Remora

Time and Western Man, or Amis and his buddies

When LI sees a fly, we never grab a flyswatter; we grab an Uzi...

Or so it might seem to the always patient readers of this post. Our last post, you'll remember, started out as a scolding of Martin Amis' latest book, and then detoured, radically, through Russell's paradox of George IV and the author of Waverly.

It occured to us, after we posted our mini-treatise, that the effect of the paradox might be blunted for the contemporary reader who does not know that Walter Scott published Waverly anonymously. The resulting publicity was much like that gained by Primary Colors, which was published anonymously, and generated enough controversy that the author of it became a public issue. So one can update Russell's paradox cleverly enough this way: Bill Clinton wished to know if Joe Klein is the author of Primary Colors.

In any case, we've seen Russell's solution to his puzzle involves reforming the logical structure of description in conformity with the requirements of the truth function.

LI had an un-Russellian reason for going through Russell's paradox. The context that fills in the variable of signification, from Russell's example, has a before and after structure. It is, in other words, historical.

Now, like many English philosophers, Russell wasn't comfortable with time. He preferred to eliminate time as a determinant in the work of logical analysis. A good essay from the same era as Russell's "On Denoting" is available on the web: McTaggart's The Unreality of Time, which was published in Mind in 1908. LI can't resist alluding to McTaggart's argument -- one by which he proves the objective non-existence of time (and incidentally, announces a view of events that will later be developed by Donald Davidson). The argument is that there are two series that can be extracted from the prima facie view of time:


"Positions in time, as time appears to us prima facie, are distinguished in two ways. Each position is Earlier than some, and Later than some, of the other positions. And each position is either Past, Present, or Future. The distinctions of the former class are permanent, while those of the latter are not. If M is ever earlier than N, it is always earlier. But an event, which is now present, was future and will be past."

McTaggart calls the series of earlier and later the B series, and the Past Present Future series the A series. In the B series, given an event (for McTaggart, the fundamental elements of the two series), it's description, with relation to another event, will always be described as earlier or later. But in the A series, oddly enough, all three descriptions will apply. At one point an event will be present, at another point it will be future, and at one point it will be past.

McTaggart throws in another characteristic of time -- he connects it to change. A world in which nothing , including thought, changed, would, McTaggart claims, be timeless. What this means is that time is being treated two ways in McTaggarts essay -- both as a metric and as a content. His contention, really, is that time, insofar as it is a metric, is a formal device, not an objective property of reality:


Take any event -- the death of Queen Anne, for example -- and consider what change can take place in its characteristics. That it is a death, that it is the death of Anne Stuart, that it has such causes, that it has such effects -- every characteristic of this sort never changes. "Before the stars saw one another plain" the event in question was a death of an English Queen. At the last moment of time -- if time has a last moment -- the event in question will still be a death of an English Queen. And in every respect but one it is equally devoid of change. But in one respect it does change. It began by being a future event. It became every moment an event in the nearer future. At last it was present. Then it became past, and will always remain so, though every moment it becomes further and further past. Thus we seen forced to the conclusion that all change is only a change of the characteristics imparted to events by their presence in the A series, whether those characteristics are qualities or relations.

LI is realizing, as we write this, that McTaggart is much more interesting than the mere political point we wanted to make about Amis...

Okay, the point here (sans McTaggart) is this. Given a commie sympathizer in the US in 1933, we can make the sentence, X sympathizes with Stalin. However, can we then substitute the phrase, X sympathizes with the leader who ordered the starvation of 2 million people in the Ukraine? I think not. On the other hand, given a Nazi sympathizer in 1933, could we substitute the phrase, X sympathizes with the leader who ordered the elimination of the European Jews? I think so. Of course, this is a statement that would have to be modified according to cases. Did Charles Lindbergh sympathize with Auschwitz? I'd guess no. Did he sympathize with shipping Jews to 'special work areas"? I'd guess yes. The expulsion of the Jews from Germany was in full swing by 1938. The consequences of supporting Hitler were, in other words, vividly in the Western consciousness by then. So, too, the reader might say, were Stalin's show trials. And yes, there is no excuse by that time to sympathize with Stalin. This is precisely the point made by numerous Trotskyist dissidents in the thirties -- and even the twenties. Boris Souveraine and Victor Serge are the names that come immediately to mind. Emma Goldman made her dissatisfaction known much before then. Remember, though, these folks were treated the way Naderites are treated by the flaks of the Democrat Party -- as annoying excrescenses impeding the flow of history.

Now, this isn't to exculpate the Stalinist sympathizer. It is simply to restore the historical circumstances surrounding that sympathy, which is that sometimes, to will the end isn't to will the means, and sometimes it is. To will the end, for a commie symp in the US, circa 1933, was to will the end of racial discrimination, the end of killing wealth disparities, the end of the depression, the end of a number of injustices. And guess what? These were good goals. In the same way, the commie party member in France in 1959 was willing the end of the Algerian war -- another good goal.

So, simply put: the distance between the real end of Naziism and goal one willed as a sympathizer of Naziism is much closer than the distance between the real end of Stalinism and the goal one willed as a Stalinist.

Now, real ends are mixed. As we have often emphasized on this weblog, the history of atrocities committed in the name of Western imperialism by no means ends with the elimination of the Indians and the slave trade. If you look at the history of British domination of India, pace Naipaul, you'll notice that nothing like the Bengal famine of 43 -- 44 has occured since India was taken over by Indians. The very good reason for this is that the British rulers were criminally negligent or worse when it came to the lives of Indians. But even throwing in the Bengal famine, one can sympathize even now with Churchill as against the Axis without sympathizing with the contrivances that lead to the Bengal famine.

The moral of this is that the goals willed by the commies of 1930 aren't infected by the means used to affect those goals: for the simple reason that those means didn't achieve those goals, and for the more complicated reason that those means, in their immorality, overshadowed the immoralities they were supposed to overthrow.