Before assessing Biden’s initiative to change America’s social structure through government, let’s stand back and consider these other initiatives to do this in the course of, say, the last hundred and twenty years, when government emerged out of a Wild West culture where businesses jousted with one another to industrialize America without much government intervention. Remember that wars, or the Space Program, or establishing national parks, or conventional infrastructure, such as building the Continental Railroad or the Interstate Highway System, however admirable they may be and of considerable consequence, are not part of these social initiatives, all of which, whether Republican or Democratic, failed or successful, have tried to expand entitlements and regulations, where an entitlement means awarding money or some other favor, such as ten points oxtra on a civil service exam for veterans, and a regulation is the stipulated procedures for an organization, such as regulating the way to calculate utility charges for the consumer, and these entitlements and regulations have been opposed by those who had preferred whatever had already been there, or thought government was too intrusive and so a danger to individual liberty, or were simply oppositional, in that the other party was always to be opposed against the incumbents for that reason alone, and that is the present case, where Mitch McConnell is against Biden’s programs just because Biden is proposing them, and think that Republicans can win the Congress and the White House just by being contrary.
Read MoreJane Austen's Sexual Morality
“Sense and Sensibility”, which is the first of Jane Austen’s novels, is a fully developed work. It has the brittle and humorous dialogue, the vivid characterizations, the plot twists, and the deep penetration into the social life of the time, that mark all of Austen’s completed novels, even if there are later novels that include even deeper and more complex people than is the case in “Sense and Sensibility”, such as Fanny Price in “Mansfield Park'', or themes very different from supposedly sunny Jane Austen, such as when death and despair provide the tone for “Persuasion”, the last of her novels. In “Sense and Sensibility”, Jane Austen had already established herself as the best author since Shakespeare. Moreover, “Sense and Sensibility” is clearly grounded in and expressed in its moral lesson and so the novel has the weight that other of her novels have about the meaning a reader is to infer and to contemplate, even if this meaning is one that current readers might find uncomfortable or even repugnant.
Read MoreThe Anger of Rashida Tlaib
An event in current events prompted for me a consideration of the nature of anger. Rashide Tlaib, the only Palestinean American person in Congress, was at the tarmac in Dearborn, Michigan meeting with President Biden a week or two ago when he was touting the recovery and promise of the Ford River Rouge auto plant and she was reported to have had a heated exchange with him about what was the then continuing war between Israel and Gaza, she reported to have claimed that Netenyahu was a “aparteid prime minister”. Afterwards, at the auto plant, Biden had publicly praised Tlaib as an eloquent and passionate spokesperson for her own point of view and that he hoped her family on the West Bank was doing well. The question is how she would have taken to his response, putting aside that the meeting itself, as that had been engineered by the President, allowed the congresswoman to be known as someone expressing the concerns of her constituents in a particularly pointed manner. Quite aside from these politics where one hand washes the other and that Biden might need a favor from her later on for his having given her the opportunity to speak out, a deeper question is whether she would have felt the President was to be noticed as having been gracious rather than angry for what she said, certainly not how Biden’s predecessor would have done, which was to angrily chastise Tlaib for her point of view. Rather, Biden and Tlaib had acted in a civilized manner to one another. Biden had in effect said that being cordial whatever are the political differences, however emotional they can become, and that recognizing familial loyalty is something everyone can embrace. Biden. In his brief remarks, refused to villainize an opposition just as George Bush ‘43 had done when he did not villainize Arab Americans after the World Trade Center disaster. Biden, I might take it, was binding wounds and making all of us feel better, rejecting animosity in favor of mutual respect. That is the way I first took it. Biden’s remark was to remind us that American politics can put aside personal rancor while pursuing the political process, each of those who hold positions in the government to be treated as worthy of dignity. We all become warm, or many of us do, for having risen to this occasion.
Read MoreRadical Sociology
The philosophical movements of the Twentieth Century included Anglo-American analytic philosophy, Existentialism, Phenomenology, and social and psychological theories that had philosophical implications, such as psychoanalysis and Marxism. But the one I have found the most important philosophical perspective is that of the sociological perspective that developed in mid twentieth century America and Europe that had been based on the earlier generation of American Pragmatism, by Dewey and Nagel, even though the sociologists themselves, such as Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton, were not philosophers but sharp observers and analysts of the social scene. I want to take note of their dominant procedures because they do what all philosophers do, which is to turn ideas about what has to be to go topsy turvy as when they eliminate ideas that are to be regarded as superfluous because they are not necessary ideas, which is the case when Spinoza thought that “justice” and “cause” were unnecessary terms, or thought that terms are to be added as necessary, as when Kant based the idea of free will on the necessary invocation of the word “should” so as to make the world what it is.
Read MoreThis Week in History
Here is a record of what happen this week that might be worth remembering fifty years from now, just as I wish I remembered vividly some week’s events in 1962 when people like me were wondering whether Kennedy would push for some civil rights bill, that mounting sense of disappointment occurring at the same time of heightening tensions while there were rumors and reports that the Soviet Union was placing missiles in Cuba. I have also repeatedly seen the record captured in the footage of George Stevens of the ravages of Berlin and Munich in mid 1945. Women send bushels of rubble from one hand to another in a chain of workers so as to clear some of the debris (I understand they were paid a day wage by the American government so that some people could get some work). Stevens also, at the time, filmed German POWs, smiling perhaps because they had survived the war or, perhaps, only angry that they had lost, not yet rehabilitated from Naziism. Like every moment, there was a knife edge on whether Germany would change what was not at all inevitable, which is to return to a democratic society. The Stevens films conveyed the tenor of the times, more accurate than a reconstruction through history. I also remember having read the next day of the New York Times reporting on the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, in 1911, when 146 girls died and 78 were injured in a sweatshop factory where the doors were locked so that the girls could not take bathroom breaks. Journalism didn’t only provide “the first draft of history”, a phrase invoked to praise journalism. Rather, such journalism or newsreel footage or memory provide but facts that might otherwise ever escape notice and retain the character or flavor of the concatenation of events that make the period of a time as being such.There were reports of girls jumping off the building, where the Triangle Shirtwaist Company was housed, to their deaths so as to avoid the fire, just as people did when they also jumped from the World Trade Center on September 11th, teachers not telling the children who saw it that these were not birds. That immediacy of experience is not as well captured as happens in, let us say, the 9/11 Commission, and so should be treasured for what is established as a record just last week too.
Read MoreJane Austen's Fantasy
Jane Austen published “Persuasion” posthumously in 1817, which meant that the novel was composed by her in her late thirties, far beyond when she was likely to marry, but she seems still in her later years to have pined about having never managed to marry. She was, in fact, a maiden aunt, tending the children of relatives, which is just what Anne Eliot, the fictional heroine of “Persuasion” believes has begun to happen to her, nursing children and putting up with her whiny and self indulgent sister as best she can. Anne’s is a rather grim future, even if Jane seems to have gotten along with her real life sister. So Austen, so committed to the notion of bourgeois matrimony, as it includes both romance and children, crafted “Persuasion” as a fantasy about what might have been: how a lover she jilted comes back on the scene and after a while she and he reawaken their mutual sense that they were meant to be together, that they both had persistence in their mutual devotion despite the fact that people will persuade them to be otherwise and so lose several of their years before finding one another again. Anne gets everything: a suitor arises before she gets the man she wants, and even gets the childhood estate she wanted as the place where she and her new husband will live. What makes the story other than a silly girlie romance is the perspicacity whereby Austen looks into family dynamics and the context of the times that make what is happening to the characters’ individual lives. First off, however, is how harsh Austen is to the people in this last of her novels, much more so than was the case with other Austen figures who are also undeserving. Mr. Collins is a clown and so is so patently insufferable that he is amusing. Even Mr. Wickham, who is a cad, is discovered to be just what he is and so to be avoided or sent away, his main purpose is to let Darcy to be seen as how noble he is. But the people who surround Anne are dangerous and insufferable and deplorable and it is a wonder that Anne can follow through the crowds of ingrates and social climbers so as to find her own true love. The main setting for the romance of Anne and Frederick Wentworth is set in Bath, the fashion spa developed only recently in the 1770’s,where the wealthy live in what we would call a planned community of mostly grand apartments, as accompanied with musicals and shops. The poor are there only so as to provide service., as is the case with a modern ski resort. As in all of Austen’s novels, the pace races ever more quickly towards its ending, and Anne does so, going to see Frederick before he will leave and admit to him that she loves him even as he is trying to send him a letter admitting that he loves her, and so both of themselves proposing to one another, which is just a perfect thing. The anxiety comes from all those other people interfering, and most of them malicious, including a distant relative, a Mr. Eliot, who is told by another that he was a cad who wanted her title and would have had a mistress if he had married Anne. It would not seem that it was much too fit that Anne learned he was right to distrust Elliot, but Austen tends to do that, making who was good and bad all too certain rather than left murky, as happens when Mr. Wickham is not just an opportunist but a seducer and the good people overcome the bad rather than just do what they do while the particularly good people find one another. In “Persuasion”, there are so many bad people, and we have to sort out their kinds of badness. Jane is getting bitter.
Read More"2034" Is About The Past
I read a recently released future history novel about a naval conflict between the United States and China. “2034” was written by Eliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavrides. The novel was entertaining even though it had very elementary skills at fiction writing and so provides a good sense of how elemental are the properties of fiction, that fiction is an enterprise that is pleasing in its basic idea, and so to be examined to find out just what that is. I think of it as “painting by the boxes” which was a pastime of some decades ago when people would use the paints provided by dabbing each of the thousand square boxes with the number designated in each square. The painter, not really an artist, found some satisfaction from completing the project. It was less demanding than doing a crossword puzzle. And what resulted was a picture that had the elements of painting, however rudimentary and mechanical was the process. The painting had color, texture, composition and emotional tone, which is what emerges from any painting even if there is little art that makes it deeply feeling or thinking. The same is true of this novel which alludes to the elements of the novelistic style rather than freshly or vividly engaging it as that of a distinctive accomplishment, but satisfying nonetheless. Moreover, it also has a moral theme and a sense of war that at least reminds the reader of more significant fictional and real events and are worth noting because even people, including writers, also have takes on the military life and the history of nations that are worth observing because they render cliches rather than insights.
Read MoreJustice Is A Bad Idea
I am going to say something outrageous, but hear me out. What I will say is clear and has deep philosophical roots. I am saying that there is no justice. I do not mean that the ideal of justice is rarely fulfilled, that life is full of disappointments. I mean that the concept of justice is empty. It is a word without a meaning and so not part of the metaphysical furniture of the world, while truth, beauty and goodness are some of the many metaphysical things that do exist. The word “justice” is used to evoke a sense of a final rectification whereby wrong action is compensated through the action of courts, whether by those who adjudicate that Orestes should not be punished or that Charleton Heston intones the Ten Commandments. Life can do without the concept and is better rid of it because the invocation of justice always creates unnecessary suffering and so people are worse off rather than better off.
Read MoreVictimized and Non-victimized
Critics have a way of judging with hindsight what writers said or should have said about them while knowing what has happened since. A case in point is a recent article of The New York Review of Books which reappraises what Faulkner should have done about segregation during the period in the early Fifties when he thought in favor of a gradualist approach to restructuring the South. What I too him to mean was that Southern whites were soon to undergo an agonizing reappraisal of the South and that we should not expect them to readjust quickly, to which I would have responded, as MLK did, to ask how long are Blacks to wait to get their redress of grievances, but that was a consideration at the time, to easily dismissed nowadays as Faulkner simply being not up to the moral and political challenges of his times. I want to generalize this problem. Like Faulkner, there are some people that have to deal with the fact that they are now to recognize themselves as having been exploiters, and how they are to regard that fact. Southerners have to come to terms with the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. Other ex-exploiters include those who ravaged the American Indians and Germans have to deal with the Holocaust and the British with what to say about the imperial control of Africa. Other people, on the other hand, are those who are or are the children of those who were the victimized, such as blacks and native americans and Jews and so they also have to deal with the psychological and structural advantages and disadvantages of being in those roles. Lets elaborate the ways in which people of either sort understand these roles: the ex-exploiter and the ex-victim.
Read MoreRace Relations Today
There have been much congratulations offered by Black activists and observers as well as the President and Vice-President about the fact that Derek Chauvin was convicted on all charges for the murder of George Floyd. Those surrounding Floyd’s family think that this decision was pivotal. Police officers whose actions that illegally kill Black citizens are usually covered up and police officers charged with such a crime are usually vindicated. This time was different and the conviction will increase the pressure for Congress to pass the well crafted and long overdue George Floyd Act which would restrict police violence. But remember that we just barely missed the bullet shot against both social order and equal rights for Blacks and whites under the law. The building where the trial was held and the decision delivered was crowded with National Guard members and other kinds of police officers because there might have been significant rioting if the verdict had been otherwise, whether to acquit Chavin or just to convict him only of manslaughter. That shows there is an imbalance of forces in that the Black community has a sense of justice on its side and also a threat of rioting while the white population has an ingrained sense that the Black community is not on the side of social order and that its grievances are exaggerated even if the outrage against police violence is eloquent. The combination of justice upheld and violence deterred suggests that race relations are very bad. Blacks have a justified grievance against persistent police violence and whites think that Black neighborhoods are suspect because there are hoodlums and gangsters among them that the rest of the community cannot control. And Black advocates do not help the matter because they come up with preposterous slogans that offer justice or nothing instead of a balanced and nuanced presentation of the issues as they were once proclaimed by the Black leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, and especially by Dr. MLK, Jr.
Read MoreUtopias, Individuality and Law
My friend David Konstan was prompted by a post I wrote entitled “Utopias” to expand my view in a particularly elegant way that showed the humanities could be systematic and cumulative. I had said that utopias (and dystopias) were forms of society that had abolished the distinction between public and private life. Plato’s Republic is a place where the types of people correspond to the types of roles provided in the society. “1984” shows that the private impulse to have sex is the great danger to Big Brother’s society. David had elaborated this view so that individuality is always a critique of utopias and dystopias. Moreover, among his many nuanced ideas about the way an individual can struggle with both utopias and dystopias, is the observation that most of these erstwhile antagonists are of familiar types, like the loner who roamed the western frontier but was transplanted into a post-apocalyptic environment and who had not changed because of this new environment. Konstan is engaging with a prime idea of utopias and dystopias: people will be changed, a new person, a New Soviet Man or a Winston beaten down and newly dedicated to Big Brother. The question for utopias, then, is whether people are transformed. Otherwise it isn’t really a utopia.
Read MoreOpposites
A friend suggested that I read Rachel Kushner because she is just the opposite of me. But because every difference is an opposite in that one characteristic is the negation of all the other ones, so that black is the opposite of white but purple is also the negation of all the others in the spectrum put together. Here is another example. Various ethnic groups who came to the United States have various characteristics, but which of these groups is the opposite of all the others? Jews had been a pariah group for two thousand years. The Irish had come to a British Protestant country, which was what they had left and had been disdained there for a very long time. But the only group that can be considered as the opposite of all the others is that African Americans had been involuntary immigrants while the others (except for some indentured servants or ex-criminals) had not and that this is such a deep cleavage that it can be considered opposite, a term based on a judgment of substance rather than a simple logical negation. So “opposite” means more than different; it means a special quality which makes the two parties very different from one another so that the two parties are essentially different. I wanted to know what was important enough a difference to be considered a deep chasm between the two of us. I am familiar with Conservatives as being the opposite of being Liberal and Romantics the opposite of being Classical, so what was the difference between me and Rachel Kushner? My friend said that she was a nihilist and I was not and I wanted to consult the multiple ways in which the two differed so that the summary judgment of nihilism was worth invoking.
Read MoreBiden's Gun Control
Biden is going big in his Liberalism in that he believes that big government is the solution rather than big government being the problem, which is what most Conservatives think. Big Liberalism thinks that government can provide money and programs that will alleviate inequities and discrimination between class and ethnic groups, as happened when Social Security and Medicare led to abolishing the fact that the elderly were poorer than the other age groups in the population. Laws to insure equal accommodation transformed the southern states. Conservatives may think that government might tweak the market system, such as by creating incentives whereby private companies could expand broadband to rural areas, but Liberals think that only a government effort can make broadband universal so that it can become the basis for educating young people through distance learning and so broadband has to be the equivalent of a public utility, part of the national infrastructure, rather than a luxury item for those able to buy the product. You can’t have elementary and middle school and high school students attend distance learning if broadband isn’t universal. The prior model was rural electrification, where the government had to step in because customers were far enough apart that it made no sense for private power companies to expand their reach to rural areas and the cost of some areas, should the private companies enter the field, were prohibitively expensive. The government, such as in the TVA, had to do it, and so does broadband today, where a third of rural areas do not have broadband.
Read More"Wings"
I want to praise “Wings'', the silent war movie that was released in 1927 and won the very first Oscar award for best picture, not because the movie offers hidden depths despite what popular culture offers as fluff and evasions, rewarding audiences a faux tragedy when it is really a melodrama, nor because the movie can be “unmasked” so as to reveal how a popular product has been concocted to “fool” its audience so that the audience feels pleased with itself so that it had a few laughs and a few smiles without getting into anything but an illusion of love and war, a way to pass the time while eating the popcorn, “Wings'', all in all, a childish “art”. Rather, “Wings'' is genuine at being what it is: a set of straightforward feelings of sexual attraction, male friendship, the dangers and ironies of war, and a final reconciliation, so that this is the way life is lived however much the rough spots have been smoothed out, and so worth calling “art” even if it is less falutin’ enough to think it more closely akin to vaudeville than to the great tragedians-- except that Shakespeare was, in fact, quite adept at tugging heartstrings and having an audience hiss the villians. “Wings” has scenes and images and plot lines that move the audience and remain with them and make them the better for having done so. The movie accomplishes simplicity, which is no mean feat, given the turgid and muddied plots seen in any number of novels and movies where things take a long time getting started and are left in their lumpiness, as is the case with the Oscar nominees found in this present year, including “Nomadland'', which is about losers glorified by the actors and screenplay, or “Manx”, which tries and fails to be like Orsen Welles.
Read MoreApparant Meaning and Actual Meaning
Here is a difficult and deep literary question. What is the difference between apparent meaning and actual meaning and how do texts make use of that distinction? The actual meaning of a text is what critics will say is the accurate meaning even if people are misled to think the text is otherwise, as when readers have a sense of what they are getting at, what the text is communicating, even if the text has not been sufficiently analyzed so as to find what it actually means by looking at its words, phrases, images, and all the other apparatus through which critics or just careful readers interrogate a text. An ordinary communication exemplifies the difference of the two meanings. You get a sense that a beloved loves you even if the spouse sends you unclear or stunted signals. A person won’t rely on the words rather than appreciate the meanings of the words, consulting the intentions rather than the words themselves. The same thing happens if people swear an oath to God. It doesn’t mean that God will punish the person for having broken the oath, but a person has just indicated that they will speak truthfully by whatever one holds dear, such as a mother’s grave. The intention is more important than the formula of words even as in literature a reader can get a sense that people seem polite in Jane Austen because they use what seem to us today to be cordial words, when in fact, critics would say, Austen characters are very cutting with one another, some readers preferring politeness to incisiveness, and so separating “Janites”, as they were and are called, from the darker Austen considered by some critics. While, then, there is evidence in the text that leads people to misinterpret the text, and so the text gives off an apparent meaning, there is also and better evidence which justifies the actual text, which is the accurate or, at the least, the more accurate text as constituting the actual text.
Read MoreMelodrama is a Major Genre
Melodrama is usually thought of as an inferior genre. It pits bad people against good ones, as if it were not a simplification to separate people in that way. Melodrama also has exaggerated emotions which people dwell on for much too long and present themselves as victims rather than as active participants in their own lives, and so lose or lessen their dignity. Moreover, melodramatic plots are resolved by arbitrary intrusions of coincidence or derring do, when what ordinarily happens is that people work their way through circumstances and character. “The Count of Monte Cristo” is melodrama because his escape allows his hero to engage in a passion for revenge so as to exquisitely appreciate the suffering inflicted to make up for the suffering that has been caused, everyone drowning in their bad feelings, everyone, including the protagonist, a victim and also malevolent. This is the set of feelings that settle into the Nineteenth Century, supposedly because a more popular audience was not well enough educated to consider finer feelings, though one wonders whether the audiences for Greek tragedy were as elevated as the spectacles to which they attended.
Read MoreBiden's Long March
Biden’s press conference on last Thursday made clear that the achievement of his legislative agenda will be a long slough, inched forward, rather than a blitzkrieg whereby Biden will rush law after law following his spectacular success at the American Recovery Plan. The reasons for this are that the American Recovery Plan was a fluke in that it was subject to reconciliation, whereby only a majority was required, and also because McConnell has made clear that he will hold his caucus together to be against any legislative measure Biden may propose just so that McConnell can in 2022 claim that Biden hadn’t done anything and so the Republicans should take the House and the Senate, even though McConnell has no legislative agenda himself, the same pattern whereby Republicans had said they would replace Obamacare with a better plan and never bothered to offer one for twelve years.
Read MoreThe Contemplative Edward G. Robinson
Hollywood actors who have long careers are likely to have distinctive personalities and characters that have them play the same person in a number of different settings, just as the audience would like to believe that they too could move from living in a gangster movie to a western or from a comedy to a melodrama. Jack Lemon, for example, was a likeable but timid pushover who managed to be a Parisian policeman in a bordello, an ex-alcoholic, and the apartment ever used by his office boss, Fred MacMurray, to meet assignations. Somehow, Lemon was always appealing. The same is true of Edward G. Robinson, who had a nearly forty year career, and who was readily identified in his early days for the tough gangster and his striking intonation of “See?” that were often mimicked and put in cartoon movies. His personality and character, however, were not all that tough, even at the beginning. To the contrary, what sustained all his roles from “Little Caesar” in 1932 to “Soylent Green” in 1967, was his contemplativeness, as expressed largely in his voice and in a muggish face that nevertheless allowed him to express his secret thoughts, to see him able to change his mind, to observe the world of which he was a part, something all of us cultivate, which is to both be there and to observe what is being noticed at the moment when it is happening. Quite an accomplishment, even greater than Cary Grant’s upper class diction and amused befuddlement that also gave him a very extended run.
Read MoreIshiguro's "Klara and the Sun"
Early blurbs about Ishiguro’s “Klara and the Sun” sounded as if they would be disappointing. They promised the book to be about a clone who becomes like a human being or about the dire consequences of technology. Neither of these themes were to be the case even if Ishiguro’s earlier masterpiece, “Never Let Me Go” does show how a clone is recognized by the reader as having become human because one pair of them does find a family and one of the pair finds art by doing doodles. Rather than these themes becoming inevitable for the sci-fi universe, as when in “Blade Runner”, the robots, however short their life spans, have seen great experiences and so are the equivalent of humans, Ishiguro works to an opposite tack, which is to show how the clones, in this case the mechanical artificial intelligences, are of a very different kind of species, subject to their own initiatives and feelings, and the reader only gradually learns what is universal to all sentient species, including both humans and those not biologically based. This is a much deeper inspection into this particular sci-fi genre, in that it goes beyond showing creatures to be human like by showing what is natural to a species, any species, and so does the work that was done to Rousseau and others to find out what is the nature of human beings if they are shed of social conventions and left only with their most primitive or elementary sensations. Rousseau was the end of a century or so long experiment to find a bare bones psychology in Hobbes, Spinoza and Locke and Hume, the collection of them usually understood as contract theorists when what they were more importantly dealing with was philosophical anthropology, which meant the elementary origins of human emotions, that sequence overturned by Kant, who took up a critical stance, whereby he demonstrated what had to be there in actual rather than original life and society, because without these assumptions the world as it is wouldn’t make sense.
Read MoreJane Austen's Invention
I am afraid that I am going to stick to my guns, however much my view of romance is contrary to the long history of romance in world literature, I thinking that, Ovid and Chaucer to the contrary, love is understood until Jane Austen as it was with Dante’s Francesca and Paolo, who resided in the second circle of Hell because they were people separated by a mad passion from social life rather than integrated with one another and into society. Romance is not part of human nature and so there as long as there have been people. To the contrary, it was invented much more recently, even after the American and French revolutions. What Jane Austen invented in the second decade of the Nineteenth Century was that real romance meant that the couple would find their mutual devotion by coming to deeply understand their characters and would also find a way for the lovers to find the social situation that suited them and that the couple could emotionally prosper by being part of social life rather than isolated from it, which is also the idea that marriage counselors will say. This revolution was so powerful that the previous dispensation was suffused in its light even if Twentieth Century critics reinvent the Dante idea of love as the real meaning of love, but such are the avenues and lanes whereby cultural adaptations evolve, ever tracking back on themselves as they claim to be doing something new, as happens when politicians think they are inventing new ways to be free when they are repeating cliches of previous generations.
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