Re-release: Peter Brown's Christianity

I had the temerity of challenging the great historian Peter Brown on his own turf, which is late antiquity. Readers of the 2017 post, however, do seem interested in what I have to say and so I am re-releasing the post.

That extraordinary scholar Peter Brown’s latest book “Through the Eye of a Needle” is a magisterial account of the social, economic and theological structure of the late Roman Empire. His guiding thesis as he states it in his introduction is that as a result of that great outpouring of theological genius in the later part of the Fourth Century, the Church came from regarding wealth as a sin, which it was in the Gospels, to regarding contributions to the Church as justifying great wealth. Wealth was good when it went to the Church, and that explains the prevalence of the Church in the Middle Ages. I think this thesis basically wrong, first of all, because, as Brown himself shows in an early chapter, contributions of mosaics and other church naming occasions were already part of Church life right after Constantine converted to Christianity and, indeed, I might add, are part of every religion known to mankind, whether that means putting up a cathedral or getting a seat in a synagogue named after a deceased family member.

More important, the thesis is wrong because Brown imposes his thesis upon a description of social life where economic motivation is taken for granted as the reason for doing things, while the idea that people can earn favor with God by making contributions provides a motivation of the sort envisioned by Max Weber when he spoke of the decisive importance of the Protestant Ethic in liberating Europe to become capitalist, while Brown imagines that religious motivation for the accumulation of wealth results in the economic stagnation of medieval times, when it ought, by his logic, have led to capitalism in the Sixth and Seventh Centuries.

Most of all, why is it necessary to reconcile the remark about the camel and the needle with the practices of rich members of the Church? People join and support churches for a variety of reasons. They like the liturgy or they like feeling part of the community of respectable people. They can take theology or leave it. The New Testament has a great many passages that are in spirit contradictory. You are supposed to welcome the prodigal son, which is supposedly a tribute to the idea and feelings of family as well as an allegory for dealing with believers who stray, and yet Jesus also came to separate sisters from brothers. Which is it? A believer can live with the admonition about rich people because what he likes about Christianity is that it offers salvation to everyone, even including rich people, and maybe in a particular believer’s case, a depth of conviction must surely make up for the fact that the person is rich. Moreover, maybe the remark about rich people came from the looney or radical fringe of the movement-- though that is an insight that would come to a modern mind, one less trusting to texts than the great Fathers of the Church. At any rate, there is no need to pose this as a crucial matter, as Brown does, unless there is reason to think a doctrinal point is not only central but fraught with consequences, which is what Weber did when he said that a belief in good works was key to Protestant Christianity even if predestination ruled out those good works being the cause of salvation. Practice rather than meaning has consequences.

Seventh Century capitalism did not happen. What did happen, according to Brown’s brilliant interpretation, was that the Church had accumulated wealth and that made it powerful with a soft power that could counter the power of the state, which was the power of the various kingdoms that had arisen after the fall of Rome. It invoked this power in the name of the poor, which is to be taken to mean not only those in poverty but all those well into the middle class who were not part of the aristocracy or the wealthy. So the Church had a constituency to be looked after and its wealth made that possible, and that is what made it the dominant institution of the Middle Ages. That is very different from saying that the Church was the progenitor of a kind of capitalism, though this claim could indeed be made in that monasticism, which depended on generous contributions from the wealthy, did see the origins of a countryside based capitalism that did not survive for more than a few centuries before efficient economic activity was eventually moved from the countryside to the city in part due to the efforts of Pope Innocent III in the early Thirteenth Century.

There are structural consequences when the clergy become the repositories of wealth. They have to become part of what Brown calls “the otherness” of the clergy, as was symbolized by their adoption of the tonsure and of celibacy, something Brown thinks was something desired by the laity and only then enforced by the clergy. Celibacy was necessary because the priests were the people who handled the Holy Eucharist, and so had to remain pure. (Brown does not deal with the prior question of why sexual chastity is more pure than an occasional romp in the hay.) In these and in other ways, Christianity was transformed less by its organizational skills and its growing monopoly of learning than by the responsibilities imposed on it by its wealth. Other religions also create liturgy and a heightened sense of the holiness of their clergy, but the Catholic Church did all of this so well that it dominated Europe until the Reformation.  Brown offers up a panorama of Late Antiquity, something about which he seems to know everything. The reader is rewarded with a rich feel for the Late Roman Church. Brown explains how St. Augustine went down to meet the crowds that attended his sermons; he explains how barbarian armies were merely mercenaries recruited to deal with civil wars breaking out within the empire and these armies set up courts which local aristocrats found they could deal with as well as when Rome was in charge. 

The original thesis about religious ideology changing the Church so that it is in favor of wealth is, therefore, not Brown’s true thesis. The true thesis is one that he never overtly identifies, perhaps because he thinks that it is too obvious. That thesis, which makes much more sense and is far more significant, is that structural considerations are enough to explain the evolution of spiritual experience of the Church, an experience which would stretch to the end of the Middle Ages. This is a profound insight into the way Christianity and all other religions operate: that they are subject to the give and take of economic and political forces  but it takes no ghost come from the grave   to tell  me that Religion operates as do all other institutions.

As a sociologist, I have certain quibbles with Brown about his use of historical evidence. Early on, in his presentation of the economic and social situation in the early Fourth Century Roman Empire, he uses a farmer who eventually earned himself a position on the city council as illustrating the fact that power explained wealth rather than the other way around, though that is not what the instance he cites would support. You can’t be that loose. Moreover, as with most historians, Brown engages in anecdotal proof, however wide ranging and how many histories of particular communities he may draw upon. What is the basis for his generalizations other than that there are some places, even a great many, where what he says holds true? Now that may be the best evidence available, but it is not conclusive. But be that as it may, there is no gainsaying Brown’s mastery of and his deep insight into his material. This book stands as a worthy rejoinder to those, like me, who take the role of ideas as very important in expressing, creating and propagating new versions of old or eternal religious emotions, and who also think that the Protestant Ethic had always been there, latent in Christianity, and waiting upon events to bring it forward.

Kinds of Art

Renée Jeanne Falconetti in La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, Carl Dreyer, 1928

Here is a fresh way of dividing up the visual arts as objects that are appreciated for their things, whether in painting or sculpture; experiences, as the emotions and ideas generated from the visual object, as is clear in Abstract Expressionism; and images, which are what  are in the mind of what has been produced, like the face of the actress, Falconetti, in Dreyer’s film, “Joan of Arc”. This division can be considered metaphysical because they refer to three kinds of being, but they are actual , however abstract, because they name and refer to actual properties that exist in the world and compared to one another rather than indivisible and inevitable such as real metaphysical properties like free will or cause.This division is different from the usual ways of  classifying visual arts. The most common one is historical. Textbooks of art history divide periods from Egyptian to classical to Christian to secular and then to modern, Impressionism a bridge to the preoccupation with what the artist interprets the painting to be, and then on Asian and pre-literate art, those added to new wings in museums, and then to contemporary art, the latest additions made distinct even if of shorter duration because they are more known to the contemporary consciousness.  That telescoping of more recent history also applies to what is apparently the non-historical division of another principle for dividing the visual arts, which is by their media. There is painting and sculpture and architecture and also recently textiles, whether quilting or courtourie, and also cinema, even though people wonder about its cross with storytelling, some art aficionados are more concerned with the visual quality of films than of their narratives. Everybody argues about the edges rather than the essences.

One of the most accessible forms of art available to children is the room of armor found in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The armor is different from other things because of its time and the shapes. These objects are designed to protect combatants while being flexible enough to allow some mobility and so the various parts are designed to work together smoothly. Clearly, armor is rightly understood as an object that is artful as well as artistic  because it conveys warfare in a previous age even if I was not particularly taken with it when I was young because more representational art engaged me. Another object that did engage my younger interest was the gate in the Spanish room (where the Christmas tree sands) that showed the appeal of Spanish culture, what were its gentle curves and overall majesty. Those are clearly things that also express mood and meaning\, which are the hallmarks of art.

If you think about it, representational art, the reproduction of lives and landscapes and still pictures seen within the frame surrounding the canvas on which it has been painted, are also things. Otherwise, we could not very well understand at what we are looking at; a portrait of life rather than life itself, three dimensions turned into two, making use of paint so as to create its effects, the parts of the picture arranged in a composition so that it cuts off the sce at its four ends, a kind of balance between those elements, the artist choosing which colors and objects to provide mood and meaning, so that the viewer is prompted to ‘read” the painting. “A window in the world” indeed, though also seen as the limitations imposed by the artist, as when a poet decides to form his words into a particular rhyme scheme. A canvas is always asking what a painter will fill out of the nothingness and for ages it is to copy what is to be seen in the world because capturing that seems worthwhile, previously even to when words were able to capture what it was they came to represent.

Leonardo da Vinci’s unfinished St. Jerome in the Wilderness, 1480 - 1490

A good way to understand painting as a thing made within the constraint of a flat rectangle is to look at some of the various versions of St. Jerome in the wilderness that were painted in the late fifteenth century. They show them to be varied enough to invoke interest in the distinctiveness of the painters as they make their art while still confined to standardized techniques and ideas. Leonardo da Vinci’s unfinished “St. Jerome in the Wilderness”, composed between 1480 and 1490, segments the parts of the picture. In the center is the molding of the face, deep into the subject being distracted or perhaps internal, a kind of suffering, faces always da Vinci’s long suit. The background gives a sense of distance, a characteristic motif of the period, while the lion stretched out in front of St. Jerome shows his back, especially the long tail elongating the lion’s spine. A speculation or recreation imagines that the space in the upper right would show a picture of Christ on the Cross, which makes sense becau8sethat image is presented in Cima de Congliano’s “St Jerome in the Wilderness” from about 1500-1505

The thing about da Vici’s version is that it is fragmented into its parts on the canvas, each area having its own subject and presentation, some fresh (the lion and the face) but some conventional (the background). Da Vinci is, of course, capable of integrating the parts into a single whole, as he does in the Last Supper, where the ensemble of faces makes each of them distinct even though the effect is to see them as a whole, never as successful as being a painting that is a single composition as well as an assemblage of one until Rembrandt. What the da Vinci painting shows is that the parts of a painting work simultaneously, the viewer shifting back and forth between the various parts of it and so seeing the painting as related in that simultaneous way, as that is opposed to a story, where a novel is separated by chapters as the reader proceeds sequentially and so supposing time intervenes and so causes events while that is not necessary in painting, where everything is going on at once. The story of the lion, and the legend attached to it, is next to the perhaps spiritual or mental image of Christ and the setting amid the mountains.

The Conegliano St. Jerome is better integrated but it also is assembled within the frame from its parts. On the right is a blue hued painting of St. Jerome praying to Christ on the cross, which is to the left, and is  a tall vertical line, while the mountains in the background are in the center and a set of stones indicating a cave is on the right but is cut off by the frame, the end of the canvas, which suggests that the viewer need not see the cave, only the suggestion of it, while the stones in front of it are given in detail, suggesting the ruggedness but also the artfulness of depicting stones. What ties the segments together is the storyline about a prayerful person pursuing his ascetic devotions but also the blue water in the center behind the rocks tied in with the other blue parts. So color and cropping allow a way to fashion various images into a whole. There is a need to do something about integration in a picture.

Cima da Conegliana, St. Jerome in the Wilderness, c. 1495

Albrecht Dürer, St. Jerome in the Wilderness, c. 1496

Albrecht Durer who did a St. Jerome in the Wilderness in 1496 did not use color to tie together the parts on his canvas. He restricted himself to thick and thin lines on the picture. There are vertically composed mountains on the left and the figure of St. Jerome in the center while the lion is beside him to the right. What provides a pleasing formation is the comparison between verticals and horizontals and added on is a diagonal whereby a path away from the right indicates the obligatory rendition of distance. This is a very abstract configuration that contemporary critics would find familiar but I assume that early modern painters and draftsmen also understood, all in the inevitable service of tying the elements of a painting or drawing into a unity, an element of art at least as important as the unities of time and space were essential to Aristotle’s conception of drama.

A second kind of art has to do with experience, which means that art consists of the emotional experience that is engendered by artistic presentations which somehow corresponds to the real and imaginary worlds from which the experience is drawn and distorted. It takes a moment to unpack what is meant by “experience”, that best understood in John Dewey’s “Art As Experience”. In the later parts of the Nineteenth Century, psychologists used the relationship between stimulus and response as a way to show cause and effect in people. If a flame approached your hand, you went ouch. There is a direct implication of one external event to a person’s sensation. But by the beginning of the Twentieth Century, Pragmatists abandoned that point of view, even if Skinner would later on clearly retain that framework. William Janes in “The Varieties of Religious Experience’ was interested in elaborating the consciousness of a believer as, for example, “once” or “second” born rather than what were the roots that led people to become religious in the first place. That is also true of other complex states of consciousness, as is the case in art and literature, and literary and art critics knew that. You could look at the picture or you could look at the emotional or intellectual response and it didn’t matter because it amounted to the same thing because what you earned and your failure to read the picture or novel properly was the result of failed attentiveness from in the response was what had been in the painting or the book as rather than the inevitability of its message coming through, the reader or audience the equivalent of being color blond or maybe lived for so long in a cave that they could not get the interactions between people that were involved in dialogue. Or, to look at the object rather than the response, maybe the author had not displayed dialogue well enough so that the irony of how Emma was clueless was insufficiently spelled out, though, of course, Jane Austen had done that over and over again.

Green and Tangerine on Red, Mark Rothko, 1956

An experience, therefore, is neither a cause nor an effect but is a representation of something in the world or in the imagination (for what could it otherwise be?) as that is crafted so as to convey its distinctive nature, a representation having all the ambiguities of how it is like and unlike its object, such as the extent is objective (as if copied from nature by an artist like Church, or subjective, as when Picasso represents in “Guernica” the anguish and pain of wartime, or the difference between the real in the sense of visually accurate, on the one hand, or the unreal, which is fantastic, as in Surrealism, where figures are somewhat but not quite accurate representations. A good example of representation is found in Rothko’s Abstract Expressionism which some people will say is about nothing but has simply abstracted out of portraits and landscapes the colors and shapes, those laid bear for themselves alone, even if artists have always known that embedded in their portraits were lines, shapes and color. But take another turn. What is happening is that the shapes and color are themselves subject matters, explored for their own sakes, and so Rothko in, for example, his 1956 “Green and Tangerine” provides elemental patches, as the philosophers would say to refer to an impression not yet formed into colors,  of the two colors that are surprising in each of their qualities and juxtapositions, also requiring attendance by Rothko to the multiple decisions he made: just how large the painting would be; how thick is the paint itself, what creates an unexpected juxtaposition of shades of or different colors, and so on, the colors and shades in realistic portraiture designed to provide meaning to a representation, the figure good or bad or in turmoil, while the colors in a Rothko just reveal themselves and so are thought to be meaningless rather than about themselves A view of a Rothko is liberated to think of the scheme for itself rather than as a realistic portrait or landscape, enjoying being outside the everyday which usually encloses our lives. 

It is curious that getting back to the elemental seems liberating because a portrait has been shed of its appearances, of what we see in everyday life, as if we had a new kind of x-ray vision that can shed a scene of its figures and meanings, but the same is knot the case with the case of sound, a less powerful taste than sight, because elemental forces of sound, like the repetitive sounding of drums  seem confining and deadening rather than liberating,the aesthetic experience of sound coming to be liberated into the religious terms for being “ethereal” or “sublime” because of pianos and violins and clarinets. The other senses of touch and smell create no art at al even if they are pleasant  and even taste,let me be forgiven by the great chefs, also does not convey much meaning, despite Levi-Straus’ attempt to explain otherwise, and story requiring not a sense but mind itself to allow there to be a bridge across time so that cause can be said to precede effect. In short, art is valued as the main  candidate of experience for itself rather than the facts, either of color or shape or face that art can reveal, which it did when Holbein made portraits so that Henry VIII could find out what these real people looked like. Experience is a very different standard to use for art than is the object itself, previously referred to as the art of making a thing into a thing through the organization of its parts. 

The Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild, Rembrandt, 1662

There is a third kind of entity that constitutes art. It is neither the object in the world that has been fashioned as art, nor is it the experience of having labeled a picture as an aesthetic object and so see the meanings and emotions evoked by treating it as art. Rather, it is the image in itself that is taken from the art object so that it is no different from thee multiple views a person sees as he or she walks up a street without thinking of them as a succession of snapshots framed as stills, but just what it is that is notices every so slightly altered as you walk forwards. It is art without thinking of it as art.But it is very difficult to eliminate the frame if one at all notices that a view is striking. Think of Rembrandt’s “The Syndics”, which might as well have been a posed photograph, akin to those taken through photography with an assemblage of the Supreme Court or a baseball team. The syndics are also looking forward to the photographer or the artist; they are also wearing their similar, collective costume; they are poised for the moment before going on with their businesses. Try to forget that and go at the image itself which can reveal information and emotion about that assemblage. Each of the syndics (or the baseball players) have distinct faces even if they are all serious minded. They show themselves as indicating a common purpose because of their dress, eve if the clothing in the syndics is of appropriate business attire rather than a uniform; and they are pausing in their efforts because it is important that they be assembled and recognized as such, and in that last observation or recognition are jumping back into being within a frame.  

Yet somehow viewers separate the image from its frame or its being as art and look to the substance rather than the composition or the other filters through which the image is understood. We look at “Guernica” to see atrocities rather than a suffering bull as its central image; we see the immodesty of a naked woman at a picnic luncheon rather than about how fantasy and reality are superimposed by an artist; we see Leonardo’s face in St Jerome as poignant and deep and not just an icon of spirituality.A good way of unleashing an image from its artistry is in photographs. Sure, many of them are composed, even when the photographs were made in wartime. While Civil War photographs may have been composed, the point was to get information about what the devastation looked like, how people were quartered, and how Grant was seen as surrounded by his generals, the point of the last of them that there seemed to be a lot of generals to conduct a war. The viewer saw that. Yes, the raising of the flag in Mt. Suribachi on Iwo Jimi was rigged and came across as aesthetic and emblematic, but there are so many other war photos which are less concerned with composition than getting the facts: what it looked like and not just heard on the radio what FDR said to Congress during his Dec. 8th, 1941 Day of Infamy Speech. You had to be there. Similarly, there are loads of footage of the attack on Congress on Jan. 6, 2020 and very few, if any, were well composed. The footage recorded what happened, was a record, rather than a work of art.

Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, March 1936

Not only war or political images can emerge out of art into being something aside from art. Any image can reverberate on its own out of the available images loaded from life and, indeed, made use of by artists aside from their compositions as what convey meaning and emotion. The child in any crib, pondered by any parent, can be appropriated as the Christ child and added on any number of meanings. Anyone walking down the street can see how buildings superimpose themselves with other buildings and so create complicated spaces with horizontals, verticals and diagonals quite aside from the fact that those relations are also explored by artists given to cityscapes. The artist then is to capture a particular available image in a way so that it is more striking, as when Dorothea Lange captured Okie women moving West.

Re-release: Why Noam Chomsky Is Wrong

Right wing Americans explain themselves with either the primitive thought of conspiracy theories such as Qanon or the more sophisticated ideologies of Nazi style racial warfare. Left wing Americans invoke the warfare between the rich and the poor. One of the most prominent of the Leftists for many years has been Noam Chomsky whose ideas sum up most of the memes used by the left and are therefore quite distinct from what was considered the Liberal and now the Centrist Democratic view that is ideo;ogically based  on democratic constitutionalism and on the concepts of  rights and a policy of ever extended entitlements and the structures that are within the U. S. Constitution. I have therefore re-released my post about Noam Chomsky so as to provide a challenge against the leftist shibboleths.

RE-RELEASE: WHY NOAM CHOMSKY IS WRONG

June 12, 2017

Noam Chomsky, so I am told, is much admired as a truth-teller among young people looking for accurate explanations of what is going on in America politically and economically. His basic thesis is that the small number of people who are in power in this country exert their interest in enriching themselves by pursuing imperialist policies abroad and oppressive policies at home. They keep down poor and even middle class people both foreign and domestic. I think this view is mistaken. Rather, Chomsky is just repeating shibboleths that were inaccurate when they were first enunciated by Lenin and then, for a later generation, by C. Wright Mills, who wrote in “The Power Elite”, in the Fifties, that militarists dominated the United States government and fomented wars so that they could increase the defense budget as well as keep America in control of third world countries, the natural resources and domestic labor of these countries that fell into the American sphere of influence thereby available for exploitation. Let us deaggregate this point of view into distinct propositions and hold them up for examination.

First is the idea that the United States turns underdeveloped countries into colonies so that it can steal their natural resources and employ their work forces at very low wages.  Chomsky, in “Who Rules the World?”, applies his brush of derision for United States foreign policy very broadly and very thinly, to Haiti, to Cuba, to Palestine, and even to the springboards for 9/11. The United States just can’t do anything right. But foreign policy is more complicated than that. Barrington Moore, Jr. showed long ago that homelands spent more on their colonies than the wealth they brought in from them (with the possible exception of Belgium’s grim rule of the Congo, which much enriched the royal family). For the most part, colonies were ways of increasing national pride, especially among the newly enfranchised working classes which would therefore vote for jingoistic politicians. As far as the United States is concerned, it acquired from Spain its Caribbean and Pacific empire at the end of the nineteenth century because some nation was going to take it away from Spain and it might as well be us, we not wanting Europeans to be involved in the Americas and when it was clear that Japan was the rising power in Asia and we did not want the Philippines to fall to them. As usual, the explanation for American foreign policy is geo-political, a calculation of realpolitik, which means what is in our national interest, whatever the claims of morality or of economics. The United States has been bailing out Puerto Rico ever since it took over the island.

That insight applies to our Cuban policy, much chastised by Chomsky for having turned against Castro because he was going to distribute land to the peasants. Batista, whom Castro overthrew, had served the interests of the United Fruit Company, the Bell Telephone Company, and American sugar interests. But those corporations had made use of the opportunity to invest in Cuba rather than were the cause of our engagement with Cuba. Yes, one issue that led to a severing of relations with Cuba after Castro took over the government (not mentioned by Chomsky perhaps because he was not familiar with the fact) was that Castro did not want to honor the sugar quota that had limited exports of Cuban sugar to the United States so as to protect the American domestic sugar industry. But protectionism is not imperialism. Moreover, the break with Cuba was over political matters. Liberals like myself, who were reluctant to regard Castro as a menace or see him as a Communist until he declared himself to be one (and even then wondered whether he was saying that just to curry favor with his new masters in the Kremlin) were appalled by the show trials Castro staged immediately after taking power. Batista officials were tried in football stadiums, rapidly convicted and quickly thereafter executed. Castro also clamped down on the press and began a persecution of gays. Castro showed himself not to be a small “d” democrat, but just another Latin American strong man, this time the client of our arch enemy, the Soviet Union, and it made no sense for the United States to allow Soviet penetration into the Caribbean, the Cold War waging all around the globe, from the Caribbean to Europe to Afghanistan, to Vietnam and Korea and the Horn of Africa. There was more at stake than the price of sugar.

If there is imperialism in the world today, it does not involve the developed world exploiting Latin America and Africa;  it is in Europe. The North of the continent exploits the South of the continent by offering it loans that it knows can not be paid back and then, like American bankers, foreclosing or threatening to foreclose on the Greek or the Spanish economy unless those countries engage in painful austerity measures to allow them to repay their debts at least in part. But the more important message is that the European Union never learned the lesson demonstrated by Alexander Hamilton when he helped to further the cause of the new union of American states by having the federal government assume the debts of the states, thereby making the federal government the center of economic power and stabilizing the currency and increasing commerce. Rather, Brussels was too hesitant to federalize economic policy and so keep Southern member states from borrowing more than they could afford. As with the American mortgage crisis, don’t blame the people who take out loans but those who offer them to borrowers they know cannot pay them back.

The second and conjoined idea is that the rich people get richer by making poor and middle class people poorer right back here in the United States. That is certainly what Republican tax policy adds up to. Chomsky makes the idea that the rich rule the country for their own benefit by blaming it, in his book “Requiem for the American Dream” (2017), on the shift in power from the industrialists to the money managers, those same people responsible for the Great Recession. But both Chomsky and Bernie Sanders are wrong to think that the extravagant salaries and bonuses the rich bestow on themselves is what makes everybody else worse off and that thereby the incomes of the rich need to be curtailed except to the extent that they can provide the wealth, through taxation, to build infrastructure, fund entitlement programs, and improve the lives of the poor and middle class. Rather, Hillary Clinton, however flawed as an explicator of her own policies, was closer to the mark. What the poor and middle class need are higher basic standards of living and a promotion ladder that allows them to improve their condition of life over the course of a work life. That is why a much higher minimum wage, expanded healthcare coverage, and scholarships to community colleges where people can learn a trade, are more important than reducing the wealth of those on top. How does making the rich suffer help the poor and middle class except, as I say, by providing more taxes to support programs that help the poor and middle class? Punitive taxes don’t accomplish anything except to make radicals like Chomsky feel satisfied that they are creating a more just system simply by making rich people suffer. Rather, look at what the poor and middle class need and go from there.

So, in short, Chomsky supplies neither a detailed study of particular issues or a sustained exercise in creating an analytic framework within which to place these issues, even if any number of social commentators on both sides of the political aisle, such as John Dewey and Thorstein Veblen and William Graham Sumner have done just that. Rather, Chomsky is doing on the left what William Buckley, Jr. and Barry Goldwater did two generations ago on the right. He is just pushing out platitudes that those who are already convinced that there is something rotten in Denmark can glom onto without needing to think through. Let us hope he is not as successful as they were in providing the rhetoric that would get Presidents elected.

Tickler Is Up!

To All: Our tickler system (RSS) is now up and running and so my readers can hear of my latest and sign up here, if you have not done so, to get my posts hot off the presses. Marty Wenglinsky