Group think in our time

The Czech Republic is obviously a country not well known by many in the U.S. or Canada. Yesterday on the the ferry several local people were asking a man from that country about his  home. The name "Havel" came up, as lots of people may know of the former president, even if they know very little else about the Czech Republic. The Czech man mentioned the current president, and in doing so introduced several current "tropes" into his comments that show the effect of how group think has taken over the minds of many people. Group think releases you from the necessity of thinking for yourself; you simply have to repeat phrases that people around you are saying, especially if they are saying these things as if they were the truth. As in The New York Times or in American universities.

One trope is "businessman." Business now means for many people greed, lack of concern for others, selfishness, etc. If you are trying to tell another person what someone is like, if your first descriptive term is "businessman," then everyone gets the picture, right?

The comment that really captures group think, however, was the man's characterization of the current president of the Czech Republic as "immigrant hating." Again, no need to think. Hate closes off all discussion, e.g., of the subject of whether there might be a valid reason for limiting the number of immigrants that can enter a country.

Picture credit: Shutterstock

Lithuanian outhouses

The EU's love of regulations strikes again. The Latvian minister for environmental protection has just issued regulations concerning outhouses, of which there seem to be quite a number in this still poor country. My daily European news digest has this startling headline: "Droht lettischen Plumpsklos das Aus?" (Do Latvian Outhouses Threaten an "Out"?). I think "out" here refers to exiting the EU.

The Canadians, it seems, already have regulations for outhouses. It appears that outhouses are part of a growing environmental movement.

Photo credit: Tomasz Kuran

German anti-Americanism

The title of this post is perhaps a bit overdone (überspitzt, as my friend Eberhard in Marburg would say). I spent six days in Germany last week, visiting friends of my youth with whom I had studied in Marburg so many years ago. I found myself forced into some discussions with several of them concerning American politics.

For several years now I have withdrawn from offering opinions on American politics. Frankly, I cannot bear the logorrhea, whether from liberals or conservatives. In Canada, where I am spending two months, few people have even bothered to ask me about Donald Trump. Whenever the subject comes up, I simply say that I did not come to Canada to discuss American politics.

Several of my German friends, because we go back so far, were more aggressive on the subject, and I occasionally let myself be drawn into responding, but not often. It goes without saying that they are anti-Trump and that they follow, in their newspaper reading, the president's goings on. I suppose it is understandable that they might be concerned about his foreign policy or the fate of alliances between the U.S. and Europe. It goes without saying that they are apocalyptic about the environment. In other words, they sounded like New York liberals.

There is a world of difference, however, between these Germans and American liberals. Liberalism in its true incarnation has not had much purchase in Europe. Whatever their commitment to representative democracy, the nations of Europe are strongly interventionist in economic and social policies. They have managed (for the time being anyway) to establish strong welfare states, while at the same time being capitalist. It strikes me that the success of this model has depended on the support of the U.S. since World War II, without being burdened by the large military outlays of the U.S. Evidently, Germans think they have done better than the U.S. (Maybe they think they should rule the world again?) One can't help wondering how long these countries can keep the balls in the air.

To the anti-Americanism. What I found surprising was that my friends would be so concerned about healthcare in the U.S. I mean, what does it have to do with them? America's failures in respect of health care, however, serve to point out the superiority of Europe. That's what I mean by the anti-Americanism, which is not a new phenomenon. American liberals, in their hatred of Trump, have simply given the Europeans a cudgel with which to beat up on the U.S.

What really distinguishes the Germans who criticize the U.S. from their American counterparts is the much deeper level of historical and literary understanding of the former. Whether they are on the right or on the left, Germans know their history and they understand not only its faults and failures (Nazism), but also its achievements. They are balanced about their country. American liberalism, on the other hand, is shot through with disdain for the American past, is embarrassed about patriotism. Ironically, in recent years Germans have taken to waving their flag, at least at sports events.

Childhood reading and the map of life

In the essay “The Lost Childhood” (1947), Graham Greene writes that, for a child, “all books are books of divination.” I stumbled at that word “all,” but by the end I understood what he meant: a child is always looking for “a map,” a path that one will follow into the world, and that certain reading, in giving shape to the child’s imagination, fears, and so on, provides the material for that map. Of course, not all books are able to supply that map.

I felt both envious and superior to Greene when he claimed to recall “the suddenness”  with which he found that he could read, not just the sentences in a reader, but “a real book.” He doesn’t say how old he was, but he was evidently eight or nine years old. In contrast, reading itself was a skill that I mastered very early. In the first grade — we were living in Lynn Acres in the south end of Louisville— I read the Sunday comics page to other kids living in the same block of apartments. I seem to see us sitting on the steps leading up or down to one of the apartments in our unit. One of my earliest memories of "letters" were those of the keys on the Remington keyboard. The machine belonged to my mother, who worked as a secretary, and I have a sort of fixed image of myself standing on a chair -- the typewriter was on a chest of drawers -- with my parents on either side of me as I stared at the keyboard and of asking them about the odd unalphabetic arrangement of the letters, the "a" next to "s," and not to "b," for instance.

My childhood reading did not include the kinds of adventure stories that captivated Greene. He speaks highly of Marjorie Bowen and The Viper of Milan. Indeed, I was a haphazard reader of fiction as a child. Weekly trips to the local library led to historical fiction for girls, but nothing too demanding. The book that most affected me and that provided the kind of map of which he speaks was instead a large book of World War II photographs that was in my parents’ possession. That book, containing very little in the way of text, aside from the captions, was certainly a work of divination, for the story told there, through photographs, inaugurated a lifelong journey to understand myself and the America I lived in. The images of children, for instance, cowering in trenches in Finland, as the Russians strafed their country, made a deep impression on me. I would say they were my first intimations of the underside of life. Greene writes of "the haunting" felt by reading of life lived "on the edge of life." That is what those photos conveyed to me.

It took me a long time to look forward to reading fiction, to escape into novels. In fact, my favorite novel in high school was Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. And, like Greene, I admit that, as an adult, I do not have the expectation of pleasure when encountering a new novel. I have to return to Jane Austen for such pleasurable anticipation. Indeed, having just gone through half a dozen copies of the New York Times Book Review, I feel the opposite of anticipation at the prospect of reading any of the novels reviewed. Indeed, the opposite of anticipation … what would that be? If anticipation provokes a smile, a lifting of the muscles around the lips, I feel something like a grimace on reading even the first paragraph of the reviews of these books. How many novels about dysfunctional families can one take? How many memoirs of addiction and childhood sexual abuse? Sad lives galore, but nothing comparable to those Finnish children. But even novels that I choose to read — for the book group that I run — seldom prompt me to rush home and start reading. I dutifully  make my way through them.

Again, I turn to Greene for what one hopes for in a novel: writing in which the visible world still exists, where the characters have the solidity and importance of men and women with souls "to save or to lose."

Walter Benjamin on Capitalism

I went to the Jewish Museum yesterday to see the exhibit The Arcades: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin.The so-called Arcades Project was a mammoth undertaking of Benjamin's, begun in the 1920s, when Benjamin began compiling materials that would have 19th-century Paris as the centerpiece of a study about modernism and the rise of consumerism. It was not completed at his death, but remained a cache of 1,000 pages or so, categorized into subjects, such as "ancient Paris," "prostitution," the streets of Paris, and so on. Arcades refer to the covered shopping streets that can still be found in some European cities, e.g., Basel and Lugano. Apparently they were torn down long ago in Paris, but they once were sites of fashionable stores. I think that the Galleria in Houston might be considered an example of an arcade, a mega one, to be sure. Indeed, on entering the galleries at the Jewish Museum, one encounters a wall label comparing the arcades to shopping malls. Clearly, in the eyes of the participating artists and the curators, American shopping malls fall short of the glamour of the 19th-century urban arcades.

I found the conjunction of contemporary artists and Benjamin a strange fit. I wonder what Benjamin would have thought about the giant portrait in which the ubiquitous Cindy Sherman appears as a rapacious collector of art. On the other hand, I liked the variation on the iconic image of Charles Baudelaire by Mary Reid Kelley.

One of the wall labels, next to two large photos by Rodney Graham portraying himself as a gambler (one entitled "Good Hand," the other "Bad Hand"), has the following to say: "Walter Benjamin charted the ways in which capitalism strips us of the ability to determine our own fate, leaving us subject to impersonal forces whose scope and operations remain beyond our ken." The power of such "unanticipated, generally unintelligible" causes, which are "seemingly dependent on chance" predisposes people to gambling.

Such sentiments are self-evident to the people who voice them, but a little reflection would indicate the opposite: capitalism has allowed more and more individuals to forge their own destinies in a way that was not possible when people's lives were set down in narrow channels by social and religious authorities. Not even the king or the pope was master of his own fate in the pre-modern world. That is not to say that the results are always admirable or that it is easy to chart one's own life in the absence of transcendent grounding or social limitations, but the fault is not capitalism. "Destiny," with its suggestion of hidden power, is probably the wrong word to use in any case. No one can see what is hidden. Capitalism, however, certainly allows us to create ways of life that were unimaginable in earlier eras, even if the outcome is often beyond our control.

Another label mentioned that we moderns experience a great deal of information, but it appears to us in fragmented form. Again, all that fragments are what individuals pull together to make a life of their own choosing. It is definitely not the same as when we follow a life path laid out for us by tradition, social or religious. There seems to me to be something very romantic, even reactionary, about these complaints about the loss of a unified view of life. The same writers want to have it both ways: attack religion and tradition, and then complain about modern fragmentation.

Achilles and Ajax roll dice

I am also surprised that the writer of the wall label asserts that gambling (and also the stock market) is a response to capitalism: didn't humans gamble in earlier ages? Trying to beat chance is an ancient hobby. We humans seem by our nature to be risk-takers.

Images (from top): James Welling, Morgan Great Hall; Cindy Sherman, Untitled #474 (2008), collection of Cynthia and Abe Steinberger; Mary Reid Kelley, Charles Baudelaire (2015)

Changing hearts and minds

I went to a presentation the other evening at Columbia University by a colleague of mine. The subject was the "anti-utilitarian movement" in France, which is probably a French intellectual movement that no one has heard of, maybe not even most French. As Wikipedia tells us, "Utilitarianism is an ethical theory that states that the best action is the one that maximizes utility," with "utility" usually defined in terms of the well-being of sentient entities. I suppose that Jeremy Bentham, founder of utilitarianism, meant here the well-being of humans. So, who on earth would be against (i.e., "anti") utilitarianism?

From what I gleaned from the presentation the objection comes from the crass correlation between the provision of welfare by the state as a way of minimizing social tensions. One should not take from this that the anti-utilitarians are conservative. No, the AUs are utopians, although some scholars, e.g., David Graeber, associates them with the Left. At least, this is what I get from his piece "Give It Away." "Giving" should be a gift, something freely disposed of, without any anticipation of a reward or even thanks. Even the provision of welfare anticipates a reward: the poor won't riot! From what I have read the AU movement derives its ideas from Marcel Mauss, who wrote a book called The Gift (available here in English). Mauss was Emile Durkheim's nephew and heir of his sociological theories, and The Gift "is the foundation for social theories of reciprocity and gift exchange." Mauss, besides being something of a socialist, was a scholar of so-called primitive societies that did not participate in the kinds of modern economic exchanges with which we expect a return for our money. We give a dollar; we expect something in return. Proceeding from Mauss, the AUs (again as I understand them) hold that we also owe something that might be called "social debt."

At the same time as I heard this talk I happened to be reading a novel by the Swedish writer Jonas Karlsson called The Invoice. It seems that "a big international agreement" has been signed by "politicians and leaders from different areas of society," in which it was agreed to tax people on the basis of their levels of happiness. After the taxes were collected, there would be a redistribution to those with negative scores, who would receive compensation for their unhappy lives. It was reckoned by the powers that be that the "happiest" would be people with high incomes, those who had been born with silver spoons in their mouths or otherwise had won life's lottery.

The first-person narrator of the novel, a very average man of 39 -- he works part time in a video store and has no girlfriend -- receives an invoice in the mail for 5,700,000 kroner. (That's U.S. $740,000.) He thinks this is a mistake: he has no money, no savings even, and has lived the most ordinary of lives. He doesn't even consider himself a happy person, but in the course of the novel you come to see that he is happy, that he enjoys simple pleasures (mint chocolate and raspberry ice cream, listening to the rain beat against the windows), in contrast to all the stressed-out folks who can't bear to get out of beds in the morning. Very funny, very touching. It's not surprising that a socialist state like Sweden would come up with something like this.

Don't I look like I care, esp. if you are an animal?

But wait. Why should money be redistributed to people who are unhappy because they have jobs they don't like or are stuck with partners they have come to loathe? Taxing the wealthy (are we presuming they are happy?) to ameliorate inequalities is one thing, but a tax on happiness? The principle, which is not really worked out in the novel, is that society gives us a certain amount of "wealth." (Elizabeth Warren would say that "you didn't built it.") In socialist Sweden that wealth would include all the goodies of the modern welfare state. Having enjoyed those one's entire life, the presumption is that one should be happy and that one should cough up when someone else is unhappy. Well, as I said, the principle is not well worked out. Nevertheless, I am aware that international busybodies are afoot with ideas to institute "international taxes" that would then contribute to the busybodies' desire to fix the world.

The AUs, although people of the Left, are not yet there. As I mentioned, I find them utopian. Their aim, like that of most utopians, is to change people's "thinking." Thus, when we give it would be because we wish to do so, not for crassly utilitarian motives or in anticipation of gratitude. Shades of Kant here.

We are all smiles now

When did I first notice that everyone was smiling, indeed laughing? It must have been when I returned from Japan, circa 1980. The TV commercial that most impressed me in this respect was for a soda -- Coke or Sprite. It showed a party of happy young people, on a beach perhaps. All were happy, all were smiling. I also noticed at that time that people were more gentle, especially with their kids. You noticed it on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where I had come to live (and still reside).

I could not fail to notice a great change in the moral atmosphere of the U.S. Had I not been absent from the U.S. for several years at the end of the 1970s, this change might not have been so apparent to me. One seemingly small thing caught my attention immediately on my return. It was the kinder, gentler mood of child-raising that I observed. Parents, I noticed, constantly talked to their kids, even with babes in strollers. They had conversations with three- and four-year-olds, as if they were adults. They held hands with their children way beyond what one would have seen in the 1950s: fathers with girls on the verge of puberty, mothers with their growing sons. Little League teams were made up of girls and boys. Parents immediately demanded to know what their kids wanted on entering a store. Yes, a gentler, kinder world, one contrasting to the era in which my generation had been raised, when we had been required to eat all the vegetables on our plate at dinner and when our parents took the side of teachers, not of children.

It turns out that this small difference was really not so small at all, and it was a sign of the different priorities of my cohort going forward. Gentleness, kindness, after all, are virtues that are easy to practice when you never doubt that you will always have a roof over your head and enough to eat. And it is only one generation in American history that has been so fortunate in this respect. It was our values, those of the authentic “Sixties” generation — of tolerance and gentleness, of feeling good about ourselves — that now began to dominate American life.

It is perhaps not surprising that young people in TV commercials in 1980 looked so happy. The commercials, after all, were produced by my cohort, the people who were now doing well. We had entered "the institutions" by the early 1970s: the universities, the media, the professions. By 1980, however, the U.S. was entering an age of economic instability that still affects most Americans. Remember the oil crisis of 1973? The energy crisis was more than an economic blow. Despite our own vast energy reserves, the U.S. had allowed itself to become dependent on oil imports.

The result was that hostile dictators now held the U.S. hostage: “our neck is stretched over a fence, and OPEC holds the knife.” So said President Jimmy Carter in his “Crisis of Confidence” speech of July 1979, during which he spoke of sacrifice and encouraged the nation to unite in order to survive what he called a “fundamental threat” to our democracy. And, then, in November of that year came the takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, after which fifty-two Americans were literally held hostage, for 444 days, by followers of the Iranian Revolution. For the U.S., the energy crisis was indeed an admonition: “You must change your life,” as it says in Rilke's poem. Indeed.

Instead, we continue to smile.

Picture credit: Coca Cola Journey