Homage to Minneapolis

 

In my last post, of some time ago, I anticipated the coming need for heroism, and that time has certainly come.

I certainly haven't shown it, but in many, many places around the country there has arisen courageous resistance--resistance to corruption, resistance to lawlessness, and, most importantly, resistance to the scapegoating of the poorest, the most helpless and most hardworking of our population.  It has now come to murder in our streets, murder abroad, and imprisonment of children in a growing system of concentration camps.  And instead of redress from those sworn to uphold justice, there has been collaboration and cover-up.

I neither need nor intend here to expand on these evils, or consider their causes or possible remedies.  That work is going full steam, and for all the horror of the past year, there is hope that this tide can be turned.

Here I simply want to recognize those who, unlike most of us, have put life and limb in jeopardy opposing the ground forces of oppression.

I remember being dismayed when I realized that the current administration would be in power on the 250th anniversary of American independence, and it has confirmed those fears by announcing cage matches on the White House lawn and the erection of what can only be called neo-fascist kitsch in our capital.  

But, on reflection, the remembrance of 1776 can only be salutary this year.  

The President famously put a copy of the Declaration of Independence in the Oval Office  last year.  When asked why, as I recall he kind of sputtered out that it was a great declaration of love--which of course it isn't.  After a ringing affirmation of human equality and fundamental rights, it gets to its business of listing those grievances against the King which justify resistance.  They sound familiar:

"He has endeavored prevent the population of these states; for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners, refusing to pass others to encourage their migration...."

"He has erected a multitude of new offices and sent swarms of new officers to harass our people and eat out their substance."

"He has kept among us in times of peace standing armies without the consent of our legislatures."

"He has...giv[en] his consent to...protecting [large bodies of armed troops,] protecting them by a mock-trial from punishment from any murders they may commit on the inhabitants of these states; for cutting off our trade with all parts of the world; for imposing taxes upon us without our consent."

"He has abdicated government here by declaring us out of his protection and waging war against us."

"A prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant is unfit to be a ruler of a free people."

So, yes, there are parallels--even to that between the bitter winter of Valley Forge and the open resistance of the people of Minneapolis in the frigid temperatures of this last winter.  So, glory to the living and the dead who would not suffer their neighbors to be grabbed, beaten, separated, abused, held in filthy cells and then transported, sick and impoverished, to parts unknown. 

Retired, but not from everything

So, as of the end of last year I am retired.  Though I don't intend to continue to practice, I thought it best to renew my law license for at least another year.

So here's the old blog, which I haven't even touched since 2023, and it's not like there's any lack of talk in the cacophony of the web.  Still....

This morning at breakfast I picked out at random a volume of Petrarch's letters and opened it to a letter to Bocaccio.  Apparently a monk of some reputation had recently died, and just before his death he made a series of prophecies and directions to various individuals.  To Bocaccio he predicted that Bocaccio would die soon and that he should give up poetry ("tibi pretorea poetice studium interdici")

To this direction Petrarch tactfully replied that though perhaps it is good for an old man not to take up letters as a new endeavor,  a long-time and practiced writer like Bocaccio, far from being vexed by a strenuous challenge in his old age, would find refreshment and delight in it, and he then went on about old men whose late writing had added to the store of human wisdom.

I am of course no Bocaccio, no Petrarch, but perhaps it's a little early to go silent, to do what More expressed a hopeless desire for, "that my whole study should be upon...mine own passage out of this world."

This world is in fact unexpectedly different from what it was only seventeen years ago when I began this blog--as am I.  But I still retain the conviction, as expressed in the opening posts, that the ideals of Christian Humanism exemplified in the work of Thomas More and Erasmus are of paramount value.

This blog in the past has not typically addressed political and social questions.  But in recent years there have arisen direct challenges to those Enlightenment values undergirding our American republic's founding and progress--tolerance, equal protection of the laws, freedom of speech, religion and  press, governance with the consent of the people and curbing the power of excessive wealth and privilege.  If these ideals were not directly advocated by More and Erasmus, they certainly can trace their lineage back to Erasmus' call for tolerance of theological differences and More's assertion in Utopia that private ownership of property is the root of unrest and injustice.

And in fact, the mainstreaming of once-fringe attacks on these values has led me, in the past year, to revisit the development of what might be called, for want of a better term, our "liberal tradition":  Hobbes and Locke in England, Montesquieu, Voltaire and Rousseau in France, Paine, Jefferson and Lincoln in America.  If nothing else, such study reminds us that intolerance, oppression, censorship and crushing inequality have been history's default.

Fascism is not the only ideology that repudiates the liberal tradition, but it is the only one which is unquestionably on the rise today--as it was a century ago in Europe and America.  Robert Paxton, arguably one of the great historians of 20th century fascism, defined it, in his 2004 Anatomy of Fascism, as"a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence, and without ethical or legal restraints, goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."  That sounds unhappily familiar.

I know that this alarm has been raised many times before.  What makes the present different?

First, in its worst decision since Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court has inexplicably held that the chief magistrate of our republic, whose whole job is to faithfully see that the laws are executed, may himself violate any and every criminal law if arguably in the course of carrying out his official duty.  Why then should we be surprised that almost his first official act has been to nullify the constitutional definition of citizenship, just a few short hours after taking a solemn oath to "preserve, protect and defend the constitution"?  That he has ordered a round-up of the poorest, most helpless of those among us, calling them criminals?  That he has not hesitated to enrich himself with his position?  Or that he has rescinded President Johnson's directive--dating from when I was thirteen years old!--that the federal government should not discriminate against the historically disadvantaged and oppressed?

The balance of power is seriously out of joint.  And if we continue much further down this road with a cowardly congressional majority and a compliant judiciary it's hard to see how our constitutional order can ever recover.

Nevertheless...I would conclude with some words from "A Man for All Seasons."  These are not Thomas More's words, but the words of the playwright, Robert Bolt, so far as I know.  But they are good words, and they suggest a way forward.

More is in prison, and his daughter Meg argues that in refusing to recognize King Henry as head of the church he thereby elects to make himself a hero.

"More" replies:

"That's very neat.  But look now....If we lived in a state where virtue was profitable, common sense would make us good, and greed would make us saintly.  And we'd live like animals or angels in the happy land that needs no heroes.  But since in fact we see that avarice, anger, envy, pride, sloth, lust and stupidity commonly profit far beyond humility, chastity, fortitude, justice and thought, and have to choose, to be human at all...why then perhaps we must stand fast a little--even at the risk of being heroes."

Bookends

Time it was

And what a time it was

It was....

Thus begin the brief lyrics for the tune bookending Simon and Garfunkle's third album.

Bookends were what the Old Friends sat on a park bench like, occasioning Paul's "How terribly strange to be seventy."

 Not there yet, but close enough to know he was right.

So, it occurred to me, in the last post, that I have increasingly been doing what there I described, re-reading something that I read when young, sometimes in the original language, and not only remembering what I had forgotten, but seeing much new in it, and bringing a new understanding to it.  Thus with Hegel's Philosophie des Weltgeschichtes, now with Heidegger's Sein und Zeit.

Please don't misunderstand--I'm still over a hundred pages from China in Hegel.  This is the usual overreach.

But, as I've noted before (see two posts on August 8, 2014 and another on March 11, 2020) Martin Heidegger was a particular interest of mine in college, having finished up a philosophy major with an "honors thesis" (a kind of lengthy undergraduate paper) comparing some of his ideas to those of the English philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead.  It's still the longest thing I've ever written.

Now the volume of Sein und Zeit I've just started I actually purchased in college before starting the honors thesis, but of course I relied almost entirely on the English translation, Being and Time, with a major assist from Michael Gelvin's A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time.

But why in heaven's name start the thing when there are so many reasons I may not want to or be able to finish it?  Partly, for me, it's a more significant "bookend" than Hegel.  And part of it is that odd dissatisfaction that this is something I've already read, already studied, but that I didn't really grasp it then, and what I did grasp I didn't really retain.   And he seems important enough to the course of my lifetime to make that effort.

Why?  Well, there is the attraction to what came to be called the existentialist tradition, conventionally attributed to the anxious cry of Kierkegaard, to the obsessions of Nietzsche, to the anguish of Unamuno, suddenly taken up analytically and set out in technical German by Heidegger--and then read backwards into Pascal, Augustine, and the psalmists.  As one who's been attracted to philosophy since I was able to ask questions it's always seemed the closest to the heart of things, not divorced from the great tradition starting with the Greeks, but presupposing it and asking, That's all very well, but what does that mean for me, for us, those of us who don't sit outside of it all, but are caught up in it, a part of it, who must live and die in it?

This is part of the paradox--all these writers who today are almost universally considered so difficult, so obscure, so elusive, are remembered because they are striving after what is arguably the  simplest, the most central, the most burning questions of the heart, all stemming from the stubborn remembrance of one's own existence.

I think of a wonderful passage from Fielding's Tom Jones.  Tom and his friend Partridge have been pressed into the English army and are marching to battle.  Tom, good-hearted and clear-eyed, exhorts Partridge to courage:  "Nothing can be more likely to happen than death to men who go into battle.  Perhaps we shall both fall in it--and what then?"  Partridge knows exactly:  "What, then? why, then there is an end of us, is there not?  when I am gone, all is over with me.  What matters the cause to me, or who gets the victory, if I am killed.  I shall never enjoy any advantage from it.  What are all the ringing of bells and bonfires to one that is six foot under ground?  there will be an end of poor Partridge."  He is perhaps not a model existentialist, but he does remember his own existence.  Tom, though he loves Partridge dearly, can't help but think of him as something of a coward.  Neither can we--but we see he has a certain point.

So, existentialism.  What else?  I have always had a certain attraction, not only to philosophy, but to Christian theology.  I don't know why; to me it's more puzzling that so many people don't.  But in looking at many of the most original twentieth century Christian theologians, the seminarian-turned-(conventional)-atheist Martin Heidegger seems to have had a decisive influence.  Bultmann knew him and corresponded with him throughout his career.  Rahner studied under him.  Tillich, like the other two, considers Heidegger the embodiment of the modern, and shapes his theology around his categories of Being and Existence.  Even Barth, whose landmark commentary on Romans was published shortly before Sein und Zeit, was so influenced by Kierkegaard that he and Heidegger come to look like intellectual cousins.

And then I guess there is the challenge.  Many not unintelligent people have waded into Sein und Zeit and found it unintelligible gibberish.  The old joke is that, before you translate it into English, you have to translate it into German.  Its hard going, and since Heidegger himself abandoned the thing before being near finished with it, there may be always the sneaking suspicion that he gave up on it as well.  ("Later Heidegger" is still a closed book to me, though I own a couple of volumes of essays that I may someday finish.)

I toyed with the idea of comparing it to Finnegans Wake, but the obscurities are really entirely different in nature.  Joyce is trying to obscure, trying to parallel the patchwork obscurity of life, of dreams, of the night.  And he loves to joke, and make puns, and use portmanteau words.  Heidegger is working as hard as he can (I am convinced) to make clear and intelligible something that is hard to express, maybe impossible, the working out of what it means to be.  Yes, I think at one point he did say something about his work being akin to a poetry of Being--but it's not.  Though Heidegger has famously pointed to Holderlin as a poet sharing his sense of Being, Der Ister does not in the least read like Sein und Zeit.

He starts off with his fundamental distinction of Sein and Seiende, of Being Itself from particular beings.  He is interested in the former, but recognizes that he can only get at it through the latter.  He wants to investigate a forgotten, pre-Socratic concern with what it means to be, and considers the focus of all Western philosophy on beings--things--or their totality--nature--not so much as misguided as premature.

Now Heidegger hardly can set out forgetting about the last 2500 years.  In fact he takes us through a brief history of our false starts, though Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Suarez, Descartes, Kant, Hegel and Bergson.  But his program is explicitly destructive, and I have just reached his exposition of the method that must be followed to make progress--phenomenology.

Oh, and before I forget, he has also identified the being, the Seiende, whose analysis will be our focus:  Dasein.  Now Dasein in German is ordinarily translated into English simply as "existence."  But Heidegger identifies it as the being which I am, which, being the same as the investigator, is the natural one to investigate.  Or something like that.  It seems a little rushed, and that fact that the being being investigated is human being seems a little, well, anthropocentric.  Yes, human being is one I'm most concerned with, but human being seems rather a small part of Being Itself, and rather peculiar, and might possibly skew our results.  No matter, that is where we will begin.

Hegel's Philosophy of World History--well, why not?

 

There's been a lot of water under the bridge, and many a time I've thought about writing here, but over the course of dismaying politics and the pandemic there seemed quite enough talk going around, and my wife and I have been largely content to keep doing the work we enjoy and be parents to our grown children and grandparents to a few new arrivals.

Completion of Girard's Je vois Satan tomber comme l'eclair led to a round of classical mythology through Apollodorus, Ovid, James Frazer, Robert Graves, ending with a quixotic and as-yet-unfulfilled determination to read Robert Calasso's Le nozze di Cadmo e Armonia in Italian.  A detour to Aesop's animal fables, in various incarnations, led to Goethe's Renard, and then to early German romantic verse:  Goethe, Schiller, Holderlin and Heine.  And having read English translations of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past and Mann's Doctor Faustus in the 1980's, I thought the time might have come to re-read them in their original languages.  Given my age and seriously undisciplined reading habits I realized I would probably never finish them, but decided I didn't care, and that in turn led me to pick any number of other things I realized I would probably never finish.

Among them was Karl Barth's commentary on St. Paul's letter to the Romans, which revealed anew how it's still possible at any age to be astounded by something not exactly new, but new to me, and the concomitant urge to read Tillich's Systematic Theology, Barth's mid-twentieth century dark twin which was, not unimportantly, the kernel of the thought that formed those who formed me among post-war mainline Protestants.

But Hegel's Philosophy of History?  It is most correct that I have done little more than knock about in Hegel's work.  I did indeed read an English version of the Philosophy of History in college.  I took a Metaphysics course which emphasized Hegel and, oddly enough, in high school I had discovered, in my attic, a box of old books, of uniform size, black covers, with stiff yellow pages, printed around 1910, and one was Hegel's Philosophy of History.  We were each supposed to choose a work of Hegel's and do a report to the class on it, and since I already owned a copy I chose the Philosophy of History.

Since that time I've taken superficial cracks at the Phenomenology of Sprit and the Science of Logic, quickly abandoned.  But a little less than ten years ago I acquired a volume from a series of lectures entitled Philosophie der Weltgeschichte and thought that I might well one day tackle it.  This set of lectures was given during the 1822/23 term at the University of Berlin, and, to the extent that I have understood the Preface, differs from later texts based on the 1830 lectures, edited after Hegel's death by his son Karl.  I am fairly certain that it was that later edition that I read back in college.

My impression is that Hegel's reputation is quite mixed, even among (perhaps I should say especially among) the educated.  His work generated an enormous reaction.  In my own reading he was, to Kierkegaard, comic, to Marx, naive and utopian, and to many simply a pompous windbag who thought he know the mind of God better than God did.  But...but...I don't know if Hegle created the post-Hegelian world or simply anticipated it.  But so much seems to flow out of the Philosophy of History I am convinced that it is worth getting to know better.

Take our politics (please).  Broadly we are Progressives or Nationalists.

Now for Hegel, as a philosopher, history is not simply a series of events, not just "one damn thing after another."  It has a meaning.  That meaning is, in a nutshell, to realize Freedom in the unfolding of Spirit's expanding wisdom.  History has, so to speak, a motor and an end.  Now I don't want to get ahead of myself, but insofar as Hegel asserts that history is necessarily unending change, that nothing persists in ist present form, that all institutions and peoples and empires pass away, all in the gradual realization of a universal, self-fulfilling, and absolute Freedom, Hegel is the father of the Progressives, what we broadly call the left, which strives for constant improvement, with constant criticism, sometimes with reform, sometimes with revolution, but, from Marxists to socialists to humble liberals, insisting on the world's imperfections, and with a firm faith that, no, the clock cannot be turned back.

But, on the other hand, in his Philosophy of History, Hegel does not describe a world of random, incremental changes. Just as the theory of natural selection produces, not a world of undifferentiated life forms, but a hierarchy of distinct species, so history, under the power of the Spirit, produces distinct peoples, nations, empires, civilizations.  And these "species" of human political and cultural forms exist in a sort of hierarchy, defined by what stage of the Spirit's development they manifest.  This cannot help but produce a ranking of higher or lower peoples, nations, empires and civilizations.  

The crudest way to illustrate this is from those who don't get beyond the table of contents.  The lectures begin with the Oriental World, then Greece and Rome, and end with the German world.  Where else have we seen the idea that the German Volk is the highest form to appear in history, the superior race?

Now that crude example is in fact unfair to Hegel, but it shows one possible reading of his concrete account of the Spirit's march through history.  China demonstrates Oriental bondage; in India the Spirit is dreaming.  The West's embodiment of the genuine progress of the Spirt accounts for the superiority of the West over the East, and over the global South.

More than that, one talks about a people's Spirit, as a real, separate reality.  It's all very well that Hegel asserts that every concrete people will decline, but, in the everyday Hegelian world, the Spirit of the Jews is essentially an oriental Spirit, alien to that of the "West," and if the Spirit of the global South is different from the Spirit defining the more advanced culture of an Anglo-Saxon America, then Jews and southern immigrants become a threat, and the only response must be culture war, to protect the nation from decadence and decline.

Hegel's reification of peoplehood, of nationhood, is, for him, simply a way of talking about the necessarily transient nature of such phenomena.  But it also anticipates and to some extent justifies the claims of nationalism, the imperative to keep a given culture "pure," the need to preserve the superiority and maintain the control of a perceived superior race, the need to wall one's people off, or to bring others, by conquest, into the hegemony of the empire, into a superior "American way of life," or, more recently, into an autonomous "Russian World."  It is not Hegel, but it is a way of thinking fostered by Hegel's judgment on civilizations, and thus for all that see the people, the culture, the nation, the empire, as the greatest value needing preservation and defense, he is, to that extent, speaking broadly, also their Father, their progenitor.

Many have noted that the philosophy of history is Hegel's more popular work, because it is his most accessible, and I can't disagree with that.  The Phenomenology and the Logic are maddingly abstract; the philosophy of history tracks the development of the Spirit, so to speak, with a series of stories.  The Spirit enfolds on stage in a play we mostly know already.

In a certain way Hegel uses history to exemplify his notion of freedom as Plato used the polis in the Republic.  There recall that Socrates was asked to define justice, and he found it was easier to change his focus from the individual to the polis, where the ideal of justice, being exemplified in classes whose virtues were wisdom, courage and temperance, could then return to the individual as individual virtues.  In much the same way Hegel writes the development of the Spirit over a large canvas, and thus makes it perhaps more accessible to those of us having difficulty with its more abstract manifestations.

Tennyson: Begin Again

I have obviously been reading some Tennyson lately.  This one, well known, seems particularly apt this year: 

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light;
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
For those that here we see no more,
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease,
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

A late notice from Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Below the thunders of the upper deep;
Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth:  faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides: above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumbered and enormous polypi
Winnow the giant fins the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages and will lie
Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by men and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die. 

My election night reading

"Chew proof" and "rip proof."

The conclusion of chapter 47 of Dicken's Bleak House

    

"Stay, Jo! What now?"

"It's time for me to go to that there berryin ground, sir," he returns with a wild look.

"Lie down, and tell me. What burying ground, Jo?"

"Where they laid him as wos wery good to me, wery good to me indeed, he wos. It's time fur me to go down to that there berryin ground, sir, and ask to be put along with him. I wants to go there and be berried. He used fur to say to me, 'I am as poor as you to-day, Jo,' he ses. I wants to tell him that I am as poor as him now and have come there to be laid along with him."

"By and by, Jo. By and by."

"Ah! P'raps they wouldn't do it if I wos to go myself. But will you promise to have me took there, sir, and laid along with him?"

"I will, indeed."

"Thankee, sir. Thankee, sir. They'll have to get the key of the gate afore they can take me in, for it's allus locked. And there's a step there, as I used for to clean with my broom. It's turned wery dark, sir. Is there any light a-comin?"

"It is coming fast, Jo."

Fast. The cart is shaken all to pieces, and the rugged road is very near its end.

"Jo, my poor fellow!"

"I hear you, sir, in the dark, but I'm a-gropin—a-gropin—let me catch hold of your hand."

"Jo, can you say what I say?"

"I'll say anythink as you say, sir, for I knows it's good."

Our Father."

"Our Father! Yes, that's wery good, sir."

"Which art in heaven."

"Art in heaven—is the light a-comin, sir?"

"It is close at hand. Hallowed be thy name!"

"Hallowed be—thy—"

The light is come upon the dark benighted way. Dead!

Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, right reverends and wrong reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day.

 

 

It's not exactly a classic. Nevertheless, you ought to read it.

In Whit Stillman's Metropolitan two of his characters, Audrey and Tom, resume an earlier discussion about Jane Austen:

"I read that Lionel Trilling essay you mentioned.  You really like Trilling?"

"Yes."

"I think he's very strange.  He says that nobody could like the heroine of Mansfield Park?  I like her.  Then he goes on and on about how we modern people of today with our modern attitudes bitterly resent Mansfield Park because its heroine is virtuous?  What's wrong with a novel having a virtuous heroine?"

"His point is that the novel's premise--that there's something immoral about a group of young people putting on a play--is simply absurd."

"You found Fanny Price unlikeable?"

"She sounds pretty unbearable, but I haven't read the book."

"What?"

"You don't have to have read a book to have an opinion on it.  I haven't read the Bible, either."

"What Jane Austen novels have you read?"

"None.  I don't read novels.  I prefer good literary criticism.  That way you get both the novelist's ideas as well as the critics' thinking."



It's hard to remember how, a couple of years ago, the political world was on the edge of its seat waiting for the release of Mr. Mueller's report.  When finished, it went first to Attorney General Barr.  After a few days with it he released his four-page "summary."  The President then spent the next few weeks proclaiming his two-word summary:  "Total exoneration!"

Finally the report, in a heavily redacted form, was released.  And then a curious thing happened:  no one read it.  OK, that's not literally true.  A few people read it.  A vanishingly small percentage of the American electorate.  And it put me in mind of Tom, for whom reading good literary criticism was sufficient to excuse him from reading novels.

Those of us who did read it found it slow-going, hundreds of pages that might have been written by Sgt. Joe Friday.  Facts, dates, places, supported by footnotes referring to documents and sworn testimony, followed by extensively-cited  legal and policy analysis, compiled by a dour, twice-decorated Marine combat veteran and lifelong Republican.

The fact that Mr. Barr and his boss are now hinting at prosecuting those whose first inquires led to the "Russia hoax" suggests that perhaps they are confident that the report's account of the shameful conduct  of the last presidential election can now be not only denied, but discredited.

But  The Mueller Report is still out there.  Yes it's still heavily redacted (just this week, after a federal Court of Appeals ordered the DOJ to finally provide the deleted material to Congress, the Supreme Court stayed the order).  But even without the redacted material it's a powerful and damning document--if anyone bothers to read it.

So I won't summarize it.  There's been enough summarizing.  There's no need for you to rely on good criticism.  As we enter the next presidential  electoral season, you ought to read it yourself.

 "What's wrong with a novel having a virtuous heroine?"

The Last Three Stanzas of John Dryden's Imitation of the Twenty-Ninth Ode from the Third Book of the Odes of Horace

Happy the man, and happy he alone,
   He, who can call today his own;
   He who, secure within, can say:
"Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.
     Be fair, or foul, or rain, or shine,
The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine.
  Not Heav'n itself upon the past has pow'r;
But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour"

  Fortune, that with malicious joy
    Does man her slave oppress,
  Proud of her office to destroy,
    Is seldom pleased to bless:
  Still various, and unconstant still,
But with an inclination to be ill,
  Promotes, degrades, delights in strife,
  And makes a lottery of life.
  I can enjoy her while she's kind;
  But when she dances in the wind,
  And shakes her wings, and will not stay,
  I puff the prostitute away:
The little or the much she gave me is quietly resigned:
    Content with poverty, my soul I arm;
   And virtue, though in rags, will keep me warm.

      What is't to me,
Who never sail in her unfaithful sea,
  If storms arise, and clouds grow black;
  If the mast split, and threaten wreck?
Then let the greedy merchant fear
    For his ill-gotten gain;
  and pray to gods that will not hear,
While the debating winds and willows bear
    His wealth into the main.
  For me, secure from Fortune's blows,
  (Secure of what I cannot lose,)
  In my small pinnance I can sail,
  Contemning all the blust'ring roar;
  And running with a merry gale,
With friendly stars my safety seek,
Within some little winding creek:
  And see the storm ashore.

And for those who may prefer the original, from the first Augustan age:

        ...ille potens sui
laetusque deget, cui licet in diem
    dixisse "vixi:  cras vel atra
        nube polum Pater occupato

vel sole puro; non tamen irritum,
quodcumque retro est, efficiet neque
    diffenget infactumque reddet,
        quod fugiens semel hora vexit."

Fortuna saevo laeta negotio et
ludum insolentem ludere pertinax
    transmutat incertos honores,
        nunc mihi, nunc alii benigna.

laudo manentem; si celeris quatit
penna, resigno quae dedit et mea
    virtute me involvo probamque
        pauperiem sine dote quaero.

non est meum, si mugiat Africis
malus procellis, ad miseras preces
    decurrere et votis pacisci
        ne Cypriae Tyriaeque merces

addant avaro divitias mari.
tunc me biremis praesidio scaphae
    tutum per Aegaeos tumultus
        aura ferret geminusque Pollux.

The World Turned Upside Down

"Adeo mihi certe persuadeo res aequabili ac iusta aliqua ratione distribui aut feliciter agi cum rebum mortalium, nisi sublata prorsus proprietate, no posse."  

"Thus I am wholly convinced that unless private property is entirely abolished, there can be no fair or just distribution of goods, nor can the business of mortals be conducted happily."


Thomas More certainly didn't invent the idea of a community of goods.  And though his is probably the best-known early modern articulation of the idea, there's nothing I know of in his later career where anything close to the idea was considered as a practical policy or political goal.  

A little over a century later the idea of a community of goods was no longer simply a humanist conceit but a political program, a program whose advocates were not rulers or lawyers or clerics, but peasants and tinkers and others of that ilk.  

Christopher Hill is a distinguished British historian.  His life's work was centered on the England in the mid-seventeenth century, the period of what is conventionally called the English Civil War, but which HIll insists on calling the English Revolution.  He was raised in a pious Methodist family, but joined the Communist Party after losing his faith at Oxford in the thirties.  He resigned from the Communist Party in the fifties after the Soviet Union suppressed the Hungarian Revolution, but remained, for the rest of his lift, identified as a Marxist historian.  Hence his understanding of the English Civil War more as a class revolution, the displacement of royal feudal rule with parliamentary rule, driven (even after the return of kings) by an increasingly merchant, commercial class.

In textbook Marxism phenomena like religion are considered "superstructure," things unreal in themselves which simply reflect the dominant mode of material production.  A classic example of this is the assertion that catholicism reflected the traditional feudal mode of production, in contrast with protestantism, which came out of the emerging capitalist economies of early modern Europe.  

Hill never returned to his childhood faith, but he never forgot it either.  Growing up in the fervent tradition of English religious dissent, outside of the established Church, left him with a real sympathy for working class religion and undoubtedly inspired his research into its more radical forms.  It also perhaps supported his increasing understanding of religion as a force, not of course entirely divorced from economic relationships, but also impelled by its own interior logic.

In The World Turned Upside Down Hill examines a variety of social and religious movements that rose in the wake of the war between king and parliament.  The religious aspect of the war is conventionally presented as one between Anglicans and Puritans, with the Puritans, after the death of the king, breaking into strict Presbyterians, who themselves sought to establish a new national church, and the more tolerant Independents, whose strength lay in the military rule of Oliver Cromwell.  Hill in this book is little concerned with any of these, focusing instead on the proliferation of more radical groups--Levellers, Diggers, Agitators, Muggletonians, Grindletoniams, Third Monarchists, Seekers, Ranters and Quakers--and their ultimate failure.

The context of course is an England that has been Protestant for about a century, where the bible has been translated into English and sent out into the land.  Early hope that the single written authority of the scripture would produce a single authoritative form of Protestantism soon foundered.  The civil war was an inter-Protestant war, but Hill's heros, unlike the key players, declined to read the bible as Luther, or Calvin, or Cranmer did.  Here is Gerrard Winstanley, the most eloquent of the Levellers:

"Not one word was spoken in the beginning that one branch of mankind should rule over another....But...selfish imaginations...did set up one man to teach and rule over another.  And thereby...man was brought into bondage, and became a greater slave to such of his own kind than the beasts of the field were to him.  And hereupon the earth...was hedged into enclosures by the teachers and rulers, and the others were made...slaves.  And that earth that is within this creation made a common storehouse for all, is bought and sold and kept in the hands of a few, whereby the great Creator is mightily dishonoured, as if he were a respecter of persons, delighting in the comfortable livelihood of some and rejoicing in the miserable poverty and straits of others.  From the beginning it was not so." 

The sources of this are purely biblical--the common origin of all mankind, God's breaking of the bondage of the children of Israel in Egypt, the denunciation of monarchy by the prophet Samuel, the execrations brought down by the later prophets against the oppressors of the poor, Jesus' virtual exclusion of the rich from the Kingdom of Heaven, and the holding of all goods in common by the earliest Christians, as related in the book of the Acts of the Apostles.  The Protestant freedom to interpret the bible was taking an unexpected turn.  

None of these emerging groups was formally organized.  Levelers were those who sought to abolish distinctions in rank and wealth.  The Diggers entered unused, "waste" land and began cultivating it, claiming a right based on just use and the alleviation of poverty, not feudal privilege or formal ownership.

More radically, the Ranters began to question the bible itself, to ask on what basis laws and punishments were imposed.  If the bible were truly subject to individual interpretation, what right had anyone to tell me that I could not interpret it as nonsense?  The Ranters did indeed have some basis in the tradition for their claims, not only in Luther and Calvin, but going back to Augustine's "Love, and do what you will."  The Ranters certainly did what they wanted, and gained a reputation for drinking, swearing and whoring which accounted, perhaps, both for their initial attractiveness and eventual violent suppression.  They had no catechism, but if they did, it would surely read something like William Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell.  And they are certainly fun to read (e.g. Joseph Salmon's "the Lord grant that we may know the worth of hell, that we may forever scorn heaven," or Thomas Webbe's "there's no heaven but women, nor no hell save marriage").

Of all these movements, only the Quakers survive today, at least in name.  (I should note that part of my interest in this subject comes from the fact that, in my paternal line, my ancestors who came to this country were Quakers, and remained so until the First World War).  Hill is quick to emphasize that in their origin the Quakers were far different from their eventual successors.  The commitment to pacifism came much later; many of the original Quakers served in the New Model Army.  The standard source for Quaker history is George Fox's Journal, but Hill points out that Fox's later acknowledged leadership of the Quakers was not so apparent in the early days.  They were then much closer to Ranters, a sect that refused to remove their hats before their betters, disrupted the worship of other sects, denied original sin, affirmed that a free man could attain perfection wholly apart from compliance with conventional Christian standards, and looked for guidance, not to the bible, but to the "inner light," by which God spoke to every individual.  In the Ranters these ideas led to an intolerable libertinism.  Fox managed, in contrast, to forge a new people with a new spirituality admired grudgingly even by detractors.  But one of the ways he did it was by de-politicizing them.  The Quakers were not particularly liked by the establishment under Charles II and James II and William III--but they didn't threaten it, either.  And so they survived and later flourished in William Penn's Wood in America.

A final note:  I can understand how those of you reading this might have been surprised that a post called "The World Turned Upside Down" wasn't related to the current COVID-19 crisis.  It's mainly my own slowness.  I began this post at a time not so very long ago when Senator Sanders, ahead in the early delegate count, was being widely acclaimed as the all-but-inevitable Democratic nominee for the presidency, accompanied by much hand-wringing about the monstrousness of a major candidate advocating "socialism."  This subject, I thought, was somewhat topical for providing some little-known historical context, and reminding ourselves that "socialism" didn't begin or end with Karl Marx.  But in a way the two subjects seem to come together this morning when I read, in the Santa Fe New Mexican's editorial page, a reader commenting that "The unjust criticism that Bernie is a socialist no longer has meaning.  For the next few months, the country will be an effectively socialist country, or we will perish."  Where we turn in a crisis is always revealing of our deepest values.

Speaking of Being

In an earlier post on the subject of Karl Rahner I observed that existentialism hasn't kept the edginess  it still had in my college days.  Its various proponents (express and otherwise) have retained their roles as significant thinkers, but, like the Hegelians before them, their successors and disciples are now less scruffy revolutionaries than safely-tenured seniors.

So the experience of reading Sarah Bakewell's At the Existentialist Cafe was in some ways a nostalgic return to those dangerous days of the existentialists.  The book is a narrative of a twentieth century movement; pre-1900 precursors are duly noted and largely ignored.  The genre is collective biography, with a greater cast characters than those featured at the top of the cover above.  Yes, we have Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus, Heidegger, Husserl, Jaspers and Merleau-Ponty.  But we also have Arendt, Weil, Levinas, Brentano, Marcel and many lesser known figures.  Ms. Bakewell not only takes us chronologically through these tangled lives (and loves) but interweaves the crises they faced with the kernal of their ideas.  So it's an intellectual history of existentialism plus celebrity gossip.

Now Ms. Bakewell is a serious scholar.  She teaches at Oxford's Kellogg College and is the author of an award-winng biography of Montaigne.  She begins her account with Sartre's decision in 1933 to attend Husserl's lectures on phenomenology in Berlin.  In some ways Husserl's phenomenology is the source of the whole movement, the exhortation to go "Zu den Sachen selbst" ("to the things themselves"), to bracket out one's theories and systems and confront the bare phenomena of existence.  ( I remember that for decades I owned one of those impossibly thick paperbacks, cover blazened only with the words:  HUSSERL PHENOMENOLOGY, and never really cracked it between purchase and eventual re-sale.)

And from there we're off.  But despite the large cast of characters, the focus keeps returning to the two around whom the others, to some extent, revolve:  Heidegger in Germany and Sartre in France.  Each is a charismatic figure, drawing disciples to the cafes of Saint-Germaine-du-Pres or the rural fastness of the Black Forest.  Each exemplifies what might be considered the fundamental ethical scandal of existentialism, that Heidegger was a member of the Nazi party, and that Sartre for too long defended the most violent excesses of Stalinism.  They met once:  after Sartre had defined existentialism as  a "humanism" in which "existence precedes essence," Heidegger disclaimed any intent to respond to such superceded "metaphysical" categories--and denied being an existentialist.  When finally brought face to face in 1952, their private meeting was apparently awkward and fruitless for both.

In a book like this there must obviously be a lot of simplification in summarizing the thought of a dozen or so difficult and nuanced thinkers.  I was a little surprised, myself, to realize about halfway through that, though I felt I was familiar with most of these characters and their characteristic assertions, I had really actually read the work of only a few:  Heidegger's Being and Time and a couple essays, a pair of novels by Camus and his "Myth of Sysiphus," Sartre's essay on existentialism referenced above, and a book-length essay by Merleau-Ponty on Arthur Koestler's Darkeness at Noon and the Communist problem.  It was good to get a broader overview, but at the same time I was more dissatisfied with the summations that covered ideas I thought myself most familiar with.  It's not that I imagine that I could do a better job.  It's more perhaps that the topic of existentialism well-illustrates the general limitations of reducing complexities to slogans, summaries, abstracts or maxims.

And that of course leads me to wonder about the value of this very blog, or of any blogs, or of applications like Twitter.  When I was growing up, the Reader's Digest company sold these things called "Condensed Books."  They took mostly best-selling books, abridged them to about a quarter of their original size, and would publish four or five in a volume, on the assumption that writing required compression if it was to keep relevant to the frantic pace of modern life in the mid-sixties.  We had rows and rows of the things, and I even had a twelve-volume set of condensed classics for young people.  They were scorned, for good reason, and I rarely find them in used-book stores.  But we modern  readers are still impelled by that same impulse to epitomize.

So I can certainly recommend the book as a page-turner, as something even of a pot-boiler, a portrait of an important part of the age, and an introduction to an increasingly remote climate of thought.  But as Richard Bentley said of Alexander Pope's Iliad, "It is a very pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer."  And one might, in the same vein, with Husserl insist, regarding the existentialists, that one there also go (however reluctantly and deliberately) "zu den Sachen selbst":

Max von Sydow, 1929-2020

"Everything begins and ends at exactly the right time and place."
--Miranda

Exhausted (but happy) again after Christmas

Apologies for more silence through a busy fall and early winter.

Many visitors, some from across the sea.  No snow when forecast, snow when not.  A round robin of minor winter illnesses.  Friends who kindly loaned us the borry of their house.

 Δόξα ἐν ὑψίστοις θεῷ καὶ ἐπὶ γῆς εἰρήνη ἐν ἀνθρώποις εὐδοκία.

Gloria in altissimis Deo et in terra pax in hominibus bonae voluntatis.

And may 2020 be the year we see clearly.

Varieties of tourism

Sacre Coeur

I've recently returned from a brief visit to Paris, occasioned by a personal family matter that happily gave us a reason to go.  The first week back, my wife was asked an unusual question, "Why would anyone go to Paris?"  It's a question that could come from a variety of assumptions and motives, and one that normally wouldn't occur to most people, given the overwhelming popularity of Paris as a tourist destination.  But it's a question worth thinking about.

One reason we travel is to see spectacular sights.  Anyone who's been to the Grande Canyon, or to the mountains, can attest to the unparalleled sense of the sublime occasioned by natural grandeur.   Sometimes it's just worth it to see something, and all around the world there are, in addition to natural wonders, human creations that satisfy that longing for the gasp of admiration and awe.

The Basilica of Sacre Coeur, pictured above, is one of those monuments I'd never visited. It obviously has a religious role, and a place in history related to the crushing of the Commune, and some architectural significance (though controversy still rages as to whether it is a "good" building).  But standing on the summit of Montmartre it is, aside from those, a monument that evokes a kind of awe.  Up close it is impressive.  But its location makes it visible from all sides at fairly great distances, and, from a distance, whether from the escalator at the Centre Pompidou, or from a balcony of the Musee d'Orsay south of the Seine (see the final photo of my post of  September 6, 2015), it fairly shimmers and hovers over the city like a fairy palace from the Arabian Nights.

HIstorical sites are a draw for some of us.  Paris is obviously thick with them, from the occasional plaque informing you that Voltaire died in this house to the more spectacular, such as the Luxembourg Palace, built by Marie de Medici, (which I'd never before seen).  Notre Dame has obviously seen its share of history, and unhappily made its way into the news this spring with a terrible fire and a brush with collapse.

The flying buttresses buttressed

Not surprisingly crowds thronged the quais along the river to get a glimpse of the various measures taken to stabilize the wounded cathedral.  Scaffolding covers much of the exterior, and some sort of translucent cover seems to be protecting most of the stained glass.  When I learned, on the day after the fire, that the roof had been destroyed, I remembered that the great flying buttresses were there to counter the outward thrust of the weight of the roof, and I wondered whether, in the absence of that force, they might dangerously push the walls inward.  I don't know if that was the reason, but, as can be seen above, the buttresses are now apparently supported from below by wooden supports, fitting precisely under each buttress, and having a kind of beauty of their own.

This being France, there is endless discussion of how to restore (or rebuild, or reconstruct, or renew) the cathedral.  (The verb matters.)  In America there would be no question of government involvement in the restoration of a damaged cathedral.  In France, despite its considerably more radical commitment to a secular state, the collective social responsibility to protect the patrimonie is almost universally shared.  I picked up, from a stack at the check-out of the bookstore of the Centre Pompidou, a longish essay called Notre-Dame de l'humanite, written by Adrien Goetz, a member of the Academy of Beaux-Arts and a professor of art history at the Sorbonne.  It ranges from his personal observations and feelings witnessing the fire, to the present dire state of many prominent monuments, to reflections on the role of medievalism and romanticism, the effect of seeing the cathedral through the eyes of Viollet-le-Duc and Hugo, and the religious, national and artistic sides of a catastrophe that gripped even those with no such connections or commitments.

Another reason to visit Paris  is of course  the great art collections, most prominently in the Louvre and the Musee d'Orsay.  We didn't go to the Louvre, and we only went to the d'Orsay because of a Berthe Morisot show.  The d'Orsay was significantly more crowded than even four years ago, and it took us an hour in line just to get in.  I would never say that it wasn't worth it; the collection is unmatched in the world.  But as a way of seeing art, the giant museum has its down sides.  

One reason for avoiding the Louvre was that the Mona Lisa has been moved, in anticipation of a Leonardo da Vinci exhibit this fall.  A certain Young Friend complained that moving the Mona Lisa made certain other favorite collections practically unreachable, due to the crowds massing around Leonardo's disproportionately iconic painting. 

What we discovered on this trip were a few of the smaller, more overlooked museums. One was the Musee Cognacq-Jay, the former home a nineteenth century couple who collected painting and sculpture from the late seventeenth and eighteenth century. 

The Boucher Room at the Musee Cognacq-Jay

Another was the Gustav Moreau Museum, the former home and studio of the nineteenth century Symbolist painter, the lower floors his meticulously preserved living quarters, the two upper floors his studio, the walls covered with enormous, often unfinished, and usually rather bizarre paintings.  

A probably better-known smaller museum is the Rodin Museum, well-attended but hardly crowded, with bronze castings of much of Rodin's best-known work in the well-kept gardens of the exterior.  The interior contained not only Rodin's own work, but work he collected (from classical antiquities to a Van Gogh) as well as work by his increasingly-appreciated apprentice, Camille Claudel.

And I shouldn't leave out the easy-to-overlook reconstruction of Brancusi's studio just across from the Centre Pompidou.  

A perhaps less-inviting, but nevertheless worthwhile aspect of Paris is the great University, sprawling across, around, and beyond the left bank Latin Quarter.  

The administrative center of the University can't normally be entered by those who are not students, faculty, or employees (and we were unable to talk our way past the polite but persistent guards).  I have an earlier post on the University's origins (April 12, 2019), with a photo at the end of the Sorbonne's inner (and inaccessible to me) courtyard.  I understand there are limited tours that we simple gawkers can sign up for, and though I would have liked to see Richelieu's tomb, the public Place de la Sorbonne (the "other side" of the afore-referenced photo) is a pleasant venue for people-watching and grabbing an inexpensive, student-priced lunch: 

The public Place de la Sorbonne

The life of the scholar is a far cry from the life of the tourist.  Per Ernest Renan, the great nineteenth century philologist and religious historian,  "You Englishmen think of Paris as a great fair, a place of frivolity and amusement.  I tell you it is nothing of the sort.  It is the hardest working place in the world."

The best I could do was this:  I had picked up, at the L'ecume des Pages bookstore, on the Boulevard St. Germain, a slim paperback called Dieu, la mort et le temps, a transcription of the last lectures given by Emmanuel Levinas at the University in 1975.  Striking a studious pose under one of the trees I was able to at least begin--"Il s'agit ici, avant tout, d'un cours sur le temps--la duree du temps.  Le mot duree du temps est choisi pour plusieurs raisons...."--and could  imagine my 1975 self (who admittedly knew not a word of French) listening seriously to these novel ideas with excitement and puzzlement. 

Window shopping at the Sorbonne

Speaking of reading, we also spent a day around Saint-Germain-du-Pres, the left bank neighborhood best known for the cafes that served as haunts of writers and intellectuals.  Today of course they are more the haunts of us tourists (a natural progression).  Below is a shot of Les Deux Magots, reputedly a favorite of Hemingway (though I don't think it's mentioned in A Moveable Feast).  Next door is the Cafe de Flore, where Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir held court. 

I am not a great fan of Hemingway.  I enjoyed A Moveable Feast, but more for the celebrity gossip.  And I re-read The Sun Also Rises this year, for that whole Lost Generation vibe, and enjoyed it and maybe had a little more appreciation for its clipped style (especially when juxtaposed with James' The Ambassadors, another part of the "Paris prep").

But over and above those, I had a plan with a French language book I had been creeping through for some time.  Back in the eighties I had read Balzac's Lost Illusions, and last year I started to read it in French.  Illusions Perdues is in three parts.  The first part focuses on two friends in Angouleme, one of whom, the ambitious poet Lucien Chardon, attaches himself to the aristocratic Madame de Bargeton, managing, by the end of the first part, to accompany his would-be mistress to Paris.  The second part of the novel takes up a common theme, the hapless provincial in Paris, where, after being thrown over, Lucien (never a particularly admirable character)  descends into a foreordained sequence of [spoiler alert] poverty, despair, ruin and betrayal.

I had hoped to coordinate my own arrival in Paris with Lucien's, and came rather close.  (Left the book on the plane (!), but easily found another copy).  Happily I am even now still in Lucien's "poor-but-honest" phase, and the following, from a letter Lucien writes to his sister, sets out well the dazzling world that the young poet encounters: 

"Ce pays est celui des écrivains, des penseurs, des poètes. Là seulement se cultive la gloire, et je connais les belles récoltes qu’elle produit aujourd’hui. Là seulement les écrivains peuvent trouver, dans les musées et dans les collections, les vivantes œuvres des génies du temps passé qui réchauffent les imaginations et les stimulent. Là seulement d’immenses bibliothèques sans cesse ouvertes offrent à l’esprit des renseignements et une pâture. Enfin, à Paris, il y a dans l’air et dans les moindres détails un esprit qui se respire et s’empreint dans les créations littéraires. On apprend plus de choses en conversant au café, au théâtre pendant une demi-heure qu’en province en dix ans. Ici, vraiment, tout est spectacle, comparaison et instruction."

Rodin's Balzac

So, those are a few of my own reasons that someone might want to visit Paris.  I should add that, on this trip, we did a little more aimless wandering than usual.  Paris is a walker's town; I actually lost four pounds.  The Metro is cheap, clean, quick and reliable (admittedly, being footloose and fancy free, we could avoid rush hours, and it was August, when many true Parisians were elsewhere).  But we had time to explore various neighborhoods and districts--Montmartre, the Marais, San Germain de Pres, l'Ile Saint-Louis, and the Bois de Vincennes and its environs.

Some street someplace

France is no utopia, nor is Paris the celestial city.  We never saw the Gilets Jaunes, as I think the July heat dimmed some of their enthusiasm. But the country and the city seem to work comparatively well, in contrast to the present discontents of our American Republic. 

It's kind of like that old joke:  Nobody goes to that restaurant any more; it's always too crowded. 

Le reve et le souvenir