Sí, Don Diego, That Ees Right

I've been an admirer of the great playwright, critic, and polemicist George Bernard Shaw since I first stumbled on his writing in high school.  Since then I've become more aware of his limitations as well sa his brilliance, but I've also learned that many of the criticisms that have been leveled at him reflect willed misreading by people who hope to diminish his stature by any means necessary.  The American critic Eric Bentley produced an excellent study of Shaw, originally published in the 1940s, that effectively answered many of those critics.  I reread Bentley's book while I was slogging through Michael Holroyd's four-volume Shaw biography, which reinforced my sense that Holroyd, though a competent researcher, was in his judgments mainly recycling received attacks on Shaw.

One of those cliches was that as a playwright Shaw lacked emotion, and that his plays were primarily didactic intellectual contraptions, his characters mere ventriloquist's dummies for his ideas.  Reading all six volumes of his collected plays a few decades ago disabused me of that notion.  Seeing some of his plays performed confirmed my opinion.

But I also simply enjoy reading Shaw for his style.  I'm amazed at how prolific he was, producing not only many plays but the notorious prefaces to the published plays, plus political pamphlets, some fiction, music criticism (collected in three big volumes) and theater criticism (four volumes), and correspondence, collected in at least four volumes.  (I'm not sure yet if the collected letters include his correspondence, which had been published separately decades earlier, with notable ladies of the theater.)  He did all this without word processors, and probably without a typewriter.*  How did he do it?  (But then T. S. Eliot seems have produced even more letters, and he didn't live as long as Shaw.)

Which brings me to my subject for today.  I've owned the first two volumes of Shaw's letters, edited by Dan H. Lawrence, for some time without having read them, and decided it was time to get the second two and begin reading them. 

Volume three (Viking Press, 1985) arrived in the mail last week.  Flipping randomly through its pages I happened on this 1919 reply to an American named F. V. Connolly, who had asked Shaw, "Do you for instance think an all black company could depict Shakespeare, Shaw or Archer, or would they be limited by their colour to portray Comedy."  Now Shakespeare and Shaw, at least, wrote comedies as well as "serious" dramas, so Connolly must have been using the term to refer to "low" comedy.  Shaw's  response is short enough that I'm going to quote it in full:

Negroes act very well, usually with much more delicacy and grace than white actors.  The success of [Bert] Williams and [George] Walker in London was a genuine acting success.  Their powers of physical expression are very effective on the stage.

So far... not bad, but not really good either.  The next paragraph, however, delighted me:

The notion that there is anything funny in a man or woman being black is as childish as the notion that there is anything funny in being white, though no doubt the first white men in Africa must have elicited shouts of laughter from adults, and terrified the children into convulsions. The only difficulty about performances of Shakespear by negroes is that his characters are white Europeans, except Othello and the Prince of Morocco, neither of whom are negroes.  But as English actors have never been prevented from playing Romeo and Juliet by the fact that they are not Italians, and nobody's enjoyment is spoilt by the fact that the play is not written in Italian, so a performance by a black company would be just as enjoyable as a performance by a white one if the acting were equally good.  And the chances are that it would be better, as a black company would hardly venture on the play without some special qualifications for it.

The ideas expressed here are, I think, advanced even today, a century later.  It brings to mind the objections that actors playing Romans in English-language movies should speak with British accents, not to mention the convention that Anglophone movies set in foreign parts should speak English with foreign accents.  I first noticed this in the old Disney Zorro TV series, set in Spanish California, in which all the characters spoke broken English with Spanish accents.  (Imagine a production of Romeo and Juliet in which the actors spoke with stereotypical Italian accents!  Could be fun, but it would probably infuriate almost everybody.)  

But just today I saw a trailer for a Chinese martial arts film, in which the characters speak stilted English with a faint Chinese accent.  And of course we've seen many complaints about straight actors playing gay, Caucasian actors playing Asians, cisgender actors playing transgender, and don't even think about white actors playing black.  (Or vice versa -- didn't Kenneth Branagh cast Denzel Washington to play an Italian in his film of Much Ado About Nothing? Why yes, he did.)  There are real issues at stake here, because the objections can cut both ways: it's considered bigotry when someone argues that a gay actor shouldn't play a straight character, for example; how about a trans actor playing a cis character?  Should Americans play Brits, or vice versa?  Should Yankees play Southerners?  Why or why not?

But as usual our normal discourse on race/ethnicity stinks to high heaven.  Shaw cut through the confusion effortlessly over a hundred years ago.

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P.S. I glanced through volume 4 of Shaw's letters, which arrived in today's mail, and noticed that in his later years at least he refers to his typing.  So he did use a typewriter, but even so I marvel at his productivity.

Clap Your Hands If You Believe in the Ferryman

I've begun reading For the Ferryman: A Personal History (Chelsea Station Editions, 2011) by Charles Silverstein, a psychologist who played a significant role in the gay liberation movement.  He presented an argument to the American Psychiatric Association's Nomenclature Committee that contributed to the removal of homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual in 1973, and went on to write pro-gay books on numerous subjects that many gay people nowadays would tell you were impossible to write about positively in those ancient times.  One was A Family Matter (1977), on dealing with parents and other family members; another was Man to Man (1981), on the management of committed gay male relationships.  Most famous, probably, was The Joy of Gay Sex, co-written with Edmund White, which first appeared in 1977 but has gone into three editions, the latest in 2009.  I could have sworn I'd heard that Silverstein died twenty years ago, but Google tells me he's still alive at 85, which pleases me a great deal.

I'm about a hundred pages into For the Ferryman; it's not great literature, but it's a good read and a significant document of the post-Stonewall era, and there are a couple of passages I want to pass along.

One involves the Gay Activists Alliance, the second and longer-lived gay activist organization to emerge in the wake of the 1969 Stonewall rebellion.  GAA's headquarters was a former firehouse, which supported its activities with weekly dances that drew crowds of a thousand or so every Saturday night.  (There's a scene in the movie Parting Glances set at the Firehouse during one of those dances.)  GAA was an avowedly anti-capitalist organization, but:

On the other hand, GAA had to pay rent and the phone bill and buy beer for dances.  Therefore, we charged an admission fee of two dollars for the dances.  The result of the conflict of values was an irresponsible accounting system.  The first year the treasurer was caught with his hand in the till.  Unwilling to trust the police and the courts, GAA held its own trial and ended up the treasurer's membership.  (The former treasurer threatened to run for president in the next election, saying that stealing the money was our own fault because we let him [95-96].

And the name of that treasurer was... Donald Trump! -- No, not really.  Unfortunately, antisocial behavior among LGBTQ people is still sometimes excused on the grounds that the offender suffered under heterosexism and can't be held responsible.  It occurs to me now that charging admission to the dances as a fundraiser to cover expenses wasn't capitalism, but people had the same trouble defining their terms that they do now.  Besides, many GAA members at the time were probably still influenced by the hippie ethic, which held that everything should be free; but it was still necessary to get money for necessities even for nominally free stuff.  GAA could have called the admission fee a "donation," and maybe they did.  It's not capitalism unless you're accumulating capital and making a profit.

The next bit has bearing on an issue that's still very much with us:

The word "homophobia" is another example [like "gay"] of using words to reinterpret the world.  It has very little meaning from a psychological perspective, especially because of its use of the word phobia.  It was a brilliant political conception first publicized by the psychologist George Weinberg and used so extensively that people believed it to be a significant psychological term.  Its political function was to attack institutions or people who depreciated gays.  The people who who beat us on the streets or called us fags were no longer merely prejudiced.  They suffered - and here is the brilliance of the term - from a mental illness called "homophobia." We provided a medical diagnosis to balance the scale that had previously been tipped to our detriment.  "Homophobia" was as effective in going on the offense against discrimination as the word "racist" was to the Black Liberation Movement and "sexist" to the Women's Liberation Movement [96-7].

Now, that's interesting, but even though Silverstein was on the ground at the time, I don't believe it.  It has been many years since I read Weinberg's Society and the Healthy Homosexual, but I don't recall any sense that he was using "homophobia" as a political conception.  As late as 2012 he was arguing in all seriousness that it should be entered into the next revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, which is a bad idea all around.  Far from casting "homophobia" as a political tactic, Weinberg insisted that it must be an illness because people did bad things to gay people. It makes no sense to call a majority attitude (as antigay bigotry was in the 1960s and 1970s) an illness.  Among those who "believed it to be a significant psychological term" were the many LGBTQ people who went into the helping professions after Stonewall, so whatever political sting the term may once have had, it's long gone now.  Also, "racist" and "sexist" are not pseudoclinical terms, so they're not comparable to "homophobic."

Oh, one other thing, on the same page.  Silverstein says of the first Gay Pride Marches that

we did not call them "parades" as they do now.  Parades have a celebratory air about them, suggesting a time for fun and frolic.  We were not celebrating, we were marching for our civil rights, exhibiting ourselves to a shocked heterosexual audiences and shouting for other gay people to come out of the closet.  This was not accidental.  GAA did not want their marches to deteriorate into the parades they have now become [97].

I've written about this before.  If GAA didn't want their marches to "deteriorate" into celebratory parades, they shouldn't have included celebratory, carnivalesque elements in the very first march.  But the marches' tone was out of their control almost immediately, even just in New York, let alone all the other cities that quickly followed their lead.  In the beginning, the celebration had a political edge, because those shocked heterosexuals had never seen such goings-on outside of New Orleans for Mardi Gras.  Silverstein tries to play down those aspects, summing up the first march with "We greeted each other with friendly kisses and 'Happy Birthday,' as if we had started life anew at the Stonewall" (97).  (N.B.: Silverstein wasn't at the Stonewall, as he informs his readers himself - see page 87.)

Harumph, harumph!  Ah well.  Silverstein's perspective is worth having, and I look forward to the rest of the book.

Become the Helper

I just finished reading The Hunt, by Maurice Sachs (1906-1945).  I picked it up, along with Sachs' previous book Witches' Sabbath, after reading about it on the Neglected Books Page.  Sachs was an odd but remarkable character: queer, notoriously charming, amoral, energetic, talented - even brilliant - but unfocused: he began many projects but finished few of them.  Witches' Sabbath was a memoir, fascinating yet exhausting as Sachs ran wildly about, cramming an immense amount of study, scamming, and socializing into his short life.  Like many queer French writers, he wrote openly about his affairs with men, and it's not surprising that Witches' Sabbath and The Hunt drew homophobic fire when they were published in France soon after the war, and in English a decade or so later.  I reminded myself as I read that these books would have been much more shocking then.

The Hunt picked up in 1940, a couple of years after Sabbath left off, as the Nazis invaded and occupied France.  Sachs was Jewish by ancestry, and though he knew the danger he faced, he not only backed away from escaping, he went the other way, into Germany itself.  He left only a fragment of The Hunt, which his publisher filled out with letters he wrote from Hamburg.  I found these letters the most interesting part of the book, especially this one:

The entry for April 23rd, 1860 in the Goncourts' Journal reads as follows: "A vague unease, for no particular reason, and it's pacing restlessly round inside me all the time.  Life is decidedly too flat.  Not two sous' worth of anything unforeseen to be had in the world. Nothing ever comes to me except catalogues, tiresome minor ailments, the same old migraines.  And that's all.  I don't inherit a fortune from someone I don't know.  That pretty house I saw for sale in the Rue La Rochefoucauld will not be presented to me this morning on a silver plate.  And when I look back over my whole past life, it has always been like that, nothing outside the usual humdrum flow of everyday events, and I have the right to call Providence a harsh stepmother.  I have only had one adventure in my whole life: I was in the arms of my nurse, looking at a toy, a very costly toy.  And a passing gentleman stopped and bought it for me."

I could not read this page without sadness and pity. What?  Could Edmond and Jules de Goncourt find no remedy for melancholy of that sort?

Good Lord! what ignorance.  The remedy was to make themselves into the passing gentleman who stopped!*

That reaction seems uncharacteristic of Sachs, who was by his own admission a very selfish person.  Even when he was generous, which was often, it was with the expectation of getting something from his beneficiaries.  Yet here he recognized the importance of being a benefactor, with no evident return.

The passage reminded me of many people today who think of Fred Rogers's exhortation "Look for the helpers" as an invitation to look to others to protect and help them, rather than to help others. I'd thought that this kind of self-pity and sentimentality the Goncourts expressed in the quotation was a much more recent phenomenon, a paradigmatic First World Problem, but there it is, clearly expressed 160 years ago, along with its refutation.

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* Witches' Sabbath and The Hunt, translated by Richard Howard, Ballantine Books, 1966, p. 371

Taking It Spiritually

I found this in How to Read Nancy - you know, the comic strip.*

[Ernie] Bushmiller ... was routinely besieged with correspondence from his readers who searched for significance in his strip and found it: everything from tips on the ponies and lucky numbers for policy players to the theory of tectonic isostasy and the perfect names for their newborns.

When you encounter any esoteric spiritual reading of any text, remembering this should make you wary.  If such meanings can be read into a minimalist comic strip, then they can be read into any writing or image.  But I suppose it's possible that Bushmiller was the unknowing vehicle for a higher truth, just like the writers of the gospels or today's New Age channelers of past lives.

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* Paul Karasik and Mark Newgarden, How to Read Nancy: The Elements of Comics in Three Easy Panels (Fantagraphics Books, 2017).

The Bach Door

The Netherlands Bach Society has a whole bunch of videos of performances of Bach's music on Youtube, and I put one on now and then when I'm in the mood for that old-time rock and roll.  This one came up in my recommendations today, and since I like the Cello Suites I clicked through.



I like the design of the video, the small audience sitting impassively in the darkened background, the cellist's concentration under the light.  But then I noticed the cello itself: I obscurely expected it to be shiny, new-looking, but it looks old, much-used, perhaps antique.  It's not important - I was only half-watching it as I listened - but it pleased me.

Contrast this clip from the same source, of a young man - a boy, really - playing the Third Cello Suite on a different but still banged-up-looking instrument.  There's no audience, the room he's in has large windows overlooking today's Amsterdam so you can't forget that you're in the twenty-first century.  Also interesting, not just a recitation of Bach's music but a comment on it.

In the Heart of the Heart of the Country

And so, when you return to the environment from which you came -- which you left behind -- you are somehow turning back upon yourself, rediscovering an earlier self that has been both preserved and denied.  Suddenly, in circumstances like these, there rises to the surface of your consciousness everything from which you imagined you had freed yourself and yet which you cannot not recognize as part of the structure of your personality -- specifically the discomfort that results from belonging to two different worlds, worlds so far separated from each other that they seem irreconcilable, and yet which coexist in everything that you are.

-- Didier Eribon, Returning to Reims (Allan Lane, 2018), page 12

It Didn't Begin with Smartphones...

Most people still went about on foot in Göttingen.  The distances to be traversed inside the city were so short that it would have been hardly worth while to go by car or motorcycle.  Not until after the First World War did students and professors adopt the bicycle and this was a novelty not popular with everyone.  Was it not those leisurely strolls before and after lectures which had so often given rise to the most interesting ideas?  Had not chance meetings at a straight corner or along the picturesque city wall often accomplished more than formal seminars or committee sessions?

-- Robert Jungk, Brighter Than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists  (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1958), page 11

Embracing The Barbaric Yawp

I've been reading a number of satirical novels about academia lately.  It started by chance, but then a friend, an academic, mentioned another one to me (Robert Grudin's Book), and I began thinking about the genre a bit.  I may or may not write on this topic at length, but I'm near the end of David Lodge's 1975 novel Changing Places now, and found a passage that I feel compelled to quote.

The premise is that two professors of English literature, one English and one American, take each other's places in their institutions.  The story began slowly, but became much more engaging as Lodge developed some entertaining complications.  It even made me laugh aloud a few times, which these novels almost never do.  What I'm going to copy here isn't one of the laugh-aloud passages; it is, I think, more interesting than that.  The Brit, sitting in a coffeehouse toward the end of his American stay, suddenly has an epiphany:

He understood American literature for the first time in his life that afternoon, sitting in Pierre's on Cable Avenue as the river of Plotinus life flowed past, understood its prodigality and indecorum, its yea-saying heterogeneity, understood Walt Whitman who laid end to end words never seen in each other's company before outside of a dictionary, and Herman Melville who split the atom of the traditional novel in the effort to make whaling a universal metaphor and smuggled into a book addressed to the most puritanical reading public the world has ever known a chapter on the whale's foreskin and got away with it; understood why Mark Twain nearly wrote a sequel to Huckleberry Finn in which Tom Sawyer was to sell Huck into slavery, and why Stephen Crane wrote his great war-novel first and experienced war afterwards, and what Gertrude Stein meant when she said that 'anything one is remembering is a repetition, but existing as a human being, that is being listening and hearing is never a repetition'; understood all that, though he couldn't have explained it to his students, some thoughts do often lie too deep for seminars ... [195 of the 1978 Penguin edition].

Reading this passage in the context of the novel, I understood it too.  It's a notably generous insight to give a protagonist in an academic novel, most of which are extended sessions of Ain't It Awful.  Lodge is, unlike most of the authors of such books I've read, smarter than his characters, yet he doesn't look down on them.  He's written more academic novels, and I think I'll end up checking them out too.

How to Be Good

I was about to start bitching yesterday about the reports that Oprah Winfrey plans to run for the US presidency in 2020 -- just what America needs: another uber-rich celebrity President with no political experience, right? -- but then I started reading Betty Smith's 1963 novel Joy in the Morning (Doubleday) and cheered up remarkably.

Smith is best known for her autobiographical first novel, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, published in 1943.  I knew of it only because the title featured in so many Warner Brothers cartoons, though I finally read it three years ago and was impressed enough to want to read more of her work.  I picked up a copy of Joy in the Morning at a used book sale not long ago, and yesterday I took it out of one of the piles of to-be-read books on my living room floor.  I was a bit wary of it, I admit, because as fine as A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was, it was fairly grim, depicting a childhood of grinding poverty in early twentieth-century New York.

But Joy in the Morning lived up to its title.  Set in 1927, it's the story of Carl and Annie Brown, newly married and relocated from Brooklyn to an unnamed college town in the Midwest.  Carl is twenty and studying law, Annie is eighteen and had to leave school at fourteen, but loves to read and wants to write.  Contrary to the assumption of all the adults around them, they are not marrying because Carl got Annie pregnant: in fact, they are both virgins at their (civil) wedding.  Carl knows about contraception and is determined that they won't become parents right away.  Not too surprisingly, the best-laid plans don't work out in that department.

Smith periodically switches viewpoint to Carl and other characters for a page or two, but Annie is the focus of the novel, and it is she who cheered me up.  She's positive without being bland or syrupy, and that I think is no mean achievement.  She isn't sure of herself, she feels inferior next to Carl because of her lack of schooling, she has her blind spots and prejudices, but she overcomes these weaknesses through conscious effort and a determined refusal to let herself be treated as less than a person.  So, for example, there's this scene, where Annie recalls her mother's reaction to being told that Annie was going to marry and move away:

"I can't wait, Mama.  I got to get married."
"You got to?  Did you say you got to?"
"It's not what you think, Mama."
"Tell me what I think.  Tell me."
"You're hurting my arm, Mama."
"I said, tell me!"
"It's better that you don't know."
"When was your last period?"
"Don't say ugly things, Mama."
"Don't you tell me what to say, you ... you tramp!"
"Mama,  if you say that again ..."
"Tramp!"
"You went too far, Mama."
"How dare you raise your hand to me!  When I think ... when I think how I suffered bringing you into the world, the sacrifices I made for you ... " [7]

The only indication that Annie offered physical resistance to her mother's violence is that "How dare you raise your hand to me!"  I don't know whether to read it to mean that Annie hit her, pushed her away, or simply took her hand off her arm.  The important thing is that it shows that despite her lack of self-confidence, there are limits beyond which Annie will not be pushed, even by her mother.

This scene does show one of Annie's weaknesses: she is comfortable enough in her body, she enjoys marital sex with her husband, she's fairly non-judgmental about other people's lives -- but she is intensely uncomfortable talking about these things.  She knows that Carl uses condoms, for example, but considers it nasty for him to say the word.

Similarly, when Carl defends his mother's misjudgment of Annie:

"She said she was sorry."

"An easy thing to say after she had the fun of telling me off.  Does she think 'sorry' is a word like a rubber eraser she can use the rub out the dirty way she thought of me and the things she said?" [17]

And when Carl tells her never to change over their wedding dinner:

"Oh, I couldn't give you a guarantee on that.  No."
"Why not, Annie?"
"Well, the world is full of people."
"No kidding!"
"And people are persons."
"You mean individuals."
"All right.  Individual persons.  Persons change.  A person gets old and old makes him different.  So he changes whether he wants to or not."
"I ask you a simple question, my girl, and you go all away around the mulberry bush."
"All I'm saying is, persons have to change.  I am a person.  I will change." [21]

Annie is mostly outgoing, curious about the world and the people in it, determined not to be limited by her lack of schooling or class status.  So she makes friends, reads omnivorously thanks to the university library (to which she has access through Carl), eavesdrops on and finally audits classes, and begins writing plays.  Until I was about three-quarters of the way through the book I was afraid that she was going to be punished somehow, and not until I finished was I really sure she wouldn't be.  The novel ends with the birth of their first child, their first wedding anniversary, Carl's graduation, and Annie's nineteenth birthday.  Initially I'd thought that Smith had set Joy in the Morning so far in the past so she could follow them until the time of publication, and I'd have been happy to see that; but it ends in early 1929 -- a few months before the Great Crash, just as some gay male fiction is set to end just before the arrival of the AIDS epidemic.

One reviewer on Amazon called Annie "petulant."  I can see why she'd annoy a certain kind of person -- someone like her mother, say -- but it's definitely the wrong word.  I liked her because despite her intense desire to be liked, she won't let anyone abuse her, not even her husband, which I think is what that reviewer objected to.  She has a core belief that people, starting with herself, shouldn't be treated badly.  Carl is also quite likable, by the way, and though he's a fairly conventional middle-class boy in many respects he is ready to put aside his expectations and adjust to Annie, just as she adjusts to him.  I've said before that one shouldn't look to fiction for a reliable guide to the workings of relationships, but I thought that Joy in the Morning provides a plausible account of how a happy marriage might work.

It also reminded me of something the critic Marvin Mudrick wrote in a review of a book on Chaucer from the 1970s, which has stayed with me ever since I first read it.  (In fact this passage was quoted in a review of Mudrick's book, Books Are Not Life But What Is? [Oxford, 1979], and it led me to buy and read it.)

Howard has a fund of jazzy generalizations, as when he defends the dull Parson against the fascinating Pardoner: "If goodness is dull in literature -- if Milton's Satan is more interesting than God, Iago more exciting than Desdemona -- this is a fact not about goodness or about literature but about ourselves.  Take someone to the zoo and he wants to see the snakes."  But it doesn't occur to him that nothing in life or literature is more interesting and exciting than goodness: that Troilus, Criseyde, and Pandarus are all both good and wonderfully interesting; so too Elizabeth Bennett, Anne Elliot, Sophocles' Antigone, Pushkin's Tatyana, Trollope's Plantagenet Palliser, Lawrence's Tom Brangwen; so most of all the character Chaucer in Chaucer's poems, who is the best human being on record and marvelously interesting.  And when someone takes me to the zoo I want to see the swans [184].

I still basically agree with Mudrick, though I think there's some sloppy, lazy thinking on his part here no less than on his target's.  I do agree that nothing in life or literature is more interesting and exciting than goodness.  I can quibble about some of his chosen examples of literary goodness, but who couldn't? Most of my favorite characters are good people, and I don't think I can think of any favorites who aren't.  (The bit about God also reflects less on God than on Milton, I should think, but I've also complained that given the opportunity to invent good gods, people always seem to invent monsters.)  I believe I was bothered slightly by the snakes/swans contrast from the beginning, though: snakes are not evil, and swans aren't good.  I don't think that moral goodness applies to non-human animals, and certainly not to entire species.  But Annie and Carl are good without being goody-goody, and wonderfully interesting, which is very much to Betty Smith's credit.  I'm grateful to her for giving me a hand out of the Slough of Despond today.

If You Don't Know, I'm Certainly Not Going to Tell You!

Two passages from Morality and Expediency: The Folklore of Academic Politics (Blackwell, 1977) by the anthropologist F. G. Bailey.  I've read, enjoyed, and learned from Bailey's work before, but I picked up this particular book because I've found myself reading some famous satirical works on academia lately, such as Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim, Robert Grudin's Book, and Frederick C. Crews's The Pooh Perplex.  Morality and Expediency is based on the English academic Bailey's fieldwork in some American universities, and I felt sure he'd have some useful things to say.  He did, though for me their usefulness goes beyond the Ivory Tower.

First:

The contempt in which a 'popularizer' is held, particularly when he is himself a member of the academic community, comes about for several reasons.  Firstly, he is using the discoveries of other people to make money or reputation for himself: the fact that special talents are needed to market the stuff (so that in fact he does add something), is usually ignored.  Secondly, in the process of popularizing he is likely to dilute and distort: the fact that dilution may be a necessary price for the dissemination of knowledge is ignored. Thirdly, at the back of all this, lies a dominating myth among academics about their own superiority.  Knowledge, for whatever reason accessibly only to the few, is by that very fact superior to knowledge accessible to anyone.  It is all strangely economic: knowledge is valuable in proportion to its scarcity.
In fact this argument is never taken to its logical conclusion, at least by scholars: for the conclusion must be that any sharing of knowledge dilutes it.  But that will not do, since, by definition, knowledge (as distinct from mystical experience or revelation) exists only to the extent that it is disseminated, that is, shared with other people [21].

I don't think I agree with the line Bailey draws here between "knowledge" and "mystical experience or revelation," because revelation, at least, tends to be shared and disseminated, though with the same ambivalence about the process.  On the one hand, the revelation will be polluted by the unclean ears of the many, so must be reserved for the few who have shown themselves worthy; hence the commands in books of revelation to seal up the material until the time is fulfilled, or Jesus' secrecy about his status, to the point of teaching in parables in order to keep "those outside" from understanding and being saved (Mark 4:10-12). On the other hand, the revelation often includes a command to spread the word like seed cast by a sower (also Mark 4), and in the New Testament book of Revelation, the order not to seal the book, for the time is near (Revelation 22:10).

That popularizers are also distrusted, even despised, by scientists no less than other academics, is among other things a sign of the common origins of science, religion, and magic.  On one hand, the rabble are despised for not being willing (or able, depending on the presuppositions of the elitist) to learn the Truth; on the other hand, to attempt to teach them, to let knowledge out of its pen to wander freely in the world, is inevitably to dilute and distort the Truth that only the elect can know.

But this ambivalence also turns up in the arts.  I've mentioned before the composer who despised laypeople for loving the wrong music for the wrong reasons, and speculated that those who make art will inevitably understand it differently than those who consume it.  I first began thinking seriously about this problem, though, when Nirvana's Nevermind became a platinum-selling hit in the early 1990s and I saw people fuming about it online.  They'd been fans before the band signed with a major label, when they could think of Nirvana as esoteric knowledge reserved for the wise few, and they were furious that the masses were going to pollute Art once again with their unclean ears.  I realized that those who see themselves as elites may lament the fact that Artists are despised and rejected (again the language comes from biblical precedents) by the ignorant rabble, but if the rabble suddenly embrace an Artist's work it isn't because their taste has miraculously improved but because the Artist has sold out, gone over to the Dark Side, prostituted himself.  (Myself, I never could hear much difference between Nevermind and Nirvana's earlier work, but then I too am a man of unclean ears and lips, though I have heard the word of Kurt.)

And yet I don't think that the people who were so upset by Nirvana's sudden popularity thought of themselves as elitists; they probably saw themselves as marginalized outsiders, anarchists, the common people trampled on by big business, and they'd thought Cobain and the guys were just guys like them.  The same would be true of the early Christians.  Jesus, after all, had taught that only a few would pass through the narrow gate that leads to salvation, so it couldn't have been only the rich (a small minority in any society) who were going to be damned.

There's a similar confusion among the right-wing Republican base of the Tea Party and of Donald Trump's presidency: on the one hand they are a pitiful minority persecuted by godless brown and black people, transgenders, and extreme liberal media; on the other, they are America, We the People, hear them roar, and the government should govern as they demand.  I also detect echoes of the ambivalence police (also a Trump constituency) have toward the public: on the one hand, a sentimental stance of service and protection; on the other, a paranoid sense that the public misunderstands them, won't support them, blames them first for everything that goes wrong.

Bailey goes on to discuss the conflicting attitudes academics have toward the outside world that supports them.  The University produces and stores Knowledge and Wisdom; it is utterly distinct from and must maintain a wall of separation between itself and the World (the religious precedent again) -- but therefore the public should feel honored to support it; on the other, the public are stupid and can never understand the Truth, so the wise elites of the University are entitled to extract "resources from the outside world without giving anything in return" (40).  These attitudes are also echoed in the arts and sciences.  They are somewhat caricatured, but like any caricature they are recognizable.

Next:

The arena [as opposed to the 'elite'] committee tends towards the public model.  The members of the committee are representative of bodies outside, to which they are accountable and to which they must report back, and the awareness of this potential audience will push members towards posturing and the language of principle and policy, and away from a gossip-like exchange about persons.  Furthermore, since altercation has to be contained if anything is to be done, there may be a tendency to develop rules of etiquette, and with that would appear the suspicion that the committee's work is becoming ritual and ceremonial, leaving the real decisions to be taken elsewhere.  In practice, this descent and fall is usually arrested, because the contestants begin to see the necessity for collusion and for concealing from their followers some of the deals they make with the opposition.  The Planning Sub-committee is an example: the crude antagonisms of its earlier days have been softened a little by increased formality but more by a growing camaraderie and spirit of give-and-take among the members [72].

This made me think of government, especially above the local level.  It's a description of an arena committee like the US Congress, for example, no less than of a university faculty Senate.  The public face of the legislature allows for a lot of grandstanding and posturing, and much work must (therefore?) be done out of the public view.  Members of Congress are representative not only of the voters but of non-voters, and of their donors.  I've often noticed that many citizens talk, at least, as though they believe that their legislators should know what they want or need without being told, and should produce laws cut to order when just one citizen (themselves, of course) confronts them and tells them what he or she wants.  This is impossible even in smaller bodies, like a university senate, because as Bailey says, there is no objectively correct way to divide up limited resources: everybody thinks their wishes and interests are most important and should get attention.  So,

in those small committees which are designed to take or recommend action, just because they are nearer to reality than the larger assemblies, the unpncipled business of compromise behind the scenes -- one of the main indicators of the community [as opposed to the organizational] style -- takes place.  This in turn reinforces the need for secrecy, because there are no public principles -- other than 'reasonableness, which means refusal to stand on principle -- by which they decisions can be defended [66].

I also found useful the distinction Bailey draws between "organizations," based on principles and accountability, and "communities," based on interpersonal relationships, where to "ask for accountability is at best a misunderstanding and at worst a wicked perversion  of the true nature of the institution" (12).  Of course every institution is at the same time a community and an organization, and while it must be decided which mode is proper for dealing with a problem, there is no objective (or public) way to decide it.  Reading a liberal Democrat's account of her interaction with Elizabeth Warren through these filters is revealing: on the one hand, the writer sees herself as a member of a community shared with Warren, whom she evaluates as a person, but also as a member of an organization unfortunately dragged down by the proles, because "we [the wise elites, the Party insiders] are always talking policy but the voters are always choosing on personality."  As I've argued, it isn't true that the voters don't care about policy, and certainly this writer chose on personality; some mixture of the two will probably be present in every individual.

Reading Morality and Expediency, then, reminds me how much I need to learn about real-world politics.  It also fits with what I've been learning about the impossibility of distinguishing science from religion, or the arts from politics, or any number of human institutions from each other: what I, and others, tend to see as specific traits of each turn up in all the others.

Fake News in the Seventeenth Century

I just finished reading The World on Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading (Cambridge UP, 1994) by David R. Olson, which I happened on at a library book sale and turns out to be even more interesting than I expected.  It's one of those wide-ranging books that casts light on many matters.  Not only does it address the psychology of reading and writing, it puts them in historical and cross-cultural context, with forays into their relation to modern Western science and art.

So, for example:

[O]nce a representational format had been developed for factual description, as exemplified by Boyle, for example, that form could be exploited for literary purposes.  Jonathan Swift’s A modest proposal gives no indication that it is irony; it adopts all of the features of an honest proposal.  Even more impressive are the imaginative accounts of imaginary voyages such as those of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.

Fiction is a new kind of allegorical writing in which literal meanings, that is meanings which normally report truth, are used to report things known to be false.  Medieval allegorical writing, such as Pilgrim’s Progress, made prominent the fact that the writing was allegorical by providing characters with names like Pilgrim and Envy; the story never pretended to be factually true.  Fiction, on the other hand, often pretends to tell the truth.  There is nothing in the fiction to indicate that the account is not factually correct.  Fiction remains allegorical in the sense that the reader comes away thinking he or she has learned something about reality but the reader knows that, counter to its appearance, it is not a factual narrative report.  Consequently, some literary sophistication is required to see truth, now allegorical truth, not factual truth, in fiction; to the uninitiated it appears to be a lie … [229]

And:

Similarly, right into the school years [children] continue to have difficulty understanding irony.  Sarcasm presents less difficulty presumably because it is marked by a strong, sneering intonation.  Sarcasm without intonation is irony.  Children tend to take ironic utterances either as literally true or as lies … To interpret an utterance as ironic requires that the listener or reader grant both that the utterance is not true and that the speaker does not believe it to be true nor want the listener to take it as true and yet that it be taken as informative [252].

As Olson also points out, many adults continue to have difficulty understanding irony.  On reading these passages I thought of the confusion many adults exhibit about satire.  Many people resent it, because they "take ironic utterances either as literally true or as lies."  I think of Harvey Fierstein's grumpy indignation when he learned that the meme he'd posted of Ted Cruz endorsing businesses' right to discriminate on religious grounds was actually satire: "Maybe I'm just tired, but I don't find that kind of crap at all amusing.  These are people's lives and reputations."  I don't believe that he doesn't find such "crap" amusing, as long as it mocks people he wants to see mocked, or that he cares about Cruz' reputation.  (Or was it his own reputation he was worried about, since he's a comic actor and writer revealing that he has no sense of humor?)

I also think of the Clinton Democrats who took an Onion piece at face value, although it was clearly from the Onion and they knew full well that the Onion does satire.  And I think of all the people who have trouble recognizing satire and irony, while fancying that they're smarter than illiterate, ignorant Rethugs.  Learning to recognize irony doesn't come naturally or easily, and Olson goes on to discuss the failure of most schooling to equip students to deal with the complexity of the things they will read -- not just rarefied literary material, but day-to-day stuff.

Not many people had access to the Internet when The World on Paper was published twenty-three years ago, and far from hampering literacy the Internet has made tougher demands on readers' abilities to make sense of what they read.  Much of the fuss over "fake news" springs from confusion about the different kinds of text and video purporting to be news that people will encounter: there's satire like the Onion, which imitates the format of print and TV news for pointedly humorous purposes, there's fraudulent material like the dishonestly-edited videos put by organizations like Breitbart, and there's supposedly real news by respectable institutions like the New York Times or CNN that ranges from the honestly erroneous to the disingenuous to fraudulent stories like Judith Miller's articles that laundered Bush-regime propaganda about Iraq into news (or "news"), which might just as well have come from Breitbart.  And more, none of it really new.  So it's hardly surprising that most people, whose education in literacy was intended to prepare them to read newspapers, fill out forms, and follow recipes, not to to evaluate what they read, have trouble applying their skills in the stormy media seas.

A Hundred Selves

Through the windy night something
     is coming up the path
     towards the house.
I have always hated to wait for things.
     I think I will go
     to meet whatever it is.*

I should probably avoid sites like The Neglected Books Page; it's not as if I need to learn about more books that I might want to read, after all.  There are hundreds of books piled around my apartment that I want to get to, and I hardly need to add to them.  Or do I?  I think that is really a metaphysical speculation, so I'll leave it there.

The fact remains that a couple of evenings going through Neglected Books's archives pointed me to several books that I hadn't known before, and was glad to have discovered.  Isabel Bolton's The Christmas Tree, for example, originally published in 1949, with a gay man as a key character.  And I just finished reading Elizabeth Coatsworth's Personal Geography: Almost an Autobiography, which pleased me even more.

I've long been interested in books about aging, by aging people, whom I see as pioneers advancing before me into the country of Old Age -- less and less before me as I get older myself.  May Sarton's journals were the first for me in this genre, if genre it be; then Jane Rule's writings, both fictional and autobiographical, about old age.  I've also returned to books by older women writers who were well-known in the mid-twentieth century but are less well-known now.  I tend to think of them as "lady" writers, which I've come to realize is unfair.  Many of them have rather old-fashioned styles, but when I become accustomed to their manner I find that they are more realistic, hard-headed and honest than most of their male contemporaries.  Coatsworth (1893-1986), probably most famous for her 1931 Newbery-Medal children's book The Cat Who Went to Heaven, led quite a life.  She traveled around the world from an early age, usually with her sister or her mother, and didn't slow down much even after she married (rather late) and became a mother.  She and her husband -- also a writer -- settled in Massachusetts and Maine, which puts her close to some other interesting writers, like Sarton, Ruth Moore, and Marguerite Yourcenar.

Personal Geography was Coatsworth's last book, though she lived another ten years after it was published.  It's a collection of short pieces that cover parts of her life from childhood to her years of widowhood.  I was struck by her travel descriptions, some of which took place a century ago, in Europe and Asia very different from what they later became; since she lived into the 1980s, she saw many changes and paid attention to them.  Nor did she idealize the past too much:

I loved China the most.  At that time it was half ruinous, with the especial sadness and poetry that hang like a mist over ruins; I doubt if I should care much for communist China, though it may be a better place to live in [89].

I did not know travel at its dawn, as Marco Polo might have claimed, though he, too, had many predecessors.  But it was at my dawn, and the early light lies on my memories.  We never went on tours, or by schedule: we followed our whims stayed for a day or a week or a month in one place, or struck off at a tangent when someone told us of some wonder.  Only once did some pilgrims to the high Buddhist monasteries of the Korean Diamond Mountains look at us in wonder as the first white people they had seen (and examined our clothing almost to our skin) but we traveled at a time when all ports did not look alike and when people, East and West, wore the clothes their ancestors had worn. I should never feel such joy traveling in today's homogenized world [181-2].

To each her own!  I'm even more impressed by Coatsworth's travels when I consider that this was before air travel, cheap international telephone calls, credit cards, bullet trains, to say nothing of the Internet.  Nor was the world in those days necessarily safer.  I get a lot of joy from traveling in today's homogenized world, and I think I'm too much of a sissy to dare what she, her sister, and her mother dared to do.

Like Ruth Moore, Coatsworth appreciated her rural neighbors but wasn't sentimental about them:

When a lightning storm begins after dark, the farmers and their wives always dress, to be ready to save the stock if the barn is struck.  Fire, the unknown -- one begins to fear the things that the farmer fears.  And one understands more and more their helplessness before bad neighbors or tramps.  Each man is so isolated.  He does not dare make enemies: someone may dig up his potatoes, but the farmer does not dare voice his suspicions; someone may carry away one of his sheep, but he does not dare rouse bad blood, that may end in a burning barn or a fire in his woods [128].

Ah, the good old days!  And she's matter-of-fact about her aging, failing body.

I forget words (the other day I came to a full stop because I had lost "button" from my mind), and generally use a synonym because I know that any word is better than none.  I forget names, but I comfort myself with the knowledge that I have always forgotten them.  The long-ago day comes back to me when a stranger asked me my name -- I was perhaps six -- and the sudden question drove it entirely from my mind.  I still remember the bewildering feeling of "I don't know who I am"; and perhaps I still feel it [157].

These remarks are necessarily self-centered, but not by intention.  They are written primarily for people of my own age or for those who are approaching it, to discuss honestly the problems which we all face.  It is my good fortune to have inherited, nothing so dashing as courage, but acceptance of what cannot be changed, and a willingness to enjoy the small gifts of life which still are so plentiful if one will look for them [158].

She's good company.  I'll hang on to this book, as I have to May Sarton's journals, and refer to it now and then as I catch up with her.
---------------------------------
*Elizabeth Coatsworth, Personal Geography: Almost an Autobiography (Brattleboro VT: The Stephen Greene Press), p. 183.

The Safety Exit

I just read The Leopard, by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896-1957).  Originally published in Italian in 1958, it was promptly made into a prestigious epic motion picture by Luchino Visconti, with Burt Lancaster as the lead.  I decided to read the book before I watched the film, but now I wonder if I should follow through on the latter.  For one thing, I generally dislike dubbing, and the original version had Lancaster dubbed into Italian; a shorter version made for US release apparently has Lancaster's own voice speaking English, but I presume everyone else is dubbed.  For another thing, I suspect Lancaster was miscast physically: his character, Prince Fabrizio Corbero di Salina, has a "vast expanse of" belly under "his waistcoat" (7),* which doesn't sound like Burt.

Not that he was fat; just very large and very strong; in houses inhabited by common mortals his head would touch the lowest rosette on the chandeliers; his fingers could twist a ducat coin as if it were mere paper; and there was constant coming and going between Villa Salina and a silversmith's for the mending of forks and spoons which, in some fit of controlled rage at table, he had coiled into a hoop. But those fingers could also stroke and handle with the most exquisite delicacy, as his wife Maria Stella knew only too well; and up in his private observatory at the top of the house the gleaming screws, caps, and studs of the telescopes, lenses, and "comet finders" would answer to his slightest touch [7-8].

I find myself picturing someone more like John Goodman, if the actor must be American.  I don't quite believe any Hollywood actor, especially of that era, could play such a character convincingly, especially amid a mostly Italian cast.

But the main reason I'm now reluctant to watch the movie is that Lampedusa's prose (as translated, quite beautifully, by Archibald Colquhoun) carries the book.  It hasn't much of a plot, though I can understand why the vivid descriptions of people (aside from the Prince, his future daughter-in-law is described so sensuously that even I wanted to caress her), food, buildings, and Sicilian landscapes would have tempted Visconti.  Everyone who writes about the film mentions the forty-minute-long ball scene, based on the one in the book, which I'm sure will be visually gorgeous, but I doubt it can convey Lampedusa's voice and tone.  That's always a problem with omniscient narrators, which is why every film or TV adaptation of Jane Austen I've seen falls flat.

Austen's on my mind right now because, inspired by a book group discussing Pride and Prejudice on the bicentennial of her death, I'm rereading all her work.  Film and video can give you the costumes, the landscapes, the architecture and the decor, which, along with Colin Firth in a wet shirt, are what most people take to be what these stories are about; it's much harder for them to convey the author's attitude to his or her story.

Like Austen, Lampedusa was an observer, often acidly satirical, of his social world.  (Lampedusa was himself a prince, and The Leopard is based on his grandfather.  It's said that he began writing the novel -- the only one he wrote -- after the family palace was destroyed by bombing during World War II. He died of cancer shortly before it was published.)  So, for example, we are told of a Sicilian peasant:

In fact with his low forehead, ornamental tufts of hair on the temples, lurching walk, and perpetual swelling of the right trouser pocket where he kept a knife, it was obvious at once that Vincenzino was a "man of honor," one of those violent cretins capable of any havoc [202].

I think it was the word "ornamental," so carefully and meaningfully placed, that first made me think of Jane Austen in connection with The Leopard: it's the kind of touch she often employed.  Though she would never have written as Lampedusa did, of the young ladies at the ball:

The more of them he saw the more he felt put out; his mind, conditioned by long periods of solitude and abstract thought, eventually, as he was passing through a long gallery where a populous colony of these creatures had gathered on the central pouf, produced a kind of hallucination; he felt like a keeper in a zoo set to looking after a hundred female monkeys; he expected at any minute to see them clamber up the chandeliers and hang there by their tails, swinging to and fro, showing off their behinds and loosing a stream of nuts, shrieks, and grins at pacific visitors below.

Curiously enough, it was religion that drew him from this zoologic vision, far from the group of crinolined monkeys there rose a monotonous, continuous sacred invocation.  "Maria! Maria!" the poor girls were perpetually exclaiming.  "Maria, what a lovely house!"  "Maria, what a handsome man Colonel Pallavicino is!"  "Maria, how my feet are hurting."  "Maria, I'm so hungry, when does the supper room open?"  The name of the Virgin, invoked by that virginal choir, filled the gallery and changed the monkeys back into women, since the wistiti of the Brazilian forests had not yet, so far as he knew, been converted to Catholicism.

Slightly nauseated, the Prince passed into the next room, where were encamped the rival and hostile tribe of men ... Among these men Don Fabrizio was considered an "eccentric"; his interest in mathematics was judged almost a sinful perversion, and had he not been actually Prince of Salina and known as an excellent horseman, indefatiguable shot, and tireless skirt chaser, his parallaxes and telescopes might have exposed him to the risk of being outlawed.  But he was not talked to much, for his cold blue eyes, glimpsed under their heavy lids, put questioners off, and he often found himself isolated, not, as he thought, from respect, but from fear [222-3].

Lampedusa wrote about his era in retrospect rather than from within it, as Austen wrote about hers.  The social worlds of balls, crinolines, hunting, palaces, are very similar, though fifty years after Austen, the Prince knows that the order he represents is in decline. If she had lived a century later, and felt free to write about sexuality and politics (most of The Leopard is set in the mid-1800s, during Italy's transition to a unified "modern" state, and several of its characters play significant roles in that transition), and if she had lived long enough to write about old age from experience, Austen might have produced something like The Leopard.  But Lampedusa did produce it, and I'm very glad to have gotten around to reading it at last.

*Quoted from the 2007 edition published by Pantheon Books.

Some Good Questions

And then this question of intelligence, -- are we too much, too readily impressed by mere articulateness?  I mean, is Raymond really a more intelligent person than the subaltern here who has commanded Indians all his life? How would Raymond come out of it, if he were suddenly put into a position of responsibility and authority?  How would his appreciation of the finer shades serve him then?  And which is the more important?  Or is it merely a question of difference, not of degree?

Besides, so far as feeling goes, I suspect there is as much feeling in the terse remarks of the subaltern, -- "Jolly day, -- jolly the mountains look, -- topping view," --as in any amount of verbiage.

-- Vita Sackville-West, writing to Virginia Woolf from Tehran, 23rd February 1927

[The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf, edited by Louise DeSalvo and Mitchell A. Leaska (Morrow, 1985), p. 178]

"Feverishly Patriotic and Irrational Effusions": Fake News in the Eighteenth-and-a-Half Century

I recently read Benjamin Franklin, Politician: The Mask and the Man (Norton, 1996) by the late Francis Jennings, a historian whose work has been very instructive for me.  The book is a relatively brief, revisionist (though not hostile) take on Franklin's rise to prominence before the American Revolution; Jennings dug around in the archives and found some information that hadn't been taken into account before.  It describes the history of the colony of Pennsylvania, which was a relative enclave of religious liberty in that period, complicated by mismanagement both of its founder, Wiliam Penn, and his son Thomas.

I especially liked this passage, about an attack on the colonial government written by a young Anglican priest, Thomas Barton, a protege of William Smith, who was in turn a protege of Franklin's.  Franklin didn't know that Smith later spied on him for Thomas Penn.  In 1754 Smith wrote anonymously "an incendiary pamphlet, entitled A Brief State of the Province of Pennsylvania, intended among other things to 'induce the Parliament to take measures for the future security of this Province by excluding the Quakers from the Legislature.'"  The pamphlet "aroused a great furore in Britain" (99).

Barton brought copies of [William] Smith's Brief State pamphlet, already in circulation in England, attacking the Assembly, the Quakers, and the Germans. It made such a "prodigious Noise," and was so far-reaching in its intended and unintended effects, that it deserves in some detail.  Its title page describes its author as "a Gentleman who has resided many Years in Pennsylvania."  This set the keynote for the pamphlet's deceptions; Smith, at the time of writing it, had visited Philadelphia for several weeks in 1753, and had resided there less than eight months in 1754.

The pamphlet opens with a brief review of population statistics on the generous side, and lays down maxims of government.  Popular government is all right for infant settlements, it says, but as communities grow their government should become less popular and more "mixt."  Pennsylvania has become more of "a pure Republic" than at its founding.  A "speedy Remedy" is needed.  The province has too much toleration: "extraordinary Indulgence and Privileges" are granted to papists.  (They were allowed to celebrate mass openly.)  The Quakers conduct "political Intrigues, under the Mask of Religion."  (As all the organized religions did, in England as well as America.)  For their own ends, the Quakers have taken "into their pay" a German printer named Saur, "who was once one of the French Prophets in German, and is shrewdly suspected to be a Popish emissary."  (Saur was an Anabaptist, fiercely independent.)  The "worst Consequence" of the Quakers' "insidious practices" with the Germans is that the latter "are grown insolent, sullen, and turbulent."  They give out "that they are a Majority, and strong enough to make the Country their own," and indeed they would be able, "by joining with the French, to eject all the English inhabitants ... the French have turned their Hopes upon the great body of Germans ... by sending their Jesuitical Emissaries among them ... they will draw them from the English ... or perhaps lead them in a Body against us."  The Quakers oppose every effort to remedy this evil state of affairs, attacking all "regular Clergymen as Spies and Tools of State."  Thus the Quakers hinder ministers from "having Influence enough to set them right at the annual Elections."  The greatest German sect is the Mennonites -- people like the Quakers.  A quarter of the Germans are "supposed" to be Roman Catholics.  (Even Thomas Penn understood that there were only about two thousand Catholics in the province.  But he did not make that knowledge public.)  [106-7]

Smith's diatribe should sound familiar to observers and consumers of American political discourse today: furriners who refuse to learn our language are taking over, to impose Canon law on decent Christians. and pacifist surrender-monkeys not only want them to succeed, they are actively in the pay of Putin!

The other day someone shared this meme on Facebook:

It turns out, surprisingly enough (it's a meme spreading like a radioactive virus on Facebook, after all) to be a genuine quotation.  One commenter called it "prescient," which was, um, stupid since Bonhoeffer was not talking about the future but about Nazi Germany in his present and recent past.  I pointed this out, and the commenter replied that he didn't mean it "foretold" anything, which was probably a lie, or to put it more nicely, apologetic invention; he proceeded to tie himself in knots trying to justify it.  It was as if he'd found a passage where Bonhoeffer referred to sunrise, and kvelled that the sun came up this morning, so Bonhoeffer was prescient about that.

Of course it's a common and "natural" human tendency to take literary or other material from the past as not just relevant to the present as well, but as a specific reference to the present: Christianity, for one major cultural force, was built on such appropriation of the Hebrew Bible.  And like the ancient Christians, today's American liberals think of all history as a prelude leading up to themselves, the crown of creation and the fulfilment of all human hope, as foretold in the scriptures.  Liberals love to jeer at fundamentalists for thinking like this, but they are treading the same path every time they claim that today's Right is completely unprecedented.

The reason why the Bonhoeffer quotation should give Americans pause is not that he was foretelling American's future, but that he was describing a problem that was current then, had a long history worldwide, and has not gone away since then.  Thinking otherwise helps foster the dangerous illusion that things used to be different, the media used to tell the Truth, people used to be good to each other, America was the land that didn't torture, Barack ended the wars, etc., and all the Democrats need to do is take America back.
 
But it's also dangerous to think of "stupid people" as the Other.  I am stupid, you are stupid, we're all stupid here or we wouldn't be here.  I told another liberal commenter on the Bonhoeffer meme that I too have given up on talking to stupid people, but that was just rhetoric.  It's always important to answer, rebut, and try to refute positions and statements we think are stupid.  True, we probably won't convince the people we're criticizing, but we might persuade someone else who reads what we've written.  That's the point of debate -- to persuade not our opponent, but our audience.

So that's why I liked Jennings's book and the passage I quoted here, though I suppose it could just as easily make people feel hopeless: if people have always been dishonest and irrational, then why even try to oppose them?  It's a question I don't have a good answer for, especially since dishonesty and irrationality so often win.  But it's possible to make them lose too.  If we remember how persistent they are, though, we won't be surprised when they bounce back.  We might even be able to think of ways to resist and stop them before they get the upper hand again, instead of wailing, "Oh no, this is unprecedented, where did these people come from, why are they being so mean?"

Swallowed Up by the Skirt

You know that unpleasant feeling when you feel a sneeze coming on, but you just hover there on the cusp, waiting for it to get done with, but it won't?  Well, I've felt like that for most of this week.  I'm not sure I remember a cold quite like this before.  I began to notice the onset of a cold on Monday, with congestion and a muzzy inability to concentrate, and by Tuesday noticed at my (part-time) job that several of our student workers were in even worse shape than I was.  So I kept waiting for it to crest, so that I could begin recovering, but it got worse each day.  Today I napped for a few hours, which seems to have helped a bit; I'll probably do that for the rest of the weekend.  It's frustrating -- I had several topics to write about, and was ready to get to work on them, but this week I couldn't get motivated.  In the end one simply has to sit down and get on with it.

I've been reading a book I found at the public library sale, Speaking of Jane Austen (Harper & Brothers, 1944) by Sheila Kaye-Smith (1887-1956) and G[ladys] B[ronwyn] Stern (1890-1973).  It's a fond discussion of Austen's works by writers who like her a lot, though they distinguish themselves from hard-core "Janeites."  (There's always somebody more extreme than you are, no matter where you stand.)   It's fun to read, not a work of academic criticism but still historically informed, and both authors grew up in an England very different from the one they died in, probably closer in culture to Austen's than to the England of the late twentieth century.

Among much else, I was intrigued by Sheila Kaye-Smith's digression on women's underwear:

Miss Bingley's remarks on Elizabeth Bennett's petticoats -- "six inches deep in mud, I am absolutely certain, and the gown which had been let down to hide it not doing its office" -- inspires the reflection that most articles of feminine underwear started on the outside.  Elizabeth's petticoat was meant to be visible, a part of the scheme of her dress, with the gown above it looped up to show either a contrasting or a blending colour and a different material.  Sometimes the gown was slit down the front to display that petticoat beneath, and half a century earlier had been hunched high over it in panniers.  It was not until Victorian times that the petticoat disappeared under the skirt.  Stays, too, by Elizabeth's time invisible, started as outside wear, much in the style that still survives among certain European peasants, with the chemise visible above them.  Drawers were later than her day, but they also began as a visible article of dress, reaching the ankles and to be seen for several inches below the skirt, which finally dropped to the ground and swallowed them up as it had swallowed up the petticoat.  The Victorian women, then, wore no less than four unmentionable undergarments which had in their day not only been mentionable but plainly visible.  By the time that her crinoline and bustle had shrunk away into modern streamlines and what was beneath might be expected to be revealed, it was found that these had shrunk too, contracting all four of them into a single scantie.  [243]

It happened that I read this progress (if that's the word) of outerwear to underwear as more controversy raged over Muslim women's headscarves.  It's worth remembering that in England and Europe, respectable Christian women covered their bodies below the neck, as well as above.  (Male visitors from the Muslim world still found them "immodest," of course.)  The remarkable thing to me in this case was how each new covering apparently had to be covered up in turn.  Where does it come from, this obsessive need to package women's bodies in layer after layer of wrapping, like a fast-food hamburger covered in tissue and paper and a cardboard box, then put in a paper bag?  We seem to have left the tendency behind in the West for the most part, though I expect a reaction to come eventually; the best hope I see is that women here do have a lot of room for personal choice, whether for long skirts or short shorts.  The problem isn't the degree of covering so much as making a specific degree of covering or uncovering mandatory.

Sit Back, Relax, and Leave the Foreign Policy to Us

I've been reading Ben Ehrenreich's new book The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine (Penguin, 2016).  It's a long, grim slog, but worth it, and every now and then there's a touch of comic relief.  Describing the 2014 collapse of talks between Israel and Palestine, mediated by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, Ehrenreich writes:

Another month would pass before a frank American narrative of what had occurred in Jerusalem and Ramallah hit the press.  In May, the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth's Nahum Barnea published an interview with anonymous senior U.S. officials who, he wrote, had been closely involved in the talks. The story that emerged from what Barnea called "the closest thing to an official American version of what happened" was one of Israeli cynicism and an almost astonishing American naivete.  "We didn't realize," said one of Barnea's sources, that "Netanyahu was using the announcements of tenders for settlement construction as a way to ensure the survival of his own government.  We didn't realize continuing construction allowed ministers in his government to very effectively sabotage the success of the talks."  If true, this is a shocking admission: the Americans, with all their vast data-collecting capabilities, did not know what even the least observant reader of Israeli newspapers had for months understood to be self-evident [262].

The theme of American naivete unto gullibility when faced with conniving Oriental slick dealing is well-worn by now, and makes me suspicious.  American elites have always tried to excuse their short-sightedness and (let's not mince words) incompetence and/or collusion with authoritarian regimes by claiming that they were babes in the woods, outclassed by the ancient wiles of their opposite numbers.  It's echoed by the Vatican apologists' claim that, confronted with sexually predatory priests, they were so unprepared to deal with such Evil that they could do nothing but send them to new parishes to prey some more.  In either case the defense is unconvincing, and could only be supported by immediate resignation, confessions of incompetence, and departure from public life, except perhaps as garbage collectors.

On the next page Ehrenreich continues:

In the end, the officials pinned the blame for the negotiations' failure squarely on Israel, and on Netanyahu's insistence on continuing settlement expansion throughout the talks: "The Palestinians don't believe that Israel really intends to let them found a state when at the same time it is building settlements on the territory meant for that state.  We're talking about the announcement of 14,000 housing units, no less.  Only now, after the talks blew up, did we learn that this is also about expropriating land on a large scale." 

When I first read that line, I nearly coughed up a small piece of my kidney. "Only now," the unnamed official said [263].

And, of course, six weeks "after the talks collapsed ... Obama sent his secretary of defense, Chuck Hagel," to Israel to pledge eternal U.S. fealty, along with "$3.1 billion per year in foreign military financing, which is not only more than we provide to any other nation, but the most we have provided to any nation in American history" (264).

Which brings me to another bit of comedy.  After the end of the talks, Hagel's opposite number, Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon, complained to the same newspaper about Kerry's "naive and meddlesome 'messianic fervor' ...'The only thing that can save us ... is for John Kerry to win a Nobel Peace Prize and leave us alone" (234-5).

Of course, Ya'alon doesn't really want Kerry or the U.S. to leave Israel alone, any more than corporate CEOs want meddlesome big government to leave them alone.  Leave them alone -- but continue to send vast amounts of money, stand by them in the United Nations, and make it illegal for any Americans to organize boycotts against them.

The other examples I gave show that this is not a new problem in American foreign policy or diplomacy.  But once again, combined with Obama's (and his fans') feckless responses to domestic opposition, it makes it impossible for me to believe that he or his advisors know what they're doing.

Learning to Drive

One summer in Vermont approximately twenty-five years later ... he told me he really wanted to learn to drive.  Would I consider giving him lessons?  Recalling our initial attempt, I had him sit on the driver's side and acquaint himself with the various controls.  He assured me that he had been studying Kenward at the wheel, and by now had a pretty good idea of how things worked.  "O.K.," I said, "let's start at the beginning.  First, put the key in the ignition.  No, it goes the other way.  Good.  Notice that the gearshift is in park, where it should be.  Now turn the key clockwise and when the engine starts, give it a little gas -- I mean push gently on the accelerator."  Joe turned the key, but the engine would not start.  How could that be?  Kenward's car always started easily.  Joe tried again.  Rrruh rrruh rrruh.  Nothing.  "Let me try," I said.  We changed places.  Vroom, the car started right up.  I shut it off.  We changed back.  Joe turned the key again.  Rrruh rrruh rrruh.  So I reached over and started the car and told him to hold down the brake pedal with his right foot and to shift into reverse.  Fruump,the engine died.  Joe, with a look of total dismay, said, "I think we had better try again later."  As in never.*

I found this story in Ron Padgett's memoir of his lifelong friend, the artist and writer Joe Brainard.  It is a beautiful, moving, and loving book, often quite funny, and well worth reading even if you don't know anything about Brainard or Padgett.

The reason I wanted to quote this passage here is that it made me think of all people who have trouble learning.  Brainard was not "stupid" (though he was simple in the best sense of the word, a direct and honest person) nor was he disabled physically.  He was a very fine draftsman and craftsman, capable of drawing beautifully and of assembling intricate objects on scales raging from the very small to the large.  Padgett's memoir gives plenty of examples of Brainard's artistic dexterity.  So why couldn't he learn to drive?  Plenty of less intelligent people who couldn't draw a straight line can do it; but confronted with a modern (mid-1980s) car with automatic transmission, Brainard became helpless.  The lesson here is that we should not be surprised when ability, even great ability, in one domain isn't matched by even minimal ability in others.  That seems obvious enough, but many people, myself included, tend to forget it.

* Ron Padgett, Joe: A Memoir of Joe Brainard (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2004), page 278.

Wars of Compassion; or, Pacifists Who Kill

I've written before about Brian Daizen Victoria's work on the collaboration between Zen Buddhism and imperialist warfare.  Since then I've read his book Zen at War (Rowman, 1997; second edition 2006), followed by Christopher Ives's Imperial-Way Zen (Hawai'i, 2009), which is critical of some details of Victoria's thesis but overall agrees that the major Zen sects in Japan actively colluded with and rationalized Japanese imperial violence.  Now I've reading Victoria's Zen War Stories (Routledge, 2003), which adds more material to his argument.

The first chapter is a knockout.  Victoria recounts his 1999 visit to the Rinzai Zen Master Nakajima Genjō, a year before the latter's death at age 85.  Genjō told Victoria

that he had served in the Imperial Japanese Navy for some ten years, voluntarily enlisting at the age of twenty-one.  Significantly, the year prior to his enlistment Genjo had his initial enlightenment experience (kenshō).

... To my surprise, Genjō readily agreed to share his wartime experiences with me, but, shortly after he began to speak, tears welled up in his eyes and his voice cracked.  Overcome by emotion, he was unable to continue.  By this time his tears had triggered my own, and we both sat round the temple's open hearth crying for some time.  When at length Genjō regained his composure, he informed me that he had just completed writing his autobiography, including a description of his years in the military [3].

Genjō was the first Zen master Victoria had met in person who had served in the military, so he gratefully accepted the master's offer of a copy of his autobiography on its publication.  Victoria then provides a "somewhat abridged" translation of the portion describing Genjō's wartime experience.  He kept in touch with his own master, Yamamoto Gempō, who continued his Zen training by correspondence while encouraging him to be "the genuine article, the real thing!  Zen priests mustn't rely on the experience of others.  Do today what has to be done today.  Tomorrow is too late!" (4).

When Genjō's ship landed in Zhenjiang, China, in 1937, he visited the famous temple of Jinshani there.  He found five hundred novices engaged in meditation practice, and being "young and immature," he remonstrated with the abbot.

What do you think you're doing!  In Japan everyone is consumed by the war with China, and this is all you can do?  [The abbot replied,] And just who are you to talk?  I hear that you are a priest.  War is for soldiers.  A priest's work is to read the sūtras and meditate!

The abbot didn't say any more than this, but I felt as if I had been hit on the head with a sledgehammer.  As a result I immediately became a pacifist [7].

Pacifist or no, Genjō continued to serve in the Japanese Navy.  He dismisses reports of the infamous massacres in Nanking: "... I am firmly convinced that there was no such thing.  It was wartime, so there may have been a little trouble with the women.  In any event, after things start to settle down, it is pretty difficult to kill anyone" (ibid.).

Genjō sketches out the rest of the war from a Japanese sailor's perspective.  In 1943 his ship was torpedoed and, while drifting in the South China Sea, he had another enlightenment experience as he grappled with "life and death."

There was nothing to do but totally devote myself to Zen practice within the context of the ocean itself.  It would be a shame to die here I thought, for I wanted to return to being a Zen priest.  Therefore I single-mindedly devoted myself to making every possible effort to survive, abandoning all thought of life and death.  It was just at that moment that I freed myself from life and death.

This freedom from life and death was in reality the realization of great enlightenment (daigo)... I wanted to meet my master so badly, but there was no way to contact him [9].

Looking back, Genjō waxes indignant, even wrathful, over what he perceives as the cowardice and incompetence of the top brass.

In the Meiji era [1868-1912] military men had character and a sense of history.  Gradually, however, the military was taken over by men who did well in school and whose lives were centered on their families.  It became a collection of men lacking intestinal fortitude and vision.  Furthermore, they suffered from a lack of Japanese spirit and ultimately allowed personal ambition to take control of their lives [10].

The national polity of Japan is characterized by the fact that ours is a land of the gods.  The gods are bright and like water, both aspects immeasurable by nature ... Stupid military men, however, thought: "A country that can fight well is a land of the gods.  The gods will surely protect such a country."  I only wish that the top echelons of the military had absorbed even a little of the spirit of the real national polity [11].

In conclusion, Genjō laments:

This was a stupid war.  Engulfed in a stupid war, there was nothing I could do.  I wish to apologize, from the bottom of my heart, to those of my fellow soldiers who fell in battle.  As I look back on it now, I realize that I was in the navy for a total of ten years.  For me, those ten years felt like an eternity.  And it distresses me to think of all the comrades I lost [11].

Reading Genjō's memoir made Victoria realize that when the two of them wept over the war, Genjō was mourning only the Japanese military personnel who suffered and died in the conflict, especially those who died from disease and hunger rather than from a more fitting and glorious death in battle.  He also considers the war "stupid," not because it was a war of aggression, or even because it was a gigantic cataclysm of destructive violence, but because, "unlike in other wars, Japan had been defeated" (11) due to the leaders' incompetence in planning and strategy.  This immediately made me think of many Americans' judgment of our invasion of Vietnam, which is often touted as the first US defeat; that we killed millions of innocent people who had not attacked the US is of no interest to them at all, only that we failed to extract another victory to add to our large, glorious collection of trophies, at the cost of American lives.

Imagine someone who informs you, while tucking into a big juicy steak, that after a stunning confrontation with a religious teacher, she immediately became a vegetarian, and remains so to this day.  In what sense Genjō considers himself a pacifist, considering that he nowhere rejects war in principle, baffles me, as it baffles Victoria; Genjō's account "suggests that in practice Genjō's newly found pacifism amounted to little more than 'feel good, accomplish nothing' mental masturbation" (14).  To the credit of both men, he followed up this question.  (I say both men because it would not be surprising for a revered senior monk to slap down probing questions from an impertinent junior and a foreigner at that; but as you'll see, Genjō didn't do so.)

In fact, during a second visit to Shōinji in January 2000, I personally queried Genjō on this very point: I asked him why he hadn't attempted, in one way or another, to distance himself from Japan's war effort following his change of heart.  His reply was short and to the point: "I would have been court-martialed and shot had I done so."

No doubt, Genjō was speaking the truth, and I for one am not going to claim that I would have acted any differently (though I hope I would have).  This said, Genjō does not hesitate to present himself to his readers as the very embodiment of the Buddha's enlightenment.  The question must therefore be asked, is the killing of countless human beings in order to save one's own life an authentic expression of the Buddha Dharma, of the Buddha's enlightennment? [14]

A few things should be borne in mind here.  One is that, while Genjō's disinclination to face court-martial and execution for rejecting the Japanese war is understandable during the war -- and like Victoria, I don't condemn him for it, being even less sure than Victoria that I'd have done any differently in his place -- he continued to accept the validity of the war even sixty years later, when the political situation had changed and he would probably have faced no consequences for rejecting it.  This too is similar to many Americans' reluctance in retrospect to condemn the Vietnam War, or the 2003 Gulf War for that matter.  It's okay and quite safe to criticize the way those wars were prosecuted, but to argue that they should not have been fought at all is Going Too Far.  It's popular (both in Japan and in 'the West') to point to the conformism and groupthink of Japanese society to explain the paucity of dissent by Japanese, but Americans are not very different in that respect.

Brian Victoria has a personal history of dissenting within institutions.  As a young American Methodist in 1961 he became a conscientious objector, several years before the rise of a movement against the US invasion of Vietnam, though that invasion was already well under way.  He became a missionary to fulfill the alternative service required of COs, but when he rejected the "political indoctrination classes" he was expected to take he was turned down for service first in Hong Kong and then in Taiwan.  He was sent to Japan instead, which didn't have the same doctrinal uniformity among its Christian groups.  There he became interested in Zen and was ordained as a Soto Zen monk a few years later.  After working in the movement against the US invasion of Vietnam, which brought him into conflict with Zen superiors who didn't think priests should get involved in politics, he became aware of the previous Buddhist role in Japanese imperialism, which led him to the writing of Zen at War.

A reviewer of Zen War Stories for the Journal of Buddhist Ethics commented:

Reading Victoria’s new book in late 2003, as an American reflecting on recent and past U.S. policy in the Middle East, I cannot help wondering about the comparable role of Christianity in the West. In criticizing the nationalistic role of Zen, are we holding Japanese Buddhism to higher standards than we have upheld ourselves? To say that Buddhism was distorted by Japanese society: in the end, does that mean anything more than that Buddhism too is a religion practiced by human beings?

This seems disingenous to me.  I haven't seen anything by Victoria which indicates that he's "holding Japanese Buddhism to higher standards" than he would hold Christianity, since he has been no less critical of Christianity, and of the US (his home country).  The reviewer's complaint is typical of tactics used to discredit critics of any tradition: if you criticize US foreign policy, for example, or Israeli oppression of Palestinians, or various misconduct by Christians, you will be accused of considering America (or Israel) to be uniquely bad, perhaps claiming that it is 'the source of everything that's wrong in the world.'  Victoria's thoughtcrime lies not in considering Buddhism unique, but in rejecting the claim that it is unique, a religion like others, and in criticizing it from within.  It's perfectly acceptable, and indeed normal, to treat Buddhism, or Christianity, or America, or Science, as uniquely good; apologists only fall back to the line of "we're just human beings like everybody else" for damage control.

That "Buddhism too is a religion practiced by human beings" is precisely what Brian Victoria has been saying all along.  As the Austrian-born Hindu monk and sociologist Agehananda Bharati said, one can be a believer and a sound scholar if one "radically criticize[s] the doctrine with which one identifies, pointing out its weaknesses, its foibles, and the clay feet of its founders and sustainers, at every step."  (Which is why I myself criticize atheists along with theists, and my own country along with others.)  Victoria judges Zen and Christianity, Japan and America, by a single standard.  But that is exactly what no doctrine wants its followers to do.

It's also okay for good believers to criticize competing traditions as harshly as is expedient.  Christians and other monotheists are notorious for doing so -- see the passages Victoria quotes from Christian scholarly texts on Buddhism on page xiv, for example -- but the tendency isn't limited to them.  Buddhism has a long pacifist tradition, as does Christianity; Victoria quotes a story that the Buddha, questioned by a professional soldier, "informed him that if the latter were to die on the battlefield he could expect to be 'reborn in a hell or as an animal' for his transgressions."  This is a much harsher judgment than anything Jesus is reported to have said; he never condemned war himself, perhaps because he expected to lead the war against unbelievers in the final judgment.  (Indeed, according to the gospels, he was quite friendly and helpful to soldiers of the Roman occupation of his country.)  Victoria continues: "Inasmuch as I make no claim to omniscience for myself, I do not know in what state, or even if, the protagonists in this book will be reborn.  But, like the Buddha himself, I do not hesitate to judge them on the basis of their deeds, whether of body or speech" (xv).  Like Christianity, Buddhism has a long tradition of violence and warfare, and it didn't begin in twentieth-century Japan.