The Loeb Classical Library

Originally posted by Acilius on Los Thunderlads, 13 September 2011. Comment there.

A logo Harvard commissioned to celebrate the publication of the 500th volume in the Loeb series

In honor of this year’s 100th anniversary of the Loeb Classical Library, the Barnes & Noble Review posts a piece by Adam Kirsch on the books in that series that describe Socrates. These include not only the dialogues of Plato, but also Xenophon’s Memorabilia and Aristophanes’ Clouds.

If I were given Kirsch’s assignment, I would not have chosen these as examples of the strengths of the Loeb Library. Most of the 518 volumes in the Loeb series have the same format: a brief introduction, combining remarks about an ancient Greek or Roman author with remarks about the manuscripts in which that author’s works have come down to us; then one of those works, presented in the original on the left hand page and an English translation on the facing page. A few years after the Loebs began to appear in the USA, the Collection Budé began to appear in France. The Budés are rather like the Loebs, only with French translation on the left and the original on the right.

When the Loeb series began in 1911, the texts and translations were of wildly uneven quality. The great problem the series faced was that each volume was entrusted to one person, who might be an accomplished textual critic or an accomplished translator, but who was not especially likely to excel in both of those fields. Very poor translations were produced when, as some critics put it, men who had never before tried their hand at English verse were required to translate Greek verse into it; A. S. Way’s translation of Euripides was long famous as an example of this. The translations by David Kovacs that replaced Way’s version are certainly readable, though, perhaps in reaction to Way’s ludicrously purple versifying, they are so resolutely unpoetic as to obscure the fact that Euripides was writing verse drama.

Even some of the prose translations were unreadable; at times I’ve picked up A. D. Godley’s Loeb of Herodotus to sort out some thorny passage in the Greek, only to find that I was using the Greek as a crib to decipher Godley’s English. The Loeb translations of the Socratic writings aren’t as badly rendered as that, but none is among the best translations of its original available in English. Other volumes were feature readable translations, but unreliable texts. Again, the Socratic volumes aren’t the worst offenders, but neither would their Greek texts be useful to a scholar.

If I had to choose a single volume to praise the Loeb series, I would pick A. W. Mair’s edition of Oppian, Colluthus, and Tryphiodorus. Not only are the texts exemplary, but the translations are sufficiently sensitive that even a Greekless reader might be able to understand why the two poems attributed to Oppian are unlikely to have been produced by the same person. (Granted, it helps that the author of each poem starts by telling us where he was born, and it isn’t the same place, but still, the style is important.) And the footnotes represent a fine commentary on these three neglected authors.

Scientists need media advisors

Originally published by Acilius on Los Thunderlads, 12 September 2011. Go to that post for comments.

The other day I read an article in Popular Science magazine profiling Felisa Wolfe-Simon, the NASA-sponsored scientist who made headlines in December with a paper claiming that a particular strain of bacteria throve in environments high in arsenic and low on phosphorous. Wolfe-Simon hopes to find a life form that uses arsenic in its DNA in the way that all other known organisms use phosphorous, and NASA foregrounded that hope in its publicity for the paper. While Wolfe-Simon did not claim that she had proven that the bacteria were using arsenic in this way, so much press discussion centered on that idea that when subsequent findings suggested that they probably weren’t, she was subjected to a kind of disgrace. In the Popular Science piece, Wolfe-Simon says that her career may very well be over now.

After I’d read this sad tale, I turned on the TV. The History Channel was showing a program they’d produced in 2008 about Professor Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, a political scientist who has used game theory to devise an algorithm for use in analyzing high-level decision-making. To be precise, about a third of the show concerned Professor Bueno de Mesquita. This third included many excerpts of the professor and his associates talking to the camera about his research. The other two thirds were about Nostradamus. Neither Professor Bueno de Mesquita nor any of his associates ever mentions Nostradamus, and only one of the many Nostradamus fans who appear mentions Professor Bueno de Mesquita. I strongly suspect that the professor did not know that he was going to be presented as “The Next Nostradamus.”

Two opinion surveys I have not conducted

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 12 September 2011:

1. I teach in a state university deep in the interior of the USA. It is likely that most of my students plan to settle in urban areas after they graduate, but a significant minority would strongly prefer to live in rural areas. And it is definitely the case that most of them are looking for a person with whom to live, in whichever setting they prefer.

The students seem to spend more time than one might expect arguing about what restrictions, if any, the law should place on private gun ownership. I wonder if they raise this topic as a way of signaling to potential mates whether they plan to settle in the city or in the countryside. I’m not an opinion researcher, but perhaps someone who is might like to see if support for lax gun laws is a strong indicator of a preference for a rural life and support for restrictive gun laws is a strong indicator of a preference for city life. If it should turn out that these opinions are strong indicators of these preferences, it would be interesting to see under just what sort of circumstances people volunteer opinions about gun control and strive to be identified with those opinions.

2. My wife has cerebral palsy. Many of her friends, like her, grew up with major disabilities. The university where I teach prides itself on accessibility to the disabled, so both through my marriage and through my work I have come to know a substantial number of articulate, highly educated people who have been visibly disabled throughout their lives.

It seems to me that the people I know who meet this description show the same range of opinions as do Americans generally about public policy regarding abortion. Some think that abortion should always be legal, some think it should always be illegal, some support each of a variety of restrictions. What none of them accepts is the label “pro-choice.” I’ve heard people who would not vote for a policy that would bar or discourage any abortion anywhere hotly deny that they are “pro-choice.” I don’t know if my acquaintances are in any way representative of Americans with disabilities. If a survey showed that American adults who grew up as disabled children are in fact much more likely to want to keep abortion legal than they are to call themselves “pro-choice,” and that they are in this way different from American adults who grew up without visible disabilities, I wonder what we might find about the label “pro-choice” and the rhetoric associated with it that they find repellent.

The Nation, 26 September 2011

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 9 September 2011:

James Longenbach contributes a surprisingly sympathetic review of a collection of letters by the young T. S. Eliot. Longenbach argues that Eliot’s Unitarian family made a fetish of doubt and complexity, and that the aspects of Eliot’s life and thought that puzzled them came from a rebellion against this fetish, against “the Eliot Way.” Eliot rebelled against what he called “the Way of Doubt” by time and again taking actions that entailed an irrevocable commitment. As Longenbach puts it:

In retrospect, all of the momentous events in Eliot’s life were determined by a moment of awful daring. In 1933 he left Vivien as abruptly as he had married her, and his decisions to enter the Church of England and, many years later, to marry his secretary, Valerie Fletcher, were similarly nurtured in complete secrecy and subsequently revealed to a world in which even close friends were baffled by Eliot’s behavior, left feeling as if they had never known him. To Eliot’s Unitarian family, a conversion to Anglo-Catholicism seemed as explicable as an initiation into a cult.

Considering this disposition of Eliot’s, and in view of his time and place, it is nothing short of amazing that he did not join the Blackshirts. When Longenbach provides this excerpt from an unpublished essay of Eliot’s, it becomes amazing that he didn’t murder anyone:

In Gopsum Street a man murders his mistress. The important fact is that for the man the act is eternal, and that for the brief space he has to live, he is already dead. He is already in a different world from ours. He has crossed the frontier. The important fact that something is done which cannot be undone—a possibility which none of us realize until we face it ourselves. For the man’s neighbors the important fact is what the man killed her with? And at precisely what time? And who found the body?… But the medieval world, insisting on the eternity of punishment, expressed something nearer the truth.

The man’s neighbors, in their fascination with the details of the crime, might easily fall into a psychological or other scientific explanation of the killer’s motivation, which would in turn reduce the crime itself to the ordinary level of everyday life. The medieval view insists that murder, like other sin, is not ordinary, that it is a thing set apart from the created world around us. Eliot may not have craved murder, but he did crave that sort of setting apart. For him, it was a lie to say that the whole world is one thing and that it can be reduced to one set of laws. Eliot’s onetime teacher Irving Babbitt was fond of quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson’s lines, “There are two laws discrete,/ not reconciled–/ Law for man and law for thing;/ The last builds town and fleet,/ But it runs wild,/ And doth the man unking… Let man serve law for man,/ Live for friendship, live for love,/ For truth’s and harmony’s behoof;/ The state may follow how it can,/ As Olympus follows Jove.” These lines come from a poem Emerson dedicated to W. H. Channing. W. H. Channing was the nephew of Unitarian theologian William Ellery Channing, and like Emerson was himself a Unitarian preacher. The Channings, Eliots, and Emersons were all related to each other, so Eliot likely perked up when he heard Babbitt quote these lines.

While Emerson may have concluded that the “Law for Man” is best observed by general friendliness, Babbitt drew a more sobering conclusion. In his first book, Literature and the American College (which takes the lines from Emerson as its epigraph,) Babbitt explained that he called himself a “humanist” rather than a “humanitarian” because the former word suggests a more selective sympathy than does the latter. One can see the humanitarian impulse, in Babbitt’s sense of the word, in the neighbors’ insistent focus on the practical details of the murder, in the implication that the act of murder can be reduced to those details, that it can therefore be put on a level with other acts a person might perform. The humanitarian impulse thus reduces even murder to one form of behavior among many. In an age dominated by humanitarianism, murder loses its terror. The word “mystery” comes to mean, not that of which one may not speak because it lies outside the ordinary realm of our experience, but that of which one must inquire until it can be reduced to the ordinary realm of our experience. The “murder mystery,” a story in which investigation reveals that a murder was of a piece with the ordinary life around it, thus emerges as the signature genre of the humanitarian age.

Longenbach doesn’t mention Babbitt, through the study of whom I first became seriously interested in Eliot. Nor does he mention Eliot’s Royalist politics, one of the aspects of Eliot’s thought that kept Babbitt from taking his former student seriously. However, I was thinking of Eliot the Royalist earlier today, when I offered a comment on the website Secular Right. A post there complained about a speech Prince Charles had made about global warming. As rightists, the authors of the site aren’t much interested in speeches about global warming; as secularists, when they hear such a speech from the heir apparent to a throne which sits at the center of the established Church of England, they are quick to attribute it to a yearning for the apocalyptic. For good measure, the post threw in an identification of the prince as an “aristocratic idler.” I suggested in reply that this yearning might be a sign that the House of Windsor is an unsatisfactory sort of monarchy:

It might be better if Prince Charles truly were an “aristocratic idler.” As it is, his handlers set myriad tasks for him each day, among them the delivery of public statements that reassure various groups that their concerns are being taken seriously at the highest levels of the state. This frees the people who actually exercise power at the highest levels of the state to ignore those concerns. If the prince and his immediate family were relieved of this chore and their other public functions, they would have an opportunity to withdraw into seclusion, appearing only on those occasions when they might strike awe into the natives. Then the UK might have a proper monarchy, distant, godlike, surrounded by an aura of high majesty and cold terror. Then there would be no need for the heir apparent to repeat warnings about the end of the world; the sound of his name would suffice to fill the people who find such warnings emotionally satisfying with the dread they crave. Failing that, you might as well have a republic.

Walter Bagehot said that there can be arguments for having a splendid court and arguments for having no court, but that there can be no arguments for having a shabby court. I’d say that there can be arguments for having a terrifying king and arguments for having no king, but that there can be no arguments for having an unrelentingly ordinary sort of person as king.

I call Charles “an unrelentingly ordinary sort of person,” not only because his statement is a pack of cliches, but also because of his busy-ness and because he is so familiar a figure. Irving Babbitt criticized the cult of busy-ness in his own time as something that robbed life of depth; today, the same cult has gone to such extremes that it has reduced people to interchangeability. By the end of the day, virtually anyone who had completed Prince Charles’ schedule would be indistinguishable from Prince Charles. And his constant presence in the public eye makes it impossible to accept the prince as a figure embodying any kind of mystique. As humanitarianism has made murder an ordinary act, albeit a costly one, and murderers ordinary folk, so too it has made kingship an ordinary job and kings ordinary fellows. I don’t disagree with the Secular Right crowd that there is an unwholesome yearning for the apocalyptic afoot in our time; though perhaps that yearning is in fact simply a yearning for an event that will cast ordinariness aside once and for all.

Babbitt also came to my mind when I read a post on the Nation‘s blog, “The Notion,” about the end of the Jerry Lewis Telethon. I should explain that every year since the early 1960s, comedian Jerry Lewis has occupied a bloc of several hours of television time, ending on the morning of the first Monday in September (Labor Day in the USA.) During that time, a variety of entertainment acts would perform; in between acts, Lewis and others would solicit funds for the Muscular Dystrophy Association. Lewis made his name as a comedian by mocking people with spastic conditions, so one would think that he was doing penance by raising money for research into Muscular Dystrophy, though he never seems to have made the connection. What he did do was present people with Muscular Dystrophy as helpless objects of pity; the archetypal moment of the telethon came in 1973 when he held up a child with Muscular Dystrophy and said “God goofed, it’s up to us to correct his mistakes.” Not everyone with Muscular Dystrophy was happy to be declared one of God’s mistakes, nor did all of them enjoy wearing the label “Jerry’s Kids.” For more than 20 years, the pitying, patronizing tone of the telethon has inspired people with Muscular Dystrophy to protest outside the theater and around the country. While the Muscular Dystrophy Association, funded largely by the telethon, does a great deal of good, many of its best programs have taken their direction from people who object most strongly to Lewis and his maudlin display. The post expresses relief that the telethon is finally ending.

Again, I would say that what made the telethon so hard to take was its denial of mystery, of mystery in the sense of a realm apart from the ordinary. People with Muscular Dystrophy suffer and die, and in their physical aspects those experiences are a brutally ordinary affair of deterioration and destruction. But when people show respect to each other, they agree to look at each other not only in terms of the biological processes that are inexorably carrying all of them to death and decomposition, but also in terms of the stories they tell about themselves, of the roles they play in the groups that matter to them, and of the effects they hope to have on the world. The idea of a “law for man,” of a realm apart from the ordinary processes of matter and energy, can give such stories and roles and hopes an urgency that the worldview which Babbitt would call humanitarian cannot. That isn’t to say that every materialist is doomed to be as big a jerk as Jerry Lewis, or that every dualist will as a matter of course keep a humane perspective when meeting someone who has a visible disability, of course. But it may help to explain why Lewis and his apologists were sincerely unable to understand what he was doing wrong.

Babbitt cared enormously about Socrates, often listing him alongside the Buddha and Jesus as the three greatest men who ever lived. So if this issue of The Nation were to have fallen into his hands, Babbitt would likely have turned directly to Emily Wilson’s review of Bettany Hughes’ The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens, and the Search for the Good Life. Bettany Hughes has become a bit of an industry; an Oxford-trained classicist, she has presented many television popularizations of classical scholarship and written books tied in with them. Partly this may be a consequence of her marriage to television producer Adrian Evans, partly to her looks (YouTube’s suggestion, when you begin typing in “Bettany Hughes,” is “Bettany Hughes hot.”) Still, I don’t doubt that Michael Grant and Rex Warner and Gilbert Murray and Edith Hamilton and Erasmus and all the other popularizers of the classical tradition over the years had their own ways of gaining position, and I’ve found some of her videos useful. So I don’t begrudge her the fame and fortune she has reaped.

Wilson is bemused by the Bettany Hughes industry. And she has some harsh words for this book:

The Hemlock Cup is not a biography of Socrates. Nor is it a book for a specialist, or one that any reader, specialist or not, will want to take slowly. Hughes has nothing to say about Socrates that is not pure cliché: Socrates was “a maverick,” “individual to his core,” “very human,” somebody with a “radical” and “refreshing” “take on the issues of life,” and who “decided to pursue not just the what, but the why.” In general the prose limps along from dangling modifiers to dramatic, verbless sentences to one-sentence paragraphs. Socrates, inspired by his daimonion, was “Rapt. Lost in his own mind.” Vivid. Also annoying. The first sentence of the introduction—“We think the way we do because Socrates thought the way he did”—is, as it stands, clearly false, though you can roughly understand its meaning. There are lots of sentences like that, which one can easily imagine Socrates himself, on a mean day, tearing to shreds.

Readers of Plato may be surprised to learn from Hughes that “Socrates did not believe in or deal with abstracts.” In dialogues such as Laches, Lysis and Euthyphro, Socrates is ostensibly concerned with nothing but the attempt to define the “abstracts” of courage, friendship and holiness. This Socrates may not be a historical character, but Hughes gives no indication of whether, or why or how, she mistrusts Plato as a source. Her use of textual evidence is also sketchy. No sources are given for the injunction “Understand yourself by loving those around you”; one might well doubt that either the historical or the Platonic Socrates held any such belief. Readers may puzzle over what it means to say that “Socrates believed humanity was society”—unless it’s just a rhetorical way of saying that Socrates, like everybody else, knew that people are social. Surely it doesn’t take the wisest man in the world to figure that out.

Treating an academic book, Wilson might stop there. However, she realizes that Hughes is aiming to introduce Socrates to a general audience, and so praises Hughes’ “television-presenter’s eye for visual detail” that may not offer much to a professor of Greek, but that does make the Athens of Socrates seem more real to a reader with no special background in the subject.

Babbitt’s best friend was Paul Elmer More, who edited The Nation from 1909 to 1914. After his retirement from journalism, More devoted himself to literary criticism and the history of philosophy. More coined the phrase “the Inner Check” based on his conversations with Babbitt and his reading of Plato’s Apology. This phrase expresses an idea which many have regarded as the central metaphysical proposition of the school associated with Babbitt and More. The idea is that the ancients, including Socrates, the Buddha, and most other sages of pre-Christian Europe and Asia, believed in free will, but that they believed that will to be solely a capacity for negation. Babbitt, responding to Henri Bergson’s philosophy of the élan vital, preferred the term frein vital to More’s “Inner Check,” but meant the same thing by it. Since so many wise men in such a wide variety of societies had arrived at this conclusion, Babbitt and More reasoned, it would be unreasonable to reject it.

So, it should be clear what Babbitt and More would have thought of a scholar who interpreted Socrates’ message as “Understand yourself by loving those around you,” and even clearer what they would have thought of one who said that the daimonion, which as More pointed out is Socrates’ term for the sensation that he ought not to do a particular thing, would lead him to be “lost in his own mind.” On the contrary, More argued that it was precisely this sensation that kept Socrates focused when others around him were losing their way in the confusions of his time.

New post on Los Thunderlads

The site you are now reading consists almost entirely of reposts from the blog where I do most of my posting, Los Thunderlads. I maintain this site as a backup in case something happens to that one. Occasionally people leave comments here; I feel sorry for them, since I am the only person who is at all likely to read those comments, and even I sometimes go for weeks on end without looking at them. On the other hand, comments posted on Los Thunderlads will usually get looks from a few people, so today, I put up a post there giving exposure to some of these comments.

Chronicles, December 2010

Originally published on Los Thunderlads:

Lawrence Dennis and his foster mother circa 1908, when he toured England as "the boy evangelist"

I never quite finished my notes on the December 2010 issue of far-right Chronicles magazine, but it includes several notable pieces. So I’ll mention them now, months late though I may be.

Justin Raimondo brings up one of his favorite writers, Lawrence Dennis. Dennis is also one of my favorites, though I think it is rather stretching matters for Raimondo to call Dennis an “African-American intellectual.” Certainly Dennis’ background was African-American; when the 12 year old Dennis toured England as “the boy evangelist” in 1908, his ethnicity gave him an exotic appeal. And he was undoubtedly an intellectual. When he was on trial for sedition in 1944, government witness Hermann Rauschning startled the prosecutor by testifying that Dennis was not a tool of the Nazis, but was a thinker fit to be compared with Oswald Spengler. Dennis was conducting his own defense; when time came for him to cross-examine Rauschning, he rose and thanked him. Yet Dennis was hardly the spokesman for the African American experience that we’ve come to expect when we hear the phrase “African American intellectual.” He said little about the African American experience, and never presented himself as a representative of African Americans. Indeed, the only book-length study of Dennis is titled The Color of Fascism: Lawrence Dennis, Racial Passing, and the Rise of Right Wing Extremism in the United States, and interprets Dennis’ writings and political behavior as symptoms of a life spent passing for white. As Robert Nedelkoff put it in a sympathetic piece about Dennis that he contributed to issue #13 of The Baffler (published in October 1999,) “when he spoke of race relations he made no reference to his being of a particular race” (page 99.) Nedelkoff’s piece, covering pages 93-100 in that issue of The Baffler, was the second place I’d read of Dennis; the first was the chapter on Dennis in Ronald Radosh’s 1975 book Prophets on the Right. Between them, these pieces convinced me that Dennis was more interesting than his onetime embrace of the label “fascist” would indicate. In a series of books published between 1933 and 1941, Dennis predicted that the USA would eventually adopt an economic system similar to those prevailing in Italy and Germany at that time; that this new system would be promoted as a triumph of America’s traditional system; and that he himself would be prosecuted for sedition for saying that free speech was obsolete. Looking back in his final book, Operational Thinking for Survival (1969,) Dennis concluded that all of his predictions had been vindicated.

Chilton Williamson shares fond memories of the time when he and the late Joseph Sobran worked together at National Review. I always looked forward to Sobran’s columns because of the witty remarks that so often appeared there, though I can’t say I ever found a well-constructed argument in any of them. I must mention a grievance I have against Sobran. One of the statements he made that got him fired from National Review and driven to the fringes of society was praise for the magazine Instauration. Because I found much to admire in Sobran’s work, I looked for Instauration. When the magazine became available online, I read several issues. I’d expected an intellectual magazine marked by a hard-headed conservatism, with some pieces that crossed the line into racial prejudice. In other words, I was braced for something rather like Chronicles, only more extreme. Imagine my disappointment when instead I found a racist tract containing article after article dismissing the Holocaust as a hoax (in the first issue the editors express great satisfaction in putting the word “Holohoax” into print.)

George McCartney reviews the movie The Social Network, by Aaron Sorkin. Sorkin’s grand project seems to be showing groups of aggressive, self-indulgent people clashing with each other in the course of work that creates a benign product. The difficulty with such works as The Social Network and The West Wing is that the real-life counterparts of Sorkin’s characters seem to be far more quietly efficient and their products far more problematic than he allows. So Mark Zuckerberg is rumored to be rather a pleasant sort of chap; Facebook has unnerving features that lead me to call its administrators “the Zuckforce.” Actual staffers in the White House probably spend less time dashing about the corridors and snarling at each other than they do showing friendliness and good manners; but the US presidency, as they help to constitute it, may well be the single most destructive institution in the world today. Someone like Lawrence Dennis, were he to see a society with a surveillance network like Facebook and a political leader who starts a war every year or two, would likely show little interest in whether the people administering that network and staffing that leader observed the social graces. In the popularity of Facebook, he might see a people who had become so thoroughly inured to surveillance that they can enjoy themselves only in an environment structured to record their every move; in The West Wing, a people so inured to war that they expect to enjoy a cozy relationship with the chief warlord.

"Great Universities" and "Great Cities"

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 25 March 2011:

The other day, I made a long comment on a post at the blog commonly known as “Gelman.” The original post is by the blog’s namesake, Professor Andrew Gelman. Gelman referred to a newspaper piece by Professor Edward Glaeser on the idea of developing an applied sciences center in New York City. Glaeser makes some rather strong claims for the power of universities to promote economic development in the cities to which they are attached. Blogger Joseph Delaney had put something up in which he expressed doubts about Glaeser’s general claims, challenging those who would defend them to explain why New Haven, Connecticut, home of Yale University, is such a dump.

Gelman is impressed by Delaney’s post. He also picks up on a paragraph in Glaeser’s piece that includes a quote from New York’s late US Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan:

The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York is often credited with saying that the way to create a great city is to “create a great university and wait 200 years,” and the body of evidence on the role that universities play in generating urban growth continues to grow.

Gelman doesn’t dwell on Moynihan’s words; he makes it clear in the comments (here and here) that what really interests him is the question of the economic impact of universities on their urban environments in the (moderately) long run. Many other commenters (for example, this person) expressed doubt as to whether any answer to the question could be tested quantitatively, considering how few “great universities” and “great cities” there are at any point in time. In my comment, I suggest that if we take Moynihan’s words literally (admittedly, a rather silly thing to do) we might be able to develop a quantitative test of his hypothesis:

Well, if we take Moynihan’s claim literally, what we need are two lists: a list of “the great universities” as of year n, and a list of “the great cities” as of year n + 200. Of course we wouldn’t want to top-of-the-head either of those lists, so as to avoid some kind of Clever Hans effect.

I haven’t looked for any list that anyone has put forward of “the great universities” as of any particular year, but it sounds like the sort of thing many historians would be fond of producing. And lots of people like to make lists of “the great cities.” Once we have a list, however subjectively it was generated, we can look over the items, try to find quantifiable characteristics that most or all items on it share, and having found such characteristics we can refine the list by adding other items that share them or deleting items that don’t share them. So we can try to work backward to foundations.

As for Yale, I doubt very much that you could find any reasonable criterion by which it either was or had been a “great university” in 1811. Nowadays, sure, but in its first centuries it was a backwater. Would any American university have qualified as “great” in 1811? The faculty of the College of New Jersey, later renamed Princeton University, had been home to quite a few distinguished scholars from Edinburgh in the late eighteenth century, and Columbia had produced a lot of impressive alumni by 1811. Still, it would seem a bit much to call either of them a “great university” at that early date.

Other commenters, such as universally beloved public figure Steve Sailer, have brought up the idea that it isn’t great universities that make the cities attached to them great, but great cities that make the universities attached to them great. Here again, I’d ask to see two lists: the world’s “great cities” as of year n, and the world’s “great universities” as of year n + whatever number you like. New Haven continues to be a counterexample; while Yale may never have been on any list of the world’s “great universities” until the middle of the twentieth century, it undeniably has a place on any such list today. Yet New Haven has never been anyone’s idea of a “great city.” How many seats of the “great universities” have been?

Of course, one challenge in analyzing such lists would be deciding which universities are attached to which cities. It may not be controversial to say that Cambridge, Massachusetts is part of Boston, and so to give Harvard as an example of a (currently) great university located in (what I’d call) a great city; but what about San Francisco and the two great universities in the Bay Area? Is Berkeley really part of San Francisco? You go through Oakland to get from one to the other, and Oakland is most definitely not part of San Francisco. Is Palo Alto part of San Francisco? The relationship between Stanford University and San Francisco is often cited as one of the things that makes that city great, but Palo Alto is in fact 35 miles from San Francisco at their closest points, and Stanford’s campus is further than that. San Jose, a very different city, is only half as far, and it’s southward to and beyond San Jose that Stanford-based tech entrepreneurs have usually gone.

When is it ethical to accept a prize?

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 7 April 2011:

In a post here a few months ago, I described some views expressed by my namesake, Roman historian Gaius Acilius. Acilius, who was in his prime in the year 155 BC, apparently had some concerns about the conditions under which it was appropriate to accept praise. In particular, Acilius seems to have wondered if it could be right to accept praise offered on a particular basis if one were not prepared to accept blame offered on that same basis.

I was reminded of this a few moments ago, reading the news. Martin Rees, Britain’s Astronomer Royal, has accepted the Templeton Prize. This exchange from an interview Rees gave to Ian Sample of The Guardian made me wonder what Acilius would have said:

IS: What do you think the Templeton prize achieves? What is the value of it?

MR: That’s not for me to say to be honest.

IS: You must have a view?

MR: No.

IS: But you think it achieves something?

MR: Well, I mean as much as other prizes, certainly, but I wouldn’t want to be more specific than that.

IS: That’s a shame. Might you at some time in the future?

MR: They are very nice people who are doing things which are within their agenda, but their agenda is really very broad. I should say that I was reassured by the rather good piece in Nature a few weeks ago, which talked about the Foundation and I found that reassuring. Certainly Cambridge University, I know, has received grants from Templeton for editing Darwin’s correspondence, which is a big Cambridge project, and also for some mathematical conferences. They support a range of purely scientific issues.

Imagine if the judges who grant the Templeton Prize had sent Rees a letter, not offering to give him £1,000,000 and add his name to a list of distinguished thinkers as a reward for his achievements, but demanding that he pay them £1,000,000 and allow his name to be added to a list of ill-doers as a punishment for his delinquencies. Would he accept that demand so blithely?

Of what narrative is the US Civil War a chapter?

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 21 April 2011:

A couple of days ago, I found a mass mailing from the libertarian Independent Institute in my inbox. It included these paragraphs:

The 150th Anniversary of the Outbreak of the U.S. Civil War

April 12 marked the 150th anniversary of the outbreak of the American Civil War, when Confederates fired on U.S. troops holding Fort Sumter, in the Charleston, South Carolina, harbor. Although people routinely succumb to the temptation to reduce the cause of the war to a single factor (e.g., to the slavery issue or to “states’ rights”), the cause was more complex. Independent Institute Research Fellow Joseph R. Stromberg discusses one causal factor that often gets short shrift in public discourse (although he cites many historians who support his analysis): interest groups with material, rather than ideological, stakes in promoting the war.

Antislavery, Stromberg writes, “was one of many themes generally serving as the stalking horse for more practical causes.” The Republican Party Platform of 1860, for example, focused less on antislavery grievances than on proposals designed to benefit northeastern financial and manufacturing interests and Midwestern and western farmers–policies that would have become harder to implement if southern states were allowed to secede. Lest he overgeneralize, Stromberg hastens to add that northern trading and manufacturing interests that bought from the suppliers of southern cotton–”the petroleum of the mid-nineteenth century,” as he puts it–were aware that they would face severe disruptions if war broke out.

In a post on The Beacon, Independent Institute Research Editor Anthony Gregory argues that April 12, 1861, also marks the date of the federal government’s repudiation of the Founders’ vision of the American republic and the birth of Big Government. “The war ushered in federal conscription, income taxes, new departments and agencies, and the final victory of the Hamiltonians over the Jeffersonians…. Slavery could have been ended peacefully, to be sure, but ending slavery was not Lincoln’s motivation in waging the war–throughout which this purely evil institution was protected by the federal government in the Union states that practiced it, and during which slaves liberated from captivity by U.S. generals were sent back to their Southern ‘masters.’”

“Civil War and the American Political Economy,” by Joseph R. Stromberg (The Freeman, April 2011)

“The Regime’s 150th Birthday,” by Anthony Gregory (The Beacon, 4/12/11)

“The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate,” an Independent Policy Forum featuring Harry V. Jaffa and Thomas J. DiLorenzo (5/7/02)

“The Civil War: Liberty and American Leviathan,” an Independent Policy Forum featuring Henry E. Mayer and Jeffrey Rogers Hummel (11/14/99)

“The Bloody Hinge of American History,” by Robert Higgs (Liberty, May 1997)

It’s true enough that “people routinely succumb to the temptation to reduce the cause of the war to a single factor… the cause was more complex.” Though I would not disagree with this statement, I would go on to say something subtly different as well. Much public discussion of the US Civil War turns on a rather odd question. This question is, “Of what narrative is the US Civil War a chapter?”

As the press release above suggests, libertarians tend to say that the war was a chapter in a narrative titled “The Growing Power of the Nation-State in the Mid-Nineteenth Century.” Anthony Gregory’s description of the powers which the federal government first exercised during the war, and never renounced, gives an idea of the structure of this narrative. Right-wing libertarians like Gregory focus on the conflict between the growing power of the nation-state and the unregulated operations of the free market, while left-wing libertarians like Joseph Stromberg point out that no unregulated free market has ever existed and focus instead on the role of the nation-state in forming the economic elites that actually have wielded power throughout history.

Most other Americans tend to say that the US Civil War was a chapter in a narrative titled “The Rise and Fall of Human Slavery.” In this narrative, the United States figures as the champion of Emancipation and the Confederate States figure as the champions of Enslavement. This story elides the facts that Gregory and others point out, that six slave states remained in the Union, that federal forces enforced slavery in the South throughout 1862, and that President Lincoln took office vowing to leave slavery alone. However, it is undoubtedly true that all the Confederate states were slave states and that its leaders bound themselves time and again to defend and promote slavery, while the United States did eventually move to abolish the institution.

It should be obvious that the question, “Of what narrative is the US Civil War a chapter?,” is a meaningless one. Of course the Civil War is a chapter of “The Growing Power of the Nation-State in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” of course it is a chapter of “The Rise and Fall of Human Slavery,” of course it is a chapter of any number of other narratives. Why, then, is this nonsensical question agitated so intensely?

I blame the schools. More precisely, I blame the tradition of presenting history to students as a grand narrative. It’s natural for people who have spent a decade or so of their early life hearing history presented as a single grand narrative to go on assuming that every story is part of one, and only one, larger story. Perhaps schools must present history this way; if so, I would say that it is a point in favor of a proposal left-libertarian thinker Albert Jay Nock made early in the last century. Nock recommended that schools should teach mathematics “up to the quadratic equation,” Greek and Latin, and a course in formal logic. Equipped with this training, students would be able to educate themselves in everything else, with some here and there finding it possible to benefit from association with some advanced scholar.

Be that as it may, in US schools, the grand narrative of history is usually packaged under some label like “The Story of Freedom.” The word “freedom” in these labels raises the question “freedom from what”? For libertarians, the freedom most urgently needed today is freedom from state bureaucracy. In the story of that freedom, the US Civil War cannot but figure as a vast reverse. For others, the freedom most urgently needed today is freedom from white supremacy. In the story of that freedom, the war may appear as an advance, albeit a rather problematic one. For still others, the freedom most urgently needed today is the individual’s freedom from domination by irresponsible private interests, whether employers, families, or other groups in civil society. In the story of that freedom, the war stands as a moment of triumph, perhaps the supreme moment in American history.

Few would say that the freedom most urgently needed by the United States today is freedom from foreign domination, but I would point out that if the war had ended differently this need might very well be felt very keenly indeed. When the war broke out, Southern leaders claimed that their cause was the defense of slavery, while Lincoln disavowed any plan to interfere with slavery. By the end of the war, Southern leaders were discoursing earnestly about the theory of state sovereignty, while Lincoln declared that “if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another, drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said: ‘The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’” What remained constant through all this flip-flopping was the Northern intention to protect the domestic US market with a high tariff, while the South wanted to trade on equal terms with the industrial centers of the North and those of Britain. The world economy being what it was in the mid-nineteenth century, a nominally independent Confederate States of America would likely have been drawn into Britain’s economic sphere, and thus into the orbit of the British Empire. We should therefore add “US Resistance to the British Empire” to the list of narratives in which the US Civil War figures as a chapter.

Intimacy and Humanity

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 3 September 2011:

A doodle by Franz Kafka, with a comment by Acilius*

Part I. Some remarks about Franz Kafka

In the Autumn of 1921, Franz Kafka wrote a letter to his sister Elli Herrmann in which he discussed, among other things, Jonathan’s Swift’s educational ideas. This letter, published in an English translation in The Chicago Review in 1977,** contains these passages:

This, then, is what Swift thinks***:

Every typical family represents merely an animal connection, as it were, a a single organism, a single bloodstream. Cast back on itself, it cannot get beyond itself. From itself it cannot create a new individual and to try to do so through the education within the family is a kind of intellectual incest. (page 49)

Kafka enlarges on this statement through two very interesting paragraphs, in the first of which he describes the family as “an organism, but an extremely complex and unbalanced one”; in the second, he attributes the unbalanced character of the family to “the monstrous superiority in power of the parents vis-á-vis the children for so many years.” He then comes to the heart of the matter:

The essential difference between true education and family education is that the first is a human affair, the second a family affair. In humanity every individual has its place or at least the possibility of being destroyed in its own fashion. In the family, clutched in the tight embrace of the parents, there is room only for certain people who conform to certain requirements and moreover have to meet the deadlines dictated by the parents. If they do not conform, they are not expelled- that would be very fine, but it is impossible, for we are dealing with an organism here- but accursed or consumed or both. The consuming does not take place on the physical plane, as in the archetype of Greek mythology (Kronos, the most honest of fathers, who devoured his sons; but perhaps Kronos preferred this to the usual methods out of pity for his children.)

The selfishness of parents- the authentic parental emotion- knows no bounds. Even the greatest parental love is, as far as education is concerned, more selfish than the smallest love of the paid educator. It cannot be otherwise. For parents do not stand in a free relationship with their children, as an adult stands to a child- after all, they are his own blood, with this added grave complication: the blood of both the parents. When the father “educates” the child (it is the same for the mother) he will, of course, find things in the child that he already hates in himself and could not overcome and which he now hopes to overcome, since the weak child seems to be more in his power than he himself. And so in a blind fury, without waiting for the child’s own development, he reaches into the depths of the growing human being to pluck out the offending element… Or he finds things in the child that he loves in himself or longs to have and considers necessary for the family. Then he is indifferent to the child’s other qualities. He sees in the child only the thing he loves, he clings to that, he makes himself its slave, he consumes it out of love. (page 50)

After this description, Kafka finds it necessary to clarify. “I repeat: Swift does not wish to disparage parental love; on the contrary, he considers it so strong a force that under certain circumstances children should be shielded from this parental love” (page 51.) He concludes:

What then must be done? According to Swift, children should be taken from their parents. That is to say, the equilibrium the family animal needs should be postponed to a time when children, independent of their parents, should become equal to them in physical and mental powers, and then the time is come for the true and loving equilibrium to take place, the very thing that you call “being saved” and that others call “the gratitude of children” and which they find so rarely.

[snip]

Of course Swift does not deny that parents under certain circumstances can be an excellent unit for educating children, but only strangers’ children. That, then, is how I read the Swiftian passage.

If Kafka shared the view that “parents under certain circumstances can be an excellent unit for educating children, but only strangers’ children,” one may wonder what those circumstances would be. What always comes to my mind when I read that line is the passage in The Castle when K. is told that he and Frieda are to make their home in a classroom:

You have, Land-Surveyor, to clean and heat both classrooms daily, to make any small repairs in the house, further to look after the class and gymnastic apparatus personally, to keep the garden path free of snow, run messages for me and the woman teacher, and look after all the work in the garden in the warmer seasons of the year. In return for that you have the right to live in whichever one of the classrooms you like; but when both rooms are not being used at the same time for teaching, and you are in the room that is needed, you must of course move to the other room. You mustn’t do any cooking in the school; in return you and your dependents will be given your meals here in the inn at the cost of the Village Council. That you must behave in a manner consonant with the dignity of the school, and in particular that the children during school hours must never be allowed to witness any unedifying matrimonial scenes, I mention only in passing, for as an educated man you must of course know that. In connection with that I want to say further that we must insist on your relations with Fräulein Frieda being legitimized at the earliest possible moment. About all this and a few other trifling matters an agreement will be made out, which as soon as you move over to the school must be signed by you.” To K. all this seemed of no importance, as if it did not concern him, or at any rate did not bind him; but the self importance of the teacher irritated him, and he said carelessly: “I know, they’re the usual duties.” ****

In this passage I suppose we see the obverse of the point Kafka finds in Swift. As the family is an impossible setting for the education that raises a person above the animal level, so a schoolroom is an impossible setting for the animal connection that grounds the intimacies of family life.

The overall impression is of a horror of intimacy. Kafka, or Jonathan Swift as Kafka interprets him, recoiled from the intimacy of the bond between parent and child and dreamed of replacing that bond with the professional relationship between teacher and pupil. Throughout his diaries, Kafka mirrors the desire to replace an urgently intimate relationship with a coolly professional one as he confesses that he is holding Felice Bauer and her successors at a distance while developing an ominous fascination with prostitutes. Take for example this passage, which he wrote on 19 November 1913:

I intentionally walk through the streets where there are whores. Walking past them excites me, the remote but nevertheless existent possibility of going with one. Is that grossness? But I know no better, and doing this seems basically innocent to me and causes me almost no regret. I want only the stout, older ones, with outmoded clothes that have, however, a certain luxuriousness because of various adornments. One woman probably knows me by now. I met her this afternoon, she was not yet in her working clothes, her hair was still flat against her head, she was wearing no hat, a work blouse like a cook’s, and was carrying a bundle of some sort, perhaps to the laundress. No one would have found anything exciting in her, only me. We looked at each other fleetingly. Now, in the evening, it had meanwhile grown cold, I saw her, wearing a tight-fitting, yellowish-brown coat, on the other side of the narrow street that branches off from the Zeltnerstrasse, where she has her beat. I looked back at her twice, she caught the glance, but then I really ran away from her.

This uncertainty is surely the result of thinking about F. *****

Self-critical as he was, Kafka analyzed his behavior towards his fiancee as a series of attempts to avoid intimacy, and he felt terrible about it. It’s with another image of streets and alleys that Kafka confesses that he has willfully kept Felice at a distance, and done her harm thereby:

Coitus as punishment for the happiness of being together. Live as ascetically as possible, more ascetically than a bachelor, that is the only possible way to endure marriage. But she?

And despite all this, if we, I and F., had equal rights, if we had the same prospects and possibilities, I would not marry. But this blind alley into which I have slowly pushed her life makes it an unavoidable duty for me, although its consequences are by no means unpredictable. Some secret law of human relationship is at work here.******

In his letter to Elli, Kafka had spoken of the relationship between parents and children as monstrously deformed by the imbalance of power between the parties, and had speculated about a way to introduce a balance between them. Here again he is concerned about inequality in an intimate relationship, seeing his relationship with Felice as one in which he has been cast as her oppressor by the different standards to which society held men and women. From a certain perspective we can say that Kafka speaks as a feminist in these passages; but it would be far more accurate to say that he speaks as a liberal. To the extent that liberalism can be defined as the doctrine that society should be based on reason, the views Kafka attributes to Swift might almost be called liberalism’s reductio ad absurdum. Perhaps this thoroughgoing liberalism reflects a side of Kafka’s sincere belief. It is not difficult to imagine the author of the famous “Letter to His Father” speaking in this vein, and his diary entry dated 19 June 1914 suggests that Elli might have heard sentiments like those her brother here attributes to Jonathan Swift from another sibling as well: “How the two of us, Ottla and I, explode in rage against every kind of human relationship.”******* Perhaps, too, his willingness to believe that Swift is speaking straightforwardly when he praises the Lilliputians is in part a response to the fact that Swift, as a British subject who wrote in English, symbolized a world power that was in 1921, under the banner of liberalism, enforcing policies in Central Europe that did in fact break up families and push people into the care of impersonal institutions.

If Kafka saw families as single organisms which deformed the individuals in them, it can hardly be surprising that he was desperate to avoid forming one. But what of other institutions that promise intimate experiences, but involve unequal power relationships that might overwhelm their individual members? What of religion, for example?

Several times in his diaries, Kafka reflects on the intimacy of shared religious experience, often in such a way as to connect that intimacy with the sort of raw animality that he finds in the parent-child bond. Note this account of a bris:

This morning my nephew’s circumcision. A short, bow-legged man, Austerlitz, who already has 2800 circumcisions behind him, carried the thing out very skillfully. It is an operation made more difficult by the fact that the boy, instead of lying on a table, lies on his grandfather’s lap, and by the fact that the person performing the operation, instead of paying close attention, must whisper prayers. First the boy is prevented from moving by wrappings which leave only his member free, then the surface to be operated on is defined precisely by putting on a perforated metal disc, then the operation is performed with what is almost an ordinary knife, a sort of fish knife. One sees blood and raw flesh, the moule bustles about briefly with his long-nailed, trembling fingers and pulls skin from some place or other over the wound like the finger of a glove. At once everything is all right, the child has scarcely cried. Now there remains only a short prayer during which the moule drinks some wine and with his fingers, not yet entirely unbloody, carries some wine to the child’s lips. Those present pray: “As he has now achieved the covenant, so may he achieve knowledge of the Torah, a happy marriage, and the performance of good deeds.”

Today when I heard the moule‘s assistant say the grace after meals and those present, aside from the two grandfathers, spent the time in dreams or boredom with a complete lack of understanding of the prayer, I saw Western European Judaism before me in a transition whose end is clearly unpredictable and about which those most closely affected are not concerned, but, like all people truly in transition, bear what is imposed upon them. It is so indisputable that these religious forms which have reached their final end have merely a historical character, even as they are practiced today, that only a short time was needed this very morning to interest the people present in the obsolete custom of circumcision and its half-sung prayers by describing it to them as something out of history.********

These paragraphs sit oddly together. The opening remark that the “operation” is impeded by the traditional circumstances of its performance is belied by the lovingly detailed description of those circumstances and their profound peacefulness. Obviously it would be missing the point entirely to turn this most intimate of rituals into an antiseptic operating room procedure. Without the grandfather’s lap, the prayers, the wine, the hushed relatives, and the picturesque rabbi with his unassuming double-edged knife, it’s simply a medical procedure, to be recommended perhaps in rare cases. The “operation” itself is the least defensible part of the whole thing, from the strictly rational point of view a modernizer might have been expected to adopt in 1911. With “obsolete” in the last sentence, however, we return to the conceit that the narrator is unaware of this absurdity, that he sincerely wants to create an up-to-date circumcision, a sterilized scientific bris for the age of progress.

Undoubtedly Kafka’s irony is at work here, an irony which perhaps might have borne richer fruit in a more polished composition. Indeed, he seems to have been dissatisfied with the entry; the next day, he wrote an account of the highly unsanitary circumcision practices allegedly prevalent among Russian Jews, which is so remarkably ugly that it reads like an antisemite’s fever dream. I’ll quote only the last four sentences of this nauseating passage:

The circumciser, who performs his office without payment, is usually a drinker- busy as he is, he has no time for the various holiday foods and so simply pours down some brandy. Thus they all have red noses and reeking breaths. It is therefore not very pleasant when, after the operation has been performed, they suck the bloody member with this mouth, in the prescribed manner. The member is then sprinkled with sawdust and heals in about three days. *********

The next paragraph is more palatable, if not exactly convincing:

A close-knit family life does not seem to be so very common among and characteristic of the Jews, especially those in Russia. Family life is also found among Christians, after all, and the fact that women are excluded from the study of the Talmud is really destructive of Jewish family life; when the man wants to discuss learned talmudic matters- the very core of his life- with guests, the women withdraw to the next room even if they need not do so- so it is even more characteristic of the Jews that they come together at every possible opportunity, whether to pray or to study or to discuss divine matters or to eat holiday meals whose basis is usually a religious one and at which alcohol is drunk only moderately. They flee to one another, so to speak.**********

In both of these passages, we see a similar movement from the first paragraph to the second. The first paragraph describes in considerable detail a ritual in which people share what appear to be bonds of great intimacy, the second explains that this intimacy is mediated through something that keeps those same people from becoming too close to each other. At his nephew’s circumcision, the ritual is lovely and tranquil; among the Russian Jews of Kafka’s Prague imagination, the ritual is an obscene Bacchanal (believe me, the passage I quoted is the printable part.) The Prague Jews in attendance at his nephew’s circumcision only appear to be sharing a moment of the closest intimacy; in fact, their attention is focused on the distant history behind the ceremony, and only incidentally do they relate to each other at all. The Russian Jews of Kafka’s imagination also seem to be sharing something very personal, but when we follow them home from their loathsome debauch we find that they are deeply intellectual and only too mindful of the proprieties.

Not only does Kafka see religion as a sphere in which people only appear to achieve intimacy with each other. He also imagines the supernatural realm as a set of equally diffident relationships. Take this diary entry, for example:

The invention of the devil. If we are possessed by the devil, it cannot be by one, for then we should live, at least here on earth, quietly, as with God, in unity, without contradiction, without reflection, always sure of the man behind us. His face would not frighten us, for as diabolical beings we would, if somewhat sensitive to the sight, be clever enough to prefer to sacrifice a hand in order to keep his face covered with it. If we were possessed by only a single devil, one who had a calm, untroubled view of our whole nature, and freedom to dispose of us at any moment, then that devil would also have the power to hold us for the length of a human life high above the spirit of God in us, and even to swing us to and fro, so that we should never get to see a glimmer of it and therefore should not be troubled from that quarter. Only a crowd of devils could account for our earthly misfortunes. Why don’t they exterminate each other until only a single one is left, or why don’t they subordinate themselves to one great devil? Either way would be in accord with the diabolical principle of deceiving us as completely as possible. With unity lacking, of what use is the scrupulous attention all the devils pay us? It simply goes without saying that the falling of a human hair must matter more to the devil than to God, since the devil really loses that hair and God does not. But we still do not arrive at any state of well-being so long as the many devils are within us. ************

I’ve never understood the appeal of the distant, indifferent gods of Epicurus and the deists; evidently Kafka does.

Part II. Three pieces in the May 2011 issue of The Atlantic

Kafka’s letter to Elli may also have shed some light on another English author, one born the year after he wrote it: Philip Larkin. Larkin’s most famous lines are undoubtedly the opening of his “This Be the Verse“:

They fuck you up, your Mum and Dad.

They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had,

And add some extra, just for you.

The May 2011 issue of the Atlantic includes a review of a new collection of Philip Larkin’s letters to Monica Jones, with whom the poet had a relationship that not even Kafka’s famously frustrated girlfriends could have envied. The reviewer, Peter Hitchens’ less interesting brother Christopher, notes that Larkin and Jones “did not cohabit until very near the end, finally forced into mutual dependence by decrepitude on his part and dementia on hers: perhaps the least romantic story ever told.” He supports this description with numerous quotations from letters in which Larkin apologizes for the rarity and unpleasantness of their sexual encounters.

Where Kafka retreated into a fascination with prostitutes as a way of avoiding intimacy with Felice, Larkin kept his relationship with Monica arid in part by becoming “a heroic consumer of pornography and an amateur composer of sado­masochistic reveries” and amassing “the vast library of a hectically devoted masturbator.” Larkin’s interest in sadomasochism may have helped him develop this idea:

I think—though of course I am all for free love, advanced schools, & so on—someone might do a little research on some of the inherent qualities of sex—its cruelty, its bullyingness, for instance. It seems to me that bending someone else to your will is the very stuff of sex, by force or neglect if you are male, by spitefulness or nagging or scenes if you are female. And what’s more, both sides would sooner have it that way than not at all. I wouldn’t.

People often accuse feminist thinkers Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon of holding the view to which Larkin gives voice here; I don’t actually believe they do, but perhaps some of the reason people are so fond of caricaturing their views in this way is that they suspect it is the truth and they wish someone would say it.

In the same issue, Benjamin Schwarz writes an essay about novelist James M. Cain, Cain’s novel Mildred Pierce, and a TV adaptation of the novel that was due to air when the magazine was on the stands.************* This paragraph caught my attention:

[I]n Mildred Pierce, Cain wrote the greatest work of American fiction about small business. He made compelling the intricacies of real-estate deals and cash flow, of business planning and bank loans, and of relations with suppliers and customers. (“She had a talent for quiet flirtation,” as Cain explained Mildred’s technique, “but found that this didn’t pay. Serving a man food, apparently, was in itself an ancient intimacy; going beyond it made him uncomfortable, and sounded a trivial note in what was essentially a solemn relationship.”) He rendered the plodding method and the fundamental gamble of small-time commerce—the foundation of Los Angeles’s service-oriented economy—not just absorbing but romantic.

The quote from Cain might have intrigued both Kafka and Larkin. Each of those men managed to conduct his sex life in a way that had more of solemnity than of intimacy about it, and in each case it was through “small-time commerce” (with prostitutes in Kafka’s case and with magazine vendors in Larkin’s) that a barrier was put around sexuality to keep it from becoming too intimate.

Ta-Nehisi Coates compares Barack Obama with Malcolm X. Here’s an important paragraph from Coates’ piece:

For all of Malcolm’s prodigious intellect, he was ultimately more an expression of black America’s heart than of its brain. Malcolm was the voice of a black America whose parents had borne the slights of second-class citizenship, who had seen protesters beaten by cops and bitten by dogs, and children bombed in churches, and could only sit at home and stew. He preferred to illuminate the bitter calculus of oppression, one in which a people had been forced to hand over their right to self-defense, a right enshrined in Western law and morality and taken as essential to American citizenship, in return for the civil rights that they had been promised a century earlier. The fact and wisdom of nonviolence may be beyond dispute—the civil-rights movement profoundly transformed the country. Yet the movement demanded of African Americans a superhuman capacity for forgiveness. Dick Gregory summed up the dilemma well. “I committed to nonviolence,” Marable quotes him as saying. “But I’m sort of embarrassed by it.”

Again, this reminds me of Kafka, in particular of his ideas about education. Parents may hand over their right to educate their children to teachers whose relationship to students is impersonal, and it may be beyond dispute that this is called for. But it is sort of embarrassing to admit that the passionate relationships within the family must sometimes be reined in, that children have needs that are not simply outside the scope of what parents can provide, but needs that cannot be met in the presence of the parents. That applies as well to the need for defense against physical violence as to the need for education.

Coates finds two similarities between Mr X and Mr O. First is their common emphasis on the theme of self-invention, second their symbolic roles as powerful African American men:

For all of Malcolm’s invective, his most seductive notion was that of collective self-creation: the idea that black people could, through force of will, remake themselves… For black people who were never given much of an opportunity to create themselves apart from a mass image of shufflers and mammies, that vision had compelling appeal.

What gave it added valence was Malcolm’s own story, his incandescent transformation from an amoral wanderer to a hyper-moral zealot. “He had a brilliant mind. He was disciplined,” Louis Farrakhan said in a speech in 1990, and went on:

I never saw Malcolm smoke. I never saw Malcolm take a drink … He ate one meal a day. He got up at 5 o’clock in the morning to say his prayers … I never heard Malcolm cuss. I never saw Malcolm wink at a woman Malcolm was like a clock.Farrakhan’s sentiments are echoed by an FBI informant, one of many who, by the late 1950s, had infiltrated the Nation of Islam at the highest levels:

Brother Malcolm … is an expert organizer and an untiring worker … He is fearless and cannot be intimidated … He has most of the answers at his fingertips and should be carefully dealt with. He is not likely to violate any ordinances or laws. He neither smokes nor drinks and is of high moral character.In fact, Marable details how Malcolm was, by the end of his life, perhaps evolving away from his hyper-moral persona. He drinks a rum and Coke and allows himself a second meal a day. Marable suspects he carried out an affair or two, one with an 18-year-old convert to the Nation. But in the public mind, Malcolm rebirthed himself as a paragon of righteousness, and even in Marable’s retelling he is obsessed with the pursuit of self-creation. That pursuit ended when Malcolm was killed by the very Muslims from whom he once demanded fealty.

And:

Among organic black conservatives, this moral leadership still gives Malcolm sway. It’s his abiding advocacy for blackness, not as a reason for failure, but as a mandate for personal, and ultimately collective, improvement that makes him compelling. Always lurking among Malcolm’s condemnations of white racism was a subtler, and more inspiring, notion—“You’re better than you think you are,” he seemed to say to us. “Now act like it.”

Ossie Davis famously eulogized Malcolm X as “our living, black manhood” and “our own black shining prince.” Only one man today could bear those twin honorifics: Barack Obama. Progressives who always enjoyed Malcolm’s thundering denunciations more than his moral appeals are unimpressed by that message. But among blacks, Obama’s moral appeals are warmly received, not because the listeners believe racism has been defeated, but because cutting off your son’s PlayStation speaks to something deep and American in black people—a belief that, by their own hand, they can be made better, they can be made anew.

Like Malcolm, Obama was a wanderer who found himself in the politics of the black community, who was rooted in a nationalist church that he ultimately outgrew. Like Malcolm’s, his speeches to black audiences are filled with exhortations to self-creation, and draw deeply from his own biography. In his memoir, Barack Obama cites Malcolm’s influence on his own life:

His repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me; the blunt poetry of his words, his unadorned insistence on respect, promised a new and uncompromising order, martial in its discipline, forged through sheer force of will. All the other stuff, the talk of blue-eyed devils and apocalypse, was incidental to that program, I decided, religious baggage that Malcolm himself seemed to have safely abandoned toward the end of his life.

Kafka was no prophet of self-invention, collective or otherwise, and charismatic leaders never attracted his attention. However, the one political cause that sometimes did inspire him was Zionism. He even seems to have toyed with the idea of moving to Palestine himself. He occasionally made harsh remarks about Jews as a people, such as the Russian circumcision story quoted above. Those remarks appear in the context of an explicit longing for a new social order in which Jews will no longer be everywhere in the minority, everywhere under pressure to assimilate, everywhere humiliated and relegated either to the squalor of poverty or to the shadow world of the metropolitan bureaucracy. So I’m sure he would have understood the appeal of the Nation of Islam quite well. Perhaps what Kafka hoped to find in the kibbutz he dreamed of joining, and what Malcolm X hoped for during his Black Muslim period, was a new world where family relations were untroubled by the stigmas imposed on the family from without.

Coates seems to favor such an interpretation of Malcolm X. He begins his piece by talking about his mother’s childhood, spent largely in the absorption of homemade hair-straightening product. He commits a pun when he says that at 12, his mother was relaxed for the first time in her life. It turns out that she had undergone a hair-straightening treatment called a “relaxer.” He goes on to describe his own childhood, passed in the 1970s, in an atmosphere where the legacy of Malcolm X was everywhere. He suggests that he enjoyed an easy intimacy with his parents that his grandparents had never had a chance to share with them, in part because his grandparents had felt an obligation to press the standards of white America onto their children.*************

When Kafka talks about the unreasoning animality at the heart of the relationship between parent and child, and the imbalance of power that inevitably deforms that relationship, I wonder if he might imagine a world where those qualities would be tempered. Perhaps in a family that is not pervaded by the sense of being a guest, and not a welcome guest, in the only home available to it the parents might have emotional and intellectual resources available within themselves, and social support available from their neighbors, sufficient to reinvent the parent-child relationship in such a way that its animal character is sublimated into something as humanizing as any school. And perhaps in such a society the family’s bonds with its neighbors would include the children in a complex enough social order that the parents’ power would be moderated. One wishes Kafka had lived to see the establishment of the state of Israel; I wonder whether he would have advised Israeli Jewish parents to send their children to boarding schools.

*A sketch by Franz Kafka, published on page 354 of Franz Kafka, Diaries 1910-1923 (Schocken Classics, 1976); edited by Max Brod, translated by Joseph Kresh

**”Two Letters by Franz Kafka,” edited and translated by Richard Winston and Clara Winston; Chicago Review, volume 29, number 1 (Summer 1977,) pages 49-55

***Kafka is referring to chapter six of Gulliver’s Travels. In his previous letter to Elli, he had written thus:

For myself I have (among many others) one great witness, whom I quote here, simply because he is great and because I have read this passage only yesterday, not because I presume to have the same opinion. In describing Gulliver’s travels in Lilliput (whose institutions he praises highly), Swift says: “Their notions relating to the duties of parents and children differ extremely from ours. For, since the conjunction of male and female is founded upon the great law of nature, in order to propagate and continue the species, the Lilliputians will needs have it that that men and women are joined together like other animals by the motives of concupiscence, and that their tenderness toward their young proceedeth from the like natural principle. For which reason they will never allow that a child is under any obligation to his father for begetting him or to his mother for bringing him into the world, which, considering the miseries of human life, was neither a benefit on itself nor intended so by his parents, whose thoughts in their love-encounters were otherwise employed. Upon these and the like reasonings, their opinion is that the parents are the last of all others to be trusted with the education of their own children.” He obviously means by that, altogether in keeping with your distinction between “person” and “son,” that if a child is to become a person, he must be removed as soon as possible from the brutishness, for so he expresses it, the mere animal conjunction from which he has his being. (from Franz Kafka, Letters to Family, Friends, and Editors, translated by Richard and Clara Winston; Schocken Books, 1977, page 293.)

It may prevent misunderstanding if I mention that in his original letter, Kafka quoted Swift in German translation, not in the original text the Winstons provide above (see pages 342-343 in Franz Kafka, Briefe 1902-1924, edited by Max Brod; Schocken Books, 1958.)

****Kafka, The Castle, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir (Schocken Books, 1982) page 123

*****Kafka, Diaries, page 238 (19 November 1913)

******Kafka, Diaries, page 228 (14 August 1913)

*******Kafka, Diaries, page 290 (19 June 1914)

********Kafka, Diaries, pages 147-148 (24 December 1911)

*********Kafka, Diaries, pages 151-152 (25 December 1911)

**********Kafka, Diaries, page 152 (25 December 1911)

***********Kafka, Diaries, pages 204-205 (9 July 1912)

************Yes, I know that was several months ago. I’m sorry, I’ve been busy.

*************And yes, I know that “press the standards of white America onto their children” is, in the context of a story about hair straightening, also a pun. It’s catching, I’m afraid.

In the flesh?

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 2 September 2011:
Most Sundays, Mrs Acilius and I can be found in a Quaker meeting down the street from our home. She is a member of that meeting and a convinced adherent of the brand of Christianity associated with Quakerism; I’m not a member of any religious group, nor am I convinced of the truth of any religious doctrine. The Friends are a likeable bunch, though, and I always feel that my time among them is well spent.

In many ways, the Quakers are a group apart from other Protestants. Not in all ways, however. For example, like many mainline Protestant denominations the US branches of Quakerdom are currently rumbling with disputes about the status of homosexuality. In some areas of the country, these disputes have gone very far. The venerable Indiana Yearly Meeting, which has been going since 1821, is apparently considering a proposal to dissolve itself so that the local meetings affiliated with it can sort themselves into pro- and anti-gay groups. Other yearly meetings may be approaching a similar point. That means that Quaker denominations that have already made their minds up about the issue are facing the prospect of reorganizing to accommodate refugees from the divided groups.

Because I hear about this controversy quite often, I took a keen interest in Eve Tushnet’s notes on a talk that Christopher Roberts gave at Villanova University a few years back. This bit especially piqued my interest: “* CR: Progressive theology of marriage separates creation and redemption–for progressive, pro-gay-marriage theologians, sex difference is about creation/procreation and is private, while redemption (linked to marriage?) is ecclesial but unisex. “
Roberts’ view of “Progressive theology,” as Tushnet relays it here, reminds me of a problem at the heart of the sacramental theology of Quakerism. The Quakers have traditionally held that the sacraments of baptism and communion are entirely “inward”; that is to say, what makes them holy is nothing to do with the physical elements of a ritual, and everything to do with supernatural events involving the soul and the Holy Spirit. So, most Quakers do not practice an initiation ritual involving water, nor do they take wine and bread together in meetings for worship.

I haven’t read deeply on these topics. If I were to study the arguments that have been made for and against Quakerism over the 350 years that the Friends movement has been underway, I wouldn’t be surprised to find some old writer who thought he had reduced Quaker sacramental theology to absurdity in this manner: 1. Quakers hold that the sacraments of baptism and communion are entirely supernatural, and that no particular physical act or material form is necessary to complete them. 2. Quakers do not deny that marriage is a sacrament. 3. Quakers do not provide any reason to regard the sacrament of marriage as radically different from other sacraments. 4. To be consistent, Quakers must therefore hold that no particular physical act or material form is necessary to complete the sacrament of marriage. 5. The difference between male and female is known to us through particular physical acts and material forms, and in no other way. 6. Therefore, Quakers have no grounds for insisting that a marriage requires a male and female body for its consummation.

Nowadays, many Quakers might accept this line of argument, and might proclaim that they are following in the tradition of the weighty Friends of the past when they endorse same-sex marriage. Many others continue to resist it. I’m not at all knowledgeable about Quaker theology, but it might be interesting to learn what sorts of arguments are exchanged in this matter. If you happen to have knowledge I lack, I invite you to comment.

Two items of interest to Classics types

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 31 August 2011:

When the world was young and I was in grad school, many of my classmates went to Rome to hang out with Father Reginald Foster. Reggie, as they all called him, is an American priest who at that time was in charge of translating official Vatican documents into Latin. His schedule was light in the summer, so Reggie ran a summer institute in conversational Latin. Granted, there aren’t any native speakers of Latin around to converse with, but there is a substantial body of permanently interesting Latin literature, and it is easier to read the language if you can also speak it.

Reggie moved back to Milwaukee after Pope John Paul II died. He teaches conversational Latin there from time to time. No future generations of graduate students will be studying under him in Rome, but two current graduate students have revived the Rome summer program They call it the Paideia Institute. Slate magazine ran a piece about it recently.

David Graeber

Also of keen interest to classicists is this recent interview that economic anthropologist David Graeber granted to the website Naked Capitalism. Graeber summarizes Adam Smith’s hypothesis that money originated as an advancement on barter systems that had prevailed before its adoption. He then points out that in the 235 years since Smith published that hypothesis in The Wealth of Nations, observers have examined thousands of cultures in search of examples of pre-monetary barter economies, and that they have yet to find one. Graeber concludes that Smith’s hypothesis is thereby defeated. Societies which have not invented money do not organize markets around barter; they do not organize markets at all. Money and markets arise together, and barter becomes widespread only when currency systems collapse. Non-monetary societies distribute goods and services, not through markets, but through hierarchies in which obligations are based on force. The king or chief or whatever he is has what he has because everyone else is indebted to him for protection and status, and they have what they have because of their relations with him. When multiple authorities lay claim to the same person, they need a way of sorting out whose claim comes first and which authority is entitled to demand what deference or service. Sometimes they develop a way of sorting those claims that involves quantifying them and making them transferable. Once claims on a person’s deference or service can be quantified and transferred, there is a need for tokens to signify the quantification and contracts to enforce the transfer. That is to say, there is money, and with it the dawn of market society.

Graeber makes some remarks that are similar to points that come up in some classes I teach. For example:

Since antiquity the worst-case scenario that everyone felt would lead to total social breakdown was a major debt crisis; ordinary people would become so indebted to the top one or two percent of the population that they would start selling family members into slavery, or eventually, even themselves.

Well, what happened this time around? Instead of creating some sort of overarching institution to protect debtors, they create these grandiose, world-scale institutions like the IMF or S&P to protect creditors. They essentially declare (in defiance of all traditional economic logic) that no debtor should ever be allowed to default. Needless to say the result is catastrophic. We are experiencing something that to me, at least, looks exactly like what the ancients were most afraid of: a population of debtors skating at the edge of disaster.

And, I might add, if Aristotle were around today, I very much doubt he would think that the distinction between renting yourself or members of your family out to work and selling yourself or members of your family to work was more than a legal nicety. He’d probably conclude that most Americans were, for all intents and purposes, slaves.

When I’m talking to a class, I’m rather more emphatic than Graeber in saying that in this conclusion Aristotle was a man of his time, and that our view of wage labor as a form of freedom may be as legitimate in its own way as was the Greek view of wage labor as a form of slavery. Partly that difference in views stems from the fact that so many slaves in ancient Greek cities were paid wages, and that those who labored side by side with free people in big workshops were paid exactly the same wages as those (nominally) free people, while American slaves were generally denied access to money. Still, I do have a lecture that unnerves them when it ends with my remark that Aristotle would not have thought that we moderns have abolished slavery, but that we have abolished freedom.

I can’t resist quoting another bit of the Graeber’s interview. After he derides the idea of money as a development subsequent to a barter economy, we have this exchange:

PP: You’d be forgiven for thinking this was all very Nietzschean. In his ‘On the Genealogy of Morals’ the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously argued that all morality was founded upon the extraction of debt under the threat of violence. The sense of obligation instilled in the debtor was, for Nietzsche, the origin of civilisation itself. You’ve been studying how morality and debt intertwine in great detail. How does Nietzsche’s argument look after over 100 years? And which do you see as primal: morality or debt?

DG: Well, to be honest, I’ve never been sure if Nietzsche was really serious in that passage or whether the whole argument is a way of annoying his bourgeois audience; a way of pointing out that if you start from existing bourgeois premises about human nature you logically end up in just the place that would make most of that audience most uncomfortable.
In fact, Nietzsche begins his argument from exactly the same place as Adam Smith: human beings are rational. But rational here means calculation, exchange and hence, trucking and bartering; buying and selling is then the first expression of human thought and is prior to any sort of social relations.

But then he reveals exactly why Adam Smith had to pretend that Neolithic villagers would be making transactions through the spot trade. Because if we have no prior moral relations with each other, and morality just emerges from exchange, then ongoing social relations between two people will only exist if the exchange is incomplete – if someone hasn’t paid up.

But in that case, one of the parties is a criminal, a deadbeat and justice would have to begin with the vindictive punishment of such deadbeats. Thus he says all those law codes where it says ‘twenty heifers for a gouged-out eye’ – really, originally, it was the other way around. If you owe someone twenty heifers and don’t pay they gouge out your eye. Morality begins with Shylock’s pound of flesh.
Needless to say there’s zero evidence for any of this – Nietzsche just completely made it up. The question is whether even he believed it. Maybe I’m an optimist, but I prefer to think he didn’t.

Anyway it only makes sense if you assume those premises; that all human interaction is exchange, and therefore, all ongoing relations are debts. This flies in the face of everything we actually know or experience of human life. But once you start thinking that the market is the model for all human behavior, that’s where you end up with.

If however you ditch the whole myth of barter, and start with a community where people do have prior moral relations, and then ask, how do those moral relations come to be framed as ‘debts’ – that is, as something precisely quantified, impersonal, and therefore, transferrable – well, that’s an entirely different question. In that case, yes, you do have to start with the role of violence.

Nietzsche may once have been overrated as a political thinker, but I believe that he is now seriously underrated in that wise. So the bit above made me happy.