In Praise of Principles

Surprising although it may appear, even a quite pragmatic and seemingly self-centered idea, like national interest, can underpin a rational foreign policy. Surprise diminishes when I go on and see that national interest, at the level of the individual, translates into the protection of life, limb, and living space. Therefore George F. Kennan (1904-2005), the diplomat and thinker, who advocated an abstemious foreign policy based on national interest alone—resistant to humanitarian or moralistic temptations—was really urging a policy easily defended using Natural Law.

I once saw a mouse raise itself up on its hind legs as one of our cats was playing a terminal game with it. The mouse was trying to fend off the cat with its front legs. It was an astonishing if brief spectacle.

Policy based on principle must, of course, never be permitted to become legalistic or sophisticated. National interest does not include protecting the properties overseas of our commercial sector—never mind even more vaguely described interests like access to oil or other resources. Preemptive strikes and the euphemistically called “regime change” cannot be justified by national interest. And interventions on humanitarian grounds? Now that’s the tough one. Fact is, we must say no to that. Such interventions effectively translate into denial of sovereignty to others—also denial of the rights of people to govern themselves. In a very real sense Syria is undergoing an internal process of change. Call it democracy by other means. Now if we had a genuinely effective world government and a world army, then, of course, such mayhem as we see in Syria would be put down. But before such a condition actually arises, the End of Time may have to dawn.

Why Semmelweis Didn’t Make It Big

My earliest introduction to medical discovery—indeed to science—came when I learned the story of Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis (1818-1865) from my mother. Semmelweis is remembered, no doubt only by a few, for discovering a method for drastically reducing puerperal (or childbed) fever; it killed anywhere from 10 to 35 percent of women giving birth in hospitals during the nineteenth century. Semmelweis discovered that puerperal fever was contagious. Therefore he insisted that caregivers wash their hands with chlorinated water after touching a woman—before touching another. This came in 1847 at the Vienna General Hospital. The incidence of fever dropped, in consequence, from 10 to 1-2 percent. His discoveries were ignored and, in a sense, drove him mad. The germ-theory of disease had not been discovered yet. Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) made the discovery in the later 1860s.

What with patenting genes in the news, I also know why Semmelweis died early in an insane asylum. Washing hands couldn’t be patented either—and the Market, therefore, could not use its hidden, and largely unwashed, hand to solve the childbed fever problem sooner, making someone very rich in the process. 

The Prefix Sometimes Dominates

A “venture” is occasionally used as a noun all by itself. Sometimes, with a prefix added, it is an “adventure.” Fine. But neither Brigitte nor I have ever read the word “monition” used by itself, although it turns out to be a perfectly legal English word. Here the background. We saw a movie titled Premonition (2007). We would recommend it. In the wake of seeing it, we got to wondering about the word itself. We could only think of two forms of it: an admonition and the premonition under current scrutiny. Both are common, their meanings known, therefore the meaning of monition is also obvious. It is a warning. When it comes ahead of something that really takes place, it is a form of precognition, but with the negative character of it emphasized. With the ad prefix, which means “to” or “at,” the warning is expressed by someone to someone else. Here is a case where the word warn, derived from Old High German, was too well known and too often used to be displaced by a monition, which comes from the French. But its prefixed versions took root…. If you’re an English speaker with a taste for word-puzzles, a frequent prayer on your lips will be: Nearer, my dictionary, to thee!

Liberal Footnote

On June 6 of this year Harvard issued three reports addressing the fact that enrollments in its humanities programs are declining. This page provides links to those reports. The term, humanities, is a latter-day broadening of what used to be called the liberal arts. The current agitation at Harvard—which is matched, per Wall Street Journal, at many other colleges and universities (“Humanities Fall From Favor,” also June 6, 2013)—is that education has gradually been accepted as entirely and absolutely linked to future employment. What with the enormous cost of education, the burdensome loans that they demand, any curriculum that does not lead arrow-straight to a well-compensated job must be avoided. And the humanities seem useless—unless your career-choice is to teach them.

Now for the footnote portion of this post. It is well to remember that the liberal arts once represented the education of free individuals; that’s what that word “liberal” means. The Online Etymology Dictionary helpfully notes that once that word was contrasted to “servile” or “mechanical” education—thus to the education of people who had to work to survive. This means that the humanities are suitable only for the independently wealthy—whose contributions to society would take the form of public service of one sort or another.

As those with real experience understand full well, all higher level work—I don’t care whether it is done in business, non-profit, military, government, or academic positions—needs above all well-developed powers of insight, judgement, communications skills, and intellectual discipline—not mechanical skills. One tends to learn such of those latter skills as may be needed on the job. The significant exception is the medical profession—typically acquired as a higher degree after the foundations are already laid. I have one daughter who became a midwife—after acquiring a liberal arts degree.

The real solution for the preparation of a genuine leadership class, it seems to me, is to absolutely demand a liberal arts education as a foundation—say three years. After that, chase the pragmatic, by all means. Unless your lottery ticket scores.

Some Still Have It

Early this morning, drawing the curtains aside upstairs (I was already gone), Brigitte saw a fairly bulky bunny rabbit in our backyard feeding at its leisure. I came up bringing the coffee. She told me the story. “He was quite relaxed,” Brigitte related. “Just moving slowly around.” The thought then occurred to me: The bunny has no cell phone; therefore it still has its privacy.

Privacy, Celebrity

Two contradictory tendencies in our society came to mind this morning when I noted that the government’s access to so-called metadata, thus records of phone numbers and the numbers those phones have dialed over time, are still making front-page news with our many sages hyperventilating over the loss of privacy. Yet we are living in a time when evidently very many people long to achieve celebrity.

Celebrity has certain practical benefits—and evidently has had going back to the beginnings of time. I recall reading once that , in seventeenth century France, any person observed in conversation with Louis XIV had as good as made his fortune; I’ve labeled this a law of social physics (link). At the same time, celebrity can mean at least some loss of privacy; in extreme cases media (in such context always labeled paparazzi) will ferret out quite embarrassing details—and even after the famed person grows quite old, they will hound him or her for interviews in preparation of impending death or anniversaries.

The value of brief fame—those 15 minutes Andy Warhol once made famous—may seem rather dubious, but something very odd lurks, thankfully inactively in most people, in the human heart. It is a weird belief that being famous, even if only briefly, gives one something valuable enough to risk not only one’s own but other people’s life and limb. That is why mass shootings take place. One such caused the loss of five lives in Santa Monica yesterday. Alas, no amount of privacy, no amount of anonymity, protects the victims of such celebrity-seekers when fate (see yesterday’s posting) puts them in harm’s way. 

Half-Visible Fate

Fate is a word that signifies the outcome of a life, of a society, and is the sort of thing altogether beyond the control of the individual or of a collective. Not surprisingly, in our democratic age, it is much less used in books today (three times less frequently in 2000, according to Google’s ngram program, than it was used in roughly 1805). We don’t believe in fate. If it doesn’t have an arbitrary quality—thus the idea that it is meted out by gods who have a mind of their own we cannot in the least influence—what is left of it is determinism. (Determinism, by the way, while still less used than fate, increased in usage by a factor of 1,842—also per Google—in the same period.) We believe in our power to observe and, by calculation, to project.

Now arguably a large component of fate is to some extent measurable—provided that the data are available for making calculations. If Europeans had had effective world wide news coverage and demographic statics in, say, 1205 AD, they should have been able to predict the Mongol Invasion certainly by 1234 (when the Mongols had already conquered Siberia, China, and parts of Persia) some 50 years before the Mongols reached the borders of Hungary.

My guess is that, in today’s Information Age, we are capable of predicting at least half of Fate quite accurately if we simply focus on two aspects of collective life: energy and demographics. Quite similarly, if we know something about an individual, we shall also be able to predict half of his or her fate based on such measures as intake of poisonous substances, physical activity and body-weight, genetic profile, and criminal record.

That still leaves the arbitrary element inviolable. The government might be able to record in a vast database what we do with a little Verizon phone. But, thank heaven, our data collection has not yet advanced to such an extent that funeral homes, for a fee, can get notification of my future passing years, say, in advance, guaranteed to happen within, say, a three-month period in such and such a year.

Stuck in the Industrial Revolution

It isn’t surprising—indeed it is a positive sign, by and large—that the aging “just fade away.” One sign of that fading is failure to keep up with trends in all but a few areas that, once, were of great interest. The reason for this is that the final destination is drawing nearer; one becomes peculiarly aware of a separation from one’s aging body; and attention-capacity is limited. Hence I track events in the world of business in a kind of half-distracted way by scanning headlines, mostly, which tell me that the newest thing, never mind its actual importance in the scheme of life, is mobile communications, social networks, and the devices that make it possible. That’s where things are hot. Occasionally I’m forced to read a little more—because I don’t even recognize a hot new name. Zynga? What or who is Zynga? The headline, in today’s Wall Street Journal, says: “Zynga Reboots With Layoffs.”

My ignorance, today, made me read a few words more. They said: “Zynga Inc. is cutting to the bone. The online game maker, which struggled to build its mobile business…” That’s as far as I needed to read to be in the picture. My eye went on to the next headline. But a thought came as I did so. “You’re hopelessly stuck,” I thought, “hopelessly stuck in the Industrial Revolution.” That a mere game company should dominate a business paper’s business section (“Marketplace”) is part of the future I’m no longer interested in tracking. Industry, yes. I grew up with industry. Big, physical plants making all the things we need to have our kind of massive physical civilization. Materials and machines, rails and planes, chemicals and petrochems. The old world. I used to track it closely. Not that it is dying. But it is—fading away.

Gatsby Blindness

A paper by Arthur Applebee published in The English Journal in 1992 reported (I learned here) that The Great Gatsby was taught (and presumably still is) in 54 percent of public, 64 percent of Catholic, and 49 percent of independent high schools. I attended a Catholic high school in Kansas City, Lillis, which must have fallen into the Gatsby-ignoring 36 percent. The one book I remember reading there was The Screwtape Letters. By the time I read Gatsby, having grown curious about it and wondering why it kind of bobs up at right regular intervals, I was already a grown man with family and children. What it produced in me at the time was a yawning boredom and a baffled wonder. This is a classic? Well, I am a member of the Silent generation. That generation is dated from 1925 to 1945. Gatsby was published in 1925. Children often find some of their parents adulations a little weird. Or is there something else at work here?

Probably. The Great Gatsby was not a flaming success when it first appeared. It bombed in its own time, so much so that its author, F. Scott Fitzgerald, who died in 1940, thought himself a failure. But the book took on a life of its own during World War II. But why exactly? It centers on the rather empty and sordid love affairs of the tony and the rich, of which Gatsby is the starring figure. Why he is a star, apart from being rich, escapes me. Is that the Great American dream, to be empty, super-rich, and idle? Beats me. No. Not inclined to reread the book to see what I have missed. I guess I simply suffer from another version of Darnay’s disease (link), Gatsby blindness.

Education Costs Through a Wider Lens

With controversy churning once again around a rise in the interest on student loans, Brigitte wondered how the U.S. situation compares to that in other countries. We have memories, of course. Two of our daughters went to college, Michelle in France, Monique in Spain; Michelle also graduated there. We made some minor financial contributions to those efforts (it seems)—but not painful enough even to be remembered. My own reflex reaction was cautious. I sort of doubted that good data would be available. It turned out that I was wrong. A Canadian group, called Higher Education Strategy Associates (HESA, link), part of the Canadian Education Project (link), has been collecting data on fifteen countries. The most recent report, titled Global Higher Education Rankings 2010, is available online (link).

HESA’s objective is to measure the affordability of education. Their approach is to compare the actual total cost of education to median income in every country. The cost of education is measured as tuition and costs (fees, books) added to necessary living expenses; that is total cost. Total cost is then reduced by measuring grants and additional tax expenditures made by the country to subsidize educational attainment; such tax expenditures do not include loan programs in HESA’s scheme. The result is net cost. Net cost expressed as a percentage of median income then produces a ranking. HESA reports on those few countries for which it was able to collect all of the data required. I am reproducing one of the summary tables here based on 2008 data:

The table here includes actual net costs for the individual. Loan programs, which do not reduce costs but improve accessibility to education, would be applied to these net costs. In this tabulation, Germany ranks lowest in cost or highest in affordability. The net cost is 15.2 percent of median income in that country. Japan is worst, with education costing 107 percent of median income.

Worth noting here is that in Denmark, France, Germany, Norway, and Sweden, virtually no tuition is charged at all. Finland, Latvia, Netherlands, and New Zealand fall into the low tuition category, Canada, England and Wales, and Mexico are placed into the medium tuition bracket, whereas Australia, Japan, and the United States are in the high tuition category.

The report contains many tables showing details, including data on loan programs. The text brings explanations. The focus in this country, right now, is on loans—which HESA treats as a somewhat marginal issue. The real one is what education costs. The high costs in the United States and in Mexico are in part due to the big cost difference between private and public education in those countries. If only public education were charted, the U.S. would be closer to Canada in rankings and Mexico closer to Australia.

Medical Layoffs

Back when we first arrived here in the United States, hospitals did not advertise, merge or acquire one another, or had layoffs. St. John, the nearest substantial hospital to us, was then under construction and opened its doors the year after, in 1952. It was founded by the Sisters of St. Joseph, who had their own start on these shores in 1889—but whose origins as an order date back to France and 1650. Things change, as they say. Later, much later, St. John, a by-now expanded health system, became part of Ascension Health, the largest Catholic non-profit organization in the United States. It is now St. John Providence Health System. By that time, what with the competition, don’t you know, St. John was already advertising itself. So do virtually all the major systems in this city: the whole ball of wax: billboards, videos, print. Therefore advertising, check. Mergers and acquisitions, check. The latest checkmark came last week: yes. Layoffs. The reasons for this are multiple.

For one, there has been a shift from inpatient to outpatient care, not just within the St. John’s system but across the board, affecting all hospitals. All those rooms, all those beds: neglected. The outpatient services, very crowded. Why this change? Money, no doubt. Ever more people who need to stay in the hospital are, instead, homeward bound on self-propelled stretchers, on crutches, or never even bothered to have that necessary operation because they had been laid off. Add to this escalating costs, not least barely compensated emergency room services, the sequester, and so on. Cost are going through the roof.

One of the St. John billboards is prominently located at Mack and Moross, about a block from the St. John, the flagship. We see it all the time. Others are located at much more densely travelled traffic lanes like Interstate 94—competing there with the Ford System’s and Beaumont’s proud towers in the sky. I got to thinking about that. 1951—no advertising. So what does a billboard cost—never mind several. I did a little looking. Billboards are in the range of 14 by 48 feet in size. They are populated by panels, so-called, measuring 14 by 4 feet. So it takes 12 panels for each. Minimum costs per panel, for four weeks, are around $1,500 dollars. In the Detroit metro area, pricing for high-traffic areas begins at around $2,800 per panel. So the range here is, for one billboard, from $18,000 to $33,600 for a four-week period. To be sure, not all billboards are full size—and some are larger. Costs may be less for some, significantly higher for the big ones. Still, if one billboard can cost a hospital minimally $216,000 (suburb) or $403,200 a year (freeway)—and several are used—and if you add the cost of preparing a handful of promotional videos, with actors, music, writing, and all that, and sprinkle in some print promotion too—it would not surprise me that a system like St. John Providence has an advertising budget of at least a million a year.

The system is now going to lay off 160 people—and the local media add: “probably only for starters.” If we assume an average saving per discharged employee of $40,000 (which is a very low guesstimate), the savings will be $6.4 million. Therefore X-ing out the ad budget would not produce anything like the gains promised by layoffs. Therefore the show goes on: endless new mergers (presumably saving on overhead), advertising (to attract people to underused facilities) and layoffs to lower costs. And after us, the deluge. It pains me to see all this high-tech progress rapidly evolving to bring what? The witch-doctor back?

As in the Past So in the Future?

In 1994 Farrar, Strauss and Giroux published The Coming Plague by science-journalist Laurie Garrett. Brigitte read a review of it the following year and immediately ordered the 750 page tome. Just a year after its publication, it had already had fourteen printings. Garrett had spent a decade researching the book, subtitled “Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance,” a monumental portrait of one of the Four Horsemen. Garrett won the Pulitzer Prize for Exploratory Journalism in 1996.

Just recently we’d dug out the book for renewed perusal. Yesterday I saw a story on CNN about a new virus—category coronavirus—that has no known treatment yet and, thus far killed 23 of 44 infected (that’s 52 percent). It’s origins are in the Middle East and the condition produced is called Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS). The virus has claimed the most lives in Saudi Arabia and has already spread to France and the United Kingdom in Europe.

I expected stories in the papers today on this outbreak—but saw nothing at all. Until such things show up in the United States, the media, with the admirable exception of CNN, this time, shrug it off. There are plenty of warning voice—some as distinguished as Garrett’s, others less prominent. One of our own publications Social Trends & Indicators USA, Volume 3: Health & Sickness, published in 2003, featured the following graphic:

I reproduce the first paragraph that came with this illustration:

At the timer when news periodically reaches us that now this bacterium and now that virus have become resistant to our antibiotics or antivirals, it may be useful to look at some diseases that the 19th century would have immediately recognized—and some that stem from Biblical times. The graphic charts actual cases of seven such diseases from 1944 to 1999. They are still with us. We are still getting cholera and the bubonic or pneumonic plague. In 1999, for instance there were 35,600 new cases of syphilis and 17,500 people were diagnosed with tuberculosis; more than 1,600 cases of malaria were documented, up from the year before; 350 new cases of typhoid fever were reported, and more than 100 people came down with leprosy. That year, doctors notified the Centers of Disease Control of fewer than 10 cases each of plague and cholera—but these diseases were beginning to show up in some numbers toward the latter part of this 56-year period—having been absent in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s.

To which I might add that brand new viruses, such as the most recent variant of MERS, are also busy innovating.

Résumé v. Job Description

A column in the New York Times this morning by Thomas L. Friedman (“How to Get a Job”) once more recalled for me the old, call it hoary, subject of the value of a liberal arts education (link on this blog). That education included such “useless” subjects as logic, grammar, and rhetoric (at the core) and then, added to it, arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy. I can just feel the mouth of a personnel administrator water reading such word’s on an applicant’s resume. Now the words that actually did cause employers to feel appetites were Stanford, Harvard, and, especially, Harvard MBA. I know of a case where a company wished to hire a marketing manager and put out a single qualification: Harvard MBA. It was a certain kind of, alas, very conventional company. Offering them a black Harvard MBA would not have had a point; such, in the view of that outfit, would not have “fit” with the distribution channel. Offering them an Asian Harvard MBA would have failed as well; it would have introduced a certain threatening superiority that might not have “fit” the management. But enough said. Friedman’s theme is that, these days, it’s not the diploma or what you know, but the skills you have acquired. He thinks that a sea-change is underway: from now on, the successful applicant will have to pass the gauntlet of some online startup that creates tests for the job in question. If you pass it, you’ll be hired. And as for whether or not you are actually human, that is a minor detail.

Believe it—or better, Not. Right now the only hiring, evidently, is for jobs with a thick connection to social networks and the Internet generally. Personnel managers have nothing to do. When, eventually, the economy picks up again, it’ll be back to mass hirings and—the usual profiling.

Friedman’s column, however, does show that the shades of the old liberal arts curriculum are still virtually, if not actually, alive. Friedman quotes a comment by one of the doers and shakers of the New Hiring Model. The man, commenting on the skills of today’s applicants, says: “What surprises me most about people’s skills is how poor their writing and grammar are, even for college graduates. If we can’t get the basics right, there is a real problem.”

Now as for that hoary traditional way of preparing leaders for life, current applicants probably don’t know the word “hoary” at all. The meaning is “grey, white-haired,” therefore old and wise. Not, of course, old, very old, like humanity’s first formal profession.

Iridescent Grackles and Subteen Nest Defenders

Our distraction this 2013 Spring is caused in part by bird-watching and scientific watering of newly laid sod. The watering, in turn, was originally caused by some maintenance to our sewer. That tore up our front yard sufficiently so that the whole of it required renewal.  (But maintenance is good.) This process took a while—what with sod being quite late this year, the landscapers quite over-booked, and so on. Now the huge unsightly gash (with little yellow flag) is healed, our front soil removed, the roots torn out, new black dirt introduced, sod laid. Therefore the watering. It’s tedious work—but it is raining today so that even the blog gets a little attention.

After we dispatched two over-wintering Black Swallowtail butterflies with the first warm days of this season, we hastened to buy, and plant from seed, lots of dill. We have so much of it, every year, that it even grows in the cracks of the driveway—which is fine with us. We take the plants out with a knife and replant them in pots. But while waiting for the butterflies, we have been watching birds.

As I’ve noted a while back, Brigitte discovered a Cardinal nest in our backyard with one fledgling identified. Now our knowledge has grown. There are actually two. One is a boy, one is a girl. Both have learned to fly, but while the boy is up and about a good deal—and is as brightly red as a Cardinal should be, but its little crest is still not sharply visible—the girl is more a stay-at home. At the same time our squirrels are building nests, gathering the materials. We discovered that, in that process, they’re quite willing to grab hold of other creatures’ and carry them away. Yesterday we saw what happens when those nests happen to be occupied.

A squirrel came and headed up toward our Cardinals’ nest. Enormous uproar suddenly. It was hard to make out what was going on. Well, our two Cardinals, brother and sister, making nasty noises, attacked the squirrel with beak and claw. And as it fled, they chased it, coming down at it as it ran on top of the fence for the safety of the garage roof. The girl returned to the nest, but her brother remained, for an while, vigilantly watching for a renewed attack from a power line.

This sort of drama inclines one to spend one’s mornings in the sun, pretending to read. And in that process one sometimes gets to know other species. One of these, resident not too far away, behind the garage of another house, its back to our back, lives a tribe of Common Grackles, technically Quisculus quiscula. In the shade they look quite black, like little crows, but with light they have a wondrously iridescent blue-bronze coloration. Part of yesterday’s Bird Watch included observing a Grackle mother followed by two very fluffy and seemingly much bigger fledglings. She would pick things to eat and then, in turn, fed her children, beak to beak. My image is from Wikipedia (link).

We also discovered, to our amazement, that Cardinals have a lifespan of up to 24 years—and that our fledglings will take a year or more before they are ready to breed.

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.

Tinker, Tailor—and Notes Taker

We watched the last disk of John Le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy with Alec Guinness working in splendid company. The book was published in 1974, made into the miniseries in 1979; the Cold War was still lingering on, in other words, and the Tenth Crusade had not yet begun. The experience of that series, which I followed up with starting to read an old copy of Smiley’s People (1979), left its mark on my sleeping self. The works of Le Carré serve as reminders of how society operated at certain levels in the twentieth century, best rendered as dark, dark. It occurred to me this morning, shaking off the shadows as the sun labored to shine, that in the very far away future, by contrast, the twentieth will be remembered as a fabulous and magical time owing to the Twins: Technology and Oil.

Another note occurred as we were watching the segment where the “mole” offers an explanation for his treason to Queen and Country to George Smiley. In the 1970s, quite obviously, the great paralysis that had gripped the world with the Capitalist-Commie polarization, lasting from 1945 right up to the fall of the Berlin Wall, had temporarily preserved a widespread perception that civilization was still something real—rather than, let us say, a lifestyle choice; and that it mattered which side you were on though both were monstrous. That civilization was in major crisis, and right on the brink of a precipice, was clearly present in Le Carré’s mind. But it still mattered enough to write about. Interesting how, since then, everything has…how should I put it? Well, how everything since has come so visibly unraveled.

Lilac Bush Acclimated

Our lilac bush arrived as a little thing on Mother’s Day in 2010. It was then in bloom. Indeed I have a picture of it blooming taken, before it was planted, because a butterfly had landed on it to get some nourishment in the early season. Plants are sometimes seriously traumatized after their passage through the Commercial System to their intended home in the Real World. This happened to our lilac bush. It failed to provide flowers in 2011 and again in 2012, but this year, finally—having grown nearly triple in size—it finally feels at home and this Spring returned to its natural cycle.

A Living Laptop?

Since our retirement, roughly—we ignored them altogether during the many decades of our active lives—we’ve gone through relatively brief periods of engagement with crossword puzzles. It all began one time during a late fall vacation near Michigan’s Sleeping Bear Dunes resort. We rented a house there on Glen Lake and used to solve the easy puzzles that came with the local paper which we worked on the lake shore itself with breakfast—and the later, laid out on the sand of Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. Yes. Michigan has a West Coast too. This madness soon escalated. My Mother’s eightieth birthday was approaching. I decided to make a crossword puzzle for her—and the extended family—of the size and complexity typical of the New York Times Sunday version. In no time at all I was in deep trouble—but Brigitte then joined the effort and we spent much of that vacation—and also some time after coming home again—creating the puzzle. Thus began our “cooperative” approach to this game. The puzzle was a great success—and taught us what it takes to make these wondrous art-for-art’s-sake artefacts.

We entered another period like that a few days ago, having decided to enjoy early spring evenings doing something other than watching movies. Now, of course, in this relentlessly pragmatic era, the pure enjoyment of solving puzzles must be, absolutely must be, justified by such motivations as keeping Alzheimer’s at bay—although, sure enough, some ultra-stupid techno-guru urges the elderly to play computer games instead. Not so for us. We enjoy crosswords—as we enjoy our own Olympic style MyWord (on  sheets of our own creation—with eleven letter words being entirely acceptable along with the shorter ones). We also still play crosswords cooperatively, working on separate sheets of the same game and helping each other.  No ego games here. The pleasure comes when we’ve done the thing with never more help than using an ordinary dictionary.

As in the past so in the present. We are again rediscovering the cunning ways of crossword puzzle makers. Most puzzles are quite easy—if the clues are straight-forward. To make a puzzle difficult, make the clues as deceptively vague as possible. Last night one clue resisted us to the very end. It was “Old laptop instruments.” Such a clue—once it has been penetrated—teaches deeper lessons, namely that most of us, most of the time, have a rigidly limited framework of associations when seeing a word. Laptop, for us, meant a little computer, and we never got past that—until, at last, with the help of other words the answer itself was simply there, on the paper. The cunning crossword maker, in this case one Randolph Ross, had used the word “LYRES” and clued it with the deceptive “laptop” clue. At once I made notes in my still existing Crossword Notebook. Use the clue “A living laptop?” (that question mark is a dead giveaway, of course). And for the answer put in the four-letter “BABY.”

Avaunt, Alzheimer’s! Avaunt!

Some Cardinals are Hatched

One such lives in a little nest built deep inside our by now tree-sized forsythia shrub. Brigitte discovered it the other evening and then, as we alertly watched in the still mildly glowing darkness, we saw its mother coming home and just made out her form bent down, feeding her off-spring. Both mother and chick have brilliantly red beaks. The sex of the chick is still undetermined. I tried my best today with ladder and such, but the nest’s too deep to permit a photograph, hence I bring an image of a “juvenile” from the Internet IBC Bird Collection (link). Having just recently dispatched Castor and Pollux, the butterflies, we are delighted to welcome Cardinals, no less, to Rancho Mariposa. The birds are, formally, Cardinalis cadinalis. Now there is a bioname that’s easy to remember. The song of these birds is stunningly sweet, especially in the gathering dark, very close to us just above our heads, as we sit on these very stained white plastic chairs and the sun is about to set.

Augeas’ Immortal Cattle

Yet another story in the papers of toweringly complex corruption in our financial sector brought to mind the stables of Augeas—and, not coincidentally, the absence, no matter how searchingly one looks, of any figure as potently large as Hercules. But our discussion lead me to look up the story of Hercules’ sixth labor. It had made a vivid impression on me reading it as a child—so much so that the mental images I had then formed were back, pristine. But back in those days an important, and in a way amusing, feature of the story did not register in my young mind—or was, perhaps omitted from the account I read. As the Wikipedia article puts it, “the livestock were divinely healthy (immortal) and therefore produced an enormous quantity of dung.” The emphasis is mine. That had us laughing. All things have a bright and a dark side, you might say. It is good to be immortal in this material dimension—but the consequence appears to be the ability to produce fantastic, towering, gigantic, and presumably ill-smelling mountains of dung. But, as a more humble writer of the modern age has put it, “A river runs through it.”

You Can’t Stop That Clock

Catching up on printed media all at once after a lag of several days—an almost electric shock accompanies the experience—made me think that we really do have far too many people in the world. The collective consequence of that is there in print. This got me wondering about the current population of the globe. I went to worldometers, one of the population clocks, and took a look.

I measured first how many people accrue to world population in a minute. The number was 144. That number is births net of deaths. In my statistical minute, I noted 249 births and 105 deaths, producing my net population growth. Now that translates to 8,640 net new people every hour, 207,360 every day, and 75.7 million every year. And that clock, when you watch it, is absolutely relentless.

worldometers labels itself “real time world statistics.” Concerning “statistics,” there are two views. One derives from their right use. When used with caution and handled carefully, as if they were dangerous explosives, we get a lens on the vast collective. The other view characterizes the abuse of statistics with a famous phrase: Lies, damned lies, and statistics. Which of the two applies to worldometers? Well, censuses of population always appear at a lag of time and, because it takes several months to conduct any census, they’re not even accurate snapshots. But such population clocks more or less accurately reflect change that can be tracked, census to census. So here we’re dealing with a truth—indeed, watching that clock rushing madly along, a dangerous truth.

At the same time, lies and damned lies are there as well. I read today an article which suggests that as homeownership rises, so does joblessness. Some feeble-minded economists have collected data on both and—assuming an entirely untraceable cause and effect relationship—proclaim that homeownership may be a baddy.

In the time I put these words on the screen about 42,000 people have been added to the world’s population. Educating all of these new people is truly a growing burden. It does not surprise me that, as population increases, the average skill of economists is tumbling like the seeds are falling out there today—covering my driveway in a nice mixture of yellows and whites.

Rudyard?

A medical day for us had me sitting in the doctor’s waiting room—just observing. The procedure is that you sign in. That involves handing over, every time, one’s driver’s license and insurance card. These are Xeroxed, every time, and filed away. Then, having signed the sign-in sheet, one settles facing a translucent but still opaque glass door where the nurse will appear. When the nurse approaches from the other side, her shadow provides a welcome heads-up. The door then opens and one sees one of five or six different nurses, differently attired but each in uniform, and each is holding a clipboard. This is a large practice. Finally the nurse looks out over the waiting figures and says: “Annemarie?” “Lisa?” “Frederick?” — or something along those lines. After the nurse came and called “Brigitte?” I was left alone. The odd thought then occurred to me. You explain how such thoughts rise. It occurred to me that if Mr. Kipling had been an American and would have needed to visit our Dr. Larose, he would have signed in, would have been carded, and after a reasonable wait, the nurse appearing, as shadow, then as image, would have looked out over those waiting and would have called out: “Rudyard?”

Innocent Nature

Nature red in tooth and claw? Oh, come come. That’s pure projection. The gardening season is now upon us—draws us outward irresistibly—and hence we encounter a small patch of nature immediately beyond the sunroom door. The same thought always occurs as I then set to work clearing off winter’s layers: Nature’s innocent and so’s the cosmos. The world itself has never fallen. It has always been and still remains absolutely obedient. Then, unless I have to do something drastic, like move a hosta bush a few feet over—which invariably escalates to digging dirt and axe-cutting through buried roots—my mind goes on elaborating…

Hermes had it right when saying, As above, so below. This innocent but demanding realm we know may be a faint mirroring of heavenly vistas. Swedenborg spoke about correspondences between this world and those above. Yes, I need a new cutting shear, my tooth and claw all clogged with wood debris. It makes a kind of temporary order in the untutored jumble of nature in which the only red I see is the color of my quince-bush flowers.

Seasonal Notes

Unusual early warmth last year, an unusual cold spell in 2013, has caused us to spend at least a month marveling at Nature’s variability.  Last year everything began to bloom late in March already; this year the same process began late in April. Spring 2013, however, also brings multiple new phenomena to our late-blooming backyard garden. One of them, already touched upon in the last posting, is that two Black Swallowtail butterflies spent a full seven months and two weeks as chrysalides and then, early this month, both emerged. We were, of course, unsure what gender they were, individually or severally. Brigitte had named them Castor and Pollux. When Castor emerged we took her to be a lady, but learning (certainly at our age), is sometimes missy. It turns out that Black Swallowtails with yellow markings are male; those with white markings female. We had to look up this distinction again. Castor and Pollux, it turned out had been rightly named. Both were males; Pollux arrived on May 5. I show him resting on the same forsythia bush as his earlier and much more energetic brother. Pollux spent hours on that bush before himself taking off—and flying in a contrary direction, the first of many ever to do so; he flew South.

Our quince bush produced voluminous red flowers this spring. They appear at the bottom of the bush rather than at the tip of the branches. We are still investigating what manner of adaptation that represents. And our lilac bush, which is now observing its third spring, finally shows very energetic signs of actually producing flowers—and in volume. Those I will show some other time.

A Little Jubilation

May first, a truly warm day—and we saw our second Black Swallowtail butterfly early in the afternoon! And with some jubilation. Let me explain. The first we saw came to our pussy willow tree on wing a while ago—and flew away again after a brief snack on the yellow sweetness of a seed. But this one, one Brigitte had named Castora in the dim past, came outdoors, in a glass jar, carried by a jubilant Brigitte crying, “Look, look!” Yes! Castora had been with us as a chrysalis  since September 14 of last year. With her sister, Polluxia, she spent the winter in hibernation in a glass jar in our dark garage (link). Now, after two weeks and seven months of confinement in a tiny shell, the May sunshine had finally convinced her that it was time to take wing. Which, presently, she did. And we bring a picture of her on our forsythia, itself finally in full bloom. The picture isn’t very sharp, but then my hands were a little shaking from the momentous nature of this occasion—our first ever guiding a butterfly through the darkness of winter.

In the image of the chrysalidae, Castora is on the left. Her sister, who took this from two days later and preferred clinging to a stalk, is still, as this is written on the morning of May 2, “undecided.” But now we hope that she too will soon take off, as Castora did. And yes, as always, flying straight north and high, very high, topping our neighbors still leafless but budding tree…

Mottos

God is there, don't despair!

Sleep is the most formidable creditor. It will get its payment no matter what is going down!

The Little Real Life

People live three lives these days: daily, media, and inner. One of these is unavoidable, another is neglected at our peril, and the third, frankly, is becoming quite absurd. Both daily and inner life are “real life,” this in contrast with what “real life” is supposed to be about if we watch today’s entertainments. Daily life in our now retired state still holds its daily chores. Sometimes they are unusual and produce their own muted little triumphs. Sure enough the string-pull light above this station, which turns on the fluorescent lamps above, once more went on the blink. There are seven such in this basement; six have been in place since, well, since 1989 when we bought this place. But the one above me has been replaced, this morning, for the fourth time. Hard, black wires, their copper teeth bared, must be attached to two screws set into a porcelain device. And then the device, with suitable openings, must be threaded, in a manner of speaking, around two longer screws until they “catch.” After that the screws are tightened and the job is done—in relative darkness because the basement lights are turned off at the fuse box. And—it worked! The muted triumph. Real life. That life also involved my visit to Ace hardware. We began in sunshine—using which I cleared off last year’s vast clump of dead Michigan bamboo stalks (read Japanese knotweed, link). Drops marked my windshield on going, rain fell hard as I returned, having swiped my card and signed my name on a little calculator-sized screen with a kind of stick anchored to this device by another black wire. As if those signatures mattered. The Little Real Life has its own profound mysteries too. Returning Brigitte told me that an upstairs walk-in closet has another overhead that fails to dispense its light. Another item for my to do list in the Little Real Life; they are sometimes challenging, as that closet, I fear, shall be. But so long as the problems are little, no problem; when they are bigger, the pains tend to be financial. But nothing compared with what flows over the media every day, every day. And turning them off only helps a little—because the chaos is in the air. Which then, of course, reminds us of the Inner Life. It holds out hope.

Archibald Craven’s Problem

We watched a charming children’s story rendered into a seven-part series last night: The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Significantly—in light of what is to follow here—the tale was first published as a serial in 1910. A significant if minor character of the novel is Archibald Craven, the lord of the manor; he is very rich but humpbacked. After watching the story we got to talking about it—not least Archibald Craven. Both Brigitte and I recall seeing, here and there, now and then, a hunchback in our childhood. In the wake of World War II, for instance, I knew one very well. My father employed him on occasional jobs—one of which was chopping our firewood. But looking back over the last fifty-sixty years, we can’t recall a single instance. Brigitte got to wondering about the cause of that condition—and why it had disappeared…

There are, of course, many thousands of anciently incurable conditions that modern times have made to disappear. To elucidate one on a blog like mine may be justified by the role that humpbacks have played in literature.

So (as the young begin their expositions nowadays) the human spine’s natural shape, seen from the side, is a flattened S—where the upper part is called the anterior, the lower the posterior. When the upper angle is unusually curved relative to the posterior, the back takes on a hump-like form. This curving can occur in teenage years due to uneven bone growth in the spine itself caused by the interruption of blood supply to the bone, known as Scheuermann’s disease, also known as Scheuermann’s kyphosis, using the Greek for “hump.” The disease is self-limiting; it affects its victim for a limited time only, but because the deformation is to the spine, the consequences remain in place. The condition has disappeared thanks to advancements in surgical know-how, medical technology, and metallurgy. Scheuerman’s is treated by major—and very invasive—surgery in youth. It involves spinal fusion and the installation of hardware—rods and anchoring (so-called pedicle) screws. The rods are made of titanium. What many unfortunate individuals had simply to live through today we solve with know-how and technology.

Some great challenges lie ahead of us as we enter the post-oil dark ages. One of them is how to preserve the advanced arts the Age of Oil has bequeathed us—not least the transmission of knowledge, skill, and technology the arts will continue to require. By all means let us deprive our future literature of certain categories of heroes.

Endless Debate

I’ve had occasion to point to a categorization of problems offered by E.F. Schumacher earlier (link). Schumacher suggests that humanity’s problems are either convergent or divergent. The first of these are physical in nature, dealing with the non-living sphere.  In attacking these physical problems, sooner or later efforts “converge” on a decent solution. The second, divergent problems, center on the living, including human phenomena. Values are always involved in these. And precisely for that reason, humanity never embraces a single solution. There is perpetual discovered. And that is because humans are—and this is my label, not Schumacher’s—unfinished.

Endless debates are a marker of divergent issues. Even masses of empirical data fail to solve them. One such is whether “life” or “mind” are emergent or transcendent phenomena. If they are emergent, all is but a consequence of matter/energy complexly arranged by chance. If the latter, we must posit a “higher” dimension from which life and mind derive. The debate is unending because the scientific observations will not produce an answer. They present a pattern which people with different awareness will interpret intuitively, thus from personal experience. And they will therefore have a very firm conviction that they are right. If one’s intuition produces the inwardly felt truth of transcendence, the mechanical will never seem sufficient explanation for the living or the spiritual. If no such resonance is felt by the person—but the facts of life and mind are still there to see—the equally firm view is that these must have evolved.

A recent example of this is a book by Ray Kurzweil, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed—and a review of the book by Collin McGinn (link), in the New York Review of Books, titled “Homunculism” (ht to Siris).

Rare, exceedingly rare, is the case where a man of science after long, long study of what is a divergent problem, at last concludes that something transcendental is going on. I came across a book that makes this point last year, Wilder Penfield’s The Mystery of the Mind (p. 113-114). Penfield was a pioneering neurosurgeon.  And even Penfield ends with a reservation:

And so I come to my final reconsideration: I worked as a scientist trying to prove that the brain accounted for the mind and demonstrating as many brain-mechanisms as possible hoping to show how the brain did so. In presenting this monograph I do not begin with a conclusion and I do not end by making a final and unalterable one. Instead, I reconsider the present-day neurophysiological evidence on the basis of two hypotheses: (a) that man’s being consists of one fundamental element, and (b) that it consists of two. I take the position that the brain-mechanism, which we (my many colleagues and I all around the world), are working out, would, of course have to be employed on the basis of either alternative. In the end I conclude that there is no good evidence, in spite of new methods, such as the employment of stimulating electrodes, the study of conscious patients and the analysis of epileptic attacks, that the brain alone can carry out the work that the mind does. I conclude that it is easier to rationalize man’s being on the basis of two elements than on the basis of one. But I believe that one should not pretend to draw a final scientific conclusion, in man’s study of man, until the nature of the energy responsible for mind-action is discovered as, in my own opinion, it will be.

The debate will certainly continue on. There is such a thing as the will to believe, but  it arises from a spark of intuition. Until it does, all will be matter, matter, drearily matter.

O Sole Mio

Renaissance Festival, sometime in the 1970s, on the southern outskirts of Minneapolis. There we bought what then was a bright casting made of sandy clay. It came from a vendor who came from New Mexico or Arizona. It had been hanging on some fence for many decades now at the two places where we’d lived ever since. Last fall the hanger affixed to its back gave way. The sun fell but landed softly. I brought it in to see if I could fix it. And now it’s Spring again. The time has come for this old sun, much battered by the winds and waters, to be cleaned up and, if possible to be hung again.

Return to Basics

“No doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.” Almost as if to convey to us just that message from the famous poem, “Desiderata,” yesterday a quite young Black Swallowtail butterfly appeared. It landed on our flowering pussy willow tree and stayed a while to feed on the nectar  it found there. Then, briskly, it flew away again.

The times now are unusually turbulent. The Boston Marathon disaster consumes our media. Even the weak attempt to curb our gun-use failed in the Senate. Almost as if it were a vast collective “meaningful coincidence,” a fertilizer plant blew up in tiny West, Texas and killed ten times as many people (and still counting) as died in the marathon bombing. Once more we hear about the cowardice of our attackers and the heroism of our police and fire-fighters. And quite undeserved and cloying flattery comes from the mouths of our leaders suggesting our own unique exceptionalism—attempting to pump up our morale and trying to show that the center is still holding. But quite another smell rises with the smoke. These very attempts to manage the collective emotion suggest something else. President Obama’s focus on children—and the horror of their death in terrorist attacks—causes us to wonder how many equally innocent children died in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen thanks to the deployment of our own sleek drones.

Relativism, pragmatism, materialism left to storm unchecked eventually produce a state in which madness comes to be the norm—and it seems that only the steadying of egotism and of our self-regard will permit us to “finish the race.”

Contemplating all of this with involuntary shudders made me think: Valuable books repay rereading. So, last night, I picked up once more E.F. Schumacher’s book, A Guide for the Perplexed, to remind myself how things really are—and where the path begins back from the chaos to an ordered life. The more the chaos mounts, the more people will set foot on that path and begin the pilgrimage we sorely need.

Silas Deane and the Corrective Lens

During a recent exchange, Brigitte noted that our memories of the past filter out most of the ugly and the bad. Not always, to be sure, but on average. Such a conversation causes one to look back to check—and yes! So true. I was reminded of this again this morning. A mutual friend of ours purchased a plate produced by the D’Arceau-Limoges, a big name in fancy porcelain. It commemorates Lafayette signing a contract to serve in the American forces in  December of 1776. Present as a witness is Silas Deane, an American diplomat of the newly forged Republic—and Baron Kalb, another French officer and the first recruited by Deane. Our friend asked us to translate the French text on the plate into English—in course of which I became aware of the solemnity of this occasion, as rendered by collective memory, and of Silas Deane himself.

Collective memory recalls the gallant Lafayette—and several other French officers—gallantly serving to help the new Republic achieve its independence from Britain—and Silas Deane as the agent who did his high-level recruiting in France. And, as they say, the rest is history.

But real life as it happens is always much more problematic. Deane was effective, but in part because he promised each officer he recruited very high rank. The French recruits, once here, did not get along either with each other or with the Americans. Here a quote from Baron de Kalb (source):

On the whole, I have annoyances to bear, of which you can hardly form a conception. One of them is the mutual jealousy of almost all the French officers, particularly against those of higher rank than the rest. These people think of nothing but their incessant intrigues and backbitings. They hate each other like the bitterest enemies, and endeavor to injure each other wherever an opportunity offers. I have given up their society, and very seldom see them. La Fayette is the sole exception; I always meet him with the same cordiality and the same pleasure. He is an excellent young man, and we are good friends.... La Fayette is much liked, he is on the best of terms with Washington.

Deane was a wretched record-keeper and careless in money matters. After his recall from France, he was tried for misdemeanors, eventually turned against the new nation that he had served, and went to live in England and in the Netherlands.

The correcting lens of memory, itself once more corrected, brings us what we always experience in the here and now: a pretty kettle of fish. But memory reminds us how we should treat the never-ending failures of our nature: with benign neglect.

Inured When in Iraq

Some people have noted—certainly my friend Montag on his blog yesterday (link)—that terrorist events in Iraq yesterday killed 61 people (per this morning’s Wall Street Journal). We cannot help ourselves. We become hardened and eventually ignore that which relentlessly recurs. Disasters closer to us are another matter—until they become frequent enough so that we are hardened to them in turn and just roll our eyes. Boston. Yes. Strong feelings and heartfelt prayers, here in Detroit, as we witness the loss and suffering that concluded this year’s marathon—whatever its motive, most likely some mad personal grudge. Deliver us from evil. Amen.

Il Linguaggio Musicale

We have been attending performances of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra held at various churches and centers in the suburbs of Detroit, yesterday once again. We like to sit in the front row of the balcony quite close to the orchestra at Grosse Pointe Memorial Church. The balcony has a neat railing where the opened program finds a spot so that we can follow the movements as they are played. Mozart’s Serenade No. 6 in D major for Two Small Orchestras, “Serenata notturna.” It has three movements: Marcia maestoso, Menuetto, and Rondo. The Rondo is described as Allegretto, Adagio, Allegro. Originally, when first performed, the first movement, the “majestic march,” was played both at the beginning and at the end. At the beginning the two orchestras marched in playing it, positioned themselves at two different spots in a great hall. And when they finished the Rondo, they rose again and, playing their majestic march, again departed. So our vastly gifted conductor, Christopher Warren-Green, informed us. (Not all knowledge comes from the Internet.)

Looking at those, and the succeeding, movements, I got curious about the designation of tempos these words indicate. So what exactly is the difference between an Adagio and an Allegro? Well, adagio means slow, allegro merry and cheerful. One movement was Allegro con brio, meaning that the composer of it, Franz Joseph Hayden, wished it to be played cheerfully and “with panache, with flair.” Are these tempos or do these words transcend mere beat? Did I just discover a secret but quite literal “language of music” quite familiar to composers, who know this stuff much better than I do? It’s common to hear that music just cannot be expressed in language—but here are the composers doing so. Very parsimoniously, to be sure, but they have something in mind.

Among tempo indicators, for instance is Solenne, meaning “solemn.” But just as solemn music is quite difficult to put into words, so is that word itself. How do you render solemn into other words? What is a solemn occasion? Perhaps a funeral? What all does that word contain? It contains the whole behavior of a collective of humans gathered for it, their dress for the occasion, their postures, their facial expression, the words they utter, the look in their eyes. It means the kind of music that will be played, the formality of movements observed by everyone, the content of the words exchanged, the subject of the sermon, the words chosen for the service itself.

And what exactly does “with flair” signify? Not any one thing? Something graceful may be entirely still—or may be in motion. Not just music, it strikes me; vast ranges of human experience, rendered by words as well as music, extend beneath words the meaning of which is as elusive as music itself—and yet we all know what they mean.

Gershom

Reading Verlyn Klinkenborg, Robinson Jeffers, and certain other inhabitants of Brigitte’s poetry folders, I sometimes wonder whether that persistent inner feeling expressed in Exodus 2:22 (link), “I have been a stranger in a strange land,” refers to what we call civilization where only token remnants of the natural world survive, rather than (as I sometimes feel, failing to make the proper distinctions) the whole order of earthly existence. Nowhere in this vast, hardened lava flow of urbanization do we see—

…the jewel-eyed hawk and the tall blue heron;

The black cormorants that fatten their sea-rock

With shining slime; even that ruiner of anthills

The red-shafted woodpecker flying,

A white star between blood-color wing-clouds,

Across the glades of the wood and the green lakes of shade.

This from Robinson Jeffers “The Broken Balance, Part III,” quoted more fully on Laudator Temporis Acti, on November 30, 2010 (link)—a valued gift.

O Tempera, O Tempers

We’re rather fascinated by classification schemes of all kinds around here, not least personality types that go back a long time to such categories as the humours. Here I show a very nice graphic provided by Wikipedia (link). It shows four personality types based on the predominance of four humours, each in turn linked to the four elements as viewed in ancient times. Going clockwise, yellow is choleric, black is melancholic, blue is phlegmatic, and red is sanguine.

Very few people are so predominantly or consistently only one of these, personalities are thought of as mixtures—as Brigitte and I discovered the other day when discussing temperaments and Brigitte, as is her wont, wondered about the etymology of that word. We were both a little taken aback, lacking Latin, as it were. My only association was with tempera, a kind of egg-based paint. Could it have to do with color schemes used long ago to classify personalities? Let’s by all means go to the basement and look it up.

Temperaments are mixtures. But in the case of personality types, the mixing is of the various biles—whereas, in tempera, the mixing is of colors. The Latin for “to mix” is temperare. What is your mixture and your color, and are you wet, dry, hot, or cold? Or does it all change hour by hour, day by day? On this, the fifth day of unrelenting dark grey skies and steady rain, color me dark blue. And I am definitely cold.

A Note on the Passing of the Iron Lady

The passing of Margaret Thatcher produced in news coverage exaggerated encomia. I learned that she had changed the very arch of history and heard other words with much the same meaning. Such hyperbole was possible because she was conservative and her years in power coincided with the collapse of Russian communism. Now it happens that exemplary leaders moved by principled convictions are always present with us in small numbers; but they rarely reach the top or remain long in  power. Mrs. Thatcher was an exceptionally able and admirable figure, very rare in politics. But she did not bend the arch of history. She no more caused the moribund communist structure to collapse than did Ronald Reagan or the blessed free market system. Communism collapsed from within; if an individual must get the credit, that credit belongs to Mikhail Gorbachev; but he probably only needed to give the structure an energetic kick.

The arch of history is quite out of the reach of our leaders. The chief trauma of our age is not even recognized; yet it is causing our gradual decline. It is technology or, to put it more precisely, energy slavery. Actual human slavery produced the fall of Rome. It destroyed that culture’s yeoman farming sector (thus its economy) and caused displaced farmers to crowd into its urban centers. It is impossible to ignore the moral wrong in human slavery; yet it was practiced in this supposedly Christian nation until the Thirteenth Amendment (good number) passed in 1865. Our own case is much more problematical. We see technology and our vast number of energy slaves as the greatest blessing ever to fall into human hands. We see no problem at all. But its effect—as that of vast hordes of imported slaves laboring on latifundia in Roma—is to destroy jobs, livings, and therefore organic social relations. That destruction is still going on. And if one’s interested in the arch of history, say in England, a good source from the trenches are the books of Theodore Dalrymple. But the cause for the conditions Dalrymple describes is not the failure of a too-left ruling class; it’s energy slavery. As for us, we who are, perhaps, the high point in that arch of history, around 44 million living in poverty proclaim that no one is bending the arch—not downward, anyway.

It took a long time for Rome to die; and, in a sense, under the feudal order that rose thereafter slavery lingered in a milder form. You couldn’t sell people, but you could acquire lands to which the peasants were bound as if by chains. Our own case suggests another scenario. Our own arch of history will last just about until the oil runs out. And that day is quite visible already while we’re just laboring on the 237the year of our still nominally republican system.

As for Maggie Thatcher: admirable. Let’s not diminish her principled labors in the vineyard by speaking of history, arches, and other such foolish things.

The Hittites

Back when I was reading Toynbee for the first time ever, in the Army, stationed in Germany, it was difficult for me to look up any of the ancient civilizations Toynbee classified and then viewed from countless angles. A few, of course, like the Greek-Roman, I knew a little about. My current re-reading is aided by a quite magical reference facility, the Internet. Now I read, mark, and then, in the morning I look up the strange old names, see their extents on maps, and can rapidly put them in the time-frame of the centuries, millennia past. The Hittites are one of these. I had no idea where and when they’d lived.

Click to enlarge.

It was instructive for me to discover that the Hittite “empire” occupied parts of what today is a single country, Turkey. Also, to diverge just a little from the narrower topic, that the majority of the civilizations Toynbee discusses were located pretty much over the same regions of Europe, Eurasia, and Northern Africa—a region more or less centered on the Tigris-Euphrates valleys. Not to overstate this, I note that Toynbee does cover all cultures, including, say the Eskimos (to pick a truly Nordic one) and the Incas (to range to the extreme south).  Population density in the extreme past was not what it was today; therefore an “empire” could very well cover but one or two countries, and parts of a few more, to deserve the name.

In naming centuries in the BC scheme, the eighteenth century BC, for example, when the Hittite empire began, started in 1800 BC and ended in 1701 BC. (I keep having to remind myself of this.) Well, the Hittite realm extended from the eighteenth century BC to the year 1178 BC. So it lasted, in round numbers (because we don’t have an exact date for its beginnings), some 622 years. The Hittites are remembered as using horse-drawn chariots as the major “armor” of that time. They were significant producers of bronze goods and early in switching to iron. Indeed, the Age of Iron is dated to about the fall of the Hittite Empire. In the major cultural region of Greece, Turkey, Mesopotamia, and down to Egypt, all culture seemingly went to sleep for a while, an era some call the Greek Dark Ages (roughly 1200-750 BC). Various civilizations came under fierce attack from southern European “People of the Sea” or “Sea People” who arrived in boats, carrying their populations along, and attacked the cities they could reach from the oceans. Sea Peoples? Well, ancient history has its endless mysteries.

It gave me a strong same-old, same-old feeling to learn that the Hittite Empire itself, never mind its people, existed principally by trade. Much of it flowed through what is known as the Cilician Gates, a passage through the Taurus Mountains (link). The pass gave access to Mesopotamia and to Egypt, and from there to the Anatolian Plateau where the Hittites ruled. So what was life like in, say 5600 BC? What will it be like in 5813 AD? It is good to know, in any case, that we can now drive through the Cilician Gates by using a major twentieth-century six-lane freeway. It will last for a while yet.

The picture I am showing, from Wikipedia (link), is of German origin. The blue area, labeled Der Reich der Hethiter, was where the Hittites lived. And the city, Tarsos, on the southern edge, shows the approximate location of the Cilician Gates.

They've Accepted Us

It’s a little mad, I know, but I am sitting out of doors in sunlight writing with a pen on a genuine Staples clipboard even though the temperature is grimly stuck on 39. Time for a face-off. Strengthened by having done my Turbotaxonomy (link), and both Fed and State having “accepted us,” it’s high time to stare down a stubbornly clinging winter and do what in clement season I do every morning in sunshine, later in the shade, and, between thoughts, idly watch tiny ants and very high-tech bees visiting our flowering plants. No flowers yet. But we saw a single bee two days ago trying to learn to fly. And the ants have been exploring. Birds? They are a little slow, a little tentative, but they are here.

Now for that title of mine. Ages ago, our girls still quite young, we arrived one evening at an extremely crowded motel very close to the Atlantic shore in Delaware. It was a big holiday. We’d tried two motels already; both had been full. We wanted to be close enough to walk to the beach before dawn to watch the sunrise. I parked the car and said to Brigitte: “I’ll go and check. I hope they’ll accept us this time.” The girls got out to go with me while Brigitte stayed behind to listen to the radio. Daunting. There were lines before three clerks. We waited our turn. At last. Yes! They still had room. I filled out the form, credit card, ball of wax. We headed out. People stood about. Our girls at once set off on a run toward Brigitte shouting at the top of their lungs: “They’ve accepted us! They’ve accepted us!”

We had a good laugh. That’s how family slogans are born—used many times since on fitting occasions, always with laughter. So I am out here in the cold trying to signal to Spring: “We’ve accepted you! Come right in. Plenty of room. Don’t be so shy!”

When the Balloon Goes Up

Modern industry, Retailing, and Nature played a neat April Fool’s joke on us. The day being bright and sunny, looking out of the bedroom window Brigitte glimpsed what looked like a balloon hung up in a tree quite a distance away. Or was it just a plastic sack? From certain angles it had a diamond shape—possibly a balloon. We made a note take a look at it. Off I went late in the afternoon, driving and then walking by. I carefully examined the trees that line Charlesvoix Avenue at the appropriate spot, looking in our direction. Nothing. Sigh. Well, it wasn’t visible from the bedroom window either. And it wasn’t there yesterday.

Suddenly it was back again. And sure enough, Brigitte was just talking about time travel. This time, armed with a camera, I set out at once. And the picture shows our “balloon” form up close. Only it is a plastic bag.

The reason it had disappeared? There are three. It is attached to the tree by its two sides, right at the top of the bag. When the wind blows from ENE, as it often does around here, the bag plumps up. And if the sun is shining, it is brightly white. And when the wind slacks, the bag just hangs. It also happened to be located above the driving pavement whereas I took it to be over a back yard and failed to look behind me.

I managed also to photograph the bag from its printed side, as shown in the inset. It is from an outfit called Wisted’s. I got busy tracing it—all the way to Huntley, IL, a place about midway between Rockford and Chicago, reachable by I-90. Lordy. That’s a long ways from here. Reviews of Wisted’s say that it is a pretty good supermarket. Sometimes a little disorderly and crowded, but you find good things there. Like our Village Market? Probably. But now hung out to dry until the next really serious windstorm takes it off to visit Canada somewhere.

Collective Wealth

Still reading Toynbee’s monumental work on history, it strikes me—as I see him assessing ancient cultures’ decline and occasionally touching on our own—that humanity has never experienced a situation like our current one (viewed some 80 years after Toynbee wrote his first five volumes). It is a situation in which extraordinary wealth touches a huge population—but it’s  not wealth as once understood, namely personal control of physical resources and money; it is wealth in the form of collective systems, structures, technologies, and organized knowledge.

Two examples may be Communications and Health Care. Communications anciently demanded personal wealth in that, to deliver a message, one had to send a courrier to distant places; no such media as telegraphy, telephony, radio, or television existed—and general circulation news papers were also absent. Health Care then was centered on the person of a doctor, midwife, or a surgeon—and what small bag he or she carried. The hospital, with its emergency room—accessible even to the poor—did not exist; nor did colossal testing technologies, clean-rooms, remote and robotic surgery, or the pharmaceutical industries.

Behind communications today are submarine cables and space satellites; behind the satellites stands an aerospace industry. Behind medicine are mountains of extraordinarily sophisticated institutions, technical developers very much cut of the same cloth as aerospace, computer technology, and world-wide supervisory organizations communicating, by means of the never-before-seen communications sector, to inhibit the spread of plagues; among them is our own Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

These two sectors—and they are just two of many others that operate in the same way, for the collective—represent a form of wealth one cannot discover in ancient times except in the most rudimentary forms: state-built roads with their bridges and water control on a large scale for river management and for delivering water via aqueducts.

Can our collective wealth, which makes even the poor a little “wealthy,” be traced to a single discovery? Yes. It is the “discovery” of fossil fuels. I put that word in quotes because, of course, coal and oil were known before the age of fossil fuels dawned. They were also used, principally for making weapons-grade metals, usually employing human-made and therefore manufactured charcoal. The discovery, however, was triggered by a technological innovation, the steam engine. That device—the Luddites’ first nightmare—then led, step-by-step, to an extraordinarily massive geological raid of dormant energy hidden beneath the earth probably by cataclysmic global changes literally eons ago.

The quite foreseeable exhaustion of this incredible and non-replaceable deposit of wealth will have consequences we can logically project forward. The extent to which essentially “free” energy underlies virtually everything we do and touch—not least how we communicate and heal—is effectively invisible to the public—except its members visit filling stations. The sooner it becomes the daily conscious worry of the average citizen, the sooner can creative responses to future troubles begin. The most important job now is to slow our current energy consumption drastically—to give humanity more time to adapt to conditions where effective “wealth” will once more become personal and nothing much beyond—except roads, bridges, aqueducts, and (I hope) sewage systems that will still, collectively, support us all.