Republicans

Focus on Congressional Republicans. Despite their allegiance to Trump, and their fear of being primaried, most of them are smart enough to realize that the tariff water is a dumb ass move with no economic justification as is witnessed by the chart Trump offered that showed we would be putting tariffs on an island of penguins, which are hardly to be imported to the United States as meat because penguins are so cute. So the question remains why Senators and Congress members continue to support him, even though he has moved so much closer to economic and social chaos than any previous President and yet they refuse to  stop him? My suggestion is that even though they don't say so in public, they think he is crude but basically correct in that they are rejecting everything that has happened in  America since the Sixties and are filled with enough rage that they want revenge against it. Oh so low and far from statesmen like these people that they seize themselves with Ante-Bellum  feelings against the Union but without the contiguous geographic area or the control of the military that would enable them to unleash their feelings. Not the Progressives and certainly not the Liberals are as angry as even the apparently courtlyConservatives like Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz and John Kennedy, all of them well educated but giving up their souls to join the Populist cause, let alone Nancy Mace and Marjorie Taylor Green, the second of whom got into a cat fight with Jasmine Crockett who said Green was a bleached blond in  answer to being told by Green that Crockett had too much mascara. A comic version of Senator Seward of New York pummeled with a cane in pre Civil War times but exhibiting tremendous animus and very different from when Biden joined the Senate and learned to be courteous to arch segregationists because, after all, they had been elected to and the office should be honored.

What is to be done to bind a tourniquet  around America's wound? I would suggest that we can’t wait until the midterm elections because what if there is a cris over taiwan  orf a nation wide measles epidemic or major private sector layoffs and no one capable of managing such matters are available in  that the organizations to deal with these cruises have  been  depopulated and the now appointed leaders are incompetent.

Four Republican Senators have already broken ranks though for specialized reasons. They voted to suspend tariffs against Canada. Susan Collins did so because Maine exports lobsters to China and imports berries from Prince Edward Island, Lisa Murkowski because she has a secure and independent minded constituency in  Alaska, Rand Paul who has a principled position on Randian economics and seems reasonable under contemporary circumstances, and Mitch McConnell, who is retiring from the Senate and hates Trump. Four other recruits to a Republican Senate opposition to Trump suggest themselves. Chuck Grassley will probably not run for another term  and so is free of a fear of being primaried. Ron Johnson represents Wisconsin, a state dependent on  cross US-Canada trade. Freshman Senator John Curtis of Utah has five and a half years before he faces reelection and has already said that dismantling the government should be a kinder, gentler process, and perhaps Roger Wicker of Mississippi, the Chairman of the Armed Services Committee, who could claim his higher responsibility to matters of the shambles in foreign policy.

I am therefore appealing to other of very Trump friendly people to shed their cloaks of invisibility and raise out as statesman to say enough ios enough by moving to  impeachment proceedings on the grounds that the Constitution is not a suicide pact and incompetence is a high misdemeanor. It is easy enough for a democrat to say that, you wi;lsay. Because you are not betraying or changing your beliefs in  order to do so, but remember that Liberal Democrats displayed the Southern Democratic leadership over civil rights and opposed the Democratic President concerning the Vietnam War. People need to rise to the occasion  lest they become or remain  ashamed of themselves. Have these people no dignity?

The Dow Jones has dropped about 3900 points in two days. Is this not sufficient to awaken Republicans from their slumber?

                                                                      3 P. M., MST, April 4th

Into The Third Month

The open secret of farce is that nobody gets hurt. There are sound effects accompanyingTthe Three Stooges hitting or twerking one another but none seem the worse for where. So it could be said that the clown car is in charge of the Trump Administration, one another falling over one another in firing nuclear experts and then rehiring them after having done the same with avian flu experts. But the clown car runs into being a horror show when real damage gets done, as when a footballer is sent to a notorious El Salvador prison because his tattoo was misidentified as a gang tattoo rather than, as the ACLU claims, a tattoo of the soccer theme Real Madrid. That mistake could have been clarified if even minimal due process had been filled. A nm habeas corpus hearing would have revealed that and avoiding that suggests that the administration is deliberately acting to be cruel and capricious and so terrify anyone who they come across in their searchlights. Arbitrary arrest is the goal rather than a mistake and I wonder how far it will go, Social Security recipients without their checks because their names are similar to those who have died and law firms deprived of security clearance because the law firms are Liberal. Oh, the second of those events have already taken place.

Incompetence mostly seems a joke, just a clown car activity, just like The Three Stooges. Ordinary people fumble at doing their ordinary activities and so lapses are forgiven or perhaps for other reasons thought malicious. You forget your driver’s license but that’s important ikf your car is stolen. People get onto chat chains and there is no worse for wear unless they are communicating state secrets and lying that they are doing that to cover up the embarrassment of saying “oops”. Then it is worse to sound stupid than to lie because there is something at stake and so no longer a farce.And errors of incompetence add up to an evil if they destroy any institution through inadvertence even if not by design by culling the workforce sol that Social Security is inoperable or USAID stops operations and people die, or maybe it has been very clever that it is possible to circumvent getting Social Security and USAID without legislation to eliminate these programs by simply throwing monkey wrenches  into tube organizational machinery. The public has to decide if stupidity or malice is the prime emotion, and what difference does that make, if anything at all.

We have gone a long way from Milton’s idea that evil is so powerful that it must result from a fallen angel whose power resides in his tarnished glory. In the twentieth century, Hannah Arendt discovered the banality of evil, which did not mean that the consequences were banal but that the perpetrators were trivial people only concerned with running the trains on time, that very different from Iago, who we still try to understand for the depths of his m alice. Buty now, in the twenty first century, there is another aspect of evil, where it is uncertain whether it resides in  malice managed to achieve evil ends or, the same thing, evil ends thought of as good ones, as when Commerce Secretary says only cheaters complain of having lost their Social Security, or is just the fumblings of inadequate people set in high office because the President does not screen people for competence and only cares for loyalty, and anyway what difference does it make if appointees are incompetent father than malicious if the consequences are the same? The clown car is inn charge and people have to realize it isn't funny to want to make Canada the fifty-first state.

Short Post: Two Months In

I thought that Trump would go from bad to worse and then even worse than that but I did not expect it so quickly and deeply. Two months in, thanks to tariffs and personnel reduction, the United States has alienated its closest allies and endangered the Stock Market, Speaker Johnson passed a continuing resolution to keep the government open because Chuck Schumer correctly observed that a shutdown was even worse than the continuing resolution even though the House passed its initial approval of the CR without the Democratic amendments to say Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid wouldn't be cut. A Trump shutdown would give him even more authority to close agencies as non-essential. Moreover, cutting USAID in spite of Congressional mandates to spend it, means that the Congress' power of the purse is thwarted. By the end of the week or soon thereafter, Federal judges who insist that USAID and other agencies must be unfrozen will have to deal with the executive intransigence but the Supreme Court, however much a weak reed, can't just let Trump do whatever he wants to. It will be up to the Congress to enforce Federal judges and many of these people only care about buying the office chairs they were assigned to when they went toCongressrather than standing up for the Constitution. They may change their minds when people lose Social Security and other entitlements, being primaried a lesser danger than losing in the general election. But 2026 is a long time away in that there can be a lot of damage to the nation done in the interim.

So far, Trump has been an agent of destruction. People like J. D. Vance and Karoline Leavitt reinterpret what Trump says to make him more reasonable. He will leave out part of what he said and she will offer an interpretation of tariffs Trump never opined. Others will say Trump was ironic when he said Schumer was no longer a Jew when he was in fact quite serious minded. Oh for the days when Biden said what he meant and meant what he said when he called Putin a dictator and that he hadn’t communicated with him for a long time, there being only the obvious interpretation tat there was nothing for the two to talk about. The truth of the matter is that Trump is an agent of destruction because he can only think of destruction as the only way to accomplish things. Trump is stupid, ignorant and mean spirited. He is also deeply superficial and so has impulses and a word, such as “tariff”, as his only justification, not knowing what it means. He wants Greenland so he can build a sign called “Trumpland” on its biggest town. He wants Canada to be a state in the United States so that he can feel grandiose. He wants government efficiency because he lies the word, even if Musk really does want to destroy the government. Don’t expect him to be any deeper than that.

Who is going to bell the cat? Chuck Schumer in his NY Times interview Sunday, showed the menu we all, including me, can read. The Supreme Court could uphold the unfreezing of money allocated to Congress on various agencies and Schumer is worried that the administration would still keep it frozen, which troubles Schumer, and for good reason, because that would be a constitutional crisis. Another alternative is that Republican Senators would have had enough and oppose Trump, though Schumer may be giving them more credit than they deserve. Hasn’t Trump done enough to get Republican Senators to say enough is enough? Third, there is the midterm election. I note campaigning is just a year away. But Schumer worries whether the election will be clean, and so do I.

The Horseless Israelites

Only the Egyptians have horses in “Genesis” and “Exodus” though Canaanites do have horses in “Deuteronomy”. (No wonder the people of Israel were reluctant to embark upon an invasion of the Promised Land.)  Solomon had horses, but he is the possessor of what is supposedly a great kingdom. The domestication of horses is therefore the sign of great military power as well as of an advanced civilization. Wendy Doniger reminds us of this in her recent “The Hindus: An Alternative History”. She makes a big deal of the importance of horses, both for commerce and conquest and also as religious sacrifices. By that standard, the Israelites of the Five Books of Moses must be regarded as an inferior people even if they are possessed of what they think to be a superior God, one which is carried around by them, on foot, in an Ark. Remember, they walked rather than rode out of Egypt.

That image and idea of a horseless people is of central importance to what is ever afterwards regarded as the central moment in Jewish history: the liberation of the Israelites from Egypt. “Exodus”, which is a cohesive and extended narrative, and so very different from “Genesis”, which is known for its abbreviated narratives, is different as well from the retellings of the Exodus story that are found in the three other of the Five Books of Moses, interrupted as they are with digressions on law and authority. “Exodus” gives horses a certain pride of place, even if scholarship suggests that a chariot cavalry was anachronistic in that it did not develop until a few hundred years after the supposed time of the exodus. Four times in a few paragraphs in “Exodus” is repeated the tag phrase: “the Pharaoh, his horsemen, his chariots, his soldiers”.  These are all the same thing: the sign and the fact of a highly disciplined and trained fighting force available at a moment’s notice to a ruler, and the sign of an economically and technologically developed country, as is the case today, when rapid movement of devastating force is available to nations engaged in “asymmetric” combat with suicide bombers and guerillas equipped with weapons and only such transport as is captured from the enemy. 

The chariot is made possible by the large scale domestication of horses rather than just of asses and also by the invention of that very elegant machine, the chariot, which combines a platform with wheels. The platform is able to move at considerable speed, perhaps nearly as fast as the horses that pull it were they shorn of that burden. This machine can deal with the uneven ground that might easily unseat a standing rider. Chariots allow projectiles to be sent out into the air for long distances because the spear thrower who might accompany the charioteer has a solid place on which to set his feet and that gives energy to his throw. The chariot is therefore the tank of its time, a formidable weapon of war, here in “Exodus” used to recapture a departing people, even though a great number of the departing might be killed when rounding them up, something not thought advisable in the recapture of slaves, who are valuable property, and so a chariot led attack on the departing is a measure to be taken only if the previously subjugated population really does seem to be making good on its exit from home territory. Maybe they would have faltered or returned to their homes and their slavery if they had been left to try to get themselves organized and had failed at that. But the Israelites had done well enough to get to the borders of Egypt, and so the chariots had to be sent, like the cavalry, at the last minute. 

Not that the Pharaoh had not been willing to use harsh measures before. The narrative provided by “Exodus” suggests that the Pharaoh had used near genocidal means from the beginning to try to control the political impulses of the Israelites. He had ordered the Hebrew midwives to kill off the male offspring, which they had not done, claiming that the Hebrew women gave birth on their own, without benefit of midwives, and for this God praised the midwives, because otherwise that would have put an end to the Israelite rebellion then and there. So it was clear that the Israelites had a well organized social structure on their own that was independent of the Egyptians.

The Egyptians then tried to rule the Israelites indirectly. They made it more costly for the Israelites who, we may surmise, had a monopoly in the construction industry, to produce bricks. The Egyptians required the Israelites to provide their own straw, a necessary additive in the manufacture of bricks, but the Israelites were able to manage that. Then the Egyptians imposed the equivalent of a one child rule similar to the one that has operated in China for a few generations now, presumably as a way to control the population of a group growing too powerful.  

Maybe the Israelites weren’t really slaves but just a subordinated people. Maybe, on the other hand, they were slaves and the Egyptians were just culling the herd so as to keep the number of Israelites manageable. The “Exodus” account seems garbled because getting rid of male children would bring an end to the Israelites, which is not what you want to do with either a slave population or a subordinate population that is working for you. Maybe it was supposed that some males would live because their births would slip through the cracks but a great number would not, and that is all the policy makers care about. The presentation of the story as calling for the death of all male children is of use because it serves the literary purpose of bringing this story into line with the other attacks on children: the Egyptian massacre of first born followed afterwards by the massacre of the first born of the Egyptians. 

The heart of the matter may be that the slaves, or whatever they were, were becoming too numerous and that was a political threat but they were also so productive that fewer of them were needed. How do you control a subordinate population when you don’t want to kill the golden goose? Whatever the answer to that question, the fact of it is itself of the highest importance. This is a new kind of threat, one to the stability of the social structure, and such is not the case with occasional food shortages or the tribal unrest or the failed amalgamation of populations (as that is recounted in the tale of Dinah) with which “Genesis” had made the reader familiar. Distinctive bodies of people do not rebel in oriental despotisms, but here it is happening. 

Whatever the answers to the textual questions might be, the overall pattern is clear. God serves as an advisor and cheerleader for the Israelites who manage their own rebellion. They first resist by using internal social structure--the professional community of midwives-- to protect their children and are apparently successful at it. God need do nothing but praise them for that. Then they succeed at maintaining their prosperity even though they have to manufacture bricks rather than just build with them. This draws no comment from God, who is not required to weigh in on a purely economic issue as well as because the narrator does not want to draw attention to the fact that the Israelites managed this hurdle. It would be as if Jefferson had also listed in the Declaration of Independence all the good things King George had done for the Colonies. 

Then Moses and Aaron negotiate with the Pharaoh for the terms of release of the Israelites. That itself is a sign that things were going well for the Israelite cause. The apartheid regime began negotiating with Mandela only when they realized that the game was about over. The negotiations between the Israelites and the Egyptians were conducted against the background of plagues, which is the sort of guerrilla warfare that makes negotiations between ruler and ruled all the more urgent, however much it may also prompt one side or the other to contemplate ending the negotiations altogether. God takes credit for the plagues and for the parlor trick whereby Aaron’s rod turns into a snake, but doesn’t provide advice on what the Israelite negotiators should settle for. This is left to Aaron and Moses, who are engaged in the normal process of high stakes negotiation: what, if anything, to compromise so as to achieve their aims, which is the evacuation of the Jews from Egypt rather than an autonomous region within it or rights within the Egyptian polity. This aim is like that of Spartacus, to take people to a seacoast and thereafter elsewhere.  

Intergroup maneuvering, economic interplay, negotiations, are all the stuff of ordinary political life, whatever the magical trappings, and however bloody the relation between a superior group and a subordinate group can become. These interactions are just of the sort that S. N. Eisenstadt says are characteristic of bureaucratic empires such as ancient Egypt. The ruler pursues the political interests of the government by inveigling the cooperation of various subordinate groups through taxation, special favors, and regulation. The ruler is never secure; the people under him never satisfied. (Spinoza made the same point about the Seventeenth Century French monarchy.) But, for some reason, the Israelites would not settle for some compromise, even if it would better their material and social situation, and even though the Pharaoh had expected that compromise would be the outcome in that he withheld his chariots until the last minute. Why couldn’t the Israelites settle for some reasonable accommodation?

Once they had moved themselves to the shores of the Red Sea, the Israelites could no longer manage the conflict. They have to hope that God will exercise his powers to intervene in a most visible way when the chariots confront them as they are about to make good their escape. That may have always been the Egyptian plan--not to call up the cavalry until the last minute, should they then become necessary--but it was not a plan that the Israelites could have planned to deal with. The Israelites were not an organized military group on their own, just a number of families moving along on foot with perhaps some asses to carry their baggage. They were as surprised as were the Egyptians by what God did and that is part of what makes the story a miracle: it is an intervention unexpected as well as fortuitous. Brute force is not so manageable as politics, especially not the brute force of the greatest army then on the face of the earth.  So “Exodus” is, among the many other things it is, a tribute to the power of technology and to the fact that technology is distinctive in that there is no answer to it with negotiations or clever practice.

So the Israelites are mesmerized by the technology of chariots as the final appeal of a ruler. What did they have to contest it? They had shown they were good at social organization and at entrepreneurship and at moral clarity. These traits were among the ones that Joseph had brought with him to Egypt, though it may have been in Egypt that he picked up the ability to disguise his perspicacity about people and situations as a gift for the interpretation of dreams. The distinctive virtues of the Israelites will flower when they leave Egypt and form their own nation. Talents hidden or stunted in adversity can blossom in another environment. Organizational and political skills and moral clarity would make them a great nation. They would get chariots later. The intellectual inventions that allow the Israelites to think they can go against the grain of history is the invention of a literal God and the conception of that God as one of abstractions.These two claims on reality exist independent of the power conferred by chariots. 

A literal God is one who acts directly on history rather than as a metaphorical force in history. A literal God might seem to be an appeal to superstition or primitivism, while an appeal to metaphor is to think of all the signs God can give in history that an event is carrying a moral meaning. So it is a metaphor but realistic to take notice of the fact that an assortment of wise men are all telling you to do the same thing, and so that is to be regarded as a way God “intervenes”, so to speak, into the world. What makes a literal God as plausible as a metaphorical one and, indeed, far more psychologically impressive, is that this characteristic of direct action is reserved for very few events and very few personages. Most Catholics can understand that Santa Claus is a metaphor while Jesus, the Son of God, is not.

The Book of Exodus is so rich in imagery that there are images other than that of the chariot to provide a sense of an efficacious power that might counter the literal power of the chariot. That would show the engagement of God with his creation in a way that cannot be denied. God must act as a truly causative force and therefore not through nature but in nature. One image is that of the wall of water to the left and the wall of water to the right of the dry path through the sea that has now been presented for the Israelites to use to gain their freedom. That would have been quite a formidable sight, one available to everyone there at the time, not just the religious cognoscenti, nor as God was available to an unaccompanied Moses at the time of the burning bush. It is as if God had descended in a chariot upon Central Park so as to make himself available for a photo op. 

The Israelites would have had to have considerable confidence in their perception that a miracle was indeed taking place if they were to step onto the path left open by the cleaving of the sea, much more courage needed than is required today to drive over tall bridges or over causeways that move out of the sight of land. All you need in the modern instance is confidence that unseen engineers have set the bridge or causeway down properly. And yet the Israelites did it, perhaps because the approaching chariots left them little choice. Well, they could have surrendered, but this time it might have been full scale genocide rather than a return to slavery, the mutual killing of the first born making further negotiation impossible. 

The image of the walls of water in part has resonance because it is a reminder of the Flood. In a place with many arid and semi-arid districts, an abundance of water is a threat as well as a boon. Everyone knew the Nile was a sliver that kept Egypt alive, and so the Israelites were engaged in negative space: the dry sliver keeping them alive. It is also a powerful image because it is so unnatural, so clearly a violation of the way seas operate and so is clearly miraculous to anyone who witnesses it or trusts to the accounts of what happened. Robert Alter appreciates that the image of the walls of water is meant to be understood literally. He supplies the Hebrew word that describes the cut as being sharp and rough and so there is no possibility of it being merely an exaggeration of some “normal” kind of parting of the seas. Martin Noth says that all of the source texts for the final redaction of the story also present the event of the parting of the sea as literal.

The most visually and theologically rich portrayal of the parting of the Red Sea does not make use of the device of walls of water, however much that image is present in “Exodus” and is the common understanding, thanks to Cecil B. De Mille, who makes the water roll back on itself, so that it is like a Niagara that does not make wet those close to it. That profound portrayal is supplied in Poussin’s “The Crossing of the Red Sea” which shows not the actual divide of the waters but the immediate aftermath, as if Poussin had read G. S. Lessing and knew that portraying the moment before or after the central event, whether in sculpture or painting, is more effective than portraying the central moment. Poussin treats the Israelites as if they were only slightly more composed than survivors of a shipwreck. They pull themselves out of the still flailing waters as if the sea had closed over them as well as the charioteers and so some of them had probably been lost to the waters. There are casualties that accompany even miracles, which is a very sobering thought. 

The moment Poussin chooses to portray is right after the miracle and so is like the first few seconds after the Big Bang, when the aura of what happened is still around even though what is presented in now back in normal time. The people are just gathering themselves together, in twos and threes, in those intricate compositions that are so well known in Poussin, as well as being dragged down by their draperies, which some of them tug at so as to get out of the water. The faces of the survivors are painted small but even so they capture a moment of being dazed and yet awed and serene, not what would be expected of everyday survivors of a shipwreck but perhaps appropriate to this very special world historical event made by God. One man on the lower right is dragging a shield from the breakers, which is to be supposed to be from an Egyptian because the Israelites had no weapons of their own. So Poussin is paying tribute to the dead even at this moment of potential exaltation. 

This brief moment of the aftershock of a momentous event is accompanied by the wordlessness of awe and gratitude for what God has done. The glow of that moment will dissipate, but for the moment God is still present in the dark rectangular cloud mentioned in “Exodus” as what shows the way during daytime. It hangs in the sky of the Poussin painting so as to suggest the end of a storm, but the shape suggests something more. It is the barrier that God created between the Egyptians and the Israelites before the Israelites began their crossing. It is also like the rectangular solids Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick use in “2001” to mark the presence in this solar system of Clarke’s substitute for God: some far off intelligent race which every once in awhile intervenes to allow a race of sentient beings to survive. Only rarely do these creatures make themselves known through their objects

Poussin is more able than anyone else I can think of to treat the crossing of the Red Sea as both a religious and a natural event. All the physical elements of a shipwreck are there as well as the emotions and surroundings that would accompany a shipwreck, except there are intimations of something more: there is a feeling of release after a great religious moment has passed, it having transformed not only individual lives but all of human history. The reader of “Exodus”, however, knows full well that there are many more magisterial religious moments that will soon transpire: the wandering in the wilderness; Moses’ trip up and down Mount Sinai; the arrival at the door to the Promised Land.

Treating the miracle of the parting of the Red Sea as something to be explained away by providing a scientific explanation of how the winds could have separated the Sea of Reeds so as to provide a path through the water is to miss the point of the story, which is that it takes God’s grandeur to counter human invented technology, just as it had taken God’s grandeur to defeat the Tower of Babel, another claim of the power of human ingenuity to recraft the world. Moreover, the imagery seriously redefines the relation of God to his people and God to the world. 

There is a sequencing of events, the stakes ever more significant. The beginning and most of the struggle between the Egyptians and the Israelites can be understood, as has been suggested, in strictly secular terms. There are group dynamics between the rulers and the institutions of those oppressed; there are economic sanctions; there are negotiations. Even the plagues can be understood as urged on by God through his siding with Aaron and Moses, but the plagues are themselves mostly natural: kinds of pestilence and other disaster that can come in that climate. The parting of the Red Sea, however, is a necessity in that the failure to do so will result in the destruction of Israel, and that God cannot allow. And so He steps out of the shadows, no longer the instigator or the presiding presence, to take an active part in the history of Israel. Moses may be the one who raises his arms to part the seas, but he is acting out of his special relation to God, and so here distinguishes himself from being a mere patriarch or prophet or priest or magician by becoming a co-adjustor with God, a singular relation to God not to be repeated until the same claim is made for Jesus. 

This intervention of God into history contributes to making of Judaism what it would become called: a historical religion. That means that the interventions of God into the world is always momentous and also very rare. Not every chance event or bad emotion bears the mark of the supernatural. God intervenes, becomes clear in history as an actual force, only when there is no other recourse than God to change things, and only then does God declare himself by indeed changing things, his capacity to do so become visible. So the story of the parting of the Red Sea can be taken as part of the path to the secular because it restricts the arena for the operation of the supernatural. It also helps put humankind on the road to the secular because these few events when God intervenes are to be taken as having actually happened, “historical” in the same way that events of ordinary life are actual. It is therefore possible to describe them as being true or untrue, while mythological events always play on the close relation between a metaphor and a simile, the wise man or magician always knowing that what is attributed to the gods can also be attributed to a human passion and who is to say whether it is better to refer a feeling or event to one or the other? 

Putting a truth value on a supernatural intervention, treating it as a fact, means that there is no need to distinguish between miraculous times and non-miraculous times. There never was, to the imagination of “Exodus”, a time whose characteristic was that miracles occurred on a regular basis, only times when miracles were called that because they took place only when they had to. The same goes for another of the momentous interventions by God into human events that takes place in “Exodus”: the giving of the Ten Commandments to Moses. It was the enormity of a people living without a law that made Mount Sinai necessary, for only afterwards would it be understood that people needed law not only as a practical expedient whereby tribal unrest might be mitigated, as is provided for in the Book of the Covenant, where penalties are assigned for bad deeds done when one tribe raids another, but as the necessary bedrock upon such an obstreperous people as the Israelites can become suitable to abide together rather than remain an anarchic mob subject to the whims of the moment.

A Short Post on Ukraine

Here is a principle of international relations if that can be dignified as a “principle” when it is backed up, as is usually the case in political science, with only a few examples. The principal is this: an alliance takes a long time to develop and when alliances change quickly because of immediate circumstances, such as a casus belli or a shift in national administrations, they are likely to be short-lived. Russia became an ally of Great Britain and the United States only when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union became an adversary of Great Britain and the United States as soon as the war ended as it had been since the Russian Revolution and has remained so until this past month. On the other hand, Great Britain and the United States who were in opposition from their founding through the Civil War, gradually realigned with one another so that the Americans couldn't but help to assist the British by the time of the First World War.

The reasons for that principle are based in two overall theories of international relations: geopolitics and elective affinities. That the two powers of France and Great Britain have been at war on and off from the Middle Ages through the Napoleonic Era, the two coming onto the same side at the time of the Crimean War and ever since, is because they were separated by only the English Channel and between them could contest the entire world, not just in Europe. Croatia and Bosnia were at war with one another also because there were two distinct peoples living right next to one another. The United States went to war with Spain in the Spanish-American War not because of the sinking of the Maine but because someone had to take over the remains of the Spanish Empire, particularly the Philippines, and the Americans didn’t want that to be Japan, the new rising power. Elective affinity helped the realignment of Great Britain and the United States because, at root, the Americans shared a common language, a common culture, and a mutual appreciation of democracy and constitutionalism. John Adams admired the British system. The division for a century was fratricidal. The United States championed Israel despite the geopolitical interest in cultivating the Arab states because the Israelis were Westerners who settled in an unfriendly area and were devoted to medical research, symphonies and a democratic regime.

So what of the present situation in Ukraine? Geopolitics partly explain it. Just as the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the Nineties could be understood as a set of boundary disputes occasioned by the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1989. The war between Russia and Ukraine is also a border dispute over the boundaries of Russia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Ukraine had been given guarantees of its independence when it gave up its nuclear missiles when it left Russia. There are also cultural differences between eastern Ukraine, which had been part of the Austro Hungarian Empire and so a European country while eastern Ukraine and Crimea were largely russified and so a partition could have been arranged between Putin and Biden but Puyin miscalculated, thinking he could get it all, including Kiev and Odessa and so restore what Catherine the Great dad conquered in the eighteenth century. And so a protracted war between Europeans and Russians. With the United States on the European side

What Trump does is intrude and alter traditional alliances on the very flimsy excuse, the casus belli, akin to the U. S. S. Maine, of regarding Zelensky as having insulted him in the Oval Office even though Zelensky was willing to give over mineral deposits if he got some guarantees of independence which Trump was not willing to accede to. What was really at stake was not the trade but a realignment to Russia rather than Europe by Trump for reasons long discussed but not uncertain. Does Trump just like strongmen or is it thatPutin, for some reason, pulls his strings? We don't know. But such an alliance will be short lived because it can be dissolved in haste if made in haste, a subsequent President restoring its shared culture with Europe and in opposition to big power authoritarian regimes, but different this time in that Europe, having matured as as entity since after the Second World War, is an alternative democratic continent and wary of the American one. America will not be the leader of the Free World because it will have two consuls and perhaps, in not too long a time, the Pacific Rim a third democratic area. That may be what Trump hath wrought.

Dr. Johnson's Sociology

A literary person, not a statistician , invented sociology.

The usual way to deal with the history of disciplines is to identify its originating figure. Copernicus started modern astronomy; Aristotle invented poetics and metaphysics; Adam Smith invented economics and Darwin, backed up by combining geology with Malthus, invented evolution. But that isn’t quite right. Evolution was independently developed at the same time by Wallace, which suggests that the idea was gurgling  along and would have been invented a number of times at about the same date, and Smith was predated by  those who influenced Hamilton even after “The Wealth of Nations”. And who is first at biology? The circulation of the blood or the cell theory or as far back as Vesalius who operated on wounded soldiers? There are incremental changes that take place before there is a striking moment when a field becomes recognized as itself. Rather than looking at pivotal figures, look at the distinguishing characteristic when the discipline emerges. Plato engaged in distinguishing reality from appearances before Aristotle proposed treatises on the essential categories of cause and animation.

The same is true of sociology which is credited as a discipline by Comte, the Frenchman who, after all, had coined the term around 1830 even though he is not to be identified either with statistics or a mechanism for society but is rather a popularizer of the metaphor that society is subject to a scientific endeavor borrowed from physical science. Forebearers would include the political dynamics of Madison in the Federalist Papers and Hume on the social dynamics of revolution, the political sphere of social life examined before its social life, but then again More’s utopia shows how agriculture and commerce constrain one another and isn’t that sociology? I want to present as a forbearer of sociology nolt only Samuel Johnson’s description of the sociological state of the Scottish economy and society, which was a travel book and bereft of statistics (Hume already having introduced statistic about social life with his description of the demographics of the ancient world populations) and even though he was writing essays rather than treatises or monographs. What he did in his short essay “The Benefits of Human Society”, (“The Adventurer”, No. 67)  was to find the characteristic thing of sociology, its essential method, which was to think of an attribute as a characteristic of a social group rather than as a generalization of the attribute of individuals and applied that to the modern world while Tacitus invented anthropology because he  had attributed the customs of the Germanic tribes to their collective cultures.

Johnson observes that people familiar within their social circumstances may become insensitive to what is going about them, and that is an explanation enough for why people immersed in society may not appreciate the significance of what they are doing even if they are acting in perfectly reasonable ways. It takes the trained eye, such as Johnson's, to notice the obvious, and that can be said of sociology itself, whereas anthropologists observe the exotic so as to identify the fundamental. Johnson notes that in cities people create goods to sell that people did not know they needed until these objects were invented and offered for sale, his example the clay pipes whereby people can indulge in what he regards as the filthy habit of smoking, further refined as snuff so as to gain a pleasure never before acquired. There are any number of these products and with little trouble anyone can become a producer and a seller of some product or other and cumulatively provide a cornucopia of plenty never heard of before. I can add that the socialist ideal of an efficient and therefore less expensive service, such as universal health care, might save money through eliminating duplication and waste and profiteering, but that competition however its costs, can also lead to lower costs and better products so long as real competition is maintained through  government t regulation, but these issues appear much further on from Johnson on the stages of economic development. The point is that abundance, such as cities produce, is natural only for cities and is not there in a state of nature where goods are scarce and rudimentary. What now seems inevitable in London is a wonderful invention of the cities.

The primitive man can be praised for being self sufficient in that with his own tools he can build a canoe or work a farm, but this individual life is meagre in its pleasures and in its abundantly painmms and that life is “short and mean”, tome invoking the use Hobbes’ phrase to describe the social life when there is no  commercial life rather than because there is no political life. The baseline is that the primitive life cannot imagine the prodigality of the commercial life which allows people to ease themselves on the couch and think of the luxury of deep thoughts rather than just living day to day. London is a miracle taken for granted.

People have noticed the difference between cosmopolitan cities and rural areas for a long time. Aristotle treated “coincidence’ as what happens when people meet one another in the port city of Piraeus. Presumably, people who otherwise meet one another on the street are people you come across one another a lot of the time as part of their daily routines and so are not coincidences. But really big cities that emerged in the modern era seem to have a life of their own. London grew by a quarter from 575,000 to 740,00 from 1700 to 1760, which meant just about within Johnson’s lifetime, which was between  1709 and 1784. So it made sense to think of the growth of the city as an attribute of the city rather than just the intermingling of individual actors, and so we are at sociology rather than group psychology.

Johnson can therefore be thought of as an originator of sociology because of his noticing attributes of groups rather than people even though his writings  are literary rather than scientific, Comte later to claim that sociology was the application of scientific method to social life. Moreover, Johnson noticed social qualities without reducing it to formulas, which happen a generation later when Malthus came to understand that population increase was exponentially while food increase was linear, which turned out to be untrue, while Johnson’s “prediction” or just suspicion that Scotland needed to invest in herds of sheep was correct if it were to become prosperous. Nor did statistics become more than incidental rather than essential to sociology. What Lazarsfeld found about voting  behavior was the application of the Marxist idea that attributes rather than motivations could be considered the “cause” of voting behavior. What made Johnson seem less than sociological was that his right resulted from personal acumen rather than the application of replicable and  methodical study, a goal rarely attained in sociology because if an election doesn’t turn out as was expected, it just means voters changed at the last minute and, anyway, that is just one election never to be repeated again  and so not testable.

Sociology has long distinguished itself as the study of advanced industrial societies as opposed to anthropology which centers on primitive peoples and how present societies still have the dynamics found in primitive societies. Johnson engaged in such a venture in his Tour of the Hebrides where he contrasted the ancient castles and spooky moonlight shadows of Scotland with the more advanced, prosperous, commercial society of Great Britain. Another theme of sociology has been urbanization, the culture and structure of cities. Explored by the Chicago School in the early part of the twentieth century, the process of suburbanization in  the Fifties and Sixties, and the decline of the older inner cities in youtube following twenty years. This preoccupation with the cities is explored by the purist of sociologists, Georg Simmel, the German sociologist in the first quarter of the twentieth century, because he thought most of social life could be understood as tube direct consequences of sociation itself, which are the qualities like conflict and affiliation that are inherent in dealing with people and so not matters of personal inclination, that A way to treat human behavior as attributed to interaction or group rather than individual behavior.

Simmel,  like Johnson,  dealt with cities and came to similar conclusions. The prolixity of products and services available in cities made them prosperous and in some sense free because they could get anything they wanted or things that they did not realize they wanted until it became available. But the reason for that is not as Johnson thought, commerce but the fecundity of people to invent things out of their minds because of their various interests and capacities. Simmel mentions that in a city there can be found a broken plate society, something I have never heard of elsewhere, but that makes sense. A plate is broken into pieces and every piece is given to each of its members, the piece given to another member when a person dies. When the last but one piece or person is left, the last piece goes to the last survivor and the pieces are reassembled. That can be thought of as a symbolic expression of the fidelity of the group or simply a commemoration that there was such a group. This procedure exists because people in cities are various enough to do inventive or strange things. So it is necessary to distinguish cosmopolitan from simply large cities. Cosmopolitan cities, such as those in European seaports, which bring all sorts of people there, will originate such fanciful o profitable enterprises while cities that are merely lare, so that a great many people congregate in a place but are very similar to one another, which I am told is true in many current Chinese cities, will not generate such ingenuity. That situation and practice of cosmopolitanism is a measure and tribute by Simmel to individualism.

Here is a thought inspired by Johnson which is not met by even Simmel’s sagacity. The result of all of this production and commerce in tube city is not just that it is prosperous but leads as well to a kind of equality of the only sort there may be. Whether low or high, honorable or dissolute, people will find this to produce and sell. Moreover, the city will provide all of these plenties to buy and so every person is not just to beware of what is sold but sense the profligacy of what is available, the abundance of riches between people can make choices about what to buy and what not to buy, The consumer is the king, gaining his pleasures as he sees fit and so to have an  active and real meaning to the abstract notion of choice and therefore, I would suggest, the gist of the idea of electoral choice, every voter assessing the merits of the candidates offered and deciding which ones are worthy of selection and subsequent election. There is a tie between democracy and commerce that is emerging at that time in England, Adam Smith a decade later than this essay offering “The Wealth of  Nations” Democracy is the hustle bustle of commerce and this connection was appreciated as far back as Spinoza who observed that a politician was someone who had to gain the supporters of his constituents  whether he was a nobleman or a blackguard or both who was offering himself for commendation. The energy of campaigning is like the energy of engaging in financial transactions. There is a drama about whether a deal to exchange a good for money will be consummated just as there is the drama of whether a candidate, whether for charm or sobriety or meanness will be turned to the favor of voters.

A Short Post on Impeachment

It is not too early for the House of Representatives to impeach President Trump. He has in his one month of office violated a number of significant laws that injure the Constitution and seriously endanger the fabric of the American order and there is no need to wait until the government is destroyed before it can be remedied. The impeachment power is very broad and inherently political, the Constitution saying “high crimes and misdemeanors” which means anything weighty enough to get Congress to act, as Hillary Clinton said when she was a staffer on the Watergate Committee. Andrew Johnson was in danger of taking over the War Department when it was still a question whether the South would restart the Civil War and so, in my opinion, should have been convicted. The near impeachment of Richard Nixon was also serious because there was a plan and action towards undermining the electoral system. The impeachment of Bill Clinton was frivolous, just a private matter just to get payback over the Nixon resignation, and the two impeachments of Donald Trump were for serious matters: first to use foreign policy for personal political advantage and, second, to overthrow the government.

Here are some of the charges against him. Trump, first off, fired the inspector generals who are career servants who manage abuse in their agencies and so belies his attempt to get rid of fraud and abuse. He did so by failing to provide the thirty day notice required by law, which Senator Lindsey Graham regarded as a technicality b ut is at the heart of the matter, which is an executive branch independent of the chief executive, reliant on law rather than as Trump says, as a king. Trump all but abolished the USAID, which had been established by Congress, and so while there is a degree of flexibility whereby it can be reorganized by the chief executive, it is illegal to abolish the overwhelming part of it because that would be the equivalent of a line item veto and no such act has been passed by Congress and might not pass muster as a constitutional law, at least under most supreme courts, because it unbalanced the arrangements established in the Constitution for the balance between the legislative and the executive branches. Aside from being unconstitutional, dumping the USAID is unwise because the agency gains friends overseas and is an adjunct to the State Department and the Defense Department. Piling up chaotic firings is also open to impeachment because dismembering the executive is so great an affront that itg ios in  itself a ground for impeachment in that the President’s job is to faithfully steward the government. That also applies to the wholesale firing of people in the Department of Justice, quite aside from that particular set of firings undermines the independence of justice, another impeachable offense by politicizing the judicial process, as became clear in the Eric Adams case where there was a policy consideration traded for dismissing the Justice Departm ent’s charges against him.

Most egregious of all is Trump allowing Elon Musk to wander around into the most sensitive issues in the Treasury and Defense Departments. Musk has access to the Social Security payment system and has not said what he wants to do with that information. Will he reduce a percent or the whole of Social Security checks that have been sent unfailingly and effectively and efficiently since the first checks were issued in  1940? That would not only be illegal. It would violate what is sensed as a claim on the full  faith and credit of the United States, just like the dollar, and so also an impeachable offense. That remedy should be quickly applied so that it is not destroyed before it is remedied. At the least, Congress can demand Musk appear before congress to explain what he is doing, the claim that he is just a technical advisor to the White House clearly a subterfuge in that up to a week ago he claimed to be running DOGE.  

The impeachment is our final legal recourse for unseating a President. We have learned that the judicial system is too clumsy and burdensome a method in that it was not able to get to trial either the insurrection case, the stolen documents case and the Georgia case to interfere with the 2020 vote, all of them in the four years since the events happened. The Supreme Court can not be expected to uphol;d constitutional law because the majority, all men, are tainted by corruption, covering up corruption, or having lied during their confirmation hearings that Roe v Wade was settled law without adding that they would overthrow it anyway. The Congress is the final bulwark of the Constitution and even its Conservative members are likely to endorse an impeachment when, finally, public opinion shifts against Trump because of any attempt to reduce or alter Social Security payments without Congressional authorization. Some Senators are chafing at Trump preferring Putin to Zelenskyy and a legitimate impeachment offense is to change basic and long timer foreign policies, such as claiming Canada as a state or arbitrarily taking the Panama Canal. Policy matters, such as dismantling NATO, are also impeachable issues.They are being done without legislative consultation and so interferes with the ability of only the Congress to declare war.

Act in haste rather than try to rebuild the American constitutional structure should you be able to when Trump leaves the scene.

A Short Post on DEI

Diversity, Equality and Inclusion are the watchwords and collectively the name of programs dedicated to fighting for allowing members of minority communities, such as Blacks, women and LGBTQ+, to be respected and get a fair shake in universities, workplaces and other organizations. I think they are somewhat overbearing in that they savor the thought police out to badger and threaten people into changing their ideas. Trump and his supporters are outraged at these programs and want to eliminate them particularly in the military, however worthwhi;le it was for those programs to have eased the integration of Blacks and women into the military and that malignant attitudes can arise again, as when gerrymandering and unequal voting conditions in the South arose again when  the preclearance of voting rights in the 1964 Voting Rights Act was suspended ten years ago. Moreover, I think that talk of white supremacy or inherent white bias seems to me a bad way to conceptualize the current racial and gender assignments. Better to use the idea of prejudice, which means feeling disparagingly about minority groups, and the idea of discrimination, which means laws and regulations that bar or set quotas for minority members, to remain the most accurate way to describe minority conditions. They are objective and measurable. A study in New Jersey in the Fifties showed that people said they wouldn't mind Blacks buying a house in their neighborhood but that their neighbors wouldn’t like it. 

But the issue remains whether DEI programs are pernicious or not. Do they invoke Critical Race Theory or Project 1619 which say that racism is in the heart of America? Or is it more salutary, by emphasizing how everybody should work to be aware of their shortcomings as human  beings, just as Jesus suggested? It turned out that it was very difficult to get an answer to that question. Organizations devoted to spreading DEI were notoriously vague and anodyne about what specific points of view they were expressing. Brochures promoting DEI curricula say that participants should engage in “tough conversations”. What does that mean? That there is “white supremacy” in the United States? That the United States is deep down anti-Semitic? Such brochures also say they encourage mentorship, which seems a laudable aim until you realize it might mean only Black mentors for Black students. Is that a good idea? Or only Jewish or Asian mentors for people of their races? That seems exclusion rather than inclusion and does not foster getting along with other kinds of people. Couldn’t it be that the specifics are too controversial to be named?

I ran across such an event of intimidation thirty years ago when a lawyer for the university administration came to address the assembled faculty members on female harassment. He said people should use their common sense to address whether an interaction was beyond the bounds. Clearly, he gave this talk so as to cover the university should it be sued. I raised my hand and asked whether kissing the wife of a faculty member at the end of a dinner party was acceptable. Let’s be concrete. He said I should be discrete, which was hardly commonsensical. The leading Feminist in the faculty emphasized my point by saying there are more serious things to deal with, such as female work discrimination and sexual assault. But  vagueness prevailed, is the coin of the realm, as when Sen. Gillibrand speaking to a Democratic National Convention said that a woman can tell the difference between a pat on the ass and a sexual assault, and a few years later got Al Franken to resign from the Senate because of a picture of him faking a grope of an actress playing her part. Imprecision is dangerous.

A Short Post: One Month In.

Donald Trump does not hide what he plans to do, even if the major idea is to damage or destroy institutions rather than to improve them. He made clear in his campaign that he wanted to politicize the Justice Department and that he wanted to get rid of the permanent civil service and he also wanted to deport ten or so million illegal aliens. He has done the first by firing FBI agents who worked on tnhe cases against him and fired people at the Justice Department and wants to make a deal whereby Mayor Eric Adams of New York will have his corruption charges dropped so as to encourage him to go after ilegal aliens, but that was resisted by attorneys in the Federal District Court of Southern New York who say they could not do that in good faith and as of yesterday one attorney agreed to sign the order so as to protect the jobs of the rest of  the staff from resigning or being fired. Stay tuned.

Trump has used Elon Musk to get rid of the permanent bureaucracy, but by slashing programs rather than auditing them first. He shut down USAID which provides children with food and life saving drugs to a number of foreigners without checking out the facts. He claimed a hundred million dollars of condoms were being sent to the Gaza Strip and took it back, saying he would make some mistakes, in that some amounts of money for condoms were being sent to Gaza, Mozambique. So Musk is sloppy checking out his own facts and so he is like Trump, who said Haitians in  Springfield, Ohio were eating cats and did when the Republican governor of Onhio said it never  happened and J. D. Vance shrugged that falsehood as a metaphor for how disorganized Springfield life had become. Musk is looking into the Treasury Department payment system and continues to do so even if there are court orders to unfreeze accounts, reopen USAID and stop snooping around Treasury payments. So there is a potential constitutional issue about whether the Administration will flaunt the judiciary.

An even  more constitutional test will occur in the attempt to engage in large scale deportations, which have so far been minor. The administration needs a lot of money to carry this out legally and more or less humanely. The House is proposing the money as part of the budget bill to be passed through Congress in  March. But there will be a handful of deficit hawk Republicans who will oppose it and so some Democrats will be required to pass the bill. The threat is that failiing to do so will shut down the government. But Democratic congresspeople have said that they will not accept such cuts on entitlements that the Republicans are proposing and get a government shutdown  by not providing money to the executive from Congress. But consider this. What if the Administration refuses to shut down the government? What if it continues to spend? SWnat can the Congress do about this constitutional crisis? The legal remedy is impeachment or the 25th Amendment but the Republicans are so intimidated by Trump that they will not exercise their constitutional prerogatives. What could they do? Raise an army of their own or ask the Pentagon to support them? So far, Trump has said he will obey district court federal judges, but he might get peeved about them or about Congress. 

Some voters may not be particularly concerned about constitutional processes if as some focus groups have said, Trump is moving the government, though not sure to what purpose. I blame the shortcomings of high school social studies. But people may wake up if they find, as the Republican House proposes, to cut Medicaid and ACA. The people are the final resort. Stay tuned.

Grand Themes in Literature

Stories explain societies.

An anthropological definition of culture says that a culture consists of all the customs, ideas and structures that obtain in a society and that are consistent with one another so that it constitutes a distinctive world view. Such cultures predominate in pre-literate societies and the concept is extended to include ethnic groups or nations which have similar characteristics. A sociological definition of culture separates culture from other institutions or functions of society such as production or distribution or norms. The culture is the set of values by which a population is guided, the presumption that values are necessary so that they people can act in that people cannot be conceived as operating from reason or self interest alone. This definition of culture, whereby  cultural objects are largely for the purpose of maintaining order, are characteristic of industrialized societies. A third definition of culture might be called literary. It concerns the number of objects and performances created so as to entertain and enlighten the populace or some section of it, like opera, and so are autonomous in that the creations are the result of a coterie or social calling of some part of the population whether it is to entertain or to enlighten. This kind of culture is overtly and self consciously created and some people in handicraft industries can turn their talents, such as weaving or graffiti, into works of art recognized as such and so take on a distinct kind of being, as an artwork, whether or not they receive remuneration from their efforts, are different from its function and so not dependant, as Stalinists would say, as a kind of production useful as are other workers.

The point I wish to make about this third kind of culture, that is as old as “Gilgamesh” and remains quite active, is that it can explain the other two types of culture and is founded in history and so documented rather than regarded as having existed in a society from the start, as when historians thought that the Lowland countries came from their swamps rather than their writers or Henri Frankfort thought that Egyptian culture emerged from large spaces, these consistent with the first definition of culture. The usefulness of the third approach can be consulted by reviewing some of the great themes that emerge from the artistic artifacts.

A grand theme is a short summary of the arc of a plot that sums up and educates its readers about the basic way the history of a civilization works. This arc seems the most natural and obvious way both history and present day events and feelings emerge even if it includes some harsh realities. A good example of a grand theme is the repeated stories of exile and return that characterize the distinctive Jewish civilization. Moses led his people from Egypt to his Holy Land to the East. The Jews came back to their homeland after the Babylonian Captivity. Indeed, scholars claim that the redactors of the Old Testament were done with this grand theme in mind as a result lof their recent experience. Jews for millennia chanted “Next year in Jerusalem” so as to remind them of their exile, the latest return to Israel having occurred only  in the last hundred years.

The matching of a theme to history or literature may not be perfect for it to remain as a guiding principle. “Exodus” does not explain how the Hebrews found themselves in Egypt, a foreign people in their midst, though we can think Jews came to Egypt as a result of Joseph becoming the czar of foodstuffs during a period of famine. Moreover, the land of milk and honey conquered by the Israelites seems foreign territory rather than already familiar. Jews in exile had been so for so long that Reform Jews in the nineteenth century reconceptualized themselves as a Christian type religion, which meant an association of believers rather than an ethnicity, and so no need to return to Israel. But even Reform Jews in the twentieth century became overwhelmed by this grand theme and so came to support the state of Israel without wanting to jin their brethren in the eastern Mediterranean.

Moreover, a grand theme may not be an origin story that has always been part of a people’s understanding but develops over time. The early parts of “Genesis” are about a different grand theme: that of catastrophe and survival. Adam and Eve suffer the catastrophe of being expelled from Eden and then have to manage by Adam sweating on his brow and Eve experiencing labor pains. That is the new life. Noah endures the catastrophe of the Flood and the Bible story goes on to ell what happens to him after he is resettled in the world: he becomes a drunk and develops bad relations with one of his sons. Babel encounters the catastrophe of losing a single tongue and all of us since then have to adjust to that.

More so, there may be different grand themes that exist simultaneously until one of them becomes overwhelmingly convincing. The story of Joseph can be thought of not as an exile who is reunited with his people though in  a different land but as an immigrant who with luck and pluck was able to rise to the top, in which case that is to follow a different grand theme, the one adopted by America as its grand theme, which is that we are all immigrants who have managed to make well in our own land of milk and honey, “The Godfather” a stark reminder, a moral lesson, of what happens when a promising figure looks back and engages in the way of life of previous immigrants.

Grand themes can also be variations on older grand themes, a new civilization altering the grand theme of a different civilization so as to create a distinctive and bold alternative understanding of what a culture is fated to be forever retold.That happens in Christianity which modifies collective exile and return, a political and social matter however deeply felt, with personal exile and return in that people are exiled from their own nature because of the Fall and then can return to peace and tranquility wherever they reside by acknowledging Jesus as their savior, whether in Him as a mystical person or as a moral exemplar whereby people have now become spiritually free. The arc switches with crucial matters: whether law will be replaced by the spirit of the law and whether past and current metaphysical events take place, as is the case in Catholicism, or whether, as in Protestantism, salvation or not rages within each psyche, whether to surrender to Christ’s soul rather than his being the Son of God.

Other civilizations have very different and independent grand themes. The Iliad has war as its topic. Its great theme is about whether  a person is or can become a hero. Achilles has to choose between a long life or a heroic life, as most people in combat also face. And there are different kinds of heroes or can be honored as such even if their qualities are not readily apparent as admirable. Odysseus is sly and Priam is dutiful. People shine in different ways and, to be generous, a great many people can become heroic and so out of the ordinary because of their character traits which lead to particularly decisive engagement with the world. Nietzsche considered heroism as a particularly Greek issue and the Iliad is a way to display or fail to display it. A story is an opportunity to display that and Plato displayed again and again the heroism of Socrates and others to parry their wit so as to conquer opinion with truth, which is an application of heroism that leads to the extension of sci9ence, a method of inquiry the Hebrews never explored. There seems to be a connection.

The Odyssey has as its topic a  post war world, and so is akin to “The Best Years of Our Lives” and the second half of “Gone With the Wind”. How will the veterans adjust to the aftermath of the war? The grand theme is that survivors both at war and on the homefront remain loyal to their pre-war allegiances despite temptations to do otherwise. Helen goes back to Menelaus. Penelope resists the suitors. Telemachus looks for his father. Odysseus goes back to Ithaca despite the temptations of Circe. People are admired for the persistence of their loyalty as a kind of duty even if it is just custom in  that it is thought inevitable, but is nevertheless heroic. The idea of loyalty as an end in itself is an element of stoicism that finds its way not only into Roman culture, as in Seneca,  but also in Chrtistian thinking

European nations presented themselves as civilizations and had specific grand themes that sum up and further their preoccupations. The English culture is laden with the separation of the social classes and how to overcome them. It dominates the nineteenth century novel but goes as far back as ”Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” where a knight who is decidedly minor proves himself to become accomplished as a courtier by achieving feats of courtesy falling short only in sleeping with a woman which is excused perhaps because that is thee way of the world. But I do not know that “Beowulf”, earlier on, was not into the niceties of politesse, but was more like cave people huddled around their campfires to become warm and ward off animals. The theme is fear and foreboding, a very unhappy tale.

France also has a distinctive grand theme. It is about hiding and then revealing an inner self, perhaps because it is so entranced with the pomp and ceremony that emphasize externality. It begins, as most French things do, with Descartes, who wanted to shed the artifacts of self down to its bedrock reality, revealing that at the heart of self was consciousness, that “I think, therefore I am”, an axiomatic postu;late on which people can stand as indubitable and firm. Subsequent French thinkers modify and challenge the primacy of the self. Pascal shatters it with his wager. If you arise in heaven knowing God to be sovereign, then you had been wrong as a matter of fact from what you had believed otherwise, what had been in your soul. I would surmise, facing the pearly gates, to give in to fact and abjure whatever you had believed previously. Facts triumph over self even if they had been honestly arrived at so that a conscientious atheist could reasonably have believed there was no God and would not be respected for his conscientious posture. Moreover, Pascal’s Wager means that any fantastic claim has to be given credence lest it might be true and so every self is always in terror and so not much is left of the autonomy of the self.

Another attack on the autonomy, and self certain existence of the self comes in a very different direct6ion in the nineteenth century from Emile Durkheim. He does not counterpose the self with what Pascal regards as facts which are just superstitions but with norms, which are the current moment of a cultural more. The self is beaten up by norms in every which way. If you engage too much in a norm, you are liable to engage in altruistic suicide, like a kamikaze pilot. Or if you are too disengaged with norms, you are anomic, which means unanchored and drifting. Not too much or too little but just right which makes you always anxious, which is always an emotion that counters the certainty and solidity of the self, dismembering it into a puddle.

An additional way the French unravel selfhood is offered by twentieth century Existentialists. Albert Camus thought that after you peel off the onion of pretense down to its core, there is nothing left. The protagonist--hardly the hero-- of “L’Etranger” has no feeling, even about his mother’s death. He is soulless, an d so the opposite of the solid ground of self or ego. 

And so the French careen away from what was established as fundamental thought in different forms of negation and so each of them and collectively grand themes about the conflict between self and life. But the French, however, have not always been wedded as a core concept and story to the dynamics of selfhood. Rather, “The Song of Roland” is a prior and seminal figure of the French grand theme and it is not preoccupied with selfhood even if some historians and anthropologists insist that every nation from its origins had such a grand theme, as when nineteenth century historians thought that the people of the low countries are preoccupied with pushing back the floods from a marshy area. The grand theme for the song lof roland is chivalry which means something very different from  the English “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which means politesse or manners, but is concerned with how to carry out warfare, echoing back to the Iliad that warfare is a sly and brutal affair and to be chivalric means to engage in that dirty business such as sending their people as hostages to their enemy, these people to be sacrificed when the ruse is revealed. 

Exhibiting a set of grand themes may seem obvious and faces the objections that one could characterize a civilization as otherwise and could select different literary and historical works to suit one’s case, but the advantage is that this approach allows for evidence and of change. A civilization can be one way or another and need not remain stable as if it is what is called a culture that can be traced to customs established long ago and which never change, Germans doing what they do since before Tacitus and finding notg too distant German atrocities as inevitably in their cultural nature. I would prefer to think that Germany understands itself and has for a very long time been fractured and then unified, its latest unification setting off its present regime in 1989 when East and West Germany unified after the end of the Cold War. Similarly, the story of America as the accommodation of immigrants to America’s advantage is presently challenged by thinking of Americans as an ethnicity rather than disparate peoples  united under the Constitution.

A Short Post on Taxes

Every new Administration follows its traditional tax policy. New Republican Presidents or Republican controlled Congresses try to cut taxes on the rich and cut costs by restricting entitlements for the poor. Democratic Administrations or Congress's try to do the reverse: raise taxes for the rich and expand entitlements for the poor. Despite Trump’s outrageous and unprecedented assaults on permanent government structures, such as USAID and the Treasury Department payment system, Trump is following the playbook of Republican tax policy. There will be a fight in Congress in early March about how many taxes and programs to cut.

That is at least one of the key issues in any government whether or not such negotiations on either side is corrupt or self-serving rather than crafting tax policy for the interests of the people. Tax policy is an essential part of all governments. Just as businesses all engage in producing products or services such as lawn care or automobiles to be sold to individual consumers, just as they also package and advertise their wares, and also collect and monitor their receipts, all governments engage in parallel functions. They provide social services such as welfare and agricultural price supports and maintain defense departments and food safety; they appeal to their constituents for votes, which is the equivalent of purchases, and engage in campaigning, which otherwise is advertising, and they do the equivalent of getting remuneration by getting taxes. Ever has it been since governments began. The elders (but maybe not the old men) got the best parts of the giraffes the Pygmies had slain.

Here, however, is a problem faced by modern societies as that was outlined in the Fifties in John Kennnethj Galbraith’s “The Affluent Society”, those ideas still central to my thinking. The United States was very successful at providing individually produced privately owned goods and services. Competition might be redundant but effective at getting better products and services cheaper-- though I wonder about the entertainment industry which now, through streaming and cable, charges people to watch baseball  and football when they used to be free. Clearly, though, Galbraith claimed, collective goods and services such as fire departments and police departments, which make better sense to buy as a group rather than individually, because your house can get fire from an adjacent house that does not individually buy fire department services, the same true of regulations on clean air or defense establishments and the NLRB, are undersubscribed, even if some people conceive of how to package individual purchases of old age pensions and FEMA services. Taxes are not sufficiently raised to deal with the levels of demand needed by collective purchases. So American health care and education and struggling populations in Appalachia and the inner cities are not well serviced. And so there is a real fight in every Administration over whether to change the balance between collective and individual services and congresspeople are very articulate about this real issue, some finding the private or the public sector at fault, business ripping off consumers or government lazy and incompetent. These are rock bottom perceptions, Trump or not.