Day of the Midwife

Here in America we are aware today that it is the Cinco de Mayo south of the border. Within Ghulfdom we are aware that the fifth of May is International Day of the Midwife. One of us is a member of the profession, our youngest, Michelle. Here she is photographed at the airport last year—and the passport in her hand announces her international credentials. Odd that members of my immediate family were all born in Europe—except Michelle; she saw the light of day in Kansas City at St. Lukes just north of the lovely Plaza. But we’re a contrarian clan. The only member of our family who is a permanent resident of Europe is also Michelle. Paris is richer by her. It was over there, across the Atlantic, that she had her own four children—Max, Stella, Henry and Malcolm; the last two are twins and their names are therefore listed in alphabetical order. Thierry, the father, is an actor, a flutist, and on the side rather a good chef; and Michelle works at Bluets, in Paris, one of the renowned maternity hospitals that continue the tradition of the famed Dr. Fernand Lamaze. Michelle began her formal studies after she had first brought four babies into the world. Thus she experienced before she studied deeply. As it should be. It took four grueling years while she raised a young brood. Here she was, the sole American, in the exacting French medial education system, and she graduated second in a class of more than forty. When word of that finally came, there was wild dancing in America around the telephone.

This day of commemoration is sponsored by the International Confederation of Midwives, an organization formed in 1919 and housed in the Hague, in the Netherlands today. Some 80 countries are members. The website is here. Knowing something about this subject through Michelle, following the gradual evolution of this field, we are heart and soul behind the ICM in its efforts to promote this little-noted profession—no doubt much older than any. The French call their midwives sage femmes, which always gives me a kind of shiver and proud joy. So fitting, in seems to me. As a 16th century midwifery text has it, “A midwife has a lady’s hand, a hawk's eye, a lion’s heart.” Michelle would say: “Easier said than done, Dad!” Yes, that’s our Michelle. And yes, the words fit her. Happy Day of the Midwife to you!

A Well-Worn Phrase

I used one yesterday to round out the rhythm of a sentence: “Be in the world but not of it.” The phrase has the smooth, comfortable feel of a very well-worn tool obtained from one of the two main sources for such things in English: the Bible or Shakespeare. It comes from neither. Its logical structure is ambiguous at best, but the meaning is accessible. It illustrates wonderfully how far we really are from mere collocations of atoms. The phrase suggests that we may have a choice: in the world or out. We don’t. And if we opt to be in, it suggests that we may in some sense be of it, in another sense not. But what do these options mean? I’d hate to be the one assigned to teach a computer, destined to serve in Artificial Intelligence, exactly how to handle this string of words, how to parse it, how to apply it in actual life situations. People have no such problems. What a piece of work is man…

Veni, Vidi, Mori

The other day a huge debate ensued at this household because, thanks to something on TV or in the New York Times, I protested because the speaker or the author translated Caesar’s Veni, vidi, vici, as “I came, I saw, I conquered.” — “No way!” I cried. “I went, I saw, I conquered.” Brigitte begged to differ. And we were off. The truth is that two things temporarily disabled me. One was that Caesar had gone to Gaul, not come to the territory. The other was my very faulty memory according to which the French venir meant go rather than come. Off I stormed to marshal witnesses in print. Unfortunately I have two places of work, one upstairs and one in the basement, both chuck full of reference volumes that, as life would have it, often change places as I drag them from place to place. Thus I had the devil of a time discovering even one of my three Latin dictionaries. One is Latin-German, another Latin-French. Four trips up and down. Cursing in Hungarian—a language whose powers of sexual sacrilege are second to none. At last I found the Latin-English, alas also the smallest, but it had the word. I looked it up. Thus, in a way, I went, I saw—and I died. Arriving in the kitchen, I muttered in tones barely audible: “Well, looks like I was off the beam on that one.” Brigitte gracefully continued chopping carrots and never even gave me that look. But this episode once more proves that in any competition with her on the spelling or meaning of words, withdrawal is the best defense.

The Third Stance

One of the intriguing patterns Arnold Toynbee thought he had discovered in the late stages of a civilization was that its elite elements polarize into archaists and futurists, thus into those who seek solutions in the past and those who seek them in a radical break with the past. But this sort of view was not particularly original even in the mid-1930s when the first volume of Toynbee’s A Study of History appeared: the left and right were clearly visible and painted in appropriate colors already. Toynbee’s discernment showed itself because he suggested that neither of these orientations had much of a future. Futurists and archaists would engage in a more or less meaningless battle until disorder finally triumphed. But Toynbee also saw emerging at late stages of mature civilization a third element: neither of the left nor of the right—neither of the West nor of the East, to echo the Koran’s Niche of Lights (24:35)—but an elite that looked up, as it were, detached itself and turned its sight toward the transcendental, rose above the battle yet in the midst of life, in but not of the world, and, from this curiously immaterial but yet fixed point, it begins the process from which a new culture can eventually arise. Toynbee called this third position “transfiguration,” and “etherialization.” He saw it as a detachment from the macrocosm and a return to the microcosm—put very simply: “Stop fixing the world and start improving you.”

This was not merely an abstract codification of historical fact. Toynbee wasn’t merely looking back, discovering Christianity in the rotting womb of a decadent Rome, and rendering this picture as a general historical rule. But he did see, beginning around about the turn of time from B.C. to A.D. the rise of multiple original religious impulses. These included Gnosticism (before it became Christianized), the revived cults of Isis and Cybele, and, most notably, Mithraism. Indeed those times were very similar to ours beginning around the early 1960s. All manner of old religions were invading the Roman realm in new guises, including Eleusinian, Dionysian, Orphic, and neo-Platonic cults and groups, and—among them—a new Jewish religion. One element—that third element—of the society supported them all. Christianity eventually emerged as the victor and, in the process, also absorbed features of others. Rome became Christendom, a new culture.

This is a divergence from my theme but interesting in the context. Toynbee also noted the behavior of two proletariats, as he called them: the masses. The internal proletariat, thus within the limits of the civilization, tends in the late stage to become alienated from the dominant (read governing) minority—the turn-off. And the external proletariat (read third world) becomes antagonistic to the Imperium and, rather than striving to be included in it, begins to fight it.

I’ve often wondered what it might really have been like in old Rome—knowing full well that big abstractions almost completely lose the meaning that they try to synthesize. What does "archaist" actually mean in daily life? The answer, I find, is three-fold: study history, look around, and look inside. At my birth in 1936 the zillion cults of this latter day, not least weird religions from abroad, were not even faintly visible either in Hungary or in the United States. Hare, hare, hare! There was neither culture war at home nor yet its equivalent that we call the War on Terror now. And my own personal history has been a gradual detachment from the macrocosm, if you like. With the passing of the decades, I’ve come to see more and more clearly that the big battles aren’t worth fighting. You win today, but in the see-saw the other side will triumph tomorrow and think that a new epoch has begun. And so it shall be until a new dispensation eventually gives meaning to the whole again. That will take place when we are once more properly oriented to the greater reality.

Welcome, Brigitte

I celebrate the fact that on this May the First I can welcome as a new follower no less a person that Brigitte, my life's companion. To be sure, doing all the dirty work of giving her a blogger profile fell to me, but then that's only normal when it comes to computers and such. She wanted to comment on Patioboat and couldn't, and thus we now have, in this community, one of most avid readers of blogs ever. She was doing that back when I couldn't even spell the word and, indeed, professed a certain contempt for the activity. It's not difficult for me to find occasions for penitence. But never mind that. Welcome, Brigitte! May your comments proliferate throughout the blogosphere...!

Of Brains, Cars, Romans, and Phoenicians

Today’s headline in the Detroit Free Press was A NEW LEASE ON LIFE—a curious way of marking the fact that Chrysler has fallen into bankruptcy.

Almost instantly my brain presented an association that immediately made sense, but not quite in a lineal and therefore obvious way.

I remembered a rather impressive scene that Gibbon described—but it might have been Mommsen. It’s the account of an event during the second Punic War when Hannibal, in an attempt to relieve pressure on his forces elsewhere, moved on the city of Rome itself. According to this account, the Romans arrayed a large force in front of the city in splendid formation, standards lifted high, sunlight reflecting from shining armor, shields, etc. The Romans also engaged in what we’d call psychological warfare today. They managed to leak word to Hannibal’s forces that a large piece of land the Carthaginian army was then occupying had just changed hands in Rome, and at a very decent price… Stiff upper lip! In your face! We shall overcome!

To be sure, Rome was a formidable obstacle Hannibal couldn’t have taken in any case except, perhaps, at catastrophic cost. So far as I know, the only people ever to overrun Rome were some early Celts (take note John); but even they failed to take the last fortified tower. And being barbarians, they didn’t know what to do with the city and moved out again. Hannibal, in any case, was merely engaging in scare tactics, trying to move public opinion, hoping, perhaps, to produce hysteria he could exploit. The stand-off continued until Hannibal finally marched off to the south, “no shot having been fired,” as it were.

Why this image as a mental echo of the day’s headline? Because deep down I reacted to the headline with a feeling: I wanted a more dignified, a more elevated, and less servile and crawling sort of response to the grim news of fate that had reached Motown yesterday. And my brain immediately and obligingly fetched from my memory the nearest available and most vivid example of a dignified public response to a major threat: Rome marshalling its spirits in response to Hannibal who, by that time, had savaged Spain, marched north, through Gaul, crossed the Alps, beaten Rome in two stiff battles (as I recall) and now stood before the gates. The real state of mind inside the walls of Rome was actually fear and trembling—but those in charge rallied and made a great show. And that’s how I really wanted Detroit to take the news. With dignity. But that response was still a coil of feeling inside me. It hadn’t unpacked its meaning yet when picture was already there.

Chrysler almost went bankrupt thirty years ago. The government and the leadership of Leo Iacocca (a Ford guy) saved the company then. Next a German automaker (Daimler) made a stab at it. Then venture capitalists thought they’d pretend to love the cars in order to grasp Chrysler’s financial organ. Now it is the government again, and an Italian firm (Fiat) who are the saviors. Look. This is just a corporate entity. Let’s help Chrysler’s labor element find new ways of making a living. But enough of the dance macabre. A new lease on life? A better iron lung? — As you can see, my brain obligingly serves up images as my inner vision surveys this scene of mayhem.

* * *

A note or two for the younger reader. Edward Gibbon wrote The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Theodor Mommsen was a German scholar, Nobel Prize winner, and one of the best-known historians of Rome. He wrote History of Rome, which covers the period from the origins of the city to the time of Caesar in three volumes. The fourth, about the imperial period, never got done. — The wars of Rome with Carthage were called the Punic wars because the Carthaginians were supposedly Phoenicians, and the Romans referred to them as Punici; hence Punic. The Phoenicians were traders originating in what is now Lebanon. They colonized an area across the Mediterranean which is now Tunis. That’s where Carthage was. But the name Phoenician had followed them to Africa. Hannibal’s stand before Rome took place in 211 B.C.: one long time that that one image has lasted to inform a modern man about the loss of a relatively minor battle in the War of Cars.

Abstraction and Experience

In college I did rather poorly in required science courses, owing perhaps to the disconnect I felt between an abstract and an experiential level of knowledge. In these courses the two were separated and acquired side by side—if at all. We got the conceptual material in lectures, the experience in lab work. Try as I might, I couldn’t connect the two, especially not in chemistry.

In the sciences generally, as taught at universities (at least in my day—perhaps the methods have improved), the actual experience of discovery is too much compressed. The messy lab experiments did not, for me, actually illustrate the elegant formulae of chemical transformation that I’d jotted down in notes. The lab time was too short; the stuff I dribbled from jars into tubes was alien and messy; things never seemed to work out; the smells, the fumes…. Those who had originally discovered all the formulae had spent months and years in what must have been a fascinating process. We were supposed to absorb all that in two-hour stints—without training or time enough to hone the many skills involved. It didn’t work out for me.

Passing grades could be achieved by memorizing formulae and abstract tokens in chemistry and Latin names for species and body parts in biology. Rubber stamp on forehead. Passed required course. Keep the line moving.

Later on I really did learn a good deal about chemistry by working in industry. There I saw problems in a brand new and active context. I had to understand what really transpired and why. I got my knowledge by interaction with lots of people and spending time looking at things in refineries and chemical plants. The formulae became a language by which to talk about the bigger, the real thing. In college the lab was an interlude of chaos. In working life it was the center of events, the real thing, Kant’s Ding an Sich—even if not in the way Kant meant it. Behind the abstract thought now loomed this vast, real, imposing and concrete reality. The thought was thin, the thing was thick.

Yet later—decades later—I learned a lot about biology as well. Surprisingly my greatest help in comprehending that mysterious world came from years of experience I’d had of human institutions and technology. That gave me what amounted to an almost reflexive recognition of the Hermetic slogan: As above, so below. Human experience in its complexity mirrors the arrangements of organic nature at another level, enlarges it to ordinary view. The parallel reaches way down, down to the behavior, characteristics, and arrangements of sub-cellular organelles and their constituents in turn.

I came to believe, as a consequence of this experience, that education should be inverted. First, after high school, let us say, should come ten to twenty-five years of work in the world’s economy. Then college! Only fractions of effort would be required and would then yield ten times the benefit that would have been available to the same person at eighteen or nineteen. Education could thus be seen as completing the human, not to prepare him or her for work. Real preparation could still be provided by apprenticeship programs under patient masters.

Now, to be sure, I had more native inclination in my youth to understand literature, history, and philosophy—the humanities generally—than the sciences. But the same rules, it seems to me, also apply to these fields. Experience is the real teacher. Before we learn the names we ought to have experience of das Ding an Sich. If high schools were properly organized—and here and there they are—they would suffice for minimal preparation, not least in ethics and philosophy. At higher levels these subjects really require a rich experience of life before the problems they deal with even fully surface in human life and, therefore, the raw materials for understanding become available.

My own experience is that the really educated are self-taught—yes, even if, nominally, they already have advanced degrees when this real learning begins. It is thought based on experience that educates. By thought I don’t mean simple musing—not merely the storing of knowledge into cubicles provided by a classification system ready-made by public opinion. I mean genuine, ordered reflection.

Here, perhaps, it may be well to reflect for a moment on that word itself—reflection. It rests on abstractions, concepts, immaterial memories, phantasms, but it carries the richer connotation of the inner life that I’m seeking to portray here. Abstraction is a technical sort of word—not something we experience. What we experience is reflection. And it is a rich sort of thing, not the dry, shrunken head of something that once lived—rather something still vital and alive but on another level…

Plato has Socrates say that “the life which is unexamined is not worth living” (in Apology, the text is here). The statement is odd. The person who fails in examining his life wouldn’t know, would he, having never looked; thus the opinion is that of a third party. The phrasing is poor, but the meaning is clear enough. It signals that experience, as such, however valuable and indispensible it is to genuine knowledge, does not really reach the authentically human level until we view it separated from itself, thus in reflection. The experience, needless to say, may be mental, emotional, or spiritual. It doesn’t have to be sensory. But it should have been perceived.

At the same time, reflection without experience, which seems so common in many philosophical contexts, is next to useless. It reminds me of a ping-pong game without a ball. Such a game would feature many wild gestures at two ends of a table, many loud outcries no doubt, many loud arguments about who just scored a point, with denials and passionate affirmations—but really nothing there to prove the facts one way or the other.

Ether

In something like 500 years we’ve replaced a theological with a mathe­matical scholasticism. The old one could be understood by a reasonably educated and diligent person; the new one requires specialized skills few have the patience to master. Furthermore, it has become difficult to check the new theology independently because the experiments that gave rise to the math are difficult (or very expensive) to reconstruct.

I often think that if I had access to the physical facts, I’d reach conclusions quite at variance with those embraced by science. Another thought is that physics posits tangible facts not because they really exist but because the equations come out a certain way. I’ve yet to read a popular book on physics in which the words persuade me. Elementary particles are supposed to be simultaneously waves and objects. A wave requires a medium like water. The water goes up and down. The cause of this motion is an invisible force. On a beach the force drives the water against the land. The damage, if any, or the rearrangement of the sand at least, is directly caused by the medium, not by the force. When a photon arrives at a screen, something tangibly lands.

My Dictionary of Physics (Penguin, 1977, p. 518) defines the wave much as I’ve defined it above, namely as the disturbance of a medium. For elementary particles, the medium itself is “space” generally and its magnetic or electrical properties particularly, the latter registering the disturbance caused by what I call a “force” and my dictionary simply labels as a “quantity.”

Based on this definition, “space” is filled with “properties” of an electro­magnetic character. Now it strikes me as peculiar to dismiss the old idea of the “ether” as nonexistent and yet to assert that “space” is filled with a “property” which has inertial behavior and is subject to ever-so-faint disturbances by light. The mysterious “field” of modern physics thus turns out to be the ether after all. The last shall be the first, the first last. The Michelson-Morely team (the pair that tested for the ether in 1877 and found it not) may someday be found right on whereas, in the not too distant future, Einstein’s relativity may be honorably retired. That sort of thing wouldn’t surprise me.

Slips on the Desk

My desk accumulates stacks of paper that I tend to sort roughly by size, from tiny stick-it notes, through small slips torn from pads (usually filled with numbers), on up to regular 8.5x11s with stuff printed from the web. I came across one of these, one ripped from a steno-pad of the sort Brigitte uses for her version of a diary; we have stacks of pads all filled up, ready, and waiting for historians—and brand new ones still tightly held in shrink-wrap straight from Staples waiting for her pen. My torn sheet bears, along with numbers, such annotations as “Oh, if only…” and “1848-1931,” no doubt the birth and death years of someone notable, and additions like 10 + 10 + 7 = 27, indicating that I must have been really tired; finally, at the top, the words “La Nuestra Señora.”

I remember jotting that phrase down in delight and wonderment, having come across it somehow, somewhere. I also remembered bookmarking a page from the Internet where I went later to confirm the name and to learn more. That page is here. It reveals that the original name of the settlement that mushroomed (pancaked?) into Los Angeles was originally La Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciúncula—Our Lady the Queen of the Angels of the Little Portion—that last phrase coming from the Italian for a “very small parcel of land” (porziuncola). The very long name for the settlement came to be shortened to El Pueblo de la Reina de Los Angeles, later to Los Angeles, finally to L.A.

Back when I made the note a wonderment came over me—names, and lengths, very small things, very small places, and grandiose hopes. At my birth I was christened Szentmártoni Darnay Arzén Farkas Gyula Mária. Some thirty years after that, by then in Kansas City, we knew a family where the lady of the house, called Dorothy, was a tall, thin, strange woman who had a memorable laugh and lively way of never stopping to speak with machine-gun rhythm. Her mode of speech inclined her to shorten all names. Brigitte thus became Bridge. And I became Ars. Now whether she intended that word to end in an e or not of that I can’t be sure. But she certainly got rid of a lot of complexity in the process.

The longer the name the smaller and younger its object. As the object’s size and complexity increase and become difficult even to encompass, the name shrinks in proportion until it has been eroded by endless use to a mere syllable or two.

Words

Polonius: What do you read, my lord?
Hamlet: Words, words, words.

Many years have passed now since my first encounter with the word “epiphenomenon.” I came across the term in studying modern theories of mind. To be sure I’d seen it earlier too, but I’d carelessly assumed that those who used the word, especially in reference to mind, meant “above the phenomenal,” thus separate from, indeed superior to the latter. That meaning seemed legitimate enough because the Greek prefix may be taken as indicating upon, besides, among, on the outside, above, over, and anterior. But later I discovered that the word, as used in the scientific literature, seemed to be understood in quite a different way. Eventually this sent me off to a succession of dictionaries. And I discovered that epiphenomenon actually meant—meaning that it was used by everybody except me—to indicate the very opposite of what I’d understood the word to signify. They meant that mind was a secondary phenomenon—not superior but, to the contrary, inferior, menial, a servant, a non-entity. Indeed, the word meant that mind was entirely the product of an underlying physical phenomenon which caused it. Deeper excursions confirmed this. With that confirmation I placed the word on my personal Index, as it were, and whenever I encountered it used even with vague approval, I would mentally do the sign of the cross, reach for my rabbit’s foot, cross my fingers, and mutter incantations.

Now the other day, perusing one of my favorite blogs, Siris, I came across this passage:

In Toronto I once brought a group of my fellow graduate students almost to tears of laughter by commenting offhand that I thought that anyone who talked much about supervenience ought to be drug out in the street and shot.

That word, supervenience, only served Brandon as a take-off point for an amusing discourse on the way Texans express their frustrations or their pride. And there was more of anthropological interest to those of us beyond the borders of the Lone Star State. After I read the posting, a strange feeling caused me to return to its beginning. I found the word again, stared at it hard, and had the sensation of once more being face-to-face with a small but malevolent something disguised, this time, in Roman garb. I went to Merriam-Webster to find confirmation, and indeed I did. Here was a close relative, at minimum, of my much-loathed epiphenomenon. The definition is “Coming or occurring as something additional, extraneous, or unexpected.” This definition seemed to me, however, to deserve horse-whipping at worst, little more, so I went on to see what the Wise, in this case the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (online) had to say on the subject. Here the first sentence of the article on the subject indeed made me regret that I do not own a gun:

A set of properties A supervenes upon another set B just in case no two things can differ with respect to A-properties without also differing with respect to their B-properties. In slogan form, “there cannot be an A-difference without a B-difference”.

This may be familiar ground for some (say two out of twenty million) but in a humble descendant of a man ennobled by an archduke in the current region of Baden-Württemberg circa 1475 or thereabouts for having been a court-jester of note (I kid not), this sort of thing sets up an urge to crack jokes. But I’ve deteriorated from that lofty status and actually practiced computer coding and such, the menial way of thinking mathematically; thus I plowed on, learned that the vernacular (dictionary) meaning is not to be accepted. I learned that supervenience is a technical term, that it is “proprietary,” meaning that it relates to the properties of things. I went beyond and eventually discovered the following paragraph and nutritious morsel of a quote:

But regardless of how long the notion of supervenience has been around, or who first used the term ‘supervenience’ in its philosophical sense, it is indisputable that Donald Davidson played a key role in bringing the idea to center stage. He introduced the term ‘supervenience’ into contemporary philosophy of mind in the following passage:

Mental characteristics are in some sense dependent, or supervenient, on physical characteristics. Such supervenience might be taken to mean that there cannot be two events exactly alike in all physical respects but differing in some mental respects, or that an object cannot alter in some mental respects without altering in some physical respects (1970, 214).

At last I’d traced the family lineage of this word to my own favorite bête noir. In the process I’d also discovered its home of origin, analytical philosophy, that realm of sentence parsers who, for lack of any meanings to discuss, cavort with grammar instead. Oh, how wonderful it is to discover that those who don’t believe that minds exist except as chemical traces will use so many tricky, tricky words to say what the chemicals are really saying....

Sukie sits back down politely and…here is hoping that…you know, cause I don’t have a clue.
Oh words, words, words, I can never find the words, words, words...
I can never find the words.
[But when I do, Sukie, then I weep.]

Maria Friedman for The Witches of Eastwick

Other Transitional Figures

Emerging as I did from a Jesuit education—which I value, incidentally—one of the amusing paradoxes I encountered was that some famous authors of my youth were labeled heretics by both sides—my teachers as well as the Pundocracy of Unbelief. I use that ponderous term in order to signal a difference between science and scientism. Practitioners of science—physics, chemistry, astronomy, biology—are too busy to be ideological. They tend to be confident—but only too aware of their own and of their craft’s limitations. To have a dogmatic spirit must be a special cross to bear. It is a temptation to exercise power rather than a yearning for truth. I’d rather suffer from the latter. But the point is that any system of belief, religious or atheistic, will have those who yield to the temptation and thus morph into irritating busybodies.

The authors I have in mind, those who didn’t fit the orthodoxies on offer, I call transitional figures, believing (maybe with an excess optimism) that what comes around goes around, hence no curve ever just goes up. There will be seasons. And if rationalism (however much I value it) goes too far, it will be corrected by intuition. And vice versa.

I’ve mentioned two of these figures recently—Carl Jung and Teilhard de Chardin. The first began as a Freudian and then reintroduced the West to God in the form of the Collective Unconscious. The other began in Darwin’s neighborhood and produced an evolutionary theory which gradually forms a sphere of mind straining towards Omega. Both of these terms are nicely ambiguous. Both thinkers clung to naturalism when you get right down to it, but of an antsy sort. It’s a naturalism clawing away at veils and trying to break free. Messy, too. Over against it a stolid, Stoic atheism appears downright noble—but, alas, the Stoic must eventually confess that pop culture is its lineal descendant, and it ain’t pretty, much less noble. Slimy wiggle-things: are they new birth or corruption?

Other figures I think of as transitional are William James, Pierre Lecompte du Noüy, and David Bohm. They were a psychologist, a doctor, and a physicist. James influenced me greatly with his book entitled The Varieties of Religious Experience; du Noüy wrote on evolution. David Bohm strayed from physics enough in his late years to commit cosmology.

James was one of the first of those who almost touched the transcendental in his writings—and certainly did so in his actual life. He keenly felt the constraining limits of naturalistic science but was a modern man rooted in empirical soil and resistant to the older practice of “natural philosophy.”

Du Noüy’s book, Human Destiny, lay waiting for me a-mouldering on the shelves of the Grosse Pointe Library; written in 1947, it must have been enormously popular to make it to these shelves. Grosse Pointe is an auto-baron’s sleeping quarters (although I live, so to say, in the servant’s wing of it). The Library here is the worst I’ve ever had to call my own. By the time I was fully grown, the name had disappeared, but de Chardin, who had a similar take on evolution, was all the rage. De Chardin saw evolution is cosmic terms, du Noüy under a moral sway. He saw the triumph of life as “conscience” and pictured morality as the future path of evolution. Conscience will somehow lead to another leap forward in some remote future time. He offered very meager hopes for individuals in that he seemed to doubt that “souls” exist and thus continue beyond the grave. His focus of admiration was “human dignity.” He also embraced the piety that seems to have come down to us from the nineteenth century—held by scientifically inclined but well-meaning people (like my Mother)—that we “live on” through our deeds and contributions. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, etc. The man must have been a moral paragon to think that such a view could possibly inspire humanity to heroic self-denial; at bottom his vision offers no hope for the individual. But du Noüy was clearly not an intuitive, poetic type and therefore missed a whole dimension of his theme. He thought that the miracle—at least the last miracle—was the human brain—which tells me that he never pondered the paradoxes of consciousness or the mysteries of inner life. The book has a distinctly nineteenth century flavor. The New Age was still aborning…

David Bohm wrote the definitive textbook on quantum theory, under that very title. It is still used in teaching the subject—and a copy of it is on sale at my local Barnes & Noble. His claim to fame, however, is an alternative hypothesis to quantum theory; when applied it explains the same phenomena giving the same physical results, but the underlying theory requires a new cosmological view. The theory is laid out in a book, written with B.J. Hiley, titled The Undivided Universe: An ontological interpretation of quantum theory. His take on intelligence—as the manifestation of what he describes as an “unconditioned order” in the cosmos—is developed in a much more accessible work (almost no equations), Bohm’s Wholeness and the Implicate Order; it is available in trade paperback from Amazon.

One is tempted to include in this listing Henri Bergson as well, but he does not fit my criteria. He was not a scientist by avocation or profession. His poetic élan vital was the product of a philosophical intuition, not a diversion from a narrow scientific path forced on him by intuition. And ultimately the famed élan is the assertion of a “it is what it is,” thus “life is life.”

There are probably other important figures I just failed to come across, notice, or remember. But these five individuals have been important in forming my conviction that we are in a transitional period. Thought always leads. What I see around me contradicts that which I feel, but then the present is always a drag on the future. And the Renaissance dreamers were also surrounded by the mediaeval inertia, and its corruptions, visible all around them.

Ends, Means

It is almost a truism that “the end does not justify the means.” For that very reason, the rule or doctrine contained in that phrase invites a closer look. If it is true, why is it violated in so many small and, indeed, shocking ways. One of the most visible and outrageous examples is the sanctioning of torture by artful interpretation of Section 2340 of 18 U.S.C. The United States Code actually prohibits torture; it defines it as follows:

[A]n act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody of physical control.

One is tempted to ask Jay Bybee: What part of “no” don’t you understand? Is it the “n” or is it the “o”? Bybee was an Assistant Attorney General of the Justice Department, the man who gave the CIA the green light to use waterboarding and several other nasty techniques. The artful way of escaping this dilemma, adopted by Mr. Bybee, was to find that (1) the CIA did not intend to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering; it had other, more lawful intentions; and (2) so carefully, indeed artfully, parsing the concept of pain and of suffering that, miraculously, the actual effects of waterboarding (it makes you feel as if you’re drowning) don’t quite measure up to the definitions of 18 U.S.C.—or so at least Bybee argues. If you wish to read the memorandum yourself to check on my veracity, you can begin on this site. The item to download is labeled as “A 18-page memo, dated August 1, 2002, from Jay Bybee, Assistant Attorney General, OLC, to John A. Rizzo, General Counsel CIA.” Finally a footnote to the definition above: the parenthetical phrase refers to such things as capital punishment.

Having laid this out, I’m not going to say too much more about this business except to point out that the Administration’s acrobatics, turning itself into a pretzel to get around the law, was done for a “worthy cause.” That cause is the security of the United States and the prevention of another terrorist attack. That is the “end” for which “torture” is the means. And it’s that relationship I want to examine.

The more I pondered that relationship—and why it is both misunderstood, misstated on the Internet in discussion forums, and ignored in legal tight-rope walking—the more puzzled I became—until the actual solution to this problem hit me. But before I go there, I want to point out what I stumbled upon on the way. One is that the phrase is understood by young people in a reverse formulation: “the end justifies the means.” I found a site where this very concept was being stoutly defended, although, to be sure, by what sounded like teenagers. In slightly more adult discussions, the emphasis of the argument is on the nature and grandeur of the end. The glorious end is then allowed to shed its radiance backward, haloing whatever kind of action is sincerely undertaken for the noble cause. It does not surprise me, therefore, that senior senators will actually use the same argument, not quite as bluntly of course, but in circumlocutions. For a sample of such a presentation, I would suggest you check out this interview on PBS’ NewsHour aired April 22, 2009 and available in transcript here.

Now for my insight. The reason it didn’t come to me at once is because I hold, as a matter of habit, an old-fashioned concept of truth. And the insight, really, is that many people must not. The fundamental issue that illuminates the end/means argument is that there is such a thing as absolute truth. Some things are simply wrong, and they are wrong in an absolute and not merely in a relative sense. In the modern usage, including the way senators and teenagers approach this subject, an act, a means, is neither right nor wrong, not on the surface, not out of the box. You have to ask what the circumstances were. If the means served some noble end, its character undergoes a change. If it serves some low or indifferent end, then it may seem loathsome. This is moral relativism, and it seems to be widespread—not because the public is malevolent but merely because it’s ignorant.

The final point that I think must be made is that any kind of absolute truth also implies a hierarchical order in the entire universe, hence demands that there be a God. If the prevailing worldview is very fuzzy about such a being, the public's morality will eventually become quite blurred. The public will instinctively adopt a stand-in for the highest value, typically choosing the political collective. This view will be interestingly self-centered, so that waterboarding captured Muslims will be far more acceptable than waterboarding CEO’s of too-big-to-fail financial institutions. But I’d better curb my lower instincts here and stop.

Sensate Reflex

A while back I read again certain portions of Carl G. Jung's book entitled Synchronicity. The word is of Jung's own coinage and refers to the phenomenon we ordinarily call "meaningful coincidences" or, with a slightly more romantic toning, serendipity—that word, in turn, derived from a Persian fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip. Synchronicity, meanwhile, has taken pretty deep roots in the circles that concern themselves with borderline phenomena.

Jung's very choice of a neologism to label a relatively common, usually pleasant, but also mildly wonder-rousing experience that people have reflects what I call a kind of sensate bias, a word to which I'll return in a moment. The essence of the experience is its meaningful quality; in Jung's treatment of it, however, the emphasis shifts to the coincidence of something, presumably X and Y, in time. Meaning is introduced, but almost with a kind of timidity. Quite a few people, straining to reach once more a holistic stance toward reality, but wishing to be thought orthodox by Science capitalized, exhibit sensate bias. Jung illustrates this tendency in the present context rather neatly. Now to the substance.

The part I was rereading is the account of a very interesting and, indeed, classical near death experience (NDE) reported by one of his lady patients. She had the experience in the wake of giving birth under difficult circumstances. What struck me in reading the account this time—and reading beyond the case itself—was the curious bias that seems to have held back even a figure like Carl Jung from reaching the logical conclusions that the case that he reported clearly demanded.

The very essence of Jung's book is to show that synchronicity is evidence for meaning in the universe. In making room for meaning, Jung created a quaternity of principles supposedly underlying the cosmic design. He arranged these, initially, in the form of a cross as follows:

		Space
Causality				Synchronicity
		Time

Later, in collaboration with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, he modify this scheme further to yield the following:

		Indestructible Energy
Constant Connection Through Effect (Causality)				Inconstant Connection Through Contingence, Equivalence, or "Meaning" (Synchronicity)
		Space/Time Continuum

Note that the word meaning here receives a set of quote marks around it, almost as if to signal that we must not take the word too literally. Jung is striving for a scientific flavor here even though what he is saying transcends the category of science as usually understood.

I can’t help but see this as what might be called a reflex by all those reared in the atmosphere of a sensate culture. That term comes from Pitirim Sorokin, the sociologist, who classified ages such as ours as totally focused on sensory experience whereas religious ages focus on internal, spiritual processes and look "upward" as it were, rather than "outward" at the world. Members of the sensate culture live in flatland. They cannot quite internalize the fact that the moment meaning is seriously contemplated to be part of the cosmos—wherever it may be found—the picture is immediately transformed. It becomes hierarchical.

Jung’s whole career had a transitional flavor. I myself strongly suspect that part of the nineteenth and all of the twentieth century were times of another renaissance, thus periods of transition between ideational/spiritual and sensate/materialistic ages—or the other way around. The period we call the Renaissance was the transition between Christian spiritualism and the great era of materialism that is now crumbling all around us. Such periods are outwardly oriented. The reverse motion is inwardly directed. In the chaotic times that always follow when materialism collapses by its own weight are dramatic in another way and do not leave the same kind of grandiose impression. Throughout his life Jung kept reintroducing his audiences to the ineffable dimensions of spirit and mind, but he tried so hard to remain part of the scientific caste that his creations were highly ambiguous at best, an example of which is the Collective Unconscious. It has a strong flavoring of divinity. His archetypes, which live in the Collective Unconscious, are reminiscent of Plato's eternal ideas. And, finally, his synchronicity reintroduces “meaning,” albeit in quotes.

I’m glad that Jung labored as he did. For many members of my generation, he was among the most important guides leading us out of the wilderness of materialism toward the new world that approaches, as it were, both from the future and the past. For many of us the old order was decadent beyond retrieval. At the same time, in my generation (although I may only be speaking for myself) the sensate bias that caused Jung to hesitate did not prove to be much of a barrier. I myself wave it off as mere hesitation to make the break clean.

Ahead of His Time

If Teilhard de Chardin could now observe
This vast electric universe converse
Across the continents and oceans to
And fro unceasingly by light and night,
He’d surely think that he’d foreseen before
It could cohere the realm that he had named
The Noosphere.

Exit Torture

In politics they call it “lowering expectations.” During my years in Kansas, some of my colleagues used to do that by saying, in a drawl, “Shucks, I’m just a simple country boy.” Whoops! Time to check your wallet. Beware of Greeks bearing the gift of humility. But this sort of thing doesn't bother me much. The savvy see through the maneuvers; the innocent learn from them when conned.

More painful are expectations arising from a long tradition of self-admiration reinforced in every way, not least in the way history is thought. It’s not a uniquely American trait. In Hungary they taught us geography using maps of the country quite oddly drawn. Hungary itself was in the center, relatively small. Drawn around it was another border making the country look a good deal bigger; one leg of it actually touched the Adriatic. The inscription on the map was:

Kis Magyarország nem ország
Nagy Magyarország mennyország!

The lines rhyme, have the same meter, and can be recited like a slogan. They translates as “little Hungary is not a country, big Hungary is paradise.” Guess which was the actual country we were living in…. The system was bending those little minds of ours into the pretzel of good citizenship.

The papers today are full of outrage over revelations that a recent Attorney General, his knees no doubt buckling under the majestic pressure coming from the White House, found official grounds for permitting torture. First of all, these news are stale. We’ve known the fact for quite a while, but now we have another occasion to tear our clothes and hair and roll on the ground in outrage. Come on! What this calls for is repentance and confession of shame—always a good deal more useful if sincere.

This shining city on a hill was born at a time when people owned people and could whip them bloody without any court’s intervention. During the Civil War we suspended habeas corpus. In World War II we interned Japanese citizens in camps, violating our own constitution, in spirit certainly. During and after World War II we actively recruited and brought to this country Nazi operatives. During the McCarthy years we persecuted and marginalized people with offending political leanings. We manipulated other governments all over the world and made “regime change” a legitimate government activity. Iran? If they resent us, there’s good reason. The aftermath of 9/11 is simply another repeat of patterns we’ve seen before. In a crisis we pack up our morals and ethics and put them in the closet high up there, covered in plastic to be sure, but covered.

Enough of this self-pleasing outrage. It suggests that we are sinless and a few bad actors are to blame. The proper way to look at this is to confess to oneself that, quite possibly, under sufficient pressure, my own knees might buckle too. And I pray to God they won’t.

Of Microbes and Men

The headline in the New York Times, dateline April 13, was UNITED MILITANTS THREATEN PAKISTAN'S POPULOUS HEART. The story dealt with combinations of Taliban and local militants in several areas, and cited as examples the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore and the bombing of a Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, both done by lash-ups of locals and external groups. The article emphasized that intrusive activities by the United States have stimulated combinations in Pakistan of groups that have not always worked together. Brigitte read this story and saw analogies to biological phenomena—namely the body’s mobilization against invasion. I thought the analogy very neat indeed, especially in the context of cultures that, having an organic character, behave in the manner of an organism.

Pakistan, India. These two, of course, are parts of a decadent empire, more of a huge seedbed of cultures than a living organism, and within them new cultures have formed and compete against each other trying to win dominance. Our conventional view from here is obviously not sophisticated enough. We’re able to see only states and so-called “failed states.” We see neither Muslim fundamentalism in Pakistan nor Capitalistic India as both being contenders in a battle of cultures. We assume that modernizing India is the legitimate future and chastise it for not bringing rural India up to tractored and fully-irrigated snuff fast enough. We imagine that Pakistan ought to buckle down and bring its western regions under proper control, unable to see that its regions bordering Afghanistan (and those of Afghanistan bordering it) are culturally cohesive and fiercely resistant to so-called higher civilization. Our Western concept of progress is like a blinder. We can’t imagine any other future for any large population in the world that does not feature mass democracy and free-market economics dominated by capital.

But this is not Brigitte’s insight so much as a way of saying that we can’t see organically enough. Brigitte’s point is that excessive intrusions produce exactly the opposite of the desired result. Modest doses of antibiotics may help a body rid itself of harmful elements, but too much (read: a lot of collateral damage) rallies the body to an energetic rejection of the intruder, no matter how beneficial the gifts that it bears. Elements accustomed to operate competitively unite against the common enemy. Why can’t we see that? Brigitte asks.

I would answer that civilizations are rootless and therefore unaware of forces that maintain societies over the longer haul. If elements in Pakistan resist us, it is because they know that our intention is pure national interest. Our real attitude towards Muslim culture is contempt. We want access to Afghanistan to protect us against Al Qaida. We could care less about the strange cultural process taking place down on that far-off map. We are the user—and elements down there would be God damned if they’ll be used. Special Ambassador Richard Holbrook is talking to the wrong people. He is communing with Pakistan’s rootless elements who, in turn, are really just as helpless against the organic formations within their geography as we are. Folly. Folly.

Culture and Civilization

When we use the word culture more or less unthinkingly to mean “the things going on around us” and “the general arrangement of things,” we are very close to the original and still used secondary meaning of the word. That origin lies in “cultivation,” thus the arrangement and working of the soil, garden, field, and forest land done to sustain us. The modern word ecology carries a very similar meaning but with an unstated stress on the mutual linkage of everything.

Oswald Spengler, one of my cyclic historians, proposed (in Decline of the West) a distinction between culture and civilization. I found this view most apt and informative even when I first learned it at around nineteen or twenty years of age. Kultur for Spengler was the early and still organic phase of a distinctive society; Civilization was the late phase. The chief characteristic of civilization is deracination (still citing Spengler), a neat derivative from French which euphemistically makes its blunt Anglo-Saxon rootless sound sophisticated. You might say that the word itself describes civilization. We move from rootless to déraciné and in the process begin to float in the air, from Conan the Barbarian riding a great steed to Master of the Universe riding clouds of default swaps and derivatives. I realize that the analogy is inexhaustible: the homestead is culture, the mortgage-based derivative is civilization. One last pairing: tradition and public opinion: one is rooted in long-established and time-tested habits; the other is the unstable and flighty flutter of moods in the winds of the media.

We can escape neither culture nor civilization. It pervades, it penetrates, it’s everywhere. If you’re a person of culture, whether primitively so or highly cultivated, you will not, repeat not, feel at home in a civilization. The cultivated person will in some real ways be related, will belong to the same category, ultimately, as the fundamentalist.

More pairings will make this plain. Rationalism belongs to culture, intellectualism and sophistry to civilization. Culture cultivates the will, civilization the appetite. Sports and contest (whether of teams or spellers) are on one side, spectator-sports and soccer riots on the other.

The chief differences are that cultures are coherent, if often carrying an irrational element; they are also hierarchical, perhaps because they are coherent. Civilization is incoherent and ultimately flat. Its incoherence is in fact caused by its flatness. Power in civilizations derives from mass opinion. It is a single value although differently named: wealth, celebrity, popularity (as in politics).

Multiculturalism is an example of incoherence. All cultures are equal. Give us a break! I wouldn’t want to be a woman in a Muslim or a Hindu culture. No thanks. But let’s look at the ultimate meaning of that term. When everything is equal, nothing has value. Multiculturalism is the de facto rejection of culture dressed in a patronizing tolerance.

I’ve had the good fortune to experience real culture before the last wave of civilization submerged most of it in Europe. I was born in Hungary and therefore in the provinces of Christendom where modernism had had somewhat muted influence. In my early childhood I lived on the edges of Hungary yet, thus even more removed into spaces still dominated by the past. And, in the last year of World War II, and for a time thereafter, I lived in a backwater of Bavaria, in Tirschenreuth, where Christendom was still in full flower—more by the nature of its location and national neglect, I think, than any other reason. This background formed me. I’ve always been grateful—even if living in civilization gives me little comfort. Living in modernity, however, cannot be avoided—no matter where we first saw the light of day. My coming to America had nothing to do with it. Here, too, many have lived in pockets of resistance, but the times keep marching on, the blight spreads, indeed will do so until the season once more changes. I have a sense that, beneath the undifferentiated devastation modern civilization represents, new shoots are sprouting. In time a new culture will be born of these green things as the old order finally breaks down and its rubble is carried off as raw material to build something new. Signs of that are also evident.

Turbotaxonomy

Doing taxes is the royal pain it is for reasons more domestic than federally bureaucratic. The really big job, in other words, is to assemble all of the necessary slips of paper that actually prove that we exist. In Taxland, that is. Those pieces of paper rarely matter, but when they do, they really do. I remember the shock I experienced some years ago when, applying for Social Security on or around my reaching ultimate ripeness, the SS Administration turned up its nose at all manner of proofs that I exist—my immigration certificate, my citizenship certificate, my honorable discharge from the Army, and lesser documents yet. No! They wanted my birth certificate! But here I was, age sixty-six, and I’d never actually seen it—only a typed translation from the Hungarian into German, I think, that my father had procured by some odd stratagem in the late 1940s. I was born in Budapest just before that city was laid under siege by the armies of the U.S.S.R. during World War II. The city was badly bombed and shelled. Could I possibly get anyone now, two-score-years-and-counting later, to come up with that piece of paper from over there? So far as the SSA was concerned I hadn’t been born; I was the mirage of an elderly man; I existed physically, for there I stood—and in the United States of America I had the necessary papers to prove myself real—but not in SSA Land. I began the process by painstakingly assembling old Hungarian words to address the Hungarian Embassy in New York (on paper, of course), the folk bureaucratically indicated as the keepers of the gate. Amazingly it all went very smoothly. Thanks to humanity’s widespread passion for hoarding old records, the appropriate place in Budapest still knew me! Heaven be thanked! They hadn’t been bombed or burned! Now came another surprise. SSA accepted the certificate as it was, in Hungarian, and scoffed at my offer to provide them a translation. “We’ll take care of that,” they told me with dark knowingness. And now, that I existed, I could approach the table and sit down.

Even in those days now half forgotten when at tax time you praised the Lord for electrical calculators and sharp pencils, I’d come to the conclusion that actually doing the taxes, which amounted to filling in blanks as instructed, was not really beyond the powers of a person able to read. Indeed, back then, I used to joke that I made my living by the power to read alone; many had learned the art but had decided not to exercise it once out of school. But the trauma of tax-time was then no different. Find the little pieces of paper.

TurboTax, my well-paid slave (this year’s package cost me $60), automates the fill-out-the-form process, thus shaving a very thin sliver of effort from the entire process. You still have to enter the data on the keyboard, but all the numbers will end up in the right place, the slave does all the look-ups, does all the calculations—and dispenses good advice during the process. But this begins after you’ve assembled that ominously named documentation.

This year, horror of horrors, I discovered at the end of the longish day that we owed a huge amount in taxes, over against last year, despite the fact that our income was just a thumb-width greater than in 2007. Why? Why? Why? The printout of the new 2008 tax form on the screen, I compared it to the printed version of the 2007 return—and discovered that, somehow, we were missing (shriek, cackle!—as the comics put it)—two pieces of paper!!!

We were missing, to be specific, two form 1099-Rs, those that recorded our RMDs from our IRAs, one from Brigitte’s, one from mine. I’d filled in the actually RMD amounts from other data; but without the forms themselves, I could not discover whether we’d paid income taxes on those sums or, worse, had not. RMDs have now etched themselves into my memory after these experiences. The letters stand for “required minimum distribution” from “individual retirement accounts.”

As always on these momentous days, I descended from the fumes and nasty fires of my working desk upstairs to find Brigitte serenely living her life, watering plants in our bright sunroom. Brigitte is Keeper of Records and CFO of this unit; nowadays letters like that must be appended to underline the person’s importance. Her face took on a rigid form. The search for 1099-Rs began. It took a while. The tension mounted. At last we found a soiled copy of mine, abraded somewhat by having slipped off a tax-pile on a desk. We already had the number, not the paper! At last. The second one required, finally, a telephone call to Merrill Lynch, the spelling of whose name (two Rs, two Ls) tax time always re-teaches me. Now we are in the clear, at last, and the turbotaxonomy of our lives is ordered properly. I can breathe easier now and therefore have decided to postpone e-mailing our Federal return until tomorrow.

Meddling

Among the consequences of narrow materialism are certain interventions by experimenters into the medical arts. Today the New York Times brings us a story of scientists able to erase memories selectively in mice and rats using a drug called Zip, suggesting that people’s traumatic memories, drug addictions, or anything else currently thought unpalatable may in the future be removed from the behavioral menu by zip-zapping their memories. I pity misbehaving school boys in the future; come to think of it, I already pity them; they’re already targets of Big Pharma. George Orwell’s imagination evidently failed to disclose the sophisticated means whereby Big Brother in the future will show how much he loves us. By coincidence—a meaningful coincidence, perhaps—just yesterday I finished reading an Agatha Christie novel quite unusual in its subject (Passenger to Frankfurt). It projects a crisis in the world (resurgence of anarchy and Nazism) dealt with by the deployment of a wonder-chemical, the invention of Project Benvo, which compels those who’re dosed to display benevolence for the rest of their lives. The unexpected consequences of modern discoveries are another sub-theme of this novel.

Now glancing at my own reaction I’m reminded of the story of the two old ladies in church listening with great approval as the fiery preacher in turn thunders against greedy merchants, seductively dressed women, and adultery. Each time he reaches a crescendo, the old ladies nod and say “Amen, Amen.” But when the preacher next turns to excoriate those who indulge in the consumption of snuff—then the two ladies look at each other. And they say: “Now he’s meddling!”

Consuming, as I do, seven different medications, I’m not exactly abstemious when it comes to pharmaceuticals and hence only, at best, passively resist such “interventions.” Indeed, without interventions, I probably would have said my farewells and adieus in 1995. But there’s a limit.

When it comes to mind and memory, we know too little. When it comes to medicating people to control behavior—done to minors mercilessly and their parents yielding to Big Brother (or Sister) like shy primitives—I draw the line. We know too little. And our governing model is not at all persuasive to me. What is that model? It is that pure chance, thus Bertrand Russell’s “accidental collocation of atoms” produced all living things including brains. There is neither meaning nor purpose in this great process and therefore intervention is permitted by definition if only you can get “the parents,” as it were—the public—to agree. Whoa! I for one would like to zap the Zip before it reaches adulthood and it becomes politically correct to get a memory tune-up especially, perhaps, after adulteries or divorces.

A House Gone South

There is a house on Charlevoix, a choice estate high on a mound
And bound around its ample girth stand firs and bushes dense and green—
Stood once stand still, but in the past a flag cracked high atop a mast
And nights on summer walks I saw warm lights from windows large and small
And in the Fall at times red lights and movement, music, cheer announced
A party underway to celebrate the harvest on Wall Street,
Halloween, or was it just the summer’s end? The house had two
Perhaps three children, too, and in the day you’d see abandoned on
The drive the boy’s turned-over trike and girls’ forgotten dolls and toys.

But that was then.

One fine day three years ago a For Sale sign appeared, discreet and
Tucked away, almost as if to say we want to sell but yet we
May still change our mind. Bushes slowly hid the sign behind
Their leaves, and then time seemed to stop as on a dime because the life
Inside the place began to flow more thinly now, then slow…
Although a single car (once there were three) still stood out in the snow.
The auto vanished too, replaced there by a box placed there by PODS
The mobile storage folk, to hold, perhaps, the last few residues
Of once rich harvesters of higher revenues now rent apart
Who knows, nasty divorce? or the worst auto sales since before
The day that Ford began to build the Model-T in old Detroit?

And that was later.

The other day, the sale sign gone, the vegetation taking charge,
The pod departed and no trace of life, I dared to stray beyond
The fence into the mansion’s unkempt grounds whence no longer
Veiled by bush or tree, I now could see the house abandoned to the
Birds, the mouse. And there I glimpsed through broken glass interiors left
To the past—torn bits of carpeting, a half-demolished desk-like
Thing, a fallen plastic jar that, rolling, had disgorged a wreath
Of sorts onto the naked floor. Another look revealed yet more
Unsightly scars, not least the plywood sheets that had replaced the
Windows raiding boys, presumably, had earlier destroyed and,
Running off, had left behind. “Alas, this house’s gone south,” I thought and
Shook my head, troubled in mind but homeward bound to eat my daily bread.

The Middle Class

Several years ago both Monique and I participated in the production a four-volume work entitled Social Trends & Indicators USA, a project that we’d envisioned ourselves and which then appeared under the copyright of ECDI† in 2003. The concept behind SIUSA (as we abbreviated the project in-house) was to illuminate trends in society by the use of government statistics. Each entry in these volumes consisted of a graphic followed by a page or two of succinct commentary. We placed the actual statistics we’d used to make the graphs at the back of each volume in numerical format—following the general rule that in socio-economic studies others should be able to examine your logic with all numbers disclosed. Six of us labored on this project virtually day and night to bring it home by the deadline. It was a memorable year filled with valuable discoveries. The highlight of each week was a meeting in the course of which each of us presented the entries we’d produced that week in summary—and we discussed them all. Perhaps the most general of our discoveries was that demographic structure drives everything else, all things being equal—but often also when they’re not. But all this just as a preamble to something else.

The other day Monique sent me a link with the laconic subject: “When you have a spare hour…” The link turned out to be the video of the 2007 Jefferson Memorial Lecture presented at UC Berkley by Elizabeth Warren, the Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. (Yes, I do! I bow to those who fund these chairs. Many people don’t share their wealth, and those who do deserve the bow.) The lecture’s title was “The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class.” You can see the lecture here. Yes, it takes an hour. And yes. It’s worth it!

In this living version of the Ghulf clan there are quite a few of us with a keen interest in the cultural and cosmic climates. Tracking and documenting pieces of it that become visible in some way—through statistics, literature, comic books, pop music, esoteric culture, however we can get at it—is occupation as well as preoccupation. SIUSA and the other USAs we have produced were and are part of that effort. So is our interest in Peak Oil and my own in cyclic history. Well, Elizabeth Warren undertook a very careful study, in methodology identical to that which we followed in SIUSA. She compares a representative (median) family of four as it existed in the early 1970s to one as it was in the early 2000s. She too presents graphics and then makes succinct but penetrating comments—and the conclusion that emerges is dramatic. Listening to her one feels as if watching (helplessly because we are so tiny) the slow-motion evolution of a major disaster that’s coming with what seems to be a kind of inevitability.

But enough said. The lecture is worth seeing, the conclusions worth pondering. It’s better always to face the future knowing than not—and we may even be enabled to change the course of the raging river despite only holding a little cup in the hand.
__________
†Editorial Code and Data, Inc.

By Two Waters

On the shores of Lake Nokomis
We once glided on our skis. The
Winters then in Minnesota
Had a certain bite and brightness
Or is it just my memories
That conjure up vast fields of snow?

On the shores of Detroit river
Where Jefferson its traffic bears,
We live our lives more overcast
By age. Fog sometimes covers up
The view. Ships pass unseen but you
Can hear them sadly moaning in
The afternoon. But where’s the sun?

Don’t fret, my dear. Spring’s surely on
Its way again. The fog will lift.
The tower of the yacht club shall
Stand proudly in the sun again,
The waters clear, the sky deep blue,
And Canada, bent down across
The way, shall drink its fill, look up
And wink, and wave at you, and smile.

The Name of the Rose

Within my own family the name of this blog is instantly recognizable as the title of a futuristic novel I wrote ten years ago. I began to market it just a month before 9/11 changed the cultural landscape, although my failure to find a publisher, I hasten to add, had perhaps little to do with that event. The book is rather long and, while technically a work of science fiction, it crosses the boundaries of the genre. This isn’t the case of a would-be author who’d always longed to publish a novel. In the late 1970s and early ‘80s I’d published a number of novels, a collection of stories, and a series of novellas that all appeared in science fiction magazines. I have what is called a “name” in the field—not a big name, but there it is. A search on my name on Google will show that my books are still out there, used copies still available from Amazon.com. Nor did I lack access to publishers in 2001. Several saw the book but chose to decline. Too bad. Ghulf Genes is probably the best work I’ve ever done. Not only that. It is the first in a three-volume work that I’d tentatively named Symphony in Ghulf Major. What I had to say in that series included views that did not resonate with the times, including a favorable take on Muslim culture and a very dark view of the future American empire in the twenty-fourth century and beyond.

The subject of the novel is a fictitious clan, the Ghulfs, whose involvement in space travel is complex and long-lasting—but that’s the outer wrapper. The real essence of the book is the family saga itself, traced across several generations in three separate novels. One of the requirements laid on every Ghulf who wished to participate in the family in a substantial way was that he or she file with Ghulf Records an annual report—by computerized means, of course. When members of my family began to blog in earnest, this suggested Ghulf Records to me, and, consequently, led to my own choice of naming this record after the book in which the clan is introduced to the world at large.

As for the content of this blog, enough of it exists now so that neither introduction nor comment is really required. The perspectives offered here are philosophical, by and large, appropriate for a person of my age and experience. Beyond writing science fiction off and on, I’ve had careers in the military, in big business, and in big government (I was once the nation’s Garbage Man at the Environmental Protection Agency). I’ve been an independent consultant, a self-taught computer wizard, and ran my own small publishing business, Editorial Code and Data, Inc.—which continues on without me. My education, such as it was, centered on literature and history, but most of my work focused on economics, markets, and technological development.

My real interests have always been cosmic, however—and that occasionally bleeds through here although I do try to keep things accessible.

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Picture credits: Karen's Whimsy, reachable here.

The Youth of Our Age

The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation.

I detect a certain childish innocence in the thought of the Enlightenment, not least in the wisdom of one Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), a jurist and thinker, who framed the quotation above—and thought it was a sacred truth. He attributed the saying to Joseph Priestley, although Priestley used a paraphrase. Childish innocence? Yes. Bentham had discovered that all human behavior could be reduced ultimately to pain and pleasure—that such reactions absolutely ruled each individual—furthermore that anything else, such as “relationship,” for instance, was a mere fiction we could do without. When he said happiness as in his sacred truth above, he meant, ultimately, the preponderance of pleasure over pain. Morality thus is what feels good, and pain is naughty, naughty, naughty. Let’s by all means spank that bad, bad chair for hitting your sweet little head. Childish well into old age. In his will Bentham decreed that his body should be preserved and stored seated in a wooden cabinet—where it remains to this day, at the University College in London, and you can see a picture of it here. The head now is made of wax because the original was damaged in restoration. Alas and alack. Postmortem pain. Naughty embalmer.

Said Enlightenment, if not childish, then let’s call it juvenile. There is a certain flavor of that in Voltaire’s pronouncement that if God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him—a flavor of juvenile sarcasm and pride in having at last discovered that the stork doesn’t bring babies but instead, you know, snicker, snicker. Humanity seems to fall for simplicity as if it really explained something. But keeping things too simple is ultimately stupid.

There seems to be a need to shake off cultural skins—pleasure in skinny dipping, to change the metaphor. The real truth resists institutionalization and shakes off the crust. Then come periods like the Renaissance and the Enlightenment in which people discover the obvious, glimpse something of the mechanics of reality, and think themselves struck by the lightning bolt of sacred truth. Pain and pleasure move us! Holy Moses! And everybody feels it! Jeepers-Creepers! They throw the old away, never mind if it’s still useful. Thus the Enlightenment got its extra light by demolishing the last house Western humanity had laboriously built. Yes, yes. The French months of the post-revolutionary calendar: Vendémiaire, Brumaire, Frimaire, Nivóse…Vintage, Fog, Frost, Snowy—like the calendar children might make; like the words used by New Age couples who’ve invented their own vows....

We grow up fast, though, and having just mastered the Id, Ego, and Superego—having just discovered that the Will is God (hat tip to Schopenhauer), that God evolves (nod to Hegel), that God is dead (thanks for that Nietzsche)—we encountered concentration camps, atomic bombs, and the mysterious fusion of space and time, particle and wave. I came in around that time and now, thanks to the Invisible Hand of Adam Smith my very visible hand sometimes fails to hit the mute button when I chance across CNN. Man alive. Better get busy rebuilding that old human mansion again before something real naughty comes creeping in through the door-less opening from that jungle out there.

A Late Revision: Recently, thanks to the Siris blog, I was enlightened about the circumstances in which Voltaire made the statement I attribute to him above. Evidently I wasn't very fair to the philosopher. For the real scoop on the subject, I suggest that you read the post on Siris available here.

Hey Q!

Patioboat, that ever funny and ever surprising blog-opus of a once majestically bearded family member, introduced haikus as its subject just long ago to show how slow I’m on the uptake. On a recent walk, watching some birds, I thought of westernizing the genre by rendering common proverbs into haikus—thinking, foolishly, that the form might improve them. Alas! The result convinced me that the effort, fun although it is, removes some subtle element in the real thing. This suggests that a new name for my western form, something like Hey Q!, might be more appropriate. Two examples.

Birds of a feather
Always flock together in
Spring fall forever.

A rolling stone won’t
Gather moss. But winter’s snow
Oh how slow the roll.

The form requires three lines of five, seven, and five syllables, a seasonal reference, and what the experts call a verbal caesura or a kind of pause followed by another meaning. Not quite sure what caesura really means, but I guess I know it when I see it. In the examples above, the caesura, if present at all, rather limps.

Becoming?

If we look for the sign under which Modernity hopes to conquer, that sign surely is becoming. This fascination with process and change deeply marks the philosophical current of the Enlightenment. Dynamism is everything. Everything’s emergent by a dialectical fusion of the opposites. The superior emerges magically from the inferior as Hegel’s god creates himself. This mode of thought submerges being in a flux. Being remains but merely as a recurring but temporary term. No wonder that even destruction gets decorated with the adjective creative in modernist parlance—much as the word sheikdom must be decorated with oil-rich.

I’m sometimes quite sure that this position arises from a temperament, the temperament itself the product of a state of being, the state of being perhaps stamped on us in a preexistence we no longer can remember. Karma? I simply don’t remember ever consciously choosing the side of being in this controversy. Or did I acquire my mental stance by osmosis during a Catholic education? Perhaps. In any case, it feels more like a skin I came with than an acquisition.

My traditional attitude seems innate because orientation is important and meaningful to me—and orientation seems to require a fixed spot on which to stand (in Archimedes’ sense). The concept of being serves that purpose admirably, but only if being is absolute and prior, meaning all-inclusive, thus including within its sphere becoming itself as one of the modalities of being.

In the traditional temperament, everything has a place. We may change places, but each of those, in turn is also rooted in the firm ground of—let’s call it eternity. What modernity cannot offer, adrift as it is in a torrent of flux, is genuine orientation that has a bite, as it were, that makes a demand on us. The chief orientations appear to be those in space and time, narrowly considered, but these are relatively trivial. Those that matter are dimensions of existence I associate with Paul Gauguin’s questions, placed as the title of one of his Tahitian paintings: “Who are we? Why are we here? Where are we going?” What I’m seeking for here is an apt name for a dimension that transcends time and space: the dimension of meaning. Too bad that nothing Greek’s on offer to make this sound profound.

Modernity’s answers to Gauguin’s questions are not exactly satisfying. Who are we? Biological products of matter. Why are we here? Because the conditions of matter on this planet favored the appearance of living matter, a state that routinely emerges if random events and background conditions favor the process. Where are we going? Back to the earlier form of matter from which we first emerged. Wow! Five hundred years of scientific thought have truly produced—a mouse… Well, not even quite a mouse yet.

This being the sum and substance of modernity’s meaningful answers, that situation entirely justifies my seeking grander myths of worlds beyond the Mountains of Qaf—as the Islamic mystics would have it. A leaning towards being is not a bad start toward that journey. The Mountains of Qaf, by the way, form the outer shell of the visible cosmos.

The Logic

A second take on this subject—being and becoming. The human mind begins with being because the notion of something emerging from nothing is imponderable nonsense, purest magic; Being with a capital B must already be present at any creation. The promotion of becoming to primus inter pares is based on the dialectical pairing of nothingness and being. If being emerges from nothing, thus becomes (“emerges” in modernist parlance), becoming appears as the veritable agency of creation. But the human mind won’t go there. Nonsense.

What this illustrates, in turn, is that all traditional thought intrinsically relies on the assumption that reason must have real standing before we can make even a toddler’s halting step towards any kind of meaningful knowledge. The dialectical progression from nothing to something violates reason.

Discussing this subject with Brigitte brought the perfect ending to this posting. With that special look she sometimes has, she said to me, “But you have to admit this, my dear. Being Arsen means becoming a blogger!”

The Hydrocarbon Lottery

The Census Bureau—that worthy supplier of great statistical instruments by means of which we see our world—provides (here) a tabulation of world population going some 12,000 years into the past. I’ve taken these data and graphed them in Excel, plotting the upper and the lower estimates the Census makes available.

The chart, shown below, is sloppy as such things go; the bottom axis, showing years, is unevenly spaced: on the left side intervals are thousands of years, in the center hundreds and then fifties, to the right tens. I present a more properly scaled picture of the same data (second chart), using intervals of 1,000 years. In that graph I’ve shown the 2000 world population as 6.071 billion for both the low and upper estimate.

Looking at these patterns, the first thing that stands out—by not standing out—is that the world’s population, going back thousands of years, barely changed. Our numbers never managed to exceed 500 million at any time until the year 1500, roughly the end of the Renaissance. The first great leap comes between 1700 and 1750—and after that population bursts upward like a geyser! The second chart, with its millennial scaling, shows the rise as an almost vertical ascent.



Wow!

Here is an analogy. Place a tiny bacterial population on a laboratory sheet of glass. Watch it shrink or slowly increase using some faint residual nutrients clinging to the glass, left there by invisible moisture adhering to your fingertips. Now place a tiny drop of sugary water on the surface of the glass and watch what happens. The bacterial population will explode.

The analogy is apt because the sugary water most easily identified as the likely cause of our surge in numbers is the harnessing of fossil fuels. If we plot U.S. energy consumption from 1850 to 2000, shown below courtesy of Wikipedia, we get a pattern very similar to our population curve. As shown here, coal production predates the harnessing of oil, natural gas, and nuclear power.

The first mining of coal on record in the United States dates to 1748. Modern use of petroleum began when extraction of kerosene from “rock oil” began in 1852, the fuel used initially for lighting. The steam engine, which stimulated coal mining to feed it, dates to the late eighteenth century (the 1770s). The first internal combustion engine, a clumsy affair that ran on hydrogen and oxygen, saw the light of day in 1806, produced by the Swiss engineer François Isaac de Rivaz.

The philosophical implications? One can’t help but think, looking at skyward rising curves that, well, what goes up, must come down. Was it wisdom or luck that opened cornucopia for us—or was it Pandora’s box? In any case, plenty to ponder here—not least the falling curves of oil discovery projected into the future. Will population follow where once it led?

Sociobiology

Back a while now, I think it was late in 2005, Smithsonian published brief profiles of “35 Who Made a Difference.” The magazine, celebrating its 35th anniversary, decided to honor “innovators.” One of the editors’ choices was Edward O. Wilson, the founder of sociobiology. His is the scientific doctrine which gives genes predominance over their carriers; thus the egg is greater than the chick; indeed the chick is the egg’s tool. Richard Dawkins made this subject even more controversial in 1976 by publishing a book with a catchier title, The Selfish Gene. While we were still in Virginia and Brigitte still going to school, I bought Wilson’s book for her in “a cloud of unknowing” as it were. The book is monstrous, oversized, evidently aimed at the coffee-table market: Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. But while its cover lives up to the coffee-table promise, the contents stray far from English; the book is boring, its message dismal. In the last section of the last chapter, Wilson concludes that in the next century, namely this one, humanity will have evolved to a form no longer recognizably human. He ends by saying: “But we still have a hundred years.” He doesn’t mean a hundred years to fix things. No. The genes will have the last word—and they will have their way. He simply means that we still have a hundred years to experience what it feels like to be human. He envisions a completely planned society, “the creation of which seems inevitable in the coming century.” “In this,” he says, “the ultimate genetic sense, social control would rob man of his humanity.” The book was published in 1975.

On gloomier days we might agree with Edward O. Wilson; we need but look around to see monuments to his predictions…

Sociobiology, curiously, illustrates what fundamentalist religion is all about. It is a kind of passionate reasoning from partially true premises; in both cases the premises are found in holy books; in both cases there is a prophet; for Wilson the prophet is Darwin, for the fundamentalists he is St. Paul. The factual basis on which the structure is erected is never really questioned, indeed may not be questioned.

Wilson starts his book by saying:

Camus said that the only serious philosophical question is suicide. That is wrong even in the strict sense intended. The biologist…realizes that self-knowledge is constrained by emotional control centers in the hypothalamus and limbic system…These centers flood our consciousness with all the emotions—hate, love, guilt, fear, and others—that are consulted by ethical philosophers who wish to intuit the standards of good and evil. What, we are then compelled to ask, made the hypothalamus and limbic system? They evolved by natural selection… Self-existence, or the suicide that terminates it, is not the central question of philosophy. The hypothalamic-limbic complex automatically denies such logical reduction by countering it with feelings of guilt and altruism…. In a Darwinist sense the organism does not live for itself…. Each organism…is a unique, accidental subset of all genes constituting the species…

[T]he organism is only DNA’s way of making more DNA. More to the point, the hypothalamus and limbic system are engineered to perpetuate DNA.

This extract from a much longer paragraph sums up the fundamental problem of sociobiology, indeed the problem of any system which posits an unconscious and emergent causation of mind. It was Archimedes who said, concerning leverage: “Give me where to stand, and I will move the earth.” We’ve improved that by saying: “Give me a fixed point outside the earth…” A fixed point, and outside the system, is absolutely essential for any kind of genuine knowledge. If my thinking is governed by the subtle string-pulls of a vast power beyond me (whether I’m aware of it or not) my thinking is essentially worthless. So is my science: it’s simply whatever DNA wants me to think.

I cannot lift myself by my own bootstraps. I cannot see my eyes without a mirror. Reality demands a fundamental dualism—a fixed point outside. Without that, no genuine knowledge can exist—only a system of reactions. Wilson thus transfers genuine consciousness to the DNA—but in orthodox Darwinian manner he clings to all of the machinery: it all happened by accident and natural selection. As Gertrude Stein said about Oakland, California: “There is no there there.”

Sociobiology is well known primarily because it tackled one of the basic problem in Darwinian theory—altruism. It shouldn’t be there beyond, perhaps, the narrow sphere of a brief mother-child relationship. Wilson explains altruism as the transcending wisdom of DNA guiding us by the “hidden hand” of hypothalamic/limbic influence so to behave that a more diverse gene pool will survive.

If you leave a lot out, if you do not think rigorously enough, anything can be explained by natural selection.

Across the Wide Missouri

In rural south-east Missouri, never a region of particularly rich soil, driving unpaved backwoods roads, you see how thin a layer civilization actually forms. Its brittle surfaces broken and eroded, you see the sickly striving of ill-watered barbarism sprouting like disordered, dusty spreads of weed. Interstate-44, pointing from St. Louis to Springfield, MO, was not long since meth-alley in local parlance. Here, not long ago—maybe this is an urban legend, but if so it is a good one—a motorcycle gang leader was said to have been buried seated astride his splendid Harley Davidson like a feudal lord of old atop his sacrificed white steed. The region is just south of the Lake of the Ozarks, an area experiencing a bit of a boom, and directly south of Springfield is Branson, the recently emerging competitor of Memphis in all things Country Music. That area is booming too. But get away from well-paved and billboard-festooned approaches to these areas and you see a good deal of hidden disorder. But the disorder isn’t exactly new. The landscape is and ever was rather scruffy, the population, now as ever, eking out a living from marginal farming, hunting, fishing, and the salvage of old cars and their parts. To be sure most farms and homesteads are tidy, picked up, and nicely kept, but in the course of a ten-day trip we saw unusually many properties in dreadful disrepair and chaos. Talking to friends and family, we once more tuned in to the old tales of woe: excess of drugs, the consolations of alcohol, dysfunctional families, the seeming failure of the male element to pull its weight: a matriarchal society supporting men who barely function. This is not a scientific survey but rather a sampling of the odor of a landscape.

On the trip from out there to Kansas City, aside from endless giant ads selling fireworks, we saw the wondrous contrast of two cultural forces embattled one with the other: Porn and Christianity. On I-70 bound westward, there is a place where the world’s seemingly largest Adult Superstore raises a gigantic sign trying to attract the needy trucker; and right opposite this place there looms the largest conceivable white cross, its beams the thickness of the Washington monument on the Ellipse in DC.

Thoughts ran through my head during this trip: the thin layer of civilization. The Progressive Age, which either dawned or reached adulthood in the eighteenth century, now fading gradually, envisioned a time of ever-improving human conditions. The thought in my mind on this trip to Missouri was: It’s not about achieving the millennium, my friends. It’s about maintaining a decent level of civilized existence against the relentless pressures of decay that seem intent on bringing down every tower of Babel humanity begins to build.

A Story

If you want to hear one of my science fiction stories read aloud—and rather well at that—I suggest you go to this link, click on the title at the head of the page (A Bite of Stars, a Slug of Time, and Thou – Episode 12). A little radio control then becomes active, and clicking on it you can hear my tale, Such is Fate. After the story is finished, some British commentators, headed by host Elisha Sessions, discuss the tale for quite a while—most intelligently. Amazing what you can find on the Internet! Concerning the story, it’s one I dashed off once on several legs of several flights of a business trip back in Anno Long Ago, starting in Atlanta and eventually ending in Kansas City a couple of days later…

Angela Thirkell

While I am in the mode of talking about authors—and for a change in subject—I want to recommend the novels of Angela Thirkell.

She was a twentieth century author of extraordinary prolific output. She wrote a novel in almost every year from 1931 through 1961. These are family sagas; most are also love stories. They are funny and yet deadly serious as well. Each novel’s “time” is the year in which they were written; many of the same characters appear in book after book, first as children, later as adults. Thirkell had the brilliant idea to set her novels in Barsetshire, a fictional county invented by Anthony Trollope.

I’ve found that the novels written during and after World War II are by far the best. The earlier works don’t appeal to me quite so much. Something happened to the English during the war, and this change also deepened Thirkell’s own take on the world.

These are truly weird novels. You fall into them. You start to live the lives of the characters. I’ve read about ten of them now. If my library is a good random sample, there will be two or three of them present on the shelves. I started with Love Among the Ruins (1948) and got caught.

Brigitte got me started. She picked up a stray comment on Thirkell in a column by Verlyn Klinkenborg in the New York Times. Klinkenborg said something to the effect that one tends to hide the book lest visitors see what you’re reading (not high literature). Since we think that Klinkenborg himself is right up there with the best of writers, this was enough for a trip to the library. To see Klinkenborg on the subject of Thirkell, read here.