A Short Post on DEI

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

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

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

Grand Themes in Literature

Stories explain societies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Short Post on Taxes

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

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

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

Re-release: Class and Gender in Thirties Movies

Men, like the poor, are stolid and reliable, while women, like the rich, are diverse and uncertain.

In four years we will mark the centenary of “The Jazz Singer”, the first talkie movie. That is as long a time as the century between the time of “Great Expectations” and when I graduated from college. That seems to me to be a very big difference. There should be a major celebration of the invention of the talkies, as important as great battles or other events so dedicated, because so much was ushered into our consciousnesses. Maybe the publication dates of great novels, those who always seemed to have been here once they were created, should also provide a new version of a saints calendar, also now forever once canonized. Oh, and how the talkies talked! The dialogue of Thirties films, often based on plays and novels, were crisp and witty and eloquent, characters saying what they had to say about themselves and other people and their situations, even including “The Grapes of Wrath”, where Henry Fonda makes clear enough what an Okie immigrant family off to California had to say for himself in his understated way. But that decade was so long ago, however vibrant they may still be, that the topics covered in them, across the genres of comedy, tragedy and melodrama, are very different from the ones seen today and so it takes some excavation so as to mine them.

The topics for the decade were the condition of women and the condition of the rich. In both cases, the conditions were problematic in that it wasn’t clear what women or the rich were like or what they should be like. Both of those kinds of people were murky and so difficult to understand. Ernst Lubitch, known for his scintillating touch, starts “Bluebeard’s Ninth Wife” with  whether Claudette Colbert is married or unmarried or a loose woman or not because she is buying the trousers of men’s pajamas. It turns out that she is buying it for her father and so that is respectable and so the romance can begin, Gary Cooper, not known for comedy, the usual and unproblematic man who is daring, decisive and stoic, just what a stereotypical man should be, just as he is in all his stereotypical roles all the way through “High Noon” and beyond, while Grace Kelly is surprising in that she appears ats the decisive decision maker at the end of that movie. Women are amazingly different from one another even if also attractive while male heroes like Fonda and Heston and the aforementioned Cooper are true to form even if also deficient rather than fulfilled, as happens in “The Wizard of Oz”, where the Tin Man is lacking a heart and the Scarecrow lacks a brain, and the cowardly Lion lacks courage. A true man has to gain all three attributes, while Dorothy and the other women and girls all have their own peculiar motives, Dorothy wanting just to go home, and all those witches, some good and some bad.

The same is true of the women in the melodramas of the Thirties that were regarded as “women movies” because they explored the varieties of what were women, ever fascinating and to men alluring even if subject to conversation as “only” about women’s concern. The queen of the sub-genre was Bette Davis who could be everything: an ugly duckling who becomes a therapist and a lover to a limited Paul Henried in “Now, Voyager”, a flibbertigibbet who becomes a heroine as she faces death in “Dark Victory'', men in these movies dutiful, like George Brett, never fully aware of what is going on in women’s secrets, as when he is killed in a duel in “Jezebel” because Bette Davis eggs him on about supposed slights and then she turns into a hero by taking Henry Fonda into a pest house during an epidemic, she more likely to manage through it if anybody could. Women could be anything, but men were the same old.

The same division between women as problematic as to what they are while men have problems, whether of enemies or existential issues while remaining true to their identity or just failing to accomplish it by being too soft or insufficiently suspicious or overtaken by lust, as happens in “Double Indemnity”, something Catholics understand as an overabundance of a natural thing, also applies to the rich, who are problematic in that they are opaque, not quite revealing what they are up to.  The young George Cukor’s movie “Holiday” enters a rich home to find out what those people are like. The girl to whom he is engaged but he knew little about her turns out to want him to become a banker, which he, Cary Grant, finds boring, himself a self made man through Harvard and a fancy law firm, and wants to try out new things, which is admirable for men, and so she tires of him, while her sister, Katherine Hepburn, perhaps at her most glamorous rather than overly angular, wants Grant to follow his whims, which is what a respectable and loving girl wants her man to happen, a lapse into conventionality unbecoming of Hepburn as the independent woman, but there being other fish to fry, and so the two at the end come to one another, as would be expected from the first moment the two stars meet with one another because, after all, they are the stars. The financial magnate of the family, on the other hand, is difficult to understand other than that he has connections but does not know why capitalist fetishism is a concept much less a fault, just trying to meet his potential son in law by offering his own connections and wealth, having disregarded his own son who drinks too much because he is so tied to the loathsome bank when he had wanted to be a musician. Woe is me to the children of the rich. They are all psychologically scarred and most of them would be better off without money, which is a fantasy that other than rich people in the audience might find as a compensation for not being rich.

Unlike most Thirties movies, which are long on talk and short on visuals, Cukor is alive with set decoration, leading to his visualization thirty years later of “My Fair Lady”, what with all those flowers. Here, in “Holiday”, Cukor contrasts the mansion with staircases and internal elevators and regal paintings and adornments, with the room Hepburn has set aside for herself as having a fire, comfortable sofas, bookcases and the piano and barbells her brother used before he gave up his childish ways. (Someone else, I suppose, stokes that fire. As Mel Brooks might say, “It's not bad being rich.”) Hepburn is comfortable rather than stuffy, and that seems all to be said of the difference between the rich and those not inclined to be rich, the father saying he does not understand what is happening to the world other than that it makes him uncomfortable. The rich are not greedy, just confused, a set on the way out if they could bother to notice. Maybe the title is called “Holiday” because viewers are on holiday visiting the rich but knowing the rich are dodos, those people making themselves rather than their employees miserable.Feel sorry for them. That is a kind of vacation.

On the other hand, the poor are not problematic, even if they are also tragic or flawed. To use the terms used by Civil Rights activists in the Sixties, when whites asked what Blacks wanted, the answer was that Blacks wanted to have what white people already had. Similarly, the poor in the Thirties, wanted the comforts of the rich, by hook or by crook. Edward G. Robinson in “Little Caesar” wanted to become a powerful boss and his nerve, intelligence and diligence, all male traits, led that to him, even though he is machine gunned in the end, a classic tragedy about the wheel of life, ending with his remark “Is this the end of Rico?”, which sadly it is. The hero of “Scarface” also rises to the top and also is upended, even more unsettled by his unaware lust for his own sister. But that is aside from the rise and fall, all the way through to the Godfather trilogy, where he cannot free himself from crime and become, let us say, a Senator. His greatest betrayal is that of his wife, who aborts his child, because she does not want to live with this gangster family, and that is the only time that Michael Corleone rages rather than calculates, while his older brother Sonny is always raging, and so weaker as a man. The type of men runs through the movie decades.  

One of those so-called “screwball comedies” of the Thirties combines the two binaries of male and female and rich and poor. It is Gregory De Cava’s “My Man Godfrey” starring William Powell and Carol Lombard. The magnate father is annoyed at the  spendthrift ways of his wife, who is a ninny, as well as his two daughters, one mean and vindictive and snooty while the other is ditzy, and supposed to have had a nervous breakdown in the past when in fact she was trying to escape from her madcap lives. The two daughters compete in a scavenger hunt, which means they are so mean spirited and callous and humiliating so as to recruit some poor person as well as a live goat to show himself to a society party to win points for having accumulated worthy objects that are useless. The mother has what is called a “protege”, which is an exiled Russian who amuses the family by walking around the living room like a gorilla to amuse the family, in return for which he gets canapes and the chance to play the piano. The idle rich are women who don’t know what to be or to do with themselves. 

Into their lot comes a bum who, it turns out (spoiler alert!) to be down on his luck because he was a Harvard graduate who had been spurned by a woman and thought of suicide but was impressed by the stoical men who endured their poverty and so he lived in a shanty near a refuse dump and is picked up for the scavenger hunt and then asks to serve as a butler for what shows itself to be a ditzy family. He too is the compassionate, articulate, well mannered and stoical and resourceful person who can lead the labile young girl out of her distress and she falls for him even though he is thought to be a bum, hardly likely given his bearing, while another bum just wants his reward for having been entered into the scavenger hunt. Poor men have dignity while rich girls are mean or atwitter.

I take note, again, of the set decoration and the costumes. The, at the time, well appointed kitchen has a refrigerator with a cylindrical portion on top of it which I take was the refrigeration unit, and is, of course, now antiquated. Technology marches on.. The women wear Thirties gowns that seem to me colorless and dowdy though no doubt glamorous at the time. Fashion also moves on. The dump where Godfrey is found is just off Sutton Place, which means, I infer, before the FDR Drive built in that area and doing away with the dumps and the bums. Infrastructure changes. The value of a movie made in a time will last as physical culture is available to be appreciated from another time for its atmosphere whatever the time’s only much more slowly changing social structure.

How different it is in the movies twenty years later. In the musical remake of “The Philadelphia Story”, with Grace Kelly and Bing Crosby, called “High Society”, only the just teen daughter acts haughty and weird, everyone else normal people. Another movie at the time, “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” has Frederic March as the haggard advertising mogul who blames himself for having neglected his troubled daughter, je in despair about her rather than, in the Thirties, indulging her. Gregory Peck is the up and coming advertising executive, also forthright and stoic, who arranges to provide regular money to the child he had made when in Italy during the war when he finds out about their condition, and the wife supports him in his plan, something regarded as heroic. 

Skip another generation. The rich are like Michael Douglas in  “Wall Street”, from 2010, just greedy rather than people who can justify themselves, as investment bankers do, of making it possible for the economic market to work, and young women are physically exploited by rapacious men, as is clear in “The Handmaid's Saga”. Reese Witherspoon in the recent miniseries “The Morning Show” offers up many victims of rape because of men using their powerful positions, a version of the idea of a previous generation where  Andrea Dworkin saif that all sex is rape, just modified enough to be plausible, when what I think is that Jane Austen got the relation of the sexes and the rich and the poor just about right, however are the changes since then of costume and mores. Mr. Wickham, in “Pride and Prejudice”, is a cad, but he is an exception to the rule, not the rule itself.

A word should be said about the relation of fiction to reality. Should we trust to Thirties movies and those films that follow them about the reality of what is depicted there? After all, fiction, whether a novel or a movie, is made up. Its characters and plots are concocted even if films claim to be “based on a true story” because scriptwriters put in events and characters so as to make the films clearer to follow and so as to fill out a generic type.Its hard to make up settings, it is true, especially in science fiction, where even Kubrick’s “2001” is an extrapolation of how women and men would dress and how no one would smoke. So a reader is unlikely to trust fiction. People are distorted from what people really are and situations are abbreviated or just insufficiently imagined rather than an accurate depiction of reality.

But what is the alternative? Voting behavior measured through polling data may have said somewhat accurately from 1940 to about 1980 or so who would vote for whom, that moment past in that people came to hide their preferences by lying. And even the most innocuous question, such as whether you approve of the President, is ambiguous, in that it doesn’t make clear whether you approve his way as a person or approve of his policies. And much of history is to condense contemporary newspaper reporting with some documents added on. So what else is there to do but find the truth through fiction, especially when it comes to the temper of the times or the fads of the moment, like Hula Hoops and the war between the Communists and the ex-Communists that Whittiker Chambers regarded as the central debate and war of his time? 

I would suggest we follow Georg Simmel who thought that what was embedded inevitably in fiction was not the mores or the fashions or the technologies of a time, however much those artifacts are accurately recorded in film s of the past, but what Simmel regarded as the inevitable consequences of sociation, which means the qualities that emerge from people dealing with one another. Things like cooperation and conflict and hierarchy are everywhere the same down to the higher apes and I would suggest the same for friendship (as old as “Gilgamesh”), and courtship and political negotiation. Simmel modified only to mean that social structures may change, but only very gradually, even as those other things feel quite different from one generation to the next. Men and women haven’t changed since Samson and Delilah, even if Feminists say otherwise. So trust the Thirties movies as telling the truth.

Trump's Charisma

Giotto, The Road to Calvary, c.1305

Max Weber defined “charisma” as a personal quality but I prefer to regard it as the attribute of an office rather than as a personal quality because of the derivation of the term “charisma” as referring to people being invested with an aura like power by higher authority as happens when there is a laying down of hands in a church congregation or empowered by regulations in Catholic Church so that one is made a priest or a bishop. Hebrew rabbis earned their charisma by the number of their followers. In a modern secular world, political figures get their charisma through election into office, Donald Trump thinking that a President has the right to kill his political opponents, so universal is the power of the charisma of that office. That is very different from the popular version of charisma where the term refers to personal charm and attractiveness, which applies to movie stars and pop singers and may indeed be part of what leads some people, such as Ronald Reagan, to be elevated to the Presidency.

More formally put and more up to date is to define charisma as a role in that it has a body of attributes that make it recognizable as having a distinctive set of activities, such as being a bus driver or a physician or a father who is called upon to do the things that are part of those roles or to be found lacking in that role, so it can be said some people are bad parents or inept at repairing a computer glitch even if they pretend to be otherwise.  Roland Wulbert has suggested to me that a person  is charismatic if they are never contrite, just as Jesus was never contrite and Donald Trump was criticized for not being contrite even though not being so was at the heart of his being and so violated normal behavior. But he was being what he was, which was charismatic, and there are oyster attributes to be added as the qualities of charisma, including incisiveness that sees farther than ordinary people do, or confidence despite what ordinary people may think, or as Trump points out, being a stable genius, even if he is not eloquent, as Hitler was, and so may mangle or exaggerate or even lie, the truth underlying his words an expression of his charisma. 

Here are some other attributes of the role of the charismatic. Such a person has authority to declare meanings as legitimate, as when supreme court justices decide whether separate but equal is fair at the turn into the Twentieth Century and is a contradiction half a century later. Charismatics endure slander against them, as is the case with Jesus and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Trump. Charismatics draw their followers to themselves, which is the case with Luther and Lenin and Trump. Why do their followers do so? That seems the most central power and so is taken to be a magic like enchantment of the charismatic person by the followers, as if they were indeed pop stars. But the basis of charismatic following can be tawdry and unholy. Gandhi pedaled a retrogressive economic policy but adopted a garb  and a demeanor and attracted publicity that made contributions to Indian independence. Trump was an inherited real estate mogul who bankrupted his own casinos  but had an afterlife as a celebrity selling the idea of being a mogul on television who dreamed of being trich and respected, which was every Ralph Kramden’s dream, and that led him into a political venture he expected to lose and wound up the possession of a gigantic following. Barnum would be proud. Nothing very impressive is needed to get one’s credentials as a charismatic person. That is why Weber thought charisma introduced something new into the social mix but was unreliable because it was untethered. FDR had charm and he did win over the American people, but Al Smith thought there wasn’t much to be said for a cripple who would die soon, and instead persevered for thirteen years as President.

So if personal charm is not the key to being charismatic, unlike movie stars who have to fill the screens with their magnetism,.what is it that people make of Trump that gives him his hold on them? People interviewed about Trump, including both ordinary voters and people like Lindsay Graham, who seems to just admit accepting to the fact that Trump has his loyal supporters and that is reason enough to make his peace with him, is that he expresses himself crudely towards women, or with exaggeration, though not quite willing to say he lies, because Trump apparently evokes a deeper sense of what is wrong with American politics. Yes, Trump is a braggart and a loudmouth and always mean and angry but maybe people feel liberated by having someone voice feelings and ideas that they themselves would be ashamed to voice. Trump is naughty and that makes respectable people feel glad about it even if they say tsk tsk to his more outrageous claims or secretly sympathize with his racist thoughts to, for example, reinstate an Arab ban on immigration, only letting Europeans in. Trump expresses their darkest angels. That doesn’t mean he is not likable. It is that supporters either feign likeability, as with Graham (who early on despised him) or have transmuted unlikeability into its opposite, seeing the virtue of being at odds with everything in  government they find objectionable as one Trump supporter in 2016 who was against government intervention but demanded saving her Social Security, as if that weren't a government program.

 It is a good question whether Trump found an audience looking for him or whether his support was generated out of the shambles of the 2016 Republican primary battle, where no opponent seemed  to be able to deal with his demeaning jokes about his contenders. They still thought candidates should maintain some dignity and he didn’t or treated their opponents with it.

Weber thought that charismatics brought innovation into social life because that was the only alternative to custom and law as forms of social control, custom being the time immemorial way to do things, and law and bureaucracy, by which Weber meant the same thing, as having begun to prosper in the late Medieval period with the development of joint stock companies. But innovation is only a universal claim by charismatics that they are doing so. In fact, charismatics use innovation to establish retrogression. Jesus announced a new dispensation of being kind to people when, in fact, the Prophets had said the same while introducing the retrograde idea of miracles and pagan mythology. Hitler announced the innovations of technology, such as planes and cars and weaponry, but was reviving an older spirit of family values and ethnic warfare. Stalin was ushering in a new age of economic organization when he was establishing himself as the most bloodthirsty of the Czars. In general, it is incorrect to agree with “Ideology and Utopia” and think the cutting division is between past and future mindedness.

Trump is also a charismatic who pretends progress but engages in retrogression. He says he will be revolutionary by dismantling “the deep state”, suspend parts of the Constitution and creating detention centers for hundreds of thousand illegal aliens, but what he actually proposes is an old fashioned border wall, the self same restoration of Fifties family values, and punitive forms of law and order, a platform adopted from traditional Republicans so as to get their support when, pre-political, he had been open on social issues, as might be expected of most New Yorkers. Trump has joined a Know Nothing nativist party, though he may not mean he knows only Americanism but that he really doesn’t know very much about anything.

Weber misunderstood the innovativeness and potency of custom and law. Custom does not mean mores of very ancient times but only practices that seem to have ever been and forever to be even if they last only for a brief period of time. So the double standard whereby sexual chastity  was expected for only women existed for hundreds and hundreds of years or maybe for thousands but was suspended a genera tion or two back and now it seems natural for women to have sexual relations as they please. That is the new natural and an amnesia sts upon what was the natural previously. Similarly, law also seems to suspend time in that what a law does is make edicts stated in the past binding in the future. But laws can be modified. The Founding Fathers developed the Constitution as an original form of government as that was expressed in a set of intersecting fundamental laws that emphasized the balance of power and Supreme Court rulings are able to create rights and abolish them, as when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Roe v. Wade and abolished the right of abortion fifty years later. Law is flexible and those who make it and administer it are also flexible, rather than an iron rule of delegated authority responsible only to an original charismatic. Weber was being too Lutheran in thinking that the sole freedom of a person or a society was to submit, to engage in free will, to be obedient to God or some other charismatic, and that applies to custom as well, whereby people adopt and dispense with hula hoops, the moon walk, Taylor Swift and hiding under student desks so as to train for an atomic invasion.

Another cardinal characteristic of a charismatic person is not to take their words too seriously. The allegiance of the follower to the charismatic is formed by the strength of the personality of the charismatic, the follower trying to gauge the subtleties of the emotions conveyed even if not clear on the character underlying the personality. The charismatic remains an enigma, obscured from others even as followers try to grasp his meanings or being. Jesus remains enigmatic, his personality obscure, seen mostly from the outside, and his sayings enigmatic, deliberately confounding his listeners, though those who wrote down and edited his sayings were developed well enough to constitute a literature, in that people have pondered their meanings for thousands of years. Moses was charismatic even though and maybe because he stuttered and had a temper, and smote a person, as did Billy Budd. Washington was not charismatic, even though he was tall and dignified, because he stated what he said clearly and neither was Lincoln charismatic in that he was eloquent, even though both figures are retrospectively regarded as central iconic figures. Hitler’s strong suit was his emotional fervor, not the strength of his reasoning. He was fascinating rather than taken as wise.

Jesus is understood as charismatic and has been recognized as such for a very long time, whatever He was in life. Giotto painting “Jesus at Calvary”, from 1305, makes that clear by having his face turned to the viewer while the other figures are part of the mise en scene. Jesus is without expression, an icon of a figure, rather than realistic and so Giotto is bringing a Medieval representation of Jesus into Giotgto’s realistic setting. Jesus is different from other people and also silent  and expressionless while other people bustle about, whatever His other concerns might be, about heaven or His Father or the plight of mankind, speculations where Jesus’ consciousness is never plumbed. His charisma is for the ages rather than the property of the historical Jesus.

Donald Trump should therefore not be expected to offer wisdom but rather his fierce meanness, as I have suggested, which gives him his allure, and it is his followers to explain that as an attractive feature, just as why the early followers of Jesus are to find attractive an itinerant preacher who was crucified, whatever was the evolving church structure that sustained him. Maybe Trump’s hold on people will dissipate if he is convicted of multiple felonies, but maybe, then again, not. Alive or dead, he may remain appealing to a figure who garners resentments both those real and imagined. Mankind is not likely to be rid of resentment.