When, in the first decade of the Eighteenth Century, Peter the Great had ships built for him by Holland, a great maritime sea power, he could take on what was then regarded as the Swedish Empire. Peter succeeded in his Great Northern War and the Swedish Empire was no more. Ever since, for three centuries now, Russia has tried by war to alter the divide between Europe and Russia, sometimes to the East and sometimes to the West. The main division remains the one between Catholic and Protestant countries in Europe, ones that experienced the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and rapid industrialism, to the more scloratic processes that define Russia. The standard division draws a line where the small countries on the eastern edge of the Baltic are within Europe: Lithuania Catholic as was when it was in confederation with the Poles since the Middle Ages; Latvia Protestant, a remnant of that Swedish Empire; and Estonia, because it's people were sent by the Soviets to that territory, atheist then and probably Russian Orthodox today. Poland was the unfortunate buffer between the Russians and Soviets on the East, to which they shared a common boundary, and the equally hated Germans to the West, also with shared boundaries. The southern flank of Eastern Europe was distrusted to the Soviets and the Russians, they always claimed to dominate those territories. Madelyn Albright, who was Clinton’s Secretary of State, was fully aware that the setbacks in Russian power would be temporary after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and tried to arrange measures that would make the division between Russia and Europe more permanent and in accord with the traditional division between the two. Albright had the Baltic states and Romania tied into NATO, which meant that an attack upon one was to be regarded as an attack against all, and so the military integrity of the continent was associated with the economic ties that had been created in the European Union. That would allow whatever storm arose when new more belligerent Russia arose, which happened with Vladimir Putin. Putin always regarded the movement of NATO to its Russian boundary as hostile even if NATO and Biden regard it as a defensive alliance, though the only one there is to defend against is Russia, NATO sending troops to Afghanistan which it regarded as having been an attack against the United States. Defensive versus offensive doesn’t mean much.
Read MoreJohn Le Carre's "Ordinary" Novel
Let us say we call it “an ordinary novel”: not breathtakingly ambitious and with a host of memorable characters and a big deal moral and philosophical meaning, like “War and Peace” but any number of satisfying and entertaining tales that involve a few distinctive characters, a setting with atmosphere and some plot twists that are surprising and illuminating and where the strands are more or less tied together in te ending, even if some are not. Add some set pieces, like falling in love or turning a spy into a double agent and a reader has got his or her money’s worth, a distraction into another world not too far from our own. Even if exotic, and having had an experience which adds to the reader’s sense of life even if not very specifically. Even extraordinary novels are like ordinary ones in providing those pleasures, from the time when Robinson Crusoe was stranded on an island and the reader wondered how he would manage it--very well indeed-- all the way through English and American literature where a reader at the end of Bellow's “Herzog” whether or not he liked the title character. Even “Ulysses” had the hero wander across Dublin for a day doing the qquantidion and spectacular things he did never mind the fancy linguistic theatricfs. I wanto look in this way to John Le Carre’s “Agent Running In The Field”, the last published of his books before he died. (I reviewed favorably a few months ago his posthumous novel, “Silverview”)
Read MoreWhoopie's Free Speech
Current issues having to do with free speech are repetitive, boring and obfuscating in that they have to do with defending the rights of people not to be insulted and that makes what is no longer permissible speech very broad rather than limited to only important exceptions from free discourse. This idea that people are free from being offended has been a major change in discourse, and was inaugurated, as best I can tell, when universities decided or some of the students decided that classrooms were safe spaces where professors had to be warned if they said something controversial or contrary so as not to make students uncomfortable rather than regard classrooms as places whose purpose was to make students uncomfortable with their received opinions. There are any number of school boards who insist that the curriculum should not include books or ideas that offend either Blacks or whites, as when Governor of Texas Greg Abbott says that no group is to be denigrated in history books, which means you can’t decide that slavery was a bad thing because the white people cannot be thought of having done bad things. I think of such people as Gov. Abbott as being culturally illiterate because they are opting out of trying to understand how complicated things are but retain a naive view of all people as being well meaning rather than having views placed in their own contexts that nonetheless result in differential advantages. Neither slave owner or enslaved can be condemned, in that point of view, even though they are all long dead, and that is to the detriment of all and whatever are the descendents.
Read MoreStrong and Weak Moral Words
Although they might not care to agree with this characterization of their work, most philosophers regard moral statements as similar to opinions in that they are statements of belief about behavior preferences. Just as public opinion researchers will ask people if they prefer one presidential candidate to another, or whether abortion is right or wrong, philosophers will abstract moral words as the particular kind of qualifications of behavioral descriptions that turn them into preferences. Saying abortion is wrong is the equivalent of saying “It is my opinion that no one, regardless of their opinion on the matter, should have an abortion. Their preference should be not to have an abortion, and I am certain about that. You can list me as ‘very certain’ rather than merely ‘somewhat certain’.” Philosophers disagree among themselves about whether moral preferences are matters of taste, or instances of universal rules, just as opinions are sometimes statements of personal preferences between brands, but are also sometimes statements of presumably disinterested preferences, as when a respondent opines that affirmative action is good or bad, acting for a moment as if this were not also a matter of self-interest.
Read MoreThe Boxing Match Between Ukraine and Russia
The curious thing behind the ramping up of a possible war between Russia and Ukraine is how the important actors have all limited their options, either overtly or implicitly or by secret agreement, so as to create a kind of Marquis of Queensbury set of rules about how the contest will proceed. The United States has taken off the table sending American troops to Ukraine, which means that they will have to fight it out alone against the very formidable Russian military. Biden suggests that the Russians will take serious casualties, but could probably occupy the entire country, and so will rely on economic pressures to make the russians relent or arrive at some settlement, perhaps with an increased area under Russian control, or economic pressure so significant that russia has to accept a humiliating surrender, which would not make russia look well to China, which Biden believes is the real reason for Russian swagger so that it does not become a very minor antagonist to China. NATO has also stipulated its own self control. It will send munitions to Ukraine but will beef up the military only in the nations already affiliated to NATO to insure that the conflict doesn’t spill over into the Eastern front NATO members. Even more important are the unstated constraints on Russia and the United States. There is no discussion at all about nuclear weapons even given the fact that Russia and the United States have the two largest nuclear arsenals in the world. It seems that nuclear weaponry between the two is passe, and reading the arrangements that ended the Cold War, it seems that the general in charge of the Soviet Rocket Forces are selected or approved of by the United States and so I presume that the guy to be in charge of NORAD is vetted by Moscow. Also, I presume that there are secret agreements between Russia and the United States as to limits on cyberspace. Neither will pull down the electrical grid of the other even if the two will be mischievous and try to get into secret codes of the other so as to spy on one another.
Read MoreFlawed and Serious Romantic Comedies
The genre of the romantic comedy is long lasting and stable, reaching back to Menander, and currently available in great numbers in contemporary screening services. The basic idea of all of them is that a couple meets cute, which can also mean conflicted or troubled by their natures or their circumstances, the two becoming emotionally involved, amd then the story concerns how they deal with or unravel the conditions of how they met so that they can live happily ever after at least until they die, which in “Romeo and Juliet” not all that long after they met, and so treated as a romantic tragedy rather than a romantic comedy. That love obtains, and often triumphs, over the corpus of literature, suggests that love is a deep thing and that alterations in this perennial story reveal a good deal about how cultural ages themselves alter, love given as the standing parameter, not altered until very late, in Jane Austen’s time, when love becomes a mutual appreciation and involvement of personalities and not just a matter of sexual attraction, as that happens, as best we know, of Paris and Helen and Samson and Delilah.
Read MoreDaydreams and Reality
Fantasy or daydream is a kind or structure or story that is more primitive than are the kind of stories that are associated with Aristotle as having a beginning, middle and end, those that build suspense to a climax and then offer an emotional release or completion. Aristotle had in mind the sophisticated performances in drama, which are aimed at an audience who will get pleasure and meaning from having mimicked reality in their productions, requiring its audience to see how the performance is similar and different from reality, how gestures and words are like what real people say and do, and create a mood which is different from what one has felt and contemplated than what they had experienced. The audience, whatever their walks of life, only intermittently suspend their disbelief. The nature of the story is to go in and out of it so as to continually refract on the differences between reality and illusion.
Read MoreFeminism in Astaire and Rogers
William Hazlitt said that comedy arose at disjunctions in society, when people saw people as strangely juxtaposed. He might be thinking of the humor Samuel Johnson found in a woman preacher Johnson had compared to a dog walking erect: managing it but not very well. People a hundred years ago might find amusing minstrels or white people in blackface, though in present times that seems very offensive rather than an expression of artistic freedom in that blackface allowed people to be more uninhibited. Similarly, comedians in vaudeville found that the comedy was funnier if they used foreign accents or adopted foreign identities, such as Jewish or German or Chinese.. Such features can illuminate the culture and structure of the moment rather than simply provide a way to disdain it. The same is the case with the plots in Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movies, meant to be amusing fluff and just interludes between seeing the heavenly and always uplifting dancing, when what they do is make funny the moment when men and women banter with one another about their situation, as it was for the moment, about how men and women could engage one another in courtship. So let us look at the comedy as sociology, particularly in “Top Hat” and “Swingtime”, those musicals produced respectively in 1935 and 1937, long before the first women's march in the Seventies, and also by counterpoint in “Follow the Fleet”, a service comedy in 1936 and directed by the same Marc Sandrich who had directed the other two.
Read MoreMorality is Overrated
Even if you think that every “should” is a command, as Kant thinks, and that “should’s” are ubiquitous in everyday life, as when you should mind your mother and grant favors to friends and comply with reasonable requests by employers, and ubiquitous as well in collective or political life, as when Jesus commands that people be kind to one another, or that Martin Luther king, Jr. commands that we look to people’s character rather than their race, that does not mean that the moral life is neither the only life or even a predominant aspect of life, even though religion feels that it has accomplished and made more powerful and attractive the association of religion with morality, something that emerges with Abraham, who criticizes God for not meeting a higher standard of morality by imposing conditions whereby God will forego the destruction of Sodom and Gemorah, and where the charismatic power of Jesus is wedded with a morality of compassion. Rather morality, as a whole, is just one of the affective affinities and has to be properly placed within the passions, however much religion has stated otherwise.
Read MoreClutter in Art and Reality
All around us is clutter, these objects right at hand because they are functional in that you may need any one of them to help move along the day, but items thought so insignificant unless they are misplaced that you forget how important they are and so we dismiss them as clutter, whether a person surrounded by clutter is the kind of person who organizes the mess or lets it find itself, a person knowing where to reach to find it in its disorganization, such as a book not catalogued, or a hand lotion on the bathroom sink rather than in a medicine chest. Some of the clutter places its historical provenance while others do not. Women had sachets because people smelled bad, but there are still perfumes and room deodorants. But paper clips seem to me to have been of a time in that people needed to clip together single sheets of paper when those could be separated or mislaid, while today you just print off another copy of numerous pages from your computer and the printer staples the copies. Think of all these objects as a museum that offers time and place and general functions and so an entry into life, akin to the artists that make collages of objects atop one another so as to provide the mood of a person or a place. I have in mind Picasso and Braque and let us learn something from them before turning to the clutter of real life.
Read MoreStratification Is Everywhere
Equality means that the social order is based on each group or person having universal rights that guarantee that they can each act independently and are not be subordinated to one another. Individuals and ethnic groups are equal even if their average wealth or modal prestige are different but because none can claim moral superiority one from the other as was the case when Blacks and whites were separated as castes into superior and inferior kinds of people. Under equality, everyone can take pride in their ethnicity and everyone can take pride in their occupations, or in their own individual pursuits of happiness, only some of those occupations, like prostitution or drug dealing, seen as dishonorable. There was a time when actors and actresses were regarded as disreputable and perhaps their celebrity makes them stand out as exceptionally honored, but all an occupation needs to be considered as an honest living to be considered a worthy occupation by politicians and preachers is that it is lawful. In the light of equality, an individual can cultivate his garden or write his essay or support his family or live off his rents, and each can be thought a free choice as a way to live one’s life. Authority, on the other hand, is that the social order is marked by ranks all of them under command of hallowed leaders, whether as persons, such as God or charismatic figures,or captains of industry, or by invisible forces, such as norms or traditions, which require people to know how they are to behave in the subordinate ways of life to which they are assigned. There is always an external instruction and one cannot very well see how it could be otherwise, for then would come chaos.
Read MoreGetting Through to 6ers
The New York Times, in a front page article a week or so ago, could not understand what was so upsetting to large parts of the population of Enid, Oklahoma, and neither could I. It seemed to be about mask mandates, but how could the local populace be so energized about what was a practical and usual public health measure of the sort that had been in place for hundreds of years so as to avoid pestilence? There had to be something more about the matter and the anti-maskers said it had to do with liberty, which is a very big deal concept not to be invoked so cavalierly. So the Times and others tried out alternative explanations which I, for one, found wanting. The article noticed that local residents were concerned about uncertain sexual identifications, but those people have been going on for thousands of years. The article also mentioned that there are more diverse populations in the area, but how does that demographic change impact on a particular person rather than serve as a background for the entire group, and how masking and sex orientation and government distrust are all tied together even though the issues are so different from one another? Masks are a pretext for outrage, but about what? The experts cited said that it had to do with emotions about conflict, but that does not tie it down very much. I will give it a try.
Read MoreHumanist and Scientific Formats
Literary journalists rely on tired tropes to hold together the points they make as the themes of essays about one or another of the subjects they decide to write about . They need to have points because their high school English teachers said so, even though newspaper type reports or encyclopedia entries or recipe books may not have them, nor do memoirs or diaries or clinical records. But literary journalists do make points and those therefore can be obligatory references to a theory or a touchstone that lets the reader know how the writer is placed among the ideologies and interests and pursuits that define the writer, or else just to provide some apparatus to help hold the thing together. I am reminded of this by my catching up with past issues of the New York review of Books and finding that so many of its ideas are unnecessary or simply canned. There is an article that reminds the author that she is a Feminist, or else that imperialism was a bad thing, or that an author was underrated when all that was meant in the claim was that an author was not properly rated rather than was upped higher on a ruler presumed previously ranked.
Read MoreConservatives, Liberals, Radicals
Soon after the Second World War, in the early Fifties, Hannah Arendt and others formulated a three part typology to describe political regimes. There was the totalitarian type, something new under the sun in the past twenty years, where the individual citizen, all of them, were subject to such intimidation and terrorism that the very psyche of an individual was shattered, everyone subject to a leadership out to restructure humanity into a new kind of person in keeping with its new ideology and disregarding usual constitutional procedures of law and order. That happened in countries controlled by Nazi Germany and countries controlled by the Soviet Union and inappropriately applied to militant Japan because it was part of the Azis and because the Army and Navy were independant of political institutions even though free speech, for exaample, continued in the press and radio until the last few years of the war. The second type were authoritarian regimes where only political opponents were terrorized and tortured while the rest of the population was allowed to move apace, quickly or slowly to modernize. Authoritarian regimes included Fascist Spain and Portugal and Italy and most of the underdeveloped countries in Latin America and Africa. The third type were the democracies in Western Europe and North America and influenced by British colonialism, including Australia, New Zealand, Chile and India. These countries had free speech, the rule of law, and the other parts of a liberal democracy even if India had gained its independence only recently. A key idea of this three part theory was that there was not much difference between Left and Right totalitarian societies. Ideologies might differ but the structures of terrorism as a cause and a consequence of such regimes was the same. No need to quibble about whether Hitler was more or less worse than Stalin. In both cases, projected utopias had become dystopias.
Read MoreA Spielberg Masterpiece
Before turning to why Stephen Spielberg in his new version of “West Side Story” has created a gem and is successful at, once again, reviving movie musicals, after a considerable lapse, all the way back to “Chicago”, from 2002, because “LaLa Land”, from 2016, was a failure whether because the two stars had no chemistry or because the music was so poor, or because the genre of musical comedy, like the genre of the western, is just dead, the movie audience not relating to such vehicles, a more general point needs to be made. The first decade and a half of the talkies presented musicals as spectacular and artificial events and included futuristic mock resorts, such as in the Astaire-Rogers movie, “Top Hat”, from 1935, where the two played the Picolino, or else used the production of a musical as the excuse for offering up to the audience fanciful sets and costumes and masses of chorus girls and boys, as happens in dance number in “Gold Diggers of 1935”. Perhaps the last of these was Astaire dancing with Eleanor Powell in “Broadway Melody of 1940” where the set for the biggest event was said to have been the most expensive movie set manufactured up to that time, unless one includes from 1946 “Till The Clouds Roll By” a biopic about Jerome Kern which uses the starpower of MGM to do a medley of Kern’s greatest hits, topping it off with Frank Sinatra singing “Ol Man River” while wearing a baggy double breasted white suit with overly large lapels. Later renditions of that song sung while wearing formal wear rather than the dress of a stevedore became something of a joke. Something different was already available in the 1943 ”Meet Me in St. Louis” but it was a period piece and so might overlook that a convention of movies had turned the corner.
Read MoreReal Time Politics
Politics occurs in real time. That means that its procedures and events take place in the time it really takes to accomplish those things. That is different from other procedures and events that take place in vicarious experience, such as drama or movies or history books where time is foreshortened so that people as observers do not have to indulge in seeing everything unfold, cuts made in the film so that a walk in the woods is long enough to provide a sense of what it is like to be in the woods but not the entire time it takes to make the trip while real walks in the woods last so long as it takes to get from one place to another, to cover the distance. Vicarious experiences are allowed to be made more dramatic or presented with symbols and stereotypical characters so as to grasp what is happening in a thrice. But politics is vicarious in that except for a few events actually seen, like JFK as a Presidential candidate visiting the Bronx, politics is seen on television however much the issues or emotions that motivate politics are items of interest or not, impassioned or not, for deeply held or perhaps superficially arrived at because the slogans of the media make them seem appealing. It is a mistake to think that what Republicans believe are responses to their interests or their values rather than what they learn on the tube or could dispense with some slogans and adopt others with aplomb if there were a fashion to do so, as seems to be the case with people saying the 2020 election was rigged. They know that only vicariously; somebody told them that. That is different from watching sports, which last as long as they last and so critics have to come to understand why there is drama even in baseball, where there seem to be longueurs when what is happening is that people get beer and hot dogs and conversations while appreciating the ballpark and the crowds and the characteristic noise and pay attention when something important is happening. Color commentators, for their part, tie the television audience to what is broadcast on the field. That is why exhibiting a television broadcast of a football game without sportscasters proved unrewarding. There was an experiment where a New York Jet game some forty years ago was broadcast without the commentators, either play by play or for the color commentator, just to see if it would work. Viewers quickly signed off. All they could do was see their own living rooms to accompany the game while commentators brought the viewer into the picture, the talk from the television regularly updating what had transpired and what might happen next. So much for treating vicarious sports as in unalloyed real time. It needs dramatic emphasis to make it palatable. But politics is different and so its slow paced reality explains a lot about its dynamics and makes it always problematic how the viewers, the voters, are to make sense of what they experience, and so pay attention to its structured and emphasized drama and with less regard to the standby of demographics and policy as the engines of the engagement with the electorate and the political process.
Read MoreAnti-Abortion Rubbish
There is only one major policy or political decision about which I have changed my mind in the course of my life, and that is abortion. Moving from a Liberal, from Robert Kennedy, to a centrist, like Obama and Biden, doesn’t count because it was just recalibrating the spectrum and remaining rooted in the New Deal philosophy that big government and entitlements were a good thing. (Biden seems radical because his legislative agenda is so ambitious but its principles of expanding entitlements is part of the long time Liberal agenda.) And I am still a believer of the principles of the Civil Rights Movement even if the generations since then have altered the way to proceed to a more equal union. And i did move from supporting Head Start to opposing it, always having always been skeptical, but mainly in response to the scientific reports showed that it didn’t work as the way to improve education, though I like Biden’s initiative to fund all children below five year olds because it means allowing women to go to work and let kids get away from baleful home circumstances. Abortion was the great change because I shifted from seeing a zygote as a human being to responding to social circumstances because my daughter went off to college and I assured her that I would give money and support and arrangements if she got into trouble despite my outspoken beliefs about abortion despite the opposing views in my Liberal circles because I didn’t want to be a hypocrite. If abortion would have been gppd enough for my daughter, then it should be available to any woman. The philosophical argument was replaced by the social argument that women alone took the burden of childbearing while men only provided insemination and so women had to decide now that medical science made abortion safe, because someone had to decide when to terminate pregnancies, however dubious I thought of the claim that women were always wise about making that decision. My position became and remains what Bill Clinton said, that abortion should be legal, safe and rare, and I still think so in that abortion is a bad thing, like an execution, but a necessary thing in some circumstances.
Read MoreKant and Marx: Should We Hate Jessica?
Here Is a radically different approach to describe morality, which is usually thought of as adding something to the descriptions of the world so as to provide a fuller picture of life. Kant put that usual view clearly and succinctly. It was inevitable, he thought, that people came up with the word “should” to describe the fact that people chose to do one thing rather than another out of obligation rather than just custom or taste or else people would not have real choices and that was clearly part of the nature of the world. I am saying otherwise. People use moral categories for a particular reason, which is to blame people, and they do so by noticing the aggregation of individuals into types or roles that are in opposition to one another and find that satisfying, which means that morality is in most cases unnecessary even if blaming people, including oneself, is an easy thing to do to explain people, as when one says that all people are subject to original sin or that some part of people can be clumped together as deficient morally because of their poverty or race. Aggregation is a useful device for illuminating the social world but it is a dangerous one because it breeds unnecessary anger and allegations and, like a good medicine, should be attributed only advisedly. The significance of this proposition is that morality is an attribute for manipulating language to different purposes rather than a discovery about morality as an inevitable feature of the universe that is.
Read MoreAlan Furst: Fiction and Theory
The protagonist of Alan Furst’s most recent novel “Under Occupation”, set in occupied Europe in 1942, is a mystery writer and he offers how to go about constructing a novel and the reader can infer how Furst does the deed himself. The fictional writer says that there should be invented characters who are types or contrary to types so as to make the characters interesting and that there should be added local color, such as the colors of streetcars, so as to provide an authentic atmosphere. First applies his own prescriptions into this novel. Some women are portrayed as experienced, some less so, and he shows how it rains on a November Paris street, doing particularly well how a train filled with Germans and civilians are strafed by the RAF. That makes a novel engaging and moves a story along. But what is important in a novel are not these mechanics which provide some entertainment but also what might be called the themes of the novel which give it some moment, the sense of the meanings that a novel captures as the way life itself, here and everywhere and not just in the Occupation work, and so raise a novel to being more than an entertainment, if the way the world works is distinctive and clear enough, so that the reader gets an Alan Furst novel, or a Joyce novel, or a Morrison novel, it having created world distinctive in its own at the same time as an insight into the overall metaphysical world to which it has entered. These structures or ways in which being exists, are not as easily replicated as the schoolbook rules about how to create a novel. They have to do with the wisdom the writer may or may not know about the metaphysical and actual worlds are structured and can be inherent in the way the writer composes or thinks, Hemingway having always known ever since his early stories that his sentences added up to his pointillism style while Mann accumulated learning and history to add to his fluid style, his best work, in my opinion, during his most mature work, with Joseph and His Brothers rather than in Death in Venice, just as the mature Dickens had a dark complexity from “Great Expectations” on that made minor the comic romps of “David Copperfield” and “Oliver Twist”. So let us see what Furst does and not mind that he may not say what it is that he knows what he is doing.
Read MoreComfort and Irony
Consider the related emotions of pleasure and satisfaction to begin a way to summarily dismiss the Utilitarian and the Kantian theories of morality. In short, the idea of comfort replaces the idea of pleasure and the idea of irony replaces the idea of obligation. Moral philosophy, after all, is a partial and recondite way of dealing with what can be described as the way emotions work. A description observes what just is, and is thereby shorn of moral values about what should be done, and so can be dealt with by what is either called the sociology of everyday life or the sociology of emotions. Reducing morality into descriptions rather than proscriptions was the point of Spinoza’s “Ethics”, nothing left of ethics except descriptions.
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