The Spirit of 1989

Monday

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Checkpoint Charlie in divided Berlin: A City that Symbolized the Cold War

The Spirit of 1989 is no less significant and no less important than the Spirit of 1789. It is this spirit that keeps us honest and that, every once in a while, makes the world a little better place despite entrenched obscurantism, corruption, and apathy. And so it is the spirit of 1989 that is being celebrated today on its twentieth anniversary.

Of course, any political event of the magnitude of 1989 will inevitably involve mutually antagonistic interpretations, and this is true today. The BBC had an article, Free market flawed, says survey, about a poll that it commissioned. The poll focused on disenchantment with the free market twenty years after the apparent end of the alternative of state socialism. There was also a question as to whether the end of the Soviet Union was a “good thing.” Some of the results of this highly ambiguous poll can be seen in the table below.

I find this “poll” to be rather irresponsible, as the questions seem to be formulated for a single purpose, and that is to get respondents to say that capitalism is flawed. Even a poll allowing degrees of response to each statement of the poll’s questions would be more valuable than the tripartite division of the poll’s questions as it was given in the BBC article. In the BBC poll, it is obvious that “capitalism” is guilty, and the respondent is invited to be its hanging judge. The French, apparently, are happy to fulfill this role; despite the role of 1789 in their history, the French do not see the relation to 1989.

One of the most glaring things that is wrong with this poll is that the statement, “Capitalism is flawed and a different economic system is needed,” clearly implies that capitalism is an economic system. It may sound tendentious for me to say so, but I have said it elsewhere and I will say it again: capitalism is not an economic system in the usual sense. It isn’t a system at all. Capitalism in its pure form, laissez-faire capitalism, is the lack of an economic system.

Capitalism is a weed. It grows up anywhere that an opportunity presents itself. People pervasively (if not compulsively) engage in trade, and cannot be made to stop engaging in trade without pretty significant obstacles being placed in their way (like being jailed and possibly tortured under a communist regime). Moreover, individuals tend to make their own opportunities, so that capitalism crops up even where opportunities seem non-existent. People trade in secret if they are forbidden to trade openly.

Capitalism is what people do with their freedom. To say that capitalism needs to be curtailed means that freedom needs to be curtailed. To say that capitalism needs to be abolished and that we need some kind of economic “system” in its place, is to say that freedom should be abolished and that we should replace it with something more neat and tidy — maybe a command economy, for example. That sounds like a good idea, right?

There is a debate that has been taking place since the end of communist party dictatorships in Russia and Europe, and that debate is whether communism was ever really put into practice. The idea here is that nominally communist regimes were not really communist, and therefore communism never really got a chance to show what it could do. I do not deny the significance of this debate, and have discussed it in this forum several times (for example, in The Continuing Relevance of Marx and in Globalization and Marxism).

Whatever the merits of the above debate, whatever side one takes on the question, I think we can say that, whether or not communism as such ever got a chance, that command economies did get a chance under communist dictatorships. The communist dictatorships, as well as several non-aligned nation-states like India, bent every effort to make command economies work, and these command economies never did. The longer that command economies were forced to function under threat of violence to those who defied them, the worse the command economies performed.

The implied criticism of capitalism embodied in the BBC poll suggests that the only alternative to capitalism is a controlled economy. That is true. But a controlled economy is a command economy, and a command economy is worse the longer it runs and the more extensive it is. We have all heard about environmental sustainability, but sustainability is not limited to the environment. Economic systems, or the lack thereof, can be sustainable or non-sustainable. Command economies are non-sustainable, and when they collapse, they collapse catastrophically and people suffer as a result.

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The Incommensurability of Civilizations

Sunday

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Samuel Huntington told us that civilizations are clashing, but didn't really tell us why they are clashing, other than a laundry list of differences of history, language, culture, tradition and religion.

A Thought on the Clash of Civilizations

To observe that civilizations do indeed clash is not yet to say why civilizations clash.

Observation is the beginning of induction, and it would be a sensible and defensible approach to systematically observe many civilizations, to the extent that this is possible, and from the knowledge gained from systematic observation to converge upon a hypothesis. This would constitute the scientific approach to the problem posed by the nature of civilization.

Philosophy of science, however, has made us aware of some of the limitations of the scientific method, and these limitations are especially glaring when dealing with social and cultural phenomena like the phenomenon of civilization. One of these limitations is rooted in the fact that all observation is theory-dependent. This means that one cannot simply observe. If you put ten people in the same place and instruct them, “Observe!” they may well observe ten different things.

The modern tradition of scientific observation begins with Galileo, who aimed a telescope into the heavens and saw things that had never before been see. Often he saw flaws and imperfections, which at the time were thought to be impossible in celestial bodies.

There is a tradition of scientific observation that gives consistency and stability to the knowledge derived from observation. Experimental methodology channels observations into science-like observations. Such observations are theory-laden, i.e., such observations already incorporate a scientific theory. Science-like knowledge is derived from science-like observations.

Louis Pasteur was a great pioneer of the experimental method, deriving science-like knowledge from science-like observation.

While there are research methods for the social sciences, they are more problematic than research methods for the natural sciences. We do not say that they are simply wrong or compromised; it is a matter of degree. Observations in physics are theory-laden just as observations of human behavior are theory-laden (the LHC is an embodied research program), but human behavior has an emotional and intellectual content for the human observer that pure physics divorced from human activity does not have. Consequently, the human sciences are the most compromised; but, again, it is a matter of degree.

The LHC will make it possible for physicists to search for evidence for the Higgs boson, but this is a research program that is only meaningful in the context of the 'standard model' of particle physics. This is observation and induction, but very finely tuned observation and induction.

Civilization ought to be an object for the social sciences, and following the scientific method observations of civilization might converge upon a list of the particulars that distinguish one civilization from the other, and one might conclude that these distinctions are the reasons that civilizations clash. But this method would not be adequate to understand the clash of civilizations.

We use the one word “civilization” to identify very different social entities, and we are right to do so. We cannot think and we cannot understand anything unless we have general terms that cover a multitude of particular cases. But there is more than one sense in which civilizations could differ. If there is a Platonic idea, a Form, of civilization, then each civilization is a real civilization, a genuine civilization, in so far as it embodies the Form of civilization. Let us call this the Platonic account of civilization.

Plato more or less founded the Western tradition of philosophical inquiry, and the spirit of Plato still looms large. Platonism (that is to say, Plato's theory of ideas) still has legs.

In contradistinction to the Platonic account of civilization, there is the Nominalist account of civilization, the kind of account of the word “civilization” that one would expect from Ockham’s nominalist terminist logic. For Ockham, terms are just terms; they do no indicate an idea. For Ockham, there may be Forms, but language does not embody them. Ockham was the original philosophical minimalist, and as such he ought to be regarded as the patron saint of contemporary Anglo-American analytical philosophy, which is thoroughly minimalist in character. It was Ockham who gave us Ockham’s razor, also known as the principle of parsimony, which is the injunction to prefer the simpler explanation.

William of Ockham was one of the greatest philosophers of the Western tradition, who more-or-less single-handedly inaugurated the tradition of philosophical parsimony that still reigns today.

I hold, then, a Nominalist theory of civilization, implying that the diverse social entities we call civilizations fall under the same term, but not in virtue of an idea or Form that all possess in common. However, I do not deny civilizations do have an idea at bottom that structures the kind of social entity that each is. There’s the rub.

Each civilization is not only distinct, but each is based on a distinct idea of civilization. Thus civilizations clash because each has an idea of what civilization is and ought to be that is not shared by other civilizations, each of which are similarly are based on an unshared idea. Thus it is not the case that all civilizations embody, each perhaps in its own distinctive way, one and the same idea of civilization. In short, civilizations are incommensurable.

Civilization is not one, but many.

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Oregon Rain

Saturday

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We’ve had some heavy rain in Portland over the past few days, nothing unusual for Oregon, but it gave me the opportunity to film some of the rain and to attempt to put together another video. This I did, and posted it to Youtube. Here it is, if you’d like to check it out:

I am acutely aware of the shortcomings of my attempts to create videos for youtube. It is obvious that my writing is prepared as something to be read rather than spoken, my voice doesn’t sound good, and technically the effort is pretty awful because I don’t really know how to put things together, properly mix the audio tracks, and that sort of thing. The learning curve is always rather steep at first. But I continue to think about creating more videos as people are more more likely to watch through a presentation than to read something.

Following is a modified and slightly expanded version of the text I wrote for my Oregon Rain video:

This is Oregon rain. It is appropriate, now that November is upon us, that Oregon rain should begin in earnest. And now it has. Up until just a few days ago we had been having a glorious fall of sunny days and clear skies. Most of the leaves were still on the trees, though having turned to fall colors. Now the wind and the rain have largely brought all the leaves down, and in the space of two days of heavy rain the trees have been stripped of their fall grandeur down to their winter state of bare limbs and branches traced against a dark gray sky.

Some people have lived their entire lives in Oregon and have never become fully accustomed to the steady, dark drizzle of late fall, winter, and early spring. Others, however, myself among them, enjoy the rain and even look forward to it, unaccustomed to life without the rain. The sun-drenched days of summer are beautiful without compare, but Oregonians can feel in their bones that the life-giving rain that gives our world the form that it has and the color that it has cannot be too long absent. The rivers and the streams and the lakes and the ponds all need to be filled with water, and while for a time we can survive on the snow melt from the Cascades, ultimately the rain must come again to quench the thirsty landscape, as the snow must return to the mountains so that it can melt away the following summer and allow us to survive the dry months, the months when Oregon seems a little less like Oregon.

When it is raining, when Oregon does seem like Oregon, we often get up in the morning to the rain, we drive to work in the rain, we look out on to the rain all day long, we go out in the evening in the rain, and we go to bed as it continues to rain. On the weekend, we drive to the coast and walk on the beach in the rain. That is what life can be like here.

There is a familiar story that some of the native peoples of the far north have languages that include twenty or thirty or more words for snow. Some years ago I came across an article in a magazine by a fellow who had researched this often repeated story, and he provided a list of more than thirty words from an Eskimo-Aleut language describing various words for snow. Wikipedia cites as an early source for this The Handbook of North American Indians (1911) by linguist and anthropologist Franz Boas:

…just as English uses derived terms for a variety of forms of water (liquid, lake, river, brook, rain, dew, wave, foam) that might be formed by derivational morphology from a single root meaning ‘water’ in some other language, so Eskimo uses the apparently distinct roots aput ’snow on the ground’, gana ‘falling snow’, piqsirpoq ‘drifting snow’, and qimuqsuq ‘a snow drift.’

More recently it has become the accepted practice to refer to this plethora of snow words in languages of the far north as an urban legend (notwithstanding the lack of urban centers in the far north), and to point out that the grammar of such languages is very different. So different, in fact, that we cannot count words in the same way. While this is true, it would be a little ridiculous to maintain that peoples of the far north do not have a more extensive knowledge of snow than the rest of us, and that this knowledge is not reflected in the language and indeed in the conceptual structures that are integral with language.

In Oregon we have extensive experience of rain. From this experience comes knowledge, and from knowledge comes a certain relationship to the world. One need not invoke the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis of linguistic relativity (which is, essentially, simply a linguistic re-statement of Kantianism, so that we could go further in this direction by adopting the transcendental aesthetic to an exposition of ontological relativity) in order to acknowledge that language (at least in part) shapes our world. To a similar end I have cited Wittgenstein: the limits of my language are the limits of my world (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 5.6). Language shapes our world, for example, in thoroughly pragmatic and utilitarian ways: you cannot mention that for which you have no name.

I have always thought that in Oregon we ought to speak a local dialect of English that includes twenty or thirty or more words for rain. And, in fact, we do, after a fashion. This rain vocabulary is not reflected in any dictionaries or formal grammatical structures, but it is there among life-long residents of the Pacific Northwest, though it is so informal, so completely a matter of convention, that its boundaries may be defined by a single family or a handful of people who speak to each other regularly. The language of Oregon rain can be like idioglossia — the languages the twins create spontaneously between the two of them. The later Wittgenstein (after the Tractatus period) declared that a private language is impossible; this has led contemporary philosophers to spill much ink over the question, which remains controversial. But in the spirit of this terminology we could call idioglossia a semi-private language.

Families and groups of friends have their own shorthand methods of referring to the various kinds of rain that are common; as such, they form small linguistic communities with their own semi-private languages. And these informal languages emerge immediately from experience. In Oregon, the immediate experience much of the year is of rain, and of many kinds of rain. It is not unusual for a fine mist to fall all day long on a day when it never really rains, or showers, or drizzles, or pours. When I was in British Columbia many years ago, when I was still a child, I remember a native of the region referring to this as “soft rain”, whereas when I grew up we usually called it mist. And there is a fine line between this kind of mist and days when the cloud cover is so low and heavy that the clouds essentially descend to sea level and one breathes in the one hundred percent humidity of the interior of a cloud. Here the moisture is seemingly suspended in the air, while with a mist one can see and feel the infinitesimal droplets falling. The droplets can be so fine that they remain suspended on the end of the hairs of one’s arm, not wetting the skin. And there is another fine line between mist such as I have described and a light rain. Such varieties of rain constitute a continuum of precipitation.

Many are the varieties of rain in Oregon.

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Failed Cities

Friday

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Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Canyon, New Mexico

The city is the central exhibit of civilization, crucial to the origins, development, and continued vitality of civilization. And as history is littered with now defunct civilizations, so the landscapes of the world, from arid deserts to tropical jungles, from broken cliffs to the shores of the world’s oceans, are littered with defunct and abandoned cities. And even in their derelict state, these cities continue to exercise a power over the landscape and over our imagination. Is there anyone, anywhere in the world, who has not heard of Babylon? Babylon is a city perhaps more famous posthumously than during the years of its glory.

Promyshlennyi, in the Vorkuta area, was abandoned as services were cut off with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

And Rome. What city has exercised greater power over the historical imagination of Western civilization than Rome? Consider the famous passage from Edward Gibbon’s Autobiography:

It was at Rome, on the 15th of October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind. But my original plan was circumscribed to the decay of the city rather than of the empire…

It was the experience of the ruins of Rome, of Rome in its derelict state, that inspired Gibbon to write The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Detroit today

As we have observed above, the globe is littered with failed cities. Most were small, but there is a significant number of larger remains as well. Some failed cities are remembered only by pot sherds and broken roof tiles and the remnants of terracing (I have walked through a site like this in the hills of the Turkish coast) while others have left more considerable remains, some to the point of almost appearing intact, so that one can easily imagine moving in to the abandoned structures and taking up life almost where it left off, as though seamlessly recovering a lost history.

Abandoned buildings in Pittsburgh, since redeveloped into soi-dissant lofts.

The question of exactly what constitutes a city is as difficult as the question of what exactly constitutes a civilization, and indeed the question of how one knows when it’s love. Well, even if we can’t define a city precisely, we can usually recognize one — or the remains of one — when we see it. I suppose we could specify some quantitative measure in terms of population, area, production or consumption, but this would only be an oblique admission that we cannot get at the essence of the city… at least not yet…

The Lee Plaza Hotel in Detroit.

The ends of great cities are as mysterious and as varied as their origins and growth. In so far as a city is like a king among the lesser human assemblages of villages and towns, the manifold ends of cities remind me of a passage from Shakespeare’s Richard II (Act III, scene iii):

For Heauens sake let vs sit vpon the ground,
And tell sad stories of the death of Kings:
How some haue been depos’d, some slaine in warre,
Some haunted by the Ghosts they haue depos’d,
Some poyson’d by their Wiues, some sleeping kill’d,
All murther’d.

So it is with cities: there is no single pattern of urban dissolution Of course, we know much more about the decline and fall, the decay and ends of great cities, because there were people, many people, present to chronicle the events — unlike the obscure years of their rise to prominence. Yet there remains something compellingly inscrutable about how a grand and thriving metropolis ultimately meets its doom.

San Juan Parangaricutiro, buried under lava and ash, was abandoned during the eruption of the Parícutin volcano in 1943, claimed by a natural disaster.

Every successful city has spawned a literature devoted to it. Many authors are closely identified with their chosen city, as Joyce with Dublin or Baudelaire with Paris. Unsuccessful cities, that is to say, failed cities, have not the same paper trail to document them. As dying men often find themselves isolated and lonely, so too dying cities are left only with those who cannot leave, and once the city is utterly dead, no one but an archaeologist or an historian has anything to say about it: the authentic voices the city, those who partook of its life, are as dead as is the city itself.

An abandoned train station in Buffalo, New York

No city is a failure in its inception. A city begins with a pre-city nucleus, perhaps a town or even a mere village. It is precisely due to the success of such a nucleus that it grows into a city. But it is often the case that the first thought inspired by the ruins of an abandoned city is how and why the city was ever built in the first place, and how it ever came to grow to its apparent former size. Many abandoned cities are to be found buried deep within tropical jungles, far from contemporary civilization, or stranded in the midst of a desert like the toppled statue of Ozymandias in the poem by Shelley.

Atlantic City, New Jersey

A failed city is not the same as an abandoned city, although failure and abandonment obviously overlap. On the one hand, cities might be abandoned for many reasons, most of which have little or nothing to do with the intrinsic failure of a given city as a city, while, on the other hand, a failed city may continue in existence, much as Rome was never completely depopulated even at its nadir. Many cities are abandoned due to natural disasters. Pompeii is perhaps the most famous example of this, buried by the ash of the eruption of Vesuvius, but more recently, much more recently, there is the example of San Juan Parangaricutiro, buried by the lava flow from the formation of Parícutin volcano in 1943.

Trees growing out of a second floor window in Gary, Indiana.

We all know that particular technologies outlive their usefulness. I have written about this in The Law of Stalled Technologies and More on Stalled Technologies. Because of the succession of technologies, one technology and its infrastructure may have to be abandoned in order to move on to the next technology. This does not mean that the society or civilization that produced the first technology has collapsed; on the contrary: the abandonment is a consequence of the vigor of a society that can leave behind the past. However, when an entire life of a city is based upon the infrastructure of a particular technology, and that technology is abandoned, or has changed so rapidly that older production facilities are without value to the contemporary iteration of the technology, then that city must enter a most painful decline.

Pripyat, near Chernobyl, was abandoned not due to natural disaster or to changed economic conditions, but to a man-made disaster.

The most obvious examples of the process of abandonment because of obsolescence due to technological change are to be found in the industrialized “Rustbelt” of the United States, although examples can be found in every industrialized region of the world. In the Pacific Northwest, a similar process has occurred in connection with the timber industry. Small towns dependent on a single large timber mill were reduced to not much more than a minimart, a gas station, and maybe a bowling alley once the mill closed. I have long thought it would be an excellent topic for an academic study — whether sociological or economic or cultural geography — to write a thesis on After the Mill Closes. We could call this process industrial succession, by analogy with ecological succession, understanding that cities are a petri dish of the ecology of civilization.

There is a sense in which this process of industrial succession is predictable and an obvious consequence of social and technological change, but there is also a sense in which it is striking and remarkable. Even in a middling-sized city like Portland, where I am somewhat familiar with the commercial and industrial real estate market, a relatively small structure in the industrially zoned area of the city (and I understand that not all cities have zoning laws) costs a million dollars or more, and this represents a significant investment for a small business. If you cross the bridges over the Willamette in downtown Portland and see a panoramic view of the city, thick with small and large buildings, and you realize that each one of these properties may be worth millions (some of them worth tens of millions), you immediately understand how valuable a contemporary city can be. The amount of money represented by a urban landscape is staggering, and we aren’t even talking New York, Paris, London, or Berlin here.

The barren and desolate National Stockyards at East St. Louis

That anyone can afford to abandon commercial or industrial urban properties is remarkable. And yet it happens. Perhaps the property is owned by a corporation that goes bankrupt, the property tax bills go perpetually unpaid, and the city has other, more pressing needs and will not spend the money required to raze or refurbish such properties. Where the decline of a particular city is terminal, this process escalates and turns into a vicious circle of declining property values that drive further bankruptcies and abandonments.

The pod city of San Zhi, Taiwan, abandoned before completion.

Industrial succession is a force as relentless and as inevitable as the Industrial Revolution itself. We could say, in fact, that industrial succession is part of the Industrial Revolution, and that the civilization that has emerged from industrialized societies is a civilization that must reckon with the industrial succession that comes with the Industrial Revolution. The rational approach to this would be to plan for cities to emerge around particular technologies, and for these same cities to be abandoned gradually as that same technology inevitably becomes obsolete. This has been attempted in some highly controlled and managed economies, but cities cannot avoid becoming the domicile of our dreams and our aspirations at the same time as they grow rich, just as they become symbols of failure and decay as they decline into poverty.

An abandoned high rise in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

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Grand Strategy Celebrates One Year!

Thursday

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Coincidentally, on this one year anniversary total hits passed 30,000. Some sites get as many hits in a day or an hour, but it is more than I expected.

One year ago, on Wednesday 05 November 2008, I began this blog with the post Opening Reflection. In that opening reflection I announced my intention to see contemporary events through the prism of geopolitics, and geopolitics in turn through the prism of ideas. While I have attempted to do this, and have on occasion successfully tied these together, I also made no rigorous effort to contain myself within self-imposed boundaries.

Like an intellectual Epicurean, I have followed my tastes and inclinations quite to the exclusion of any systematic program of comment, sampling whatever fare attracted me. I gravitate to the ideas I most enjoy, for it is with the ideas that I most enjoy that I feel most free and can write spontaneously. Most of the pieces I have posted have been more or less spontaneous productions of the day. A few I labored over for several days, but that was the exception. Sufficient unto the day has been the inspiration thereof.

It is only recently that I have learned of a wonderful quote from Fernand Braudel, the great French historian of the longue durée and representative of the Annales School of historiography:

Events are the ephemera of history; they pass across its stage like fireflies, hardly glimpsed before they settle back into darkness and as often as not into oblivion.

Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Volume 2, Part Three: Event, Politics and People, p. 901

While this passage does not appear in the abridged version, the abridged version does include much that reflects this point of view. Braudel returns time and again, in detail and in general overview, to his structuralist orientation. There is a sense in which Braudel’s approach to history is something genuinely new, a novel way to understand human experience. Braudel is no less a methodological naturalist than Thucydides, but his method is nevertheless profoundly distinct from that of Thucydides, though not in a sense in which he seeks to confront and overturn the tradition.

This passage from Braudel also reflects, more and more, my own point of view on history. The political events of the day, upon which I had primarily intended to comment in this forum, seem to me to progressively embody the ephemera of history. I was always committed to understanding the world in terms of the big picture, in terms of the longue durée; the experience of writing this blog has only confirmed me in this prejudice. The passing events of the day are as meaningless as the shadows on the walls of Plato’s cave unless they are understood to be shadows of Forms that can be apprehended only by turning away from the fleeting shadows and looking into the blinding light of the ideal.

While I have had very few readers compared to those blogs that are sufficiently popular to have become news in and of themselves, I have nevertheless had more viewers than I expected; far more people have read something here than have ever picked up a copy of one of my books. And while most people who visit probably don’t read much, or in great detail, I do know that I have had a few visitors who have read me quite carefully, as I have received some perceptive comments (and criticism) over the past year. To all who have visited this forum, thank you.

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Civilization: a Rope or a Broom?

Wednesday

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There is an interesting story on the BBC, Logging ’caused Nazca collapse’, that poses several interesting questions regarding the nature of civilization.

The article concerns itself with the Nazca civilization, but Peru is something like the Fertile Crescent of South America: the home of not one, but of several civilizations, with a history that reaches far back in time. The more archaeologists look into Peru, the more they find. There was the Norte Chico civilization (also Caral or Caral-Supe civilization), the Chavín, the Paracas, the Moche, the Nazca, the Tiwanaku, the Wari, the Chimú, and the Inca. Probably there are more.

Sometimes the divisions indicated by these names are called cultures and sometimes they are called civilizations. The distinction between culture and civilization is a philosophically interesting one, and it is moreover a distinction that I will need to eventually visit, but I am not going to go into it today. For today I will simply call them civilizations.

One of the remarkable things about Western civilization is how it has inwardly transformed itself from one civilization into another while geographically moving but little. Thus Western civilization exhibits a high degree of continuity despite the discontinuity represented by the change from one civilization to another. Historical periodization remains highly contentious within Western history. There was the civilization of classical antiquity, medieval civilization, and modern civilization. All transpired within various regions of Europe.

I don’t know much about Peruvian civilization, and now that I think of it I feel the lack of my knowledge. I do not know the extent to which Peruvian civilization, rich as its history is, constitutes a changing continuity as in Western history, and to what extent it involves relatively isolated civilizations. The emphasis must be laid upon relatively, for obviously these civilizations would have had some contact with each other. The question is to what extent the civilizations of Peru exhibit the kind of seamless transformation that one sees, for example, in the transition from medieval to modern Europe. Picking a point of transition is an exercise in arbitrariness.

The Nazca civilization looks relatively isolated partly because its remains are now preserved in a desert. But looks can be deceiving. I do not know to what extent the Nazca might have carried on sea-borne trade with neighboring peoples, and whether such contacts could have bound regions together into a unified civilization.

Also, the collapse of Nazca civilization looks total in retrospect also because the remains of the civilization are dramatically preserved and isolated in a desert. When I was reading this article about the collapse of Nazca civilization, my thoughts turned to the great example of collapse in Western history: the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. Medieval civilization did not collapse; it transformed itself into modern civilization. But Roman civilization in the West collapsed. When I thought of it, it struck me that in the Western Empire there was nothing to replace Rome when its power collapsed. The Eastern Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, slowly ceded its territory over the millennium of rearguard action. There were other empires eager to take the place of the Byzantines.

In Western Europe, the collapse of Roman power meant the collapse of civilization, and as civilization returned to Western Europe it was slowly and gradually built from the ground up by incremental efforts, mostly the efforts of the Catholic Church. Yet still there was slow change and continuity in many parts of the Western Empire. Generalizations have their place — we cannot understand anything without general ideas under which we can subsume particular details — but the most interesting part of historical research is not about generalizations but rather particular details.

The archaeologists cited in the BBC story characterize the end of Nazca civilization as a collapse. Moreover, they say that deforestation contributed to this collapse by exacerbating the devastation of the El Niño cycle, one of which finished them off. Dr David Beresford-Jones is quoted as saying, “Our research contradicts the popular view that Native American peoples always lived in harmony with their environment until the Spanish Conquest.” What Dr Beresford-Jones did not say here (though I don’t know that he didn’t say it elsewhere) is that this is not news to anyone in archaeology or anthropology. There are numerous examples of peoples of the Americas depleting their food resources and either moving or or shifting to different food resources. In some instances there is an extensive archaeological record (for example, in shell middens) of native peoples alternating between food sources over the long term as one staple declines under harvesting pressure while other staple recovers after it has been abandoned as a dependable food source.

What Dr Beresford-Jones also did not say is that while the findings contradict popular perceptions of the native peoples of the Americas, the study seems to magnify popular perceptions of environmental apocalypse. The collapse of Roman power has been credited to soil erosion, over-exploitation of resources, and human-induced environmental change. These are a few theories among many theories. These theories may be correct. They may correctly identify contributing causes, even if they are not primary causes. But we do not yet know this to be the case. Similarly, human-induced environmental change may be been central or peripheral to the collapse of the civilization at Nazca. But things as complex as the intersection of natural history and human history are not clarified by simplification to one or two or a handful of causes.

How isolated was the Nazca civilization? Did the Nazca civilization experience a collapse, or did its people scatter and take their civilization with them to other regions? Did some of the people bring some of their civilization with them as they escaped the collapse of their institutions? If Nazca civilization is a part of a larger Peruvian tradition of civilization that exhibits the synthesis of continuity and discontinuity that we see in Western history, then the Nazca are to be seen in the context of predecessor civilizations and successor civilizations, and we can only form an accurate idea of the collapse of Nazca civilization by understanding the degree to which its institutions were inherited from predecessors and bequeathed to successors.

Is the phenomenon of civilization like a rope, with its many fibers twisted together?

Is the overall pattern of Peruvian civilization like a rope, which derives its strength from many distinct fibers intertwined, and with no one fiber that runs the length of the rope (a favorite Wittgenstein analogy), or is Peruvian civilization more like a straw broom, in which each individual stalk of straw emerges with many other stalks in an explosion pattern from a central originating point? The answer to this question has implications for understanding the very idea of civilization and of history.

Or is the phenomenon of civilization like a broom, with its many individual pieces of straw exploding from a central point?

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Claude Lévi-Strauss, R.I.P.

Tuesday

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Claude Lévi-Strauss was perhaps the most famous of the French structuralists, using structuralism in studies of anthropology, mythology, and sociology.

Claude Lévi-Strauss has passed away a few days ago on 30 October 2009 at the age of 100, and not far short of his 101st birthday. It would be difficult to over-estimate the impact of Lévi-Strauss on twentieth century European continental thought. While Lévi-Strauss is identified as an anthropologist, he was much more than an anthropologist simpliciter. Lévi-Strauss was a European intellectual in the grand manner, even while eschewing the trappings of being an intellectual in the grand manner. In a word, he was the genuine article, more interested in his work and his ideas than in his reputation.

Lévi-Strauss was, among other things, a prolific writer, and his writings went on to exercise an influence throughout the intellectual life of the twentieth century. He was known both for his special contributions to anthropology but as much for the wider-ranging implications of his thought. His writing has a great style, beginning with the wonderfully cranky first line of his memoir, Tristes Tropiques: “Travel and travellers are two things I loathe — and yet here I am, all set to tell the story of my expeditions.”

Lévi-Strauss was a structuralist, and as a structuralist he was ground zero, so to speak, of the European reaction to the Cartesian tradition that reached its culmination in Husserl. The generation of French scholars contemporaneous with Lévi-Strauss all cut their teeth on Husserl, and all reacted against Husserl in their own ways; the reaction of Lévi-Strauss was one of the more fruitful reactions against the subjectivism and idealism of Husserl and the tradition he represents. Structuralism had legs; it was a theoretical orientation that went on from small beginnings to influence every aspect of the life of the mind.

Freud and Marx, those twin fascinations of twentieth century European thought, are often credited with being structuralists, or, at least, following a structuralist method, and this is, in my estimation, a fair way to put it, despite the distaste most people have for using a label that ends with an “ism”. But if “isms” tend to over-simplification and schematism, and are often rejected for these reasons, the rejection of an “ism”, i.e., the rejection of a school of thought, can become as much of an intellectual fetish as the naming and labeling of a school of thought. Lévi-Strauss made structuralism explicit, he identified his work as structuralist, and he did not shy away from using the term not only in his writing but even in the titles of his books. Lévi-Strauss was not afraid of the label, and for that reason he rose above it.

I have several of Lévi-Strauss’ books in mass market paperback editions of English translations — this gives you an idea of the reach of Lévi-Strauss’ thought. As always, I prefer the shorter works, like The Scope of Anthropology, his inaugural lecture as a professor at the Collège de France, and the informal and conversational works, such as the interviews with Georges Charbonnier, in which he discusses openly not only his work but also the theoretical motivations that have been the underpinning of his work. I offer a salute to Claude Lévi-Strauss, and the permanent contribution he has made to Western civilization.

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All Souls’ Day

Monday

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A famous illustration of the beatific vision as described by Dante in his Paradiso Canto XXX-XXXIII, often called the Rose of Paradise.

The first of November is All Saints’ Day; the second of November is All Souls’ Day. The difference between All Saints and All Souls is rooted in a theological problem that was not a little contentious in its day. Nascent nation-states during the medieval period were roiled by the controversies surrounding whether and when the faithful departed experience the beatific vision. Among the faithful departed we can distinguish those who are sufficiently pure that they immediately experience the beatific vision, and those whose venial sins must first be purged away before they can experience the beatific vision. All Saints’ Day celebrates the first subset of the faithful departed; All Souls’ Day celebrates the second subset of the faithful departed.

Dore's equally famous illustration of the same passage from Dante.

The beatific vision, in simplest terms, is seeing God. The idea of seeing God is immediately problematic, and seems to involve the kind of category mistake that we find in Descartes who, immediately after promulgating an absolute distinction between mind and matter, then went on to propose that there was a particular region of the brain (the pineal gland) that was so sensitive that it could register the subtle doings of the spirit, and this, according to Descartes, was the point of relation between mind and body.

William of Ockham, one of the greatest philosophers of the late Middle Ages.

William of Ockham, who entered into a protracted political controversy with Pope John XXII, in his criticism of the same formulated the beatific vision thus: “purified souls of the saints now see God clearly face-to-face.” (In the original Latin: “anime sanctorum purgate vident nunc clare et facialiter deum.” Ockham, Dialogus, Tractatus Primum) This puts it pretty clearly, and also pretty personally: face-to-face. Dante, of course, puts it more poetically, thus side-stepping much of what bothered philosophers:

With Beam direct, I fac’d the vivid Light,
██ By Instinct led; for had I turn’d my sight
██ The least degree askance, the blinding Beam

In sudden Night had quench’d my visual pow’rs;
██ But this I met with more collected force,
██ The noontide Glory in its fierce extreme.

By uncreated energy refin’d,
██ Boldly I dar’d to scan th’ Eternal Mind:
██ O heav’nly Grace, that thus benignant bore

A Mortal’s daring eyes, that travell’d far
██ Amid thy wonders, till th’ eternal Bar,
██ Uprais’d by Mercy, bade me look no more.

The more refined and abstract one’s conception of God, the more problematic the beatific vision becomes. This sort of thing would not have been a problem for classical antiquity. The ancients frequently made very concrete connections between the gods and the lives of mortals. For example, there was a particular cave on Crete that was supposed to be the birthplace of Zeus. With this kind of specificity, seeing Zeus doesn’t present much of a problem. Joseph Campbell told a story in several of his lectures in which he talked about having attended a lecture by Martin Buber in which the following exchange took place:

██So I’m sitting there and I raised my hand and he very politely said, “What is it?” And I said, “There’s a word being used here this evening that I’m not understanding.”
██And he said, “What is that word?” And I said, “God.”
██“You don’t understand what God means?”
██“I don’t understand what you mean by God. You tell us God has hidden his face. I’ve just come from India where people are experiencing God’s face all the time.”
██It was as though I’d hit him with a brick.
██He said, “Do you mean to compare?” That’s monotheism. We’ve got it. No one else has it.

It would seem that the beatific vision is as unproblematic in India as it would have been for the ancients. But in the Western Christian tradition it is problematic. Moreover, the problem has been dealt with at great length. Many of the greatest minds have struggled with the problem. Saint Augustine devotes Chapter 29 of Book XXII of The City of God (the second to the last chapter of Augustine’s self-admittedly enormous book) to the beatific vision. He begins with the most basic and obvious questions like whether or not those who experience the beatific vision do so with fleshly eyes.

Saint Thomas Aquinas, Aristotelian, author of Summa Theologiae

Aquinas is also concerned with the beatific vision, and devotes part of this massive Summa Theologiae to it. Because Augustine comes from the Platonic tradition and Aquinas comes from the Aristotelian tradition, their views provide an interesting contrast that we will not go into in detail. Suffice it to say that it is worthwhile to look up the sections in Augustine and Aquinas and to read them side-by-side.

Saint Augustine, Platonist, author of The City of God

Not long ago, in Divine Penetration, I wrote about Sartre’s thesis near the end of his Being and Nothingness that everyone wants to be God. As Sartre put it: “the best way to conceive of the fundamental project of human reality is to say that man is the being whose project is to be God.” Being-for-itself envies and wishes to become like being-in-itself. In meditating upon the meaning of All Saints’ Day and All Souls Day, I am struck by the relevance of Sartre, philosophy’s most uncompromising atheist, to the problem of the beatific vision. Ancient and medieval theologians held that the ultimate “project” of human life was to see God; Sartre held that the ultimate project of human life was to be God.

Now, to see God and to be God are two very different things, but they are defined in precisely the same terms. The theologians believed that the former was possible; even as Sartre formulated the latter, he knew it to be impossible. Indeed, the theologians would have called Sartre’s formulation not only impossible but also heretical and probably an idea of demonic inspiration.

Heresies are almost always nearly indistinguishable from orthodoxy for all but the specialist, for all but the enthusiast for detail. If people easily fall into heresy, it is because the distinctions are too fine for most to understand. Philosophers and theologians are at home on this territory, but for the ordinary man-in-the-street, the concepts of theology and philosophy are impenetrable unless they can be put in an immediate and concrete form, like seeing God face-to-face, as Ockham put it.

Ockham hasn’t been the only one offering immediate and concrete glosses upon recondite matters. As sophisticated and subtle as contemporary academic philosophy can be, it can also get down into the dirt at times. Last month on russell-l, the listserv devoted to the thought to Bertrand Russell, Irving Anellis offered the following from his own experience:

I recall once attending a meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy at which Erazim Kohak spoke on Husserl’s early phenomenology, after which John Findlay got up and began loudly berating Kohak, and calling him a Nazi. As far as I was able to detect amidst all the yelling, Findlay was calling Kohak a Nazi because he had spoken about Husserl, who for a time was Heidegger’s professor, and Heidegger was a Nazi.

This kind of shocking crudity among philosophers, after having conditioned their minds to the most subtle distinctions, offers an unflattering insight into the human mind even at its most exalted, just as refined theological distinctions that lead to cruel and horrendous religious wars (once the refined distinction is reduced to a suitably crude slogan) offer a similarly unflattering insight into the human spirit even at its most elevated.

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Autumn’s Splendid Sublime

Sunday

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In contemporary ordinary language people use the term “sublime” to express something like a more intense form of beauty or an especially marvelous experience. While this is not necessarily incorrect, in aesthetics the sublime has a specific and technical meaning, and we can both speak and think with greater precision if we will observe the distinctions incorporated into our existing vocabulary.

Immanuel Kant, who put almost nothing simply or clearly, did manage to frame the distinction between the beautiful and the sublime with wonderful clarity and concision (in six words, no less): the beautiful charms; the sublime moves. In other words, if you are charmed by something attractive, you have experienced the beautiful. But if you are actually moved by something you have encountered, then you have experienced the sublime. One doesn’t merely notice or encounter the sublime, one feels the sublime.

Kant distinguished three parts of the sublime: the noble sublime, the terrifying sublime, and the splendid sublime. The noble sublime is the sort of thing that Winckelmann famously said of Greek sculpture: “Edle Einfalt und stille Größe.” While we might not respond so powerfully to classical Greek sculpture today, a proper education of one’s taste can bring one to the point of responding viscerally to such beauty. The noble sublime is also embodied, so far as my experience extends, in some of the great gardens of Kyoto. Unlike the noble sublime, the terrifying sublime is very timely, and I am sure that anyone reading this has experienced what it is like to respond viscerally and emotionally to a terrifying experience; one is moved in such experiences, even if being moved was not a pleasant thing.

The splendid sublime is formulated in parallel to the formulations for the noble sublime and the terrifying sublime. In short, the splendid sublime is to be moved by beauty, to respond viscerally to beauty. The splendid sublime is a complex experience in so far as it involves both the beautiful and the sublime at once. Perhaps it comes upon us in two stages, first noticing a beauty that charms, and then being moved by it as the experience cascades into something greater. But it is just as possible, for example, that one might round a corner and be struck in an instant by a view that is something no camera can capture: one sudden draws in one’s breath, and then one realizes that one’s entire being has responded to the sight.

With this sketch of aesthetic theory, then, you will understand what I mean when I say that Portland today embodied the splendid sublime. It was one of the most beautiful fall days that I have ever seen. The sky was completely clear, the sun was shining brightly, but not with the intensity of summer. The trees have lost half or more of their leaves, so there are many leaves covering the ground and many yet still on the trees. I went to the Hoyt Arboretum in the afternoon and took the pictures included here, though the whole city offered beautiful and moving views today. And last night had to be one of the more perfect Hallowe’en evenings I have seen, with the air clear and crisp, and the nearly full moon lighting the leaf litter quietly covering the ground.

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Recovering the Sun

Saturday

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Last spring in Temporal Dislocation I attempted to express my loathing for daylight saving time but my prose wasn’t really equal to the task; I had an abundant surplus of loathing left over even after posting about the absurdity of twice annually altering the settings of our clocks — every country doing so according to a slightly different rule, of course — and with us now spending more of the year on an artificial time than on the actual time of the sun.

Hallowe'en is now the time to check your clock settings.

It is ironic that now we recover the authentic time of the sun on Hallowe’en night. Truly enough, it will be past midnight and therefore technically no longer Hallowe’en when the time change is made, but many will still be celebrating Hallowe’en by the time tomorrow’s change of the clock is upon them. Indeed, the time change may add an hour to their revelry.

There is something furtive and dishonest in the decree to change all the nation’s clocks deep in the stillness of the night. The famous Patti Smith song tells us that the night belongs to lovers, but apparently the night also belongs to politicians. They richly deserve to be mocked for their idiocy and for the inconvenience through which they put us all.

Pentheus torn limb from limb by frenzied Bacchantes.

In Euripides’ The Bacchae, Pentheus, King of Thebes, is unable to recognize the god Dionysus for who he is, and in consequence Pentheus repeatedly offends and humiliates Dionysus, who all the while calmly but explicitly warns that Dionysus is becoming angry. The anger of a god is no small matter, and before the play is over Dionysus takes his revenge upon Pentheus is an especially gruesome way. The king is torn limb from limb by his own mother, who in the frenzy of the Dionysian rites she is celebrating mistakes her son for a mountain lion. One elegant way to ridicule the absurdity of daylight saving time would be to write a play parallel to Euripides’ Bacchae, substituting the sun for the god Dionysus, and the Congress for Pentheus and his retinue. Do we not humiliate the sun by repeatedly and arbitrarily suspending its natural temporality? Are we not as arbitrary as Pentheus attempting to suppress the cult of Dionysus?

And Plato made the sun the symbol of the good in his famous allegory of the cave: the blinding light of the sun, the last thing that the emerging troglodyte can look upon after leaving the cave, is like unto the overwhelming nature of the good, seen in its purity and perfection, and therefore of a character that only the eye accustomed to its brilliance can look upon it: “like glist’ring Phaeton, Wanting the manage of vnruly Iades” (as Shakespeare puts it in Richard II, Act III, scene iii). Today we are still blinded, still blinking and attempting to look at the light of the good. Is it our blinking, our inability to bear the good, that makes its inconstant and ever shifting for us?

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