if each and every one of us calmly affirmed that the wind smells rotten.” He reminded her he would always stand by her—a remarkable position for a Frenchman to take in 1940, when the vast majority of his compatriots either embraced or accepted the new laws.

When he and Francine moved into her parents’ apartment in Oran, they become friends with André Benichou, a professor of philosophy who was born into a Jewish family but made a point of declaring his atheism at a local café every year on Yom Kippur, Good Friday, and the first day of Ramadan. With Benichou, Camus and Faure worked as private tutors for Jewish schoolchildren forced out of the public schools by the anti-Semitic laws.

In 1942, afflicted with tuberculosis, Camus went to the Cévennes, a rugged region in central France, to ease his damaged lungs. Unable to afford a sanatorium, Camus moved into Le Panelier, a farmhouse his in-laws owned just outside the small Protestant village of Chambon-sur-Lignon. Among the few visitors he had was his friend the historian André Chouraqui, a French Algerian Jew whom Camus peppered with questions about the Old Testament, all the while taking notes for the book he was then writing, The Plague.

By then, Chouraqui was already risking his life in the French Resistance, particularly in the critical work of finding homes for Jewish refugee children. Much of this activity centered on Chambon, where the pastor, André Trocmé, had already mobilized the village in the work of welcoming, housing, and hiding these children. By the end of the war, the people of Chambon had saved the lives of at least 3,000 Jewish children and adults.

Was Camus aware of Chouraqui or Trocmé’s activities? There is no record of such knowledge in his notebooks or in accounts of friends and colleagues; on the other hand, this was precisely the sort of knowledge one would deliberately keep from friends or notebooks. Nevertheless, the simultaneity of Camus’ reflections and Chambon’s activity is striking. The French Algerian novelist and Cévenol farmers found common ground in their insistence on the dignity of each and every human being.

Indeed, it is the theme of absurdity that most powerfully underscores Camus’ understanding of Jews, Judaism, and Israel. At the political and existential level, Camus felt a visceral connection with the absurd predicament of the young Jewish state. It was a political bond insofar as many on the French left, from whom Camus was estranged, had grown deeply anti-Zionist in the wake of the Suez War. In 1957, he publicly affirmed his sympathy and support for Israel.

His reasons still echo today: Not only must Europe accept Israel’s existence as the only possible response to the continent’s complicity in the Final Solution, but Israel must also exist as a counter-example to the oppressive rule of Arab leaders. The Arab people, he declared, wished for deserts covered with olive trees, not canons. Let Israel show the way.

A naïve hope, certainly, but one that suggests that Camus’ attachment to Israel was existential: His plea for cooperation and collaboration between Jews and Arabs in Israel echoed his pleas to his fellow pied-noirs and Arabs in Algeria. In fact, Camus had flown to Algiers in 1956 to urge a civilian truce between Arabs and French Algerians. His desperate claim that Arabs and European settlers were “condemned to live together” proved wrong, of course. They instead concluded they were condemned to kill one another—a conclusion, were he alive today, he would urge both Israelis and Arabs to avoid while there is still time.

Yet Camus’ deepest and most intriguing bond to Judaism is revealed in his philosophy of the absurd. In early 1941, when Vichy was preparing a second round of anti-Semitic legislation and the papers in France and Algeria were giving free rein to anti-Semitic rhetoric, Camus completed his philosophical essay “The Myth of Sisyphus.” The opening lines are among the best known written by Camus: “There is just one truly important philosophical question: suicide. To decide whether life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question of philosophy. Everything else … is child’s play; we must first of all answer the question.”

Of course that question needed to be answered in 1941. How could it be otherwise, given the dire predicament in which the French and French Jews, along with Camus, found themselves?

But if the question persists, it is because it is more than a matter of historical or autobiographical interest. It is perennial. It is the same question that Job confronts when, with his children dead, his possessions gone, his belief in God tested, and he himself crumpled in a mound of dust and ashes, his wife tells him, “Curse God and die.”

And it is the same question we all confront when, as Camus wrote in the “Myth,” the stage sets collapse around us—any number of belief and value systems we have lived with our entire lives—and we suddenly confront a stripped and bare world whose strangeness and opacity beggar any effort at comprehension.

Job and Sisyphus, in short, are heaved into a world shorn of transcendence and meaning. In response to their demand for answers, they get only silence. Herein lies the absurdity, Camus writes: It is “the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart. The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment it is all that links them together.”

The silence of the world, in effect, only becomes silence when human beings enter the equation. All too absurdly, Job demands meaning. “Behold, I cry out of wrong, but I am not heard/ I cry aloud, but there is no judgment.” And no less absurdly, Job must ask himself what he must do if meaning is not to be found? What is our next step if meaning fails to show up at our appointed rendezvous? “But where shall wisdom be found?/ And where is the place of understanding?”

We think we know how the story of Job ends: Rewarded by God for his loyalty, Job is paid back with even more children and sheep and property. But is this the ending? A number of biblical scholars suggest the Job we hear in the final chapter, the one who accepts and resigns himself to God’s power play, is not the same Job we hear in the preceding 40 chapters.

Instead, he is a throwback to an earlier story that was grafted onto the otherwise perplexing account. Instead, the real Job is Camus’ Job. He is a Job who answers God’s deafening and dismal effort at self-justification with scornful silence.

Robert Zaretsky is professor of history in the Honors College, University of Houston, and the author, most recently, of Albert Camus: Elements of a Life.

A Note on Law For a Change, Specifically S. 13(8) of the 2002, Limitatiions Act of Ontario

2011-11-08T15:58:00.000-08:00

An adpated note from me to someone (with names and facts being changed to ensure anonymity and confidentiality):

...You'll recall our discussion and my previous email to you about the law that a payment on account starts the time running afresh for limitation period purposes concerning suing on an account.

Attached as scanned is the relevant section 13 from the Ontario 2002, Limitations Act.

Section 13 codifies the rule of acknowledgment, which in the case of payments on account has been put in these terms:

...It is familiar law that a payment by a debtor to his creditor, from which a new promise to pay may be inferred, has the effect of starting afresh the running of a period of limitation...

Note subsection 8 of section 13.

The $2,795.88 "payment" is shown on your August 4, 2011 statement.

What's intriguing in all this is the phrase "...from which a new promise to pay may be inferred..."

It may be arguable that that phrase does away with any payment necessarily being an acknowledgement for the purposes of s. 13(8). It may be argued that it's a factual question whether "a new promise to pay may be inferred," and that that inference has to be drawn from all the evidence. So if the payment came from Brunhilda's own account and was a payment in error, I can see an argument for not being able to infer a promise to pay here. In that case the plaintiff is stuck.

And that argument fits with the rationale for the rule of acknowledgement, which is that treating a debt as live and owing displaces the the rationales for limitation periods, being: the varieties of prejudice in stale cases caused by the passage of time; and the social interest in the timely prosecution of claims.

A problem you might face in all this is that limitation periods are perceived as "technical" defences and if courts can in good, or not so good, conscience avoid applying them, they'll sometimes be happy not to apply them. Which is to say, courts generally don't like people evading their obligations on technicalities.

Ruth Franklin on Whether Novels and Politics Should Mix

2011-11-06T17:56:00.000-08:00

TNR/ November 2, 2011

Last week I had the opportunity to participate in events honoring Irmgard Keun and Amos Oz—two writers who, on the surface, would seem to have little in common. Keun (1905-1982), born in Berlin, was a literary darling of Weimar Germany who promptly found her works blacklisted after the Nazis came to power.

She spent the late 1930s in exile—for a time as the companion of the Austrian-Jewish writer Joseph Roth—before returning to Germany, where she lived out the rest of her life in relative obscurity.

Oz, meanwhile, is perhaps the best-known of his generation of Israeli literary lions, a writer showered with honors, author of nearly twenty works of fiction. Unusually for a novelist, he is nearly as well known for his journalistic writing, in which he has strongly advocated for a two-state solution, criticizing those on either side who impede the progress of peace.

The question of how to write a political novel—or whether politics and the novel ought to have anything to do with each other at all—is crucial for any writer who lives and works in tumultuous times. (Of course, some would say this includes every writer, period, since global politics affect us all.) Some of the more politically engaged writers have argued that a novelist who avoids current events shirks his or her responsibility.

Hence Chinua Achebe, writing during the Biafran War: “It is clear to me that an African creative writer who tries to avoid the big social and political issues of contemporary Africa will end up being completely irrelevant—like that absurd man in the proverb who leaves his burning house to pursue a rat fleeing from the flames.”

But others have insisted just as urgently that politics and the novel must be kept separate—among them Oz, who has often asserted, as he did in the interview I conducted with him, that he literally uses two different pens for writing polemics and writing fiction, explaining that fiction is for ambiguities and “complicated thoughts,” while politics is for the straightforward and transparent.

As a critic, I’ve always felt a little uncomfortable navigating the intersection of politics and literature, feeling safer on the “high road” of purely aesthetic appreciation.

I’ve also found the argument persuasive that a novel that foregrounds politics will always be unsuccessful as a work of fiction, motivated blatantly by ideas rather than by plot, character, or language. But there is no such thing as a pure literature, unmediated by outside influences; and there’s something about this attitude that makes me feel a little like the man who leaves the burning house to pursue the rat. So I was grateful for my recent encounters with Keun (on the page) and Oz (in the flesh), which made me think about this question again.

Keun rose to prominence in Germany in the early 1930s with her best-selling second novel, The Artificial Silk Girl, a story in the vein of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes transplanted to interwar Berlin. The difference is that, in the American novel, the floozy somehow manages always to come out ahead, her misadventures and malapropisms notwithstanding.

Keun’s version turns out more like The House of Mirth: The heroine’s beauty and charm aren’t enough to allow her to snare one of the wealthy men she desires, and she winds up destitute and desperate. Though it contains almost no overly political content, the novel’s dark vision of life in Germany earned Keun a place on the blacklist, and her books were withdrawn from circulation. In a place where simply telling the truth about the way things are is enough to get one’s books burned, writing an honest novel is itself a political act.

Keun’s novella After Midnight—written in 1937, during the period she spent on the run from the Nazi regime—uses the voice of an unsophisticated young woman named Sanna to present a subtle critique of Nazi Germany from the inside. (At the discussion of Keun’s work in which I participated, it was mentioned that she may be unique among German writers in depicting the texture of daily life under the Nazis while it was going on.)

Sanna is herself uninterested in politics, speaking uncritically of her aunt’s support for Hitler: She “bought swastika flags and joined the National Socialist Women’s Club, where she got to meet a good class of person as a German wife and mother.” And she is judgmental when a girlfriend begins dating a “person of mixed race, first class or maybe third class—I can never get the hang of these labels.” But if Sanna is personally unreflective, she is nonetheless a good observer, and the picture she draws of Nazi Germany is unwittingly damning.

Keun followed After Midnight with Child of All Nations, which looks at the world of the exiles through the eyes of a young girl: “We left Germany when my father couldn’t stand it any more, because he writes books and articles for newspapers.” (These three novels have recently been published in English translation by Other Press, Melville House, and Overlook, respectively.)

Keun doesn’t seem to have written explicitly of her intentions anywhere, but considering her circumstances, it’s impossible to imagine that these novels—as well as being works of art—were not also important to her as political gestures. Oz, on the other hand, has repeatedly made it clear that he does not intend his fiction to be read with one eye on the page and the other on the newspaper.

In that spirit, I undertook to examine his latest, Scenes from Village Life, unallegorically: as “not so much a book about the Israeli condition as about the human condition in general,” as he put it. This is a collection of linked stories each told by a different person: Some are local fixtures, appearing over and over; others we meet once and never see again.

They all live in the fictional village of Tel Ilan—“the most beautiful village in the entire country,” one character says, filled with farmland and cypresses. But the mood is nervous, dark, uneasy. Some of the characters have lost relatives: parents or children who have died or become estranged. Nearly all of them live alone, or with an elderly parent rather than a spouse. There are siblings who don’t speak to each other; guests who fail to show up; uninvited visitors who arrive without warning. In many cases, they endure guilt for crimes committed—or sustained—long ago.

All great literature is “about the human condition,” as Oz would have it; and at least several of the stories in this collection certainly merit that distinction. But great literature derives its greatness also from its particulars: and the particulars of this book are that it is set in Israel, at a time that seems to be the present, among characters who live Israeli lives and think Israeli thoughts.

Take the book’s very first line, “The stranger was not a stranger,” which works on one level as a general warning that things are not going to be what they seem, and on another as a reflection on the relations between the Israelis and their Arab neighbors. It’s easy to take this kind of interpretation too far, to infer political import in virtually every detail, ad absurdum. But to not do it at all seems equally absurd. These stories are meant to speak to the Israeli condition as well as to the human condition; otherwise they would be irrelevant. And in the Israeli condition, politics play a primary role.

During our interview, Oz told an anecdote that illustrates the intertwining of politics and literature with particular power. After a twenty-year-old Palestinian was shot in 2004 while jogging in Jerusalem—the killers apologized to his family, saying they had thought he was a Jew—the man’s father, the prominent lawyer Elias Khoury, sponsored the Arabic translation of A Tale of Love and Darkness, Oz’s autobiography and masterwork.

The book is the story not only of Oz’s childhood, but of the childhood of the state of Israel, to which his parents came as refugees from Lithuania in the 1930s and which he grew up alongside. Even its smallest details are rich with political implications, as in the debate, humorously presented, among the customers in the grocery shop frequented by Oz’s parents over whether to buy “kibbutz cheese” (“somewhere … an overworked pioneer girl was sitting, with tears in her eyes perhaps, packing this Hebrew cheese for us”) or “Arab cheese,” which happened to be both cheaper and tastier.

“Imagine the contempt with which Tolstoy would regard anyone who would buy one kind of cheese and not another simply because of a difference of religion, nationality, or race!” Oz writes. “What of universal values? Humanism? The brotherhood of man? And yet, how pathetic, how weak, how petty-minded, to buy Arab cheese simply because it cost a couple of mils less, instead of cheese made by the pioneers, who worked their backs off for our benefit!” When even cheese cannot be free of politics, how can literature?

“Elias wants to build emotional bridges between our nations, and to do that you need to let each read the narrative of the other,” Oz said in an interview with The New York Times. In fact, he took the bridge-building even further himself, sending a copy of the book to the former Fatah youth leader and convicted terrorist Marwan Barghouti in prison. “This story is our story; I hope you read it and understand us as we understand you,” Oz reportedly wrote as a dedication.

It’s hard to think of a more moving gesture of faith: in literature, in politics, in humanity. There may be two pens on Oz’s desk, but he writes with them using the same hand.

Me:

I find that Franklin is making no real argument to speak of and her ostensible subject, if that it be, as the tease has it—“Should Politics and Novels Mix?”—is more a reason for her talking about Oz and Keun as such, and it's fine talk at that, than a theme informing her comments.

And, by my lights, the reason for that—just a way into these writers—is that the question of this mixing is really no question at all, especially starting from the premise that when it comes to writing literature, prescription is to be avoided unless—in some instance, on some point—it can’t be.

Don’t a few truisms, maybe prescriptions, say it all about the ostensible essential question here, about the fake issues it appears to raise? Novelists shouldn’t be essentially didactic; novelists shouldn’t essentially proselytize; no subject, absolutely no subject, is beyond authorial province; and literature is one thing, propaganda another.

If these truisms tell the story, maybe there are others, then what’s the dilemma? For example, Franklin says,

…The question of how to write a political novel—or whether politics and the novel ought to have anything to do with each other at all—is crucial for any writer who lives and works in tumultuous times…

Is there really any issue here? Within these truisms, what can the argument be against writing a novel that treats or touches on or foregrounds or backgrounds politics and in the way the author chooses? And, within these truisms, an author can write a political novel, however that phrase might be conceived, in any way he or she chooses. Where and why need any complication arise?

Chinua Achebe may have his own thoughts about what themes are appropriate for an African writer and Oz may be held to stand for the proposition that literature and politics need be kept separate—his famous two different pens. But this supposed opposition is fake because there is no necessary answer to the supposed question the supposed opposition goes to.

Franklin also says this:

… As a critic, I’ve always felt a little uncomfortable navigating the intersection of politics and literature, feeling safer on the “high road” of purely aesthetic appreciation…

My puzzlement over her statement is on a par with it over this statement by Lionel Trilling (whose essays I’ve been reading) in Reality in America from The Liberal Imagination:

...This belief in the incompatibility of mind and reality is exemplified by the doctrinaire indulgence which liberal intellectuals have displayed toward Theodore Dreiser, an indulgence which becomes worthier of remark when it is contrasted with the liberal severity toward Henry James. Dreiser and James: with that juxtaposition we are immediately at the dark and bloody crossroads where literature and politics meet...

What is this intersection between politics and literature? And what is the navigating a critic must do? And what are “these dark and bloody crossroads” in Trilling's context of the different judgments being of made of Dreiser and James in the 1940s?

I understand Trilling’s complaint is about a particular American conception of reality that misinformed the literary judgments then being made about James and Dreiser, forgiving and appreciative of the former and severe as to James.
But why dark and bloody, and why such storm and stress, either for Franklin or for Trilling, over the further truism that when political considerations overwhelm aesthetic ones in the critic, critical judgment gets warped?

Which is not of course to say, that politics can’t help guide or even inform literary criticism, but if literary criticism it be, then the lines, at least conceptually, don’t seem all that difficult to navigate in the intersection, dark and bloody crossroads, or what all, between literature and politics.

Lionel Trilling on Homosexuality

2011-11-06T10:08:00.001-08:00

Who said this, and it's dumb, though it sounds so high falutin smart?

...But this does not leave the discussion where the Report seems to want to leave it--at the idea that homosexuality is to be accepted as a form of sexuality like another and that is as natural as heterosexuality...Nor does the practice of "an increasing proportion of.. psychiatrists who make no attempt to redirect behavior, but who devote their attention to helping an individual accept himself" imply that what the Report seems to want it to., that these psychiatrists hav thereby judged homosexuality to be an unxceptionable form of sexuality; it is rather that, in many cases, they are able to effect no change in the psychic disposition and therefore do the humane and sensible best thing. Their opinion of the etiology of homosexuality as lying in some warp--as the culture judges it--of the psychic structure, has not, I believe changed...

I read this as saying as homosexuality is a deviance, ideally to be treated, the sufferer to be redirected towards heterosexuality. The utterer, however otherwise estimable, is a man of his time in many respects, though he would not have taken kindly to such a judgment. Here he fuses the weakness of his Freudianism-he cites Freud in the same essay (The Kinsey Report) to the same nonsensical effect on homosexuality-with his weakness in making self satisfied, self assured pronouncements outside his area of competence, art, culture and intellectual history (the latter for which he is not given sufficient credit.)

Rather than reading Lionel Trilling's essay The Kinsey Report, I suggest being better served by listening to recordings of the blues band by that same name, led by the inimitable Big Daddy Kinsey, now deceased, who I once had the honour of buying a beer in The Silver Dollar in Toronto, only to have him tell me kind of emphatically that he didn't talk about no politics with strangers.

From Anonymous: Amour Propre and Amour Soi

2011-11-03T09:59:00.000-07:00

One view:

Essentially, the opposite of self-preservation (amour de soi), amour propre is an acute awareness of, and regard for, oneself in relation to others.

While the savage person cares only for his survival, civilized man also cares deeply about what others think about him. This is a deeply harmful psychological deformation, linked to the development of human reason and political societies.

At its root is a difference between being and appearing. Savage man can only "be", and has no concept of pretence: civil man is forced to compare himself to others, and to lie to himself. Rousseau traces the development of amour propre back to the first village festivals, in which competition to dance and sing well increases the villagers' awareness of each other's talents and abilities. Amour propre is best expressed in a society in which wealth dominates; there, all are compared on an insubstantial and harmful basis.

A different view:

Propre can combine with a possessive adjective to mean 'my own ...'.Je vole avec mes propres ailes (I am flying with my own wings).

Rousseau distinguishes between 'amour de soi' - which we would usually translate as 'self-respect'; and 'amour propre' - nearer to being 'selfishness' or 'arrogance'.

Amour de soi tells you that you are valuable, and so are other people. It encourages you to take care of yourself, but not at the expense of doing harm to others. Amour de soi tells you that you are as good as other people.

Amour propre is selfishness.

It tells you that you are more important than other people (in most cases it tells you that what other people need or desire doesn't matter at all). Amour propre tells you that you are the most important person in the world, and that nobody else will ever matter as much as you do.

Amour de soi is not normally competitive; amour de soi encourages you to share with other people, so that both of you can benefit.

Amour propre is entirely selfish; amour propre tells you that anyone else' gain is your loss, and insists that you behave selfishly at all times, and spitefully when you think you can get away with it.

A Note On Trilling's Essay Manners, Morals, And The Novel

2011-11-02T17:12:00.000-07:00

So I've now read half the essays in The Liberal Imagination and I'd divide what I've read into two categories: specific essays of literary criticism dealing concretely with specific works; and essays trying to work out some more general ideas. Those categories aren't rigid: some essays belong to both, say the essay on Fitzgerald; and the specifically critical essays are so rich in cultural and intellectual historical reference that they range beyond mere literary analyses, though they are that, including the most exegetical one on the Immortality Ode.

The essay I just finished, Manners, Morals and the Novel, is so far the strongest I've read of the second category. For a while there I followed along every step of Trilling's argument. But then in his discussion of why up to, and as at, that essay's time, 1947, America didn't really have a tradition of the novel of manners, as he defines manners, or a great novel of manners as such, I started to get a sense of tension (and maybe circularity) in what he is arguing.

He doesn't say in that essay that regardless of that tradition lacking, America hasn't produced great novels. He acknowledges that it has, as obviously it had. And in surveying the fiction around him, he grants only Faulkner some place of honour in the novel of manners:

...Of our novelists today perhaps only Faulkner deals with society as the field of tragic reality and he has the disadvantage of being limited to a provincial scene...

And he notes that American life has "thickened" so as to be something different than when, as he paraphrases James Fennimore Cooper, its manners were "...too simple and dull to nourish the novelist."

A problem is that Trilling suggests manners, as he defines them, are a necessary condition of fictional greatness:

...Here then is our generalization: that in proportion as we have committed ourselves to our particular idea of reality we have lost our interest in manners. For the novel this is a definitive condition because it is inescapably true that in the novel manners make men...

He goes on in that paragraph to say "It does not matter in what sense the word manners is taken." He says his generalization is true whether for, say, Proust or Dickens or Homer or Fielding.

So, at least three, maybe four, questions arise.

How does he square that necessary condition with his observation that America hitherto has produced great novels, albeit not novels of manners because there was no such tradition in America because American life was not thick enough;

what exactly does he mean by manners--and does he use the term consistently throughout his essay;

and what does he mean when he says, for example, that Steinbeck's or Dos Passos's or Sinclair Lewis's novels do not rise to being novels or manners, that their fictional representations and conceptions of reality are insufficient?

He starts, after some discussion, codifying that discussion by defining manners as more than a "culture's rules of personal intercourse," as, rather more, "a culture's buzz and hum of implication...the whole evanescent context in which its explicit statements are made." I think a problem is that developed social thickness is not necessary to Trilling's large sense of manners and a problem is that Trilling conflates the social complexity which necessarily arises from intense urban life--

...life in a crowded country where the competitive pressures are great, forcing intense passions to express themselves fiercely and yet within the limitations set by a strong and complicated tradition of manner...--

with the truism that nearly any social situation and context, whether in the developing West of Cooper, the New England town life of Hawthorne, the river, raft and town of Twain, the Pequod of Melville, the sea, the old man and the big fish of Hemingway (even if only a novella), the Yoknapatawpha of Faulkner, and on and on and on, can provide sufficient evanescent context with which, and within which, genius can yield artistic greatness.

And that's the real reason no sense of the word manners binds Trilling's listed great practitioners; it's not complex urban life with a rich tradition of manners that marks their greatness; it's their greatness itself that marks itself, setting itself in diverse ways in the evanescent context with which and within which it works.

And that's the real reason why Steinbeck and those lesser talented writers listed "don't make the cut." It's not their deficient conception of reality, as Trilling argues; it's not America's deficient conception of reality, as he argues; it's not Faulkner's provincialism limiting his genius, as he argues, a real misjudgment on Trilling’s part in any event. It's their--save for Faulkner-- lack of great talent. (Faulkner had talent enough to be considered, rightly, a world class novelist.)

So this is a problem with Trilling generally when he doesn't confine himself essentially to literary criticism. His immense learning, his real thoughtfulness, his obvious intelligence and his eloquence begin to collapse on themselves the more he tries to systematically work out an idea or a set of them. And in that regard his eloquence is beguiling. He sounds so authoritative and knowing and grand when he makes his large pronouncements that we tend to glide along with them rather uncritically. But, I'd argue, even under the pressure of some common place scrutiny of a middling scrutinizer such as myself, some of that high sounding grandness starts to crumble some.

A Precis of Stephen Pinker's Case For the Actuality of Moral Progress:

2011-11-02T13:26:00.000-07:00

Breaking News: //Robert Jervis//Nove-Dec, 2011 National Interest
October 25, 2011

Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking Adult, 2011), 832 pp., $40.00.

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

WITH THE United States fighting two wars, countries from Tunisia to Syria either in or on the brink of intrastate conflicts, bloodshed continuing in Sudan and reports that suicide bombers might foil airport security by planting explosives within their bodies, it is hard to be cheerful. But Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker tells us that we should be, that we are living in the least violent era ever. What’s more, he makes a case that will be hard to refute. The trends are not subtle—many of the changes involve an order of magnitude or more. Even when his explanations do not fully convince, they are serious and well-grounded.

Pinker’s scope is enormous, ranging in time from prehistory to today and covering wars (both international and civil), crime, torture, abuse of women and children, and even cruelty to animals. This breadth is central because violence in all of these domains has declined sharply. Students of any one of these areas are familiar with a narrow slice of the data, but few have stepped back to look at the whole picture. In fact, many scholars and much of the educated public simply deny the good news. But prehistoric graves and records from twentieth-century hunter-gatherers reveal death rates due to warfare five to ten times that of modern Europe, and the homicide rate in Western Europe from 1300 to today has dropped by a factor of between ten and fifty.

When we read that after conquering a city the ancient Greeks killed all the men and sold the women and children into slavery, we tend to let the phrases pass over us as we move on to admire Greek poetry, plays and civilization. But this kind of slaughter was central to the Greek way of life.

Implicit throughout and explicit at the very end is Pinker’s passionate belief that contemporary attacks on the Enlightenment and modernity are fundamentally misguided. Critics often argue that material and technical progress has been achieved without—or even at the cost of—moral improvement and human development. Quite the contrary, he argues; we are enormously better than our ancestors in how we treat one another and in our ability to work together to build better lives.

To make such bold and far-reaching claims, one must draw on an equally vast array of sources. And so Pinker does. The bibliography runs to over thirty pages set in small type, covering studies from anthropology, archaeology, biology, history, political science, psychology and sociology. With this range comes the obvious danger of superficiality. Has he understood all this material? Has he selected only those sources that support his claims? Does he know the limits of the studies he draws on?

I cannot answer these questions in all the fields, but in the areas I do know—international relations and some psychology—his knowledge holds up very well. With the typical insider’s distrust of interlopers, I was ready to catch him stacking the deck or twisting arguments and evidence about war. While he does miss some nuances, these are not of major consequence. It is true that despite the enormous toll of World Wars I and II, not only have there been relatively few massive bloody conflicts since then (and an unprecedented period of peace among the major powers), but the trends going back many centuries reveal a decline in the frequency of war, albeit not a steady one.

The record on intrastate conflicts is muddier because definitions vary and histories are incomplete, but most studies reveal a decline there as well. In the aftermath of the Cold War, civil wars broke out in many areas, and some still rage (most obviously in Congo), but, contrary to expectations, this wave has subsided. In parallel, Pinker marshals multiple sources using different methodologies to show that however much we may fear crime, throughout the world the danger is enormously less than it was centuries ago. When we turn to torture, domestic violence against women, abuse of children and cruelty to animals, the progress over the past two millennia is obvious.

Here what is particularly interesting is not only the decline in the incidence of these behaviors but also that until recently they were the norm in both the sense of being expected and of being approved.

In all these diverse areas, then, I think Pinker’s argument holds up. Or, to put it more cautiously, the burden is now on those who believe that violence has not declined to establish their case. (Whether our era sees new and more subtle forms of violence is a different question and I think would have to involve the stretching of this concept.) We often scorn “mere” description, but here it is central. The fact—if it is accepted as a fact—that violence has declined so much in so many forms changes the way we understand our era and the sweep of human history.

It shows how much our behavior has changed and that even if biology is destiny, destiny does not yield constant patterns. It also puts in perspective our current ills and shows that notions of civilization and progress are not mere stories that we tell ourselves to justify our lives.

So why has all this good news generally gone unrecognized, and why do many people believe that our age is unprecedented in its bloodiness? One reason Pinker notes is the tendency to whitewash history. Myths of a better time in the past and portrayals of our current era as degraded are common among social critics on both the left and right to goad us into shame—and action.

Our understanding of the massive slaughter and oppression levied by the dominance of the Western world over less modern civilizations has magnified this propensity, and stressing how much violence there was in earlier times, and in some contemporary non-Western societies, seems to stereotype Others as barbarians. Ironically, the liberal worldview that Pinker credits with so much of our progress involves a sensitivity to our current and previous sins that encourages viewing distant societies such as the American Indians not only more favorably than we did until recently but also more favorably than is warranted.

Related to this, the somewhat cynical spirit of our age makes us suspicious of claims about progress in human behavior, especially because the plethora of such claims by Western thinkers like Herbert Spencer and even Max Weber in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries failed to foresee the cataclysms that were to come and appeared to justify the dominance of racism and sexism around the world. It is all too easy for any of us to imagine how we could be ridiculed, generations from now, for our naïveté and unwitting complicity in a new malign order.

The recent past too seems to make a mockery of Pinker’s argument. Just to mention the names of Hitler, Stalin and Mao is to make us cringe at the thought of progress. Although the world has seen nothing so horrific since then, readers of this journal will be familiar with the wars between Iran and Iraq and between Eritrea and Ethiopia, and any day’s newspaper reveals numerous incidents of bloodshed. Since they are happening now, they are very vivid, which makes it hard to maintain a sense of proportion.

Reading about the latest school massacre or serial killer grabs our attention more than the drab long-run statistics. Even if we are aware of the terrors of the distant past, we do not feel them in our gut.

The wars of the twentieth century and the domestic mayhem caused by those tyrannical leaders will lead many to ask how previous eras could conceivably have witnessed as many casualties at the hands of oppressors or at the point of a gun. Well, they didn’t.

But Pinker argues that what is important for understanding social processes is not the absolute number of deaths but their proportion of the world’s population, which has greatly increased over time. To some, this will seem like a sleight of hand. In what way do tens of millions of deaths in wars and attempts to remake societies become less significant because of the rise of world population, including in continents far distant from these atrocities? Morally, they do not. But if one wants to use body counts as a way to understand the extent of violence in the world, proportions and ratios are a better measure than absolute numbers.

Is it also appropriate to point to the lack of a war between the United States and the USSR as evidence of growing peacefulness? The Cold War of course saw American troops fighting in Korea and Vietnam, not to mention numerous smaller proxy wars. These were not large enough to move the needle on Pinker’s scale, but a nuclear war would have been.

Pinker briefly notes many of the arguments for why this did not occur, but to the extent that peace was maintained by the fear of total annihilation, one can certainly question how we should enter this period into our balance sheet. If we think that we were playing Russian roulette, then the fact that we were lucky does not count quite so strongly for our living in a less violent time.

An awareness that massive war could still break out today similarly inhibits our sense of progress. Without a true rival state to the United States, the specter of world-destroying conflict has disappeared, but even optimists agree that there is at least some chance of a Sino-American war, and the danger of a nuclear exchange between other hostile pairs, most obviously India and Pakistan—but also Israel and a nuclear-armed Iran—cannot be dismissed. These perils remind us that progress always comes with costs: no splitting of the atom, no nuclear holocaust. And this makes us resist Pinker’s analysis.

Most broadly, we see less progress than we should because we are prone to what can be called the conservation of fears. If through effort or good fortune the problem we worry most about disappears, all the others move up a notch. Terrorist incidents were frequent during the Cold War, and although they did not kill as many people as did 9/11, they were a significant concern for citizens and policy makers.

But no one suggested that this was a menace of sufficient magnitude to merit making it the pivot of American foreign policy, let alone the center of societal concerns. We are now so worried about terrorism because our security environment is otherwise so benign. The fact that we no longer have to live under the shadow of instantaneous destruction has much less impact on our psyches and sense of how dangerous our world is than logic would suggest.

PINKER WANTS to do more than document the decline of violence; he wants to explain it. And that explanation comes in two forms: a “Civilizing Process” that reduced violence, especially within states, and a “Humanitarian Revolution” that extended rights not only to different races, but also to women and children. (The two processes have some overlap, and growing humanitarianism probably would have been impossible without the earlier evolution away from barbarism and toward gentility, but they nevertheless remain distinct.)

Civility, for Pinker, was promoted to a great extent by the rise of the state in early modern Europe. It is a Hobbesian notion that statistics from nonstate societies confirm: without law supported by sufficient power, both self-defense and self-aggrandizement produce a violent world. The data are quite clear that the development of a state structure is associated with a sharp decline in homicides. Here and elsewhere, Pinker is quick to note that correlation does not necessarily mean causation, but both logic and chronology indicate a significant role for state power in quelling violence.

Still, as Aesop noted in his fable of King Log and King Stork (one of the few sources that Pinker does not cite), a strong government can kill, and a decline in homicide can be more than compensated for by an increase in state-sponsored killing. Pinker acknowledges this, but I do not think fully takes on board the central problem of government that has preoccupied so many thinkers, that underpinned the American Constitution and that remains a vital concern today: How do we devise it so that the government is strong enough to maintain order and guarantee rights without being so strong and independent as to be a menace to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?

The second major civilizing impulse is the development of commerce. A fundamental intellectual breakthrough was the understanding that economic activities were not zero-sum and that uncoerced trade was mutually beneficial. Trade also provided potential income streams for states and flourished when ruling parties could provide internal order. Thus while Columbia scholar Charles Tilly was correct to say that “war made the state, and the state made war,” one too could say this about commerce.

To these well-known elements Pinker adds the insights of the historical sociologist Norbert Elias who showed how the development of royal courts led to forms of civilization that we now take for granted—table manners (including not brandishing knives that all too easily could be used to stab food, as well as one’s neighbor), not spitting, along with defecating and copulating only in private. Much of the evolution of etiquette and manners made social interactions more predictable and reinforced self-control and the need to delay gratifications, practices that made sense when being hot-blooded was likely to reduce rather than increase wealth, standing and security.

How convincing is this?

The obvious objection is that it amounts to explaining history with history; that it describes more than it enlightens. Pinker acknowledges that these mechanisms are all deeply intertwined and that proof is impossible. In dealing with such large and complex phenomena, plausibility may be all that we can hope for, and Pinker’s argument and evidence do meet this test. And his willingness to include anomalies in his explanation is admirable. But it is his desire to do so that also provides grounds for skepticism.

Pinker argues that the uptick in domestic violence in the West, and especially in the United States in the late 1960s and 1970s, can be explained by a temporary “decivilizing process.” The increase in homicides and crime was caused, he argues, by a decrease in respect for authority, a rise in self-indulgence, a scorn for self-discipline and other “bourgeois values,” and a renunciation of the belief that societies are held together by a willingness to respect others.

The fact that those of us who participated—even marginally—in these activities remember the condescending diatribes of our elders along these same lines does not mean that Pinker is incorrect. But his case would be stronger if he could show that the marchers and protesters and anti–Vietnam War brigades were the ones responsible for the increased violence.

It is also hard to rule out the possibility that both the social turmoil and the rise in crime were brought about by third factors, most obviously the dislocation and diversion of resources caused by the war and the heightened sense on the part of many young and educated people that Western social institutions had failed to live up to the Enlightenment values on which they were founded. Indeed, the 1960s and ’70s witnessed a great expansion of rights and the reinvigoration of social inquiry that Pinker sees as an engine of progress.

And while Pinker attributes the subsequent decline in crime to a return to the earlier norms, the drastic increase in the incarceration rate (which many consider to be uncivilized) may have had something to do with it.

WHAT PINKER calls the “Humanitarian Revolution” involved a recasting of normal and appropriate human behavior. Part of our historical and biological heritage, we now see torture, slavery, and sanctioned violence against women, children and others who were powerless in society, and often against those who held different political and religious beliefs, as repugnant. The world became not only safer but also more humane.

The cause, Pinker tells us, was the growth of literacy, writing and publishing. “Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else’s thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world from that person’s vantage point,” which leads to at least a degree of empathy. Furthermore, exposure to a wider range of people, thoughts and events “is the first step toward asking whether [current practices] could be done in some other way.”

Fiction as well as nonfiction can serve this purpose, and the mid- and late-eighteenth century witnessed an explosion of novels. With the Enlightenment, more and more ideas were exchanged through letters and discussions in increasingly cosmopolitan cities. Such exchanges are crucial, according to Pinker, and lest I be accused of caricaturing his claim for how they lead to progress, let me give an extended quotation:

...When a large enough community of free, rational agents confers on how a society should run its affairs, steered by logical consistency and feedback from the world, their consensus will veer in certain directions. Just as we don’t have to explain why molecular biologists discovered that DNA has four bases . . . we may not have to explain why enlightened thinkers would eventually argue against African slavery, cruel punishments, despotic monarchs, and the execution of witches and heretics. With enough scrutiny by disinterested, rational, and informed thinkers, these practices cannot be justified indefinitely....The later and parallel rights revolutions over the past thirty years (greater rights for racial minorities, gays, women, children and even animals) were similarly rooted in “technologies that made ideas and people increasingly mobile. . . . [and led to] a debunking of ignorance and superstition. . . . [and] an increase in invitations to adopt the viewpoints of people unlike oneself....

It is the free flow of ideas, unrestrained by dogmas, that is doing the work for Pinker. Nevertheless, much as this idea is appealing to academics and intellectuals, skepticism is in order. We have come to see slavery as a violation of our values and sense of what it means to be human, but one does not have to be a Marxist to doubt that this was the inevitable consequence of free inquiry (it certainly was not in the United States).

Pinker displays a great faith—although he would dislike that word—in the ability of social science (he does not like current trends in the humanities) to lead us toward not only a better understanding of the human condition but also the betterment of it. I love reading and doing social science, but think we should be wary about overclaiming. Empathy, for Pinker’s account, may lead naturally (but not inevitably) to at least a degree of do-unto-others-as-you-would-have-them-do-unto-you behavior.

But Pinker realizes that one can see the world through someone else’s eyes and still want to harm him, and also appreciates that research on the effects and, even more, the causes of empathy and sympathy are necessarily limited because of the difficulty in constructing appropriate experiments, without which it is hard to move beyond correlation. Since kindergarten, most Americans have been taught to be empathetic, and human-subjects boards would likely object to manipulations that would try to make them less so. And even good knowledge can be put to bad ends.

It is not necessarily true that all good things go together; more knowledge might lead us in directions that Pinker and I would deplore. For example, we could learn that capital punishment does indeed deter murder or that genetic endowments help explain why there are so few women in the ranks of top mathematicians. Pinker does realize that knowledge is not the same as enlightenment—no country was more educated than Nazi Germany—but does not consider whether an open society might democratically decide to close off certain avenues of thought.

So dogma, the antithesis of open inquiry, is Pinker’s bête noire, embodied above all in religion, which he associates with intolerance and superstition. There is no doubt that religion has often contributed to evil, and as a nonbeliever myself I have trouble empathizing with those who think they can understand the will of God. But we should give the Devil his due: many antiwar and human-rights movements have deep religious roots, and much of the energy behind campaigns that Pinker and I applaud comes from people who feel a higher calling to help their fellow human beings. (Pinker’s one paragraph addressing this only scratches the surface of the question.)

Pinker is on firmer ground on other crucial points related to knowledge. The first is that the reduction of violence and the expansion of humane treatment of people has been spurred by the conscious decision to design incentives and institutions to these ends.

The growth of commerce and state power may have lowered homicide rates, but only as an unintended by-product; with the Enlightenment, people began to consciously develop arrangements to reduce violence and protect not only their rights but those of at least some others as well. Here intelligent design works. The circle of empathy can be deliberately increased by measures like liberal education, and the framers of the American Constitution were not alone in seeing that they had to—and could—build institutions that would limit their own power. This is of signal importance.

At its core, this is about self-awareness—an understanding of human nature that can allow us to rein in our inner demons and give our better angels the upper hand. Self-control, so central to the humanizing trends Pinker documents, can be strengthened. If empathy is developed partly through novels, parents can urge their children to read them and school curricula can be developed appropriately.

Perspective-taking can be encouraged by foreign travel. Although we should not expect too much from these efforts (indeed they may produce contempt and hostility) and Pinker does not advocate extreme social engineering, he does say that societies function best when they are built on the realization that we are all prone to violence and abuse.

Pinker also points to the role of understanding in overcoming the particularly pernicious psychological bias that he calls the “Moralization Gap.” Individuals and collectivities usually want to think well of themselves. This trait eases our way through a difficult life but causes great problems when conflict arises because we are quick to blame others.

Pinker’s coverage of the research on the role of this bias in intergroup and international conflict is a bit thin (something I notice because I have contributed to it), but the basic point is clear and important. Although sometimes those we interact with are indeed responsible for the problem, the immediate assumption that this is the case, and the social and psychological inhibitions against seeing how we may be offending others and infringing upon their legitimate interests, is a major cause of escalating conflict.

Students of international politics know that efforts to gain mutual security can be foiled by the failure of the state to realize that others may see it as a threat, and therefore to interpret their undesired moves as evidence that they are unreasonable and aggressive. Throughout the Cold War, Soviet leaders could not see that their behavior played a large role in their encirclement by enemies; Mikhail Gorbachev’s intellectual breakthrough was to grasp this. Self-knowledge is important and difficult here (religious teachings about our all being sinners can help), but it can also be dangerous. Be too quick to believe that the Other is behaving badly because of what you have done and the lead-up to WWII happens all over again.

SOME ARE likely to see all this as the Whig theory of history decked out in social-science clothes. There is something to this, but Pinker is aware enough to argue that his “is a kind of Whig history that is supported by the facts.” Although he sees deep forces as responsible for much of our progress, he also acknowledges the role of contingency. He might have done more to discuss how these two fit together; could plausible historical counterfactuals have brought us to a very different outcome: Even with the Enlightenment, might full-blown racism have continued in the United States had Gandhi’s campaign of nonviolence not succeeded and World War II not been fought partly in the name of racial equality?

It is the attempt to link so many different types of declines in violence to one another that gives pause. Some links clearly are present. Early struggles to broaden the circle of those who were believed to have inalienable rights led eventually to the civil rights movement, just as it, in turn, contributed to the movements for women’s equality and gay rights. But there are problems in applying progress in one area to progress in another. Humanitarian advances do not necessarily lead to more peaceful and understanding relations among states. Nor does more self-control in one individual lead to more self-control across groups of individuals.

To his credit, Pinker realizes this is a problem, but his attempts to overcome it through social psychology are less than entirely successful. Pinker explains the decline of homicide and the decline of slavery quite differently, and the decline in war, coming later than the other markers of progress, may be even more distinct. Indeed, the two chapters on this subject do not build upon his previous arguments nor do they provide a foundation for later ones. I do not wish to argue that international politics is entirely a world apart, but wars continued to rage while other kinds of violence declined.

Perhaps what changed the incentives for peace and war must be found elsewhere. Similarly, the connection between the decline in intra and interstate wars is loose. International tensions often feed internal violence as outside countries support disputing factions. And civil wars can transmit violence to the international level. I agree with Pinker that some of these trends are of a piece with the decline of domestic violence, especially in the smaller role of honor and the general view that violence is at best a necessary evil rather than a valued mode of conduct. But it is quite possible to imagine a world in which wars coexist with some measure of domestic peace and humane behavior.

For Pinker, much of what was believed in the more violent eras “can be considered not just monstrous, but in a very real sense, stupid,” and
As humans have honed the institutions of knowledge and reason, and purged superstitions and inconsistencies from their systems of belief, certain conclusions were bound to follow, just as when one masters the laws of arithmetic certain sums and products are bound to follow.

Only in societies cut off from the free flow of ideas can enormous moral errors continue to flourish. He realizes that this view seems self-congratulatory but does not seem to see that it holds true only if one accepts contemporary values. His claim that previous beliefs “would not stand up to intellectual scrutiny as being consistent with other values [the people in earlier eras] claimed to hold, and they persisted only because the narrower intellectual spotlight of the day was not routinely shone on them” strains credulity. It implies that if we were transported to those times we could argue our new contemporaries out of their benighted beliefs and practices (assuming we were not killed first).

Pinker summarizes the correlations between reasoning and education on the one hand and nonviolence, cooperation and endorsement of individual rights on the other, but methodological constraints mean that only a few of these studies can make claims for causation, and even those cannot escape the possibility that the results simply show that smarter people are more likely to be socialized into prevailing Enlightenment views. One has to wonder whether those who believed in Fascism in the 1930s or endorsed the burning of witches in the seventeenth century were less able to reason consistently and abstractly than we are.

I am not sure he would appreciate the association, but Pinker’s argument echoes the motto engraved in the CIA’s lobby: “And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” These claims place too much of a burden on reasoning. After he moves on from the Civilizing Process, Pinker largely leaves material factors behind. Power and interests, costs and benefits play little role.

This, I think, is clearly wrong for the decline of war and questionable throughout. He also downplays the ways in which violence can result from reasoning, just as threats and, when necessary, the use of force is deployed to establish and maintain open societies. When these are engaged in war, they are also capable of killing large numbers of enemy civilians, as the United States and the UK did in the bombings of Germany and Japan when they calculated, correctly most historians now believe, that this would help bring victory.

Torture also had a return engagement in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Pinker could see progress in the fact that it was quite limited and was justified not only by the pressing circumstances but also by the claim that it was not torture (and that the United States had the legal opinions to prove this). I agree, and would not argue that we are headed back to the Dark Ages. But this sorry episode, which I think will be repeated if there is another major attack on America, does show that people can reason themselves into cruelty.

So what does Pinker’s analysis tell us about the future? He refrains from speculation, noting the role of contingency and statistical distributions with “fat tails”—i.e., unexpected events with large consequences. But this sensible if cautious stance does not sit entirely well with his central argument. If knowledge, reason and the free flow of ideas have brought violence down in the past, they should continue to do so in the future. It would seem highly likely, perhaps even inevitable, that free societies would develop even further where they are established and spread—if at uncertain pace—where dogma now reigns, with the result that the world would be even better in the coming generations.

Once stated, this seems too triumphalist if not reminiscent of George W. Bush, but it is to be welcomed both as a vision and a benchmark against which Pinker’s argument can be judged by our successors.

In the end, even if Pinker’s explanations do not entirely convince and his faith in reason is exaggerated, he has succeeded in documenting the enormous decline in all sorts of violence and cruelty. This achievement of humankind deserves to be better known, and readers of this important book will remember it and ponder its causes. It is a story worthy of seven hundred pages.

Robert Jervis is the Adlai E. Stevenson Professor of International Politics at Columbia University.More by

A Note To A Friend On Phasing Into Daniel Deronda After Finishing The Brothers Karamazov

2011-11-02T12:22:00.000-07:00

Note to a friend on phasing into Daniel Deronda after having finished The Brothers Karamazov who shares my view that we all should have one "great novel" on the go at all times:

...I found Bros K tough to finish but forced myself and am 10 xs better off for it. It's an amazing reading experience, like a sublime opera of novels. Let me know when you finish it: I have some thoughts and questions to bounce off you. Don't, I suggest, discuss it or check it out while you're reading it because there's a murder mystery working its way through all the rest going on.

I'm finding Daniel Deronda enjoyable reading and "easy," in a sense, after Dostoyevsky. I'm just at the part when Gwen comes back from gambling after learning her family's fortune is lost and puts her the shoulder of her will against the supposed inevitability of her and her family living in reduced circumstances.

It interests me, among other things, and apart from my obvious interest in Eliot's treatment of the theme of Jewishness, how she weaves in some characters'--so far, Gwen, Deronda (and maybe Grandcourt) bouts of existential dread in advance of the 20th century.

Another thing, Eliot was notoriously physically ugly and it's intriguing to consider her descriptions of Gwen's vivacious looks keeping that in mind and to consider the characterological superiority of Ms Arrowpoint.

One thought: a purely random event got me back to Lionel Trilling and I got a copy of his The Liberal Imagination and a book about him by TNR's Adam Kirsch Why Trilling Matters. It's all that that got me back to great novels. I tend to line up my reading by where Trilling's essays point. Even if you don't pursue that, I'd recommend Trilling's essays in themselves as terrifically worthwhile reading...

Trilling on Wordsworth and Coleridge

2011-11-01T14:06:00.000-07:00

Lionel Trilling in distinguishing between the poetry of Coleridge and Wordsworth says Coleridge responded concretely and in poetic particulars to the natural world as he observed it compared to the more general, less poetically detailed responses of Wordsworth. For Wordsworth's poetry, what was important was more the effects natural scenes had on his mind and person than the detailed, poetically precise specifics of the scenes themselves.

What a great insight!

A note on Liberalism Via Alexander Meiklejohn and Lionel Trilling

2011-10-31T10:53:00.000-07:00

Here is a nice description of the Liberal both believing and doubting by Alexander Meiklejohn, which I have been quoting for years from his book Education Between Two Worlds and which provides a striking contrast to what might be called the Conservative cast of mind shown in the argument from caution (unintended consequences)and in the argument from tradition, both Burke's:

"...Liberalism both believes and doubts, and “…indicates a pattern of culture which criticizes itself... It has customs and standards of behaviour. But it also has...the attitude of...questioning its own dominant beliefs and standards... The liberal both believes and doubts...and... if an individual or a group will hold fast both to custom and intelligence, then its experience will inevitably be paradoxical and divided against itself. The being who seeks intelligence is a divided personality.”

I lean towards this more mind-based notion of Liberalism. For its content has shifted from its origins as a laissez faire doctrine more in common with libertarian ideas of freedom from government and economic freedom to, over the 20th century, more "progressive" ideas about the virtue of government, the need to regulate commerce and the felt obligation to provide a citizenry with a decent social safety net, and thus having more in common with Democratic Socialism.

I believe in the social safety net as a hallmark of a just society and in that sense agree with it as a specific content of political Liberalism as we understand it today, apart from it as a habit of mind, as described by Meiklejohn. And if that's what's meant by Liberalism's morality being located in its search for justice then I agree. For Meiklejohn argued that the doctinal legacy of human fellowship from a philosophically outmoded Christianity is the proper understanding of the moral foundation for the political order promised by democracy.

In these senses, "generosity" captures the open mindedness of both believing and doubting and the humanity evident in a social safety net and a commitment to helping the poorest amongst us. The content and boundaries of the net and of the helping hand are always a matter of debate but the underlying commitent is there regardless.

Back to Liberalism's habit of mind: Trilling himself says, in line with Liberalism holding fast to belief and doubt, his misson is "putting under some degree of pressure the liberal ideas and assumptions of the present time" and urges the necessity of the "essential imagination of variousness and possibility, which implies the awareness of complexity and difficulty."

A Note on Trilling's Essay on Wordworth's Immortality Ode

2011-10-30T21:26:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading Trilling's essay on the Wordsworth's Immortality Ode.

Apparently this is the only close reading of a poem he ever published. I thought it excellent, making a good case for the poem not being about Wordsworth's lamenting his lost powers of poetry. It's easy to follow the argument because Trilling appends the text of his poem to his essay. I find his essays much better when he focuses on specific works of literature rather than trying to pursue a systematic account of some general idea such as in his essay On The Meaning of a Literary Idea, which I thought weak.

And, I finally understand better, not fully perhaps, what Trilling means by moral realism. As explained by Adam Kirsch, whose book Why Trilling Matters, I'm reading, it's "...a realism that is 'not the awareness of morality itself but of the contradictions, paradoxes, and dangers of living the moral life,' ” somewhat, says Kirsch, in the spirit of Berlin's idea of liberalism as necessarily imperfect and conflicted due to the inevitable clash of conflicting moral principles in specifc cases

The Iraq War Was a Win: Michael J. Totten

2011-10-28T22:46:00.000-07:00

TNR/October 28, 2011

President Barack Obama has announced that nearly all American soldiers will be home from Iraq by the end of the year. Despite the fact that Iran, as the Middle East’s most serious would-be hegemon, will benefit more than any other country from our regional drawdown, the American and Iraqi governments wish to go their own separate ways.

The president has a campaign promise to keep. Most Americans are tired of sending their money, their sons, and even their daughters to Iraq, and most who haven’t spend money or blood are tired of hearing about it. The Iraqis have been trying to elbow us out for years and hope to regain a measure of sovereignty and respect when we’re finally gone.

It’s risky. In a worst-case scenario, Washington could end up evacuating its embassy a few years from now as we did in Saigon nearly four decades ago. But there’s a big difference between withdrawing from Iraq in 2011 and withdrawing from South Vietnam in 1973: The war in Iraq is over.
THAT’S NOT TO SAY that Iraq is a model of stability. “Iran is laying low right now and is riding us out,” U.S. Army sergeant Nick Franklin told me in Baghdad two years ago. “When we pull out, though, and they know we're almost out, it will be game on here in Iraq.”

By aiding and abetting violent Shia militias and terrorist organizations, Iran has indeed been doing its worst to export its sectarian grievances and repressive political system to Iraq ever since coalition forces chased Saddam Hussein out of his palaces. Tehran is still striving for dominance—not only in Iraq, but everywhere else in the region, as well—and that job will surely be easier without the United States in the way.

The Obama administration knows this perfectly well. “To countries in the region,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said earlier this week in Tajikistan, “especially Iraq’s neighbors, we want to emphasize that America will stand with our allies and friends, including Iraq, in defense of our common security and interests.”

Obviously she was referring to Iraq’s Iranian neighbor. No one worries that Jordan will nefariously interfere in Iraq any time soon. But Clinton’s assurances are less credible given the imminence of America’s withdrawal. Promoting our interests in Iraq will be a lot harder when our closest military forces are in Kuwait rather than Baghdad.

Even so, Iran’s Islamic Republic regime won’t benefit nearly as much from our withdrawal today as it would have five years ago. Iraq was an absolute disaster in 2006. Before General David Petraeus “surged” thousands of additional counterinsurgency troops to the country, a hurricane of car- and suicide-bombers turned Iraq into the most terrorized place on the face of the earth.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s Al Qaeda in Iraq lorded over Ramadi, the capital of Anbar Province, and points beyond. Moqtada al Sadr’s radical Shia Mahdi Army militia had its own Hezbollah-style state-within-a-state with its capital in Sadr City, a vast slum in Baghdad that’s home to millions of people.

If the United States had withdrawn its forces then, as many commentators and policymakers demanded, the Iraqi government almost certainly would have disintegrated. Iraq might not even exist as a state anymore.

Al Qaeda could have claimed it beat the United States Marine Corps in a shooting war—a feat far more impressive for the purposes of propaganda than even the killing of thousands of civilians in New York and Washington. Iran, meanwhile, could have successfully replicated the quasi-imperial foreign policy it all but perfected in Lebanon where it acquired its own private army—Hezbollah—during a chaotic time of sectarian civil war and foreign occupation.

Iraq is a completely different country today. Al Qaeda in Iraq scarcely even exists anymore. No militia, either Sunni or Shia, controls territory or has its own “capital” anywhere.

Baghdad’s government is not going to fall, no matter how much Tehran tries to undermine it. No one will be able to claim even implausibly that Americans were driven out of Iraq under fire. Nor can anyone plausibly say the United States lost. The enemies of the United States and Iraq’s elected government have either been vanquished, forced to give up the gun, or driven into the shadows.

“In all societies there is an acceptable level of violence,” U.S. Army captain A.J. Boyes said to me in Sadr City in 2009, suggesting that Iraq was reaching that point. Baghdad was no longer the war zone it used to be, and it’s even less violent now that it was then.

No society in the world can be completely free of violence, but the “acceptable” level, given factors like history and political grievance, is higher in some countries than in others. It’s higher in the United States than it is in Japan. It’s higher in Mexico than it is in the United States. And it’s higher in Iraq than it is in Mexico. But Iraq today is less violent than Mexico, one of the most heavily touristed countries in the world.

That’s not to say there are no reasons to stay. “If there is one constant of American military history,” Max Boot wrote in Commentary, “it is that the longer our troops stay in a country the better the prospects of a successful outcome. Think of Germany, Italy, Japan or South Korea. Conversely when U.S. troops rush for the exits hard-won wartime gains can quickly evaporate. Think of the post-Civil War South, post-World War I Germany, post-1933 (and post-1995) Haiti, post-1972 Vietnam, or, more recently, post-1983 Lebanon and post-1993 Somalia.”

Boot is right about that. President Obama’s decision to withdraw may well end badly. But if it does turn out to be a mistake, it will be a much smaller mistake than a pre-surge withdrawal would have been. We are no longer staring down the possibility of a military or grand strategic defeat on the battlefield.

Iraq just isn’t as dangerous anymore, not to itself and not to others. If Iran tries to destabilize it with terror militias again, Iraq will fight back. And the Iraqis know how to fight back effectively now after so many years of American training. If Iran actually tries to invade with conventional forces—a spectacularly unlikely event, but one never knows in that part of the world—odds are excellent that the American military would respond to the breach of international law and sovereignty by again joining the fight alongside the Iraqi military.

Iraq has been gearing up to stand on its own for years. President Obama merely decided the time would come sooner rather than later. A Republican president would have eventually made the same decision even if it might have taken a little bit longer. Few Americans are in the mood for any more nation-building or babysitting. Iraqis, for their part, are tired of being built-up and babysat by Americans.

Some kind of withdrawal and disengagement has been a long time coming for those reasons alone. A substantial number of American officials were persuaded that sticking around in Iraq to prevent a catastrophe was probably wise as long as we’d leave when a howling abyss no longer yawned at everyone’s feet. For better or for worse, that time has arrived.

Michael J. Totten is a contributing editor at City Journal and author of In the Wake of the Surge and The Road to Fatima Gate.

Me:

There is an essential illogic in Totten's argument that defies his conclusion that, as the tease would have it, "Did We Lose in Iraq? No, and Here’s Why". The illogic is that the pivot of his argument is that the surge rescued a country disintegrating into chaos, helped rid it of al Qaeda and left it somewhat sovereign and somehwat civilly in tact. Totten in advancing his argument compares what would have happened if the U.S. left at the apex of Iraqi chaos rather than now and rather than implementing the surge.

That comparison drives his argument, which ends up with some comentary on the risks of not staying longer. The illogic is the complete begging of the question: should America have invaded it in the first place, at a time when Hussein was a terrible actor, but there were no wmds--the primary rationale for going to war--and there was no al Qaeda presence to speak of.

Iraq is better off now than it was under Hussein's reign of terror, but at what cost: 4500 Americans dead, thousands wounded and thousands amongst those thousands wounded irreparably, 100,000(?) Iraqis dead and wounded, motly civilians and a cost in the neighbourhood of a trillion dollars.

Measure those costs against that benefit, the conclusion seems obvious to me.

Debate those costs against those benefits if you want to, but even stipulating that it's debatable doesn't obviate the shoddiness of Totten's reasoning and arguments.

Some Contrarian Thoughts on The Brothers Karamazov Fresh From Just Having Finished It

2011-10-26T08:20:00.000-07:00

Here's the (one) thing: for us in these more or less thoroughly secular/atheistic times, for anyone with a bit of intellectual sophistication, the idea that without God as a moral source all is moral anarchy, or, put another way, there is no morality, seems altogether quaint and anachronistic, a sophomoric notion that bright kids in high school might debate. In Shakespeare no such naive questions form the themes of any of his plays, I'd be inclined to argue.

So I resist intuitively anything so simple minded as being the metaphysics of an artist of such overpowering talent, intellect, psychological and representational penetration as Dostoyevsky. But there it is, seemingly.

I was so moved by the last Chapter, where the simplicity of the ideas in Alyosha's final speech make so much thematic sense to me within the context of the fiction, that, maybe just by personal predeliction, I struggle against a reading of the novel rooting that wisdom in the necessity of faith. But struggle as I might, I have thus far come up pretty empty.

But not altogether so.

One possible support I can look to, as I now see things, is that Ivan, whose cynicism is an experiment in finding meaning, and Smerdyakov, his intellectual disciple but pathologically malign and very smart, albeit poisonsously so, both run feelingly and experientially into the limits of moral anarchy without God by confronting the overall impact of Smerdyakov's murder of Fyodor in their three final conversations, and especially the last one. Those conversations raise and amplify the moral meaning of the murder in their consciousnesses.

They don't need, don't have, faith at the moment of their realization, but their guilt, Smerdyakov's legal guilt, and Ivan's spiritual or moral guilt--that latter needing some parsing, now's not the time--drives the first to suicide and tips Ivan over into physiological (brain fever leading to a coma) and mental breakdown. (What the future holds for Ivan, we of course don't know.)

So their realization suggests a ground for seeing morality within the novel not needing to be based on faith. So do the various acts of goodness, love forgiveness and reconcilation--such as the final one between Dmitri and Katerina and the partial one, still in the works, so to speak, between Katerina and Grushenka. So does the most powerful and beautiful relationship in the entire novel, between Ilyusha and his father. Familiality, filiality and literal brotherliness, for three integrally related instances, are sources for natural, intuitive and from-the-ground-up human bonds not needing God or faith for their formation.

None of any of these instances, arguably, need faith at their base and thus may speak to an ethic of compassion, pity, love and fellow feeling based on common humanity in a tragic world, a vale of tears marked in part by the reality of unspeakable evil, with religion being one mode of the representation of, struggle with, that overarching compexity and moral range in existence.

(Mark Lilla has argued that from about Rousseau on religious thinkers like Hegel and others saw God and religion as man made but an ideal worth socially incorporating with even a national de jure church and compulsory attendance and belief because Christianity represents the highest conception man has of himself. Lilla suggests that these ideas are the ferment out of which Reform Judaism came. But all this is a, possibly relevant, aside.)

I'd have to reread Alyosha's last speech but I don't recall the necessity of faith as its anchor, even though he's a believer and a moral centre of the novel.

One final thought: for me it's guff that we're responsible for the sins of others even without our complicity in those sins. I think Father Zossima, another moral centre in the novel, says we are. I have some thoughts about how that idea works in The Brothers Karamazov without being guff.

That at another time perhaps.

Some Questions on The Brothers Karamazov

2011-10-25T23:10:00.000-07:00

Questions I'm posing to myself about The Brothers Karamazov include whether within the novel's terms moral life, good works and goodness itself are possible without religious faith, whether it's a thematic imperative that all are responsible for the sins of others, whether moastic life is idealized and whether Smerdyakov could have been forgiven and redeemed, despite his suicide.

Another question is whether Dostoyevsky really means to say that without God all is permissible, i.e. that that's how essential and fundamental religious belief is to his view of the world.

The Brothers Karamazov as a Novel of the 1860's

2011-10-25T22:31:00.000-07:00

Charles A. Moser, The George Washington University

.....The fact is, though, that the novel also contains a considerable number of pre-time-of-action anachronisms, at least enough to justify our treating The Brothers Karamazov as more of a novel of the 1860's than it might appear at first glance.

For example Dmitry's mother, Adelaida Miusova, who could not have given birth to him later than 1840, is pictured very much as an emancipated woman of the 1860's avant la lettre: she wished, we learn, "to display her feminine independence, to oppose social conventions as well as the despotism of her relations and family" (XIV:8) in deciding to marry Fedor Karamazov.

Then, when she realized what a scoundrel Fedor was, she abandoned both him and her three-year-old son to run away with a "seminarian and teacher who was perishing of poverty" (XIV:9), very much in the tradition of the 1860's. Adelaide's cousin Petr is depicted only a little less anachronistically as a man who has adopted an intellectually fashionable anticlericalism which has moved him to engage in litigation with a monastery located near his estate (XIV: 10-11).

Smerdyakov's biography provides us with very clear anachronistic details. At the age of 12, we read, that is, in 1854, he placed his mentor Grigory in what he considered an untenable position during his Bible lessons, when he asked: "God created the light [svet] on the first day, but the sun, the moon and the stars on the fourth day. So then where did the light come from on the first day?" Grigory is so incensed by this that he strikes him on the cheek, and soon thereafter his epileptic seizures commence (XIV:114).

This entire scene is a cliche of the antinihilist literature of the 1860's, and in general Smerdyakov is a standard nihilist of the 1860's even though his intellectual formation had to occur in the 1850's, at least if one is to hold Dostoevsky to a chronological standard. But that is precisely the point. The Brothers Karamazov is a novel formally set in the 1860's which dislocates the general atmosphere of the 1870's onto the 1860's and the atmosphere of the 1860's onto the 1850's and the 1840's. Chronology is so telescoped and intermixed in the novel that we simply cannot hold the author to any significant chronological accountability.

It is my contention that The Brothers Karamazov may usefully be regarded, among other things, as a novel of the 1860's, and more specifically as a belated antinihilist novel of a peculiar sort, a summing up of Dostoevsky's response to the literary current which began with Turgenev's Fathers and Sons in 1862 and which had been effectively stoppered by The Possessed in 1871-72.

When he sat down to write The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky believed that the intellectual momentum had clearly swung away from the radicalism of the 1860's, that he had contributed considerably to this desirable development through his own writings, and that with this novel, as he wrote in a letter of May 1879, he could complete what he called "the rout of anarchism." That rout had to be accomplished on the religious plane, through the refutation of Ivan's arguments by Father Zossima and Alesha.

Indeed, one may view Dostoevsky's four great novels as a single enormous discussion of the central religious and ethical questions which the men of the 1860's had brought to the fore. In Crime and Punishment Dostoevsky demonstrated that an ethic could not be based upon mathematics (the life of one old pawnbroker to ameliorate the lives of a hundred others); in The Idiot he proved, at least in my interpretation,(4) that an ethic could not be founded upon esthetics; and in The Possessed he showed that the ethical could not be equated with that which promoted the purposes of a political revolution.

Thus in The Brothers Karamazov by a process of elimination Dostoevsky arrived at the conclusion that the only foundation for a true ethic must be revelation, a belief in God and immortality. But he also wished to demonstrate this positively, through the discourses of the great religious figures in the novel.

The Brothers Karamazov contains many echoes of the literature of the 1860's. At one point Madame Khokhlakova quotes Bazarov, when she comments that she had always believed there would be nothing after death, that "'a thistle would sprout on my grave', as a certain author once put it" (XIV:52). Two further points are worth noting in this connection.

First, in 1876, at the very time he began creating The Brothers Karamazov in his mind, Dostoevsky thought briefly of writing a novel with exactly the same title as Turgenev's (Ottsy i deti), although the book's content apparently would have been quite different. (5) And second, Maxim Antonovich, the radical critic whose most famous single piece of literary criticism was probably his intemperate attack of 1862 on Fathers and Sons, devoted his literary swan-song to a long review of 1881 denouncing The Brothers Karamazov as a "mystic-ascetic novel."(6)

Chernyshevsky's What Is To Be Done?, the greatest single influence on the radical generation of the 1860's, is the source of several echoes in The Brothers Karamazov. Thus the young socialist Kolya Krasotkin tells Alesha that he is an "egotist", i.e. an adherent of the doctrine of enlightened egotism which Chernyshevsky elaborated in his novel (XIV:483); and toward the end of The Brothers Karamazov Dmitry speaks to Alesha of going off to America with Grusha for three years or so in order to learn English and then return as Americans, much as Lopukhov does in What Is To Be Done? (XV:186).

The Brothers Karamazov also contains a running polemic with Dostoevsky's great ideological opponent of the 1860's, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin. At one point the gushing Madame Khokhlakova talks of Shchedrin as her mentor in the matter of feminine emancipation: she had recently, she says, dispatched
to him a brief note with the text: "I embrace and kiss you, my writer, on behalf of contemporary womankind, keep it up," and signed it: "a mother." (XIV:350). Here Dostoevsky twits Saltykov by asserting that his most ardent followers are flighty, brainless females.

At another point later in the novel Dostoevsky distorted some of Saltykov's writings of 1875 through paraphrase (XV:78). Saltykov, incidentally, followed these details quite closely, and was quick to reply to his old opponent. Such muted polemics were not the most important part of the novel, of course, although they are strongly reminiscent of the 1860's.

As in Dostoevsky's earlier and more overtly antinihilist novels, the characters of The Brothers Karamazov are divided into those who exist on a more superficial, political level, and those who embody more profoundly metaphysical problems. In Crime and Punishment Lebezyatnikov serves as an example of the first category, Raskolnikov and Svidrigaylov of the second. In The Idiot the first category is represented by Burdovsky and the young radicals gathered about him. In The Possessed Petr Verkhovensky is a very well-developed example of the first grouping, while Stavrogin is a most powerful example of the second.

In The Brothers Karamazov we find an entire constellation of figures who fall into the first category. Adelaida Miusova and then Madame Khokhlakova are samples of the scatterbrained emancipated female; Petr Miusov is the fashionable anti-clerical activist; Smerdyakov has grown up as a committed nihilist, and a dangerous one as well, for he is capable not just of murder but of parricide; and the divinity student Rakitin spreads his evil intellectual influence throughout the novel, all the way down to Kolya Krasotkin, who admires Rakitin as his teacher and openly declares his socialist convictions.

And then, in the second category, there is the great metaphysical figure of Ivan Karamazov. Ivan not only - in his "Legend of the Grand Inquisitor" - recasts Shigalev's doctrines on the dominion of the enlightened few over the innumerable herd in religious terms, but he and Alesha also grapple with the central religious question of Dostoevsky's world. As the narrator writes of Alesha in a crucial passage:

...No sooner had he, after taking serious thought, come to the astounding conviction that immortality and God exist, than he immediately, naturally, said to himself: 'I wish to live for immortality, and accept no halfway compromises.' He acted just the same way as he would have, had he decided that God and immortality do not exist, in which case he would immediately have become an atheist and a socialist (for socialism is not merely a matter of the labor question... but is first and foremost a problem of atheism, a problem of the contemporary incarnation of atheism, a question of the Tower of Babel which is being built without God not in order to reach Heaven from Earth, but in order to bring Heaven down to Earth). (XIV:25)...

Similarly, later in the novel this argument is extended to the conclusion that if a person decides that God and immortality do not exist, he is obliged to invert his understanding of the moral law entirely and commit acts which would be considered criminal under the old ethical code (XIV:65).

Thus between Ivan on the one hand and Alesha and Father Zossima on the other are established the fundamental dichotomies: between acceptance of the world as it is (Father Zossima urges his followers to consider the beauty of the natural world and comprehend that "life is paradise" [XIV:272]), or its rejection; between belief in God and immortality as the foundation of the traditional ethical code, and atheism, with the inevitable inversion of the established ethical creed which flows from the conviction that God does not exist.

A certain number of relatively superficial themes characteristic of the antinihilist novel of the 1860's occur in The Brothers Karamazov, although they do not occupy an especially prominent place. One such topic, as we have already seen, is that of feminine emancipation, brought to the fore especially through Madame Khokhlakova, and also satirized in such passages as that about the three women:

...Three ladies are sitting there, sir, one feebleminded without any legs, another hunchbacked without any legs, still another with legs but even overintelligent, a student taking special courses who's always trying to get away to St. Petersburg to search for the rights of Russian women there on the banks of the Neva. (XIV:186)...

A second important antinihilist theme is the radical negation of literature, art and esthetics, with Pushkin as the central target of abuse (the dedication of the Pushkin monument in Moscow in 1880 could be interpreted as an explicit rejection by Russian society of the radical view of him: as one character says disgustedly, "they want to put up a monument to your Pushkin for his women's feet" [XV:17]). Thus Smerdyakov declares sharply that "poetry is rubbish." "Who on earth speaks in rhyme?" he goes on to ask. "And if we did all start talking in rhyme, say by order of the authorities, would we get very much said?" (XIV:204).

In Dmitry's long conversation with Alesha where he speaks of Rakitin's influence on his thinking, Dostoevsky depicts the radical contempt for poetry with biting sarcasm. According to Dmitry, Rakitin had taken advantage of Madame Khokhlakova's money to begin writing verses for the first time: "And anyway, Rakitin says, I wrote better than that Pushkin of yours, because I managed to cram so much civic melancholy into a clownish verse" (XV:29).

This remark is followed by an anti-parody of sorts, or a parody on the parodies of Pushkinian works which such satirical poets of the 1860's as Dmitry Minaev used to produce. Entitled "On the Healing of my Object's Injured Leg", it deals with the subject of Pushkin's weakness for women's feet, and illustrates, incidentally, an intertwining of Pushkin's fixation on women's feet and Dostoevsky's fascination with feminine lameness.

Still another antinihilist theme of the 1860's to be found in The Brothers Karamazov is the belief in rationalism, especially rationalism organized as natural science. That true follower of Dmitry Pisarev, Kolya Krasotkin, scornfully dismisses history as "the study of a series of human stupidities, nothing more. I respect only mathematics and natural sciences" (XIV:497).

In one of his conversations with Alesha Ivan rejects the notion of non-Euclidian geometry (XIV:215), much as Chernyshevsky did in real life, and that quite furiously, on the ground that Euclidian geometry is the foundation of a rational explanation of the physical world as it exists, and that it is totally impermissible to toy with the axioms of mathematics or geometry.

Early in the book Father Paisy comments to Alesha that modern science has sought to undo religion for quite some time, but without success on the whole (XIV:155-56). Still, as frequently occurred in the antinihilist novel of the 1860's, propaganda for natural science can have a powerful effect on individuals who are not especially intelligent.

In The Brothers Karamazov that happens to be Dmitry, who for a time succumbs badly to Rakitin's malign influence. He tells Alesha that he now knows there are various "nerves" in the brain with "little tails" which give rise to images in the mind, consciousness, so that the mind is merely a matter of "chemistry". "Rakitin was explaining all this to me yesterday, brother", Dmitry says, "and it was just like a revelation. This science is magnificent, Alesha! And then the new man will appear, I understand that now... But still I feel sorry for God", Dmitry adds, because, as he realizes, "Rakitin hates God" (XV:28-29).

Extreme hostility toward any manifestation of the supernatural was an integral part of the radical worldview which Dmitry has so naively absorbed.

All these themes, however, though they demonstrate certain superficial links between The Brothers Karamazov and the anti-radical novel of the 1860's, do not go to the book's deepest level, formed of an interweaving of the problem of the family, blood relationships between parents and children, and the question of crime - in this instance parricide - and violations of the accepted ethical code.

Radicals in the nineteenth century and since have instinctively recognized the family as a major obstacle to the implementation of their doctrines. When Kolya Krasotkin is asked what he means by declaring himself a socialist, he defines socialism as follows: "This is if everyone is equal, everybody has nothing but common property, there are no marriages, and religion and all the laws are just the way anyone wants them" (XIV:473. Italics added.)

In The Possessed the girl student keeps asking about the origin of the family, to which Stavrogin responds that it might be improper to provide too detailed a reply (X:306);and in The Brothers Karamazov old Karamazov comments to Alesha that "in our fashionable time nowadays people reject fathers and mothers as a prejudice" (XIV:158).

Dostoevsky very brilliantly grasped the crucial hostility of the radical mind to the institution of the family and the idea of blood relationships, and therefore he defended the family at its weakest point in making of his last novel a version of Fathers and Sons which dealt with the relationships between generations on a far deeper level than Turgenev ever reached.

The Karamazov family has a series of mothers, and a father who has not been able to maintain his marriages, who is on the worst of terms with his sons, who is little more than a mere biological progenitor of his children. Into this family which is metaphysically on the very edge of existence Dostoevsky thrusts the issue of parricide in its most extreme form.

The actual murderer, of course, is the son closest to the "nihilist" of the antinihilist literature, but it is the technically innocent Dmitry who is brought to trial. We are told that the fashionable ladies in attendance at the trial are quite certain of his guilt, but at the same time down to the last moment expect him to be acquitted "out of humane feeling, from the new ideas and new feelings which have such currency now, etc." (XV:95).

But in fact the jury finds Dmitry guilty, and he, in accordance with the Christian conception of guilt, accepts his punishment on the grounds that he did wish for his father's death even if he did not actually murder him. Dostoevsky thus shows the absolute dichotomy at the most fundamental level between the radical view of morality derived from atheistic socialism, which holds that it can be quite acceptable even to kill one's own father, and the traditional, religiously grounded ethic, which maintains that one deserves punishment even for seriously wishing harm to another, regardless of whether one has committed some overt act.

In The Brothers Karamazov, then, Dostoevsky goes back over much of the same ground that he had covered in his earlier novels - particularly in Crime and Punishment and The Possessed - in order to make his final artistic statement on the centrality of religious belief to a proper system of ethics. Though with scant regard for chronology, he recapitulates at a higher level the arguments of the 1860's in this novel which he explicitly sets in that decade, and through which he hoped to have the final word in that discussion.

And in my view The Brothers Karamazov did indeed terminate that great philosophical and literary argument which by then had continued for some twenty years.

NOTES
See Charles A. Moser, "Stepan Trofimovič Verxovenskij and the Esthetics of His Time", Slavic and East European Journal, vol. 29, no. 2 (Summer 1985), p. 158.
All volume and page citations given within the text are to Fedor Dostoevsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Leningrad: Nauka, 1972).
Victor Terras, A Karamazov Companion: Commentary on the Genesis, Language, and Style of Dostoevsky's Novel (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981), p. 63.
Charles A. Moser, "Nihilism, Aesthetics and The Idiot", Russian Literature, vol. 11 (1982), pp. 377-88.
Carl R. Proffer, ed., The Unpublished Dostoevsky: Diaries and Notebooks, 1860-81 (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1975). II. 149

Thematic Analysis of the Brothers Karamazov

2011-10-25T22:08:00.000-07:00

By Anonymous:

The conflict between faith and doubt

This is the central philosophical conflict in the novel, and is embodied in the characters of Zosima and Alyosha (faith), and Ivan and Fyodor Pavlovich (doubt). The conflict is a consequence of free will, in that it arises from the fact that man is free to believe in God or not.

Dostoevsky shows that faith and doubt give rise to very different types of behavior. Zosima and Alyosha's love of God overflows into love of mankind. They practice active love, whereby their main concern is to love, forgive and refrain from judging their fellow man, and to alleviate his suffering where possible.

Ivan, relying on logic, doubts the existence of God and the immortality of the soul. He thinks that the only reason why people are good is fear of the consequences of doing wrong in the afterlife. Hence, because he rejects God, he also rejects the moral categories of good and evil and preaches the message that "everything is permitted."

However, Ivan does not really believe what he preaches: he is a deeply moral person and is disgusted by those people who live out the doctrine that "everything is permitted," notably Fyodor Pavlovich and Smerdyakov. Thus there is division in Ivan's soul. His lack of faith in God spills over into a lack of faith in himself and his fellow human beings. This in turn leads to a cold attitude and an inability to recognize and accept love when it offers itself (for example, from Alyosha and Katerina).

Both Alyosha and Ivan find their viewpoints challenged, and both face a crisis of soul. Alyosha's occurs when Zosima dies and his body corrupts quickly, leading to widespread doubts about his holiness. Alyosha is briefly plunged into despair, but recovers when he meets Grushenka and unexpectedly feels a wave of love and trust pass between them.

Ivan's crisis occurs when he witnesses the logical conclusion of his doctrine of "everything is permitted": Smerdyakov's murder of Fyodor Pavlovich. Ivan realizes that he is partly responsible for the murder. This is his first experience of the truth of Zosima's teaching that each person is responsible for everyone else's sins. In the men of faith, Zosima and Alyosha, this knowledge of connectedness prompts love and forgiveness towards their fellow man.

The doubting Ivan, however, lacks any sustaining faith in, or love for, God or man. His sudden realization of his connectedness with the murderer Smerdyakov overwhelms him with guilt and despair. The intellect on which he has relied deserts him and he begins to go insane. Ivan's collapse (along with the appalling fates of Fyodor Pavlovich and Smerdyakov) is Dostoevsky's indictment of the philosophy of doubt, which, he suggests, ends in chaos and suffering.

It is significant that at the novel's close, the chief hope of Ivan's recovery and redemption lies in the love that Katerina is finally able to express for him.

Free will

Frequently in The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky emphasizes that in free will, God has given mankind a great responsibility, even a burden. Everyone is free to believe in God or not, and to do good or not. In every moment, man constantly has the ability to choose evil. It is not part of God's plan to provide convenient miracles that force doubters to believe or to respond to life's challenges in certain ways. Free will makes mankind's path more difficult, painful and dangerous, but it is necessary if man is to evolve beyond the state of childhood.

The part of the novel that most explicitly examines free will is Ivan's poem, The Grand Inquisitor, in Book V.

The Grand Inquisitor argues that when Christ rejected Satan's three temptations to perform miracles, he robbed man of the certainties of life (enough food, a rigid power structure, and a God who provides miracles in order to force people to believe) and instead, gave him free will. But free will is as much a curse as a blessing, since most people are not strong enough to refuse earthly securities in return for heavenly glory.

The Grand Inquisitor allies himself with Satan out of compassion for the weakness of mankind, to give man back the certainties of an all-powerful church that provides miracles on demand and a rigid social structure that enslaves man but ensures that he has enough food and shelter. In the Inquisitor's world, man's free will has been sacrificed in favor of social order and contentment.

Through his character of the Inquisitor, Ivan suggests that man would be better off being enslaved and secure rather than free and making the appalling mistakes that lead to the suffering of innocents. Though the Inquisitor's argument is convincing on the level of logic, it shows the emptiness and lack of faith in mankind that lies at the center of Ivan's philosophy and that eventually makes him lose his reason.

Within the poem, Christ's response to the Inquisitor is simply to kiss him on the lips - a profound gesture of love. Throughout the novel, Dostoevsky shows that to choose a life of love and faith, exemplified by Zosima and Alyosha, is the only constructive answer to the evil and suffering that spring from the exercise of free will. It is by no means the easy option, as is shown by Alyosha's crisis of soul after Zosima's death, but it is the humane one.

Moral responsibility

Zosima teaches that every person is responsible for everyone else's sins. This is why it is so important for people not to judge others but to practice active love, even regarding criminals, as through love, the criminal may repent and be reformed.

Alyosha takes this lesson to heart in that whenever he sees anyone suffering, he intervenes and does his best to help. It would be foreign to his nature to see someone suffering and walk on by. In Book V, in stark contrast with Zosima's and Alyosha's view, two characters deny responsibility for their fellow man: Smerdyakov tells Alyosha that he is not Dmitri's keeper; and Ivan says the same thing to Alyosha about Dmitri.

They mean that if Dmitri chooses to kill his father, they cannot do anything about it. Fyodor Pavlovich also expresses this idea in his utter failure to act as a father to his sons. Smerdyakov's and Ivan's insistence that they are not their brother's keepers echoes the biblical exchange between Cain and God about Abel, the brother whom Cain murdered: "And the Lord said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother's keeper? And he [God] said, What hast thou done? The voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground" (Genesis 4: 9-10).

It is no accident that Ivan, Smerdyakov and Fyodor Pavlovich express the opposite of Zosima's teachings with regard to moral responsibility. They all doubt God and the immortality of the soul, and draw the conclusion that the moral categories of good and evil do not exist.

In other words, "everything is permitted," every person can do as he wishes, and others should not interfere. This logical stance is backed up by the emotional factor that none of these men is a lover of humanity. Though Ivan loves humanity in the abstract, he is repulsed by, and distant to, individuals. Hence to Dostoevsky, a person who denies responsibility for his fellow man's sins is someone who fails to love.

The moral of the Cain and Abel story, and the moral of The Brothers Karamazov is that each person is indeed his brother's keeper - a realization that comes to Ivan just before Dmitri's trial and drives him insane.

By leaving town on the day of the murder, Ivan helped facilitate Smerdyakov's crime; even Alyosha played a part when, taken up with concern about the dying Zosima, he chose to return to the monastery rather than look for Dmitri.

Justice

The novel examines the man-made criminal justice system and finds it wanting, most notably in Ivan's The Grand Inquisitor poem, Zosima's anecdote of the philanthropist, and in Dmitri's trial. In the first example, the innocent Christ is jailed by the Grand Inquisitor for the 'crime' of setting man free.

That story is ironically reversed in the case of the wife-murdering philanthropist who escapes detection. In Dmitri's trial, untrue statements are made by the prosecution and defense, and the jury wrongly proclaims Dmitri's guilt. Dmitri's trial provides Dostoevsky with an opportunity to satirize the criminal justice system in detail. He emphasizes how any decision can be formed on the flimsy basis of circumstantial evidence, unreliable witnesses and even the hobbies of prosecuting lawyers (such as the interesting, but utterly mistaken, psychological insights of prosecutor Kirillovich).

Man-made justice, then, is shown to be unjust and unable to grasp the truth of any situation. It is also unable to reform the criminal, who is likely to respond to any punishment by further alienating himself from society. This is clear from the example of Kolya's ill-judged punishment of Ilyusha, which succeeds only in turning a well-meaning boy into a menace to society.

As Zosima says in Book II, Chapter 5, the only effective punishment is "the acknowledgement of one's own conscience." This alone can frighten the criminal enough to make him repent and reform. Zosima's words are proven by the cases of the philanthropist and Dmitri, who are wrongly judged by the criminal justice system but whose consciences provide effective punishment and sentences.

Redemption through suffering

When Zosima says that "the acknowledgement of one's own conscience" is the only effective punishment for doing wrong, he means that the person has to look within and face up to what he has done. This can entail great suffering. Repentance follows, and then reform.

Several characters in The Brothers Karamazov endure periods of suffering in which they develop spiritually. An example is Grushenka, who becomes very ill after Dmitri's trial and conviction (illness is often used in this novel as a symbol of spiritual purification).

In the course of the novel, she undergoes a transformation from a frivolous woman who plays with men's emotions to a serious, loving woman who fully intends to accompany Dmitri in exile and till the soil by his side. Her growth is partly due to her acceptance of responsibility for her part in the murder, the framing of Dmitri for the crime, and the verdict of guilt that is passed upon him.

The most obvious example of redemption through suffering is Dmitri. His redemption takes place as a result of his realization that though he did not murder his father, his intemperate passions partly enabled the murder to take place. He is also conscious of his many other sins: lying to almost everyone, stealing from Katerina, beating up his father and Snegiryov, and so on. In addition, after his dream of "the wee one" (the suffering baby), he realizes that he is to some degree responsible for everyone else's sins. As his trial approaches, he has a vision of redeeming himself through the suffering of hard labor in Siberia.

It is noteworthy that all these processes take place before the trial, which in comparison thoroughly fails in holding up a picture of truth to the defendant or in passing a just verdict. Thus Dostoevsky makes clear that examination of one's own conscience leads to a period of suffering, which in turn leads to redemption.

No part of this process is achieved through the criminal justice system. Two characters provide significant variations on the theme of redemption through suffering.

The first character is Lise, who rejects marriage with a good man who loves her (Alyosha) in favor of envisioning a marriage with someone who will torture her. In a parody of the theme of redemption through suffering, she punishes herself for her own wickedness by shutting her finger in the door. This ridiculous act of self-mutilation shows that not all suffering is necessary or constructive. Lise does not learn or redeem herself through suffering; she simply makes her life, and the lives of those around her, needlessly miserable.

The second character is Katerina, who shares with Lise a talent for creating suffering. She loves Ivan, but for most of the novel cannot bring herself to admit it, as she is too bound up in acting the martyr by devoting herself to Dmitri, who does not love her. Her redemption begins when she cries out for Ivan in court - an act of spontaneous love that marks the end of her previous tortured and strained relations with Dmitri and Ivan.

Her act is prompted by the ordeal of witnessing Ivan attempting to take responsibility for the murder in the witness box, thus saving his brother. Unfortunately, her testimony has the effect of further incriminating Dmitri. After the court case (according to Alyosha's belief), she feels overwhelmed by grief for her betrayal of Dmitri. Alyosha thinks that her pride is about to shatter, and he is right.

Katerina forgives Dmitri and Grushenka, and sets about nursing Ivan in his illness, thereby fully accepting her love for him. As well as redeeming Katerina, the relationship seems likely to redeem Ivan, too

Bernard Henry Levy: A Moral Tipping Point: Kadaffy's Death

2011-10-24T15:41:00.000-07:00

October 23, 2011/The daily Beast

Those Images of his corpse. That face, still alive but bloodied, hounded, and taunted. That bare head—suddenly and oddly bare! We were used to seeing him in turbans, and there was something poignant in the denuding that renders this criminal strangely pitiable.

You can say that the man was a monster. You can replay again and again the scenes that for eight months have haunted the friends of free Libya—the images of mass executions, torture, the hangings of April 7, the prisoners who were sort of buried alive until released from their prisons by the revolution—these and so many other victims of the dictatorship.

You can point out that Gaddafi had a hundred chances to negotiate, to stop it all, to save himself, and that, if he elected not to do so, if he preferred to bleed his people to the very end, he chose his fate knowingly.

You can observe that the West is not necessarily in the best position to teach the rest of the world lessons about revolutionary mercy. After all, don’t the Europeans still have on their consciences the massacres of September 1792 in France? What about the women whose heads were shaved after the liberation of Paris? Mussolini hung by his feet and abused? The Ceausescus slaughtered like old cattle?

I don’t buy it. I may be an incurable romantic, or what amounts to the same thing, an unreconstructed opponent of the absolute evil that I believe the death penalty to be. There is, in the spectacle of Gaddafi’s lynching, something revolting.

Worse, I fear that it will pollute the essential morality of an insurrection that had been, up to that point, almost exemplary. And anyone who knows something about revolutionary history knows that this could be the tipping point at which a democratic uprising begins to degenerate into its opposite.

I said as much by telephone to some of my friends in the National Transitional Council. I said it to Mustafa el-Sagizli, the leader of the fighters in Cyrenaica, who called me to share his joy after the liberation of Sirte. And then, later on Thursday, to the commander of the regiment that included the unruly elements that struck and killed Gaddafi. He was happy. He said (and he was right) that the disappearance of the tyrant opens a new page in the history of his country.

Through a friend, a shipowner in Misrata who was translating into English for me, this commander gave me the scoop on the capture: “He treated us like rats, but he was the rat, down in his sewer pipe, and it was my fighters who found him, pulled him out of his hole, and subdued him.”

To him, too, I said that this was indeed a great day, a new dawn for Libya, but that the nobility of the conqueror is measured in how he treats the vanquished. “Do you know the difference between Caesar and Saladin?” I asked him. “Caesar, conqueror of the Gauls, lost the moral benefit of his victory by humiliating Vercingétorix, showing him off like a trophy before having him strangled. The glory of Saladin, by contrast, owes much to the magnanimity that he showed the Crusaders after he had defeated them and had them at his mercy.”

The commander seemed to understand. And the officials of the NTC whom I was able to reach sounded perfectly aware that the fate of the Libyan Spring may hang on these images. El-Sagizli, in particular, the prince of the Libyan resistance fighters and the organizer of the Benghazi resistance from the first days of March, clearly shared my concern. He is among those who insisted on a formal investigation, the very existence of which proves that the Libyan authorities are not rushing to cover up this act.

Two outcomes are possible.

Either this collective crime will be, like the beheading of the last king of France in Albert Camus’s account, the founding act of the coming era, which would be a terrible sign. Or it will be the swan song of a barbarous age, the end of the Libyan night, the death rattle of Gaddafi’s system, which, before expiring, must turn against its founder and inject him with his own venom, making way for a new era that will fulfill the promises of the Arab Spring.

As I write, the latter is my ardent wish. More than that, it is my conviction.

Me:

… I don’t buy it. I may be an incurable romantic, or what amounts to the same thing, an unreconstructed opponent of the absolute evil that I believe the death penalty to be. There is, in the spectacle of Gaddafi’s lynching, something revolting. Worse, I fear that it will pollute the essential morality of an insurrection that had been, up to that point, almost exemplary. And anyone who knows something about revolutionary history knows that this could be the tipping point at which a democratic uprising begins to degenerate into its opposite…

… but that the nobility of the conqueror is measured in how he treats the vanquished…

I read Levy’s short bit in Newsweek even before I noted that Arnon had, helpfully here, linked to it. The piece is very Levyesque, hallucinatory (some may call it impassioned) prose driving to exclamatory conclusions.

In the bits that I quoted I tried to locate Levy’s starting point. That point seems to be his opposition to the death penalty. And that point is added to do by the savagery in the treatment of Kadaffy culminating in his execution. A consequence of Levy’s starting point is, it logically seems, his presumable opposition to the execution of Kadaffy even had he gotten some legal process. (And on that same starting point I surmise Levy stood against Saddam Hussein’s execution, but I don’t know.)

While I join with Levy in finding something pitiable in the kicking, stomping, punching out and brutal manhandling savagery attending a shot, bleeding and dishevilled Kadaffy, I disagree with what I take to be Levy's opposition to any execution of Kadaffy. Not to turn the issue into whether capital punishment, but the retributive justification for it in domestic criminal law, itself undermined by the possibility and reality of sentencing error, can here be detached from that domestic setting to be so powerful so as to make anything but a death sentence incredibly counter intuitive. I think, if I’m right from in what I extrapolate to be Levy’s position, he would be dead, and, ironically, inhumanely, wrong to oppose Kadaffy’s execution, after process, on the basis of the consistent application of his, Levy’s, principles.

The other problem I have with Levy’s piece is his either/or assertion that, as he puts it, “Two outcomes are possible.” I find his way of looking at the future regime being so umbilically tied to the manner of Kadaffy’s final hours to be way too binary and way too emphasizing of the significance of the manner of Kadaffy’s death. Does the manner of his death warn as to ominous possibilities, as if a possible harbinger of them? Surely. But will the nature of the regime to come be necessarily informed by Kadaffy’s death? Not necessarily at all, I’d argue. Too many things can over time render Levy's stark over general alternatives absurd in their exclusion of possibilities.

These points raise problems I typically have with Levy apart from his exclamatory, declamatory style: the unflinching application of principle where context and circumstances argue persuasively otherwise; and consistent with that his typical posing of middle excluding alternatives.

A Note To A Friend On The Brothers Karamazov

2011-10-22T15:21:00.000-07:00

So I'm up to just before Dmitri's trial. And I'm working on a theory as I try to think the novel through while I read it almost breathlessly. I suspect, I don't know, that the reader is never given to know whether Dmitri actually murdered Fyodor. Please don't tell me if my suspicion is right or wrong because (1) I don't want the suspense wrecked; and (2) my embryonic theory doesn't depend on it, nor do I suspect does the novel's ultimate theme or meaning.

It's along these lines:

Ilusha's heart breaking sickness and death is inextricably morally tied to (not as such caused by) Dmitri in his degenerate, heedless dissipation pulling Ilusha's father out of the tavern by his beard ("Wisp of Tow") and beating him mercilessly in front of Ilusha, marking Ilusha indelibly and painfully with the beating's terrible memory.

So Dimitri is on trial metaphysically, as well as strict criminally, being called to account for all the wrongs he has done encapsulated by the beating of Ilusha's father and the virtual beating of Ilusha, the sheer breaking of his innocence. Grushenka says to Dmitri, "You are innocent, though you've been your own undoing." Part 3, Book IX, Chapter 9.

That such a trial is going on at least at two levels--the immediate criminal trial for parricide, and the sort of cosmic reckoning--is part of an incredibly fluid and complicated interplay by way of collision and dialectical merging and separating of all levels of meaning and facets of existence, including philosophical, religious and divine, moral, social (including all forms of human exchange including sexual and soulful), political and psychologically particular, as men and women conceive them, are informed by them, act on them, embody them and are conflicted by them within themselves and by the the complicated rush of circumstances attending them.

This is the rough shape my theory is taking, evolving as I read on, another 155 pages to go to reach page the last, 701.

The Idea Of Form As An Idea In Art: Adapted From The Meaning Of A Literary Idea, By Lionel Trilling

2011-10-22T13:49:00.000-07:00

Analysis (not mine) as poetry and as the essence of the meaning of poetry, i.e. what poetry is, albeit with some editing of the analysis by me:

The Idea Of Form As An Idea

Thus it can be said
the very form
of a literary work
is itself an idea.
Dialectic:
a developing series
of several stages,
the propriety,
the relevance,
of their
connections
among themselves:
we make judgments
of the implied purpose.

Dialectic is form in art
leading the mind
to some conclusion,
conducting the mind,
inevitably.

The form of drama
is itself an idea.
The form of the drama
is its idea.
And its idea
is its form.

Literature and Morality

2011-10-17T16:16:00.001-07:00

Response to something written by a friend:

...I enjoyed reading your essay. It covers a lot of ground and is taxonomically useful. The heart of the essay to my mind, where you get most serious and interesting, is your dealing with “Liberal Moralism,” which also happens to pertain to Trilling. That’s what I’ll comment on though of course there’s lots to say on other parts of your essay.

I’d note though before commenting on that part that the distinction between “aestheticism” and “moralism” seems an exercise in futility. Some may argue as do Pater or less gloriously George Moore; and some may argue as do the “Critical Roundheads.” But why should we care? At their extreme, which is your opening characterization of them, they are middle-excluding and time wasting positions for any practical consideration of the issues Liberal Moralism addresses.

One of the problems with your essay is that you don’t distinguish sufficiently among different arts or within different arts. That said, I’ll confine most of my comments to the novel.

In contrast with the extreme positions you sketch, each excluding the other by definition, you note that most moralist critics “…accept that there is an irreducible aesthetic element in all art.” (That sounds like a truism.) But, as you note, they deny aesthetic autonomy, which you qualify to mean that artistic (or aesthetic) value depends on “moral value.” You don’t define what “moral value” means.

For this I’d go back to your opening discussion of the non-distinction between aesthetic effects and moral and cognitive effects, rightly seeing the latter within the aesthetic and within the direct effects of art. What I’d emphasize though is (using your word) the primacy of art as irreducibly aesthetic or artistic, which is to say, the moral dimension and cognitive dimension of a work must be seen—in being critically responsive—as an integral part of the artistry of a work, not something to be detached and then discussed, that detachment inveighed against by Susan Sontag in Against Interpretation.

In these terms "moral" in a novel is, I’d argue, coterminus with theme, and theme has no meaning save for how it arises from form or style. For form and content are, ultimately, intrinsically related ways of speaking about the same thing—the work as a whole, whether seen as process or as product.

Thinking about the novel this way makes irrelevant the a priori argument in favour of “the primacy of the moral”--that being the primacy of the moral in considering courses of action. The question of primacy here is a non question, for critics are right to focus responsively on any aspect of the novel they choose, whether it be the symbolism and imagery of the river in Huckleberry Finn, its themes, the critical problem of its ending or anything else that it or any book properly gives rise to.

And, too, thinking about the novel this way displaces any thought that its artistry or aesthetic value depends on its moral content—a thought you say is common to all liberal moralists. Really, on reflection, it’s the other way around. The resonance and power of a novel’s view of the world—which is theme, properly understood—emerge from its formal artistry, and is, as I say, ultimately and conceptually indivisible from that artistry. So if the liberal moralists say what you say they say, then I say they don’t understand the art of the novel.

I’ll conclude this note with a comment about what you call, inconsistently, at the end of Part VI and the beginning of Part VII both the intrinsic nature of art and the intrinsic values of art. I say “inconsistently” because nature and values are conceptually separable. Regardless, you get into interesting territory in summarizing the moral impact of art. I note though that there is some slippage in that summary given your categories because about half of that summarized impact is psychological and cognitive and not moral—“the psychological effects of…”—the other half being the promotion of imaginative sympathy.

Again, regardless, I accept the first half and have doubts about the second, based on my own experience and not being familiar with “the literature” on art's moral impact. I, a more than average reader, am not a whit more empathetic because of it. My wife, who reads considerably less than I, is infinitely more compassionate and empathetic than I. There is no line that I can draw around people I know who are quantitatively above average readers, cordoning them off for their heightened sense of compassion and empathy. So I reject that putative moral benefit.

And, finally, finally, what “serious positive moral impact” does seeing a tragedy produce other than that which is affective? Naturally we are moved more by tragedy because of its very nature; that its impact is great is a truism. But against that the whole idea of catharsis on experiencing tragedy in art is a superimposition and if a true effect, which I doubt, then certainly not a universal one. And, certainly, the idea of catharsis doesn't lend itself either to description of, or prescription for, the nature of tragic drama .

We are in some sense better for having seen, experienced, tragic drama, but no more than for seeing, experiencing, the paintings of Modigliani. But, no, we are not better morally for either of those experiences though some feel the need to think they are. I say to be better morally we need more than to have our consciousnesses heightened, though that is no small thing. We would need to be moved by what we experience to do good works for art to be morally beneficent. Otherwise, “moral impact” is a high falutin self-flattery for those who would see themselves so morally bettered.

Thoughts on Lionel Trilling's Essay Freud and Literature as Appears in The Liberal Imagination

2011-10-16T16:22:00.000-07:00

Me to a friend:

Okay, I just finished Trilling's essay. And I had a roller coaster of responses to it.

I've already said what I thought as to the beginning of its Part 1.

Trilling then he descends into intellectual history to try to paint the canvas of the times' ideas to give the intellectual context Freud operated within. I don't think that takes him very far and I don't find his foray particularly illuminating, mostly a lot of academic jibber jabber.

I liked his Part 11. He makes clarifying remarks in rescuing Freud from those who see him as a champion of the dark side. He helpfully stresses Freud's rationalism and his humane commitments. He is helpful in his discussion on Freud's views of art and is rightly critical of them and notes how his views of art, as part of his theory, serve to limit their serviceability to literature.

He also is good on showing how his psychoanalytic practice, with its own broad and clinically specific division between reality and illusion, is an important source for Freud's wrong-headed notions about art. And Trilling is good under this head stating the obvious contrast between (a) dreams and neuroses and (b) literary texts, an obvious contrast that Freud more or less conflates in his erroneous views on art.

I also liked Part 111. Trilling demolishes, using the example of Hamlet, the delusion shared by Freud and Jones that by events they believed to be true in Shakespeare's life they have penetrated its and his deepest meanings, which is to say, the deepest meaning of the play and Shakespeare's psyche. (Freud's absurdity here is also evident in case study monograph of da Vinci's life and his art.)

So far so good, more or less: but then we get to Part 1V where Trilling tries to make his case for the valuable applicability of Freud to literature. And in my judgment, given how he argues his case, he fails for the very reason, I'd argue, originally stated by me. The shoring of Trilling’s case depends on the acceptance of the malarkey of Freud's "systematic account of the human mind." I say Trilling's case is as weak as the charge that Freud's account is malarkey is strong.

That's my position and I'm sticking to it till I'm persuaded otherwise by my betters.

"The Middle East Today: Ha, Ha, Ha! Stop! It’s Too Funny! I Can’t Take It Any More!"

2011-10-16T11:58:00.000-07:00

By Barry Rubin/Pyjamas Media/October 15, 2011

There’s a saying that goes something like this: When things are bad, a Jew cries. When they get even worse, a Jew cries more. And when they even get worse, a Jew laughs. As indelicate as this may seem, the current situation makes me want to laugh.

That’s so because things are more ridiculous than they are scary. As the advice and claims of others get increasingly absurd, you have no desire to listen to them. You just have to do what you know is right and stop having any doubts about it precisely because the arguments on the other side are just so historically inaccurate, factually false,.and illogical.

For those joining the story late–a group that seems to include Western politicians, media and academic “experts”–here’s a little background. In 1993, Israel made an agreement with the PLO to try to achieve peace. It turned over the Gaza Strip and much of the West Bank to a Palestinian government. Israel accepted the establishment of large security forces, the supply of guns, and the transfer of billions of dollars of aid.

Israel made major offers of territory and concessions to Syria and the Palestinian Authority in 2000, after almost a decade of negotiation. The other side rejected those compromise solutions. The Palestinian leadership instead launched a five-year-long war of terrorism. They lost. Then Israel was attacked by Hizballah. The world intervened and made promises to Israel. These were broken. Then Israel was attacked by Hamas. It defended itself. Again it won, but the world rushed in to save Hamas and to condemn Israel.

Of course, you can say that Israel did mean things and didn’t keep every commitment it made. Yet any balanced and honest assessment has to acknowledge the basic accuracy of the preceding summary. And any that doesn’t is basically worthless as a guide to policy or education.

Now, what are the latest developments? Well, let’s see:

–Turkey’s government has gone beserk (in fact, a product of its Islamism and a celebration of breaking the armed forces that posed the last barrier to their total control of the country) and has started acting as if it is at war with Israel. There is a real possibility that Turkish naval vessels will escort ships organized by terrorist groups to violate a legal blockade to strengthen a regime in the Gaza Strip that openly talks about killing all of the world’s Jews. That government, behaving as if it is at war with Israel, is simultaneously being used by the U.S. government to help direct Syria’s future and lead its main new counterterrorism project.

Feel the chuckles coming on yet?

–The Palestinian Authority, allied with the aforementioned antisemitic, genocidal Hamas, violates all of the agreements it made during the last 18 years—after refusing to negotiate for 2 years—by seeking unilateral independence in the UN. This would mean it will never have to negotiate with Israel or compromise in any way. Thus, this stratagem will kill any chance of negotiations.

Nevertheless, countries are lining up to vote in favor of this proposal. It’s the ultimate embodiment of “social justice” and endless entitlements. The Palestinians “deserve” a state and don’t have to do anything at all to obtain one except to demand it.

–Egypt’s revolution is baying for Israel’s blood. Palestinian-Egyptian terrorists cross Israel’s border and kill Israeli civilians; a mob attacks the Israeli embassy as the authorities stand by and do nothing. Hysteria returns to the country as if the Camp David peace agreement never happened. The Muslim Brotherhood—which we were told is weak and not Islamist—is now heading toward either a takeover or at least becoming the country’s most powerful force.

–What is the reaction in much of the Media, Universities, and Governments? Let’s use the appropriate acronym for this trio—MUG. Guess who is getting mugged?

Let me limit myself to one example of the genre. The former failed and minor Jewish organizational politician Seymour Reich writes in the NewYork Times:

“Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gained nothing—except placating his right-wing coalition — by rebuffing President Obama’s proposal in May for negotiating Israeli-Palestinian borders based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, although some reports indicated that he may have later softened his stand.”

This is an amazing paragraph, if only for the fact that Reich attacks Netanyahu for taking a position that Reich admits he didn’t actually take! And after many occasions on which Netanyahu did precisely what Reich wants failed. Of course, there’s no mention about years of Palestinian intransigence or of the previous risks and concessions made by Israel and even by Netanyahu.

I do not mean this as a direct reference to Mr. Reich but as an observation to the current institutional set-up. In Biblical times, one sold out for a bowl of stew (“mess of pottage”) while today one does so for a New York Times op ed piece, or perhaps a tenured professorship, or admiring media coverage of oneself. Christians speak of “the wages of sin.” Well, those salaries are at all-time highs, with great fringe benefits, and extremely low unemployment.

Reich continues. “Mr. Netanyahu must step back from the brink. He should cast aside his far-right coalition members, form a government with moderate parties and add a freeze on settlement construction to an offer to negotiate without preconditions. This would demonstrate seriousness.”

Why does Israel or Netanyahu need to show at this date that they are serious? Doesn’t the virtually daily efforts of Netanyahu to restart negotiations show seriousness? The nine-month-long settlement freeze? The quick acceptance of Obama’s proposal for a summit conference at the end of 2009?

I will pay no more attention to these people. They are not serious. They are deaf to what we say and blind to what we do. They are not dealing with reality. As our next-door neighbors say: Let them go drink the Nile!

They only have one note: It’s all Israel’ fault! If it only had offered more and accepted a Palestinian state everything would be fine. If it gave everything and demanded nothing—since the PA is unwilling to make any concession—then everything would be fine.

As to everything else in the region from Palestinian intransigence to the alliance with Hamas to events in Egypt and Turkey, there only response is to say that it’s not really happening! The Muslim Brotherhood was real sorry about the attack on the embassy (then how come it endorsed the assault?) The moderate secularists will win everywhere. Turkey is just miffed that Israel didn’t capitulate totally.

Israel is isolated! So rather than be isolated it should make every concession demanded of it? And then everyone will love it and give up the war against it.

The fact that this is what we have been told repeatedly and it hasn’t happened means nothing! Oh, no. This time, once Israel goes back to the pre-1967 borders, recognizes the Fatah-Hamas regime, and doesn’t make trouble over little things like the Palestinians refusing to end the conflict even under those conditions; the military build-up in Palestine; and the demand that a few million Palestinians can come live in Israel then everything will really be great!

Are we supposed to take this seriously? Starting to understand why I’m laughing?

Let me take one example out of hundreds to show the absurdity of the situation. The sufferings of which Palestinians so upsets and animates Egyptians, Turks, and the Western left? Those in the Gaza Strip. What is the strategy of the Gaza Strip’s government? Kill the Jews. It is more openly radical than the policy of the PLO in the 1960s and1970s. How many Israeli soldiers and settlements are in the Gaza Strip? Zero. How many rockets from the Gaza Strip are in Israel? Thousands! So this is why I’m laughing.

First, the claims, arguments, and demands being made against Israel are ridiculous.

Second, they have become so ridiculous that maybe people should start to notice.

Third, since there is no alternative in the face of this nonsense, we know that our course is a correct one. We know that more risks, concessions, and apologies will have no positive effect for Israel’s interests or security. We know that courting death and disaster will not even win applause or sympathy.

Please listen very carefully and I will put the following conclusions in boldface:

The Palestinians and Arab regimes have given us no reason to believe that more concessions and risks will bring us any closer to a stable and secure peace. They have given us every reason to believe that they will quickly forget what Israel has done and go back to their default goal of wiping Israel off the map.

The Western democracies have given us no reason to believe that more concessions and risks will bring us greater support and more help from them if and when those actions backfire against Israel. They have given us every reason to believe that they will quickly forget what Israel has done and go back to their default position that it is all Israel’s fault

Today, Israel gives up south Lebanon, the Gaza Strip, the Sinai, and most of the West Bank as well as offering all of the Golan Heights to Syria. Tomorrow they will say that Israel has done nothing. The radicals claim that Israel does not want peace; the relative moderates that Israel hasn’t shown that it wants peace.

Consequently, with full good conscience, we can justify our laughter on pragmatic realpolitik or on spiritual terms. Regarding the former, an idiotic analysis fails; the truth comes out; those who follow foolish policies fall.

And for those of you who are spiritually inclined: “The wicked plot against the righteous, and threatens him with his teeth. The Lord doth laugh at him; for He sees that his day is coming.” –Psalm

Note to a Friend on Trilling, James, Freud and Dwight MacDonald

2011-10-16T08:06:00.000-07:00

...I got ahead of myself. I finished Trilling's essay on The Princess Casamassima before really getting into the novel, which I will read. The essay is superb; but my problem is me having it read it in that vacuum. There would be no gainsaying the fineness of the essay by dissenting from Trilling's interpretation of course; and even without having read the novel, I have sort of instinctive doubts about Hyacinth Robinson's suicide being an act of heroic sacrifice, as Trilling puts it, transcending the nature of civilized life by his consciousness. I must of course read the book.

One question for you: at the end of his essay Trilling uses the phrase a lot "moral realism." It's not clear to me what he means by it. The best I can make out is that it means James has a compassionate understanding and feeling for his characters and presents them in the fullness of their own complexities. On that understanding, the phrase does not refer to doing a certain kind of good works or standing for such and such set of values; rather James's authorial integrity is the "moral" part of his realism, the way as, Trilling puts it, borrowing from Marianne Moore, James gets the "toad of fact" into the garden of the imagination.

I have started reading Trilling's essay Freud and Literature and in that one the genteel professor has gotten off to a bad start to my mind--I'm only a few pages in--by putting Freud's alleged "systematic account of the human mind"--now so discredited--on a pedestal with literature for understanding man. This kind of thing is embarrassing to read and how inapt is the comparison, even with Freud's "science" not having been discredited.

Literature, after all, as Trilling centrally argues, is of variousness, complexity and irresolution, the "secret" source of which is man's nature. Freud is intellectually totalitarian, neurotically (I understand the seeming mild irony in using the word) reductive, generating complication from an irreducible (reified) model of how the mind works, his literary disciples then conflating that complication with literature's complexity. Literature predominately speaks to no such irreducible "secret" causes.

The true comparison is not Freudian thought to literature but rather to post modernism, which, in its application to literature, presupposes hidden totalitarian human mechanisms as the fount of all human behaviour as reflected in texts, textual surface on analysis betraying tensions and fissures leading inexorably back to first causes—hence the need to deconstruct. This is so at odds with Trilling's literary criticism as a humane project.

Finally, I ordered, got and started reading Dwight MacDonald's essays in Against The Grain, also edited by Louis Menand. Of course MacDonald has powerful insights but he sounds quaint to my 2011 sense of things, his categories so unnecessarily rigid...

Note To A Friend On The Brothers Karamazov

2011-10-15T19:35:00.000-07:00

...I hope you don't mind my occasional comment.

This novel is knocking me out even as I read it slowly at 20-40 pages a day. I'm slightly south of mid way through. I don't have many outlets for my enthusiasm.

I only wanted to note what an absolutely amazing, psychologically fluid scene it is when Ratikin takes Alyosha to meet with Grushenka just after Alyosha virtually runs from the monastery on the satisfied reaction of so many monks to Father Zossima's premature decomposition.

The constant shifts in her attitudes and behaviour, the mixture in Alyosha of spiritual and sexual arousal, the dissing of Ratikin, the tension of whether she'll go back to the officer who used her four years before are all something else.

And that shape shifting narrator, sometimes omniscient, sometimes at the limit of what he knows, and sometimes like a Greek chorus, the voice and sensibility of the community--I really have never read anything like this novel even though I've read Crime and Punishment.

Anyway thanks for lending me your ear, which I hope I repay you with a smidge of interest...

A Few Brief Thoughts On The Middle East

2011-10-15T06:56:00.000-07:00

I have always liked Netanyahu and haven't understood American Jews' animosity toward him, including some of my friends who are strongly pro Israel. I had dinner with a couple of them last night and couldn't get a clear answer that I understood as justifying their particular venom.

As for the settlements in the West Bank, I have generally followed the politically correct party line that they're a "mistake." But I have changed my mind about that in some ways.

First, I have come to the conclusion that regardless of what the U.N. resolves endlessly, it's not clear that the settlements are illegal. And my basis for thinking that is the very language in S.C. Res. 242.

Second, given legal unclarity, there's somethinng to be said for creating facts on the ground in the face of the heart of the entire problem--Arab intransigence. Facts on the ground, after all, whatever else they may be, are facts on the ground. Arab intransigence cannot, should not and does not go on with impunity, without consequence.

Third, if Israel completes its wall/fence and cedes the rest of the West Bank, while maintaining a watchful military presence, that sounds like the makings of a good unilateral solution until real peace comes around and stands to avoid the demographic, economic and political problems that continued unfettered occupation bring.

Finally, Netanyahu and Israeli policy, including its settlement policy, reflect the will of its citizenry. It is a citizenry that has lusted after peace and was willing to take risks and compromises to get it--Olmert's last offer to Abbas, for instance--but continuous rejection has led the country to see these matters as she now see them.

And who living abroad, with no harm beckoning them, can really be so quick to condemn what Israelis feel about where they now are?

A Few Thoughts On Louis Menand's Introduction To The Liberal Imagination

2011-10-14T21:45:00.000-07:00

1. Pay attention to the assumptions and unsystematic thoughts of most people, their attitudes and assumptions, their customs and manners. They require and repay critical attention. Okay. I guess that's what sociologists and social psychologists do. What's so profound about Trilling thinking so?

2. All liberals of whatever stripe from Hayekian to progressives have in common a belief in human perfectibility and in a kind of straight line to human happiness. Against that Trilling educates us in the truth that life is rife with evil, unfairness, tragic conflict, yadda yadda yadda and that these are the stuff of literature. The first part of this is a moronic characterization, ie Trilling's not Menand's, and the second is a yawn inducing bromide.

3. The function of criticism is to identify "hygienic" works of literature and unhealthy ones and explain why they lead to good or bad political consequences. "Dreiser and James: with that juxtaposition we are immediately at the dark and bloody crossroads where literature and politics meets...The liberal judgment of Dreiser and James goes back to politics goes back to the cultural assumptions that makes politics." Menand says, "it makes it seem as though a lot is at stake in getting books right. It assigns literary criticism a mission."

I don't think there is anything I agree with here. I don't understand tracing political consequences as having anything to do with literary criticism. I don't think judging, say, Dreiser or James need have anything to do with politics or where literature and politics meet. How do they meet? James said, give the artist his idea, grant him that and then assess him. Trilling seems to be saying either the opposite or something distinctly different. James was right, Trilling wrong in this. Finally, Trilling was overwrought in thinking that critics are manning a kind of barricades in keeping culture and society in tact by their evaluations.

4. Trilling says there is no stable point outside a culture from which to critique it. Culture needs the adversarial and subversive and these are built into a culture, of its nature, and therefore created by it. Culture cannot survive with them. So Trilling came to look at culture the way anthropologists do. If I understand this, I don’t see what so looking at culture has to do with literary criticism. Plus in looking at culture anthropologically isn't Trilling exactly looking at it from a stable point outside it?

5. Finally, Menand notes Trilling fretted over the pernicious uses literature might be put to, say--Trilling’s example--Laurentian sexual radicalism. It seems to me Trilling needn’t have worried. Literature doesn’t operate like that particularly in liberal societies.

The Grand Inquisitor

2011-10-14T11:06:00.000-07:00

I just finished The Grand Inquisitor and have the seedlings of a theory about it that will need me finishing the whole 701 pages to finally work out. But the start of it is along these lines: Ivan seems the archetypal rootless intellectual who argues often, maybe always, reflexively, which is to say, just for the sake of arguing, who takes positions he disbelieves and makes cases for them for intellectual sport. He longs for human connection but his cynicism and restless intellectuality obstruct that.

So (at least) a few things are going on when he tells Alyosha his long, brooding prose poem: he longs to make a human connection with his brother as exemplified by the kiss Christ returned in the end lays on the Inquisitor and the kiss Alyosha lays on him; he longs to shock Alyosha out of his (to Ivan) religious naiveté and to reclaim him from Father Zossima by his extended argument from suffering, in which he catalogues the terrible victimizations of children; he also engages in his usual intellectual sport making a shocking case for the devil just because he can and it pleases him to.

My embryonic theory has it that we are not really meant to engage this case for the devil seriously (though we are meant to confront the reality of suffering and evil.). We are rather meant to see Ivan's prose poem more as a function of his complex character both in itself and as he displays himself in his relations with his brothers and his father.

After all, he thinks to himself, at the beginning of Book V Chapter 6, "...For so many years I've been silent with the whole world and have not deigned to speak, and all of a sudden I reel off a rigmarole like that."

Into the Fray: Reassessing ‘Root Causes’ and ‘Red Herrings’: Whither Israel and the Palestinians

2011-10-10T07:54:00.000-07:00

By MARTIN SHERMAN /10/07/2011/Jersualem Post

In the face of mounting international pressure, Israel cannot afford to lose sight of what the conflict is really about.
Talkbacks (53)
We shall not enter Palestine with its soil covered in sand, we shall enter it with its soil saturated in blood.

– Gamal Abdel Nasser, president of Egypt, March 8, 1965

This chilling declaration of genocidal intent by the leader of the largest Arab nation, over two years before any Israeli presence in the “occupied territories,” was not an isolated aberration.

Quite the contrary, it was typical of a pervasive Judeo-phobic frenzy that prevailed throughout the Arab world, well before the notions of “occupation” and “settlements” — the current buzzwords for rallying anti-Israeli sentiment — had any meaning.

Recalling recalcitrant realities

Thus on May 18, 1967, following the withdrawal of the UN peacekeeping forces in Sinai, in compliance with Egyptian demands, the Cairo-based radio station Voice of the Arabs blared:

“As of today, there no longer exists an international emergency force to protect Israel. We shall exercise patience no more.... The sole method we shall apply against Israel is total war, which will result in the extermination of Zionist existence.”

Two days later, Gen. Hafez Assad, then-Syrian minister of defense, and later president, boasted: “Our forces are now entirely ready.... The time has come to enter a battle of annihilation.”

On May 27, Nasser reiterated his murderous goal: “Our basic objective will be the destruction of Israel. The Arab people want to fight.”

And four days before the outbreak of war, on June 1, Iraqi President Abdul Rahman Ali — later assassinated by Saddam Hussein — threatened:

“The existence of Israel is an error which must be rectified... Our goal is clear – to wipe Israel off the map.”

The Jordanian factor and the Palestinian element

The mood on the Jordanian front and among the Palestinians, together with their Arab “patrons,” was strikingly similar.

Nasser on November 18, 1965: “Our aim is the full restoration of the rights of the Palestinian people. In other words, we aim at the destruction of the State of Israel. The immediate aim: perfection of Arab military might. The national aim: the eradication of Israel.”

Jordan’s King Hussein, apparently impressed by this bluster, entered into a military pact with Egypt on May 30, 1967 — despite bitter acrimony between Nasser and himself. He declared:

“All of the Arab armies now surround Israel. The UAR [Egypt], Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Yemen, Lebanon, Algeria, Sudan and Kuwait.... There is no difference between one Arab people and another, no difference between one Arab army and another.”

At the time, the entire “West Bank” and Gaza, territories now claimed for the establishment of a Palestinian state as the alleged sine non qua for peace — were under Arab control. Nasser ruled Gaza, Hussein the “West Bank.” Yet neither undertook the slightest initiative to initiate any self-governing Palestinian entity in these territories.

(What is even more astounding, as we shall see later, is that the Palestinians themselves eschewed any aspirations of sovereignty over the “West Bank” and Gaza, which seem to have been totally irrelevant to “full restoration of the rights of the Palestinian people” in the eyes of both the Palestinians and of the wider Arab world — MS.)

The rhetoric from Palestinian leaders was no less bellicose.

On May 27, Ahmad Shukeiri, Yasser Arafat’s predecessor as chairman of the PLO, gloated:

“D Day is approaching. The Arabs have waited 19 years for this and will not flinch from the war of liberation.”

And a few days later, on June 1, in a somewhat premature flush of triumph, he crowed:

“This is a fight for the homeland – it is either us or the Israelis. There is no middle road. The Jews of Palestine will have to leave. We will facilitate their departure to their former homes. Any of the old Palestine Jewish population who survive may stay, but it is my impression that none of them will survive.... We shall destroy Israel and its inhabitants and as for the survivors — if there are any — the boats are ready to deport them.”

As the Arab armies massed against it, Israel began to brace itself for the coming war — preparing mass graves in Tel Aviv and other cities in anticipation of heavy civilian causalities.

‘Liberation’ equals ‘annihilation’

Shukeiri’s use of the words “liberation” and “homeland” is revealing. They clearly did not apply to the “West Bank” or the Gaza Strip, since both were under Arab rule and certainly not considered the “homeland” towards which Palestinian “liberation” efforts were directed.

The true significance of these terms emerges with stark clarity from the text of the original version of the Palestinian National Charter — formulated in 1964.

Article 16 states: “The liberation of Palestine... [is] necessitated by the demands of selfdefense” and “the Palestinian people look forward to [international] support... in restoring the legitimate situation to Palestine... and enabling its people to exercise national sovereignty and freedom.”

But Article 24 stipulates precisely what is not included in the “homeland” of “Palestine” and where sovereignty is not to be exercised. Indeed, it unequivocally forswears Palestinian claims to “any territorial sovereignty over the West Bank in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and Gaza.”

It is difficult to imagine a more authoritative source for exposing as bogus the Palestinian claim that the “West Bank” and Gaza comprise their “ancient homeland.”

Indeed, even within the pre-1967 lines, long before the alleged “root causes of the conflict” — “occupation” and “settlements” — were part of the discourse, much less facts on the ground, Israel was condemned as a colonial, fascist, expansionist power.

According to Article 19: “Zionism is a colonialist movement in its inception, aggressive and expansionist in its goal, racist in its configurations, and fascist in its means and aims. Israel, in its capacity as the spearhead of this destructive movement and as the pillar of colonialism, is a permanent source of tension and turmoil in the Middle East.”

The implication is clear. To remove enduring “tension and turmoil” in the region, their “source” — Israel — must be removed.

Accordingly, we must conclude that the only conceivable “plain-English” translation for the ‘liberation of the homeland” must be the “annihilation of Israel.”

Hatred frozen in time

The 1964 Palestinian National Covenant was replaced by a 1968 version, which in the guise of “the liberation of Palestine,” continued to advocate the destruction of Israel as a necessary precursor for Mideast peace — now in blatantly explicit terms.

Article 22 states that the “liberation of Palestine will destroy the Zionist and imperialist presence and will contribute to the establishment of peace in the Middle East.”

Any thoughts that the reference was now to the post-1967 “occupied territories” is quickly dispelled by Article 19, which declares: “The partition of Palestine in 1947, and the establishment of the state of Israel are entirely illegal, regardless of the passage of time...”

Article 20 delves even further back into history — to 1917 — to deny the validity of Jewish statehood in any portion of the Holy Land:

“The Balfour Declaration, the Palestine Mandate System, and all that has been based on them are considered null and void. The claims of historic and spiritual ties between Jews and Palestine are not in agreement with the facts of history and the conception of what constitutes statehood.”

This implacable repudiation cannot be ascribed to wrath induced by post-1967 Israeli occupation. They echo — almost verbatim — those articulated in Articles 17 and 18 of the pre-occupation 1964 Covenant, underscoring the unbroken persistence of the Palestinians enmity towards Israel — regardless of any temporal or territorial parameters.

From Shukeiri to Abbas

This provides the conceptual context for the indefatigable refusal of the allegedly moderate Fatah leader, Mahmoud Abbas, to acknowledge that Israel is the nation-state of the Jews. After all, he is merely being faithful to his National Covenant (both original and current) according to which “Jews do not constitute a single nation with an identity of their own,” and the establishment of Israel comprises a “violation of the basic principles embodied in the Charter of the United Nations.”

Both versions of the Covenant are posted on the Palestinian Permanent UN Observer website. This is an outrage of epic proportions, for despite a promise to president Bill Clinton and a vague letter that certain — unspecified — articles have been abrogated, the Covenant has not been formally changed or redrafted. Indeed, to fulfill the pledge to Clinton, 28 of the 33 articles would have to be annulled or amended.

It is therefore brazen gall on the part of the Palestinians to aspire to UN membership while flaunting documents that denounce the 60- year-old membership of another nation as a “violation of the basic principles... of the United Nations — and scandalous misrepresentation on the part of Clinton to charge, as he recently did, that it was Binyamin Netanyahu who “... killed the peace process.”

Thus, Israel would be sadly remiss not to perceive Abbas, the current chairman of the PLO, as adhering to the principles laid down by Shukeiri, the first chairman of the PLO, who drafted the original National Covenant.

This was rather starkly illustrated at the recent UN General Assembly session when Abbas, theatrically, exclaimed: “After 63 years of suffering: enough, enough, enough.”

How reminiscent this was of Shukeiri’s 1964 declaration, 47 years earlier at the first session of Palestinian National Council, that “Palestinians had experienced 16 years’ misery.”

Hmmm. 16 + 47 = 63 years! Thus both past and present PLO chairmen steadfastly condemn the birth of Israel — not the “occupation” – as the “original sin” that is exclusively to blame for Palestinian “suffering”/”misery.” Certainly can’t fault them for inconsistency!

“The Arabs are the same Arabs...”

So one might be forgiven for conceding that Yitzhak Shamir might just have had a point when he cautioned that “the Arabs are the same Arabs, and the sea is the same sea.”

Indeed there are those who might see corroboration for this abrasive assessment in the fact that the allegedly “pragmatic” Fatah movement (established in 1959) found no need to amend its constitution (also formulated in 1964 but not to be confused with the Palestinian National Covenant) at its 2009 Convention in Bethlehem.

This constitution specifies the “goal” of the organization as: “Complete liberation of Palestine, and eradication of Zionist economic, political, military and cultural existence.”

It goes on to stipulate the “method” by which this “eradication” is to be effected, i.e., “armed struggle,” and emphasizes that this “is a strategy and not a tactic. [T]he Palestinian Arab People’s armed revolution is a decisive factor in the liberation fight and in uprooting the Zionist existence, and this struggle will not cease unless the Zionist state is demolished and Palestine is completely liberated.”

The Fatah emblem shows “Palestine” as extending from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

Separating ‘red herrings’ from ‘root causes’

Israel has allowed itself to be manipulated into a perilous and potentially tragic situation. To have any hope of extricating itself from this unenviable position, it must be very clear as to what this conflict is really about — and what it is not about.

It must separate the “root causes” from the “red herrings.” Mistaken diagnosis will result in mistaken policies choices which are liable to precipitate “terminal” consequences.

It is time to acknowledge the unpalatable fact that the enmity of Arabs towards the Jews and the Jewish state is:
– not about borders but about existence;
– not about what the Jewish people do but about what the Jewish people are;
– not about the Jewish state’s policies but about the Jewish state per se; and
– not about Jewish military “occupation” of Arab land but about Jewish political existence on any land.

Israel must internalize these truths and undertake a policy to convey them – with conviction and vigor — to the world. Otherwise it may well be “liberated.”