F.K.

I've just finished reading the middle volume (the first vol. doesn't yet exist and the 3rd vol. isn't in my school's library) of Reiner Stach's epic biography of Franz Kafka (Kafka: The Decisive Years).  1st, I can't believe that any biography of Kafka could have the word decisive in its title!  But it still offers a fantastic discussion of Kafka's lunatic marriage proposal to Felice Bauer, which has to be the worst and most comical proposal of all time: he spends reams of paper explaining exactly why he is unsuitable for marriage at all and specifically to her.  So, of course, she accepts--which complicates Kafka's life immensely. (They never got married although they got engaged later on again--but again didn't get married.)  Another quotation from his relentless diary: "Often--and in my innermost self possibly all the time--I doubt that I am a human being."  But then the biographer annoys me with the following statement: "In his everyday interactions, Kafka resorted to ironic laments, gestures of comic desperation, which hid the true extent of his precarious inner state.  By social convention, anyone who whines is not suffering profoundly."  What the hell?  I whine, probably incessantly, and I think I suffer, even profoundly, he said whiningly.

My Theory of History

My theory of history is as follows: it's been mountain people versus valley people (that is, for example, the Balkans versus the Hungarians or the Turks), and you can never fully defeat mountain people because they have nothing to lose and they're essentially barbarians. But there's also been ongoing battles among the valley peoples, and so what has generally occurred is that large valley nations tend to fight against other large valley nations (e.g., France versus Germany or China versus Japan) by battling over (and thus occupying) smaller valley countries, e.g., Belgium, that happen to be in between them.  In fact, the most depressing cinema tends to be produced by victim valley countries (Belgium, Poland, South Korea).  When we visited Milan, another small valley country, the guide I hired to show us around the city told us that there was no art in Milan.  Why?   Because larger neighbors had been fighting over it against each other for the past 400 years, and every time a new "valley" country occupied it, it removed whatever art was there to its own museums: the Louvre, Madrid, Vienna, etc.  The only thing left was The Last Supper, which couldn't be removed because it was a wall in a building (although I'm sure if they could have found  a way . . . a la The Elgin Marbles).  Oh, and whenever a large valley people lose, then they look for someone to blame, which in Europe has tended to be the Jews, because, of course, their own incompetence or stupidity couldn't be the reason.  This pretty much explains everything there is to explain, I think.

Raging

In Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage, he plays the intellectual fool well:

"Life is really no more than a search for hot drinks one likes" (72).

"The perfect life . . .is one which prevents you from doing that which you would ideally have done (painted, say, or written unpublishable poetry) but which, in fact, you have no wish to do" (126).

"My greatest urge in life is to do nothing.  It's not even an absence of motivation, a lack, for I do have a strong urge: to do nothing" (226).

"I read nothing and did nothing.  I spent most of my time watching TV which may not sound so extreme but this was mornings and afternoons, it was Italian TV and--the clincher--the TV wasn't even turned on. Nothing interested me--and this, in the end, is what saved me.  I had no interest in anything, no curiosity.  All I felt was: I am depressed, I am depressed.  And then, this depression generated its own flicker of recovery. I became interested in depression" (227-228).

It hits a bit close to home.

The Left Revisited

My comment about the Left emerged, I think, when I read an interview in the Monthly Review, a journal that styles itself as an independent socialist publication, about the Chinese cultural revolution in which some hack was explaining that any excesses--meaning killings, beatings, humiliations, etc.--were not "mainstream": when in all probability they were nothing but "mainstream."  I get the same feeling when I listen to corporate spokespersons blithely defending the indefensible: do they even know just how deluded they are?  OK.  So people lie.  Everybody lies.  Big deal--no news there. And when their job is on the line, people are even more apt to dissemble.  But when thousands or millions of lives are suddenly imperiled, then lying--for whatever reason--becomes not just less acceptable but unbearable.  (But we might also ask--is it a lie when you've convinced yourself that it's not a lie?)

Oh, and I'm reading Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers, his compelling account of how Europe (and thus the world) went to war in 1914.  My sense is that World War I occurred because enough men in power wanted a war--and even more thought it inevitable--and most of them lacked the moral imagination to consider just how catastrophic such a war, even of short duration, would be.  Sleepwalking?  I'm not so sure.  But one lesson is that political systems headed by someone who has his position merely on the basis of the accident of birth (that is, hereditary monarchs) usually don't function very well.  Lesson two?  That even fairly intelligent people can miscalculate, especially when they have created the conditions (here, security alliances based on animosity towards an enemy and on misunderstandings and foolish delusions of others' capacities).  Lesson three? That world history is filled with these kinds of miscalculations and misunderstandings and that enough idiots exist who believe in the lies they're told and feel free to act upon them (blithely marching off to slaughter).

So it's 2014: what miscalculations this year will trigger a global catastrophe?  In 1914, for most people (at least outside of power) a world war muat have seemed inconceivable.  Is it so different now?

Why the Left in Power Cannot Tell the Truth

The Left has no difficulty telling the truth when it isn't in power.  In article after article, book after book, it reveals the way in which money and power inflict violence and humiliation on millions throughout the world.  Yet the very same people, once they become the communication directors for radical regimes, immediately begin to dissemble.  And the question is why.  My guess is that socialism, of most varieties, simply cannot deliver prosperity--or at least the illusion of prosperity or enough prosperity.  It can immiserate many people, but it can't deliver what most people want: status.  Much of the working class, far from being the heroes of equality, would be delighted to exchange places with the wealthy.  And then those who have attained power themselves become interested in status (if they weren't already), and so the Left must then begin to lie, to fantasize about what their regime is actually accomplishing or not accomplishing, to turn away from the inevitable jailings and killings, the misery and hopelessness--or to explain the violence as necessary (to prevent the return of the Right).  The Right also cannot tell the truth--even outside of power.  But when it is in power, it has the ability, to a large degree, to provide a measure of prosperity to enough people to ward off revolt.  At times, it becomes so greedy that it cannot provide prosperity--or it engages in endless wars that eventually destroy its own economy.  And then, at times, social movements revolt and place leftists in power.  And so on and so on and so on.  The Right can deliver enough prosperity because, to run a successful business, you have to have some sociopathic tendencies--a willingness to be ruthless and to believe that underpaying employees or screwing over your competition or even accepting discriminatory laws that refuse to allow others to compete with you are acceptable, even moral.

What's Often Nauseating About Humanity

Near the end of Bloodlands, Timothy Snyder's historical account of the state-directed massacres in Eastern Europe between 1933-1945 or so, he writes: "The human capacity for subjective victimhood is apparently limitless, and people who believe that they are victims can be motivated to perform acts of great violence" (399-400).  Amen.  Perhaps this ability is connected to evolution--perceived victimization leads to agression that allows a particular group to successfully pass on its genes.  And it operates on a more mundane, everyday level as well.  It's hard for people, virtually all people, to take responsiblity for their actions: both moral crimes and simple failures of planning.  It's easier to believe that failure was caused by someone else.  For Stalin, it was anyone he believed was undermining his efforts at forced collectivization; for Hitler, it was the Jews who somehow undermined his attack on the Soviet Union.  Since, by their own definition, they couldn't be wrong, someone else must be at fault--with murderous results.  This occurs so often in everyday life with, for the most part, obviously less violent conquences, and so I can understand the Catholic idea of the confession.  Yet there, immoral deeds--not necessarily errors of judgment or analysis--are waved away much too easily.  Pray to God--of course he forgives you.  But I don't want to suggest that victimization does not exist.  It plainly does.  But often people who have not truly been victimized of anything--or not victimized to any great degree--claim the mantle of victimization--and thus justify greater cruelty and violence.  It is at those moments when humanity most fully nauseates me.

Fortune and Providence

I read that, in the European Middle Ages, the Catholic Church would not allow people to refer to fortune as an explanation for success--only to providence.  Hence Daniel Kahneman: "Luck plays a large role in every story of success; it is almost always easy to identify a small change in the story that would have turned a remarkable achievement into a mediocre outcome" (Thinking, Fast and Slow, 9).  Yet most people would attribute their success, if they have experienced it, to hard work, ingenuity, or even a ruthless or sociopathic competitiveness.  Yet luck or fortune, not divine intervention, is the key--unless the game is fixed in which case even an incomptent white, say, can make it in a racist society.  But in a truly competitive society, luck may be more important than anything else.  Lack of success may often be bad luck--or just stupidity.