I Will Follow Him...

 

I'm old enough that I should know better, but when my Facebook memories dredged up this gem today, I was amazed all over again at how aggressively stupid Richard Dawkins is.  It seems to me that Karl Marx still has more than a "few followers" today, and I suspect that Dawkins believed that, however few he has, they are still too many.  What's a follower, anyway? I suppose Yuval Noah Harari was his target here, but typically for the kind of thinker he is, Dawkins likes airy, sweeping dismissals of his real or imagined opponents.  The Marxist writers I'm aware of have read his work and study it, but they're not uncritical, not what I think of as followers.  I have read very little by Marx, so I don't have an overall sense of his ideas.  Besides, like many heavy thinkers, he changed positions over time, so: which Marx?  Dawkins makes it easy in this case: I suppose he means the Marx of Capital, the massive analysis of capitalism he didn't live to finish.  I haven't read it, and I wonder if Dawkins has.

I also don't think I understand what he intends by devoting time "to the Internet & human genome."  As I've noticed before, Dawkins has a tendency to write sloppily, especially on social media, and then to complain when he is, or thinks he is, misunderstood.  Did he mean that potential Marxists should instead seek employment in the tech industry or biotech, and if so, why?  Should they forget their reading of Capital and simply enjoy the rewards of working for Google, Meta, X, or the distinguished biblical scholar Peter Thiel?

This reminded me of the neuroscientist Robert M. Sapolsky, who once wrote (in The Trouble with Testosterone (pp. 107-8]:

We all do indeed have our dark sides. One evening, that great horned toad of an awkward intellectual, Karl Marx, came home from fulminating in the British Museum. "At any rate," he wrote to Engels that night, "I hope the bourgeoisie will remember my carbuncles all the rest of their lives." As well they did. Few of us can ever hope for that level of retributive pissiness. We merely fantasize about returning someday to our childhood neighborhoods, encountering the ex-bullies or the catty girls who were in the in-group when we were not, and beating them into contused, bloodied contrition with our thick stack of diplomas.

Luckily, it wasn't Sapolsky but his DNA that wrote this weird, confused passage.  After I first read this, I found the letter by Marx his DNA quoted, to find out what had upset him so much, and wrote about it here.  Briefly, he was upset by the abuses of child labor in Britain in the mid-19th century, and by the efforts of manufacturers to block any legislation that might keep them from exploiting it. It's certainly fascinating, and symptomatic, that Sapolsky's DNA put that on the same level as being turned down for a date by "catty girls."  My DNA doesn't quite see the connection, but then I'm not a neuroscientist.  Sapolsky's DNA recently published a book called Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will (Penguin, 2023), but I don't know if my DNA will be able to find the time to read it.  I'm sure it's every bit as deep as his reflections on Marx.

My DNA did read An Unfinished Revolution: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln (Verso, 2011), edited by Robin Blackburn, which includes among other things, Marx's journalism for a radical New York newspaper during the American Civil War and his correspondence with Abraham Lincoln.  I was impressed by the clarity and intelligence of Marx's coverage of the conflict.  What made it most interesting to me was Marx's perspective as an outsider and a contemporary of the war: he couldn't know how it would turn out.  Dawkins might not care that Marx's followers today would pause their reading of Capital long enough to put together such a book, but he should at least be aware that they did.  Marxism is definitely pertinent to the connections between chattel slavery and "free labor" as it developed under capitalism, and I'm sure Dawkins would at least pay lip service to the idea that slavery should have been abolished; even that child labor isn't a good thing.  In the past it displeased him. At his age, there's probably little hope that he'll give up sharing his opinions on matters he's ill-informed about and hasn't given any serious thought, but the world would be a less entertaining place without his outbursts, and nowadays I need all the entertainment I can get.

And a Little Child Shall Lead Them

Speaking of mythology, I just read George Saunders's highly touted new novel, Lincoln in the Bardo (Random House, 2017).  If you haven't read it yet and would like to do so without learning details of what happens in it, some of what I have to say here will probably count as spoilers, so be aware.  It was fun to read on the whole, well-written and entertaining, so if you're curious, check it out and then return to this post if you wish.

I hadn't heard of him until I saw Lincoln in the Bardo mentioned somewhere, but Saunders has apparently made quite a name for himself.  In 2013 he was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine for his short stories.  Lincoln in the Bardo is his first novel.

Here's the historical background: Willie Lincoln, age 11, died in the White House on February 20, 1862 of typhoid fever.  This was early in the Civil War, and in the second year of Abraham Lincoln's presidency.  His death was tied to a big party his parents threw in the White House, under some criticism because of the war.  His doctor assured his parents that he was recovering, and "Both the President and First Lady took turns slipping away from the party to sit with their sick son."  He died a few days afterward, and was buried in Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown.  (After his father was assassinated three years later, both were moved to Springfield, Illinois.)  The night after Willie's funeral, his father visits the graveyard, opens Willie's coffin, and cradles the dead boy in his arms before returning to his duties in the White House.

Lincoln in the Bardo is set mostly in that graveyard, told mostly by the dead but with snippets from historical and contemporary writings about Lincoln and his son's death.  It's more like a radio theater script than a conventional novel, though judging by numerous complaints about the audiobook by customers on Amazon, it doesn't work well in that mode.  It has obvious forerunners in Spoon River Anthology and Our Town, two other works composed of the voices of the dead.  As indicated by his title, Saunders explicitly draws on Tibetan Buddhist notions of the afterlife, as Euro-American laypeople understand it anyway: the bardo is a limbo between death and rebirth into another life, where the soul's responses to its experiences will affect one's next incarnation.  But one must move on, hindered neither by attachment to the previous life nor by the visions and hallucinations that induce confusion and terror while in the bardo.  It's a trial by ordeal, as set out in the Bardo Thodol, the fourteenth-century Tibetan manual known in the West as The Tibetan Book of the Dead, for which the living must train themselves.  (According to the Wikipedia article, tradition claims that the Bardo Thodol was composed several centuries earlier and the manuscript "discovered" in the 1300s. This sounds suspiciously like West-Asian apocalyptic literature, so I'm supposing that the date of "discovery" is most likely the date of composition.) 

Saunders's premise is that Willie's ghost hovers around as most ghosts do at first, and his father's visit encourages him to stay on.  The other shades crowd around, hoping that Lincoln will hear them and respond to their complaints.  Others, hungrier and even angrier, try to bind Willie to the spot.  With help from the three main narrators, Willie is freed so he can merge with his father's living body long enough to realize that he is not just sick, but dead.  (The conviction that they are not really dead is the rationale used by many of the shades for staying where they are.)  After his father leaves the cemetery, Willie announces his realization to the other shades, and moves on, as do numerous others.  The ghost of one African-American man merges with Father Abraham and possesses him as he rides back home.  That may be the creepiest detail in the novel: the suggestion that Lincoln finally abolished slavery (a year later, in a half-assed way) because he was occupied by the spirit of a black person.  (This even though the novel makes clear that the ghosts are unable to make the living obey them.)  Saunders' treatment of race and racism is not terribly good, it seems to me: it's white-liberal sentimentalism of the sort that informed Uncle Tom's Cabin and many similar works since.

What bothered me enough to set me writing about Lincoln in the Bardo was a sequence near the end, in which the three main speakers address a woman who has entrapped herself in the hallucination of "a scaled-down smoking wreck of a rail car [with] several dozen charred and expiring individuals trapped within her barking out the most obscene demands as Miss Traynor's 'wheels' turned mercilessly upon several hogs, who (we were given to understand) had caused the crash, and possessed human faces and voices, and were crying out most piteously as the wheels turned and turned and crushed and re-crushed them, giving off the smell of burning pork" (page 331)  They apologize to her for not having encouraged her to go on to the next stage.

We are sorry this happened to you, I said.

You did not deserve it, Mr. Bevins said [332].

One of the three then sacrifices himself, and he and Miss Traynor go on.  Many of the shades remain, however.

According to the cosmology that underlies the novel, however, if Miss Traynor and all the others didn't "deserve" their condition, they had nonetheless done it to themselves.  By clinging to their memories, frustrations, grudges, and desires, they kept themselves in the bardo; all had to do was click their heels together three times, realize that they were dead, and all would be well.  C. S. Lewis tried to get around the traditional Christian conception of Hell in The Great Divorce, by postulating that the damned, too, could free themselves from their torment, but they refuse to submit and abandon their selfish selves.

The novel makes much of the importance of love and sex and human relationships, which seems to me a distortion of traditional Buddhist teaching.  (Another odd thing: Abe Lincoln himself is not "in the bardo" in this story.  I don't think the title is meant to refer to Willie.)  If you want to escape suffering, you must give up attachment, which includes not only erotic desire but family ties as well.  The sentimentalization of children, centered on young Willie, who frees himself and some of the other shades simply by his naive declaration of the truth (The Bardo Has No Clothes!), is also a form of attachment rather than an escape from it.  Caleb Crain, reviewing Lincoln in the Bardo for The Atlantic, summed it up as sentimental sadism, a phrase which sums up most popular religion.  Saunders has cobbled together a liberal American Buddhism that will appeal to many readers, but then this is a mashup, along the lines of Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter or Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.  It's really meant only to entertain, and it does that well enough.  But it's no deeper than its predecessors.

Service Advisory

The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman'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. 

In a word, Jihad!

I don't know where the guy with the beard was radicalized, but he was certainly a bloodthirsty extremist if anybody was.  Notice also the beard, which he probably began growing in whatever madrassa turned him to the Dark Side.  But there is no question that he used religion to justify a war in which he killed 600,000 of his own people, a war whose consequences we are still living with a century and a half later.

Yes, that war had one positive outcome, in that slavery was ended in the United States.  It was a very hard choice, but we think the price is worth it.

I've been procrastinating lately because there's so much I think I ought to write about, but I just haven't felt like writing.  Or reading, most of the time.  It happens.  And now I'll be going out of town for the weekend, which will not contribute directly to productivity.  My apologies. But as inadequate recompense, let me refer you to John Scalzi's post today about the Toronto Star's recent decision to turn off comments on their website.  Scalzi then discusses his own comments policy, which led me to reflect again on why I don't enable comments here.  The discussion in comments (which Scalzi moderates) is pretty good -- Whatever is one of the sites where that happens.

One commenter wrote, "It’s amazing how polar opposite a 'comments section' is to what I hear of the current politically correct state of college classrooms with their 'trigger warnings' and such."  Ah, there's a topic I need to write about here.  Instead I replied to him there.

Perhaps you should be more skeptical about what you hear, but even if what you hear is true, imagine a classroom where the discussion was like the comments sections of most newspapers, Youtube, etc.  I avoid them, not because I'm a special snowflake, but because they're useless for learning anything.  There's nothing "politically correct" about not wanting to wade naked in an open sewer. 

Classrooms have never been open spaces like an unmoderated comments section; discussion there has always been moderated by the instructors.  And nobody's as special a snowflake as the legions of reactionaries who are furious that white heterosexual males are no longer given the special status they think they deserve, and feel they must react by verbal and often physical violence. (This is not really new.  In Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas, she recounts that male students rioted when it was proposed that female students should be admitted to the elite English universities.  And I don't need, do I, to remind you how American whites reacted to the politically-incorrect presence of free blacks in what they believed was "their" country, thereby triggering terrible anxieties that could only be assuaged by rioting, dismemberment, and lynching of the offenders?)  Again, imagine a classroom where the students yelled death and rape threats at each other, which is the state of too much of the Internet today.  Again, there's nothing "politically correct" about not wanting to be subjected to that.

So.  Back in a few days, I hope.

Meeting Cute

Yesterday I read Joshua F. Speed's Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln, and Notes of a Visit to California, originally published in Louisville in 1896 but now available as an e-book.  I'd had it in mind to try to find a copy ever since I first heard of it years ago, in Charley Shiveley's Drum Beats: Walt Whitman's Civil War Boy Lovers (Gay Sunshine Press, 1989).  The only copy I could locate was in the Lilly Library's rare book collection, which couldn't be checked out, so I never quite got around to reading it on-site.  Over the years Speed got more attention, thanks to C. A. Tripp's book which argued that Lincoln might have been gay and then Larry Kramer's book on the same theme.  Neither of which I've gotten around to either, I confess, which I rationalized with the notion that I should read Speed's book (pamphlet, rather) first.  The Reminiscences seems never to have been reprinted until it was scanned and published as an e-book.

Joshua Speed (1814-1882) was born and raised in Kentucky, but spent seven years in Springfield, Illinois running "a large country store, embracing dry goods, groceries, hardware, books, medicines, bed-clothes, mattresses, in fact everything that the country needed" (page 13 of the e-book) before he returned to Kentucky, where he spent most of the rest of his life.  He married, and farmed with his wife and slaves near Louisville for about nine years; served one term in the state legislature; and finally moved into Louisville, where he went into the real-estate business very successfully with his brother-in-law.  Though he was a slaveowner, he worked to keep Kentucky in the Union, and his efforts to that end renewed his friendship with Lincoln, which had largely lapsed when he left Illinois.  According to the sketch of his life that introduces the Reminiscences, Speed "made many trips to Washington" (4) and worked with Lincoln, his Cabinet, and the army there.  After the war he moved back to the countryside with his wife; they had no children.

Speed first noticed Lincoln, he says, in the spring of 1836, when he was deeply impressed by a speech Lincoln gave while running for re-election to the Illinois legislature.  But they didn't get to know each other until a year later.

It was in the spring of 1837, and on the very day that he obtained his [law] license, that our intimate acquaintance began. He had ridden into town on a borrowed horse, with no earthly property save a pair of saddle-bags containing a few clothes. I was a merchant at Springfield, and kept a large country store, embracing dry goods, groceries, hardware, books, medicines, bed-clothes, mattresses, in fact every thing that the country needed.  Lincoln came into the store with his saddle-bags on his arm. He said he wanted to buy the furniture for a single bed.  The mattress, blankets, sheets, coverlid, and pillow, according to the figures made by me, would cost seventeen dollars.  He said that was perhaps cheap enough; but, small, as the sum was, he was unable to pay it. But if I would credit him till Christmas, and his experiment as a lawyer was a success, he would pay then, saying, in the saddest tone, "If I fail in this, I do not know that I can ever pay you."  As I looked up at him I thought then, and think now, that I never saw a sadder face.

I said to him, "You seem so much pained at contracting so small a debt, I think I can suggest a plan by which you can avoid the debt and at the same time attain your end.  I have a large room with a double bed up-stairs, which you are very welcome to share with me."

"Where is your room?"  said he.

"Up-stairs," said I, pointing to a pair of winding stairs which led from the store to my room.

He took his saddle-bags on his arm, went up stairs, set them down on the floor, and came down with the most changed countenance.  Beaming with pleasure he exclaimed, "Well, Speed, I am moved!" [13]

It's a sweet story, isn't it?  It's easy to see why Shively singled it out.  Its import, however, isn't all that clear.  Speed doesn't say anything more about their friendship in Springfield.  They shared that double bed for four years, which can hardly be explained away as a convenience dictated by Lincoln's poverty.  That Lincoln continued sleeping with Speed for several years after he could have afforded a bed (and probably a room) of his own indicates that the arrangement was comfortable and probably pleasant for him. It doesn't necessarily mean they were copulating, but it can't be assumed that they weren't, at least at times. That upstairs room was also inhabited by Speed's clerk (and later Lincoln's law partner) William Herndon and Mr. Beverly Powell, which would have put a damper on the hot man-to-man sex sessions Shively (and Tripp and Kramer, and to be fair, I) fantasized.  According to Herndon, Speed told him Lincoln had patronized female prostitutes in that period, though the accuracy of that report is disputed, perhaps correctly; but if true, it also wouldn't rule out congress with males.

Shively also cited a report that as President, Lincoln sometimes shared a bed with his male bodyguard, who sometimes wore the great man's nightshirt.  The truth of this story is also disputed, and we probably will never know for certain.  Wishful thinking plays a major role on both sides of the disagreements.  This writer, for example, argues that "if Lincoln and Derickson did sleep together, it may have been a singular or uncommon occurrence dictated by some unusual circumstance rather than a regular part of Lincoln's routine during the month or more that Mary was away".  True, it "may be" -- but it's one thing to have to share a bed when you're young and broke, and another when you're the President of the United States.  It's hard for me to imagine the circumstances that would have forced the latter situation, but who knows?  Maybe Lincoln liked friendly company in his bed since the days he shared one with Speed, and (perhaps paradoxically, from today's point of view) a male bedfellow would be less scandalous than a female one.

To my mind, though, there's a good reason not to read Joshua Speed's account of sharing a bed with Lincoln as a reference to an erotic relationship.  He didn't write it in a diary, or in a private memoir not intended for publication: he wrote it as a lecture for public delivery.  I don't find it plausible that Speed meant his story to be understood by his audiences as a declaration that he and the martyred President were Sodomites, which is how two males' loving erotic relationship would officially have been regarded in the nineteenth century.  I'd like to think that the two young men had sex, if only because I've had a schoolboy crush on Lincoln since I was in first grade, but I also wonder if Speed would have told that story in public if he knew that the relationship had been sexual.  He would have known that his audiences wouldn't take for granted two young males who shared a bed would be having it off together, but I doubt he'd have cared to risk the "misinterpretation" or "misunderstanding," as such correct surmises are often called.  I'm not going to say definitely that neither Speed nor Lincoln was homosexual or bisexual, only that I don't think Speed's account of the beginning of their "intimate acquaintance" is evidence one way or the other.

One more thing about Joshua Speed: the second lecture bound with the Reminiscences is an account of Speed's visit to California with his wife in 1874.  It's interesting in its own right to read about cross-country travel in those days, and Speed's descriptions of the scenery are vivid.  He apparently loved flowers -- his country houses had notable decorative gardens -- and was attentive to details of the landscape.  It's also more entertaining than his eulogy for Lincoln, with a sense of humor that was surely influenced by Mark Twain.  I was especially impressed by what he had to say about the Chinese, of whom there were about 100,000 in the US in those days:

[The bigotry toward the Chinese in California] reminded me of the story of our Puritan forefathers.  When they met in council they had some religious misgivings about their cruel treatment to the Indians.  The council passed two resolutions:

"I. Resolved, That the earth and the fullness thereof belongs to the saints.

"2. Resolved, That we are the saints."

These were compromise resolutions, and passed unanimously.  If there be any saints in California, however, we did not see them...

Insignificant as is this number, our two great political parties, jealous of their rights – shame, shame on them! – at their last national conventions both passed resolutions indicative of their fears lest this handful of people would overrun our country, undermine our institutions, and endanger the liberties of forty millions of free white men and women.  Ours is the land of the free and the home of the brave, and every man and boy in California is ready to show his bravery by stoning a Chinaman [39]

As I mentioned, Speed owned slaves before the Civil War, but he expresses no nostalgia for those days in his reminiscences of Lincoln, and explicitly justifies the actions Lincoln took against slavery.  I think it says something good about Speed that he was so contemptuous of anti-Chinese racism as well, at a time when inciting panic against the Chinese was a safe and popular political position among American whites. There's a tendency to 'defend' bigots and racists of the past by saying that they were people of their time, and couldn't have known any better.  Speed seems to have been better than his time in numerous respects; there aren't many people of his time whose writing makes me wish I could have known them, but he's one.