Digressions&Impressions

Hazony on Conservatism, part II

This is the second in a series of posts on Hazony's Conservatism (recall the first one here). Hazony's conservatism fuses nationalist and religious themes. Here I explore his account of the family. For, while I am no expert on contemporary conservative thought, and generally Hazony presents his views polemically against liberal or Marxist (or so-called "woke") views, his account of the family is, in fact, rather revisionary relative to the public statements of those "who regard themselves as political conservatives" and when they "speak of the importance of the 'the family' as a cultural matter or in regard to government policy." (p. 213). His views on the family, thus, give a fascinating oblique glimpse into some serious rethinking on 'the right.'

Hazony's account of the family is offered as part of a larger account of the significance of families in congregations and congregations, in turn, in the life of the nation (or clan). Congregations are composed of families, and together with the families that constitute them are key to passing on traditions. (p. 218) The account of the family itself is functional in character. I return to this below. 

Now, a casual reading of Hazony's argument seems to suggest that it is based on sex-essentialist views of human nature. In particular, Hazony denies that enduring sexual monogamy is natural to men, especially, in fact, "nothing is more contrary to human nature." (p. 208) And so, in so far as "the lifelong bond of a man and a woman" is advocated by Hazony (which it is) as the "first pillar" of "civilized life," (p. 209) it turns out that for Hazony this lifelong bond is really the effect of the proper organization of social life (including families and traditions), that is, (what the Aristotelians would call) our second nature. So, it turns out that Hazony's sex-essentialist views are dispensable for his argument (which are compatible with all kinds of constructivist views).

And, in fact, in Hazony's favored account of the family -- what he calls "the traditional family" -- gender based dimorphism is rather small. It is much smaller, in fact, than in the patriarchic account of the nuclear family familiar from those "who regard themselves as political conservatives" Let me explain.

Because  he is attuned to the changing dynamics of the function and composition of families, Hazony works with a clear three-fold distinction among three ideal types: (i) the traditional family; (ii) the nuclear family; (iii) the hollowed out family. In brief: the traditional family is a business enterprise consisting of multiple generations in daily contact; the nuclear family involves a sexed division of labor within the household with the mother devoted to child-rearing and the father as breadwinner on a Fordist family wage; the hollowed out family has all its adult members involved in society's extended division of labor and purchases services from it to take on childrearing, cleaning, and education tasks.

While the distinction is conceptual (and normative) in character, it is presented as a temporal (and conceptual) descent, even thought it is possible for a great society to have instances of all three kinds of families existing at the same time (but usually one will predominate numbers-wise and/or normatively). 

Let me quote the passage in which he makes this three-fold distinction. (And then I return to what he calls the 'traditional family.') I suspect it will be received as a bombshell among Hazony's target audience:

As anyone who has lived among traditional families can immediately see, the nuclear family is a weakened and much diminished version of the traditional family, one that is lacking most of the resources needed effectively to pursue the purposes of the traditional family. When this conception of the family became normative in America after the Second World War, it gave birth to a world of detached suburban homes, connected to distant places of employment and schools by trains, automobiles, and buses. In other words, the physical design of large portions of the country reflected a newly rationalized conception of what a family is, which had been reconstructed in light of the economic principle of the division of labor. In this new reality, there were no longer any business enterprises in the home for the family to pursue together. Instead, fathers would “go to work,” seceding from their families during their productive hours each day. Similarly, children were required to “go to school,” seceding from the family during their own productive hours. Young adults would then “go away to college,” cutting themselves off from family influence during the critical years in which they were supposed to reach maturity. Similarly, grandparents were excised from this vision of the home, being “retired” to “retirement communities” or “nursing homes,” which cut the older generation off from the life of their family in much the same way that going away to college cut the younger generation off from it.
Under this new division of labor, mothers were assigned the task of remaining by themselves in the house each day, attempting to “make a home” using the minimalist ingredients that the structure of the nuclear family had left them. Much of this involved increasingly desperate efforts to keep adolescents somehow attached to the family—even though they now shared virtually no productive purposes with their parents, grandparents, and broader community or congregation, and instead spent their days seeking honor among other adolescents. The resulting rupture between parents and their children was poignantly described in numerous books and films beginning in the 1950s. But these works rarely touched upon the reconstruction of the family, which had done so much to inflame the natural tendency of adolescents toward agonized rebellion, while depriving parents of the tools necessary to emerge from these years with the family hierarchy strengthened.
But mothers had the worst of this new family life. Some did succeed in maintaining the cohesion of their families in a world in which grandparents and other family relations had grown impossibly distant, in which the family business had disappeared from the home, and in which the congregation or community, with its sabbaths and festivals, had likewise been reduced to something accessed by automobile once each week like a drive-in movie. However, many other “housewives” despaired and fell into the arms of the feminist movement, which, not without reason, declared the nuclear family to be a tomb for women. Feminist writers were mistaken in supposing that the reconstructed household of the postwar era was itself the traditional family. But they were right that the life of a woman spending most of her productive hours in an empty house, which had been stripped of most of the human relationships, activities, and purposes that had filled the life of the traditional family, was one that many women found too painful and difficult to bear. Many of these mothers quickly joined their husbands and children in leaving the home during the daytime—thus completing the final transformation of the post-traditional “nuclear family” into a hollowed-out shell, a failed imitation of the traditional institution of the family.--Yoram Hazony (2022) Conservatism: A Rediscovery, Chapter 4, pp. 213-215 (emphasis added)

I doubt a conservative has ever been so frank in acknowledging the solidity of key features of the argument of Friedan's The Feminine Mystique!

Hazony is, thus, explicit that he rejects a restoration of the nuclear family as an unworthy project. His is rather an attempt to restore the traditional family. This traditional family has five dimensions (and main characteristics): "lifelong marriage, permanent relations between parents and children, family business operations, the embrace of multiple generations within the family, and active [that is, daily] participation in a broader community or congregation." (p. 211) These are families, that is, that live on farms or compounds, or above/behind a store-front they own (or rent). As Hazony notes, it "becomes clear that the traditional Jewish or Christian family was a far more active, extensive, and powerful organization than the family as it exists in contemporary imagination and practice." (p. 211)*

As an aside, because Hazony is working with a cultural account of the Anglo-American nation, it's a peculiar fact that he does not explore how in immigrant communities -- including Muslim and Hindu --the traditional family is still very much alive and an attractive ideal. (Hazony's views on immigration are assimilationist in character, but compatible with this fact.) I suspect this reflects the unease on the political right with how to conceive the Anglo-American nation's internal relations with non Judeo-Christian religions. (I return to this in a future post when I discuss this more directly, and his views on public religion.)

While in some of Hazony's auto-biographical vignettes the traditional family has some gendered division of labor, it's pretty clear that within the family men and women are equal and that their contributions to the family functions, including its business and enduring partnership with other families, is valued even honored equally. And while the traditional family is hierarchical in character, the hierarchy is structured around age and contribution to the joint efforts not gender. In so far as there are any patriarchic elements left in it, these seem symbolic in nature. So, in some significant ways the traditional family is a much better home than the nuclear family is for a world that takes women and girls and their interests seriously. While it would be a mistake to ignore the anti-feminist rhetoric and arguments in Conservatism -- or the passages where Hazony expresses his criticism of abortion -- in many ways Hazony's program is not a return to patriarchy, but post-feminist.*

To what degree the traditional family is an attractive (or politically winning) ideal, I leave to others. But it is worth noting how much the political economy of the US would need to be re-shaped if it becomes at all feasible. As I noted above, at the level of dwellings and urban/suburban planning it would involve very different choices from the ones that are presently familiar (including a retreat from the suburb). In addition, the traditional family is incompatible with the large corporation; the underlying political economy is Smithian in character composed of price-taking small firms/units and protected by fierce anti-trust regulations and limitations on incorporation. (This is a bit ironic because Hazony's book has a Hamiltonian polemic with Jefferson.) So, this would have to be a conservatism that commits to non-trivial attacks on very strong vested economic and political interests (in the name of a restoration). Hazony hints at this when he warns against the "excessive accumulation of power by private enterprises and cartels" (p. 343), but this part of his program seems underdeveloped.+

 

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.

 

 

Covid Diaries: A Half Full Glass and despite Minor irritants, maybe filling

It's been about a month since my last covid update. (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; here; here;  here; here, here; here; here, here; and here). And, as seems common in the most recent updates, the situation is mixed. But let me start with the non-trivial bits of good news.

First, if I take anti-inflammatory medicine before I have a social interaction (like a lunch or tea) I am capable of engaging in much longer social interactions than I was able to do during the past nine months. I am also capable of doing so in much more complex social environments. I have even been able to do so twice in a day (with a few hours apart). By this I mean that the usual symptoms of head fatigue and subsequent headache don't follow. So that's a big win, and at times I have felt euphoric about it. 

Interestingly enough, after some such activities later in the day I do register physically that I have had some such interactions. My body will feel unusually fatigued, and I need to take time to chill. (I am not allowed to nap because I need to keep day/night rhythm very distinct.) Some day, when I am fully recovered, I would like to team up with a (historical) epidemiologist and geriatric specialists because I am increasingly convinced that a lot of symptoms that in the past usually were treated as 'aging' really were the longue durée effects of (post-)viral infections.

Anyway, on the medical side, I am experimenting with the dosage of the anti-inflammatory meds. As they say in jargon: I am looking to find the minimally efficacious dosage. The month before I lost about six full days to random headaches. This past month, clearly 50% less. That's a lot of less suffering.

As an aside, it's fascinating that while the physicians can all tell you that there are increased risks associated with the use of my particular meds, nobody can tell you what the order of magnitude of the risk might be for a generic patient or for somebody that shares in some of my demographic or medical characteristics. So, while a lot of physicians practice a kind of pseudo medical autonomy -- telling me things like, 'it's your decision' or 'you need to weigh the trade-offs'  --, de facto there is a lot of ignorance being buck-passed onto a patient who is not being given even the minimal coarse-grained information to make autonomous decisions. (And regular readers know, I am no Bayesian--I am not asking for exact statistics, just very broad orders of magnitude.)

Be that as it may, I am quietly hoping that the anti-inflammatory meds also treat some underlying condition such that I can keep hoping for continued improvement over the medium term. The really interesting question for me is this: my symptoms have shifted around every few (two to three) months. And what I am wondering is whether that cycle can be broken. Stay tuned.:)

One thing I have learned about chronic disease or newly acquired disability: other ailments that in a different context would be barely noticed can be greatly destabilizing in the context of disability/chronic disease; think of things like a cold, modest hearing loss, swimmer's ear, blisters, etc. When you are learning to adjust to chronic disease such incredibly modest ailments sap energy. (Again see my comment above about aging as instances of post-viral symptoms.)

Second (back to the good news), next academic year, I'll have the kind of work-load I probably should have had this past year. I am only teaching my giant lecture course Winter 2023. To make this possible a lot of people showed me incredible amount of good-will: my immediate family, which is signing off on three months of research leave stateside (with two weeks of holiday for visits); the folks at Duke University's Center for the History of political Economy and the philosophy department; the folks at University of Arizona's Center for the Philosophy of Freedom. These allowed me to take  three months unpaid research leave this Fall. In addition, my department signed off on this. That, too, showed, good-will, but it did involve some negotiations.

Let me explain, one of the very strange features of the University of Amsterdam is that it works with a system of registered hours (for research, teaching, and some admin). Undoubtedly it was introduced for a mixture of fairness considerations (everyone pulling their fair share) and administrative control over the budget. But in practice, the 'hours' registered are by no means equal (and also model-based). And the obvious effect of the system is to turn academics into a bean-counter of sorts and, for some, also a chance to game the system. (I'll get to the really strange part in a second.)

Now, in practice these plan hours are bit like frequent flyer miles. You know what their official value is, but if you have been around for a while you also recognize you can never really cash them for their (ahh) labor value. This is especially so when there is a dire need for budget cuts; these hours are then easy prey. (That's how I 'lost' one batch of over-hours a few years ago.)

Anyway, despite my partial sick-leave, during the past few years, I actually accumulated more over-hours than I had when I started my partial sick-leave! So, to facilitate my leave and considerable teaching reduction I agreed to donate my (ca 900!) hours and start the next academic year back at level zero. I rationalized the deal to myself as a business class upgrade on a transatlantic/pacific flight.:) In addition, because of my medical leave I have been rather costly to the department and a lot of my rank-specific chores have been parceled out to others. While an apparent bad deal on paper, I felt this was very win-win, and also a chance for me to show my gratitude.

So, my underlying outlook is actually quite positive right now. Next year, I feel my work-load should allow me space to recover and do what I love work-wise (research, write, and lecture). It also allows me space to experiment, when I feel sufficiently recovered, with activities I have not dared to try yet (giving professional lectures, attending seminars, etc.) And while I will miss my family and my undergrad electives/seminars, it's good not to have to stress about their effect on my health. On the other hand, as I have hinted above, I am dealing with a bunch of minor ailments that prevent me from having unconditional optimism right now. The glass is half full, possibly filling.

 

 

 

Chronic Covid

One of the most psychologically annoying features of long haul covid is that any new somewhat mysterious ailment generates the bewildering question whether it is part of the post-viral syndrome belonging to the aftermath of the disease or a sign of a new (potentially serious) problem. (For earlier installments in the series, see here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; and here).

For example, since last week Thursday I suffer from a new kind of head fatigue. The fatigue disappears after a good night's sleep but recurs throughout the day. At first I thought it was an effect of too much intellectual ambition with me working on my Foucault manuscript. But the head fatigue also occurs when I am not on the laptop at all. I call it a 'new' fatigue because unlike the first five months of covid, this fatigue does not impact my ability to read intellectual stuff. It's not what other people call 'brain fog.' Rather, it is a feeling of tiredness combined with hunger (and irritability). 

As it happens, last week I picked up new fancy, varifocal glasses. I had gotten them because, as I remarked before, during my long bed-ridden period of convalescence I was reading books without my eye-glasses on, but with one eye closed. My cognitive-scientist, vitreoretinal-surgeon better half had nudged me to the optometrists suggesting that better eye vision might facilitate cognitive renewal. I never had varifocal glasses before, and I had been warned that a transition period might be tricky. 

In particular, I was warned not to use the varifocals at first while driving. After wearing them for about twenty minutes I could see why. As you move your head to look at new objects, different parts of the visual field go blurry. The haze disappears quickly as your eyes look through the right part of the glasses and the world returns to focus. Over time you notice the blurry moments less and your eyes adjust more quickly to where they should look relative to your glasses. While I do have a driver's license, I don't drive in the UK. This decision was unrelated to Covid (or Brexit). I simply decided that I do not drive enough anywhere to trust my judgment driving on 'the wrong side of the road' in the UK.

But last week as the fatigue first hit me, I wondered, is this covid or the fancy glasses? A week later, I can't be sure but I have to assume it's covid. Because by now I barely notice the blurry moments. And I do, in fact, enjoy reading books and my mobile phone without taking off my glasses. 

Either way, after three excellent weeks in which I was feeling close to recovered with only minor, lingering issues, now I am back at the stage where I am grateful for the good periods during the day. I was warned against such relapses by others in my long haul covid fellowship. But since I had read plenty of narratives about folk who had suddenly recovered fully, I had come to hope during the third good week I might be one of the lucky ones.

If you are like me, you might wonder what the physicians think of all of this? First the good news: I have had a battery of blood tests this past month. (For a while this showed in astounding black and blue marks thanks to a nurse's inability to find my veins.) The blood results all report that I am in fine health. The second bit of good news is that I am finally assigned an appointment with a long haul covid clinic. Sadly, that also contains the bad news, which is that the appointment is still seven weeks away. 

It's not that I expect much help from the long haul covid clinic. My GPs have tempered any expectation about breakthrough cures. Most of the folk who do benefit from medical intervention are showing symptoms much different than mine. But it would be nice to have some attentive, skilled medical attention beyond 'be patient, and don't push yourself too much.'

Anyway, it's now been six months. June was the best month of the year for me. It was the first month where I spent most of my time out of bed and active in various ways; I was very happy to be improved. I had been looking forward to my discussion with the occupational physician next week. While I am still hopeful I can return to normal teaching, say, in September at the start of the academic year, I now am considering the possibility that June was a harbinger of the possibility that my condition might be chronic; that I might be like the folks that have CFS/ME, and that I should expect good and bad periods to alternate.

When I started blogging about my long haul symptoms, a distinguished academic with CFS/ME told me she 'learned to become a fast writer.' (I have not asked her how she teaches.) Since I am a parent I write much faster, so I can relate. Even so, there is more to life than writing. As I contemplate this, I am wondering how I can be me with new constraints.  But now I must take my son to a physio appointment, for him.

 

Covid Fellowship and Constrained Living with Invisible Disability

After last week's digression on the effects of my Covid, I was very touched by the many generous well wishes I received. Reading notes of encouragement in my darkened bedroom filled my time for a few days. Thank you.

Two kinds of responses surprised me. First, while commiserating with me, a number of people shared publicly their experiences of living with regular vertigo, tinnitus, and headaches. They did so on this blog, but also in other social media. My piece was a trigger for them to come out, as it were, and share their otherwise invisible disability in our wider professional circle.* These testimonials give a glimpse of stoic perseverance and alert us, perhaps, to quiet suffering. 

Second, a smaller, but not insignificant number of covid 'long haulers,' and their partners, privately reached out to me, to wish me well, to encourage me, and also to tell me that they recognized my symptoms. They have provided me with fellowship and support through the chat functions of social media. 

Because I find speaking quite exhausting, I am, despite my family, rather isolated during the day. But the fellowship -- as I call them to myself --, has made me feel connected to those who have a sense of what it's like. Relative to the people who died or were incubated in hospitals, we don't seem especially stricken. But we struggle in a world designed for activity.

Because I mostly lacked the canonized covid symptoms  -- fever, cough, lack of smell, shortness of breath** --, the fellowship has been reassuring. Knowing that others, too, experience the waxing and waning of dizziness/boat-rocking, fatigue, headaches, difficulty concentrating, and insomnia has given me a sense it's part of the territory. They have given me a window, a sense of familiarity, into how my experiences hang together. 

Last week, I discussed my inability to read and focus; I have withdrawn from all professional activity. In particular, classes start without me next week. Even the fellowship can't remove the dread I may never teach again. 

This week, however, I want to give a sense of the manner in which the inability to concentrate ('brain fog') manifests itself in other ways, too. The most obvious example is that three times since quarantine ended, I nearly burned down our kitchen. Each time I skipped an otherwise obvious step; e.g., pouring water into the espresso machine after adding the beans, removing the paper-towel-role or the plate from the burning stove. Each time I missed that something was burning in front of my eyes until I smelled the problem, and, eventually, registered it as a warning.  

In reflecting on my experiences I receive, I imagine, an oblique glance at the what it's like of Alzheimers and dementia (and, perhaps, other forms of consciousness in animals and AI). And  there is no difference in experience. Compared to my pre-covid self my steam of consciousness does not feel more granular or gappy. I don't have a sense, in the moment, of my blind-spots.

Thanks to Dennett's work I am familiar with the fact that even very healthy conscioussness is full of unacknowledged gappiness. Because I recall my past capacity, I recognize, after the fact, that some of my behavior exhibits less skill-full functioning, an incompetence at tasks I had once been familiar with. Since I am nearly fifty that's not a wholly new experience.

A few years ago, the work of Elizabeth Barnes on disability taught me that the human condition should be conceived as constrained living (here); (here), (and here). The gappiness of my possible blind-spots is not experienced as constraint at all. I don't feel handicapped when I walk into our kitchenette.

By contrast, while I have some recollection issues (with names, especially), I have a pretty vivid sense of my capacities before Covid. And this alerts me to a whole range of new constraints day-to-day. For example, I have learned to walk while dizzy, which involves an inattention to the sense that I might fall any minute; instead I trust in the sturdiness of my legs.

I also can't listen to any music. In fact, the only distraction I tolerate is watching already familiar films, but not musicals, or TV  (or highly episodic series). This is also familiar to the fellowship. One curiosity is that watching explosives or gun-fights on Netflix does not bother me at all, but any other background noise -- the barking of a dog in the yard, even my son singing happily -- evokes the horror of a scratch on a blackboard. 

  

On Tuck Everlasting

"Know what happens then?" said Tuck. "To the water? The sun sucks some of it up right out of the ocean and carries it back in clouds, and then it rains, and the rain falls into the stream, and the stream keeps moving on, taking it all back again. It's a wheel, Winnie. Everything's a wheel, turning and turning, never stopping. The frogs is part of it, and the bugs, and the fish, and the wood thrush, too. And people. But never the same ones. Always coming in new, always growing and changing, and always moving on. That's the way it's supposed to be. That's the way it is."--Natalie Babbit (1975) Tuck Everlasting

When my son, now almost 11, first went to school, I had to get used to the fact that he was not especially forthcoming with what happened during the day. I learned that certain directed questions might make a difference, but he quickly and repeatedly alerted me to the fact that I ask too many questions. (Another way my occupation deforms me, I thought ruefully many times.) 

Since, I have been well trained to accept any information about his day from any source with gratitude. I have also learned to read signs of distress or success in oblique fashion. 

I don't want to suggest that I never learn anything at all about what goes on in school. For instance, a recent book they read in class -- Peter Pan -- was deemed boring and stupid. 

It is not because he dislikes reading. Our son is a voracious reader. While we are a rather bookish family, I have been, in fact, astonished by the speed with which he reads and the complexity of the material he assimilates. (Okay, I am a proud dad!) He reads so fast that he is perpetually running out of things to read. But despite the fact that he frequently faces a serious search problem, he is quite adamant that our suggestions won't do. (So, he and I most frequently bond over films and football, not books.)

The other day I was, thus, quite surprised that he recommended a book to me: Tuck Everlasting. I learned they also are reading it in class. When I asked him why he recommended it to me, his answer surprised me: it's very philosophical. But after that enticing morsel little else was forthcoming. 

I had never heard of the book. And I was amazed to learn that it had sold millions and was turned into numerous feature films. I suddenly felt very sheltered. It turns out my spouse was convinced she had read it and still owned a copy. After a fruitless search, and a repeated nudging from our son to me to read it, I ordered it online and read it Saturday.

Now, nearly all books I read I encounter with a reputation attached to it. I either know the author personally or by reputation; it's a classic I should have read or a work central to debates in my field; or it's a novel I have heard about (through reviews or word or mouth) or that has been gifted to me with some kind of comment. And in writing these sentences I realized it is, in fact, incredibly rare that I read a book without any sense of what I might expect.  

When I was a late teen-ager a family friend, Marion Zilversmit, gave me a paperback copy of Paul Auster's New York Trilogy. I am not sure whether it was for my birthday or a goodbye gift for my departure for college Stateside. For some reason I did not read it initially. And so it stayed in my room in Amsterdam, where I found it after I returned my freshman year. I took it with me in a backpack following the Dutch team around Italy for the world cup in 1990. 

After the (horrible) game against England in Cagliari, where all fans were treated as dangerous animals -- the police used tear-gas indiscriminately --, I found myself alone on the deck of a freight boat returning some of us to Palermo. The fans were packed in and the boat reeked of alcohol and piss. I found a spot on the upper deck, and started reading Auster through the night under the mediterranean sky. When I look back on it, I only see the romance because Auster took me into a vastly more fascinating and stimulating world than the one I was sailing; the smell and disgust are evaporated. 

The first major surprise of Tuck Everlasting is the incredibly abstract, even mythical style that is achieved at once:

The first week of August hangs at the very top of summer, the top of the live-long year, like the highest seat of a Ferris wheel when it pauses in its turning. The weeks that come before are only a climb from balmy spring, and those that follow a drop to the chill of autumn, but the first week of August is motionless, and hot. It is curiously silent, too, with blank white dawns and glaring noons, and sunsets smeared with too much color.

Yes, my brain knows that this is strictly false in the Southern hemisphere and, in some sense, unintelligible prior to the building of the first ferris wheels. But simultaneously it feels like I have just assimilated a truth eternal. This sense is heightened by the next sentence with starts with an "Often..."

After I read the book my son pointed out to me, while we were on an errand, that Babbit's descriptions are simultaneously lively ("glaring noons") and austere ("silent," "blank"); that when you read it, you have to do a lot of work imagining what's going on, but this work of imagining does not feel like work. I recognize part of the point and whisper, we co-construct the story, as it were, with the author. He squeezes my hand. 

A second major surprise of my reading Tuck Everlasting is when I recognize (I hope he forgives me for sharing this) my son's recent bedtime questions to me in a passage early in Chapter 1:

The ownership of land is an odd thing when you come to think of it. How deep, after all, can it go? If a person owns a piece of land, does he own it all the way down, in ever narrowing dimensions, till it meets all other pieces at the center of the earth? Or does ownership consist only of a thin crust under which the friendly worms have never heard of trespassing?”

At the time he did not disguise his disappointment with the inadequacy of my responses (something about local jurisprudence, scarcity, innate commitments) to his questions. I hope to do better some day.

The other day, I asked him if he wants to talk about Tuck Everlasting (which is a rather violent book). No. Did he identify with the main protagonist (also a single child around his age). No. I could tell I was risking asking too many questions. We eventually negotiated a compromise that I could write a digression about it.

That concessions feels like a pyrrhic victory here; what to say now?

You, perceptive reader, will have noticed that eternal return and heracleitan flux are key themes in Tuck Everlasting. And I don't share any spoilers if I say that the plot is accelerated by ordinary decisions about what to do with dangerous secrets that take on weight in virtue of the possibility of eternal return. 

And then, as I am contemplating a post about how Frodo has to leave Middle Earth, and wondering if I have written that already, and before I realize what's happening, I recognize something else my son was telling me, but hadn't heard; if he and I both co-construct the story while reading it, there is a sense we have not read the same story at all. And while I reflect on this, I discern that asking about the version he is constructing with Babbit would be a way of grabbing illicitly what's now his. 

 

 

 

On Audre Lorde's Political Critique of Capitalism

The principal horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, or which defines human need to the exclusion of the psychic and emotional components of that need - the principal horror of such a system is that it robs our work of its erotic value, its erotic power and life appeal and fulfillment. Such a system reduces work to a travesty of necessities, a duty by which we earn bread or oblivion for ourselves and those we love. But this is tantamount to blinding a painter and then telling her to improve her work, and to enjoy the act of painting. It is not only next to impossible, it is also profoundly cruel...

The erotic functions for me in several ways, and the first is in providing the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person. The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.

Another important way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy, in the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, harkening to its deepest rhythms so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, or examining an idea.

That self-connection shared is a measure of the joy which I know myself to be capable of feeling, a reminder of my capacity for feeling. And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible, and does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife.

This is one reason why the erotic is so feared, and so often relegated to the bedroom alone, when it is recognized at all. For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe...

This brings me to the last consideration of the erotic. To share the power of each other's feelings is different from using another's feelings as we would use a Kleenex. When we look the other way from our experience, erotic or otherwise, we use rather than share the feelings of those others who participate in the experience with us. And use without consent of the used is abuse.

In order to be utilized, our erotic feelings must be recognized. The need for sharing deep feeling is a human need. But within the european-american tradition, this need is satisfied by certain proscribed erotic comings-together. These occasions are almost always characterized by a simultaneous looking away, a pretense of calling them something else, whether a religion, a fit, mob violence, or even playing doctor. And this misnaming of the need and the deed give rise to that distortion which results in pornography and obscenity - the abuse of feeling.---Audre Lorde (1978 [1984]) The Uses of the Erotic, reprinted in Audre Lorde Your Silence Nill Not Protect You. [A recording of a version of the essay can be found here.]

One of Lorde's critiques of capitalism is that on the production side, it is joyless. This is matched, by a related critique that on the consumption side, capitalism promotes a certain kind of numbed, inauthentic, feeling -- she calls it 'sensation' -- that is soulless. To be sure these are not the only cruelties and sources of oppression Lorde diagnoses with capitalism. In fact, the more important critique (in case we had forgotten that Lorde is a poet) is centered on 'misnaming:' the abuse of words. In particular, both this joyless production and soulless consumption are accompanied by forms of rhetoric (or marketing techniques) that turn this bad reality into something cruel (on the production side) and oppressive (on the consumption side). It's cruel because we are encouraged to buy into a set of distorting fantasies that are not just impossible to live up, but self-undermining. It's oppressive because our desires are turned against ourselves (and each other) or, worse, numbed entirely, or even worse yet, abused by others.

By contrast, Lorde promotes a form of authentic, joyful feeling (she often uses the word 'deep') that can be shared; this joyful feeling is life-affirming and, when recognized by others, fruitful not just in our psychic lives, but in our political lives. Unlike inauthentic sensations, which are draining, shared joy is empowering, creative, and energizing and so (Lorde is no quietist) a source of political agency.

Mohan Mathen, in a critical engagement with Kristie Dotson, first alerted me to the significance of Lorde (1934–1992) on contemporary thought. Then, more recently, Amia Srinivasan has been developing Lorde's views on fury and anger to criticize a rejection of anger in political life (see also her article), associated with say Martha Nussbaum's political philosophy (recall also this post). So, when I encountered a collection of her essays and poems on display at one of the tables at the Waterstones at the 02 Center, a mall on the Finchley Road, while my son and I were were killing time before we would go watch Thor: Ragnarok, I did not hesitate and slipped it in the pile of children's books we bought. Yesterday, I read it through, feeling like I was listening in on a vaguely familiar, secret conversation that I have been hearing all along, but not wishing to hear. This post is the start of my overdue reckoning with Lorde.

It may seem perverse to start with Lorde's political economy, when she is such a powerful critic of patriarchy/sexism/racism/gay-bias, and at times veers close to new age spirituality, but one striking element of her writings is that she regularly reminds the reader to ask "who profits from" the unjust status quo* that the "form our creativity takes is often a class issue." For example, "of all the art forms, poetry is the most economical. It is the one which is the most secret, which requires the least physical labour, the least material, and the one which can be done between shifts, in the hospital pantry, on the subway, and on scraps of surplus paper."**

What's central to Lorde's vision of joyful feeling is that in sharing, and she does not deny this can be both gentle and painful, we do not become the same or identical (like Stoic sages), but recognize mutual difference. This connects the personal with the political; for her central political insight is that "unity implies the coming together of elements which, are to begin with, varied and diverse in their particular natures."+ In unity these natures are not effaced, but they work together in a common goal, which is the development of "a liveable future."++

Lorde is not essentializing women as feeling and men as rational; rather while men benefit from this status quo, we also end up distorting our own lives. The most savage  passage in her work is this cool reflection: "Men who are afraid to feel must keep women around to do their feeling for them while dismissing us for the same supposedly 'inferior' capacity to feel deeply. But in this way also, men deny themselves their own essential humanity."* That is she understand capitalism as a system of oppression that turns the oppressed into slaves of inauthentic desire (there are echoes of Wollstonecraft here) and the sometimes sadistic, privileged into robots. And, while the privileged are unfeeling (I couldn't help but think of Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho), they encourage manifest forms of hatred and self-distortion among the oppressed. Before you think the previous sentence is fantasy, remember that our for-profit media encourages such inventive hatreds on a daily basis.  

Some other time I'll face the question if a future liberalism can salvage commercial life from its present (and, perhaps, domesticate Lorde's critique), destructive capitalist manifestation, but today I close with this observation. Unlike many critics of capitalism, Lorde is not naive about existing socialism nor a revolutionary. She reminds the reader, time and again, not to fetishize novelty, not to participate in historical amnesia, but to develop the right forms of historical 'continuity.'+++ In fact, what's revolutionary about her view is that she insists on the significance of continuity and memory. For, "there are no new ideas, just new ways of giving those ideas we cherish breath and power in our living."****

 

On Being a Racist in Retreat

When you walk through a town like this--two hundred thousand inhabitants, of whom at least twenty thousand own literally nothing except the rags  they stand up in--when you see how the people live, and still more how easily they die, it is always difficult to believe that you are walking among human beings. All colonial empires are in reality founded upon that fact. The people have brown faces--besides, there are so many of them! Are they really the same flesh as yourself? Do they even have  names? Or are they merely a kind of undifferentiated brown stuff, about as individual as bees or coral insects? They rise out of the earth, they sweat and starve for a few years, and then they sink back into the nameless mounds of the graveyard and nobody notices that they are gone. And even the graves themselves soon fade back into the soil. Sometimes, out for a walk, as you break your way through the prickly pear, you notice that it is rather bumpy underfoot, and only a certain regularity in the bumps tells you that you are walking over skeletons....

All people who work with their hands are partly invisible, and the more  important the work they do, the less visible they are. Still, a white  skin is always fairly conspicuous. In northern Europe, when you see a  labourer ploughing a field, you probably give him a second glance. In a hot country, anywhere south of Gibraltar or east of Suez, the chances  are that you don't even see him. I have noticed this again and again. In a tropical landscape one's eye takes in everything except the human  beings. It takes in the dried-up soil, the prickly pear, the palm-tree  and the distant mountain, but it always misses the peasant hoeing at his  patch. He is the same colour as the earth, and a great deal less interesting to look at.

It is only because of this that the starved countries of Asia and Africa are accepted as tourist resorts. No one would think of running cheap trips to the Distressed Areas. But where the human beings have brown  skins their poverty is simply not noticed. What does Morocco mean to a Frenchman? An orange-grove or a job in government service. Or to an Englishman? Camels, castles, palm-trees, Foreign Legionnaires, brass trays and bandits. One could probably live here for years without noticing that for nine-tenths of the people the reality of life is an endless, back-breaking struggle to wring a little food out of an eroded soil.--George Orwell (1939) Marrakech

Yesterday morning, while watching my son and his friends sell lemonade and cookies to raise money for the Grenfell Towers victims and the Royal Free -- a refrain they repeated all morning long, most effectively when they would corner a passer-by ready to climb up to the Heath -- on the South End, I was reminded, because I checked my email absentmindedly on my phone, that a promised tenure and promotion letter is due in two weeks; at once I recognized the foolishness of my intention to finish two overdue papers -- both in late stages of draft -- before I go on holiday this Friday (which becomes the de facto deadline for that tenure letter). After our lunch, we went to Daunt's to buy him a book, and there, while browsing, I noticed the  Penguin edition of Orwell's Essays. I checked the index, and marked that "Reflections on Ghandi" -- an essay I blogged about admiringly, twice, in fact, [and here] -- was the last one. The collection lacks an editor and while I puzzled over my previous lack of curiosity about his other essays, my son called me from the sales counter; he was ready for me to pay for his selection. I grabbed the Essays and was secretly relieved when my son informed me he was too tired to frisbee and insisted on reading his book.

These days tourists still go to starved countries,  but while for Orwell, "people with brown skins are next door to invisible," now the locals and their skin colors are noticed. I wouldn't say that it is the main purpose to return home from holiday in a packed, charter flight hungover while a kid is crying for the tablet in the row behind you, but we should not ignore the frisson of informing the neighbors, after some obligatory remarks about the shocking ways children are prostituted, that they lack sanitation and have too many babies, that we have a proper work ethic, and so on. (If you protest, my dear reader, that you would not be caught dead in a charter, I remind you of the pictures you posted on Instagram of yourself and your healthy friends enjoying a hearty meal after a day's volunteering in a dusty, crowded refugee camp.)* As Orwell puts it (in his remarkable essay, "Antisemitism in Britain,") "we are all more or less subject to this lunacy of believing that whole races or nations are mysteriously good or mysteriously evil."+

Orwell's Marrakech is about what it's like be an imperial master on the edge of the precipice, which is represented by the Senegalese soldiers, French citizens, who march by a "long, dusty column, infantry, screw-gun batteries and then more infantry, four or five thousand men in all, winding up the road with a clumping of boots and a clatter of iron wheels." At that point there is,

one thought which every white man (and in this connection it doesn't matter twopence if he calls himself a Socialist) thinks when he sees a black army marching past. "How much longer can we go on kidding these people? How long before they tum their guns in the other direction?"

It was curious, really. Every white man there has this thought stowed somewhere or other in his mind. I had it, so had the other onlookers, so had the officers on their sweating chargers and the white NCOs marching in the ranks. It was a kind of secret which we all knew and were too clever to tell; only the Negroes didn't know it. And really it was almost like watching a flock of cattle to see the long column, a mile or two miles of armed men, flowing peacefully up the road, while the great white birds drifted over them in the opposite direction, glittering like scraps of paper.

Orwell's point is not to deny that colonial empires are gained through military force. But, rather, to insist that empires are kept through a master-servant ideology in which the imperial rulers dehumanize the conquered in various ways [invisible work; mass-anonymity; seen as animals; etc.], and makes him the enforcer of his own chains. Orwell assumes here the power of (the propagandist's) education and military drilling. (I am probably not the first to notice that the characterization of totalitarianism in 1984, owes something to his experience of being on the empire's side in colonial rule.) Orwell's faith in the power of education is not infinite--it's a matter of time before the game is up, and the guns are turned--but he does not underestimate it either. But beneath the facade of virile, imperial strength, he reveals a quiet terror, so manifest today in America's behavior toward its blacks and the Europeans toward its 'non-natives,' that the tables will be turned.

In context, Orwell is not much interested in the phenomenology of the oppressed even though he is capable of generating sympathy for them. He does not make the leap into Ellison's perspective, avant la lettre. It's not because he is incapable of writing from perspectives other than his own (-- I will return to his treatment of passive helplessness in "Inside the Whale"), after all the essay starts with an imaginative interpretation of the behavior of flies.** But Orwell's topic is to chart a certain psychological void at the heart of "modern civilization." Orwell exhibits colonial mastery (with the rhetorical trick of making visible that which he claims stays invisible) in order to make expressible set of experiences that survive the fall of empire as such.

That is, I suspect dark skins may be noticed by tourists now because of the end of direct military rule. But our military and technological superiority has not ended. So, the relationships of subordination and superiority have not evaporated (merely displaced), and the dark skins encountered abroad are inevitably, it seems, tracked with narratives that extol our (non-existent) moral superiority over them.

The surge of fondness for closed border-walls is a sign of fearful weakness--not merely a wise recognition of limits, but a retreat. The desire to keep them out, is a collective admission of our terror that the game is nearly up and we'll be treated the way we raped and killed them.

I looked up from Orwell's essays, my mind uneasily shifting to the morning's scene with the happy children singing and dancing selling the fresh lemonade and delicious, sprinkled cookies and (ahh) brownies, and just then I refuse to finish my train of ideas. For, after we had installed ourselves at the cafe, I glanced furtively -- guiltily aware of my prior lack of interest -- at the title of of the book I had bought for my son, who was reading it hungrily; it was David Walliams' The World’s Worst Children 2.

 

On Not finding the Words to Be in This World

Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully.

The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgements of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."--Lincoln (1865) The Second Inaugural.

In trying to find words to organize the jumble of my thoughts on this week's events Stateside, I was reminded of my second visit to Washington DC with the College Democrats in the early 1990s. One bright night I got bored with the networking and the efforts of the under-aged to obtain drinks, and went with a small group to the Lincoln Memorial. I had never been there. I had discerned that professional politics was not for me. One of my companions mentioned that Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I have a dream speech," was given at the base of Lincoln's statue.

A few years before I had visited the Jefferson Memorial and I had struggled with my response. The rhetoric gripped me at first, but over time I came to see in the particular choice of words a clumsy effort at propaganda. I was bracing myself for disappointment as I entered the Lincoln Memorial. And at first, I had to suppress laughter--Lincoln looked just like I imagined him to look and I expected him to stand up and play the part in a cartoon or a third rate horror movie. I recognized the Gettysburg address (recall my post), but the words of the Second Inaugural were unfamiliar. I was horrified and astounded by it: while allowing that God's providential plan may be unknowable, he was treating the suffering of the war inflicted on all parties (both North and South) as divine punishment for the evil of slavery.

I was astounded because I could not imagine a politician, certainly not a war-time leader, magnifying the voters' sins back at them. I had come to assume that while democratic political leadership was coextensive with some truth, it primarily entailed a form of flattery of the people by the politician. That Lincoln's stance had seemed impossible to me, made me feel not just physically small in his statue's presence, but I suddenly saw that my purported knowing-ness and realism revealed itself as underestimating democratic, no human, possibility.

I was awestruck, yet angry.

His words horrified and angered me because it reminded me of the Rabbinic argument that I had encountered as a teenager that the Holocaust was divine punishment of the Jews' sins. My teenage (modestly existentialist) self earnestly opted for nihilism given the choice between meaning-less suffering or a God that inflicts such (disproportionate) horrors on his creatures. (I didn't recognize that if God existed, my choice would seem comic to her.) Since, I learned that God is not required for the stance I rejected; I sometimes spot secular versions of a divine retribution theory (e.g., austerity measures inflicted on 'lazy' populations).

I have come to recognize the moral majesty of Lincoln's great sense of shared complicity in evil. And I am impressed by his willingness to entertain, subtly, such public doubt in God's possession of the attribute of justice and his sense of the absurdity even blasphemy of so much prayer. Yet, whether he believed his own words or not, I revolted against the embrace of divine retribution because (as a doctrine/explanatory principle) it seems biased against history's victims--it victimizes them twice over. Even so, while steady in my rejection of this theology, as the years have passed, I have come to wonder whether Lincoln's greatness and his theology are inseparable. (I am not claiming this theology is sufficient for greatness!)

So, here I am, a father of a young child, hoping that he will be surrounded by people willing to cope and adjust to each other without violence, knowing that I have no grounds for expecting this. Out of scholarly duty I look up the full text of Psalm 19, and there just before reaching, "the judgements of the Lord are true and righteous altogether," I read, אֵין-אֹמֶר, וְאֵין דְּבָרִים:    בְּלִי, נִשְׁמָע קוֹלָם. There is no speech, there are no words, neither is their voice heard.*

 

 

Stoner and Augustus On Love and Freedom (and Parenting)

There is a variety of love more powerful and lasting than that union with the other which beguiles us with its sensual pleasure, and more powerful and lasting than that platonic variety in which we contemplate the mystery of the other and thus become ourselves; mistresses grow old or pass beyond us; the flesh weakens; friends die, and the children fulfill, and thus betray, that potentiality in which we first beheld them. It is a variety of low in which you…have found yourself for much of your life, and it is one in which our poets were happiest; it is the love of the scholar for his text, the philosopher for his idea, the poet for his word. Thus Ovid is not alone in his northern exile at Tomis, nor are you alone in your far Damascus, where you have chosen to devote your remaining years to your books. No living object is necessary for such pure love; and thus it is universally agreed that this is the highest form of love, since it is for an object that approaches the absolute.

And yet in some ways it may be the basest form of love. For if we strip away the high rhetoric that so often surround this notion, it is revealed simply as a love of power…It is the power that the philosopher has over the disembodied mind of his reader, the power that the poet has over the living mind and heart of his listener. And if the minds and hearts and spirits of those who under the spell of that appointed power are lifted, that is an accident which is not essential to the love, or even its purpose.

I have begun to see that it is this kind of love that has impelled me through the years, thought it has been necessary for me to conceal the fact from myself as well as from others. "Augustus to Nicolaus of Damascus"--John Williams Augustus: A Novel (306)

In the face of death and delirium (when one can be "more reasonable than most men"), there are, we are told, three kinds of love:

1. One consequent the pleasure of, let's say, body-coupling. (This is fleeting.)
2. One (Platonic) consequent our intellectual awareness of our lack of knowledge about our intimates—a form of unstable, self-knowledge that is revealed to be an imprisonment.
3. An enduring love that the scholar-craftsman feels for one's necessary creations, which – upon further reflection – is revealed as love of power.* 

It is no surprise that an emperor would identify his own ruling passion with a love of power; nor surprising that a novelist would have him say so. It is a bit more surprising that at the end of this novel about the art of ruling, which is simultaneously about the art of parenting, the novelist would allow his reader to entertain the thought that her immersion in the written text is a form of subjugation to the author's craft.

So, we are back in familiar terrain of the modern novel: the novelist as prosecutor of his own craft. We might say that the main defense of the novelist is that he acts from "necessity" ((305) or "destiny" (295)). While the propagandist's utility for the novel can be aimed at directly (recall), if there is genuine utility to the novel – elevating minds toward greatness (recall this post on Grunberg/Coetzee) – it is an unintentional byproduct of the love of power. (This is the secondary defense.) Williams lets us enjoy the irony that the emperor is wiser on the novel's possibility, and takes it more seriously, than his poet-propagandist (recall Maecenas here and here). But this very possibility is also destabilizing psychologically and politically; for the novel leaves no doubt about the dissatisfaction that follows from wise rule. Our excellence is revealed under duress (privation), not in prosperity.

This writer's necessity is not opposed to freedom (although there seems little room for the readers's/subjects' freedom--John Williams's sudden popularity offers a window on our limited aspirations). On the contrary, Augustus is recorded as claiming: