Digressions&Impressions

On Clarke's Criticism of Austrialian Settler Colonialism and his account of intelligence

[I will phase out D&I at typepad. This post was first published at:  digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber at <digressionsimpressions.substack.com>]

This digression is devoted to an extended aside in A Fall of Moondust; a slender 1961 novel by Arthur C. Clarke (1917 – 2008). It's easy to forget how famous Clarke once was not just as a science fiction author, but in wider discussions of science policy and search for extraterrestrial life. Anyway, the main action of the book is the rescue mission of a group of passengers on a sightseeing tour on the Moon, who are trapped under a kind of lunar dustbowl caused by a lunar Earthquake. While it plays some role in the development of the genre of 'hard science fiction' (or scientific science fiction), the novel is primarily a study, from multiple angles, of group dynamics and leadership under great stress and time constraints. What's neat is that there is no unique hero in the story, but that many kinds of contributions are valued. But because Clarke's characterizations are flimsy (and marred by gendered stereotypes) it's best read as an adventure story with occasionally comic touches. What follows does not contain any spoilers. 

The novel, which is set in the future, is oriented around a kind of settler-colonial mission to the Moon, and the possibility of developing a tourism industry on it. Clarke leaves the exact political details underspecified, and even the institutional contents of global peace is left unclear (especially compared to his slightly earlier Childhood's End). There is some evidence that the United Nations is politically influential and that some of the balance of power in it has shifted to Africa--we'll see evidence of what one might call 'post-colonial subaltern solidarity' that Clarke expects. (It's the great age of decolonization in which he was writing.) And while there is some evidence that the Soviet Union is culturally significant, the novel offers plenty of suggestions that ordinary market capitalism is not extinguished yet. I leave it at that (some of the evidence is quoted below).

Interestingly enough (given Clarke's own non-fictional views), the possibility of encountering extra-terrestrial life is actually minimized and ridiculed throughout the novel. It’s compared to religion in ways unflattering to both UFOs and religion.

In fact, one natural take-away from the novel is that if technological barriers to space-colonization can be overcome (and it is not obvious it's worth the money and risks), it's much preferable over settler-colonization on Earth. And the reason I say this is because there is a set-piece about 2/3rds of the novel, when -- during the dramatic action of the novel things have reached a real nadir -- there is an extended conversation between Pat (the captain of the space-bus buried under lunar dust), who we just learn is Lunar born, and McKenzie (who is one of his terrestrial touristy passengers trapped alongside him). I'll quote the passage in full:

 

"...Incidentally, how did you get a name like McKenzie?"

Having had little contact with the racial tensions that were not yet wholly extinct on Earth, Pat could make such remarks without embarrassment—indeed, without even realizing that they might cause embarrassment.

"My grandfather had it bestowed on him by a missionary when he was baptized. I'm very doubtful if it has any—ah— genetic significance. To the best of my knowledge, I'm a full-blooded abo."

"Abo?"

"Aboriginal. We were the people occupying Australia before the whites came along. The subsequent events were somewhat depressing."

Pat's knowledge of terrestrial history was vague; like most residents of the Moon, he tended to assume that nothing of great importance had ever happened before 8 November 1967, when the fiftieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution had been so spectacularly celebrated.

"I suppose there was war?"

"You could hardly call it that. We had spears and boomerangs; they had guns. Not to mention T.B. and V.D., which were much more effective. It took us about a hundred and fifty years to get over the impact. It's only in the last century— since about nineteen forty—that our numbers started going up again. Now there are about a hundred thousand of us— almost as many as when your ancestors came."

McKenzie delivered this information with an ironic detachment that took any personal sting out of it, but Pat thought that he had better disclaim responsibility for the misdeeds of his terrestrial predecessors.

"Don't blame me for what happened on Earth," he said. "I've never been there, and I never will—I couldn't face that gravity. But I've looked at Australia plenty of times through the telescope. I have some sentimental feeling for the place— my parents took off from Woomera."

"And my ancestors named it; a woomera's a booster stage for spears."

Are any of your people," asked Pat, choosing his words with care, "still living in primitive conditions? I've heard that's still true, in some parts of Asia."

"The old tribal life's gone. It went very quickly, when the African nations in the U.N. started bullying Australia. Often quite unfairly, I might add—for I'm an Australian first, and an aboriginal second. But I must admit that my white countrymen were often pretty stupid; they must have been, to think that we were stupid! Why, 'way into the last century some of them still thought we were Stone Age savages. Our technology was Stone Age, all right—but we weren't."

There seemed nothing incongruous to Pat about this discussion, beneath the surface of the Moon, of a way of life so distant both in space and time. He and McKenzie would have to entertain each other, keep an eye on their twenty unconscious companions, and fight off sleep, for at least five more hours. This was as good a way as any of doing it.

"If your people weren't in the Stone Age, Doc—and just for the sake of argument, I'll grant that you aren't—how did the whites get that idea?"

"Sheer stupidity, with the help of a preconceived bias. It's an easy assumption that if a man can't count, write, or speak good English, he must be unintelligent. I can give you a perfect example from my own family. My grandfather—the first McKenzie—lived to see the year two thousand, but he never learned to count beyond ten. And his description of a total eclipse of the Moon was 'Kerosene lamp bilong Jesus Christ he bugger-up finish altogether.'

"Now, I can write down the differential equations of the Moon's orbital motion, but I don't claim to be brighter than Grandfather. If we'd been switched in time, he might have been the better physicist. Our opportunities were different-that's all. Grandfather never had occasion to learn to count; and I never had to raise a family in the desert—which was a highly skilled, full-time job"

Perhaps," said Pat thoughtfully, "we could do with some of your grandfather's skills here. For that's what we're trying to do now—survive in a desert."

"I suppose you could put it that way, though I don't think that boomerang and fire stick would be much use to us. Maybe we could use some magic—but I'm afraid I don't know any, and I doubt if the tribal gods could make it from Arnhem Land."

"Do you ever feel sorry," asked Pat, "about the breakup of your people's way of life?"

"How could I? I scarcely knew it. I was born in Brisbane, and had learned to run an electronic computer before I ever saw a corroboree—"

"A what?"

"Tribal religious dance—and half the participants in that were taking degrees in cultural anthropology. I've no romantic illusions about the simple life and the noble savage. My ancestors were fine people, and I'm not ashamed of them, but geography had trapped them in a dead end. After the struggle for sheer existence, they had no energy left for a civilization. In the long run, it was a good thing that the white settlers arrived, despite their charming habit of selling us poisoned flour when they wanted our land."

"They did that? "

"They certainly did. But why are you surprised? That was a good hundred years before Belsen."

Pat thought this over for a few minutes. Then he looked at his watch and said, with a distinct expression of relief: "Time I reported to Base again. Let's have a quick look at the passengers first."—Chapter 19.

We don't learn what role Belsen (presumably a reference to Bergen-Belsen) has in the intellectual self-understanding of the future. But the implication seems to be that it is a non-trivial part of the cultural common ground of the educated of the future. Clarke here invites the reader to reflect on the commonalities (and some of the differences) between the genocidal treatment of the Jews by the Nazis and the settler-colonialism of the Anglo-Australians toward the aboriginals. 

More explicitly, McKenzie's argument (which is not contradicted anywhere else in the novel) is critical of racist views of intelligence in two ways (one obvious and one more subtle): first, he rejects racial nativism as explanatory when it comes to intelligence, and he plainly comes down on the side of education, opportunity, and culture as key drivers of intellectual development.

Second, he explicitly rejects the idea that there is one kind of intelligence; intelligence is something context specific. And, in fact, in this day of machine learning, it's a useful reminder of the older, wiser idea of intelligence as a culturally embedded skill that allows one to navigate one's environment(s).

This anti-racist view is embedded in a Victorian stance (that one finds in, say, J.S. Mill) that draws on a much older conceptual contrast of civilization vs savage that is understood in energetic and cultural evolutionary/selectionist terms ("geography had trapped them in a dead end. After the struggle for sheer existence.") Now, again the 'civilized' are not necessarily smarter--the point of the passage is to alert us to their arrogant stupidity and biases that makes the more powerful miss or overlook intelligence when they encounter it (and it suits their interests to do so).

But the implication of the cultural/group Darwinian argument in the quoted set-piece is that it is fundamentally better to be technologically civilized and that ‘savage’ life-styles are fundamentally not worth preserving or revitalizing (notice that 'dead end'). That is to say, the total effect of the extended aside is a kind of cultural argument for technological progress or spatial manifest destiny that tries to avoid the racialist, even genocidal versions of the past. But the racist versions are not wholly repudiated on consequentialist grounds because  "in the long run, it was a good thing that the white settlers arrived" despite the costs. Not to put too fine point on it, but this is a species of secular theodicy.

• This first appeared at: <https://digressionsimpressions.substack.com/p/on-arthur-c-clarkes-criticism-white> a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

 

On Borges, John Perry, Spinoza, and Identity

[I will phase out D&I at typepad. This post was first published at:  digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber at <digressionsimpressions.substack.com>]

I once met John Perry for a few minutes in line at a hotel Starbucks at an Eastern APA when those were still the job-market. We didn't know each other, and we never met again (so far). But I knew his name because I owned his A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality; our chat was brief, but it was kind not the least because his eyes didn't wander to scan the room while we talked. I forgot what we talked about, but, as the kids say, sometimes the vibe is more important than the words and it was one of the few sweet moments during that otherwise dismal APA.

So, I'll forgive him that in his (2007) Amherst Lecture which offers a reading of “Borges and I,” Perry opts for "the more straightforward interpretation" in supposing that the implied author of "Borges and I" is Borges the (famous) actual author of the piece, and not some fictional counterpart or doppelgänger of the actual author. After all, we're dealing with Borges, the author of Pierre Menard!

"Borges and I' is, in fact, about the estranged relationship between the implied author of "Borges and I" and the famous author, Borges. So, it's not impossible that the implied author of "Borges and I" is the fictional counterpart.

Perry actually acknowledges this possibility on some level later in his argument when he concedes that "in following the writer’s thoughts, we must to a certain extent pretend that the writer is not Borges." But Perry thinks we can't sustain this perspective because "the interest of the story is the thoughts that the writer has about himself" (emphasis added) and not the implied fictional counterpart.

As an aside, the less straightforward interpretation that Perry rejects is that "Borges could have written a story like this about some other author." But that's compatible with the implied author being (not just a counterpart/doppelgänger of Borges, but) also (say) Eric Schliesser. And it's quite clear that the latter option is not really implied by the story. So, while I agree with Perry that this is less likely and should be rejected, I don't think, as I hinted in the previous two paragraphs, Perry has canvassed all the relevant options when he opts for what he takes to be the more straightforward interpretation.

Perry's interpretation of "Borges and I" actually goes off the rails, I think, shortly thereafter when he writes that "It would not only be odd, but quite impossible, for Borges to survive the writer. Even if all that is meant by “survival” is living on as a literary figure, if Borges lives on in that way, so will the writer."  This is not right if we reject the more straightforward interpretation.

But even on the straightforward interpretation there is a wrinkle that Perry does not confront. (I say this with some trepidation not just because I remember his kindness so fondly, but also because between the two of us, he is actually the expert on identity.) Before I get to that, for Perry, "Borges and I" is fundamentally about the expression of "a certain alienation [the actual Borges] feels about certain aspects of himself and certain achievements of his." The alienation thesis is quite plausible. But the reason for Perry's confidence here is that he is working with a theory of identity (let's call it a 'classical' one) in which "the relation that A and B have when there is just one thing that is both A and B. It is the relation that Tully has to Cicero, the evening star has to the morning star, Mark Twain has to Samuel Clemens, Bill Blythe has to Bill Clinton, and so on. Identity is the relation that each thing has to itself and no other." This is familiar enough for philosophical readers.

In order to hold on to this classical theory of identity and to handle the ways in which A and B (Borges and I or I and Borges) may seem to come apart in "Borges and I," Perry introduces the idea of "motivating cognitive complex." If you are interested in finding out what that is read Perry’s lecture. I'll stipulate here that it can do the job Perry wants it to do.

To be sure, I don't mean to deny that Perry may be playing an elaborate, Borgesian game with us, too. After all, along the way, while discussing a thought experiment of Hector-Neri Castañeda, Perry notes that "then I see on the web that the date when John Perry published his Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality was 1978, that information goes into the same mental file where information about what is in front of me, whether I am hungry or not, and the like, is kept. I get the information “John Perry published the dialogue in 1978” and this leads to the thought, “I published the dialogue in 1978.”" One may well wonder who this I really is supposed to be. 

Be that as it may, I don't think that Borges (in the straightforward interpretation) or the implied author, Borges's counterpart (in my preferred interpretation) is relying on the classical theory of identity in "Borges and I." And my reason for thinking that is two-fold: first, the story ends with an epistemic claim: "I don’t know which of the two writes this page." On Perry's reading this ought to be deeply puzzling. For, by stipulation (the straightforward interpretation), the persona who is writing the piece is Borges the famous author. So this doubt really can’t arise on Perry’s straightforward reading.

Second, Perry completely, and somewhat oddly (he is a professional philosopher, after all), skips the explicit invocation of Spinoza in "Borges and I" (which in the translations I am familiar with is shorter than a double-spaced page). 

It's pretty clear that Spinoza rejects the classical theory of identity. This is obvious in Spinoza's doctrine of eternality in which the X that becomes eternal loses all the particularity one naturally  (and also on the classical theory of identity) associates with X and becomes, in fact, in a certain sense co-extensive with the true or the truths (Y). But it’s not so that from the perspective of eternity, X=Y. (See here for an attempt to describe this.) In fact, Spinoza also rejects what Tarski calls the 'classical' conception of truth (and defends what one might call a metaphysical identity theory of truth (recall here)). Rather, like the Muslim philosophers' views of God’s knowledge (as Al-Ghazali infers, they deny that God knows individuals), from the perspective of eternity, Spinoza's individuals and individuality are ephemera (and so unknowable). My point here is not to defend Spinoza.

Now, it's possible, of course, that the implied author of "Borges and I" has a different interpretation of Spinoza than the one hinted at in the previous paragraph. Fair enough. In the story, the following is claimed: "Spinoza understood that all things want to be preserved in their being." This is an evocation of a feature of the so-called general 'Conatus doctrine' (EIIIp6). In fact, it echoes Ethics IIIp9 (and a whole series of propositions developed in parts IV/V of the Ethics): "The mind, both insofar as it has clear and distinct ideas and also insofar as it has confused ideas, strives to persevere in being." In "Borges and I" the doctrine gets glossed as follows (in the translation of Ilan Stavans): 

the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others and in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried freeing myself from him and went from the mythologies of the arrabal to the games with time and the infinite, but those games are Borges’ now and I shall come up with other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to the other.

Again, at first one may think it's pretty clear Perry is onto something when he suggests that this expresses alienation. Perhaps an alienation so extreme, that the conatus doctrine ends up in a kind of inversion: rather than tending toward eternity, it tends in the implied author toward oblivion or near-total loss of identity.

Before I close this digression, I should admit that I ended up returning to Borges' story because my friend Petra had bait-and-switched me into buying Amina Cain's fascinating essay, A Horse at Night. This essay mentions two of Borges' stories (including "Borges and I”.) I write ‘bait-and-switch,’ because Petra had sent me a picture of a paragraph from Cain, which I only later realized (while reading Cain's essay) was an excerpt from Annie Ernaux's The Possession.

A major theme of A Horse at Night, is how in "writing and life" two things can be imaginatively projected on top of each other without eclipsing each other and, thereby, generating something new. That is, Cain explores the complex nature of identity. To put this as a serious joke: I find Cain's implied author in A Horse at Night nearly insufferable and banal when she is engaged in autobiography and mesmerizingly evocative and interesting when discussing other artist’s works of art. For the record: Cain treats the implied author of "Borges and I" as sad.

Neither Perry nor Cain discusses Spinoza or the skeptical conclusion of "Borges and I:" "I don’t know which of the two writes this page." It's not obvious on Perry's reading why this occurs. It's a rather extreme form of skepticism; it denies knowledge of the self-identifying features of the Cartesian ego in the very act of affirming its existence. It is especially notable — alerted by Cain — that this occurs in the writer’s life that one forgets or losses oneself in a certain sense. (Cain touches on this from the perspective of the Soto Zen tradition, not Spinozism.)

If we glance at Spinoza's theory of identity the puzzle disappears if we imagine, as we are allowed in fiction, that the sentence, "I don’t know which of the two writes this page," is written from the perspective of eternity/oblivion. For from that perspective such individualizing marks are not known/knowable. Of course, the joke is knowing that one is Borges, or the implied author, or his very vain counterpart, wouldn't matter from that perspective either, or at least it shouldn't.

• This first appeared at: <On Borges, John Perry, Spinoza, and Identity - by nescio13 (substack.com)> a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Foucault on Enlightenment, and Journalism

It was toward the end of the Age of Enlightenment, in 1784. A Berlin journal asked a few worthy thinkers the question, "What is enlightenment?" Immanuel Kant answered, after Moses Mendels­sohn.

I find the question more noteworthy than the answers. Because enlightenment, at the end of the eighteenth century, was not news, was not an invention, a revolution, or a party. It was something familiar and diffuse, something that was going on-and fading out. The Prussian newspaper was basically asking: "What is it that has happened to us? What is this event that is nothing else but what we have just said, thought, and done-nothing else but ourselves, noth­ing but that something which we have been and still are?"
Should this singular inquiry be placed in the history of joumal­ism or of philosophy? I only know that, since that time, there have not been many philosophies that don't revolve around the question: "What are we now? What is this ever so fragile moment from which we cannot detach our identity and which will carry that identity away with it?" But I believe this question is also the basis of the journalist's occupation.--Michel Foucault (1979) "For an Ethic of Discomfort," [reviewing Jean Daniel], in Power: Essential Works of Foiucault 1954-84: Volume Three, translated by Robert Hurley, p. 443

lt is probably well known that near the end of his life, Foucault got very interested in Kant's essay, "What is Enlightenment?" Foucault engaged with it directly and circled around it on a number of occasions. A subset of these has, in fact, been collected in a volume edited by Sylvère Lotringer (who I long thought an invention of Chris Kraus) What is Truth? It contains a version of the same book review that I quoted above, but there it is translated beautifully by Lysa Hochroth.

My interest here is not to litigate to what degree Foucault's reading or appropriation of Kant does justice to the source material, or even is worth emulating. But I digress on some of Foucault's moves.

First, Foucault redefines the nature of journalism from, say, the reporting of news, to this more ontological or existential question pertaining in tricky ways to identity, 'what are we now?' To be sure, Foucault does not legislate that journalism is not about reporting the news anymore, but we might say that what is thought or taken to be worthy to be reported must pertain to this kind of salience. What's interesting about this claim is that it prefigures, but also reminds us of what we already know, that 'All the News That's Fit to Print' reflects the question of (our potentially fleeting) identity. The expanding lifestyle pages, perhaps, suggest that the oblique mirror that contemporary journalism provides us with to answer this question is more suggestive of our desires and fantasies than anything else.

What journalism is perhaps not, however, is the initial record for law and (historical and social) science that can enter into any truth. It's orthogonal to establishing a public record that enters as facts into, say, a deliberative practice. It is, of course, so conceived not wholly irrelevant to public deliberation because in a non-trivial sense it defines and helps constitute the unity -- the we -- that deliberates and does so in virtue of some non-trivial identity. And while in the previous paragraph I satirized the pretentions of journalism so conceived, in this paragraph I point to the constitutive role of journalism to social life. 

Evidently, this constitutive role to social life is also a task for the philosopher. In fact, Foucault tells us explicitly that nearly all philosophies he is aware of -- and while he has limitations, Foucault is nothing but well-read and he stakes a knowledge claim on it "I only know that"-- try to play this role, at least since Kant tried to answer the question. It's a bit of a shame that he doesn't hint at the exceptions, but Foucault's claim here is a nice way of capturing one way in which analytic philosophy, while conditioned by the ages in which it is produced, does not -- despite our advances in quantified modal logic -- generally (there are exceptions) answer the question, what are we now. 

There is, of course, for all the play (Foucault clearly admires w the author of the book he is reviewing) a dethroning involved here. To speak crassly, philosophy is not in the business of truth as the law and science are, but it is much closer to the world of opinion (that is journalism) and this is a world of near-Hericlitan flux--the oft imperceptible instability of identity, when its self-evidentness cannot be taken for granted anymore, is the great theme of the review. * 

As I have noted before, there is for all his nominalism and disciplined skepticism a historicism lurking in Foucault. Each fleeting now has its singular identity, and it takes occupations devoted to singular inquiry -- journalism, philosophy, and, of course, the arts -- to try to sketch a kind of repetition of that once diffuse identity; for after completion of the task, it turns out already to be "familiar" even if we see it afresh. 

 

 

 

RIP: Rob Brouwer 1938-2022

In a few weeks, Neglected Classics of Philosophy 2 (OUP, 2022) will appear. As you can see at books.google, it's dedicated to "Anneke Luger-Veenstra, Jan Stronk, and Rob Brower, my learned high school teachers, who encouraged a love of the classics." Two days ago my high school classmate, Jorine Lamsma, called my attention to an announcement in the newspaper that Rob had died June 1, 2022. The memorial service and funeral are today.

Rob was my high school Latin teacher for four years at Amsterdam's Vossius Gymnasium. My class (1c, 2c, 3c) was known to be 'trouble' and quite a few teachers fought trench warfare with us, as we found ever more creative ways to prank and be disruptive. But not in Rob's classroom. We called him "Mijnheer Brouwer," of course. He was not on first name basis with his charges.

Rob commanded our instant respect not because he was strict (which he was) and unperturbable (which he was), but because he somehow managed to convey that he instantiated the promise of bildung (without having to say so); he wasn't aiming to reach some learning target decomposed in weekly grammar, vocabulary, and syntax acquired. But rather he always made clear that whatever task of memorization and repetition we were assigned was in the service of our introduction to the classics and, without veneration, their wider cultural significance. As another classmate, Max Rosenberg, put it, each class was part of a much broader whole. And as the years passed, I slowly grasped -- hence my use of 'bildung'  --, these classics in turn would be good friends accompanying me in a life-time of imperfect self-cultivation.

Once, I was fourteen or so, a classmate pushed his button, and the unfathomable happened: the boy (no, not me) got sent out of class, with the archaic, 'gaat heen' and Rob, visibly steadying himself, pointing a finger at the door. For years we could get a good laugh trying to mimic that 'gaat heen,' but we had to acknowledge simultaneously that we were in awe of him. 

Not just because of his formal language and dress, Rob seemed like a character from a different age -- his classroom had the surprisingly bittersweet smell of his pipe --, he was the subject of myths: his son had died tragically (which turned out to be true), he suffered from Leukemia (which turned out to be true), he had studied to be a Jesuit (possible), and he was dating the German teacher, Erika Langbroek (which also turned out to be true). 

I had a very checkered high school career; I should have flunked out at the end of my third and fourth years (ninth and tenth grade). Mevrouw Luger played a big role in bending the rules my way each year. But I always passed my Latin, and to this day, I recognize that I have built a scholarly career on the years Rob put into me. (And I often regretted he was not my Greek teacher.) 

I forget if it was my junior or senior year, but I got wind that Rob was doing a reading group in philosophy with some interested class-mates at his home not far from the school in an apartment on the Beethovenstraat. (At this point he wasn't my teacher anymore, but it was before he moved into a different apartment with Erika also on the Beethovenstraat.) I invited myself along for the wine and the mystique. They were reading Die Kritik der reinen Vernunft (in German). I would like to say it got me excited about philosophy, but I suspect the main effect of the reading group was to make me excessively and irresponsibly fearless in the face of any text. 

Some time after college, I got back in touch with Rob. I suspect in order to brag to him that I had been taking philosophy classes with Dan Dennett (he was underwhelmed) and Martha Nussbaum. Rob, it turned out, was a real fan-boy of Nussbaum who, in graduate school, was one of my supervisors of my qualifying paper on the puppet image in Plato's Laws. Alongside E.B. England's commentary, Rob's wisdom became instrumental in helping me figure out the nuances of Plato's Greek and thought.

But perhaps I had simply bumped into him with Erika at the kleine zaal at Concertgebouw. Even long after he was struck by an increasingly visible Parkinson, he was a transfixed presence in the little balcony. I didn't share his love for nineteenth century Lieder, but we often discovered that we (or, in my case, my mum) had acquired season tickets for the same chamber music series.

We started to see other more frequently during my Summer visits back home while I was in graduate school. I am also unsure of the exact sequence of events that led to our first reading group with Martin Claes, then a Jesuit getting a PhD (now a pastor and a scholar), on Augustine's De Magistro. I  never asked Rob if he identified with Augustine's loss of his son. He never spoke of him to me, but he often expressed pride in his daughter (a lawyer). It was the start of numerous partially overlapping, reading groups with Rob in varying combinations with people from his life -- often people who adored Dante or choir (or both) -- or my own circle of Dutch academics and friends. 

Meanwhile, we started corresponding and as I look through our letters, I see that he never stopped trying to broaden my horizon. His letters reflect his curiosity, even an excessive strain of enthusiasm; he offered a never ending stream of suggested novels or works of scholarship. While in his own work, he had an exacting low tolerance for minute error, in his reading habits he was primarily searching for bold and expansive interpretations. As I advanced in academia he relished keeping me informed of scholarly fashion that had somehow captured the imaginations of the culture and book sections even editorial pages of the Dutch broadsides.

In addition to being a teacher, Rob was a scholar, translator, and poet. His translations of Dante's Divine Comedy, Statius' The Thebaid, Lucan's Bellum Civile, Virgil's Bucolica/The Eclogues combine vast erudition with linguistic and poetic sensitivity. He also translated Epictetus. He would probably be very amused to hear me claim modest credit for triggering his renewed interest into Lucan just as he was completing his stupendous Dante translation. But it's true: while teaching the Treatise in my first seminar at Wesleyan in 2002, I was confused by the way the motto of book 3 of Hume's Treatise had been translated in the then new 'student edition' published by OUP. (The motto is from Lucan.) We started a correspondence about it, and I date to it the start of my interest into Seneca.

When I heard Rob had died, I looked at our correspondence to see when we last had written. I noticed to my horror he had never acknowledged my word that I had dedicated the forthcoming Neglected Classics volume to him. I had not registered this silence at all during the depths of my own illness.

Before I close, I don't want to suggest Rob was an ethereal personality only. He was happy whenever he could talk about Erika or Sabine. And our reading groups were carefully planned around not just his choir practices, but also his cycling holidays.

I also don't mean to suggest he was above name-dropping. Once he asked me slyly if I knew who Henny Vrienten was. They had met swimming their laps in de Zuiderbad. Later Vrienten became involved in the recording of Rob's Dante.

Near the end of De Magistro, Augustine suggests that when we praise a teacher, we're really praising ourselves and this never seems to me more true than in the Academy during the many, lovely ritual practices of acknowledging the roles of supervisors in one's education. Self-praise does not strike me as a sin, but I have to admit that all of these academic practices (fests, collections, memorial conferences, etc.) seem, however sincerely felt and expressed, a bit tainted by the multiplicity of self-advancing roles they play in our prestige hierarchies and zero-sum political economy. (Perhaps this also accounts for the sincerity.)

We encounter our high school teachers through their words, their curriculum, their classroom, and features of their personality as well as the school yards myths about them. The older, and more experienced I get in the classroom, the more it seems to me they -- I mean all true teachers -- use a feature of their personality, perhaps made excessively visible to the student, to find a way to connect with the longings and desires, perhaps vanity even (as Adam Smith claims), of their students, and turn this connection, however tenuous, into the engines of shared enquiry. This also means that not every teacher is the right fit for each student.

The reason why when we praise a teacher, we're really praising ourselves according to the closing lines of De Magistro is that teachers are kind of puppets or actors speaking thoughts of others and that it's the student's reason or intuition that is doing the real work of understanding even if the words of the official teacher trigger or guide such understanding. The Platonic idea with which De Magistro closes, that nobody teaches another anything, has, thus, generated learned philosophical commentary that betrays non-trivial professional anxiety.

Augustine does make an exception to this quite general claim at the start of De Magistro, which I doubt is retracted during the dialogue. He suggests that when we ask questions we're really teaching something about our needs or our plans. The latter includes, of course, the path of inquiry, as Augustine explicitly notes. Rob was magisterial in asking questions that directed our gaze to the inner, guiding light that we need on life's path.

 

 

On Starship Troopers (and Peckinpah)

Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls has gone through the complete cycle. It was initially received as a notorious turkey, then it became a cult hit that college students watched while playing Showgirls-themed drinking games, and before long it gained a reputation among highbrow commentators including legendary New Wave director Jacques Rivette) as one of the greatest American films of the era.

Good-bad films culture is a space where transgressive movies that are rejected by initial audiences can begin the process of reappraisal and rehabilitation...there is a high degree of overlap between good-bad movie fans and art cinema fans. Film maudit culture emerges from this overlap. I don't mean to say that a legendary film maudit such as Heaven's Gate or Showgirls should be seen as good-bad. Rather, I mean that film maudit sits at the nexus where the concepts of cinematic merit and artistic seriousness are problematized and reshaped.--Matthew Strohl (2022)Why It's Ok to Love Bad Movies, p. 19.

I have been living with Strohl's book for a few weeks now. I avidly search, often without luck, the streaming networks for the movies he discusses and I watch (or re-watch) them in light of his sophisticated and amusing analysis. I quietly mourn the days when my laptop had a DVD player and I could go to the university library or rent from Netflix's once enormous supply. 

The passage quoted above got me thinking of Verhoeven, and especially about (1997) Starship Troopers which has always troubled me. The film has stilted dialogues, an insipid story, but a lot of amazing visual imagery. On Twitter I asked Why think Verhoeven's Starship Troopers is satire? And that went viral with everyone assuring me that it is best understood as a parody/satire of fascism. I am not so sure.

Verhoeven's first major cinematic work was a documentary, Mussert (1968)--Anton Mussert was the leader of the Dutch national-socialists and executed for treason after WWII. I have been unable to find it in order to re-watch it on short notice. But I recall it as an engaging character portrait of Mussert, who is humanized in virtue of the kind of ordinariness of the perceptions of people that knew him. It's important for what follows that I do not mean to say that Verhoeven is interested in defending Mussert's ideology or choices. What is important is that Verhoeven has a documented interest in fascism (no surprise given his biography). 

Soldaat van Oranje (1977) is part of Verhoeven's period of great success in the Netherlands. It's based on a true story. What's distinctive about it (other than the nudity which made all his movies appealing later to my teenage self) is that it starts as a kind of group portrait of students and the choice to collaborate or to resist seems largely arbitrary and driven by ambiguous motives. It's a movie that repays multiple viewings because it's also unusually reflexive about the power of images and the way mutual surveillance is internalized. But I wouldn't call it an antiwar movie because it also treats war as an adventure. (Feel free to challenge this; it's been a while.)

This all by way of prologue. In what follows I want to argue that Verhoeven's Starship Troopers actually expresses a fascist viewpoint. At a high level of abstraction this actually echoes the initial unease about and reception of the film that by now is widely thought inadequate. Since the film also clearly and repeatedly parodies and satirizes a world government that deploys an explicitly fascist aesthetic and propaganda methods most people I know disagree with me.

Moreover, if I am right it also goes against how Verhoeven's claims about the film are usually interpreted (2014). Verhoeven is quoted as follows:

"I stopped after two chapters because it was so boring," says Verhoeven of his attempts to read Heinlein's opus. "It is really quite a bad book. I asked Ed Neumeier to tell me the story because I just couldn't read the thing. It's a very right-wing book. And with the movie we tried, and I think at least partially succeeded, in commenting on that at the same time. It would be eat your cake and have it. All the way through we were fighting with the fascism, the ultra-militarism. All the way through I wanted the audience to be asking, 'Are these people crazy?'" Empire. By Adam Smith, Owen Williams

Interestingly enough, Neumeier is on record (see here) of being a huge fan of the novel.

In what follows, I take for granted that Verhoeven's intentions are anti-militarist. Even so, there are two weird things worth noticing about Verhoeven's claims. First, the main points of the first chapter of Heinlein's Starship Troopers, are the fear and adrenaline in the confusion of battle. The first sentence of the narrator is "I always get the shakes before a drop" despite being full of drugs! I am not suggesting Heinlein's Starship Troopers isn't fascist -- that's a different debate --, but it is quite striking that Verhoeven claims he could tell after the first two chapters. (The second chapter is a flashback to the narrator's decision to join the service which is how the movie starts.) So, I want to suggest that this passage is worth being cautious about.

Second, Verhoeven himself explicitly qualifies the success of his own effort, he claims he only "partially succeeded." Verhoeven is not known for modesty, and I suggest that he must have discerned something of the argument I intend to offer.

Now, in the quoted passage fascism and ultra-militarism are equated. And such militarism and fascism are indeed on display in the first visual of the movie with the logo of the federal network (and the soundtrack playing a marching tune). The first scene of the movie is a slick recruitment video for the mobile infantry. Strikingly, this is a racially and gender integrated force. (The US Armed forces did not allow women in combat roles until much more recently.) We also learn that the world is imperiled ("help save the world") and something of the ideology of the federation: "service guarantees citizenship." (I return to this below.)

The second scene is shot as if embedded with the infantry in the process of invading Klendathu (the planet of the bugs), "which "must be eliminated." This invasion turns out to be disastrous not the least for the reporter and camera man embedded with the troops which are destroyed by the local bugs. This scene is not slick at all. 

That Klendathu "must be eliminated" is an echo of Cato's famous genocidal claim about Rome's arch-rival, Carthage (censeo Carthaginem esse delendam). This is important to my argument. For, the political ideology of the federation, as presented (and mocked and satirized) in the film, is a militaristic form of civic republicanism. This is, in fact, explicitly articulated in the third scene.

The third scene is a flashback (partially analogous to the second chapter of the book). And we find ourselves in a high school classroom where we are introduced to the hero -- or (if he you disagree with me) main character -- of the film, Rico, a conventionally attractive young man, who is drawing a picture of a boy and a girl and not paying attention to the teacher (Rasczak) who we learn is veteran missing part of an arm (and later turns out to be lieutenant commandeering an elite infantry unit that Rico joins after his initial unit is largely wiped out).*

In the flashback, Rasczak immediately summarizes the main point of the year: "the failure of democracy and the social sciences who brought the world to the bring of chaos."+ We learn that humanity is united in a federation akin to the United Nations (and Star Trek's federation). This federation has been transformed by a coup d'état of veterans who have created a system characterized by social stability for generations.

As we hear the teacher intone, Rico returns to drawing and we see the girl (Carmen Ibanez), who is his model. And as she smiles to him (into the camera), we clearly see her and a portrait of Spinoza. (I return to this below.) Raszcak switches to a Socratic method, and asks another student why are only citizens allowed to vote? And so the audience gets a civics lesson of the ruling ideology, which has a number of distinct elements:

• A distinction between citizens and civilians. The distinction is political and moral.  
• Citizenship is gained through service, primarily (perhaps exclusively) military service.
• The political distinction is that the voting franchise is limited to citizens.
• The moral distinction is that citizenship is freely chosen, and accepts personal responsibility for the safety of the body politic. (Later, by focusing on Rico's parents, we learn that the life of a civilian is basically hedonist enjoyment without responsibility.) This moral distinction is characterized in terms of civic virtue. 
• Importantly, while the students view citizenship as a means toward social benefits (including college entry), as reward for services rendered, the teacher rejects this. Gifts are never of value.**
• Voting is treated as an expression of political authority, which rests on force, especially violence.
• Violence is the supreme authority from which all other authority is derived. (This is much quoted.)

A student (Dizzy Flores, who is interested in Rico) objects that her mother claims violence does not solve anything. We then get another look at Spinoza, when Raszcak asks Carmen Ibanez (the student who is being portrayed by Rico), what the "city fathers of Hiroshima would say about that," (to which the astute and chilling response is, nothing because they are dead). Near the end of the scene we see a drawing of Hannah Arendt and a bust of Marcus Aurelius. It's not silly to have images of Spinoza, Arendt, and Marcus Aurelius in the classroom if one's ideology is a kind of realist, civic republicanism. 

At the end of the scene -- it's only 90 seconds long -- the question is asked (of Rico) if he believes the ruling ideology and Rico honestly says, he doesn't know. And Raszcak responds that he doubts any of them would 'recognize civic virtue if it bit them in the ass.'

I have spent some time on this because the federation's self-understanding and its structure is formally not fascist. (I don't deny, by the way, that there are important connections between, say, the roman republic and fascism.) We also learn quickly that the federation's military is a meritocracy. And there is some freedom of speech in the federation because there is no suggestion that there will be dangerous consequences for Dizzy Flores' mother doubting of official ideology (and Rico's own lack of conviction). 

Now, the film goes on to show that much of this is sham. The aesthetics of the federation are openly fascist (we see Neil Patrick Harris --  of Doogie Howser, MD fame -- visually transform into a Gestapo officer), it seems committed to open-ended wars of aggression, its claims about citizenship largely a sham because soldiers are treated as expendable; many of the scenes provide us a window into the propaganda that the federation directs at its own citizens. In addition, the federation clearly presents itself as superior to bugs (whose intelligence it constantly underestimates). And it is this fact, this exposure of the militaristic hollowness of the federation, alongside the sheer craziness of its way of life, that is taken as representing the viewpoint of the film and this, in turn, is treated as its anti-fascist message. 

The problem is, however, that exposing that civic republicanism and the duties of citizenship are a sham is itself a feature (not a bug [sorry]) of fascism, or at least what we now call the alt right. In addition, Rico's journey in the film is treated sympathetically. And his species of masculinity is also familiar from contemporary alt right. 

That is to say, while some viewers may end up thinking that Rico is a kind of idiot, I don't think that's the perspective of the movie itself. Initially, his decision to join the service is a rash rebellion against his parents and motivated by his desire to stay near Carmen Ibanez. (This plan fails because Carmen, who is much smarter, is sent to space-force to become a pilot.) He has a change of heart once he is responsible for the death of a fellow trainee (and Carmen far away), but he rescinds his decision to leave the military after his parents (and the city of Buenos Aires) are destroyed by the bugs. After this, this decision is existential. and he devotes his life to killing bugs. 

Rico never questions his decision. And whatever limited growth he shows, it's primarily in the art of killing and military tactics. Rico shows himself to be brave and a good, loyal platoon leader, who rises through the ranks because infantry has a high mortality rate. Importantly, while the smart kids who become officers are uniformly shown to be awful and true believers, in the infantry we see mutual care and comradery of beautiful young people willing to sacrifice for each other and the greater good. 

Now, for some people it's obvious that in virtue of serving an awful regime, which is parodied in the film, Rico and his friends are also so satirized. On social media Liam Kofi Bright suggested, with a knowing nod to Stanley Fish, that it represents a kind of surprised by sin structure. I actually think that's right. For Kofi Bright the lesson is, for the viewer, 'you too can be made to empathise with and root for the villains.' This may be Verhoeven's intention, although it is worth noting that we never root for the senior officers or the federation while watching Starship Troopers. 

My response is that to be surprised by sin just is the human condition. And it does not follow that in virtue of serving an awful regime -- in Kofi Bright's words "objectively what they're doing is aiding a fascist war of conquest...[a]ll their virtues and vices play out against that unquestioned background" -- Rico and his friends are also satirized or parodied. It's not even obvious that Raszcak is satirized in the film. (He turns out to be rather brave and caring of his troops.) In fact, we see Rico taking on the virtues that Raszcak extolls (and exemplifies). 

My position is illustrated by Sam Peckinpah's (1977) Cross of Iron, which appeared the same year as Verhoeven's Soldaat van Oranje. Cross of Iron, which explores the comradery and conflicts of a German platoon on the Eastern front, was a flop Stateside and was panned by critics. (Interestingly enough it did very well in West Germany.) Now, Cross of Iron is very violent, but there is no reason to think that in virtue of coming to sympathize with Corporal Rolf Steiner (James Coburn), whose home is on the front, and who is shown to be courageous and have quite a bit of humanity toward the enemy, we end up admiring the Wehrmacht or Nazi Germany.++ It's pretty obviously an antiwar movie, even though we are shown that for some men war is preferred over domestic life (a good part of the movie explores a romance between Steiner and his nurse Eva, who he ends up rejecting). 

Of course, Cross of Iron is not satire, so structurally it is not identical to Starship Troopers. And whatever aesthetic surrounds Coburn's Steiner, it is by no means fascist. But the aesthetic surrounding Rico and his friends is fascist. The ones that survive keep their beauty. And at the end of the movie Rico even 'gets' Carmen, while the morally superior Dizzy Flores dies. And so while insipid militarism is clearly criticized, Rico's military service is not. 

Now, one might object that Rico's inability to see through the lies and his dedicated service to a corrupt regime make him flawed. Obviously, I am not interested in convincing you otherwise. But I don't think the movie manages to convey this; unlike the smart elites of the federation, he is not obviously "crazy." In fact, he remains likeable and heroic to the end; he is a fascist poster boy. 

If  am right then this episode also illustrates something else: that so many people defend the movie as merely satire also shows something of how difficult it is to distance ourselves from fascism.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Dispossessed (Spoilers), Pt 4.: on the limits of Anarchism

The second year I was in Elbow, I was worklister, the mill syndicate cut rations. People doing six hours in the plant got full rations just barely enough for that kind of work. People on half time got three-quarter rations. If they were sick or too weak to work, they got half. On half rations you couldn't get well. You couldn't get back to work. You might stay alive. I was supposed to put people on half rations, people that were already sick. I was working full time, eight, ten hours sometimes, desk work, so I got full rations: I earned them. I earned them by making lists of who should starve. The man s light eyes looked ahead into the dry light. Like you said, I was to count people.--From Ursula Le Guin (1974) The Dispossessed, p. 407 (page-number are from a 2002 adobe e-reader edition)

This post is the fourth in an open-ended series on Le Guin's The Dispossessed (see here for pt 1; here for pt 2.; here for pt 3.).

It is commonly claimed that Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed offers a positive representation of a planet-wide anarchist society (on a planet Annares). This is no surprise because the narrative offers extensive details on the functioning of this society. In addition, Ursula Le Guin has herself invited this interpretation by adding a brief clarificatory note to one of her short stories, "The Day Before The Revolution." The story is about a day in the life of Odo, the intellectual visionary, the philosophical prophet, of Annares, where Odo's writing and her exemplary life function as the shared principles and touchstone of the anarchist program. This dedicatory note (recall) is "In memoriam Paul Goodman, 1911–1972" explicitly inserts the story into the history of anarchist theorizing mentioning ""early Taoist thought, and expounded by Shelley and Kropotkin, Goldman and Goodman."*

In addition, the action of The Dispossessed, which centers on Shevek, is all about the tension (I almost wrote 'dialectic') between an ossified version of anarchism and anarchism as a perpetual work in progress. And so any flaws noted in Annares can charitably be interpreted as evidence of the need for the more dynamic understanding of anarchism "properly conceived," that "was a revolution, a permanent one, an ongoing process." (230) This Shevek attributes to what we may call true Odo-nism. And the narrative of The Dispossessed is itself plausibly understood as a narration of his growth from (recall) political "fool" (123) to this more mature understanding.

So far so good. And in what follows I do not want to deny that the representation of Anarres, a kind of Socratic political theory, is a major contribution to Anarchist thought. It is especially important because this is not an anarchism that turns its back on technology and goes back to nature: "they would not regress to pre-urban, pre-technological tribalism. They knew that their anarchism was the product of a very high civilization, of a complex diversified culture, of a stable economy and a highly industrialized technology that could maintain high production and rapid transportation of goods." (124) But in what follows I suggest that Le Guin herself offers hints that there are limitations to Shevek's character (development) which might suggest more fatal flaws in Annares. After all the subtitle of the book is "An Ambiguous Utopia."

But first a relatively small point. So, there are two important features of the political economy of Anarres. First, their economy consists of cooperatives or syndics which are centrally coordinated from the top-down. Now unlike the economies familiar from the Soviet Union and its allied states, this is not a state capitalism. Anarres rejects property and money. Second, the economy has no mechanism to exchange surplus in one sector (say energy in which it is abundant) for needs in another section (say food). The second feature is a consequence of a kind of self-imposed autarky and political rejection of the mother planet, Urras, from which the revolutionaries were (self) exiled. Jointly, these two features make the economy of Anarres rather fragile, especially against famines in which all kinds of transportational and logistical bottle necks develop and in which starvation is a real possibility. In fact, at one point, during the famine Shevek becomes a locally important coordinator who literally decides the rations which might mean life and death for his community (see, especially, p. 407 quoted above).

Now, it's pretty clear that one of the side-effects or perhaps part of Shevek's mission to Urras is, in fact, the opening up of exchange of a commerce in ideas between Anarres and Urras. (And once on Urras he discovers a wider Hainish universe the possibilities of which are expanded by Shevek's intellectual breakthroughs and revealed to us in the last few chapters.) So, there is a sense in which the novel suggests that a truer Anarchism is open to the world/universe. And, so, perhaps this suggest that the limitations on the second feature might be overcome.

However, spatial distance might make planetary exchanges of commodities too slow and too costly to prevent famines. And Shevek's own approach (recall) is to promote nobly communism of knowledge, not trade. So it is by no means obvious that joining the league of worlds would be decisive on this score, and does not solve the coordination problems that are a consequence of central planning.

So, since there is no sign that Shevek is willing to promote the introduction of markets to solve the coordination problems that beset Anarres (and turn it into a more anarcho-capitalist society), it is by no means obvious that these can be solved. As an aside, it is worth noting that the (Hainish) League of Worlds seems loosely modeled on Kantian ideas as presented in Perpetual Peace. And Kant did think that such a League would need to be composed of commercial, trading republics. Some other time, I return to the Hainish League.

The other limitation of Anarres is that for all its egalitarian ethos, it has not, in fact, eliminated patriarchy. What I am about to discuss has long held me up writing about The Dispossessed. Shevek quietly presupposes and leans on women's labor of his scientist partner Tevek, who does menial tasks for him (see especially pp 488-489 and here paging of his manuscript). More important, Shevek sexually assaults the sister of one of his hosts on Urras, Vea. While the alcohol induced assault is very troubling by itself, it's his reaction once sober after that is, perhaps, especially jarring. While he feels humiliated, he never recognizes his own assault for what it is -- rather, he represents Vea as having betrayed him (355) -- and he rejects feeling any "guilt" (356) or shame, and this is crucial, nor does he seek any kind of atonement for it.

Now, that he rejects 'guilt' is no surprise because he has been taught to despise it. Guilt is associated with property, and in the consequentialist ethic of Anarres it's undoubtedly too backward-looking and too reminiscent of the kind of religions they have rejected. One can admire (recall) the cultivated, anticipatory "sensitivity" or sympathy (or empathy) with the pains and "suffering" of others that regulates behavior and mutual aid (393) among these anarchists, while still noticing that the absence of guilt and genuine atonement prevents forms of accountability worth having. They have norms that banish people from society (sending them to asylums), but nothing that allows people to -(ahh) own up to their wrongs to their victims, or themselves. 

And once one faces up to the significance of this sexual assault that Shevek simply sets aside, one notices that there is a structural undertone of always present violence on Anarres. Compared to the wars of the twentieth century, Anarres is quite pacific. But the book is literally book-ended by actual violence in chapter 1 and the threat of violence toward Shevek in the final chapter.  And while Shevek was still a comrade in good standing back home on Anarres, we see him in an unprovoked fist-fight with his near-name sake Shevet for no other reason that the near nominal identity causes a lot of mix-ups. (Shevet is the aggressor.) And once impartial bystanders decide that it would be a 'fair fight' (65) nobody intervenes to stop the punching despite the fact that this is an organicist society with an abundance of internal norm-enforcing social control. And after the fight a girl gives her body to him. 

Once one is willing to acknowledge that Anarres has more trouble than merely too much politics at the center, one sees that is very much a closed society of walls. This much Shevek himself diagnoses (with the help of his friends). But in so far as we are invited to reflect on the relentless forward looking ethic of Anarres, -- after he assaults Vea, Shevek wastes little time to engage in (a noble) political revolution -- we might well come to think that a society that is so incapable of registering harm done to each other may well be more rotten than just a certain amount of stasis in its cultural and social life. 

Again, this is manifested in troubled gender relations. Part of the political conflict that we are shown between Shevek and his friends with the more establishment critics, is also represented symbolically between his mother Rulag and his friend Bedap. And the reader can't help but wonder if the intensity of the conflict between mother and son isn't fueled by their mutual earlier personal rejection in accord with the anti-family norms of Anarres. The claims of family are treated as instance of property on Anarres, but this means that forms of what we might call natural sympathy are systematically suppressed or discouraged. 

And while one may well end up concluding that the anarchism of Anarres governed by true-Odonism in which a more robust openness to other perspectives may well be the best possible polity given the imperfections of human nature, Le Guin invites us to size up its true shortcomings carefully.+

On Rammstein, MRIs and Being Real (long covid Diaries)

A month ago we went on a family holiday on a deserted island in the Indian ocean with a very tiny, quiet resort on it with huts overlooking the ocean. It was very quiet, and my family spent their time sailing and snorkeling. While I love swimming, I didn't feel ready to try my luck with an ocean. So, twice a day I went to the hut with a treadmill and started to do a gentle interval training. It was painful, but I enjoyed it. The rest of the day I would read and live-tweet some of my chapter summaries of books. Only at dinner would I notice any symptoms of covid with the minor buzz of other guests in the background and dinner conversation exhausting me. I would fall asleep early not bothered by the heat, and sleep long restful hours.

I was reminded of a book, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction, by my graduate school dog-park buddy (and basketball competitor), Matthew Crawford  (whose Shopcraft as Soulcraft was a genuine bestseller and briefly a cultural icon), in which he points out that in our age the very rich pay for quiet (as can be noticed in their airport lounges). Most of the few other guests at the resort were very bourgeois Suisse couples (bankers, insurance, etc.), sporty and pleased with the lack of noise while they enjoyed the ocean (and presumably each other). It was truly restful, and it was also delightful to be around my spouse and son while both were mellow. 

When I returned from the holiday, I went back to lap-swimming in the pool down the hill. And I quietly started to muse that if it weren't for my fatigue  after social interactions I had turned the corner on covid. (For my official "covid diaries," see here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here;  here;  here;  here;  here; here;  here; here;  here; here; here; here; here; here; and here). Two weeks ago I went to Amsterdam for a MRI and a visit to my occupational therapist. The occupational therapist insisted that I try to to discipline myself and avoid social interactions for more than 25-30 minutes (including with my family). Of course, I had to experiment occasionally with longer interactions, but I should really try (now using her words) not to deplete energy. She recognized that returning to teaching in February would mean I would violate her instructions, but since I claimed I 'gain energy' from my undergraduates, and these were fairly unidirectional lecture courses (I promised her to make few jokes and leave less room for questions from the lecture hall), she resigned herself to it.

Now I know many academics really dislike social interactions, and I am myself known to be irritable, impatient, and unpleasant on occasion. And there is no doubt that I can be incredibly happy writing hours on end. But in general I love the social aspect of doing philosophy together, and hanging in cafe's and talking. And I love spending time with the undergraduates discussing the material and learning from their insights. And I love gossip. And after a few years of pandemic I really just want to watch crowds enjoying life. 

I was musing about this when I arrived early at my MRI. Much to my amazement I was allowed to go thirty minutes ahead of schedule. After the MRI I had a minor panic attack that the nurse who administered it never asked me for my name (just my weight) and whether my wedding band was made of pure gold. I haven't heard the results yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if my results were mixed up with those of the lovely old man who was scanned after me.

The brain scan was pure horror. I have done them before, and I have never been too bothered by the claustrophobic set-up or the noise. (I had a MRI done of my lungs when I was first diagnosed with covid.) The claustrophobia still didn't bother me--I just closed my eyes. But even with ear-plugs and noise-canceling headphones, a brain scan is the way to kill off all the long haulers. Imagine your head exploding, and then adding TNT, while listening to Rammstein. It only lasted thirty minutes or so. But the variety and intensity of the noise stayed with me for a whole week. I was bedridden, insomniac, and with a weird nausea/headache. And while I am much better this week (more about that below), the optimism of a few weeks ago  eliminated. The bitter irony is that I had arm-twisted my neurologist to put me in the scan. (I am back to swimming my laps daily.)

On Monday I had an important telephone meeting with an occupational health agency expert. According to the law, after one year this expert evaluates my dossier in light of a formal report of my occupational physician, documentation sent by me, and an employer's report. While I have another year on disability funded by my employer, this is the first moment a process that can lead to termination or a new career can be initiated. So, it's not just a routine conversation. I don't think I reveal any state secrets when I disclose that my Chair had not submitted her report. This told me that my department wasn't yet at the point where they would use my partial disability to get rid of my position and salary.

As an aside, but not irrelevant, luckily, the evals of my Fall course were stellar: students felt they had to work hard and were challenged, but they adored the course. (I did say I love my undergraduates, and it is returned.)* The only sign in the evals that my students noticed anything of my covid is that one complained that my jokes were real downers (usually people praise my jokes).

The conversation with the occupational expert got off on the wrong foot when I misunderstood her intention in her trying to get me to understand that based on my CV I was probably overstretched before I got covid. I thought she was insinuating that my covid was mostly a burn-out. My reaction was not wholly surprising because too many Dutch medical types have tried to push this line on me this past year. And I reminded her that while everyone in Dutch academy was overworked (because of structural lack of funding), I was in no mood for another physician trying to convince me that my situation would just heal itself if I took a step back. But we quickly clarified that what she was trying to say was that I should not expect to return to my former level of activity in my job. I assured her that there was no risk of that. I don't expect to get any research done while teaching, and for the moment I am withdrawing from all speaking engagements. 

The rest of the meeting was anticlimactic. She said she trusted my occupational physician that I was likely to have a full recovery. And that as long as my department and I stayed within the guidelines of the occupational physician we should aim to keep me in my position. We would re-evaluate in four months. Later that day I received a lovely email from the Chair of my department that echoed these sentiments.

As I turned to preparing my syllabus for my enormous required, survey course -- 637 registered students -- I initiated a whirlwind of emails to settle logistics. Leaving aside pandemic uncertainty and the fact that we still have to do online testing, courses this size really and this prominent in the curriculum involve half a dozen stake-holders who all have their vision on what it should be. As the emails went back and forth, I mentally realized and accepted I would not get much scholarship done. It would be a prep week. 

Two nights ago I awoke in the middle of the night from a complex nightmare. As I laid in bed restless, I wondered whether my irritability over the burn-out trope was perhaps blinding me to the truth; maybe I couldn't handle the workflow at work? But as my mind drifted into anxiety and I reflected more on the dream, I was terrified over my future: what if each class lecture would incapacitate me for two days (like my Fall seminars)? What if I really could never have a real, long conversation with my kid again? What if I could never attend a workshop again? What if my wife becomes miserable because she has lost her partner in crime? And so on, and so on. 

I mentioned in some of posts at the end of last year that I understand myself as partially cognitively disabled. This limits my life, but it also puts enormous strains on others. My immediate colleagues have had to pick up some of the slack, and my family's life-style is hugely impacted. A lot of the changes can be folded into 'the pandemic', but some of the adjustments pertaining to me qua individual may well be structural for me, and my environment. If my class does incapacitate me I will have to think about a career switch. Not because my department will nudge me out, but because i shouldn't be in a job that makes be bedridden out of sight. And that is terrifying.

As regular readers know I have been influenced by (recall here; here; and here) Elizabeth Barnes' The Minority Body. And one lesson I took from it is that being alive just is living with constraints. The real political and psychological problem is that when you are disabled or impaired, our social environment is shaped for different bodies and agents.  The adjustment to the absence of once familiar affordances which have become out of reach is painful and tiring. Yesterday, Matt Strohl called my attention to a beautiful essay by Francey Russell in The Boston Review. In it, she quotes Sidney Poitier that “acting isn’t a game of ‘pretend.’ It’s an exercise in being real.” This made me see that each new role would be exhausting for actors. For me, being cognitively impaired is taking on a new role, and, if you allow me the inference, so an exercise in being real.  

The Dispossessed (Spoilers), Pt 3.: Utopia without Satire (on Le Guin and Borges)

Bedap’s eyes had got very small, like steel beads. “Brother,” he said, “you are self-righteous. You always were. Look outside your own damned pure conscience for once! I come to you and whisper because I know I can trust you, damn you! Who else can I talk to? Do I want to end up like Tirin?”

“Like Tirin?” Shevek was startled into raising his voice. Bedap hushed him with a gesture towards the wall. “What’s wrong with Tirin? Where is he?”

“In the Asylum on Segvina Island.”

“In the Asylum?”

Bedap hunched his knees up to his chin and wrapped his arms around them, as he sat sideways on the chair. He spoke quietly now, with reluctance.

“Tirin wrote a play and put it on, the year after you left. It was funny—crazy—you know his kind of thing.” Bedap ran a hand through his rough, sandy hair, loosening it from its queue. “It could seem anti-Odonian, if you were stupid. A lot of people are stupid. There was a fuss. He got reprimanded. Public reprimand. I never saw one before. Everybody comes to your syndicate meeting and tells you off. It used to be how they cut a bossy gang foreman or manager down to size. Now they only use it to tell an individual to stop thinking for himself. It was bad. Tirin couldn’t take it. I think it really drove him a bit out of his mind. He felt everybody was against him, after that. He started talking too much—bitter talk. Not irrational, but always critical, always bitter. And he’d talk to anybody that way. Well, he finished at the Institute, qualified as a math instructor, and asked for a posting. He got one. To a road repair crew in Southsetting. He protested it as an error, but the Divlab computers repeated it. So he went.”

“Tir never worked outdoors the whole time I knew him,” Shevek interrupted. “Since he was ten. He always wangled desk jobs. Divlab was being fair.”

Bedap paid no attention. “I don’t really know what happened down there. He wrote to me several times, and each time he’d been reposted. Always to physical labor, in little outpost communities. He wrote that he was quitting his posting and coming back to Northsetting to see me. He didn’t come. He stopped writing. I traced him through the Abbenay Labor Files, finally. They sent me a copy of his card, and the last entry was just, ‘Therapy. Segvina Island.’ Therapy! Did Tirin murder somebody? Did he rape somebody? What do you get sent to the Asylum for, beside that?”

“You don’t get sent to the Asylum at all. You request posting to it.”

“Don’t feed me that crap,” Bedap said with sudden rage. “He never asked to be sent there! They drove him crazy and then sent him there. It’s Tirin I’m talking about, Tirin, do you remember him?”

“I knew him before you did. What do you think the Asylum is—a prison? It’s a refuge. If there are murderers and chronic work-quitters there, it’s because they asked to go there, where they’re not under pressure, and safe from retribution. But who are these people you keep talking about—‘they’? ‘They’ drove him crazy, and so on. Are you trying to say that the whole social system is evil, that in fact ‘they,’ Tirin’s persecutors, your enemies, ‘they,’ are us—the social organism?”

“If you can dismiss Tirin from your conscience as a work-quitter, I don’t think I have anything else to say to you,” Bedap replied, sitting hunched up on the chair. There was such plain and simple grief in his voice that Shevek’s righteous wrath was stopped short.--Ursula Le Guin (1974) The Dispossessed, Chapter 6, pp. 141-143 (in the British edition). 

This post is the third in an open-ended series on Le Guin's The Dispossessed (see here for pt 1; here for pt 2.). Annares is an anarchist society without public laws, property, nor guilt. Relatively minor violations of local norms and practices are generally sanctioned by social criticism and ostracism. The exchange between Bedap and Shevek, the initially foolish hero of the story, reveals that some major violations of norms are medicalized; one is viewed as psychologically diseased if one murders, rapes, or systematically refuses to contribute work to society (a society -- it should be noted, in fairness -- that teeters on the edge of subsistence and otherwise is quite generous). Presumably the Asylum aims at rehabilitation. (In chapter 10, we hear the Asylum understands itself as a "refuge.") Bedap's suggestion is that those who show too much independence of  thought are also nudged to the Asylum.

What makes Tirin's situation so interesting is that his free-thinking is expressed in terms of a satire. And it becomes clear through the narrative that Annares is unfamiliar with such comedy. In this respect Annares, a community devoted to sympathetic mutual aid, is not unalike to how Socrates legislates Kallipolis and, perhaps more pertinent, how J.L. Borges imagines (recall) Ibn Rushd's Muslim Spain (which also lacks satirical comedy). That Le Guin was very familiar with Borges' thought, and took it rather seriously, is suggested by her (1988) introduction to Borges' co-edited volume The Book of Fantasy, which focuses exclusively on Borges (without paying much attention to the two other editors) and the "honours" she thinks he is due, and scattered remarks in her non-fiction writing. Among the noteworthy claims of that introduction is that she treats fantasy and science fiction as a joint genre, each (to convey her thought rather reductively) devoted to making visible the moral questions of our age.

The arts are key to social life to the relatively isolated communities of Annares. And, in particular, the theatre is very important, "the Art." (Chapter 6; p. 131) But the syndics who put up art-works also have rather restrictive interpretations of what art should be shown. So, comedies do exist on Annares, but are not as central: ‘They performed tragedies, semi-improvised comedies, mimes. … Rising out of and embodying the isolation and communality of the Anarresti spirit, the drama had attained extraordinary power and brilliance.’ (p. 131) So, satire is unknown.

My students and I had some initial difficulty in understanding why Tirin's play created such trouble for him in Annares. It looks rather innocent. Here is a brief, post-facto summary by an eye-witness (in chapter 10):

“Did you see the play he put on, the one that made trouble for him?”

“At the Summer Festival, after you left? Oh yes. I don’t remember it, that’s so long ago now. It was silly. Witty—Tirin was witty. But silly. It was about an Urrasti, that’s right. This Urrasti hides himself in a hydroponics tank on the Moon freighter, and breathes through a straw, and eats the plant roots. I told you it was silly! And so he gets himself smuggled onto Anarres. And then he runs around trying to buy things at depots, and trying to sell things to people, and saving gold nuggets till he’s holding so many he can’t move. So he has to sit where he is, and he builds a palace, and calls himself the Owner of Anarres. And there was an awfully funny scene where he and this woman want to copulate, and she’s just wide open and ready, but he can’t do it until he’s given her his gold nuggets first, to pay her. And she didn’t want them. That was funny, with her flopping down and waving her legs, and him launching himself onto her, and then he’d leap up like he’d been bitten, saying, ‘I must not! It is not moral! It is not good business!’ Poor Tirin! He was so funny, and so alive.”

“He played the Urrasti?”

“Yes. He was marvelous.--chapter 10, p. 269

At first sight, Tirin is merely making fun of the money-obsessed Urrasti, drawing on the shared prejudices or ideology of the anarchists of Annares. These views are taught on Annares from a young age. In addition, Urrasti are not allowed to visit Annares. (Annares and Urras are each other's moons.) This is, in fact, part of the founding "Settlement" that governs the isolationist anarchist society (which is developed out of the refugees of the members of a failed revolution on Urrasti). They keep outside influences and people, which are seen as dangerously corrupting, out of Annares. This is achieved by limiting planetary entry to a few commodities that are exchanges with mining commodities that are useful to the much wealthier Urrasti societies. 

So, Tirin's play is a fantasy about the troubles an Urrasti might find in adjusting to life on or trying to subvert life on Annares. And since the Urrasti is not presented in attractive fashion and is, in fact, held up to ridicule, it is at first odd that Tirin is sanctioned so badly for staging the play (and his life haunted by it), and that Shevek eventually decides he has to publish it independently despite social disapproval. 

Now, eventually, we are informed that Shevek learns to understand Tirin as an "inventor-destroyer, the kind who's got turn everything upside down and inside out. A satirist, a man who praises through rage." (Chapter 10, p. 270.) This goes very much against the purpose of drama on Annares, which really frowns on (i) individuality in all the arts and tends to praise works that (ii) promote (without being shallow) uplifting harmony. (This is also seen in the treatment of choral music on Annares.) 

So, let's take stock: in virtue of (i) and (ii) and (iii) representing immorality in satirical fashion Tirin's play is called "immoral" by some (270). Even in the narrative of The Dispossessed, it is recognized that calling an author immoral in virtue of (i-iii) is not an especially sophisticated response to the play.  But despite the Urrasti being the but of the joke, there is an important feature of the play that is highly critical of Annares. While the satire seems to be primarily directed against the traditional capitalist or properterian enemy it also expresses a criticism of the isolation of Annares. As Shevek puts it, this satire also teaches, "what prisons are, and who builds them. Those who build walls are their own prisoners." Annaeres is simultaneously a great social project, and a prison.

Now, for us as readers with only partial and second hand access to the play, it's not entirely clear how this interpretation follows from what we have been shown. But it is not entirely unclear either: the local Annares women does not get satisfaction, and the interaction between the man and women is governed by mutual misunderstanding. And all of this is due to the fact that the Settlement has built a theoretical and empirical wall around Annares. To keep capitalism out, the locals also deliberately keep themselves uninformed and to avoid nearly all mutual exchange.* The outside world is a source of contamination--and needs to be quarantined out. (This point is actually made on the very first page of the book.) 

And taken like this, Tirin's satire is not misunderstood at all by those who criticized and socially ostracized him. And while they may seem initially outlandishly vindictive and dangerously totalitarian to us, Tirin's audience accurately perceives that his ridiculous satire is taking aim at the foundational commitments of their society of mutual aid.+ (Notice that in the play, the Annares basically leave the Urrasti to his own devices.)

To close: one of the main questions that The Dispossessed makes us ask -- this is played out in a number of set-piece debates in chapter 12  -- is whether a society founded on the noble ideals of mutual aid and solidarity, can tolerate individual, intellectual commerce with the rest of the world (especially if that commerce is not governed by social utility) without risking its own survival by it. The question is, of course, not limited to such admirable societies. Le Guin's book offers no platitudes of reassurance or an answer to the question; each of us have to think it for ourselves with our communities.**

 

The Dispossessed (Spoilers), Pt 2.: Inductive risk in State Capitalist plutocratic-oligarchic society

"I did it in ten decads. Well enough to read To’s Introduction. Oh, hell, you need a text to work on. Might as well be that. Here. Wait.” He hunted through an overflowing drawer and finally achieved a book, a queer-looking book, bound in blue, without the Circle of Life on the cover. The title was stamped in gold letters and seemed to say Poilea Afio-ite, which didn’t make any sense, and the shapes of some of the letters were unfamiliar. Shevek stared at it, took it from Sabul, but did not open it. He was holding it, the thing he had wanted to see, the alien artifact, the message from another world.

He remembered the book Palat had shown him, the book of numbers.

“Come back when you can read that,” Sabul growled.

Shevek turned to go. Sabul raised his growl: “Keep those books with you! They’re not for general consumption.”

The young man paused, turned back, and said after a moment in his calm, rather diffident voice, “I don’t understand.”

“Don’t let anybody else read them!”

Shevek made no response.

Sabul got up again and came close to him. “Listen. You’re now a member of the Central Institute of Sciences, a Physics syndic, working with me, Sabul. You follow that? Privilege is responsibility. Correct?”

“I’m to acquire knowledge which I’m not to share,” Shevek said after a brief pause, stating the sentence as if it were a proposition in logic.

“If you found a pack of explosive caps in the street would you ‘share’ them with every kid that went by? Those books are explosives. Now do you follow me?”

“Yes.”

“All right” Sabul turned away, scowling with what appeared to be an endemic, not a specific rage. Shevek left, carrying the dynamite carefully, with revulsion and devouring curiosity.--Ursula Le Guin (1974) The Dispossessed (chapter 4; p. 89 in the (1999) Millennium edition).

As regular readers know, ever since Joshua Miller introduced me to The Dispossessed, I have become an Ursula Le Guin fan-boi. I wrote about the book enthusiastically six years ago almost to the day (recall here--that counts as pt 1 of the present series). And I intended to return to it regularly. However, when I taught it the next time around, a class discussion about the sexual assault scene in chapter 7 made me realize I didn't understand the book. Normally, I use these digressions to think my way through to some clarity or higher order confusion, but, despite writing joyously about many of Le Guin's other works since, I was blocked on The Dispossessed, which I think of not just as a work of science fiction, but a major contribution to Socratic political theory (recall also here; this one on Thomas More; and here on Kant and Spinoza) in utopian and anarchist thought. (This post will illustrate that.) So now, I'd like to try again with a series of posts, including, eventually, a revisit the significance of that scene.

Okay, in the quoted passage above, our main protagonist, Shevek, a brilliant physicist, is introduced to a feature of what philosophers call 'inductive risk' (a now flourishing topic again thanks to Heather Douglas' revival of it). As I noted back in 2015 Shevek is politically very naïve, "a fool," this includes the politics of the science. And part of the action of the book is us viewing his education in politics (as well as the politics of science). And while I would never claim you should primarily read the book in virtue of its many insights into the nature of the socially embedded intellectual mind, but it is a good reason to read the book. (Yes, I am a fan.)

As an aside, I am usually not one for insisting biography matters, but while Le Guin never completed her doctorate, she was the daughter of the influential anthropologist Alfred Louis Kroeber, the sister of the literature professor Karl Kroeber, and the spouse of the historian Charles Le Guin. And she used her keen powers of observation and analysis in  her (gentle) satire and advocacy of the intellectual life (including the labor of spouses to make it possible).

What makes the passage notable is that Sabul, the director of the Sciences Institute, uses the inductive risk argument in the service of secrecy. That's not surprising; inductive risk does not entail secrecy, but it's always a live option in light of it. Yet, we realize rather quickly that in many ways it's a bogus argument because the interests that are being served are primarily his own careerist ones. For despite the absence of profit as a motive -- Annares is anarchist society without (private) property and commerce -- the Sciences Institute itself has become hierarchical in structure and a source of social benefits not the least prestige. And through his office and political maneuvering, Sabul controls gate-keeping rather severely (e.g., publication locally and access to information from and with international networks). 

And the reason why the inductive risk argument works so well with Shevek is that the social responsibilities of science (and other practices) are very important in Annares, which teeters constantly on the edge of famine, and where all the social mores are organized around mutual aid and local control by local syndics. Part of Le Guin's wizardry in the book is that she simultaneously makes the potential oppressiveness of such little platoons local syndics highly visible and felt, while not destroying the ideal behind it. Like all important ideas that can be communicated to others, inductive risk can be abused. Of course, in this case it is a reflexive problem (it's the inductive risk of inductive risk). And it is striking that it can be abused so badly in a society where social consequences are taken so seriously. In lots of other contexts, the scientists themselves might well resist the idea that their work should be evaluated in light of social consequences--that's other people's responsibility and problem.

Interestingly enough, despite rejecting property, and embracing mutual aid, the scientists of Annares, the idealistic Shevek not excepted, crave credit/recognition for their scientific work. When Shevek is arm-twisted into sharing credit with his boss (Sabul), we see him experiencing misery. And he looks for ways to receive the credit he thinks he deserves. Sabul and Shevek end up bargaining (through barter and withholding labor/benefits) over credit. And it is one of his motives to challenge (and eventually leave) the Physics syndic. On first principles, one would have expected anonymous or collective publication -- so, either put all the names of the syndic on it or just the name of the syndic -- to be the norm in Annares. But Le Guin discerns, not implausible, that even when profit motive is eliminated by society, status and recognition are important pulls.

To be clear, when Le Guin turns to science's functioning in A-Io (on the planet Urras),--an excessively patriarchal-state-capitalist society [a critic calls it "plutocratic-oligarchic" at one point], which appears as a kind of a mirror-hybrid between the UK and US of the 1970s, but still highly familiar--profit and bureaucratic advancement are also not the only motive in science. When Atro, the doyen of science in Urras, and a champion of Shevek's theories, explains his motives he says:

“I hope you feel the same, my dear. I earnestly hope it. There’s a great deal that’s admirable, I’m sure, in your society, but it doesn’t teach you to discriminate—which is after all the best thing civilization teaches. I don’t want those damned aliens getting at you through your notions about brotherhood and mutualism and all that. They’ll spout you whole rivers of ‘common humanity’ and ‘leagues of all the worlds’ and so on, and I’d hate to see you swallow it. The law of existence is struggle—competition—elimination of the weak—a ruthless war for survival. And I want to see the best survive. The kind of humanity I know. The Cetians. You and I: Urras and Anarres. We’re ahead of them now, all those Hainish and Terrans and whatever else they call themselves, and we’ve got to stay ahead of them. They brought us the interstellar drive, but we’re making better interstellar ships now than they are. When you come to release your Theory, I earnestly hope you’ll think of your duty to your own people, your own kind. Of what loyalty means, and to whom it’s due.” The easy tears of old age had sprung into Atro’s half-blind eyes. Shevek put his hand on the old man’s arm, reassuring, but he said nothing.

“They’ll get it, of course. Eventually. And they ought to. Scientific truth will out, you can’t hide the sun under a stone. But before they get it, I want them to pay for it! I want us to take our rightful place. I want respect; and that’s what you can win us. Transilience—if we’ve mastered transilience, their interstellar drive won’t amount to a hill of beans. It’s not money I want, you know. I want the superiority of Cetian science recognized, the superiority of the Cetian mind. If there has to be an interstellar civilization, then by God I don’t want my people to be low-caste members of it! We should come in like noblemen, with a great gift in our hands—that’s how it should be. Well, well, I get hot about it sometimes. By the way, how’s it going, your book?” (119-120)

It's important that in the self-conception of Atro, science is in its social aspect fundamentally about prestige and recognition. In this respect he is not so different from the attitudes of Shevek.

But for Atro, it is a means to winning in a competition. In an important (1987) paper, Playfulness, "World"-Travelling, and Loving Perception, the feminist philsopher, María Lugones, noticed, correctly, that modern advocates of play (she names Johan Huizinga and Hans-Georg Gadamer) tend to think of play in terms of agonistic competition, that is winning, and in which competence (under uncertainty over the come) reigns supreme. And she, quite rightly, connects these ideas to imperialist outlook. Atro fits this agonistic schema very nicely.* (I actually think the alternative, loving play, also has a platonic origin in Plato's Laws, but about that some other time.)

In fact, Atro (a scion of an old noble family) rejects the profit motive (which is otherwise very important in his society). But prestige can also be used for ends that are quite political: international standing, and international competitive advantage. And while there are plenty of hints that others in Atro's society intend to make great profits from technological advantage, even derive military advantage, Atro is keen on gifting ideas to others recognizing, a norm once ubiquitous in the academy, that in gift-economy bearing great gifts is a source of great prestige (and power).

There is one more scene that bears on this. It occurs just after the assault scene (and Shevek's response to it) that is so troubling. And after it, Shevek's character changes course in significant. It's an introspective meditation by Shevek:

To be a physicist in A-Io was to serve not society, not mankind, not the truth, but the State.

On his first night in this room he had asked them, challenging and curious, “What are you going to do with me?” He knew now what they had done with him. Chifoilisk had told him the simple fact. They owned him. He had thought to bargain with them, a very naïve anarchist’s notion. The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself. (Chapter 9, p. 225)

It's important to recognize (and this is explicit in the book), that in this respect, there is little difference between a communist state [which Chifoilisk serves], where "one [centralized] power structure controls all, the government, administration, police, army, education, laws, trades, manufactures [and with a] money economy.” (p. 114) And wages are determined by this power structure. And a society (A-Io, akin to ours today) in which profit is pursued, but in which the state and interlocking companies and foundations fund research. The modern state is mercantile in character, and even in the absence of actual violence, it is always lurking in the background to those who refuse or resist its coinage. (This is, in fact, the point of chapter 9.)

Here foreseeable, inductive risk really means either that science is corrupted by letting the state's coinage rule it (that is, that science's intrinsic reward scheme is displaced by extrinsic ones), or that it serves to entrench state power (by becoming "an investment or a weapon" (p. 288)) at the expense of those in the margins of society or other societies. That is, the book very clearly (and rightly!) rejects the idea that the state's and its functionaries' interests coincide with the wider proper interests. And the hard-hitting message of The Dispossessed is that all of us in the academy are, in this respect, state functionaries with more or less greater self-awareness about this.

At the end of the book, Shevek decides that the best solution is free, universal open access; a true communism of knowledge (familiar, say, from the Stoics). But it's not wholly clear whether Le Guin endorses it; because she shows that for Shevek this for all his idealism, too, is partially transactional. He receives credit and a chance at return home (or freedom). And a moment's reflection suggests that international open access may strengthen the states and oligarchs, if they can control, and they have the means to do so, their state functionaries. 

Orwell, Pynchon, Spinoza, and the stability of texts and records (Pt III)

[46] We lack, not only all these things, but also and especially, a phraseology of this language. For time, the devourer, has obliterated from the memory of men almost all the idioms and manners of speaking peculiar to the Hebrew nation. Therefore, we will not always be able, as we desire, to find out, with respect to each utterance, all the meanings it can admit according to linguistic usage. Many utterances will occur whose meaning will be very obscure, indeed, completely incomprehensible, even though they are expressed in well- known terms.
[47] In addition to the fact that we cannot have a complete history of the Hebrew language, there is the very nature and constitution of this language. So many ambiguities arise from this that it is impossible to devise a method which will teach you how to find out with certainty the true meaning of all the utterances of Scripture. For besides the causes of ambiguity common to all languages there are certain others in this language from which a great many ambiguities are born....

[65] These are all the difficulties I had undertaken to recount arising from this method of interpreting Scripture according to the history available to us. I consider them so great that I don’t hesitate to say this: in a great many places either we don’t know what Scripture really means or we’re just guessing about its meaning without any certainty.-- Spinoza, Theological Political, Treatise Chapter VII, translated by E. Curley.

This is the third and final post in a series on Orwell's 1984 inspired by Thomas Pynchon's (2003) "Introduction" to it (here is pt 1; pt 2). After this week's controversy (recall), it might seem cheeky that this piece is mediated via Spinoza. But careful readers of the second in the series will not be surprised (I hope). Okay, with that in place, let me turn to Orwell.

After Winston has been tortured, he comes arrives at three slogans, the third of which is: "GOD IS POWER." Now, on the face of it, this is an odd slogan in the context of 1984. For, first it seems religion and theology are altogether outlawed in Oceania, and this in fact only the second mention of 'God' in the book. What mysticism exists is itself (recall) funneled through the creation of Newspeak. Much earlier, God had been mentioned in the context of the Party's rewriting the poems of Kipling, in which 'God' could not be eliminated as a rhyme (with 'rod'--the subject matter is serious, but the scene is hilarious). Shortly after, writing "GOD IS POWER," Winston insists he is no believer.

The slogan itself echoes one of the claims of his torturer, who says, 'We are the priests of power... God is power.' And, in fact, he goes on to claim in one of the more philosophical passages in the book.

Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.

And in fact, Winston echoes this argument in the context of writing down the "GOD IS POWER" slogan. 

Now, that God is power is a feature of Spinoza's a priori demonstration of God's existence (see, especially, E1P11S). And there is, in fact, more than a kind of superficial similarity between the de-individualized Party and Spinoza's conception of eternality. I don't mean to press the analogy too far because Spinoza's idealism (yes, I know very controversial) is not of the subjective kind.  And while Spinoza's philosophy certainly risks turning the state into a new idol, he would reject many of the Party's techniques and positions. 

This may all be a bit anachronistic, but it is worth recalling that Orwell certainly thought Swift the first great critic of totalitarianism (see his essay Orwell (1946) "Politics vs. Literature — An examination of Gulliver's travels.") And in a World-War II BBC program, Orwell treats Hobbes "and other 17th century writers" as original predictors of totalitarianisms. So, the connection is not entirely far-fetched.

In particular, in the Appendix to 1984, we are told by a narrator of the distant future that in Oceania, "What was required in a Party member was an outlook similar to that of the ancient Hebrew who knew, without knowing much else, that all nations other than his own worshipped 'false gods'. And, in contrast to Pynchon, I claimed that key features of life in Oceania are modelled on a certain interpretation of the Old Testament. But this is also a problem.

For, from the first, famous sentence of 1984, we are also reminded that we have entered a universal with a certain kind of instability at its core. That the clocks strike "thirteen" is distinctly odd.* Odder still is that when Winston starts his diary, he quickly writes, ‘To begin with he did not know with any certainty that this was 1984. It must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945, but it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two." The theme is repeated throughout the novel.** This uncertainty about the date is especially odd because in his work, at the Ministry of Truth, which involves fabricating and retouching news-stories in the Times, he encounters the official date on the newspaper every day.

But, of course, that calendric reform coincides with a major political revolution is no surprise. It's happened before. So, the Party could have changed dates for convenience sake. And the fact that Winston is part of the process of permanent falsification (in the ordinary not Popperian sense) means he knows nothing he reads can be trusted. The "terrible" book by the traitor Emmanuel Goldstein ("The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism") turns out to be circulated and written by the Party so Winston's torturer claims. Can he be trusted, who knows?

In fact, and I hate to go meta-textual, but textual instability is even part of the title of Orwell's book, which is often spelled just '1984'; 'nineteen eighty-four' and 'Nineteen Eighty-Four.' And as Pynchon notes, the American edition was almost published without its appendix.

Now, first, Orwell's important political insight, anticipating (recall) Arendt, is that in true totalitarianism the center and near-center is often not just paranoid, but also has no better access to the truth of its own affairs than ordinary citizens or foreigners. In a system like that it cannot develop a true shadow book-keeping. And, as Orwell notes, this also makes collective planning so difficult and self-defeating.

Second, (recall) as Walter Lippmann (building on, as Nick Cowen reminded me, J.S. Mill) emphasized, reliable record-keeping by the state (of birth, death, property deeds, etc.) is one of the bedrocks of many species of modern liberty. Yes, anarchists everywhere and some Foucaultians will see in such legibility an immanent, would-be panopticon. (Pynchon's own writings are worth re-reading for reflection on this.) Even so, reliable record-keeping is the foundation of removing many forms of uncertainty and generating reliable expectations. And when there is little reason for doubt and suspicion about these records, the politics tends to be more temperate. Blessed are the times in which such record keeping can be taken for granted, and is available to all! 

Third, I put the passages of Spinoza at the top of the post because in many ways we readers of 1984 are in the position that Spinoza attributes to the would-be-interpreter of Scriptures. In a way, the Appendix reinforces this point. For, it provides us with an interpretation of the rules of Newspeak that, while compelling, is clearly also post facto and may, in fact, serve it's own political ends. As I noted last week, Pynchon is surprisingly optimist in reading the Appendix as a sign of a restoration of sorts, whereas my two previous posts argue that this need not be so. And because Orwell deliberately does not inform us of the author of the Appendix and his/her intentions, we are pretty much in the same position as Spinoza implies about Scriptures, "we are completely ignorant of the authors (or, if you prefer, Writers) of many of the books, or else we have doubts about them." (TTP VII [58]).

Let me close. I do not mean to suggest that the severe textual and referential instability of and in 1984 reduces it to a kind of meaningless white noise. Spinoza address an objection like this in Chapter X, too:

[42] But perhaps someone will say that in this way I overthrow Scripture completely—for in this way everyone can suspect that it is faulty everywhere. But that would be wrong. 

Something like this seems true of one's reading of 1984. But once one starts pressing on the details, one has to allow major insecurity about one's own judgments of it. Paradoxically, inducing such an experience into the attentive reader may well be one of its aims.