An Exposition of Hegel
9 February 2010
Tuesday
Giving an exposition of Hegel's notoriously difficult philosophy is no small achievement. Hegel himself didn't do so well at communicating his own ideas.
As I am able to find them in the library, I have been listening through a series of lectures titled, “The Odyssey of the West”, published under the series The Modern Scholar, which is a collection of lectures on CD published by Recorded Books. In previous posts I have mentioned several of the courses that are part of The Modern Scholar series; all have been excellently produced and have been intellectually stimulating and satisfying.
I‘ve just finished listening to Part V of “Odyssey of the West”, subtitled, “Enlightenment, Revolution, and Renewal.” The whole “Odyssey of the West” series has been produced under the editorship of Professor Timothy B. Shutt of Kenyon College, and I notice that many of the lectures are his colleagues from Kenyon College.
Joel Richeimer
Lecture 11 of Part V is a lecture about Hegel given by Joel F. Richeimer, associate professor of philosophy at Kenyon College. This is, hands down, the best brief treatment of Hegel that I know of. I’ve listened through this lecture twice now, and I will probably listen to it a couple more times before I return this to the library. Within the compass of about a half hour it gives a sense of Hegel that is largely free of schematic oversimplifications. I heartily recommend this.
Another good treatment of Hegel is from Darren Staloff of the City College of New York. He recorded a wonderful series of lectures for The Teaching Company titled “The Search for a Meaningful Past: Philosophies, Theories and Interpretations of Human History.” This must be the only set of lectures devoted exclusively to the philosophy of history and available to the general public. Unfortunately, I suspect that the course was not too popular, as The Teaching Company has discontinued it. I own a copy of the lectures, and one of the cassettes became damaged. I wrote to The Teaching Company to request a replacement, and they told me that there were no replacements available because the course had been discontinued. It is a great course, and certainly better than many Teaching Company offerings that remain available.
Darren Staloff
Staloff also contributed a lecture on Hegel to The Teaching Company’s “Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition.” I have listened to this also (though I don’t own it) and it is very similar to the Hegel lecture in Staloff’s no-longer-available “The Search for a Meaningful Past.” While I enjoy Staloff’s insights on the philosophy of history, his lecture on Hegel is nowhere nearly as good as Joel Richeimer’s lecture of Hegel, though, to be fair, Staloff is focused on Hegel’s philosophy of history while Richheimer is more concerned with an overview of Hegel’s thought, not even mentioning Hegel’s famous efforts on the philosophy of history.
Perhaps the best known portrait of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – 27 August 1770 to 14 November 1831.
I own a lot of Teaching Company courses because they are affordable. It is unfortunate that The Modern Scholar makes their courses so expensive, though I am deeply grateful to the library system for owning as many of them as they do. I will listen to Richeimer on Hegel, and I will probably check it out and listen to it again in the future to get all that I can out of it, just as I listen to my Teaching Company courses over and over again to get all the benefit out of them that I can.
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Shorting the Euro
9 February 2010
Tuesday
If anyone thinks that the US debt position is particularly bad, they should take a look at Europe. There is a front page story on today’s Financial Times that positions of 7.6 billion dollars have been taken shorting the Euro. A “short” is a term in finance that essentially means betting that the shorted commodity (which in this case in the Euro) will decrease in value. In other words, major hedge funds and and traders are counting on a fall in the value of the Euro. This speculation is primarily due to an expected debt crisis within the Eurozone. (I previously wrote about the woes of the Euro in Greece in The Dubious Benefits of the Eurozone.) Also today, at the same time that the Financial Times was reporting the massive shorting of the Euro, the BBC ran a story, Euro bounces back against the dollar and pound, that begins, “The euro has strengthened against both the pound and the dollar as currency traders’ fears about European debt levels begin to recede.” The BBC story points out the the Euro has recovered from recent lows, but mentions nothing of the shorting on international currency markets.
Although a currency ought to be understood as one commodity among many, as I have characterized it above, because currencies are tied to political entities (mostly to nation-states, but in the case of the Euro to the EU, which is a quasi-state entity) currency speculation takes on a political edge. Aggressive currency speculation (especially the shorting of a currency) is often perceived as a hostile act taken against the nation-state that generates the currency in question.
Speculation against the Thai Baht was widely credited for triggering the Asian financial crisis of 1997. Currency speculators like George Soros are soft targets, especially given the popular anti-financial sentiment of the present, so it is all-too-easy to ascribe blame to them, but note that I identified currency speculation as the trigger of the crisis. The causes of the crisis are many and reach back further into contemporary history.
Should we expect a European financial crisis to emerge from this massive shorting of the Euro? There may be a “crisis”, but there will be no crisis on the scale of the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Why not? Europe’s fundamentals are strong, and its institutions are robust. Neither could be said of the east Asian “tiger” economies of the 1990s. Moreover, the Euro has been a highly valued currency that has been bid up appreciably in recent years.
The short memory of traders and newspaper columnists militates against their seeing commodity prices in an historical context large enough and long enough to make sense of market fluctuations. I have no doubt that if the Euro plunged in ten percent of its value, this would be received with much wailing and gnashing of teeth in the financial press. But let us put this in perspective. The Euro is currently trading around $1.38296. A ten percent decrease would value the Euro around $1.24466. But as recently as June 2001 the Euro was only worth about 85 cents. A Euro devalued by ten percent would still be about forty cents higher than its low point in June 2001.
After the initial release of the Euro, its value steadily declined against the dollar for a couple of years. Its present high valuation has been the result of nine years of accumulated appreciation. At that rate, the Euro could afford to lose some value. A decline in the value of the Euro would be a major boost to Eurozone economies as their products would suddenly be much more affordable in major consumer markets like the US.
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The Mind’s Singular Function
8 February 2010
Monday
The nine Muses - Callipoe, Clio, Erato, Euterpe, Melpomene, Polyhymnia,Terpsichore, Thalia, Urania - embodied inspiration in classical antiquity.
Does the mind work solely on universals? Are all ideas essentially universal? Or does the mind have a unique relation to the singular (what the medieval scholastics called haeccietas)? What counter-examples can we cite to the mind’s native universalism?
The singular for the intellect is inspiration. Inspiration comes, when it does come, unbidden and outside the control of the mind so inspired. It is interesting to note at this point that from classical antiquity up to the present day inspiration has been personified in female form, viz. the Muses. That inspiration should be personified is nothing untoward, as classical antiquity personified almost everything, however abstract. But that the Muses are the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, and that inspiration is never personified (to my knowledge) in male form, is significant. Inspiration is wrapped up in, and perhaps confused and conflated with, what the feminine means for man.
I take inspiration to be a peculiar state of mind conducive to intellectual productivity. But that which is produced by the mind in a state of inspiration is in no sense identical to the inspiration or to that state of mind. And when inspiration comes again, if it does come, it will inspire new products of the intellect, again not identical with the episode of inspiration itself, and not identical with previous episodes of inspiration.
Inspiration is an intellectual condition that cannot be predicted and is not repeated. This would seem to me to adequately place it within the sphere of the singular. And the fact that the products derived from inspiration may be in no sense singular (do not most artists claim a certain universality for their work?) in no way alters the singular character of the inspiration that was the occasion of their production.
Inspiration remains as singular, as unpredictable, as unrepeatable, as ineffable, and as elusive as any chance event in the actual world. It leaves its trace, but the thing itself (or should I say “thing-in-itself”) disappears utterly. The absence of inspiration is as palpable as its presence. Thus the soul’s dark night.
When inspiration has come and then departed, even in the case of secular, non-mystical inspiration, we experience the intellectual equivalent of the dark night of the soul.
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A Day in the Country
7 February 2010
Sunday
Pascal wrote, “People go away and hide themselves for eight months in the country so that they can shine for four months at Court.” (This particular pensée was a late discovery by M. Jean Mesnard, not published until the twentieth century, so you won’t find it in most editions of the Pensées.) It is worthwhile to spend a moment to reflect on this line from Pascal. As has been said, one must unpack an aphorism. It is a journey of discovery into meaning, and we find in our journey into meaning that meanings are manifold and never final.
Pascal was writing for an audience for whom all culture was aristocratic culture. Even those who were not aristocrats were aware of aristocratic culture, if they were educated, and as this was the only possible audience for literary works (since the majority of the population consisted of illiterate peasants), untitled writers like Pascal had to write with this audience in mind. Pascal certainly wasn’t hiding himself in the country for eight months or shining at court for four months. Anti-Stratfordians have argued that Shakespeare’s scenes of domestic life among the nobility are evidence that Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare, but rather that some titled aristocrat wrote Shakespeare. But in writing of royal households, Shakespeare was writing for the only literate audience of his time (and the only audience that could afford to have plays put on for them), as was every other writer of the early modern period.
Another thing that strikes me when I unpack this Pascalian aphorism is the tempo at which life was once lived. This is something I think about often. The lives of most people in the premodern era were much shorter than our lives, and their effective life of healthy years in which things could be accomplished was far, far shorter. And yet, even with these shorter lives, activities and undertakings were planned on a long and large scale. If one planned a tour, one took a grand tour of Europe that lasted one or two years. Today we are lucky to get away for a week or two. Stagecoach journeys were undertaken, though they were so dangerous that a last will was made before departure. And still they departed. Wealthy men left their families in Europe and traveled to their estates in the New World for years at a time. If they died en route, no one knew about it for months. In Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, the eponymous proprietor left for such a tour of inspection, and returns to the rehearsal of an amateur theatrical production, much to the embarrassment of the players (who felt the sting of his disapproval). In such a world, one could disappear for eight months in order to save up one’s vital energies to shine at court for a portion of the year.
Despite the very different world that Pascal presents to us, we can nevertheless recognize ourselves in it. Politicians and celebrities today shelter themselves in anonymity so that when the television cameras appear they can flash an enormous, radiant smile that will reach through the lens and grab the viewer seated at home in their living room. Just as most people in Pascal’s day were not titled aristocrats, they knew something of how aristocrats and royalty lived. Indeed, the lives of royal families were on public display for political reasons. And today, although most people are not politicians or celebrities, our culture is constructed around the phenomenon of celebrity and therefore constructed as though for celebrities. The ordinary, uncelebrated individual knows more about the life of celebrities lived in the glare of 24/7 media coverage than they know about the lives of their neighbors. Our public culture today is as celebrity-centric as public culture in Pascal’s day was aristocratic-centric.
I didn’t have eight months in the country, but only one day, and that day not a full twenty-four hours. I am living at the pace of the modern world, not the leisurely pace of the premodern world. But, then again, I don’t have to shine for four months at court. There is no court for me. Nor is there any paparazzi, so I don’t have to save up my energy to perform as expected for the cameras. No performance whatsoever is expected from me, other than the ability to continue to work at my job so that I can continue to receive a paycheck and thus continue to live the lifestyle to which I have become accustomed. This isn’t about necessity, much less survival. What it comes down to is comfort. And who wants to give up the level of comfort they have attained? no one I know of. (Though I have been thinking about writing a post in this forum about the phenomenon of coming down in the world.)
Here in the countryside of rural Oregon, where the roads remain unpaved, dogs run loose, and the air is cool and sweet, there is true escape from the city and its rat race. It has become hackneyed to talk about the “sweetness” of the air in the country, but it is quite literally true, though not so true in the winter. Come to Oregon west of coast range in the summer when the grass hay is being baled, breathe deeply, and you will smell the sweetness of the grass. It is quite noticeably sweeter than haymaking in the Willamette Valley, though when you’re in the valley the haymaking smells sweet there as well. One can probably note the difference only by experiencing both first hand, as I have. One must make the most of the privileges one has, and my privilege is a sunny day in the country, for which I was grateful.
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Joseph Campbell Again
6 February 2010
Saturday
Joseph Campbell - 26 March 1904 to 30 October 1987.
I keep coming back to the short list of thinkers who have had a real impact on me. Twice recently (in Civilizations of Predication and Identity and in Joseph Campbell and Kenneth Clark, and before these in other posts as well) I’ve written about Joseph Campbell’s recorded lectures, and a week doesn’t go by that I don’t mention Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation. There is a sense in which we choose our influences, but there is also a sense in which they choose us. We cannot choose that to which we naturally respond: either one responds or one doesn’t.
Walter Kaufmann - 01 July 1921 to 04 September 1980.
While I haven’t written much about Walter Kaufmann, he is another influence that I often find myself drawn back to. Unlike Campbell, whom I know primarily through the spoken word of the recorded lecture, and Clark, whom I know primarily through the on-screen presence of his television series, Kaufmann I know through his books. I have copies of most of his books, and have read most of them through.
As it happens, last night I was reading Kaufmann’s Discovery of the Mind, Volume Three, Freud versus Adler and Jung in order to improve an old post to this forum (specifically, Indefinable Experiences; I frequently return to old posts to correct errors of grammar, spelling, and punctuation, and even entirely wrong words that interpolate themselves into the text when I type rapidly), and I skimmed Kaufmann’s discussion of Jung’s Answer to Job.
Kaufmann was honest to a fault and never pulled any punches. he didn’t pull any punches with Jung either. At the end of his discussion of Jung he wrote, “I wanted to give a balanced account and, if possible, end on a positive note. But I have come to the conclusion that there are no great contributions. Jung obstructed the discovery of the mind but, in effect, contributed a fascinating case history.” (Section 77) To put it bluntly, Kaufmann says that Jung had no great contributions to intellectual history.
I suspect Campbell would have disagreed as bluntly with that judgment. It would have been quite a sight, had it been possible, to get the two into a room together to review their differences over Jung. Some lectures of Campbell that I have listened to have made Jung’s work sound absolutely fascinating. But Jung is one of those authors that can be made to sound fascinating by others, but when I try to read him myself I just can’t make any progress. Jung’s writings don’t speak to me, although Campbell’s exposition of Jung was of great interest. I have had a similar experience with D. H. Lawrence: the more I learn about Lawrence the more interesting he sounds, but when I try to actually read Lawrence myself I find the experience too boring to continue. A few years ago I wrote about this to a friend:
Concerning Lawrence—he is a more difficult case for me. Everything I read about Lawrence increases my admiration for him as a writer, and I feel that I ought to enjoy reading him. However, when I actually attempt to read Lawrence I find him rather tedious. Of course, that’s not the end of it. I will try, and try again. Perhaps I will have a taste for it in the future, when I have better educated my taste. Or maybe he will remain opaque for me.
So much for Lawrence.
While Kaufmann and Campbell probably never had it out personally over Jung, it was interesting to come across this in Kaufmann’s book regarding Jung’s Answer to Job: “…the book is not only available in paperback but also included in its entirety in The Portable Jung because the editor, like many of Jung’s admirers, considers it especially beautiful.” (section 71) And again later, “…I want to ask why Answer to Job seems ‘beautiful’ to the editor of The Portable Jung and many others.” (section 73)
As it turns out, the editor of The Portable Jung was none other than Joseph Campbell, though by the way Kaufmann has phrased his above quotes it sounds like they never met. Earlier in the book (section 70) Kaufmann mentioned Campbell by name in his discussion of Jung’s attitude to India: “Other Western apostles of the East have used India in much the same way to revenge themselves upon their hated Christian upbringing, although they really detested India. Joseph Campbell, the editor of The Portable Jung, is an outstanding example.”
Although Kaufmann was an incredibly fair-minded philosopher, this does not strike me as an adequate comment on Campbell’s life. From the earlier quotes, Kaufmann doesn’t seem to have known Campbell, and, of course, Campbell’s journals of his time in India were only published long after both men were dead. But I assume that Kaufmann must have read something by or about Campbell, other than the editorial apparatus of the The Portable Jung. It would be an interesting project to try to find out exactly what these two knew about each other.
Kaufmann, as a lifelong translator and interpreter of Nietzsche, was especially wary of the ways in which ressentiment distorts a person’s view of the world, and he found this ressentiment in Jung and especially in Jung’s Answer to Job. It does not surprise me, then, that Kaufmann would have wondered how anyone could find a work he found to be filled with ressentiment to be beautiful, since he would have seen any such work as the definition of intellectual ugliness.
For all of Campbell’s catholic interests (note that this is “catholic” with a small “c” although Campbell was in fact from a Catholic background), I have not heard him often mention Nietzsche in his lectures. Campbell was no doubt aware of Nietzsche, but he was not the central figure for Campbell that he was for Kaufmann. Presumably, Campbell was not especially intellectually offended by ressentiment, and it is unlikely that he would have found it in Jung’s Answer to Job. Campbell does not discuss the essay itself of his reasons for including it in The Portable Jung other than to call it “wonderful.” (p. xxxii)
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Argentina: Slow Motion Trainwreck
5 February 2010
Friday
In the nineteenth century Argentina was one of the most successful countries in the world, with a booming economy built on an enormous agricultural industry. Argentina is a vast country, and this vast country produced a vast industry at a time when a nation-state could become rich through agriculture. Argentina still produces agricultural commodities for the world, but its economy is a wreck, a slow motion train wreck that continues to grow worse even while nothing is done to improve matters.
Argentina was once a place of great wealth.
On the outside, Argentina looks a lot like other South American nation-states. Recently I wrote about Chile in The Map of South America Changes. Chile has had a successful democratic transition of leadership, and an economy that is strong and stable. Argentina, next door to Chile, seems to have had a democratic transition of power in its recent elections and, as a large country, it has a large economy. But appearances can be deceiving.
Juan Domingo Perón and wife Eva.
The presidency of Argentina is at present a family affair. Néstor Carlos Kirchner was succeeded by his wife, Cristina Elizabet Fernández de Kirchner. There is nothing surprising in this. Argentina has a very interesting political history. it also has a long history of populist policies. The long Perón era in Argentine history was a saga of populism, as is the present Kirchner era. And Perón, too, was succeeded by his wife.
Cristina Elizabet Fernández de Kirchner, President of Argentina.
As a large economy with established institutions, Argentina has many policy options. The Kirchners have been using these options in a creative way, but the options they have been pursuing have been digging Argentina ever deeper into a hole, and at some point even the most durable institutions will break down under the unsustainable demands that are being made upon them.
Sacked: Martín Redrado in happier times with President Fernández.
There have been numerous defections from the present administration, some voluntary, others forced. Most recently, Cristina Fernández has replaced the governor of Argentina’s central bank. The government of course put a predictably happy spin on the replacement, but what it comes down to is that the former governor of the central bank refused to go along with the administration’s plan to make routine debt payments out of federal reserve funds. The new governor of the central bank, Mercedes Marcó del Pont (apparently known for her radiant smile), will provide no such resistance to administration policies.
Mercedes Marcó del Pont, newly appointed governor of Argentina's central bank.
This latest move, which predictably gave pause to the international financial community (gate keepers to further loans to Argentina, that it might spend itself even deeper into debt with populist social programs), is only the latest in a series of unsustainable policy initiatives. Argentina’s once mighty agricultural industry has been devastated by administration policies. In 2008, the government nationalized private pension funds to pay its debts.
The size and intrinsic strength of the Argentine economy has allowed it to continue soldiering on despite these disastrous policy decisions, but at some point the bill must come due. The good news is that the same size and intrinsic strength of the economy will allow it to recover relatively rapidly if ever the populist policies that are looting the country could be stopped. But the populist policies themselves are like a political addiction.
The Kirchners, first Néstor and now Cristina Fernández, have been relentlessly pursuing the policies of subsidy in a vicious spiral. The subsidies put into place inevitably cause harm to some group, and the response is order further subsidies, which in turn cause further harm and are the occasion of further subsidies. The Kirchners have even changed the way government economic statistics are compiled. It may outrage one’s sense of justice, but it is likely that the Kirchner team will be out of office when the jig is up.
In a couple of posts I have shown a map of South America with the most left-leaning nation-states colored red and the mildly left-leaning nation-states colored yellow. It is no surprise (it should be no surprise) that the most left-leaning nation-states are those with economies in the worst conditions and pursuing the most unsustainable policies. Of these countries — Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Argentina — Ecuador is perhaps the least damaged. When I was in Ecuador last year, I was told that despite Rafael Correa’s strong public leftist stance, in private he is not particularly combative. He may well be taking the talk for political reasons. But Hugo Chavaz continues to plunder the economy of Venezuela as utterly as the Kirchners have plundered Argentina. And it will be interesting to see next week how the Morales administration in Bolivia spins the Qhara Qhara Suyu protest march.
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Joseph Campbell and Kenneth Clark: Bifurcating Naturalisms
4 February 2010
Thursday
Joseph Campbell and Kenneth Clark
Bifurcating Naturalisms
Recently in Civilizations of Predication and Identity I wrote about listening to a series of Joseph Campbell lectures, The Myths and Masks of God. Campbell distinguishes four functions of mythology—the religious or mystical function (more specifically, he calls it “the mystical, properly religious function”), the cosmological function, the sociological function, and the individual psychological function. (I will not now take the time to define all of these; the interested reader is referred to Campbell’s many works.) In the course of this exposition Campbell formulates a wonderful and compelling definition of what he calls, “the primary religious attitude,” which he says is the:
“arousing and maintaining, in the spirit of the individual, a recognition and sense of wonder and awe before the absolute mystery of being itself, with affirmation and with gratitude… affirmation of life in being, as it is… ”
The Myths and Masks of God, disk 3, track 7
What we notice immediately about this is that it is a formulation that any naturalist can enthusiastically endorse. There is nothing otherworldly here, nothing supernatural or superstitious. Anyone, without any shred of belief in another world or without assenting to any theological proposition, can feel a sense of wonder and awe before the absolute mystery of being. Plato said that philosophy begins in wonder. I feel this myself, and I think that contemporary science encourages people to feel this wonder even as it seeks to understand the mystery. Indeed, Campbell in these lectures mentions in passing (mentions so quickly that I am sure many do not hear it, and many probably don’t hear it because they don’t want to hear it) that he prefers naturalistic formulations.
There is a different, but similarly compelling naturalistic formulation of religious experience in Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation: A Personal View:
“…although the Lutheran reform prohibited many of the arts that civilize our impulses, it encouraged church music. In small Dutch and German towns the choir and the organ became the only means through which men could enter the world of spiritualized emotion…”
Civilisation: A Personal View, Chapter 9, The Pursuit of Happiness
For Clark, spiritualized emotion is the center of human religious experience. Clark had earlier visited this theme in his discussion of iconoclasm during the Reformation, which reflection further deepens Clark’s implicit naturalistic conception of religion:
“…the motive [for iconoclasm] wasn’t so much religious as an instinct to destroy anything comely, anything that reflected a state of mind that an unevolved man couldn’t share. The existence of these incomprehensible values enraged them.”
Civilisation: A Personal View, Chapter 6, Protest and Communication
For Clark, religion at its best can serve a civilizing function that refines and elevates the emotional and communal life of man; religion here is a source of edification. Man is improved as man by cultivating what is best within the religious instincts. Clark’s naturalistic conception of religion in terms of spiritualized emotion is a more implicit formulation while Campbell’s formulation is a more-or-less explicit definition, but the similar intention to place religion within the life of man, and especially of man within society, is clear.
So far, so good. But there is more. The naturalistic conceptions of religion formulated by Campbell and Clark diverge when we look into them further. One of the themes that Campbell develops in many of his lectures is that the Western religious tradition has preserved specific features from antiquity that no longer allow the mythology of the West to serve the proper functions of mythology. The particular way in which Western man has elaborated his mythology had led it into a dead end. Western mythology must be freed from specific dogmas if it is to again be a living tradition. Campbell says:
“A ritual is an opportunity to participate in a myth. You are in one way or another putting your consciousness, even the action of your body, into play in relation to a mythological theme, and, as I hope I’ve made clear, mythological themes are projections of the order of the psyche… by participating in a ritual occasion you are in a magical field, a field that is putting you in touch with your own great depth. And then to have someone come along with an interpretation of that ritual that does not correspond to your experience of it, you are being cut off from the symbolic experience… The function of the church is best served when it gives people occasions and opportunities to participate in these great eternal mythic experiences without telling them telling them how to experience it, without telling what the meaning must be. What I’m saying is that the rites work but the dogmas don’t. When the rite comes along with a dogma attached to it that was formulated in the third century AD in the near east, and the ritual is presented here and you are having an experience of it, forget the dogma and experience the form. No artist sends along with the forms that he presents to you a statement of what they mean.”
The Myths and Masks of God, disk 5, track 9
Earlier in these lectures Campbell elaborated on this theme in an especially intriguing way:
“Popular religions all over the world, for the most part, are misunderstandings of … poetic images. The chief way to misunderstand an image is to imagine that it is a fact. One says to one’s beloved, “You are a rose,” “You are a swan,” and she says, “Make up your mind.” She’s what I would call a theologian.” (laughter from the audience follows)
The Myths and Masks of God, disk 4, track 1
There is an entire philosophy of theology implicit in this humorous passage from Campbell, and it would be worthwhile at some time to draw out the implications of this, but for now let us move on.
A very different perspective on rite, ritual, and ceremony in assumed by Clark in his exposition of the antecedents to the Protestant Reformation. Clark visited the museum in the castle on the hill in Wurzberg where there is a significant collection of carvings by Tilman Riemenschneider. Clark said:
“The Riemenschneider figures show very clearly the character of northern man at the end of the fifteenth century. First of all, a serious personal piety — a quality quite different from the bland conventional piety that one finds, say, in Perugino. And the a serious approach to life itself. These men (although of course they were unswerving Catholics) were not to be fobbed off by forms and ceremonies — what at the time were, rather misleadingly, called ‘works.’ They believed that there was such a thing as truth, and they wanted to get at it.”
Civilisation: A Personal View, Chapter 6, Protest and Communication
Here Clark clearly interprets northern man around 1500, primed for the Protestant Reformation, as an idealist. (I have been to the same museum and seen the Riemenschneider sculptures there, and I find Clark’s description of them better than anything I could have come up with on my own.) It would not be too much to say that Clark’s interpretation is itself idealist. The very idea that “forms and ceremonies” were something with which unserious men might be “fobbed off” but which serious men would never accept is diametrically opposed to the point of view presented by Joseph Campbell.
Previously, in Civilizations of the Image and of the Word, I mentioned Clark’s tendency to see the world from a Protestant point of view. This is another example of that. But it is also an example of the conception of social consensus based upon ideal aspirations. A few days ago in The Two Sources of Social Consensus I quoted my Variations on the Theme of Life to emphasize the difference between those who view the ideological superstructure of society as a necessary façade, a falsehood that must be propagated for the good of society — a distinguished group amongst which Plato must be counted, for he formulated near the beginning of Western history the idea of a “noble lie” with which the common people would be controlled by elite Guardians — and those who are committed to the idea that the ideological superstructure of society authentically reflect the ideals and aspirations of the people, and who are intolerant of human failings, foibles, and lapses.
While this is a schematic simplification, we could call these two perspectives, here represented by Campbell and Clark, the pragmatic conception and the idealistic conception of society. Both formulations are naturalistic in a thorough-going sense, but the shared naturalism of Campbell and Clark does not lead them to the same interpretation of religious experience. Even two naturalistic formulations of religions can profoundly differ. From this one might conclude that the difference is not necessarily in the religion or its ideas or its practice, but in something that transcends religion, something founded much more fundamentally in the world and in the human psyche.
The different temperaments of Campbell and Clark express themselves in different naturalistic interpretations of the role of religion within human society. These temperamental distinctions are deeper than the social expressions of temperament, and that is why these diverse temperaments manifest themselves in different forms, although repeatedly, throughout history. Campbell is an iconodule; Clark is an iconoclast — respectively, a naturalistic iconodule and a naturalistic iconoclast. Campbell is Catholic; Clark is Protestant — again, respectively, a naturalistic Catholic and a naturalistic Protestant. It is to be expected that these differences, and the dialectic between the two that emerges, will continue to be iterated throughout the future history of our civilization. The pattern is older and deeper than that which exhibits the pattern in its development.
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Two Forms of Spin
3 February 2010
Wednesday
Human beings are creators and innovators, both for good and ill. We are relentlessly productive not only of ideas and commodities, but also of ways to fool ourselves and others. Dishonesty is one of the great fields of human endeavor, and if for moral reasons it is difficult to appreciate the ingenuity and elegance of a perfect lie, on purely aesthetic grounds we have no basis upon which to withhold our admiration.
I‘m not sure if my own reaction to creative dishonesty is a function of moral disapproval or a more instinctive reaction of reason that rebels against fallacy and distortion. Knowledge, too, is a thing of beauty, and to disfigure knowledge — whether intentionally through lying to others or unintentionally through lying to oneself — is thus as much aesthetic as a logical offense.
Whether or not this could be called a fallacy I don’t know, but two forms of spin that are encountered in everyday life, and which annoy and irritate me whenever I notice them, involve the manipulation of the context in which something (anything) is presented. Of course, the manipulation of context is central to many forms of dishonesty. What I have in mind is this: presenting the usual as though it were unusual, or presenting the unusual as though it were usual.
We might call this the de-contextualization of frequency. In order to know what is usual and what is unusual (i.e., the typical frequency of anything), we must either rely on our experience (which may be unrepresentative) or have statistics. This, of course, presents problems of its own. Statistics are notoriously used and misused. Statistics themselves must be placed in a proper context in order that they not distort that which they presume to represent.
While individual experience may be unrepresentative of human experience on the whole, and even less representative of sentient experience generally speaking, we are all nevertheless experts on our own life. if we are not engaged in self-deception, we know it right away when someone tries to tell us that something that is unusual in our experience is common for us, or that something that is common is unusual. From this personal point of view, we extrapolate, first to those who live lives most like our own, and then, hopefully with corroborating evidence, to those with lives less like our own.
For all our shortcomings, and all our vulnerability to dishonest representations to ourselves and to others, on the whole human beings are excellent intuitive inductive reasoners. It is this intuitive inductive faculty that immediately makes us suspicious when something is represented to us out of its inductive context. Yet an expert in deception, even an expert in self-deception (whose instincts for cunning are as sure as the inductive instinct in most of us), can artfully twist the world around until the implausible becomes plausible.
One must continually practice the intellectual equivalent of what security types call situational awareness in order to prevent oneself from being taken in by subtle and artful manipulation.
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The Two Sources of Social Consensus
2 February 2010
Tuesday
Ken Lay does the 'perp walk'.
Yesterday in Hang ‘Em High I wrote about popular expressions of discontent and the scapegoating of representatives of the financial services industry for the recent recession and its consequences. This is a topic that deserves a closer look because it points to structural problems that emerge in a society when social consensus is lacking.
In this forum I have several times written about the problems surrounding social consensus, for example, in Social Consensus in Industrialized Society. It has been my contention that the profound changes forced upon human societies by the industrial revolution have not yet fully played themselves out, moreover that industrialized societies have attempted several models of social consensus after industrialization but that none of these has proved sustainable, and that a sustainable social consensus remains to be achieved.
Contemporary industrialized democracies, while they represent the most advanced social organization in the world today, are the most likely to suffer from an absence of social consensus. The mobility of labor, now approaching a global mobility of labor, results in highly diverse societies that cannot simply return to a single paradigm of the past because there is no single paradigm from the past: there are many paradigms, each of which goes deep in the past of each social unit, but each of which applies to no other social unit. It is more difficult to achieve social consensus in a diverse society because people are coming from difficult backgrounds and have fundamentally different values and fundamentally different ways of thinking.
The western tradition in particular has cultivated its own internal diversity, and this in itself is sometimes offensive to new arrivals in westernized nation-states. In other words, there is no agreement on a particularly western way of achieving social consensus and domestic harmony. From a moral point of view, there are at least two fundamentally different ways of conceiving the very essence and nature of social consensus. In my Variations on the Theme of Life I wrote the following:
There is a profound difference between, on the one hand, the man who sees the absurd rhetoric of public morality as a necessary façade, an appearance that must be maintained for the edification and instruction of the young, without which the unsteady norms of society would collapse and take all of us with it, and, on the other hand, the man who sees this keeping up of appearances as intrinsically dishonest and inauthentic, and any delay in its demolition as contributing to the depth of our corruption. Both genuinely believe in the good (unlike the nihilist), and both recognize the façade for what it is (unlike the dupe or the fool), but these similarities are insufficient to bridge the chasm between the mundane goods of stability and prosperity on the one hand, and on the other the ideal goods of principles for their own sake. (section 122)
Depending upon which of the two moral attitudes outlined above that one takes in regard to social consensus, certain judgments about appropriate public policy will follow. One’s attitude to issues of justice, and more especially to exemplary justice, are a function of whether one considers public life to be a necessary façade, as as-if believed only by fools, or whether one considers public life to be sacred and therefore to be maintained above any possible reproach.
When there is a high degree of public discontent, as we see today in regard to both the economy and political life (such as I discussed yesterday in regard to fantasies of exemplary justice meted out to CEOs and bankers who are believed to have hoodwinked the public), a public exercise of exemplary justice can have a cathartic effect, dispersing energies that might otherwise erupt violently in riots or revolution.
A little exemplary justice can take the edge off an angry crowd.
There is a limited (very limited) recognition of the need for cathartic exemplary justice in the contemporary industrialized democracies. In the US, I have in mind what the media calls the “perp walk.” Wikipedia defines the perp walk thus: “A perp walk can be intentional disregard for the privacy of a suspect, for the purpose of bolstering the image of law enforcement, to humiliate a suspect, both, or neither. Perp walks are often done to politicians or businesspeople accused of white-collar crimes (whose reputations may be susceptible to damage by public spectacle).” I especially remember the perp walks of Jim Bakker, disgraced televangelist (if memory serves he was in leg irons and a bright orange jumpsuit), and Ken Lay, former CEO of ENRON, who was convicted but died before he was sentenced.
Politicized show trials have long been a staple of exemplary justice.
Compared to the kind of exemplary justice the world witnessed with Soviet and Nazi show trials, the perp walk isn’t much, but still it can function as a focus of public outrage. People can convince themselves that someone has been punished for transgressions and that the moral order of the world has thus been restored.
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Hang ‘Em High
1 February 2010
Monday
Today when I was driving on I-5 in Portland I noticed a rather graphic expression of popular discontent and working class resentment. I tried to get a picture (see below) but it was raining heavily and my windshield was too smeared to get a clear shot. The pickup in the photograph had large green letters on his back bumper that said, “INSERT CEO HERE.” There was an arrow pointing to the right, and on the far right side of the bumper was a competently tied hanging noose. This is “gallows humor” for the executioners, rather than the victims. And, as we know, many a truth is spoken in jest.
Who are the intended victims? The way the media has been spinning the economic crisis and the recession we have been through, the intended victims are the named (and anonymous) CEOs, but also bankers and investors and fund managers and the whole panoply of financial professionals who wear suits to work and make lots of money. Bankers are soft targets, and always have been. Americans retain in their collective unconscious all those Teddy Roosevelt-era cartoons of trust-busting showing enormously fat bankers with bags of money and cash sticking out of their pockets.
Nothing about the anti-CEO, anti-corporate, anti-banker sentiment is surprising. People want to put a face on their misery and frustration. Any convenient face will do, but it has become socially unacceptable to scapegoat many of the groups once ostracized and abused by mainstream society in times of crisis. The rich, such as CEOs and bankers, have not yet achieved that untouchable status, and thus are acceptable targets of outrage in the public mind.
It is interesting to note that the recession from which the US is aat present recovering was primarily triggered by the sub-prime mortgage collapse, and one of the first effects of the recession was to put a lot of bankers out of work. I believe I commented on this at the time (for example, in Quote of the Day). There were some ridiculous articles in the financial press (I am thinking primarily of the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times) from and about wealthy and powerful mucky-mucks who were having a hard time accepting the fact that people with six figure incomes could suddenly be without a job and without prospects. It was grim, and many people convinced themselves that it was worse than grim.
And then the recession came. It wasn’t just bankers, then, it was a lot of people losing their jobs. The world economy stumbled. And then the recovery started. The last quarter (the fourth quarter of 2009) was pretty good for investors. Banks wanted to reward their best performers, but in the present political climate this had become political suicide, and bonuses to bankers become radioactive.
Employment is always a trailing indicator of economic growth. When an economy is shrinking, employers delay laying off workers as long as they can. In a recovery, employers delay hiring new staff as long as they can. As a result, whenever there is an economic recovery after a recession, there are reports in the papers of renewed economic, which is rapidly followed by a public outcry that the recovery is illusory because the job market is still soft. This is what is happening now. It is no surprise. It always happens.
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