"Control"

Aksel Waldemar Johannessen, Actors at Norwegian theater during an interval (1918)

The title today is taken from the essay of that title by E.B. White from December 1942. Back then, as at the present moment, there was a revolt at the powers-that-be by "the common man," as White refers to the ordinary American who does the work but is not part of the spoils system. And "control" in the 1942 context means the intrusion of "government" into the private life of the common man.

Jim Richardson (photographer), Card players in Kansas

The essays opens with White, a practicing farmer as well a writer, going out to his barn and finding two men from "the State," one of whom had put a hook in his cow's nose "and was pulling hard, [while] the other was poised with a needle, about to draw a sample of blood from her neck." The two men were conducting a test for Bang's disease. White thoroughly approved of the test, but, as he writes, "I also thoroughly approve of the old idea that a man's home is his castle and that anyone who arrives with a needle is expected to knock before entering."

After discussing the controls by the State, which "seem unable to make or lives more agreeable in some particulars without making them insupportable in others," he goes on to the "most challenging control that occupies the attention of our social architects and designers," namely, the control of wealth. Private enterprise is not a system in which all can participate and take their chances and thereby contribute to the general wealth; rather, the common man works and dies, but never participates. Instead, the century is being constructed for him. It is agreed that he "must be secure. He must hold insurance. He is not to be permitted to starve to death, or run up hospital bills, ... or to be buried without proper rites. ... The century has gone to the cutter."

David Carlins (photographer), Rickshaw drivers in Delhi

"The true shape of man," he continues, "is an elusive thing." Man, he believes, is a natural born gambler, whose instincts are constantly frustrated, one who is less interested in security "than in gain, less in safety than in risk, and he has always been a fool for anything that gave him a chance at the jackpot." Thus, "the terrible urge of the multitudes to participate in the chancy side of life" -- pinball games, bingo, race horses, stock markets, lotteries -- and thereby recover the gift that they are cheated by the State, by its wish to make all activities of men flat and unchangeable "in a world that is neither flat nor unchangeable." The common man will even grab at cards for a game of solitaire, "to restore himself and taste the wine of luck."

What White saw occurring in 1942 has progressed by leaps and bounds, and the present American -- and, indeed, Western -- political moment seems to be exploding with the unrest of the so-called common man, who sees more and more of his life controlled and his money being collected for who knows what, in any case, for a politics in which he has little participation. People who complain at the low voter turnout misunderstand the situation; most people feel their vote doesn't matter.

The 18th-century Enlightenment thinkers urged man to take his freedom in his own hands and to jettison the restrictions mandated by traditional institutions, primarily the Church and the Crown. Those institutions molded people's thoughts and actions in a way that people accepted as the way of the world or justified by divine sanction. The philosophers urged: "Take your destiny in your own hands!" Instead, traditional institutions have been succeeded by the rationalist structures of the State. The State justifies its actions by insisting that it has our security and our interests at heart. Who can object to that? Thus, the notion that each of us can craft our own destiny is ever more in doubt.

Picture credits: Aksel Waldemar Johannessen; Jim Richardson; National Geographic; Young Americans for Freedom

The West and the Rest

This post elaborates on ideas discussed in the previous post on the nature of tolerance. Tolerance is something we all need in order to navigate daily life: for instance, when we are put on hold while phoning to make a dental appointment, or when we have to put up with snarky customers if we are a salesperson. Marriage and family teach us to put up with others, even those we don't care for. We don't tell people, especially lowly employees, that they are bloody fools.

But the contemporary version of tolerance is different. It means not judging, no matter how ludicrous or suspicious someone's behavior. The classic example would be Pontius Pilate. This version of tolerance, which has become part of our modern Western moral code, was evidently abhorrent to the lady I wrote about in my previous post. She saw evil in our ways and wanted to return to old-fashioned truth telling on subjects like good and evil, words that have no purchase among the tolerant. She is not alone.

Tolerance is a liberal idea that emerged in the West in the course of the early modern period. Although the thinkers of the Enlightenment are given credit for spreading this idea, tolerance is what Reinhold Niebuhr called the "highly contingent achievement" of a culture that we have taken to be "the final form and norm of human existence." It is easy to be tolerant, to be non-judgmental, when you have a roof over your head and enough to eat. It is thus a phenomenon of advanced societies, and you don't even have to be a particularly rich person to be tolerant in the non-judgmental sense. If you live in Tucson or Indianapolis and eat Thai or Indian food, if you like to shop at Whole Foods (rather than at the local, lower-priced corporate supermarket), if you don’t mind subtitles with your movies, you are half way to being tolerant of every new "progressive" idea that comes down the road. And if you listen to TED talks and know the difference between Tom Stoppard and Andrew Lloyd Weber, it’s a good chance that you are the real thing, except when it comes to American evangelicals.

Our present-day open-mindedness is not a virtue; it is an attitude contingent on the prosperity that we in the West have enjoyed for several centuries, an enjoyment stemming from exploiting the resources of non-Western countries. We take it for granted that people should have choices, e.g., be allowed to follow the profession they desire or marry the person they love, not someone chosen by their parents, but for most of the world choice is not and has never been an option. I came across a very minor example of how we take tolerance for granted while searching for images for this post. A site called How to Forgive recommends "Embracing Other People's Freedom." It goes on as follows, with a statement that reeks of being "virtuous": "Everyone has a right to decide what’s good for them and the freedom to make mistakes. It’s not usually worth playing the role of a preacher, teacher, judge, critic or parent in anyone’s life. Freedom allows everyone to focus on their own lives, choices, responsibilities and continual learning." Practically every American college student has absorbed this platitude.

Bien pensant

Not only is such wisdom incomprehensible to most people who have not grown up in a Western country; the attitude underlying it is also historically unprecedented. Historically, human beings did not have the luxury of focusing on their own lives, their own choices, etc. Most people in the world today would love to have our choices, and for that reason they seek to leave the hell holes in which they live. We don't help them by being "tolerant" toward those who wish to put an end to freedom.

As mentioned in the previous post, it has been amusing to observe Donald Trump's "progress." The man has demolished our doctrinaire insistence on not judging, e.g., in the matter of illegal immigrants or whatever. The apoplectic outrage of the bien pensant class indicates that Trump has violated a powerful taboo. There is indeed something anthropological about contemporary tolerance. The chattering class now stands in for the gods who once punished violations of the sacred.

Picture credits: Observations citoyennes; Lone Wolf Base Camp; How to Forgive

"Being an American"

"I want to be an American!"

For me, the most interesting thing about the recent "progress" of Donald Trump has been his demolition of political correctness, especially the notion of tolerance. The present-day concept of tolerance has its origins in the late 17th century with the rise of the Enlightenment in Europe. Like most parts of the earth then (and still so today), tolerance for the manners and mores of other peoples does not come naturally to humans. Indeed, the various European peoples had little tolerance for one another, as can be seen in the vicious wars they have waged against one another, up into the Second World War.

That Europeans are now more "open" toward one another has to do with the fact that, outwardly anyway, there is not much difference between Germans and French and Italians and so on anymore. I mean, of course, different in their material way of life. Remember when Germans used to look like Germans, and French like French, and so on? In the new millennium, we all dress and drive alike, all drink good wine, and all have the same "values."

Who wants to disturb such a good thing? The downside of having "progressed" beyond all the intolerance with which we once greeted the stranger in our midst is that many of us imagine that everyone would like to be like us. Indeed, I do believe (with George W. Bush) that most people in the world would prefer to live in freedom and enjoy our standard of living. Yet, as in the U.S., there are people who are perpetually dissatisfied with the state of the world. There are legions out there that feel this way.

Would anyone thirty or forty years ago have believed that the woman pictured above wanted to be like us? That she wished to be "an American"? If so, as a first step, she would not have been trailing that bearded man behind her. Even as a Muslim, she would not have had to wear that oppressive garment. Everything about her appearance suggests that she did not aspire to be like us. Yet, such is the power of the ideology of tolerance that we seek to deny what our eyes tell us.

Which brings me back to Donald Trump. He has ripped away the "veil of tolerance," so to speak, and asks us to make judgments about what our eyes see. It is going to be interesting to see how things proceed.

Living collectively

Euston Station (London), 1837

Tony Judt is instructive of a certain class of intellectuals whom I call “Socialists Lite.” They are not so blind that they don't recognize that socialism, wherever it has formed the basis of public life, hasn't fulfilled its promises. He even recognizes the delusions of those who hold on to the faith. And, yet ...

A sign that a person is Socialist Lite can be seen in their use of the term “collective purpose” and their lament that such no longer seems to exist in public life. For Judt, our only shared social activity is consumerism, rather than the pursuit of “the common good.” The railways, beginning in the 19th century, exemplify for him “a collective project for individual benefit.” There is a great deal of nostalgia in his two essays on this subject -- “On the Glory of the Rails” and “Bring Back the Rails!” -- and one suspects, as with all of the leftist/liberal persuasion, that aesthetics plays a major role in their thinking.

After all, the train and the train station were the subject of some great art: the paintings of 19th-century French Impressionists, the artful, early 20th-century posters produced by the railway companies to entice people to travel, as well as some great public architecture. And on top of that the railways were also means of mass transit -- in contrast to earlier methods of locomotion -- probably also plays a role.

These two essays were among the last written by Judt. They were part of a book on “locomotion” on which he was working and did not live to finish. I wish he has been able to write this book, for the subject ties in with my interest in the subject of world literature, which, in turn, has to do with commerce and the spread of both material and cultural goods across borders.

Judt is such an artful writer that, on first reading, one might tend to agree with him. For instance, he begins the first essay with the statement that all knowledge was “enduringly local, whether cultural, social, or political” before the railway. But from my explorations on world literature, it is evident that knowledge traveled across borders and far afield, even if at 10 miles per hour at the most. It is true that many people never left the village in which they lived, even up until the late 19th century, but by the late Middle Ages there was increasing commerce among the various countries of Europe. After the discovery of the New World, knowledge increased exponentially. The railways did not arise ex initio.

Of course, as Judt points out, there were huge start-up and maintenance costs for early railways, and in the long run they have never been great money makers. Yet I don't think it is the case, as he suggests, that the railways and the railroad stations in particular were “harbingers and emblems of an age of public investment and civic pride.” The first European railways (except in Prussia), after all, were financed by private capital, probably by some form of stock company. It was only later in the century that governments got involved, for instance, in regulating fares, since trains were the major means of transport. (Now the government is stuck with them in most countries.) So, even those great railroad stations were monuments to a confident, perhaps even overweening, capitalist spirit, to the “great men” of the 19th century, e.g., Isambard Kingdom Brunel -- but not to “the public.” Thus, Judt is talking through his hat when he writes that “the railways were and remain the necessary and natural accompaniment to the emergence of civil society. They are a collective project for individual benefit.” He goes on to assert that the market cannot offer such a “practical benefit to individual and collectivity alike.” He even insists that the railways’ lack of profitability is a sign of their “social responsiveness!”

Judt is correct in pointing out the contribution of the railways to the Industrial Revolution and to the very layout of modern cities. But it wasn't the railways that inaugurated timetables and made us time-bound. The first Europe-wide postal system, put into effect by the Habsburg emperor Charles I in 1516, had timetables. Charles transformed a service meant to serve the imperial interests into one that benefited the public by contracting the Taxis family to run it and also to take letters for private clients. (See my post on this subject.)  The Taxis family had to invest in infrastructure: purpose-built postal stations, for instance, thereby relieving postal riders with the necessity of staying in inns. By the 1530s the Taxis had introduced “ordinary post”: fixed service, publicly advertised, leaving on a particular day of the week.

What distinguishes socialists from Socialists Lite is the respect that the latter have for memory and, indeed, for shared history. Socialists want to wipe the slate clean and start all over again, which is what the Soviets tried to do. What the Soviets were most successful at, indeed, was the destruction of civil society. You couldn't even trust your neighbors in the Soviet Union. So much for purposeful collectivity. For Socialists Lite, however, it always comes down to “the government," which is supposed to endow a country with “shared purpose.” Well, Hitler gave the Germans a shared purpose and look where it led them.

So, in the end, Judt's essays on the railways are a form of story-telling, an idealized portrait that is supposed to convince of the virtues of collective purpose.

"Downhill All the Way, 2"

Let me conclude the thoughts expressed in the previous posting. Judt writes that Hobsbawm, at the age of 94 (!), no longer had illusions about the Soviet Union, but that he remained reluctant to deny that it had no redeeming features. The reason: it stood "for a good cause, indeed the only worthwhile cause," which, for many in Hobsbawm's generation, mitigated its crimes. Judt introduces a footnote here, quoting the Polish writer Alexander Wat: "The loss of freedom, tyranny, abuse, hunger would all have been easier to bear if not for the compulsion to call them freedom, just, the good of the people."

I can't help thinking that the Soviets were aware of, indeed even took advantage of, the willingness of the Western intellectual class to believe that good could come out of the Soviet experiment. Successful tyrants play on people's gullibility, and Stalin was certainly a successful one. This gullibility stems from a belief that humanity can be corrected, that the world can be changed for the better, if the right conditions are met, if the right people are in charge. Even before the Soviets took over Russia, there was many a "planned economy" and "planned society" -- utopian communities -- yet not even the most benign stood the test of time.

Judt suggests that Hobsbawm was in the grip of what he calls a "secular faith" and, moreover, that he was not aware that he was. It is a striking fact that the professoriate is mostly liberal or left wing; I would not be surprised if most of them also considered themselves unbelievers or atheists. I can't think of a well-known conservative who is an in-your-face atheist. Which doesn't mean conservatives are necessarily believers. Being conservative, they are instead perhaps agnostic or uncommitted. But conservatives don't expect perfection on earth.

Picture credits: UK Media Watch; Quotehd

"Downhill All the Way"

The above is the title of an essay by Tony Judt, reviewing The Age of Extremes: A History of the World 1914-1991 by the Marxist historican Eric Hobsbawm. It appears in the posthumously published volume When the Facts Change: Essays 1995-2010. I picked up the volume at my local library, because it contains an essay that I had earlier come across in The New York Review of Books on the connection between modernity and the growth of railroads.

Ling Jian, Communist Sisters: Tears of Idealism

Even back in my undergraduate days, in the 1960s, Hobsbawm's writings figured on the edges of my consciousness, but, not being a history major, I never read him. Increasingly over the years I have become aware of his committed communism, and, as a committed conservative, this aspect of his writings made it unlikely that I would ever read him. The following, from the obituary in The Guardian on his death in 1912, speaks to my negative reaction:

"Hobsbawm was never to leave the Communist party and always thought of himself as part of an international communist movement. For many, this remained the insuperable obstacle to an embrace of his writing [!]. Yet he always remained very much a licensed free-thinker within the party's ranks. Over Hungary in 1956, an event which split the CP and drove many intellectuals out of the party, he was a voice of protest who nevertheless remained."

It can also be imagined that I would not have much sympathy for a scholar who wrote, in his 94th year, How to Change the World, what The Guardian called "a vigorous defence of Marx's continuing relevance in the aftermath of the banking collapse of 2008-2010." I have very little tolerance for people who believe they know how to change the world.

Okay. Not that I am unfamiliar with Marxist thought, and in fact it has been a great influence on my own ideas, especially the role that capitalism and the ensuing prosperity have played in creating Liberalism. (More to that topic at another time.) I learned a lot from Judt's essay, especially about left-wing intellectuals.

Judt begins by placing Hobsbawm as a scholar who had a great effect on a generation of historians from about 1959 to 1975, especially for his works on what might now be called social history, especially "a world of rural protest in Europe and overseas," as in his 1959 book Primitive Rebels. His writings unearthed an earlier tradition of British radical historiography and drew attention to labor and to workers and artisans. What Judt terms Hobsbawm's "most enduring imprint on our historical consciousness" are three volumes on the "long 19th century," beginning with The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848 (1962), followed by The Age of Capital, 1848-1875 (1975) and The Age of Empire, 1875-1914 (1987). Judt's essay, a review of the fourth volume in this series, made me think I should take a look at the second volume in particular.

Although Judt is an admirer of Hobsbawm for his erudition and breadth of "vision," what interests me about the review is his critique of Hobsbawm's shortcomings (which, although Judt doesn't say so, is really a critique of Marxist shortcomings). In a sense, Hobsbawm's allegiance to communism always remained that of the enthusiast for a vision that he embraced in his youth. Thus, the Spanish civil war, which united so many intellectuals in the anti-Fascist cause, remained for Hobsbawm "the only political cause which, even in retrospect, appears as pure and appealing as it did in 1936." The same can be said for many of my generation who came of age in 1968 and for whom the experience still represents something holy. This is a self-centered view of history and explains why so many of them, now receiving Social Security and benefiting from their IRAs, refuse to indict the anti-liberal attitudes of contemporary college students. In a similar way, Hobsbawm failed to indict Stalin's use of the Spanish conflict to "settle local and international scores under the guise of supporting an anti-Fascist war."

Beers sold in a Spanish supermarket

Judt also makes a fascinating observation, namely, that Hobsbawm, in this new book, fails to consider that Lenin's revolution was "above all the first and greatest of the 'third world' coups d'etat that he describes so well elsewhere, in which revolutionary modernizers capture the capital city and forcibly seize power in an archaic society." I guess that this explains why so many third world nations after World War II fit so easily in the Soviet camp. In a similar way, according to Judt, Hobsbawm misses the extent to which Hitler effected "a major European revolution," transforming Central and Eastern Europe in a way that prepared the way for the "Socialist" regimes of the postwar years, which built on what Hitler had brought about, "notably the destruction of the intelligentsia and urban middle class of the region, first through the murder of the Jews and then as a result of the postwar expulsion of Germans from the liberated Slav lands." Because Hobsbawm wishes to downplay any revolutionary tendencies in Fascism, he does not recognize the irony that Hitler paved the way for Stalin. This, to Judt, seems "a consequence of continuing to see the world the way it seemed at the time, when both ideologically and militarily Fascism and Communism were in total conflict, and Stalin represented the 'left wing' of the victorious forces of the Enlightenment."

I go on too long today, but I will have more to say on this subject, as it concerns my own interpretation of the current intellectual climate, a climate entrenched in the vision of Hobsbawm.

Picture credits: Christies; Affaritalini; Karen Salmonsohn

The Jews and the West

"I intend to live forever, or to die trying"

A big cultural event here in New York City is the opening of the Whitney Museum's new building. I was working away on the treadmill at the gym this morning when the Whitney director, Adam Weinberg, was being interviewed on TV. (The gym is festooned with huge TV screens.) I was struck by his name, clearly Jewish. I say "clearly," which is a response of a late day. When I was growing up in Louisville, Kentucky, in the 1950s, I didn't know a single soul who could be identified as Jewish. I kid you not. I did not know that Groucho Marx or Jack Benny, two of my favorite TV entertainers were Jewish. It never dawned on me.

Most Americans in fly-over country in that decade lived a rather hermetic familial existence. In the 1950s people were aware of "their place," and ours was among people like ourselves. For us kids the world consisted of home and school, and all schools then, whether public or parochial, were local. Unless you lived on a farm and rode a school bus, you walked to school, so that the children from even the next school district might as well have lived in another state. Such boundaries narrowed the range in which girls and even boys roamed, which resulted in much labor-saving for parents who, lest we forget, were still the primary caretakers of their children in the 1950s. Middle-class kids in the heartland simply did not roam. Where would they have roamed? There were no amusement arcades, no malls or cineplexes.

We were all Americans. Irving Berlin, for goodness sake, wrote one of our national anthems.

In retrospect, I realize that Louisville, judging from the size of the Jewish Community Center there, must have had a sizable Jewish population when I was growing up, just as it had a sizable Catholic population, of which may family was a part. But it was only in college that I came to know Jewish students. I went to a state university, Indian University, and the identifiably Jewish students there had a decidedly urban background. They were from Chicago, Philadelphia, even New York, and stood out just as strikingly in the small-town Midwestern environment of Bloomington as they would have in the small Midwestern towns from which most I.U. students came.

The Jewish students at Indiana University expressed their cultural distinctiveness in a less quiet manner. It was my first encounter with people my own age who really talked, not in the decorous and correct manner of my parents, but who were instead always voicing strong opinions on any subject, whether you asked for their opinion or not, or who would quote you the opinions of others on the subject. In high school I never heard even the smartest kids –– the student body president, the valedictorian, the obvious eggheads –– speak their mind on politics or on any non-teenage matter outside the classroom. The Jewish students were quite different in this respect. Since the most vocal and visible ones came from large cities, that meant in the 1960s that they conveyed the attitudes that flourished in such urban environments. They were, politically, “liberal," a concept with which I was then unfamiliar, and their position on the issues of the day were at some variance with the values of the American heartland, especially with the conservative milieu that reigned then at Indiana.

It was the first time that I became aware of the cultural variety of the U.S. Still, I reached an advanced age before I knew about Jack Benny and Groucho Marx. I moved to New York, I married a Jewish. It was my husband who told me that if a comedian was funny, he was Jewish!

The above is a very long preface to some thoughts about the different relationship of Jews and Muslims to Western "civilization." The Jews are clearly a part of it, indeed so much an intricate part that Hitler tried to excise their contribution to our shared cultural heritage. Starting in the 19th century Jews began to play a role in all aspects of Western life, from science to the arts. To come to the present day, it is not at all surprising that Adam Weinberg would be director of a major U.S. museum. It's not necessary to name names: Jewish scholars have been major path-breakers in the study of Western art, even of the Christian art of the Middle Ages.

In what sense can something similar be said of Muslims? Where are the Muslims who occupy important cultural institutions in the U.S. or Europe? No one denies that Muslim scholars were important transmitters of Western science and philosophy, especially back in the so-called Dark Ages. But they did not transmit the art; in fact, in some places Western art was probably destroyed for religious reasons.

I have known many Muslim students, starting back in my undergraduate days. The first ones I was acquainted with were Persians, who were then being sent by the Shah to U.S. universities to study and to return home with their expertise. Well, we know how that turned out. All of the students I knew then and have since come to know have studied science, engineering, computer science, and so on. In other words, the practical arts. I have never known one to study art history, unless it be to concentrate on Islamic art. Their lack of interest in art history or, for that matter, English or German literature, even sociology or anthropology, is not surprising. It is only "the West" that displays interest in other cultures. Since the 17th century, Western scholars have made important contributions to the study of the languages and literatures of China, of India, of the Islamic world, and so on.

A Chinese scholar

Of course, the Chinese, the Indians, the Muslims also studied their own heritages, but they never felt it necessary to go outside of that heritage. Marco Polo traveled to the East and brought back news of the peoples and cultures he found there, but the Chinese had no interest in the West, aside from technical innovations. An extreme instance was the Japanese, who actually closed off their nation for several centuries to avoid contamination with outside influences.

The West's greatest civilizational contribution may be science, which erects no ethnic or national boundaries. It is an open-access field. Chinese, Japanese, Hindu, and Muslim scientists have already produced great contributions in science, and many even teach at Western institutions. But none of them show as much interest in our cultural and artistic practices as we do in theirs. For the West, this is not simply a matter of curiosity, of an attempt to under "the Other." Indeed, under the forces of globalization, it might be said that we in the West, with our economic and technological power, are eroding cultural differences among all people, making the world less heterogenous.

Picture credits: Media Guy; Scott W. Palmer: China Page

"Truth in Diegesis"

Tom Pappalardo on fiction

The title of this post comes from the title of a chapter of a book by Michael Riffaterre, Fictional Truth. He has also penned Semiotics of Poetry and Text Production. Those last two titles suggest something of the nature of professorial approaches to literature. "Diegesis" basically means narrative.

I bought this book (published in 1990) when I was in graduate school, thus some years ago, but have never got around to reading it. At the moment I am "de-accessioning" things in my apartment, including many, many books, and I thought I would take another look at this one before disposing of it. I even thought it might offer some interesting insights, and indeed the opening paragraphs of this chapter did seem promising. Here is what Riffaterre writes:

"The only reason that the phrase 'ficitonal truth' is not an oxymoron, as 'fictitious truth' would be, is that fiction is a genre whereas lies are not. Being a genre, it rests on conventions, of which the first and perhaps only one is that fiction specifically, but not always explicitly, excludes the intention to deceive. A novel always contains signs whose function is to remind readers that the tale they are being told is imaginary."

Despite such reminders of artificiality, fiction still manages "to interest, to convince, and eventually to appear relevant to the reader's own experience."

After that, I am afraid it went downhill Here is a sentence at random from the book to show why that happened: "The clausula may be true mimetically, that is, psychologically. Its narrative function is to provide the pseudo-story, the ostensibly familiar tomato construct, with a punchline, however, and at the same time to reintegrate it into verisimilitude . . ."

Too much going on in my head

Such academic writing is why I so seldom read contemporary secondary literature when researching a subject. For instance, I understand what the words mimetically and psychologically mean, but why does he make the second one a variant of the first? It takes the traditional meaning of mimetic (going back to the Greeks) and applying it to a category to which it does not belong. This is not at all unusual in academic writing. There seems to be a desire here to sound more profound that the material calls for. The rest of the sentence is likewise obscure.

Back before I finished my Ph.D. I published two novels, which were pretty well received, so I have always been interested in fiction and its "reality." I have read lots of works on all manner of aspects of narration and technique, but it is the way that readers are able to sink into the reality of the fictional world and, moreover, identify with the fate of characters in this world that gives me most to consider. It seems to be the case that we can identify with them more than with the fortunes of people we actually know and love, which, I think, must be because fiction is the only medium where we actually get "into the heads" of other people –– even if they are not real! One has the feeling that one knows Elizabeth Bennett or any other favorite fictional character in a way that one doesn't know one's own husband.

One more book de-accessioned.

Picture credits: Tom Pappalardo; Writers Cafe

Human progress

I am beginning to think that there is a "progress" gene in the human physical makeup, a factor that propels humans to move beyond their immediate environment. Lower animals may roam, but they seem to have a genetically limited environment in which to do so. The original sense in English of "progress" was spatial, as in moving from one place to another. An early use was "a royal progress." Or one progressed from point A to point B. Such has been the history of homo sapiens, one of movement and expansion across the earth. This sense of progress was "neutral," without the present-day connotation of improvement in time. The development of the the latter sense indicates a transformation in world view and of our power to harness nature for the benefit of humans. Yet the two are intertwined: since the dispersal of homo sapiens from their original habitat in Africa about 60,000 years ago, they have not only progressed across the earth but also continually increased their knowledge of the workings of nature and applied the resulting technology so that each succeeding generation, especially in the past three centuries, has a better standard of living than the previous one. Thus, we now have the "ideology of progress."

The transition in meaning occurred incrementally in the 18th century. Reinhart Koselleck, in his article on progress in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, notes that the "denaturalization" of "progress" often appeared in the context of  "history," which was no longer regarded as cyclical (as with the ancients) or as one darn thing after another. The process of progress and of history began to be seen as having a dynamic character.

One of the earliest studies of the subject (often footnoted by Koselleck) is that of John Bury, The Idea of Progress: an Inquiry into Its Origins and Growth. Bury links the idea of progress to "an interpretation of history which regards men as slowly advancing in a definite and desirable direction, and infers that this progress will continue indefinitely." Although one may look at the records of the past and see that civilization has gradually advanced, "you have not got the idea of Progress until you go on to conceive that it is destined to advance indefinitely in the future." In his view "the intellectual climates of classical antiquity and the ensuing ages were not propitious to the birth of the doctrine of Progress."

Ludwig Edelstein, in The Idea of Progress in Classical Antiquity, takes issue with Bury and seeks to prove that pre-Socratic and classical thinkers did have a notion of progress. By his own examples, however, it is clear that not a single thinker devoted a complete work to the subject. It is true that the ancients (whom Francis Bacon instead called "the youth" of the world) were aware that things got better with time, especially in the arts and sciences and perhaps even in manners and mores. The Greeks in particular felt themselves superior to non-Greeks, who, in their view, had not advanced to their own civilized status, but did any of them believe that humanity itself could be progressed, especially in morals? Perhaps the right political order would correct the shortcomings of humans and create a better organization of society, but only Sparta seems to have put such an order into practice.

Homo sapiens (click to enlarge)

For Koselleck, Bury, and Edelstein, progress is an idea, and, as Bury writes, "When we say that ideas rule the world, or exercise a decisive power in history, we are generally thinking of those ideas which express human aims and depend for their realisation on the human will, such as liberty, toleration, equality of opportunity, socialism." Such ideas, as he continues, "are approved or condemned because they are held to be good or bad, not because they are true or false." What is missing in the study by Bury, however, and also in Koselleck and Edelstein, is attention to the conditions that made progress dynamic, that gave birth to the idea that history could be channeled into a desireable direction with benefits to all of humanity. As Bury writes, it was only in the 16th century that obstacles to progress appeared to be transcended and "a favorable atmosphere" began to be prepared. But what exactly happened in the 16th century that produced "an atmosphere" favorable to progress? All of these works are heavy on ideas, less so on the effect of material changes.

It was in the 16th century that Europeans, after the initial discovery, began to exploit the New World. This exploration led to a number of inventions and improvements in already existing technologies, and also to increasing wealth for the European nations. Competition for the seas and for the wealth of overseas territories also led to wars but also to the first international "instruments" for regulating commerce and ownership. By the 19th century, the citizens of France, Germany, Britain, the United States, Holland, and Denmark were aware that they lived better than their ancestors. They could also imagine that their descendents would do even better.  For wealth to increase, of course, ships had to be sent all over the world. It required new products to be manufactured for people to buy, and new tools invented for mastering the natural world. The engine of industrial growth had to progress if Europe and its offshoots were to progress in their standard of living.

Could ancient hedonists ever imagine people could live like this?

We moderns lived in a different world from that of the ancients. The Greeks may have felt superior vis a vis their barbarian neighbors, but they were also aware of how difficult was the task of creating civilization. Thus, they did not take it for granted that their accomplishments would outlast their lifetime, certainly not into the far future. The surplus and affluence of the modern world are such that we can hardly imagine that life could be otherwise. Progress seems natural to us. But our present affluence is the work of past generations.

Picture credit: Reproductive Revolution; Psychic Tourism

The rise of Europe

The Suez Canal

My recent immersion in human prehistory (as in the earliest posts on this blog) has deepened my notions about world literature and its connection with material progress since the navigational conquest of the Atlantic by Europeans and the discovery of the New World. The scholarly world literature industry is focused on texts, on books, on publishing, whereas Goethe's conception (in my view; see posts on this subject on my Goethe blog) was influenced by something more dynamic and progressive, by the continuing processes of transnational exchange that were in force at the beginning of the 19th century. Exchange between savants and among ordinary people had existed throughout recorded history, but the accumulation of knowledge took place with the speed with which people could travel: no faster than men could achieve by walking or on horseback. The appearance of the locomotive, which Goethe did not live to see, would vastly speed up this process, but already in the 17th century the beginnings of the postal network in Germany and in Habsburg territories had brought the countries of Europe into closer and speedier concourse with one another. Goethe's interest in the prospect of Panama and Suez canals indicates that he imagined a world-wide spread of this concourse, which would encompass the literary products of the nations. International trade was the engine of this commerce. (Click all pictures to enlarge.)

Even though trade over large areas of the earth has existed throughout recorded human history, it was carried on by middlemen operating in discrete territories. As Holger Afflerbach writes in his fascinating book Das entfesselte Meer: Die Geschichte des Atlantik:

"The Roman-Hellenistic cultures of the Mediterranean achieved a trading network with Indian merchants, in a few cases with China, which were resumed in the late Middle Ages and then took off to some extent in the early modern period. But they did not venture West. The boundaries of their cosmos was Morocco in the south and Britain in the north, even if there was local trade in the North and occasionally individual travelers who ventured to Scandinavia or even somewhat deeper into Africa. The Atlantic was simply the end of their world."

Pilgrims traveling to shrine of Thomas Becket, ca. 1400

The benefits of trade were of course enjoyed solely by "higher ups." Most people stayed where they were, excepting perhaps travel for religious reasons, and had no knowledge of foreign ways, which over millennia resulted in the deepening of regional identities, even ethnocentricism, as can be seen in the case of the early Greeks, who felt superior to surrounding natives.

What intrigues me is not simply the great expansion in knowledge of foreign peoples that resulted from the expansion of trade across the globe. It is rather that this modern expansion was fueled by Europeans. The Chinese, as Afflerbach writes, already in the early 15th century had a fleet of 3,000 war ships. They undertook seven great expeditions between 1405 and 1433. These fleets, with 20,000 to 30,000 men on board, consisted of 60 great junks that ventured to Ceylon, Sumatra, India, Hormuz and finally the coasts of Africa and Abyssinia. The Chinese were in Mecca and brought back from East Africa a live giraffe. Yet, just as quickly as they began, these expeditions ceased.

As Afflerbach writes, for economic reasons the unexplored parts of the world were of no interest. There were no gains comparable to the expenses and outlay and the incalculable dangers of such expeditions: “Die vormodernen Gesellschaften waren keine Überflußgesellschaften; sie mußten ständig mit Problemen der Massenarmut, Hunger und Seuchen fertig werden. Viel weniger als heute konnte man es sich da leisten, für Expeditionen aus purem Wissensdrang beträchtliche Summen auszugeben.” Quoting from Fernand Braudel, he writes that the length of maritime voyages even on the Mediterranean was variable. A trip from Alexandria to Venice could be made in 17 days or in 89. The “normal” time for the voyage was 55 days. Because of the perils of the sea, the Mediterranean was closed in antiquity to maritime travel from October to spring.

Area of early Portuguese Atlantic exploration

While Europe in the 15th century was still plagued by the problems of mass poverty, starvation, and plagues, trade was nevertheless vibrant in Europe, and shipbuilding had improved. The Genoans and the Venetians established colonies in Cyprus and in the Crimea, where they traded in grain. Agricultural production also began in the 15th century on the Atlantic islands of Madeira and the Canaries, with sugar cultivation, also using slave labor. The Europeans began to set their sights farther afield.

Dispersion of homo sapiens out of Africa

So, what does this have to do with human prehistory? The origins of homo sapiens, it seems, are in Africa, between about 200,000 and 60,000 years ago. By the latter date, some numbers of the species had begun leave Africa. Homo sapiens fossils and skeletal remains in Asia and even Australia are documented earlier than those in Europe. Thus, homo sapiens has been historically characterized by its tendency to dispersal across and possession of the earth. Yet, it took a while. That humans did not enter the New World before about 15,000 years ago may have been due to the transition of humans from hunter-gatherer and nomadic communities to quasi-permanent settlements with the rise of agriculture. And until Europe ripped the rest of the world out of its isolation, most countries were satisfied with their traditional ways of doing things. Indeed, what seems most to have interested the larger integrated political or social entities in their earliest encounters with the West –– China, the Islamic world –– was technical expertise and the utility that might gained from such expertise.

Bathing pilgrims on River Ganges before non-traditional background

In the meantime, of course, the intermixing of peoples that has been propelled by Western technology and trade continues to erode the traditional content of non-European cultures. Thus, although it appears to be a "human thing" to disperse and to mix, it is understandable that Europe is blamed for the problems that this mixing produces, especially as the speed with which it now occurs is unprecedented in human history. Yet, in prehistory already we see the tendency to disperse, to interbreed, to eliminate difference. Thus, the subtitle of Chris Stringer's book Lone Survivors: How We Came to Be the Only Human Race.

Picture credit: Gnome Planet

Reality in literature

Eurycleia washes odysseus feet

Not long ago I was looking through a recently published volume of English translations of essays by Erich Auerbach. The volume contains a range of essays, but my interest concerned the new translation by Jane Newman in this volume of Auerbach's essay on world literature. Previously, the "standard" translation was that of Edward Said. Auerbach's intention in that essay is hard to grasp, even if one has read it, as I have, in German –– several times, indeed. It is probably necessary to go back and read many of Auerbach's earlier writings to speak more definitively about what he meant by "philology of world literature," which is Newman's translation of the title. In contrast, Said rendered it as "philology and world literature." Both are somewhat odd, as is even the German title, "Philologie der Weltliteratur." After all, Auerbach is asserting that, in our globalized world, all nations and cultures are becoming homogenized, whereas (what he does not say) philology was a study of texts, particularly of the historical evolution of texts and the relationship of texts through history. Now that we have reached "the end of history" (a phrase Auerbach doesn't use, but it seems to be suggested),  the discipline of philology would appear to be irrelevant.

In this connection was another essay, "Vico and Aesthetic Historicism" (1948). We moderns, writes Auerbach, have a historically unprecedented access to all arts of the world and of all times, and our aesthetic preferences are "indiscriminate." It is not a contradiction to enjoy both Shakespeare and Sophocles, no matter the different dramatic choices of the two writers, or even such non-Western dramas as Noh and Javanese puppet plays. We enjoy for each, as he writes, “the same preparedness for understanding.” Unlike the Ancients, we do not judge art according to “certain aesthetic rules or judgments" that are shared by our contemporaries. The Greeks, when it came to art, had rules that pertained to each genre, but the same can be said of every other historical culture and to the greater civilizations, e.g., the Islamic empires, the Mayans and Aztecs, or China. Moreover, a civilization can be identified by its shared artistic ideals. Thus, philology, which exumes those ideals through texts.

The Sacrifice of Isaac (Rembrandt workshop), 1636

This week I read a review of this volume of translations. It was by Michael Wood and appeared in the London Review of Books. Wood's focus was on Mimesis, published in 1946 in German, which is the work by which Auerbach is principally known outside of Germany. It is subtitled "The Representation of Reality in Western Literature." That study begin with a chapter contrasting two stories. One is Odysseus's homecoming as described in Homer's Iliad; the other is the Old Testament account of the sacrifice of Isaac (which of course does not take place). Auerbach finds that what Wood in his review calls "the erratic, immediate reality of the inhabitants" of the earth is captured in the Biblical account, but not in Homer. On his homecoming, after all, and after a decade of amazing adventures, Odysseus is the same man he was when he left Ithaca to join the Greek fleet for Troy. As Auerbach writes of the Homeric style, it knows "only a foreground, only a uniformly illuminated, uniformly objective present." In a memorable coinage, Auerbach writes that the Homeric heroes "wake every morning as if it were the first day of their lives."

How different the fate of the Old Testament characters:

"[W]hat a road, what a fate, lie between the Jacob who cheated his father out of his blessing and the old man whose favorite son has been torn to pieces by a wild beast!––between David the harp player, persecuted by his lord's jealously, and the old king, surrounded by violent intrigues. [...] It is only during the course of an eventful life that men are differentiated into full individuality."

In connection with the representation of reality in Western literature, Wood connected this realism with a transcendent structure that does not ignore the earthly existence of humans. Real lives play out in real time, but it is time subsumed under a transcendental authority. Thus, one's character and one's fate are intertwined. One cannot escape who or what one is, quite literally in the afterlife of Dante's Inferno, in which one is condemned to repeat for eternity one's besetting character flaw.

This term irdisch (of the earth) in Auerbach is sometimes translated as "secular," which, to today's ears, lacks any suggestion of transcendence. Just the opposite. But as Wood points out, Auerbach also often uses the word "concrete" to suggest the situatedness of characters in Western literature in their milieu. But, again, human fate is carried out within that milieu. As Wood writes, however, we moderns, true secularists, are left to figure out the meaning of our lives ourselves. Some might disagree, but "individual destiny" sounds meaningless in a secular world.

Prehistoric art

Shield with guardian spirit, 1850

Lately I find myself hung up on prehistory, absorbed in the "evolution" of humankind, not in the biological sense so much as in the cultural. Clearly the two cannot be separated, and I would disagree with Colin Renfrew (see earlier posts) that humans were "set" in their genetic endowment by the time they migrated out of Africa. If I can speak as a layperson, perhaps certain "human tendencies" were embedded in the genotype.

This week I have been at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is hosting an exhibition entitled "Plains Indians: Artists of Earth and Sky." (How brave to use the word "Indian"!). Several of the works reminded me of the early cave art of Europe. For instance, compare the shield at left with the image below of a similar animal from Lascaux.

Horned animal at Lascaux

I will post the images here and let folks draw their own conclusions. (Click on links below images for Metropolitan Museum information on the works.)

Lascaux hunting scene

Drawing of artist's world, ca. 1830

Many millennia separated the two artistic manifestations, but the Indian examples would seem to be evidence of transmission of cultural products through time. What I find of interest is that Indian artists, as they developed and moved away from the early "naiveté," remained with the same artistic idiom, but went on to apply techniques that have been learned through contacts with "whites." They have become as "sophisticated" as European artists. Below are two examples.

Four Seasons Series (Winter) by Wendy Red Star) (2006)

Horse Effigy by Joseph No Two Horns (1880)

Between despair and strength

Angel of Grief, by William Wetmore Story (1894)

Or perhaps it is only a case of "zwischen Eifer und Einwand" (between enthusiasm and objection), as my friend Felicitas Hoppe expresses it in Verbrecher und Versager.

Strength is what I feel when I am at my work, with the result an essay, a review, a revision of the book I am writing. Sometimes even cooking does it for me. When I am not buoyed up by that sense of strength, in creeps that negative thing. Despair is probably hyperbole, since I am not a natural depressive, and the thought of suicide is not something that comes naturally to me. If I were dead, I would never again be able to read, to fill my mind, to write again. Intellectual activity brings me joy.  It is not surprising that I am a scholar of the Enlightenment, not of the Romantic period: my heart has never leapt to behold a rainbow in the sky. I admire the beauty, the order, and the like, all of which, especially after Rick's death, kept my mind active.

It is really sadness, a low-grade manifestation of despair, but when it arrives it is consuming. It is going on four years now that my darling husband died, and yet, in a nonce, sadness seems literally to invade me. It is said that one can die of a broken heart, and mine certainly suffered a blow.

From Descartes' De homine (1694)

It was the English physician William Harvey (1578–1657) who first clarified the structure and functions of the heart. On the Circulation of the Blood (1628) not only described the systematic circulation and properties of blood being pumped around the body by the heart, but it also offered powerful support for the notion that the human body was a mechanism, like a clock or like the universe. Descartes (1596–1650), a brilliant contemporary who promoted Harvey's ideas on the circulation of the blood, compared the heart to a combustion engine or a pump. The heart's status was beginning to change.

It was human reason, according to the 18th-century philosophes, that had enabled us to penetrate the laws regulating the natural world. Between Galileo (1564–1642) and Newton, even the earth lost its privileged position in the universe. The body, like the universe, was subject to regular laws; it was the task of the scientist to discover them. In the Age of Reason, emotions and passions were seen as potentially irrational, and it was seriously thought that rational men could control their influence. Aristotle had believed something similar, using the term "acrasia" (from which the English word "crazy" derives) to refer to people who made bad choices even when they knew they were wrong. By the nineteenth century, J. S. Mill claimed that the highest pleasures are those given "by the operations of the intellect and of the feelings as they blend with the intellect."

A rheumatic heart

The life of the mind, however, is a very self-centered, solitary activity. The operative pronoun is "I." In The Symposium, in which Socrates has the last word, the highest stage of love is one of self-centered intellection.

My life with Rick involved much intellectual activity, but that was only one aspect of our shared life. The heart played a greater role, and it continues to suffer.

Picture credits: Glasgow University Library; Frank Edwin

Another mystery

Cave painting from Chauvet, ca. 31,000 years BP

Continuing on the previous post: the creativity of early humans is on display in Upper Paleolithic cave art and in portable sculptures, dating to about 40,000 years ago. According to Colin Renfrew, whose book on prehistory I have been reading, it took a long time for the scholarly world of prehistorians to accept that this art was truly so old. There is earlier evidence for decorative human "patterning," in a cave in South Africa dating to 65,000 years ago, but it consists of intersecting incised lines, not of images that shows the interaction of humans with their surroundings.

What is of interest, however, is that the brilliant examples European paleolithic cave art, aside from a few exceptions, occurred only in Spain and southwestern France. Non-figurative cave art dates to 40,000 years ago at the El Castillo Cave in Spain. Animal paintings dating to 30,000 years BP (before the present) were discovered in Chauvet in France. Renfrew writes that it would be tens of thousands of years later, "some time after the inception of the  Holocene climatic phase, to see the great upsurge in rock art that then occurs."

Since those discoveries in the 19th century, scholars of prehistory have branched out all over the world, and the earliest cave paintings with comparable "sophistication" have been found on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.

Cave art from Sulawesi (image: CC 1.0 Luc-Henri Fage)

Where am I going with these reflections on prehistory? What interests me is the issue of "transmission" of culture. Renfrew distinguishes two facets of human development. One is species specific, called "speciation, which culminated ca. 150,000 to 100,000 years ago. The skills associated with this stage include the use of fire and of stone tools, which were important in the adaptation of humans to their environment. This phase occurred before the dispersal of humans out of Africa, . Everything afterward was "tectonic," with humans building on the Homo genetic endowment, which, it seems, was "hard wired" in the human DNA.

The tectonic phase brought no change to the genome, and the rest is history: cultural evolution and the transmission of "culturally inherited" behaviors. What was there in humans, in homo sapiens in particular, that drove the species to spread throughout the earth and to transform the environment, to mold nature itself to its purposes? This subject is close to my research on a more modern aspect of this human ranging across the world, namely, "world literature," in particular Goethe's concept. What propelled world literature was another dynamic phase of human history, the overseas explorations beginning after Columbus's arrival in the New World.