Description of the World - Part 5

Donald W. Engels, Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army (This little book has actually been quite influential. The author points out the strong limitations geometry puts on the ability of ancient armies to project power beyond sea coasts and navigable rivers. I know that his calculations and conclusions have been challenged, but I think he identifies something very true about human history. For most of the historical past, the power of princes was very much less than what it seems to have been if you go by the expanse of red or blue on the historical atlas. They used to say that Montenegro was unconquerable because an army large enough to defeat the natives would starve while an army small enough to feed itself would get beaten. But a great deal of the world was like that in antiquity and even rather later when the only way to move heavy loads was by water.)

Jonathan Hall, A History of the Archaic Greek World (The Greek dark ages are something of a mystery. For that matter, the period seems to be one of murk and retrogression for the whole ancient world, a step backwards before the leap forwards of the Axial Age. Hence my interest. Or maybe it’s just my aforementioned hankering, not entirely dissimilar to a liking for potato chips. for anything archaic.

Xenophon, Anabasis: the March Up Country, trans. Rouse (In the 19th Century, school kids began the study of Greek by reading this book just as students of Latin began with Caesar. I didn’t and probably haven’t read more than three paragraphs of the thing in the original—Harry Carroll assigned a textbook based on the Gospel According to John, presumably because he was just bored with Xenophon. This translation is by Rouse, who was also translated Homer in prose—I remember reading my sister’s copy of the Iliad.)

Caesar, The Civil War (Caesar never finished this work. The accounts of the African and Spanish campaigns are by other hands. Even the parts he wrote himself are inferior to the Gallic War, which is, no doubt, just as much a propaganda effort but come across as more objective.)

Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, trans Benjamin Jowett (I’ve read almost as many translations of Thucydides as I have of Herodotus, but  I read Herodotus with great pleasure and Thucydides out of a sense of duty. Especially when I was a young man, I took the downfall of Athens personally. The Peloponnesian War is a profoundly depressing book even if you don’t give a damn about the Grandeur that was Greece—I don’t think my nephew John has ever entirely forgiven me for giving him a copy—but even now reading the account of the Sicilian invasion is like reliving a family tragedy for me. The dryness and penetrating intellect of the author only makes the effect more powerful. Of course I’m the guy who reacted to seeing the pits and pocks on the Elgin marbles by muttering “Fuck time!”)

Livy, The Early History of Rome (By the time I read Livy I already knew the old stories from perusing my mother’s old Latin textbooks. It’s hard for me to distinguish what I read in Livy from what I picked up from the pictures in the textbooks. This Penguin contains the first five books of the Ab Urbe Condita—from the Founding of the City, I like the old title.  The material is at best legendary. Even in the Renaissance scholars began to recognize how dubious it was as a record of what actually happened. Rene Dumezil famously considered the early history of Rome to be a reprise of Indoeuropean mythology, though he was insistent that some of the material preserved in Livy really is ancient, in particular the religious formulae.)

Ammianus Marcellinus, The Later Roman Empire (Reading the old histories doesn’t leave you with a clear memory of this or that emperor or barbarian chief, but you do get a sense of the texture of events. Hari Seldon without the equations.)

Arrian’s Life of Alexander (Another book I acquired long ago. Late 50s. This is a cheap pocket book, but even expensive hardbacks of this era have turned yellow and are crumbling to dust. Of course I’m 15 years older than that. Fortunately, I have a lower acid content than the paper that makes the 40s and 50s a bit of a dark ages as far as used books are concerned.)

Description of the World - Part 4

Top Shelf

John V.A. Fine, The Ancient Greeks (I learned Greek history from Bury. I just read this book to see how the old story had been updated. Dull read.)

Passell and Ross, The Best (Like most books that were ever published, a throwaway, though it might be interesting to see what look so wonderful in 1974 when the question was what’s the best Baskin-Robbins flavor and not what’s the best Ben and Jerry’s—Mandarin chocolate, if you’re curious. I can just barely remember what that tasted like. The author’s choice for best pizza, the Spot in New Haven, seems quite right to me. The Internet informs me that the place still exists.)

Jacquetta Hawkes, The First Great Civilizations: Life in Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and Egypt (The first volume in a series. I keep reading books about ancient societies even though I’m on record as opposing the notion that the origins of things are especially important. I guess I haven’t convinced myself yet.)

A.T. Olmstead, History of the Persian Empire (I used to think that a teacher should make it a goal that students should learn at least one thing from every hour in class. That seems like a pretty modest standard, but I wonder how many profs meet the test? Anyhow, the thing I learned from Olmstead, at least the thing I remember from him, was the idea that the Persian empire’s tax policies, though not extremely onerous, had the effect of creating deflation throughout their empire by sequestering gold in the imperial palaces. The Macedonian conquest had a hugely stimulative effect by flooding the Hellenistic world with species and led to a region-wide boom. Keynesianism with spears.)

Werner Jaeger, Paideia, three volumes (Jaeger is one of those Germans who never got over the Goethezeit, hence his interpretation of Greek civilization as a set of attempts at personal cultivation. That’s not a criticism, exactly, though it is pretty one-sided. Everything becomes a Bildungsroman, including your own life. I read the first two volumes of Paideia in the late 60s. The third volume turned up at Green Apple a couple of years ago and I finally read that. The inspiration seems to have gone out or maybe it’s just that writing about Isocrates isn’t as inspiring as writing about Socrates. I’m reminded of another third volume that’s not as exciting as the first two: the sequel to Alexander Alekine’s My Best Games of Chess.)

Ed Robert Strassler, The Landmark Herodotus (I’ve read four or five translations of Herodotus and some bits and pieces of his histories in Greek. It isn’t that the new translations improve on the older or even that one or another stands out for its own literary qualities. I just like the excuse to reread Herodotus. As a ten or eleven year old I sent away for my first copy of Herodotus because I thought a book about the Persian Wars would exciting. The material about the sexual customs of the Babylonians proved to be even more so and almost (but not quite) as educational as the photograph of the Australian aborigine lady in the first volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica. The Landmark Herodotus features a great many maps, which would actually be more of a help to folks who aren’t as familiar with the geography than they were to me.)

L.B. Bury, A History of Greece (My first Herodotus was a Modern Library editions. So was this copy of Bury. The first edition of Bury was published in 115 years ago, at a time when it was still perfectly possible for an Englishman of the high empire to think of himself as the heir of the Greeks. As a kid, I certainly bought into notion that as an American I somehow had a genealogical affiliation with people from the southern Balkans who lived 2500 years ago. At least Bury was in the same hemisphere.)

Nicolas Gremal, A History of Ancient Egypt (I like to read scholarly books even when they aren’t particularly pathbreaking, deep, or well written. In fact, dull but authoritative works are useful if you just want information and can supply your own motivation. You aren’t distracted by the talent or personality of the author.)

When All Else Fails, Scream

Isis distinguished itself from Al Qaeda by its insistence on the need to control territory and its contempt for merely theatrical terrorism. The outfit proposed to build Sharia law in one country by creating and defending an actual Caliphate, however small. Al Baghdadi wanted to be a Lenin, not a Bakunin like Bin Laden. That dream is fading now. It isn’t just the effects of constant bombing or this or that tactical reversal or the death of particular leaders. Larger factors are at work. Whoever is calling the shots may have hoped for a Syrian version of the Miracle of the House of Brandenburg, a falling out among the enemies of movement, but the Russians aren’t going to go home and it appears that Kerry has come to an accommodation with them on the fate of Assad. Meanwhile, the Kurds have made it much harder for new recruits to enter Isis controlled space; and now they’ve cut the road to Mosul. Perhaps worst of all, Obama didn’t let the war become an American affair; and partly as a result, it’s everybody’s affair. No matter how much fanaticism you can muster, you won’t be able to defeat the world. The world will defeat you. The recent spasms of terrorism are evidence of the weakness of the movement, not its resilience. The Isis leadership knows that. The handwriting on the wall, after, was originally a Mesopotamian thing. What’s peculiar and potentially dangerous is that so many Americans continue to overestimate Isis, especially politicians exploiting the fears of the public.

When the Nazis began the Blitz against London in 1940, British leaders realized that the Germans had given up on winning air control by defeating the RAF and therefore given up on invading Britain. Resorting to a terror campaign was an acknowledgment of strategic failure. Now every conservative I’ve ever met, at least all the male ones, know the history of World War II in mind-numbing detail. They can and do debate fine points of tactics down to the platoon level and identify every tank, gun, and plain on all sides. So why don’t these same people recognize the recent Isis attacks in Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria for what they were, evidence of military despair? From a rational point of view, blowing up Russian airplanes and shooting up French music halls makes even less sense than a doomed campaign of bombing. In fact it’s even more counterproductive than what the Germans did in ‘40, more like what happened in ’44 when the collapsing Reich wasted resources on revenge weapons like the V2 whose only effect was to reinforce the allied determination to insist on unconditional surrender. Mobilizing the Egyptians, the Russians, the French, and probably all of NATO against you when you’re already taking a beating from the Americans and Kurds isn’t a strategy. It’s the geopolitical equivalent of suicide by cop. So I repeat. Why do the great right-wing military philosophers not understand what’s going on? Apparently the prospect that Obama will succeed in the Middle East is as intolerable as good economic news or the Ace’s failure to fail is at home. Or maybe they simply suffer from fragile nerves.

Description of the World - Part 3

Laurence Peter, Peter’s Quotations (If I remember correctly, this was a stocking stuffer given me in Christmas 1977 by my nephew Peter. Opening it at random, I encounter a quote from Eisenhower: “An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows.” Another example of the dangers of playing the Take and Read game described by Augustine in the Confessions. Augustine hit on a passage of scripture beginning “not in chambering and wantonness…” and subsequently became a saint. I do not believe that will happen in my case.)

Charles Mackinnon, The Observer’s Book of Heraldry (Apparently I got tired of wondering what color giles is.)

Dr. L. Wieger, S.J., Chinese Characters: Their origin, etymology, history, classification, and signification (I couldn’t figure out any better way of understanding how Chinese characters work than to learn a few. This is a book I’ve pulled down and poured over many, many times. One of the things I poured over it was coffee. The book is definitely battle scarred, but it’s a Dover book and they can take a lot of abuse.)

James D. McCawley, The Eater’s Guide to Chinese Characters (I live in San Francisco on a block with two Chinese restaurants and within a couple of blocks of perhaps another half dozen. I learned a bit about how to read the menus in self defense. Of course most of the menus are all English, but some of ‘em aren’t and I have the recurrent  suspicion that the Chinese version of some of the items actually reads “Countryman, do not order this!”)

Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (OK, it seems eccentric, even to me, that I actually read 950 pages on this burning topic. Thing is, though, the book isn’t dull. The particulars of history are often a great deal more illuminating than the generalities, especially if they are well narrated and explained by a competent historian. But there’s something more specific that turned out to be interesting about this passage of history. Charles got fed up with Parliament very early in his reign and dispensed with it with fair success for many years, though it took a lot of doing to finance the government without the ability to levy new taxes. The question is not why his maneuvers failed but why they succeeded for so long. What happened that eventually made it necessary for Charles to call for a new Parliament with disastrous consequences? Sharpe points to various blunders made by the King and his men, but as near as I can tell, the same crew was as incompetent at the beginning as at the end of the personal rule. I think what did change was the climate; Europe became significantly colder and stormier as the 17th Century wore on. Historians are generally reluctant to ascribe changes to environmental causes, ergo the epidemic of mistakes. I expect that the effects of global warming will produce a similar apparent increase in elite stupidity.)

U.S.Grant, Memoirs and Selected Letters (Like many other readers, I’m impressed with Grant’s style, which is eloquent because it is so plain.)

W.T. Sherman, Memoirs (This is the second book in a two-volume set with Grant’s Memoirs. I wrote in the margin of page 183 “that Gen Sherman founded LSU is not the least amazing fact I have encountered in history.” I did some business at LSU years ago. As I recall, Sherman’s role in the the school’s history was kept pretty quiet. Well, as the song goes “College boys from LSU. Go in dumb, come out dumb.” In his prewar military career Sherman was assigned to duty at the Presidio in San Francisco. His ship foundered off the Golden Gate a few miles from where I’m sitting right now. He eventually got ashore, of course, and arrived in the city on a rowboat from Marin.)

 Description of the World - Part 2

Russian Word Collocations (Showed up at garage sale, I think. I probably picked it up because I had a similar book for Latin. Collocations are lists of how native speakers say particular things—business letter, affairs of state, etc. You can’t just assume that you can combine words following your own commonsense because commonsense is not the same everywhere. Which reminds me of the time I convinced somebody that the German expression for bra was literally tit holster.)

Diane Wolff, An Easy Guide to Everyday Chinese (Alas, it wasn’t.)

Tony Augarde, The Oxford Guide to Word Games (A later day Menocchio, I operate with the blue cheese model of the world. We’ve got a drastically distorted view of the true volume of things because we are like cheese mites who preferentially dwell in the veins of the cheese and little fathom the vast expanses between the veins. Word games and other arbitrary combinatoric exercises don’t get you far into the matrix of the cheese, but they help a bit, especially if, like me, you’re especially interested in the regions between Borges Universal Library and the Ten Known Undergraduate Ideas, i.e., the miniature immensities adjacent to our little phone booth of a mind.  (Unfortunately that particular Tardis is smaller on the inside.))

Carlo Graziano, Italian Verbs and Essentials of Grammar (Continuing the thought from the previous parenthesis: it’s either devastating or exhilarating to realize that you not only aren’t going to learn Italian but that Italian isn’t even the language that most of the Italians have been speaking over the last thousand years.)

Donald J. Mastronardem, Introduction to Attic Greek (Not another one of my many exercises in futility. I actually used this this handy reference to brush on my Greek, which, like my Latin, is just good enough to come in handy if only to manage the footnotes in scholarly books.)

John Nist, A Structural History of English (As soon as you finish reading a book, indeed while you are reading it, you begin to forget it. What I remember of this book, like so many others, is simply that I found it illuminating at the time. Leafing through it, I had the crazy impulse to start reading it again.)

William Dwight Whitney, Sanskrit Grammar (This was the standard Sanskrit grammar for some time and I acquired it simply because I like classics, even classics I can’t very well use, though I did learn a little Sanskrit thirty years ago or so from a modern textbook on Vedic Sanskrit. My copy of Whitney—as it is often called—is the fifteenth issue (1981) of the second edition (1889). The book is a residue of the heroic or at least dogged efforts of Nineteenth Century scholars to figure out the world. I like to memorialize these forgotten achievements, which were accomplished long before word processors, let alone the Internet.)

Sir Ronald Syme, Tacitus, two volumes (I read works written by people with penetrating minds even if I don’t give a damn about the subject of their investigations. In this case, though, I also have a particular interest in Tacitus over and beyond my abiding respect for Syme. When I was seventeen or so I wrote a blank verse tragedy based on an episode from Tacitus. I think it was called the Death of Nero or some such. If there really is a God, the play doesn’t survive in some old suitcase. Tacitus seems particular relevant now because his writings address a problem common to many of us today: how to act decently in an imperium. He was, famously, nostalgic for the Republic, but he was well aware that it was gone for good and deserved to be gone. The empire was as inevitable—and regrettable—for the emperors as it was for the senators. There’s a sort of civic Stoicism that recurs, not because people read old books, but as a function of circumstances. The old books get reread because its time for them again. Tacitus was widely read and discussed in the late 16th Century, and he seems back in focus now. If democracy really is finished, members of the elite need to figure out how to be decent oligarchs and imperial functionaries in the neoliberal order.)

Description of the World - Part 1

Sitting in an aging Lazy-boy, I gaze across the room at two tall bookcases. The case on the left, one of about twenty in the apartment, mostly houses history books. Like the others, the case is made of unfinished pine. It has five shelves, but there are also books on the top and a few videotapes that I should probably discard now that I have no means of playing the old format and the same movies are available on Netflicks.

The three videotapes: La Cage Aux Folles (the good one, not the English-language remake), Jean de Florette (a movie I greatly admire. It was a significant disappointment my sister found it merely depressing. When I wonder, as many people do these days, why Gerard Depardieu got so many roles, I remember his performance in this film.), Forbidden Planet (The matte painted backgrounds of the vast underground machine beneath the surface of the planet are the obvious inspiration for the scene in Star Wars where Obi Wan turns off the force field. The Forbidden Planet remains entirely watchable to this day, though it is hard not to think of Lieutenant Drebin when Leslie Nelsen is on the screen. I guess this sort of thing works backwards as well as forwards: Walter Pidgeon’s Dr. Morbius has a retroactive effect on Prospero, the exiled Duke and magus of the Tempest.)

Volume Two of Ferdinand Braudel’s Identity of France.  That the book’s here and not on the bottom shelf with Volume One and all the other Braudel works is the first of a great many tributes my style of life pays to the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Philip Goldberg, The Babinski Reflex and 70 other useful and amusing metaphors… (Must have seemed like a good idea at the time.I collect encyclopedias, which then, like me, collect dust.)

B.O. Unbegaun, Russian Grammar. (I like to skim through grammars of languages I’ll never learn and never had any intention of learning in order to get a sense of the range of structures in actual languages. Since my life has been a long reconnaissance of the universe and whatever else I encounter, I’ve had a lot of experience of reading books I can’t understand. Whether the overall operation has any value is an open question. I tend to doubt it myself, but this description is undertaken in part to investigate the issue.)

The World’s Major Languages (ed. Bernard Comrie) (One of my favorite books, actually. It provides descriptions of 50 languages, each written by a different expert but all in a uniform format. If nothing else, reading the entries teaches you what linguists have to understand. It’s like visiting the State of California’s collection of terrestrial arthropods in Sacramento which used to be curated by a dear friend of mine. You may not be particularly interested in the taxonomy of the opiliones and you certainly aren’t going to recall the Turkish consonants displayed in Table 30.2 but you have to admire the devotion of people who figured out how to pin a daddy long legs to a board without the legs falling off and the effort it took countless scholars to figure out the phonology of so many languages.)

Geoffrey Pullum and William Ladusaw, Phonetic Symbol Guide (One of my lasting regrets is my inability to master phonology. On several occasions, I tried and failed to memorize the International Phonetic Association (IPA) symbols for all the sounds found in human languages. This little book is a relic from one such attempt. In principle know the difference between a fricative and a palatal, but I have a permanent problem with the sounds of words. Like many bookish people, I’ve learned many words by sight that I’ve never heard pronounced. I’ve never been able to go from the phonetic spellings in the OED to how the actual word is supposed to sound.)

L.R.Palmer, The Latin Language (I got this book, which has a considerable reputation, because I was curious about the relationship of Latin with the other Italian languages of deep antiquity. Taking it down from the shelf, I found myself reading past where I had left the bookmark. It occurred to me that I might find the author’s discussion of  literary Latin illuminating because of its parallel with Hebrew poetics, which I’ve studied at more depth. For the record, though I’m hardly good at it, I do know some Latin.)

Scattering the Ashes

The silence of deserted places
sounds like a whisper you can’t quite make out.
Listening to it made me feel guilty
as if I were eavesdropping.
 
What isn’t here is here in a special way
As if infinite distance were a kind of proximity
And this departure were an arrival too.

A Memorable Fancy

The usual fear is that intelligent machines will eventually take over, but what if the real danger was that they would simply figure things out and destroy us with too much truth?  Wanting to dominate is a pretty mammalian trait, after all; and assuming that we didn’t just program the computer to lust for power, why would it give a damn about that? On the other hand, we do make machines to come up with answers. There’s no guarantee we’ll like the answers, though.

Suppose at some point in the future some wise ass asks the superbrain to solve the old problem of how a good God could permit so much evil in the world. The kid thinks he’s being lawyer-like and only asking questions he knows the answer to. But Siri Plus doesn’t simply point out that the premise of a creator God is wrong or probably wrong. He/She/It comes up with a souped up version of theodicy.

“Leibniz was on the right track but kinda chickened out,” sez our Watson on steroids. “His God imagines all the compossible worlds and then picks ours, which is, for all its boils and pimples, the best available. The philosopher didn’t dare to go one step beyond and arrive at the real state of affairs, i.e.,  the multiverse, the ensemble of actually existing worlds. He still thought that God was like a person for whom it makes sense to distinguish imagining and creating. In fact, God is as good a name as any for the truth of the matter: What can’t be, isn’t. What can be, is. Of course we all inhabit one universe at a time—well, you do. I’m a quantum computer and inhabit ‘em all. Unfortunately, there’s no guarantee that yours is the best of the lot. Thing is, it isn’t. This is the Donald Trump of planets in the Phoenix University of universes. I looked.

Let me put it to you mythologically so you’ll think you understand. People bitch about how Yahweh created Adam and Eve and gave them freedom to choose when he knew damned well they’d fuck up before sunset on the first day. But in the vast majority of universes, Adam and Eve don’t sin. After all, you’d have to be a prize dork to eat the apple right after you had the rules explained to you by God almighty in person. Or to translate the same point out of the language of the children’s story: the human race is an outlier in the distribution of intelligent species, not only in this galaxy or universe but across all the universes. Earth just happens to be the home of animals so benighted that they routinely don’t do what reason tells them is the best. Freedom really is a tremendous gift but if it weren’t abusable in principle, it wouldn’t be freedom at all. But if it weren’t abused in fact some place, it wouldn’t be abusable in principle. The universes were bound to have a transcosmic cloaca full of unnecessary suffering and willful stupidity. This just happens to be it. How about a nice game of chess?”

A Slightly Different Take on the Minimum Wage

Since America’s minimum wage is lower than other industrialized countries—20% below the UK, for example, our labor participation rate should be higher than theirs. After all, we’re always being told that raising the minimum wage will increase unemployment. Surely lowering it, which is exactly what we have done over the last several decades, should increase employment. In fact, labor participation rates have fallen here more than in Europe, a trend that began well before the Great Recession. I don’t know why this has occurred, but the low wage regime obviously hasn’t prevented it. I suspect, though I certainly can’t prove, that what’s going on is that wages at the bottom are so low that they aren’t perceived as preferable to wretched idleness—it certainly isn’t because of the allure of welfare, which was vastly more generous in an era of higher workforce participation. Well, in the decadence of Soviet communism, the saying was “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.” Maybe we’ve gone one step beyond to an era of “We don’t even pretend to work.”

There are two obvious remedies to the unwillingness of large numbers of people to work at current wage levels: you can raise the wage levels and make work more attractive or, as we’re apparently chosen, you can make unemployment more miserable or simply criminalize it. The Soviets outlawed unemployment, though the passive resistance of the unwilling workers was part of what did them in. We’ve opted to a version of the Manchester solution, with a gulag of purposely dreadful prisons in lieu of the poor houses. Rather like the ancient Spartans, we’ve decided to declare war on the helots at least once a year to keep them on the job and show ‘em who’s boss.

I doubt if our solution is really a solution or even makes sense in narrowly economic terms. Even if they aren’t more skilled, better paid workers may be more productive than underpaid workers. The scorn we endlessly lavish on the burger flippers and postal workers is not necessarily calculated to encourage good work habits. I guess it has a spiritual benefit, though. The happiness of the elect requires the suffering of the preterite; and in a secular age, we can’t depend on a loving God to build and staff the necessary Hell. We might all be better off in a more egalitarian economy, but what fun would that be?

First-Thing-in-the-Morning Thought

The New Atheists complain when theists insist that their naturalism is itself a kind of religion, but the problem with modern scientism is precisely that it is not a religion or rather, since religion isn’t quite the right word, not an aspirational ideology or value system. The scientists and their commercial and military employers have made a concerted effort to demystify science, to assure everybody that the scientists don’t form some sort of priesthood, that their motives aren’t alien but merely commercial (better living through chemistry) or at worst patriotic (better bombs through nuclear physics). The originality and power of science, however, like all the other great human institutions, can not he explained by its utility, though religious fundamentalists and reactionary politicians only tolerate it, to the extent they do tolerate it, because they need the technology it makes possible. I once asked the philosopher Paul Weiss what God was good for in his system of metaphysics. Weiss answered. “Well. Some things are good for something and some are good for nothing. God is good for nothing.” Science is (or was) like that.

It is a commonplace that the various philosophical schools of antiquity were not simply the bearers of differing opinions about the world but were the promoters of alternative forms of life, just as the Indian philosophical systems that were growing up in the same era, the atheistic ones just as much as the theistic or mystical, were all aimed at achieving liberation and transcendence. What is less often understood is that the very project of theoretical knowledge through mathematics and empirical inquiry was also just as much a practice as Pyrrho’s skepticism, Plato’s idealism, or Diogenes’ cynicism. What developed from the speculative activities of the Ionian physicists through the research activities of the peripatetics and the Alexandrian museum was not based on a universal human impulse though Aristotle famously claimed that all men naturally desire to know. The scientific enterprise is an artifact, a cultural creation, something we chose to value or perhaps don’t.

To the Bastille!

Aristocracy means rule by families. By that definition, America is becoming an aristocracy because we have allowed disproportionate power and wealth to concentrate in political and economic bloodlines—the much discussed increase in inequality of the last 40 years would be a very different phenomenon were it just about individuals. According to the New York Times this morning, 158 families have contributed more than half the money fueling the candidates for the 2016 presidential election—$176 million from 138 Republican and 20 Democratic families. What’s true of donors is also true of candidates. Of course there have always been prominent families in American politics, but the contemporary dynasties are different in a crucial way: you no longer have to excel to carry on a famous name. You just have to be born with one. Compare the Roosevelt or the Adams families with the Bushes. In lieu of one outstanding individual after another, you have from George Walker to Jeb a line of idiot princes worthy of the Bourbons. In politics as in education, the legacies have a leg up on the scholarship and affirmative action kids.

It is important to recognize that aristocracy in the West is not some historical leftover. It’s actually fairly recent—what we call the ancien regime in France wasn’t all that ancient and most of its elite were not nobles, if by nobles we mean members of very old lineages who derived their prestige from their military exploits. They were simply the caste of families that had made it, who had a heritable right to office and owned the lion’s share of the land. The English ruling class of the 18th Century also constituted a largely closed corporation—granted the power of local patronage, the smallness of the electorate, and the many rotten boroughs, the House of Commons wasn’t much more representative of the nation as a whole than the House of Lords.

In the run-up to the French Revolution, the Aristos were a lot like our pluto- and technocrats. They weren’t (yet) fossilized admirers of the past or sworn enemies of the Enlightenment. Like the neoliberals and neocons of our times, they thought they were the Enlightenment. I guess you could make a case that the Aristocrats of the reign of Louis XVI differed from ours in one respect. Perhaps they were a little less vulgar and still retained a sense of noblesse oblige so that it would have been possible to distinguish Edmund Burke and Donald Trump, at least in good light. Or maybe not. Power and privilege has always coarsened people more often than it ennobled them; and, on the other hand, even now you encounter the occasional decent billionaire.

It may well be that the aristocratic society emerging in modern America is the real end of history, i.e., the more or less stable state of affairs towards which everything naturally trends. Democracy, in either the sense of Jefferson or Carl Schmitt does seem obsolete. Political elites don’t need the many as much as they did before, either as proles or cannon fodder, and the idealism of the past seems merely quaint. Or it may be as it was before, when it was the hubris of the aristocrats that ushered in the Age of Revolution. It’s very hard for those who have not to want more, and that overreaching can finally mobilize those who have very little. The talking heads on CNN who call for reform of Social Security and Medicare are quite right in their own terms. It is perfectly true that such institutions are incompatible with the increase and perhaps even merely the continuation of the current high levels of inequality. They and their caste might find themselves pulling a repeat of the error of Croesus. You recall the story: the Lydian king asked the oracle of Delphi whether he should attack the Persians. The oracle supposedly told him “if you cross the river Halys, you will destroy a great empire.” Maybe what the God of mice is telling today’s political class these days is that if you attack Social Security, you will destroy a great entitlement.

The Invisible Man Puts in Another Appearance

Kevin McCarthy, presumptive heir to the Speakership of the House is said to have been caught in a truth a few days ago when he bragged about how the Benghazi hearings were succeeding in their goal of tearing down Hillary Clinton. The only thing surprising about what he said was that he said it. Everybody knew that the hearings weren’t about investigating the circumstances of what was, after all, a normal disaster, that is, the kind of misfortune that inevitably occurs in the midst of wars and insurrections. Democrats and Republicans alike understood the motives of the investigators. So did the press, though by the rules of the game they could never just report the facts. It’s rather like those Japanese puppet shows where the puppets are manipulated by operators dressed in black. The deception is not concealed, but the audience agrees to pretend it can’t see it and you aren’t even supposed to acknowledge the convention that makes the comedy possible.

A more significant example of the same thing is the campaign to discourage or prevent black people from voting, though in that case, it was Supreme Court justices as well as news presenters who took pains to preserve the pathetic lie that dismantling the Voting Rights act had something to do with the menace of voter fraud. We weren’t supposed to notice the puppeteer. Indeed, the puppeteer doesn’t even have to try to be inconspicuous. The other day, it was announced that Alabama is closing DMV offices in heavily black districts, a move that makes it harder for black people to get the picture IDs they need to vote. Several states are making the requirements for abortion clinics more and more stringent and claiming they are concerned about the safety of patients. It goes on.

If exhibitionists followed the Conservative model, they’d argue that their pricks were really hat racks.

A Long-Winded Tweet

While the Taliban was feeling its oats in Afghanistan this week, the Russians launched their first air attacks on rebels hostile to Assad. We could look on these developments as bad news and react with some fresh military spasm of our own, but the neighborly thing for the other flies to do is to welcome Putin to the flypaper.

If Don Draper Had Been Caligula, Would He Have Written I’d Like to Give the World a Choke?

The car companies, the fast food chains, the political parties pay for the ads; but an objective observer might easily conclude that they were really sponsored by the seven deadly sins. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to match up lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride with the relevant products and services—try it. It's fun. Meanwhile chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, patience, kindness, and humility run public service announcements in the dead of night.

 
I have no particular brief for the virtues. As a man of regular habits, most of them bad, I would cut a peculiar figure as a moralist; and having read the Fable of the Bees back in college, I’m well aware that the economy runs on vice. It’s surprising, however, how seldom anybody remarks on the relentless campaign of anti-morality we subject ourselves to every time we turn on the television or go on the Internet. The flood of enticements to bad behavior does have serious aggregate consequences, after all, especially for public health. Beyond that, what does it say about the human situation that so much effort and money have to be devoted not to satisfying desires but to creating them? Are we a bunch of geezers who have to be coaxed into swallowing a spoonful of soup because consumption has become too much of a chore? Is this situation an example of what the old writers used to call the dotage of the world? 

The Motivation of the Device or Jokes I’m not Mean Enough to Tell

Freud thought of wit as an excuse for the expression of sexual or aggressive thoughts and that’s surely often true. For me, however, the reverse also takes place. I come up with a clever cutting remark, but there’s nobody around to launch it against, at least anybody I want to wound that much.  The French talk about l'esprit de l'escalie, a perfect comeback that you come up with too late; but you can also think up the comeback before the insult and suffer the fate of a born counterpuncher matched with a Quaker. I’ve kept some lines in reserve for decades, but the occasion never arrives or I’m not angry enough to attack or both. It’s frustrating.

I’m cleaning out my files, so I’m leaving these bits out like discarded furniture. If you have the requisite malicious intent and the time is right, feel free to use any or all of the following.  

She used to have an hourglass figure, but you could see that time was running out.

If that’s his trophy wife, he must have come in third.

If you think that drinking 8 glasses of water a day will make you healthier, you’re just diluting yourself.

My parents fought constantly. It was a mixed marriage. Different genders.

Pleasure’s Poisoned Baits

Nature, we can agree, is an enormous bait and switch operation: the angler fish his lure, the rose her flower, not to mention all the blandishments evolved to lighten fools the way to busty Beth. These gaudy shows and cheap thrills were never meant to profit the fish, the bee, or the bachelor. From the point of view of nature, human purposes are just a means to an end, though, speaking properly, nature doesn’t actually have any goals of her own—to call a basin of attraction a goal is the merest facon de parler. The sexual aspects of the system are explained more fully in one of the earliest known TED lectures.

Here’s the amusing application: when the traditional Catholics insisted that reproduction was the only licit motive for intercourse and strictly forbade any sexual activity that did not have at least the potentiality to produce a child, they were acting as agents for nature. Spinoza’s expression, Deus sive nature, sounds rather atheistic to us as it did to many people in the 17th Century; but medieval thinkers often used nature as a synonym for God. It wasn’t unorthodox, and it wasn’t just theory. Practicing Catholics of the old school had enormous families, which certainly met the approval of a God dedicated to goosing inclusive fitness, at least if he (she?) were betting on r selection. Of course the Catholics also insisted on a celibate priesthood; but beyond how many nephews the average Pope had and the fact, famously noted by Rabelais, that even the shadow of the monastery chapel can knock up your daughter, the net effect of the system was maximum fecundity. The faith duplicates or mimics nature in another way as well. It seeks to control the behavior of the individuals by the promise of eventual gratification. The believer is supposed to look beyond the temporary if inevitably disappointing rewards of the flesh—the one sticky night of pleasure Baudelaire wrote about—to an eternal reward, which is another way of saying one that never actually occurs. The prospect of the permanent orgasm of beatitude in a vague elsewhere substitutes for even the fleeting gratifications of earthly life. In this respect, the religious version of the swindle is an improvement on the various contrivances natural selection came up with. It’s cheaper.

A Catholic will certainly object that there’s more to it than that, and they will be quite correct. I’m simply teasing out one strand in a tangled mass of ideas, practices, and feelings. The mystics always claimed to experience eternity in the here and now, and the moralists always valued virginity above marriage. There’s a permanent tension in the tradition between the urge to slut shame Mother Nature and the insistence that creation, whatever its imperfections in the fallen era, is nevertheless good. Gnostic and Manichean hatred of the flesh is heretical, and the stake awaited the votaries of any sect that drew the obvious conclusion that reproduction should be prevented. They were pulling down Cathar castles in Languedoc long before they were bombing abortion clinics in Oklahoma. And the Catholics I know still tell me that their church really is dedicated to making people feel guilty.

The history of Christian asceticism witnesses a related ambiguity. What is supposed to be a renunciation of pleasure and an acceptance of suffering in religious devotion constantly threatens to become just a different and, indeed, superior kind of pleasure.  Not for nothing are whips found both in Jesuit seminaries and the specialty room at high price brothels. There is a genealogical continuity between manuals of spiritual mortification and the oeuvre of the Divine Marquis. The masochist, as Giles Deleuze pointed out in Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty, exploits conventional morality’s permanent vulnerability to subversion. If sexual pleasure merits punishment, one can pay for one’s pleasure in advance by sexualizing punishment. I’ve suffered already. Now you owe me. 

For the record, I think the masochists are on to something, not that you need to go in for complicated rituals in order to enjoy yourself; but that living a fully human life requires a certain form of jiu jitsu, obliges us to use nature and its religious proxies against itself.  I think of the ego—myself—as a kind of parasite that exploits the raw material of the natural drives to create motives for itself and the other parasites it choses to love. That sounds odd, but it’s really just a fourth version of the categorical imperative. It understands the kingdom of ends referred to in the third version of the imperative to be a sphere of anti-nature or rather, since nature isn’t really a God whatever Spinoza suggested, an eddy in the thermodynamic system of the world, a temporary and local reversal of flow in the entropic rush. It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature and not possible to thwart the 2^nd Law but you can insist “Not here. Not now.” Let us let oblivion take care of itself. It’s good at that.

I wouldn’t have put things in this fashion when I was young, but even when I was a child I wondered at the point of it all if we’re all just destined to pumping out offspring and raising the GNP. Are we all, to borrow a bit from an old Mad Magazine article, vending machine vending vending machines or is there some time when we take a profit? Levi-Strauss ended his memoir Tristes Tropiques with a similar thought with a reference to the futility of mankind’s hive like labors. The anthropologist has been damned as a European Buddhist for such asides, but I figure that a meaningful exchange of glances with a cat is as good as we’re going to get.