Ultimate Claustrophobia

From Jeremy Bernstein's Einstein: One way of understanding the universe is "as a sort of sphere in space, filled, on the average, with a small uniform density of matter. A light ray started at any point in the universe will return to its starting point . . .in about 10 billion years" (156). Talk about enclosures! A ten-billion-year wide coffin. And, of course: what's outside the sphere?

Psychoanalysis Psycho

Erik Erikson writes: "We have also indicated the significance of the choice of the buttocks as the preferred place for coporeal punishment; a safe place physiologically, but emotionally dangerous, since punishment aggravates the significance of this general area as a battlefield of parental and infantile wills. The fear that his parents and teachers might ever completely subject him by dominating this area and this gaining power over his will may have provided some of the dynamite in that delayed time bomb of Martin's rebellion, and may account for the excessiveness with which Luther, to the end, expressed an almost paranoid definace, alternating with a depressed conception of himself" (231). This from Young Man Luther. So the Reformtion--indeed, the shift to the individual conscience (and thus, according to Weber, capitalism)--is largely connected to the fact that Luther's parents spanked him? It's at moments like this when psychoanalysis becomes a parody of itself.

Freud and History

I'm reading Erik Erikson's Young Man Luther, and his thesis is apparently that every one has an identity crisis, and certain people--great men--emerge from it, translating whatever particular family oppression they experienced into a public arena: "Millions of boys," he writes, " face these problems and solve them in some way or another . . . .Now and again, however, an individual is called upon . . .to lift his individual patienthood to the level of a universal one and to try to solve for all what he could not solve for himself alone" (67). So if Dad ignores you or beats the hell out of you, and Mom is nuts or smothers you, certain people turn this conflict into everyone's problem: thus the engine of history, family dramas made into international issues. Frankly I don't know. Every once in a while he says something interesting--something that resonates--but it's all so pat, playing the same family drama over and over, occasionally replayed in the political world. Luther rebelled against his upwardly mobile Dad (and tried to be good as a monk), then transformed his rebellion into a global one against the Roman Catholic Church. But maybe the Church was a corrupt institution and he had just had it with it? Why couldn't that be a simpler explanation?

The Spanish Armada

I finished Garrett Mattingly's The Armada, his 1959 acount of the 1588 Spanish naval attack on England. If I hadn't been already familiar with some of the people he mentions, I would have been somewhat confused, yet I still found it interesting, especially the collateral impact it had on France (which essentially experienced a coup against Henry III, the last of the Valois monarchs, and then a counter coup). In a sense, the attack never had a chance--and almost everyone seemed to know it. Its goal was to hook up with the Spanish army in what is now Belgium and help guard its transfer over to England (so that it could take control of London and get rid of the heretic Queen Elizabeth), but the Parma, the army commander there, hadn't really been seriously building ships or barges to convey his soldiers--and eventually, after a week of ongoing skirmishes all along the southern English coastline, the effective Spanish tactic of forming into a giant crescent to ward off all attacks collapsed off the coast of Belgium and several Spanish ships were destroyed. The remnants sailed around the British Isles. Mattingly claims that it was in essence the first modern naval encounter--and the commanders didn't quite yet know how to fight it. They were all religious fanatics and conniving plotters.

The More Things Change: Part Deux

I finished Schlesinger's The Crisis of the Old Order. I know he's the bete noire of the left, especially with books like The Vital Center, but the last two-thirds of this book were quite impressive. He vividly describes the growing desperation of the Great Depression, especialy given the teeth-grinding stupidity of the discredited financiers and their government lackeys, and he makes me understand just how fantastic Franklin Roosevelt was--at last someone who was willing to listen to ideas and act on them.

"But the scope of planning was less important in the baffled years of 1930 and 1931 than the liberating emphasis on the idea itself, with its implication that men through government could do something to extricate themselves from their misery. It was the prevalent economic fatalism which exasperated Roosevelt as much as anything. When an orthodox economist told him that the only hope was to let the system strike bottom, he said to the man, with a look of disgust of his face, 'People aren't cattle, you know'" (393).

Sheer stupidity: The next book I'm reading--Philip Hallie's Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed: The Story of the Village of Le Chambon and How Goodness Happened There--recounts what happened in one, small village in France during World War II where they hid and saved several thousand Jewish refugees, just because it was the right thing to do. And somehow, even though the Nazis and the craven Vichy authorities were aware of what was occurring in this town, they managed to get through the war alive. In one memorable scene, the town's Protestant pastor and spiritual leader was arrested, although he's not sure of the charge. He tells some police officer it may be because he's tried to save some Jews, and the police officer responds scornfully:

"The captain's fury exploded. 'What? Jews? Oh--that's lovely. Now that doesn't surprise me. You're part of their conspiracy, eh? We all know that they're the ones who have brought France down into the abyss. Well, you're going to pay for this. You're going to pay for all the harm you've done to the marshall!'
This was a moment Trocme [the pastor] would never forget. In fact, his overnight stay in the police station in Limoges changed his view of mankind. He discovered people like the captain--patriotic, sincere, but above all, severely limited. These people were capable of repeating hate-ridden cliches without any concern for evidence or for the pain of others. Before he entered that police station in Limoges, he thought the world was a scene where two forces were struggling for power: God and the Devil. From then on, he knew that there was a third force seeking hegemony over the world: stupidity. God, the Devil, and halfwits of mind and heart were all struggling with each other to take over the reins." (30)

Compare this to a passage from Schlesinger's text:

"And so, in the fourth winter of the depression, American business seemed to plead not only financial but also intellectual bankruptcy. Richberg, in his appearance before the Senate Finance Committee, delivered a savage judgment. 'I submit that every conspicuous leader of affairs who has appeared before this committee and who has attempted to justify the continuance of the present political economic system unchanged, with its present control unreformed, is either too ignorant of facts, too stupid in comprehension, or too viciously selfish in his short-sighted philosophy, to be worthy of any attention in this time of bitter need for honest, intelligent, and public-spirited planning for the rehabilitation of our crumbling civilization.'" (458-9)

The ongoing presence of stupidity--a constant in human societies.

Democracy Again

I'm reading Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.'s The Crisis of the Old Order, the first volume of his trilogy The Age of Roosevelt. It's OK--a bit of a reader's digest version of the great men of history. Still, it recounts the 1920s, another age dominated by business that careened into a catastrophe. Government run by business, he writes, "In time it would appear that even the leaders of business could not decipher the intricate financial structures they were erecting" (68), a sentence that could have been written today. Joseph Stiglitz, in a review in the London Review of Books, says that in the past thirty years there have been 100 economic crises--this after about 50 years of relative economic stability through a regulated economy. So we are incapable of learning from the past: or should I say the financial world is incapable of learning from the past and we, like sheep, believe whatever they say. Of course, there are those who profit from each financial catastrophe: something that tossed 10 percent of the population out of work becomes part of a business strategy.

Schlesinger later discusses H.L. Mencken, no lover of democracy he: "Mencken's typical congressman? 'A knavish and preposterous nonentity, half way between a kleagle of the Ku Kulx Klan and a grand worthy of the Knights of Zoroaster. It is such vermin that make the laws of the United States.' The civil service? 'A mere refuge for prehesile morons.' Public opinion? The immemorial fears of the mob, 'piped to central factories . . . flavoured and coloured and put into cans.' Democratic morality? 'When one has written off crutelty, envy and cowardice, one had accounted for nine-tenths of it.' Bryan, the 'Fundamentalist Pope'; T.R., the 'national Barbarossa'; Wilson, 'the self-bamboozled Presbyterian, the right-thinker, the great moral statesman, the perfect model of the Christian cad.' Democracy as a theory? 'All known facts lie flatly against it.'" (148-149). Update this 90 years and this, too, could have been written yesterday. The Bushes, Cheneys, Rumfelds and their hatchetmen are the reincarnated clowns of the recent past--the Hoovers, Mellons, and other stone deaf fools who, in the face of human suffering, can suggest that prosperity is just around the corner.

Can we say that the same bureaucratic fools now run our world--an endless supply of fool managers who operate even in the very institution I have the privilege of working at.

Affirmative Action

In the larger scheme of things, Affirmative Action doesn't matter: in the academic world, it mostly meant that black studies departments were set up. They weren't hiring blacks--or women, for that matter--in engineering departments or economics departments. Not in chemistry. But they did in English departments. For me, it meant that I couldn't get a job, because, for the most part, women were hired for jobs I applied to. Does it matter? Surely, given the massive pools of applicants for jobs, those women who got hired were more than capable--many undoubtedly as good, if not better, than I. Yet the idea of imposing a wrong to right a wrong is still troubling, for the real perpetrators of discrimination got off scott-free. In a true, just affirmative action process, older, white men should have lost their jobs to make way for women, minorites, anyone in classes of people who were denied places in, say, the academic world. Why did I have to be denied an opportunity to make up for the crime of my elders? With their white, male privilege, plenty of fools got jobs: they didn't accomplish all that much, except they got to pretend to be academics. Had comfortable lives. Read books. Viewed themselves as wise mentors. There's an ecology of livelihoods: jobs are handed out for silly reasons, unjustifiable reasons. Was it Balzac who said that behind every great fortune there's a crime? Well, behind every desirable tenured position, there's a crime. But we always believe that, if we achieve something, it's because we deserve it. Deserve it? If so, we also deserve every disease that comes our way. Every failure. It has the same reality as prayer--as if some entity cares.