Peace Requires Awe

Surveying the papers, at least half the time, brings to my mind one of Hobbes’ famous sayings, i.e. that the absence of what he calls “civil society,” an absence that he therefore labels “the state of nature,”  “is nothing else but a mere state of war of all against all; and in that war all men have equal right unto all things.” This is from the Preface of De Cive.

Now that “state of nature” is one of those rather slippery notions. I’m not quite sure that such a state actually ever existed when humanity was actually what it is now. If it means the state of being an ordinary ape-like animal, surely the state was not one of war; orangutans are not always arming for combat. In his Leviathan, however, Hobbes offers a much more interesting qualifying conditions: it is the absence of “a common power to keep them [men] all in awe.” Herewith the entire quote, with material usually omitted this time included. I found this worth perusing today, particularly the first sentence and then that long listing in the last paragraph:

Hereby it is manifest that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man. For war consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting, but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known: and therefore the notion of time is to be considered in the nature of war, as it is in the nature of weather. For as the nature of foul weather lieth not in a shower or two of rain, but in an inclination thereto of many days together: so the nature of war consisteth not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. All other time is peace.

Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man, the same consequent to the time wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

[Hobbes, Leviathan. http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/hobbes/leviathan-c.html#CHAPTERXIII]

Hobbes does not further define the “common power” that holds us in awe. But, clearly, it need not necessarily mean a political power as such. It certainly could be that. But better than some dictatorship or royal rule that keeps everybody trembling, it might also refer to a period (note Hobbes’ disquisition bout time, usually omitted from this quote) in which a meaningful belief system keeps people unified and in awe.

Now as for the content of newspapers—that often trigger my own reaction—that content is neatly depicted in the final sentence of the quote—in which we almost feel like we’re reading a paper ranging over every aspect of modern society. Hobbes, who saw the light in the sixteenth and died in the seventeenth century, pictured “the state of nature” as in the past. Little did he know that he was witnessing its rebirth. Since his time the State of Nature has genuinely matured all over.

Selfie Stick

If you haven’t heard of this product (we had not until this morning) it is high time to get with Modernity and invest in a Selfie Stick. The illustration I’m showing is from Wikipedia creative commons (here). The image was taken by Petar Milošević in Prague. The selfie stick is widely available from Amazon to Walmart, you might say. I saw one discounted from $21.81 to $4.19 (plus shipping) at Amazon.

The big banks all over the world are desperately trying to cause economic growth by printing more money and such. Growth is already here, if only we could promote desperately needed new products so that the public could know to acquire them.

Here is our attempt to grow the economy by making publicity waves. We shall, of course, acquire a pair of sticks ourselves, a Hers and a His, as soon as we have acquired some brand of iPhone to fit into their maws.

In the future—no doubt from Amazon, which already uses little robots to fill our many orders for books and such—will come the Selfie Bot. It will roll ahead of the user and take a constant stream of selfies as that person is doing his or her shopping. Stay alert, NSA. Here is yet another way to keep track of potential terrorists. We all are, after all, especially after seeing such products on sale…

A What!?

Herewith a cultural note. I was looking for what looked like a rather nice product, a Staedtler 5-nib Calligraphy Set—intended as a gift. The Web told me that Walmart had it, and so to Walmart I went to get it. Amazon had it too, but Amazon imposes a wait.

I confess I kind of doubted that Walmart would really have it. The nearest such store to us is a sad ghost of Walmarts in more aggressively prosperous regions. But I went anyway. As I marched along I came across two rather young Walmart ladies, best to call them girls: they seemed barely in their twenties. Not trusting that the word “calligraphy” would have much traction here, I asked: “I’m looking for some fountain pens.”

Both ladies gave me strange, puzzled looks. “Fountain pen? What’s that?” I swear to you their puzzlement was genuine. I said: “It’s a pen that you write with.” Just at that point another Walmart lady came out of an aisle; she, however, was in her middle forties. The girls turned to her. “He is looking for a fountain pen,” one of them said to her. “What is that?” The older lady fortunately answered them in exactly the same words I had used: “It’s a pen that you write with.”

Long story shortened. I bought the calligraphy set from Amazon after all. Walmart failed me as did Office Depot. And so did a more local stationary store. But I truly do wonder what images flashed up in the minds of those two young girls when they heard the phrase “fountain pen.” Some kind of fountain? Which also acts as a play-pen?

How do you write “I am a has been” if you don’t have an iPhone or your thumbs are sore?

The Clash of Being and Becoming

The church needs to recognize that things have changed and times are changing and people are changing.

     [Frank Schaefer, former Methodist Minister]

Everything flows, nothing stands still.

     [Heraclitus of Ephesus]

The trigger for this note is the first quote. A story in the New York Times this morning relates a conflict within the Methodist Church. Frank Schaefer, one of its ministers, was expelled for violating the rules of the Methodist Book of Discipline; the context was gay marriage. The Rev. Schaefer clearly voiced his own convictions, no doubt feeling that they are self-evident and should therefore command universal assent. But that is because we are now living in an age in which Becoming has achieved at least a temporary dominance.

Having been brought up in a tradition in which Being is the ultimate anchor and reference, I’ve found it odd that our times are so enamored of Becoming. It’s everywhere. It neatly matches the spirit of an Age of Progress. That age itself takes its inspiration from the theory of evolution—which seemingly provided, in the nineteenth century, a plausible alternative to explain Life, at minimum, and, by extension the whole of reality as capable of explanation without God. Heraclitus, who anticipated the rise of Hellenism by some handful of decades, gave Becoming its brief motto; he had no access to Darwinism yet, original or neo, but still believed that reality had always been, would always be, but never the same at any moment. Job One, therefore, is adaptation—and the early bird catches the juiciest worms.

I’m speaking here of fashions—fashions in thought. “Being” is associated with God, “becoming” with matter. Nothing wrong with becoming, per se, of course. It’s a matter of observation, another way of saying that energy is present and acts in Time and Place. No time, no change. My musing centers, rather, on the promotion of this concept to a very high rank. Why is that? Perhaps because in our current social life the transcendental is effectively silenced and mere motion and change have been promoted and are evoked to justify change. Cultural epochs are marked by one or the other side of this pairing; Becoming is king now, but we are moving toward Being again.

I think this because I am convinced that we’re now passing through what might be called an anti-Renaissance; the twentieth century represented an important segment of it. Therefore philosophers—Whitehead comes to mind and, for me, also David Bohm, the physicist, in his cosmological writings—are struggling in some way to reconcile Becoming with Being. But, such is our time, they begin by looking at physical reality first in their attempts at explaining the “mystery.” The mystery is consciousness, agency. They are headed back toward a comprehensive answer but do not quite arrive.

The curious thing is that Being and Becoming are readily reconciled if one begins with consciousness, with agency, the most fundamental experience all of us share. Trying to explain what we are, we discover a hierarchy in which Being is more fundamental than Becoming, hence on a higher plain. And even that which always flows and moves must first be before it changes and thus because something else that still is. Even the flux is, first of all, before it is transformed. Reason, which is irreducibly part of awareness, then leads us to add another dimension to reality beyond the three of space and time. And with a transcending dimension added, the conflict disappears. Bohm discovered an “unconditioned order,” read intelligence, as a complement to the “conditioned order,” read matter. Whitehead discovered an evolving God. Close. But we’re not there yet. Anti-Renaissance still has a ways to go.

The Ins and Exes

It surprised me to discover that the word influence, as used today, originated in Renaissance times and arose from astrology. As Online Etymology Dictionary puts it, it meant “streaming ethereal power from the stars acting upon character or destiny of men.” Before the fourteenth century, the word simply meant in-flow, as of water and such. Quite rapidly, in a cultural sense, thus by the mid-fifteenth century, it had come to mean “exercise of personal power by human beings,” thus the “influential person.” The emphasis in both instances is mine. I see this as the rise of the secular. What once emanated from the stars, and earlier still from God, had come to be something that emanated from humans—though not from all of them.

There is no such word as exfluence—despite its utility and nicely democratic aspects. We may not, as individuals, be very influential but we’re most certainly exfluential. I ponder that daily when I perform my first action of each morning on waking up. But those things that we all do, and quite regularly, like breathing and blinking, are not actions likely to be used as honorifics.

There is a sense in which secular times are an inversion of religious ages, and the word in question is a nice example of that. Influence once signified something coming into us, from on high; and now it means something that comes out of us and changes our environment. In has become ex. We retain influence in its old meaning only when describing that staggerer over there who’s “under the influence.”

This brief ramble had me next researching intuition. In my personal dictionary, certainly, the word has great significance. I think of intuition as knowledge flowing into me and, what with my not having done a thing, from a higher source. OED therefore surprised me again. In that word that prefix, in, actually means at, or on. And tuition has the meaning of “looking after.” Intuition therefore means knowledge acquired after looking at something—presumably with a bit of an effort. That amounts to “observation.” If that’s the case I’m not surprised that its origins go back to the mid-fifteenth century as well, from Late Latin. That’s not at all the model in my mind, namely a kind of heavenly whispering of vital knowledge or insight—the cognitive form of grace.

To be sure, Webster’s third (and last) definition of intuition comes close to my personal one: “the power or faculty of attaining to direct knowledge or cognition without evident rational thought and inference.” Here again we have a pairing corresponding to contrasting cultural realms: intuition as a kind of grace, intuition as scientific observation. Fortunately there is no extuition in the dictionary. An extuitive individual might be a bore—unless he or she wrote very fine poetry.

Brief Resume of Broad

Let us briefly look at the career of a Man born of wealthy and powerful parents. He was born just four years before what might be called the Great War of his time began. That war lasted some 27 years, and our Man was just 23 years of age when it finally ended. His country had lost the war—and the victorious enemy established an Oligarchy to rule the country; some members of this Oligarchy were relatives of the Man. They invited him to join their activities and thus make his career, but our Man had literary, artistic leanings and preferred to write poetry and plays. The Oligarchy didn’t last very long—just a year. In that time, however, it managed to arrest and to try one of the country’s most famous intellectuals and teachers—for that man’s failure to participate in the abduction and killing of one of their opponents. The Intellectual barely escaped execution; luckily for him the Oligarchy was overthrown just before it could do him in. Some five years later, however, the Intellectual was tried again, this time for corrupting the youth of his country, and put to death. Those were turbulent times.

Our Man, 28 at that time, had been a great admirer of the Intellectual. The teacher’s death disgusted him—and he left the country to go on travels. He spent time all over the place, associating with other intellectuals. His travels took him to neighboring countries as well as to distant, but long-established colonies of his region. He spent nearly twenty years in such travels and studies. Then, having come to a decision, he returned to his country at age 51 and there founded a school and legislative consultancy to propagate the teachings of the much admired late Intellectual.

An interesting event, just before the founding of the School, but poorly documented in the life of our Man, was that, just before founding his School, he had been engaged as a consultant to a tyrannical ruler of one of his region’s one-time colonies; let’s call that place Sy. His attempts at persuading the Tyrant to rule by laws, rather than force, got him sold into slavery—but an admirer of his purchased his freedom and got him back to the capital of his country again.

Despite having founded his School, our Man twice more visited Sy later—after the Tyrant had been deposed—but his efforts to institute wise rule failed every time. Eventually, back at the School again, he devoted himself to philosophical writings and died peacefully at age 80 in his bed.

So who exactly was this man? His nickname, in the language of his own country, was Broad or Wide—either because his forehead was prominent or because a wrestling coach of his admired the width of his shoulders. Let me give that word in his own language, it was Plato. His actual name, given to him by his parents, was Aristocles. No, not a mistyping. Aristotle was someone else; in fact he was Plato’s most famous pupil…

*     *     *

The motivation for this post? It is my conviction that we tend to abbreviate, caricature, emblemize, and iconize the past. The past was just as complicated, confusing, and nitty-gritty-filled as any present ever is.

The Infrastructure Indicator

Whether it is true or not, it was said that Benito Mussolini “Made the trains run on time.” I was reminded of this famous saying when reading the paper this morning (New York Times) and learning that in Pakistan the lights go out for 10 hours a day in major cities and up to 22 hours in rural areas. Never mind that such claims deserve detailed documentation, with pointers to sources; what I can be fairly sure of is that electric power is failing, or shut down, often enough to generate demonstrations—and that the disruptions last a long time. In turn that reminded me of the failure of power in Iraq. An online paper, Al Monitor, reported on April 9 of this year that around-the-clock electricity is still something to be achieved there. Add to this context that we experienced two bridge-failures within days of each other, one near Seattle and one in Missouri south of St. Louis—in wake of which we got statistics on the huge number of bridges that belong to the “endangered” species. We moved to the Detroit area in 1989—but for two decades, earlier, we routinely traveled on I-35W, crossing the Mississippi, where, in August 2007 one of the more spectacular bridge-failures took place.

Do I suffer from Chicken Little syndrome? No. But I am quite interested in cultural indicators. At the same time, I am convinced that all things are linked. Therefore problems with a culture at its more airy-fairy levels, like its thought, its moral grip, its political cohesion, and its financial clouds, will, sooner or later, be reflected in its physical underpinnings—like water, sewers, power, and bridges.

I’ll add as a footnote that I routinely, daily, drove beneath, I don’t know—surely about 50 Detroit bridges every day, commuting to work for 20 years before retirement. In that process I also drove on top of quite a few. The view from below has been—and remains—the most instructive. You can see the erosion of the concrete and the bleeding of re-bars thus exposed to the rusting action of rain. Drive on them or beneath them. In either case, beware. The money is headed for the invisible stratosphere of where Goldman Sachs sits on a throne. Down below the infrastructure crumbles.

“Culture” is Young

It startled me to discover today that the concept of culture, as we now use it, arose, why, just the other day. As we know from “agriculture,” it is rooted in the systematic cultivation of the land. And in that sense the word is already present in the Latin cultura. Cicero is said to have used the phrase cultura animi, thus cultivation of the soul—but the word was not in use as it is with us. That began around 1500, thus in what for me is the Latter Days. Then it meant cultivation through education. It had grown up to mean “the intellectual side of civilization” by 1805. By 1867 it had reached maturity and had come to mean the “collective customs and achievements of a people.” In 1909, W.B. Yeats gave it the following interesting meaning:

For without culture or holiness, which are always the gifts of a very few, a man may renounce wealth or any other external thing, but he cannot renounce hatred, envy, jealousy, or revenge. Culture is the sanctity of the intellect.

     [W.B. Yeats, V. III of Collected Works, a journal entry dated March 7, 1909]

Yeats here is returning to Cicero’s sense, but as that word continued to be used by ever more people, it has expanded on the 1867 meaning more and more and, in our day, has endless tributaries of which pop culture is one and innumerable subcultures yet others. Yeats anticipated something of the kind when he wrote about the “widening gyre” in his “The Second Coming” and observed that “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.”

It strikes me as interesting that in secular times, which look outward rather than within, the collective becomes visible and needs all kind of words to describe it. And culture is one of those.

The Future Holds Withdrawal

In my childhood I lived (among other grander places) in two small towns, one in Hungary (Sümeg) and one in Germany (Tirschenreuth). Both were deeply and unselfconsciously Catholic communities in which religious life was very much in the public square, the visible festivals were all religious, pilgrimages quite routine. The very environment was religious, you might say, and in each the most prominent structure was the centrally elevated church itself.

This sort of place certainly had huge influence on children—they could see, and couldn’t help seeing, large numbers of adult participating in the religious life in which children themselves were also being brought up and schooled. And my presumption is that it also influenced the aging, for whom the meaning of the lives they were completing was reaffirmed in a socially obvious way.

Both in Sümeg and in Tirschenreuth that life still continues dominantly—indeed with renewed energy. In Tirschenreuth, for instance, a miraculous event produced a series of pilgrimages beginning in 1719. These were later suppressed, in 1803, as Europe was forcibly secularized. But the pilgrimage came back and is, today, held on the 13th of every month. On a recent visit to Sümeg, my brother Baldy and Peggy (Baldy is my brother) and Tibor and Evelyn (Tibor is my cousin), witnessed an openly religious festival—and a pilgrimage—in Sümeg; the pilgrimage drew people from all over Europe.

The life in these places—which also host all the usual modern facilities, factories, and the like—is a remainder of an era when religious consciousness was the environment. The sea of faith was then, too, at the full. And, what with its persistence, it may expand again from settlements like that—places known as backward. But backward is also forward; just give it time.

In the land of the free and officially secular—where the public square may not even display the emblems of faith—the process is likely to take the form of a withdrawal rather than an expansion. I conclude this because, sooner or later, elements of the public will begin to recoil from a culture in which the First Amendment is interpreted as sanctioning violent computer games as “freedom of speech”—recently (2011) pronounced to be such by a 7:2 Supreme Court ruling in Brown, Governor of California et al. v. Entertainment Merchants Association et al. I have posted the text of the First Amendment in the last post to serve as a reference here. The Justices saw the legitimization of training youth in violence contained in those words?

What with the Newtown massacre and gun control to the fore, such matters are much in the news now, and we were entertained by news of a test in which we saw the pale image of a teenage boy playing such games—and taking (ridiculous) questionnaire tests afterwards to “measure” whether he felt more aggressive after slaughtering vividly rendered digital images of humans than he felt before. Watching such a story one truly feels extraordinary disgust; and to hear commentary in which such madness is taken seriously produces mirages of the future.

In these mirages I see communities withdrawing. The Amish, Mennonites, and Huetterites will soon have company. It will be barely noticeable at first, but it will be a genuine movement, and as it grows in numbers, it will eventually rule. No. These will not be utopian communities destined to fade away. They will be real. No amount of reform legislation will ever work, but voting with the feet will. It’s in the air. Something within us tells us to take up farming again. And in a handful of decades or so, the drain-away of fossil fuels will bring practical confirmation of the faint inner urges that rise as we contemplate the death of reason.

How Values are Acquired

The values we absorbed in childhood remain with us our whole life long. They are in the culture all around us. And the values concretely expressed in our families and in our early schooling mark us most potently; those in the wider society, more mildly; and adults will see social values through the lens they fashioned in their childhood. The values thus acquired may be positively or negatively experienced. A childhood of neglect and of abuse? Negative toning. A nurturing, caring home? Positive.

The observations of Maria Montessori (1870-1952) are a clue to this. She observed that children pass through periods of heightened sensitivity when their minds are absorbent. They literally acquire all that is about them through the skin—not least their physical surroundings—so that, later in life, they are never really content unless they live in a region that matches the climate and landscape of the one where they spent their sensitive years. All other learning they experience, as young adults and onward, has a less compelling, potent quality. They are imprinted, as it were—not just with the culture and its values but also with their innate reactions to it.

When the values of a culture gradually thin out—say they are deformed, mechanized, edited to conform to some rising fashions—the children who receive that culture through the skin will later manifest it in their lives and thus they also pass it on. The process also works in reverse. A shallow culture may also deepen, usually because of upheavals and sufferings experienced by large collectives. And thus a richer, more meaningful culture may be acquired naturally by the children born into such times.

In modern thought this indelible “imprint” tends to be ignored. Modern thought is marked by the cerebral, mechanical, procedural, and programmatic; intuition is too messy. But the imprint is all-important. The education will not take if the inner culture of the child, the heart, does not resonate with it. If the absorbed culture is good, it acts as an antidote to decadence; if weak, it acts to dilute the strength even of excellent higher education.

We notice this phenomena as we age. One’s own childhood experience, that imprint, forms a kind of benchmark against which all that happens later is compared. And here, again, the quality of that early experience is crucial. If the future deepens, the individual will embrace the good if he or she experienced it potently in childhood. If not, the good will be resisted.

Having said this, I note next the virtual impossibility of “engineering cultures.” Cultures are too complex to be formed by deliberate public actions. Children can’t be left behind if they were properly formed in the first place. Nor can they be promoted if not. Culture is a given, a simple brute datum. It keeps changing not by programs, curricula, and advertising but by something mysterious—and it is mysterious because it is too vast to track.

Notes on the Muslim Reformation

Last October, when troubles in Mali first began to make the news, I suggested that “What is now proceeding in that region is, in fact, a conflict within the Muslim community.” I might also have said, more accurately, “a local conflict within a much wider revolution that is reshaping the greater Muslim community.” In the now very densely populated world, where technological modernity, originating in the West, overwhelmingly dominates everything, strands of influence and motivation are very difficult to isolate. Add to that the self-centered nature of every society, and when I do then it does seem as if phenomena like Al Qaeda and the Taliban are principally aiming aggression at the West. But a very plausible, and perhaps much more fundamental underlying motivation arises from within Islam itself aimed, in the first instance, at Islam, trying to reform it. The hatred of the West is a secondary byproduct of that, motivated in part because the West blocks this “Muslim Reformation,” principally to retain control over oil and mineral resources, and in part because hatred of the West is a handy motivator of the Muslim masses.

If we take the start of Christianity to be 29 AD, the beginning of Christ’s ministry, it took Christianity 1488 years before (in 1517), Luther launched the Reformation. It was, ultimately, a “back to the basics” movement. If we take the start of Islam to be 610 AD, the year Mohammad had his vision, 1402 years have passed since—time enough for Islam to have drifted roughly as far from the True Faith as Christianity had by Martin Luther’s time. In the Muslim world reform takes the form of a “return to Sharia.” It’s aim is to dislodge nominal Muslim but actual secularist authoritarian elites. At the core. Or thus, I suggests, we might view it. Another way to put it: Even if the West were suddenly to vanish from the globe, the Muslim Reformation would go right on.

The rootings of this reformation are traceable to the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928 by one Hassan al-Banna, its aim the restoration of the Qur’an and Sunnah. That last word means “tradition,” and Sharia its most perfect form. This movement has proliferated since, and Osama bin Laden was the student of one of its later very prominent members, Sayyid Qutb, a secularist turned fundamentalist committed to government under Sharia.

In the West the Reformation has long since faded. In the intermediate period, “On Sunday the Bible [was their] ledger, and on week-days the ledger [was their] Bible” (link), but in these latter days only the ledger remains. We’ve lost even a remote memory of what it is like to live in a religious culture. Hence we imagine that the Muslims only desire democratic and market liberties to become normal citizens of the world. Therefore we face the Muslim Reformation with absolute bafflement and shake our head in incomprehension saying, “Why do they hate us?”

Cultural Indicators Revisited

The indicator I have in mind today is the pocketbook—more generally the pocketbook distributed, thus where you could casually find it, more specifically yet pocketbooks holding the culture’s treasured literature.

There was a time when I would visit drug stores to buy books. Drug stores in those days had names like Rexall, Katz, Thrift, and SupeRx. They devoted quite a bit of space to books, arranged on rotating racks, and what you could find in these places was quite astonishing. Novels, of course. Science fiction? Yes. But also literary novels, books of philosophy, history. And all modestly priced, just sitting on racks, humbly, much like boxed spaghetti at the grocers. Up to the 1960s and mid-1970s, I routinely bought very valuable paperbacks at such stores and at airports. And the situation was much the same in Europe; in Germany RoRoRo ruled, but there were lots of others. We were refugees in Germany and immigrants to the United States. We had at best modest means. But not only the publishing world but even retailers like drug stores brought us cultural riches at affordable prices.

Click to enlarge

The first ever present that Brigitte gave me, for Christmas 1959, was a pocketbook holding selections of Jakob Boehme’s writings. I still have it and show its image. It’s 7 x 4.5 inches in size, published by Goldmanns Yellow Pocketbooks, a RoRoRo competitor. That was still the world of manual typewriters. In that same year Xerox introduced its first copier to the world. Computers in those days were still at the maturing ENIAC stage. That little book fully retains its utility today; indeed it’s featured here because it happened to be laying next to me on the computer desk having been consulted about a week ago. Meanwhile electronic goods purchased much, much later, not least music records, diskettes, and recording devices have lost all of their utility (although they still clutter up the archaeological digs of this house).

Pocketbooks like the one I’m showing have essentially disappeared, replaced by trade paperbacks of larger size and much higher prices. Is the content still available? Yes. Indeed more so. There are books, e-books, Google books readable online, and much else. But not at the drug store. Chance encounters with classics while finding something to read on the plane? Gone. I still continue to check—a kind of animal reflex. What CVS, Rite Aid, and Walgreens have to offer is, in the context of the 1950s, 1960s too pathetic even to mention. In the 1950s drug stores still served readers at every cultural/intellectual level; now they serve only the lowest layer. And, indeed, most of the time, visiting Barnes and Noble for instance (Borders having crossed the border into Bookseller’s Paradise), B&N almost never has the book I’ve come to buy. But they can get it for me online. Thanks. I can do that too, and cheaper.

I’d emphasize, here, the structural differences. Looking at the situation around 1959, a substantial market for upscale literature at modest pricing existed. Many providers competed. Many channels delivered the goods down to every neighborhood. Today a vastly expanded content is available but based on what is, ultimately, a centralized (and hence vulnerable) electronic medium, itself requiring expensive tooling to use, tooling that rapidly obsoletes itself. The readers seem to have vanished. And as the age of fossil fuels reaches its end—which should be visible in another fifty-three years from now, this system may not survive it. But in those years, my little book, echoing the voice of a sixteenth century mystic, may still be around somewhere, still readable by someone who knows German. And along with it my many dictionaries.

Yes. And I would also emphasize the economics here. Cultural wealth was once accessible easily to those with modest means. Modest means, yes, but equipped with a sound education which made them look at books at the drug store. And opened vistas no longer visible to those thumbing tiny screens.

————————

The text on the shown book translated: On Divine Revelation/Jakob Böhme/The Silesian Mystic/Introduction and Selection by Charles Waldemar/Goldmanns Yellow Pocketbooks. The book was also published in 1959.

Where Statistics are Conspicuous by Absence

It might be very interesting, as a way of assessing cultural trends, if we could get good statistics for a handful of countries—or even just for the United States—on the number of practitioners of psychotherapy by major schools and, of course, over time: say 1900, 1950, and 2000. No such thing. I’ve tried. I’ve arrived here because two such schools came to mind in the last couple of months. One is hypnotherapy, pioneered by the American Milton H. Erikson (1901-1980) and the other logotherapy, the work of the Austrian Viktor Frankl (1905-1997). For me they stand way, way above the rest, but there is a strange commonality between them that I thought I would explore—and report on, most likely on Borderzone—in 2013.

Michelle is now taking a course, sponsored by her hospital, on hypnotherapy. It tickled me pink when I discovered that the course is centered on Milton Erikson’s methods. And as for logotherapy, I’ve known about it since my young adulthood, back when I was marching through the schools: Freudian, Jungian, Adlerian, Eriksonian (no relation to Milton H. above), Horneyan, and then, finally Frankl’s. Frankl’s logotherapy is centered on meaning, and having arrived there, I had arrived—at a genuine theory. I didn’t bother much with the explosive growth of all kinds of therapies thereafter except to read a couple of books by B.F. Skinner the behaviorist.

Here I would note that while we avidly collect statistics on everything to do with money and people (the Economic and Population censuses), culture gets short shrift. I’ve long felt that statistics are a lens into the realm of vast numbers. Concerning psychotherapy, I found two numbers on Wikipedia. One lists the number of schools in 1980 (250) and the number in 1996 (450). The references cited are minimal and essentially impossible to trace. And even finding a coherent listing of such schools, they are quite varied, don’t agree, and list the names of broad categories, not actual schools. Fuzz, fog. Absent  the sharp resolution that statistics offer.

Ashes! Ashes!

Culture is vast, complex, layered, and ultimately impossible to sum up in categories—much as is the starry sky on a clear night in the country. Science derives from the precise, the particular, but the laws it builds are vanishingly thin. This comes to mind in certain contexts, most recently, in my case, thinking about vox populi.

Things run together. Ashes were on my mind as well, well mixed with dust, this month. That led to a memory linked to some work I’d done years ago now for one of our titles. In that context I ran across a children’s rhyme sometimes linked to the Great Plague and a later companion that links to the 1918 Influenza Epidemic. Let’s look at the first of these:

Ring-a-round a rosie,

A pocket full of posies,
Ashes! Ashes!

We all fall down.

That’s the American version. A British version has A-tishoo! A-tishoo! for those ashes, suggesting sneezing. Other slightly different versions exist as well, thanks to the scholars. And let’s transit to them now. Before World War II none of our learned associated this verse with the Great Plague, afterwards the notion arose. To quote the couple Peter and Iona Opie, who first noted this explanation in 1951 (quoted in Wikipedia, link):

The invariable sneezing and falling down in modern English versions have given would-be origin finders the opportunity to say that the rhyme dates back to the Great Plague. A rosy rash, they allege, was a symptom of the plague, and posies of herbs were carried as protection and to ward off the smell of the disease. Sneezing or coughing was a final fatal symptom, and “all fall down” was exactly what happened.

This version of events is challenged by other scholar saying that the symptoms do not match very well. Indeed the colors associated with the plague were black and blue; among the symptoms swollen glands dominate and one finds no mention of sneezing. Gangrene on fingers and toes, on lips and on the nose—yes. Seizures—yes. By contrast, among the top four symptoms of influenza are coughing and runny, stuffy nose. Fever is tops and sore throat third. Too bad that those Ashes! Ashes!—or the double-sneeze—predate the year 1918 when influenza came.

Now an early German version of this rhyme, or simply a sound-alike, is this one, with my translation:

Ringelringelreihen,	Ring-a-ring in rows
Wir sind der Kinder dreien,	Of children three with bows
Sitzen unter’m Hollerbusch	We sit under an elder bush
Und machen alle Huschhuschhusch!	And make together hush-hush-hush.

I cite this by way of showing that the form of such a ditty keeps persisting, but its content is subject to change. That is the way the vox populi works. It is poetic, free, and entirely untrammeled by careful observation of endless details—but it captures the most important. That is why culture gets it right in myths and science in detail. More power to both.

Now the real verse the 1918 Influenza left us is a little gem illustrating how the culture can take an alien word, like influenza, and make it something memorably part of the current language. And the details are right as well. One of the ways by which the influenza virus is transmitted is by means of airborne aerosols. A hard sneeze can send those babies flying. And they maybe even enter by the window:

I had a little bird

Its name was Enza.

I opened the window

And in flew Enza.

The Professional Soldier

One of the characteristics of the professional soldier—as my late friend and comrade-in-arms Al Coger used to say—is respect for the professionals on the other side. Both are simply doing a job that, alas, has become necessary enough to make war a calling. Hate is not an aspect of it—nor is war something elevated. It isn’t about ideology, much less about adherence to a cosmic faith. It’s organized violence to be managed as efficiently as possible, and as Sun Tzu, who belonged to this profession, wisely asserted in his The Art of War, the most efficient handling of war is to win it without an actual battle.

Elections, to be sure, are somewhat more efficient ways of resolving conflict than war. Unity frays over time, and at right regular intervals it needs to be restored by the force, in the case of politics, of superior numbers. Ballots are more efficient than bullets. And once the matter is decided, civility should rapidly return. It should return if both sides recognize the underlying issue. That issue is that conflict may be unavoidable but isn’t some kind of good in and of itself. Unity is. And conflict must be ended as soon as ever possible—not when the other side has been absolutely annihilated. Compromise, therefore is part of it.

The presence of a sense of unity, even in the midst of the conflict, is what matters. And when it’s absent, real trouble looms. War between nations must be hallowed by an understanding on both side that each is part of humanity—and humanity is the higher good. Within a nation the unity of its people as one community must be the fundamental assumption that renders elections legitimate. Demonization of the other side has been a feature of elections at their emotional heights throughout our own—and in other countries’—history. But after the election is decided, normalcy returns again. Indeed it has been a feature for the winner to embrace those who opposed him and for the looser to pledge his support.

Quite visible cracks have appeared after this year’s election. They may just be a residue of the pain of loss on the right. The right, of course, will triumph again, just give it time, but one of the signs of a loss of effective unity is that every loss today is Doom Forever, and every victory the Triumphal Arrival of the Everlasting Future. One radio host, for instance, Dennis Prager, has elevated political stances into religions. He sees three such competing for humanity’s allegiance: Leftism, Islamism, and Americanism (link). That’s the sort of thing I mean. It reminds me of Toynbee; he saw “end times” characterized internally by the rise of Futurism (read leftism), Archaism (read Americanism), and externally by the eventually successful pressure of an External Proletariat (read Islamism). The secessionist talk, largely only symbolic although it is, also indicates that even great and successful unions of people become, eventually, too big to hold together.

To whom does the future really belong? Toynbee suggested that those in charge of really shaping the future are the people who are looking up, transcending all these battles, and finding  solutions in the spiritual realm—where no “divisions,” in Stalin’s sense, are even discernible. They are too few in number to be clearly seen yet. They’re not agitating in the public square; that square is down there, not up. They’re not thirsting for power, either; they only long to do a good job—like any decent professional soldier. I’m waving to you, Al. You never thought you’d end up in heaven—or that such a place even existed—but there you are now.

The Early Grades

It’s sort of obvious, when I think about it: culture is formed in grade- and middle-school. The logic for that runs as follows. The values we form in childhood, the values we feel, later, as virtual instincts, later shape the collective. Their first experience, of course, is in the home. But their socialization takes place in schooling. The child encounters the social collective in grade school for the first time. There the three Rs are, you might say, almost incidental. It is the Big V that really counts.

If the home has effectively formed the child—the values gained there may be weakened, diluted, and eroded if the child’s first contact with society does not at once confirm them. And parents, time and again, stare in hopeless impotence at this process of erosion aided, as it is, by social consensus.

High school? Too late. Or perhaps irrelevant. My own memories tell me that it is the worst stage of education as ordinarily encountered. Puberty: humanity’s most biologically-imprinted age. Wise woman Montessori understood that; in that age, in her design, the abstract gives way to the tasks of social integration.

And by the time we reach college, the hope is that the individual’s values have reached a certain crystallization.

The difficult aspect here is that values have a holistic character. They can be said to represent a fusion of morality, empathy, cosmology, and intellect—but that comes later on. The child simply absorbs a kind of something: life itself. And as it ages, its powers of absorption, in that sense,  grow weaker. Montessori, again, spoke of the early “Absorbent Mind” present in children. Later that something may indeed  be parsed into components; as an adult, the child may modify this or that part of the whole. But something crucial in the whole remains, and it is that remainder that really forms culture. And that’s what we call values.

If we seek to diagnose the ills of our culture, we ought really to concentrated on the level that really matters: the home and the early grades. The ills of vast collective structures like politics, finance, media, entertainment, business, etc., are all of them traceable to failures in the home, where ambitious parents try to “realize” themselves and struggle to advance careers, and to schools that dare not teach values—indeed cannot—because they fear to overstep the line arbitrarily drawn between religion and the state. And you cannot teach values, as such, unless the cosmological component is a part of them.

From the Edge

Reading the papers this morning, I have the feeling of looking at the world from the edge of eternity. Observable is the age-old tug and pull of conflict. If I were transported in time to any earlier period, I would soon see it again if only I had the same lens modernity’s media have fashioned in our times. And it is certain that transported into a very far future, my report would not change, not in essence.

People who unrealistically long for the return of some Golden Age have essentially the same stance as those who believe in Progress. They’re living in the now and project some hoped-for resolution on the horizontal plane of time: the past shall return; the breakthrough is in the future. Our lives, however, are always in the Age of Iron—no matter what the cultural stage: growing, declining, transitional, or static.

One of the curious aspects of change over long periods of time is the contrast between culture and technology. By technology here I simply mean “tooling.” Cultures cycle. Technology cumulates. The discovery of steam-power and fossil fuels gave the last two centuries a sudden and enormous increase in tooling—but the improvements have been there, at the level of tooling—not at the level of core human behavior. That genuine improvement has produced the illusion of some kind of radical change in humanity. To be sure fossil fuels will be exhausted, but using energy in new ways will remain a permanent acquisition. The next Dark Age will have quite different features than the last; we’ll have plenty of solar panels, windmills, fancy explosives to help us get to geothermal sources, and so on. To be sure, also, the loss of wealth from heaven (or from the deep) that coal, oil, and gas represent will produce significant disorder; during such times innovation grows dormant, except in the military sphere, but knowledge is never entirely lost. Technology, therefore, will continue to cumulate.

Hard-nosed realism, curiously, requires a transcendental view. It rests on the fusion of comprehensive observations both of what lies within us, not least our hopes for a “millennium,” and what we see around us. This suggests a “fallen world” and also a “world beyond.”

The Waters of Madness

Today’s post on Laudator, “Flight,” and an earlier post called “Escape” referenced there (link), brought to my mind a Sufi story published by Idries Shah in Tales of the Dervishes called “When the Waters Were Changed” (E.P. Dutton paperback, 1970, p. 21). The brief tale is presented on the web (here). I will just give you the first paragraph:

Once upon a time Khidr, the Teacher of Moses, called upon mankind with a warning. At a certain date, he said, all the water in the world which had not been specially hoarded, would disappear. It would then be renewed, with different water, which would drive men mad.

Brigitte and I talk almost daily of “things in the air.” Of course we’re not alone. At one level one hears echoes of Tom Lehrer: “Just two things of which you must beware: Don’t drink the water and don’t breathe the air.” At another the air also carries the guiding suggestion to take flight, to seek escape.

A Quick Glance Back

Even the tiny handful of people who were born a hundred years before, or even one or two years earlier, cannot remember 1912 because they would have been too little. So why do I glance back? The news these days are relentlessly centered on financial malfeasance, the economic slump, and tiny electronic appliances we hold in our hands. And, of course, the elections—but that’s a perennial. That all-purpose warding phrase occurred: This too shall pass. Then I thought I’d look. Sure enough, looking by decades, the menu changes but—say in 2002, 1992—not yet the taste and flavor. So I went back a hundred years.

1912. Taste and flavor are quite different. It was the year that the Titanic sank. If you are now a citizen of Arizona or New Mexico, those two regions became states of the Union that year. The year before there were no Girl Scouts of America. In a hard-fought contest, T. Wilding defeated A. Gore. Gore? Already campaigning back then? No. This was Wimbledon, and A. Gore was Arthur Gore. Elihu Root—whose name signaled recognition in my mind but little else—won the Nobel Peace Prize for promoting international cooperation between nations through arbitration. Root failed. If a time machine could transport me to August 17, 1912, and in conversation I would refer to the two World Wars, people would give me puzzled looks. The roots of war, however, were also present—and not just the roots of the great wars but multiple small ones that still plague us: the Balkan Wars began in October. This signaled the eventual breakup of the Ottoman Empire. Serbia and Bulgaria, with secret Russian backing—and joined by Greece and Montenegro—set about to reclaim Ottoman conquests of European territory. A hundred years later, that process is still in motion.

Today brings news of banks hoping to get a special Internet domain-name category. In 1912 the Radio Act parceled out three- and four-letter station codes and restricted access to one radio frequency. The unemployment rate was 4.6 percent in the United States. My time-travelling self is also babbling on about the coming Great Depression—and getting the Cassandra treatment. No one believes my prophecies. Woodrow Wilson was still running for President, running against Roosevelt—Teddy, that is—running as a Bull Moose yet. Same old politics—but a somewhat different flavor.

My time-time travelling persona, looking forward in time from 1912, gains a quite different view of that well-worn phrase, This too shall pass. Yes, it will, this world of 1912. But what shall come in its wake? What came for that time were two of history’s greatest wars, its greatest collective economic meltdown, the Ice Age of the Cold War—which, oddly, created a period of sanity in this country—and after that, and the Berlin Wall, the perfecting hand of Progress has brought us Today. And this too shall…

Slow-Mo Fracture

Based on copies sold, the sixteen novels that comprise the Left Behind cycle, written by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, represent something of a literary phenomenon at the kick-off of the twenty-first century. The series is based on interpretations of prophetic books of the Bible under which, in End Times, the faithful will undergo rapture and be instantaneously taken up to heaven. The unbelieving are…left behind. The books appeared in the period 1995-2007; seven became best sellers; total copies sold have topped 65 million. Three movies were made from this series as well, also popular. But this series, while remarked upon by the mainstream, which cannot help but admire a commercial tour de force, has been ignored because it belongs to an alien culture, so to speak.

Two recent mass killings (at a movie house showing a Batman film, at a Sikh Temple) taking place within 19 days of one another made me think that these are symptoms of cultural break-up—and curiously brought to mind the “left behind”—those individuals and groups who feel left behind in some sense of that word. Massive, rapid change always produces such individuals and groups; the KKK represented one kind of reaction to the outcome of the Civil War. And that war, in the fullness of time, also produced the last major social movement where unity, thus integration, was at the center of the great effort: the Civil Rights Movement. It wasn’t very long after its successful implementation that  we suddenly developed a fascination with rapidly-branching ethnicity. Soon after came multiculturalism on the left and fundamentalist activism in politics on the right. The Michigan Militia formed in 1994—and will here be a stand-in for other similar groups that have sprouted since.

LaHaye and Jenkins brilliantly turned a perception, deeply felt by many traditionalistic, religious people on its head. They were not the left behind. That label belongs to the major culture as the kingdom comes. From  my perspective all this signals the slow-motion fracture of Western Civilization. Parts of it are breaking off. Cracks appear in the denuded landscape deprived of water and burned by the merciless rays of commercialism. The mass killings are, as it were, the visible sparks that fly as this breakup is taking place.