Bollettino
A peace agreement in Sudan was quietly heralded in Western presses this week. The Financial Times reported it like this on Friday:
"People would like to go back. So we are waiting now for peace." The speaker is Wol Amuk Guot, acknowledged chief of a sector of Wad al-Bashir, a camp for internally displaced persons outside Khartoum. He comes from southern Sudan, where six of his children live. He has not watched them grow up, and has not seen his mother for 14 years
An end to Sudan's 20-year war between the Arab Muslim government in Khartoum and rebels from the mostly animist and Christian south is now tantalisingly close. How many of these long-term refugees will be on the move again nobody can tell.
…
The war, one of the longest and costliest in African history, is reckoned to have claimed 2m lives and to have uprooted 4m people like these, making Sudan's population of IDPs - or internally displaced persons - the largest in the world. Fighting this year in a separate conflict in the western Darfur region, bordering Chad, is thought to have displaced at least another 600,000 people. More than 500,000 others are refugees in neighbouring countries.”
Nowhere has the curse of oil been as horrible as Sudan. It is the curse that is behind this peace – the main southern Sudanese militia, Sudan People's Liberation Movement, wants to share in the oil wealth with the Islamicist government. This curious workmanship of this agreement is the result of a number of different pressures. There is, as the major factor, oil. The oil comes from the South, which is Christian and animist, and goes to an elite in the North, which is military and Islamicist. That elite also condones the slave trade that sells Southerners to households in Khartoum. In the South, there’s a rebel authority that is as handy with the tools of massacre and torture as any Northern army. Between the two of them, an agreement has been jimmied up and blessed by the International Monetary Fund.
These are shadows and portents of something bad under the surface, a sharing of booty among various violent oligarchs, who attach as accepted costs to the sucking up of petrol by the giant American, European and, now, Chinese and Indian concerns. That tiers-mondialisme that was supposed to operate as a third force? Forget it. The Indians and Chinese are as willing as the Americans and the French to press oil profits out of African flesh and blood.
From Lord of the flies we go to a democracy of flies, a globalisation of flies. Of course, the slaving goes on; the impoverishment of the already impoverished goes on; the pushing of Africa into ever deeper pits goes on; and the engines in a million cars turn over morning after morning.
The latest deal is for a new constitution, power sharing between Garang and the Northern government, and a referendum, six years from now, on succession for the South. It isn’t hard to see that this deal is going to be violated. One diplomat interviewed by the FT calls it more like a prolonged truce. One does wonder whether the truce will be animated by a coalition force directed against the rebels on the Chad border. Truces are only stages to further violence in Sudan’s post-colonial history.
The World Today has a nice backgrounder on the whole thing by Jemera Rone, who is attached to the Human Rights Watch. She points to the role of Christian pressure groups on the Bush people, who sent John Danforth as an envoy to Sudan to try to negotiate this settlement. The Troika of the U.S., Norway and Norway have been persistent about getting the talks going, and hammering out some agreement. But as Rone points out,
“One of the main controversies is that only the main two fighting forces are party to the talks; neither was chosen in free and fair elections. Northern political parties, which repeatedly won elections in democratic times, and southern militia leaders threaten that as long as they are excluded, the agreement will be no more than a pact between 'two dictators' - which they are not obliged to recognise.”
This dovetails with the peace treaty’s central problem:
“Also controversial is the absence of any provision for human rights accountability. The Troika has not made serious accountability or truth proposals, and the parties - which have terrible human rights records - do not want to end up in jail. But this would be a big step backward from other recent African agreements providing some form of justice at war's end, or at the very least, disclosure.
Indeed, one of the chief causes of the war's persistence and spread beyond the south - to central Sudan in the 1980s, the east in the 1990s, and the west this year - is that the ruling Islamist-military party does not respect diversity among Muslims and Arabs, much less the country's African majority. There are gross abuses of the rights of the majority. If the government could abandon its central programme of Islamising and Arabising the people and agree to real multi-party democracy and human rights, peace might have a chance.”
The whole depressing saga of the poisonous alliance between oil and the Sudanese government’s policy of massacre as a twisted sort of land reform is detailed on the Human Rights Watch site, here.
Sunday, December 28, 2003
Wednesday, December 24, 2003
When LI was on hiatus this summer in Portland, we spent a day hiking with L., our friend and an associate of ex – Microsoft exec, billionaire telecommunications wizard Paul Allen. L., like many of the people who are close to “Paulie,” as she teasingly calls him, is on a program to read the great novels. She was just coming off of Anna Karenina. I told her that the greatest female character in 19th century European lit, as far as I was concerned, was Anna Ozores, the Judge’s wife at the center of La Regenta.
L. had not heard of La Regenta. This didn’t surprise us. LI would never have read La Regenta either, or heard of it, if we didn’t have a habit of trolling the aisles of libraries, our shoulders hunched up like that of an old crow, dreamily pulling tomes off the shelf and looking at first paragraphs, blurbs, pictures of authors, etc. etc. Years ago, when we came upon La Regenta, we were in the mood for a long 19th century novel. At that time, believe it or not, we were living in utter poverty (gasp!), renting a room for a pittance from our friend H. That La Regenta was a long novel was all the reason we needed to check it out and take it home. We have a lovely memory of reading the book in great big gulps: a reel of reading, a continuum, a glide down a slide. We immediately grouped Anna with Nana in terms of overpowering sexiness. But Clarin, unlike Zola, was not in the habit of drooling over his heroine. In fact, Anna is quite intelligent; Nana merely has the intelligence God would have given to any more than usually shrewd member of the 19th century demi-monde. Purge the odor of sex around Nana, and you have an operator, a nineteenth century capitalist of her own extraordinary pussy, whose vital instincts have merged with the utilitarian calculus preferred by the laissez faire economists of the time in much the way any captain of industry’s did. Her industry was orgasm, Carnegie’s was steel. Same diff.
However, we had not returned to the novel since those golden times. L. informed us, a month ago, that the book was out of print. How shocking and stupid of Penguin. We decided, over the holiday, to treat ourselves to the novel once again.
The edition we are reading was put out by University of Georgia Press. Warning: it carries a completely bogus introduction by the translator, John Rutherford. The innocent reader, stumbling into the intro, might flee from the book entirely to escape the babbitry in which Rutherford so abounds. After congratulating Leopoldo Alas, aka Clarin, for having anticipated Freud (it was the fashion, back in the sixties and seventies, to take anything anyone said about sex before Freud to be valuable insofar as it anticipated Freud, or quaint insofar as it disagreed with him – Freud being to sex what Edison was to illumination), Rutherford reaches the very zenith of platitudes with the following sentence: ‘But thanks to its universal themes, psychological insight and technical boldness, it [the novel] has proved itself to be worthy of the attention of modern men and women.’
Oh, what bliss, to be worthy of the attention of modern men and women! The heart sings like a robin… A poisoned robin.
Too much of that kind of thing makes one wonder if the translation is going to be any good. Ignorant of Spanish, we can’t vouch for its accuracy – but it achieves a consistent tone well above the introduction’s heady sampling of Rutherfordism. And there aren’t big mistakes in the English – a state of affairs that is rare, nowadays. It is amazing, the carelessness of publishers who publish translations. This is a subject we have had plenty of reviewing experience of. Ça suffit…
We are happy to note that we hold to our original judgment: La Regenta kicks Anna Karenina’s ass.
The only way to justify this would be to go through the novel at much greater length than we have time for. Instead, let’s excerpt a paragraph.
Here’s the context. Anna Ozores is the daughter of an Italian dressmaker and a petty liberal aristocrat. The seamstress dies, the petty liberal aristocrat gives himself over to the struggle to remake Spain, and then retires in disgust in a small bungalow, having shot his inherited wad. On his death, Anna, who is a scrawny teen in the throes of her first menses, is taken in by her two spinster aunts in Vetusta, a backwards cathedral town. Her aunts intentionally “plump” Anna up – and she cooperates, realizing that her aunts want to make her “eligible.” Since she doesn’t have money, her ‘eligibility’ will have to consist of her blue blood – mention of the dressmaker is under strict rature – and her beauty, which in due time blossoms. Anna is one of those 19th century beauties – poitrine a la Nana, haunches like J-Lo. That Anna has a knack for writing is discovered by the aunts, and firmly suppressed as a vice. And so the aunts put her on the market, so to speak. They catch a millionaire, an ‘American’ who has returned to Vetusta and wants to buy the biggest house and the town beauty. Anna refuses. She is being courted, at this time, by an older man, Don Victor Quintanas. This is the description of her aunt Anuncia’s receiving Anna’s refusal of the millionaire. The scene is set in the dining room. There’s a fire in the fire place – otherwise, the room, one presumes, is not illuminated. The aunts have their little ways to save money:
“But Dona Anuncia needed no more to let loose the basilisk of fury which she carried in her bowels. Her shadow, amidst all the other shadows on the wall, at times resembled that of a gigantic witch; at other times, multiplied by the flickering flames and the old woman’s jerks and contortions, it represented all hell let loose. There were moments when Dona Anuncia’s shadow had three heads on the wall and three or four others on the ceiling, and it seemed that screams and shrieks were coming from all of them, so strident were her vociferations.”
Obviously, Alas is fusing, here, a memory of Goya’s Caprichios and a motif out of European folklore to create this scene – but how brilliantly it succeeds! LI has found that arguments are extremely hard to depict in fiction. As any rookie knows, modifications of “said’ are always rather iffy – yelled, vociferated, sarcastically observed, shrieked, cried – the lexicon is there, but the effects fall short of the intensity one wishes to convey, as though one were playing the keys of a piano in which the wires had been cut. The shadow play, here, supplies a context that does everything: merges the economics of marriage to a primal scene of cannibalism; caps the whole extended metaphor of plumping Anna up – a metaphor that creates, on one end, sympathy for a woman who is, after all, simply eating, and on the other end, transforms the cooks into monsters; and finally, it gives us a sense of just how close Anna is to that soap bubble film separating perception from hallucination. This quality is at the heart of her poetic talent. It is also at the heart of her downfall.
We could go on…
Just one other thing. We’ve mentioned this before – in fact, one of our first posts, back in 01, was about this. The relation between time and suspense in novels has never really been spelled out to our satisfaction. A novel in which a man is depicted borrowing money has installed a timer in its code – the timer is the debt. Time will be measured by the debt coming due. Time spatializes itself in the actions of the indebted man – the axe he finds to get rid of the pawnbroker from whom he has borrowed sums, the marriage he intends with the rich merchant’s daughter, etc., etc. There are all sorts of timers in the novel’s code. Here we see metaphor acting as a timer – the plumping out process has to end, for one thing – Anna can’t become too fat. She has to achieve a healthy avoidupois. For another, since this is a plumping up, the timer is running on the aunts. Eventually, they have to make good on their side of the metaphor – they have to become the monsters that plump up humans, that feed on human flesh. It is an agricultural metaphor, indicating an agricultural original sin – the slaughtering of the fed beast. Since feeding is, after all, a gift, one of the great founding gifts of society, to feed and then to slaughter is a contradiction that sets in motion a whole exculpatory ethic.
We could go on…
L. had not heard of La Regenta. This didn’t surprise us. LI would never have read La Regenta either, or heard of it, if we didn’t have a habit of trolling the aisles of libraries, our shoulders hunched up like that of an old crow, dreamily pulling tomes off the shelf and looking at first paragraphs, blurbs, pictures of authors, etc. etc. Years ago, when we came upon La Regenta, we were in the mood for a long 19th century novel. At that time, believe it or not, we were living in utter poverty (gasp!), renting a room for a pittance from our friend H. That La Regenta was a long novel was all the reason we needed to check it out and take it home. We have a lovely memory of reading the book in great big gulps: a reel of reading, a continuum, a glide down a slide. We immediately grouped Anna with Nana in terms of overpowering sexiness. But Clarin, unlike Zola, was not in the habit of drooling over his heroine. In fact, Anna is quite intelligent; Nana merely has the intelligence God would have given to any more than usually shrewd member of the 19th century demi-monde. Purge the odor of sex around Nana, and you have an operator, a nineteenth century capitalist of her own extraordinary pussy, whose vital instincts have merged with the utilitarian calculus preferred by the laissez faire economists of the time in much the way any captain of industry’s did. Her industry was orgasm, Carnegie’s was steel. Same diff.
However, we had not returned to the novel since those golden times. L. informed us, a month ago, that the book was out of print. How shocking and stupid of Penguin. We decided, over the holiday, to treat ourselves to the novel once again.
The edition we are reading was put out by University of Georgia Press. Warning: it carries a completely bogus introduction by the translator, John Rutherford. The innocent reader, stumbling into the intro, might flee from the book entirely to escape the babbitry in which Rutherford so abounds. After congratulating Leopoldo Alas, aka Clarin, for having anticipated Freud (it was the fashion, back in the sixties and seventies, to take anything anyone said about sex before Freud to be valuable insofar as it anticipated Freud, or quaint insofar as it disagreed with him – Freud being to sex what Edison was to illumination), Rutherford reaches the very zenith of platitudes with the following sentence: ‘But thanks to its universal themes, psychological insight and technical boldness, it [the novel] has proved itself to be worthy of the attention of modern men and women.’
Oh, what bliss, to be worthy of the attention of modern men and women! The heart sings like a robin… A poisoned robin.
Too much of that kind of thing makes one wonder if the translation is going to be any good. Ignorant of Spanish, we can’t vouch for its accuracy – but it achieves a consistent tone well above the introduction’s heady sampling of Rutherfordism. And there aren’t big mistakes in the English – a state of affairs that is rare, nowadays. It is amazing, the carelessness of publishers who publish translations. This is a subject we have had plenty of reviewing experience of. Ça suffit…
We are happy to note that we hold to our original judgment: La Regenta kicks Anna Karenina’s ass.
The only way to justify this would be to go through the novel at much greater length than we have time for. Instead, let’s excerpt a paragraph.
Here’s the context. Anna Ozores is the daughter of an Italian dressmaker and a petty liberal aristocrat. The seamstress dies, the petty liberal aristocrat gives himself over to the struggle to remake Spain, and then retires in disgust in a small bungalow, having shot his inherited wad. On his death, Anna, who is a scrawny teen in the throes of her first menses, is taken in by her two spinster aunts in Vetusta, a backwards cathedral town. Her aunts intentionally “plump” Anna up – and she cooperates, realizing that her aunts want to make her “eligible.” Since she doesn’t have money, her ‘eligibility’ will have to consist of her blue blood – mention of the dressmaker is under strict rature – and her beauty, which in due time blossoms. Anna is one of those 19th century beauties – poitrine a la Nana, haunches like J-Lo. That Anna has a knack for writing is discovered by the aunts, and firmly suppressed as a vice. And so the aunts put her on the market, so to speak. They catch a millionaire, an ‘American’ who has returned to Vetusta and wants to buy the biggest house and the town beauty. Anna refuses. She is being courted, at this time, by an older man, Don Victor Quintanas. This is the description of her aunt Anuncia’s receiving Anna’s refusal of the millionaire. The scene is set in the dining room. There’s a fire in the fire place – otherwise, the room, one presumes, is not illuminated. The aunts have their little ways to save money:
“But Dona Anuncia needed no more to let loose the basilisk of fury which she carried in her bowels. Her shadow, amidst all the other shadows on the wall, at times resembled that of a gigantic witch; at other times, multiplied by the flickering flames and the old woman’s jerks and contortions, it represented all hell let loose. There were moments when Dona Anuncia’s shadow had three heads on the wall and three or four others on the ceiling, and it seemed that screams and shrieks were coming from all of them, so strident were her vociferations.”
Obviously, Alas is fusing, here, a memory of Goya’s Caprichios and a motif out of European folklore to create this scene – but how brilliantly it succeeds! LI has found that arguments are extremely hard to depict in fiction. As any rookie knows, modifications of “said’ are always rather iffy – yelled, vociferated, sarcastically observed, shrieked, cried – the lexicon is there, but the effects fall short of the intensity one wishes to convey, as though one were playing the keys of a piano in which the wires had been cut. The shadow play, here, supplies a context that does everything: merges the economics of marriage to a primal scene of cannibalism; caps the whole extended metaphor of plumping Anna up – a metaphor that creates, on one end, sympathy for a woman who is, after all, simply eating, and on the other end, transforms the cooks into monsters; and finally, it gives us a sense of just how close Anna is to that soap bubble film separating perception from hallucination. This quality is at the heart of her poetic talent. It is also at the heart of her downfall.
We could go on…
Just one other thing. We’ve mentioned this before – in fact, one of our first posts, back in 01, was about this. The relation between time and suspense in novels has never really been spelled out to our satisfaction. A novel in which a man is depicted borrowing money has installed a timer in its code – the timer is the debt. Time will be measured by the debt coming due. Time spatializes itself in the actions of the indebted man – the axe he finds to get rid of the pawnbroker from whom he has borrowed sums, the marriage he intends with the rich merchant’s daughter, etc., etc. There are all sorts of timers in the novel’s code. Here we see metaphor acting as a timer – the plumping out process has to end, for one thing – Anna can’t become too fat. She has to achieve a healthy avoidupois. For another, since this is a plumping up, the timer is running on the aunts. Eventually, they have to make good on their side of the metaphor – they have to become the monsters that plump up humans, that feed on human flesh. It is an agricultural metaphor, indicating an agricultural original sin – the slaughtering of the fed beast. Since feeding is, after all, a gift, one of the great founding gifts of society, to feed and then to slaughter is a contradiction that sets in motion a whole exculpatory ethic.
We could go on…
Bollettino
LI recommends the new weblog, The Loom, by a science writer, Carl Zimmer. We especially recommend this piece on William Hamilton, who is one of LI’s favorite intellectuals of the last fifty years. Zimmer reports that Hamilton, who died (as Zimmer does not distract himself to explain, died -- beginning of excursus -- while trying to find support for the thesis about AIDs propounded by Ed Hooper in The River – a thesis that has been ‘disproven’ only to the extent that Hooper’s extended point, which is that AIDS was actually activated by a polio serum, is probably wrong – but that it was spread by that serum remains, to our mind, a startlingly good thesis – end of excursus) in 2000, had been working on a theory about why leaves turn red and yellow in the fall. The larger details of the theory are here.
LI recommends the new weblog, The Loom, by a science writer, Carl Zimmer. We especially recommend this piece on William Hamilton, who is one of LI’s favorite intellectuals of the last fifty years. Zimmer reports that Hamilton, who died (as Zimmer does not distract himself to explain, died -- beginning of excursus -- while trying to find support for the thesis about AIDs propounded by Ed Hooper in The River – a thesis that has been ‘disproven’ only to the extent that Hooper’s extended point, which is that AIDS was actually activated by a polio serum, is probably wrong – but that it was spread by that serum remains, to our mind, a startlingly good thesis – end of excursus) in 2000, had been working on a theory about why leaves turn red and yellow in the fall. The larger details of the theory are here.
Monday, December 22, 2003
Bollettino
"The IMAGINATION, then, I consider as primary, or secondary. The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human PERCEPTION, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of CREATION in the infinite I AM. The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, coexisting with the conscious will, yet still identical with the primary in the kind of its cogency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates,in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still, at all event, it struggles to idealize and to unify." -- Coleridge
A week ago, my best bud and alter ego, D., sent me a news item from the NYT. The item was about Sharon’s speech. The speech didn’t surprise me. Sharon proposed that the Wall would be the basis for a line between Israel and Palestine. There was nothing unexpected in this, if you know Sharon’s history. D. was indignant, to the extent he ever gets indignant.
This, too, wasn’t unexpected. All my lefty friends at one time or another get indignant about Israel. When Israel bombs a refugee camp and kills Palestinian kids, they get red thinking about what a criminal state it is. When Palestinian kids blow up Israeli kids, they get suddenly rational: it is only a matter of the just struggle for the liberation of Palestine, blah blah blah.
I have experienced the other side too, from people who seem to think that the Palestinians should conveniently vanish, like the Cherokees or the Tasmanians. A couple of years ago, in L.A. I was having lunch with two friends, and one of them began a long rant about what a pissy character Yassar Arafat is, and how he bungled the chance for peace in 2000. Etc. The guy’s gripe was the idea of Return – that Arafat supported the right to return of Palestinians who were evicted from their land. This would make more sense if Israel didn’t also have an extensive policy giving French or Russian or Greenland Jews a right to Return – and dumping them in settlements on Palestinian land.
Now, Israel doesn’t excite my passions in quite this way. I see, on the left, the displacement of the Palestinians provoking tears and fellow travelers, martyrs that put themselves in the path of bulldozers, etc. etc. Where is the indignation about, say, the Arabization of Kirkuk, or the slave raids on Southern Sudanese Christian tribes? To mention only two examples. These, apparently, are indignations best left to specialists. On the right, of course, there has been this odd conjunction between the traditional anti-semitic Christians and the neo-cons. To criticize Israel, or not even Israel, but Sharon’s Israel, is to commit the blood crime of anti-semitism.
We can all get indignant, one way or another, about Israel.
I’ve written about Israel before. My position is well known. It is crystal, ahem, clear. It is, uh (where’d I put those notes?) the position of conscience (hey, did you hear the one about the rabbi, the rabbit and the priest? Oh, another time…) of an independent intellectual proud … did I say proud? Conscience, yeah I said conscience. Okay, drum roll please…
Okay, I don’t have a position about Israel. I have several, and some contradict each other.
That Israel unjustly drove out the Palestinians, or many Palestinians, seems beyond a doubt. That this founding act of violence was succeeded by the creation of a viable state seems beyond a doubt. There are many things to like about Israel. Other states have engulfed aid in amounts as huge as Israel’s, and the aid has basically swollen bank accounts in Switzerland. Israel, perhaps because the original founders preserved the old Socialist ethics, never went that route. All things being equal, Tel Aviv should be, to the Middle East, what Beirut was to it in the fifties – the financial center of the world. This is due, in part, to Israel bombing the shit out of Beirut in the eighties. And so it goes, ethical/dialectical tic tac toe.
I don’t think a treaty will bring peace to Israel or Palestine, although it will be a start. Rather, a more essential change has to happen.
That Israel, unlike other states in the post-colonial world, was expressly the product of the same European romantic nationalism that produced Germany and Italy (and failed to produce Scotland and Corsica) is the heart of the fascination of the place, and its current dilemma.
Bracket the violence. Bracket the struggle between Israel and Palestine. Even if you have a strong Marxist belief that the essence of the state emerges from struggle, it is still distinct from that struggle. What I think has been lost, in the talk of peace treaties and suicide bombers, is the question: what is Israel?
In 1949, Israel was pretty clearly the homeland of the Jews. But is that true in 2003? Is Israel forever identical to the homeland of the Jews?
There’s a story in the NYT today that presents this question under the guise of comedy. There is a small tribe in India that apparently embraced Judaism in the twentieth century. Their own story is that they are descendents of a lost tribe. So there is an organization, Amishav, who sponsor them. The Indians are dumped in Palestinian territories and given lessons in Hebrew. Between bouts of incomprehensible teaching, there is always kosher curry.
This is funny. It is also cruelly sad.
The reality of Israel is that its success as a state has distanced it from its status as a symbolic object. As a state, Israel is populated by Israelis, not Jews. But that state is still dependent on its symbolism – dependent on a world wide Jewish community’s feeling for Israel as a homeland of the Jews. A homeland that that world wide community, in the U.S., France, Canada, Italy, etc., has no intention, by and large, of moving to.
In other words, Israel, the state, wears a mask. The mask is that Israel is the homeland of the Jews. The mask is suffocating the state.
Masks and Powers, a well known essay by Africanist Elizabeth Tonkin, fleshes out this metaphor in a fruitful way.
Tonkin goes to the quote from Coleridge I’ve given at the head of this post to distinguish two levels of the imagination. Corresponding to those levels, there are two kinds of analyses of masks. Her analysis of masks is connected to her field work in Africa, where the mask connects up to ancestral spirits. The mask event, as she calls it, requires that there be a sense of the dead captured by the mask; that there be a position open in the semantic field for the non-masked; and that the dead have power:
Here is a fascinating passage. Note -- Tonkin capitalizes Mask to mean something like a mask with a spirit:
"Every Mask is part of an event, which can only be intelligible when understood as a performance with complex interactions between Masks and non-maskers. Indigenous explanations show that these are seen either as the actions of power or as the actions needed for its production. Power, all reporters agree, resides in the Mask (and often also in the mask on its own). The Mask is the exponent of power, which is manifested in all its actions – not just those which may be deemed instrumental exerting ‘social control’ to express power is to make power."
Masks events collect around rites of passage. As Tonkin puts it, they are metaphors-in-action, “transform[ing] events themselves of mediat[ing] between structures.” Mauss, the thinker with whom Tonkin is in dialogue in this piece, claimed that the mask was the genealogical precursor of the soul concept. Mauss was impressed by the connection between masking and the dead – that the spirits of the dead are re-produced, reborn, in the mask. Tonkin questions the generalizability of Mauss’ insight, but she, too, affirms the connection between the mask and the dead.
These remarks point to the violent energy contained in the mask of the Jewish homeland. The dead, here, are the dead of the holocaust. There’s no getting around that. But there is also no getting around the fact that the mask, perpetuating a rite de passage, an intermediate structure by which the dead are escaped, has taken over the face of the living. This, in our opinion, is the real loss to Israel of being led -- held captive, entranced -- by one of the great spirits of the Mask: Sharon.
We have other things to say about this topic, but we’ve maundered on, typically, too long.
"The IMAGINATION, then, I consider as primary, or secondary. The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human PERCEPTION, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of CREATION in the infinite I AM. The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, coexisting with the conscious will, yet still identical with the primary in the kind of its cogency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates,in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still, at all event, it struggles to idealize and to unify." -- Coleridge
A week ago, my best bud and alter ego, D., sent me a news item from the NYT. The item was about Sharon’s speech. The speech didn’t surprise me. Sharon proposed that the Wall would be the basis for a line between Israel and Palestine. There was nothing unexpected in this, if you know Sharon’s history. D. was indignant, to the extent he ever gets indignant.
This, too, wasn’t unexpected. All my lefty friends at one time or another get indignant about Israel. When Israel bombs a refugee camp and kills Palestinian kids, they get red thinking about what a criminal state it is. When Palestinian kids blow up Israeli kids, they get suddenly rational: it is only a matter of the just struggle for the liberation of Palestine, blah blah blah.
I have experienced the other side too, from people who seem to think that the Palestinians should conveniently vanish, like the Cherokees or the Tasmanians. A couple of years ago, in L.A. I was having lunch with two friends, and one of them began a long rant about what a pissy character Yassar Arafat is, and how he bungled the chance for peace in 2000. Etc. The guy’s gripe was the idea of Return – that Arafat supported the right to return of Palestinians who were evicted from their land. This would make more sense if Israel didn’t also have an extensive policy giving French or Russian or Greenland Jews a right to Return – and dumping them in settlements on Palestinian land.
Now, Israel doesn’t excite my passions in quite this way. I see, on the left, the displacement of the Palestinians provoking tears and fellow travelers, martyrs that put themselves in the path of bulldozers, etc. etc. Where is the indignation about, say, the Arabization of Kirkuk, or the slave raids on Southern Sudanese Christian tribes? To mention only two examples. These, apparently, are indignations best left to specialists. On the right, of course, there has been this odd conjunction between the traditional anti-semitic Christians and the neo-cons. To criticize Israel, or not even Israel, but Sharon’s Israel, is to commit the blood crime of anti-semitism.
We can all get indignant, one way or another, about Israel.
I’ve written about Israel before. My position is well known. It is crystal, ahem, clear. It is, uh (where’d I put those notes?) the position of conscience (hey, did you hear the one about the rabbi, the rabbit and the priest? Oh, another time…) of an independent intellectual proud … did I say proud? Conscience, yeah I said conscience. Okay, drum roll please…
Okay, I don’t have a position about Israel. I have several, and some contradict each other.
That Israel unjustly drove out the Palestinians, or many Palestinians, seems beyond a doubt. That this founding act of violence was succeeded by the creation of a viable state seems beyond a doubt. There are many things to like about Israel. Other states have engulfed aid in amounts as huge as Israel’s, and the aid has basically swollen bank accounts in Switzerland. Israel, perhaps because the original founders preserved the old Socialist ethics, never went that route. All things being equal, Tel Aviv should be, to the Middle East, what Beirut was to it in the fifties – the financial center of the world. This is due, in part, to Israel bombing the shit out of Beirut in the eighties. And so it goes, ethical/dialectical tic tac toe.
I don’t think a treaty will bring peace to Israel or Palestine, although it will be a start. Rather, a more essential change has to happen.
That Israel, unlike other states in the post-colonial world, was expressly the product of the same European romantic nationalism that produced Germany and Italy (and failed to produce Scotland and Corsica) is the heart of the fascination of the place, and its current dilemma.
Bracket the violence. Bracket the struggle between Israel and Palestine. Even if you have a strong Marxist belief that the essence of the state emerges from struggle, it is still distinct from that struggle. What I think has been lost, in the talk of peace treaties and suicide bombers, is the question: what is Israel?
In 1949, Israel was pretty clearly the homeland of the Jews. But is that true in 2003? Is Israel forever identical to the homeland of the Jews?
There’s a story in the NYT today that presents this question under the guise of comedy. There is a small tribe in India that apparently embraced Judaism in the twentieth century. Their own story is that they are descendents of a lost tribe. So there is an organization, Amishav, who sponsor them. The Indians are dumped in Palestinian territories and given lessons in Hebrew. Between bouts of incomprehensible teaching, there is always kosher curry.
This is funny. It is also cruelly sad.
The reality of Israel is that its success as a state has distanced it from its status as a symbolic object. As a state, Israel is populated by Israelis, not Jews. But that state is still dependent on its symbolism – dependent on a world wide Jewish community’s feeling for Israel as a homeland of the Jews. A homeland that that world wide community, in the U.S., France, Canada, Italy, etc., has no intention, by and large, of moving to.
In other words, Israel, the state, wears a mask. The mask is that Israel is the homeland of the Jews. The mask is suffocating the state.
Masks and Powers, a well known essay by Africanist Elizabeth Tonkin, fleshes out this metaphor in a fruitful way.
Tonkin goes to the quote from Coleridge I’ve given at the head of this post to distinguish two levels of the imagination. Corresponding to those levels, there are two kinds of analyses of masks. Her analysis of masks is connected to her field work in Africa, where the mask connects up to ancestral spirits. The mask event, as she calls it, requires that there be a sense of the dead captured by the mask; that there be a position open in the semantic field for the non-masked; and that the dead have power:
Here is a fascinating passage. Note -- Tonkin capitalizes Mask to mean something like a mask with a spirit:
"Every Mask is part of an event, which can only be intelligible when understood as a performance with complex interactions between Masks and non-maskers. Indigenous explanations show that these are seen either as the actions of power or as the actions needed for its production. Power, all reporters agree, resides in the Mask (and often also in the mask on its own). The Mask is the exponent of power, which is manifested in all its actions – not just those which may be deemed instrumental exerting ‘social control’ to express power is to make power."
Masks events collect around rites of passage. As Tonkin puts it, they are metaphors-in-action, “transform[ing] events themselves of mediat[ing] between structures.” Mauss, the thinker with whom Tonkin is in dialogue in this piece, claimed that the mask was the genealogical precursor of the soul concept. Mauss was impressed by the connection between masking and the dead – that the spirits of the dead are re-produced, reborn, in the mask. Tonkin questions the generalizability of Mauss’ insight, but she, too, affirms the connection between the mask and the dead.
These remarks point to the violent energy contained in the mask of the Jewish homeland. The dead, here, are the dead of the holocaust. There’s no getting around that. But there is also no getting around the fact that the mask, perpetuating a rite de passage, an intermediate structure by which the dead are escaped, has taken over the face of the living. This, in our opinion, is the real loss to Israel of being led -- held captive, entranced -- by one of the great spirits of the Mask: Sharon.
We have other things to say about this topic, but we’ve maundered on, typically, too long.
Sunday, December 21, 2003
Bollettino
It’s rare to find every ideological position LI is allergic to on display in one article, but the NYT Magazine’s John Tierney comes close. The utopian conservative dream of an Iraq that is democratic (but without elections), that is prosperous (without a social net, and with a seventy percent unemployment rate), and that is, above all, privatized to the gills – this is what the Douglas Feiths and Paul Wolfowitzes of the world have been working towards.
The heroic unit in the piece is a business family led by Nader and Wathiq Hindo who have come back from exile in the States to make potloads in Iraq. That you can make potloads always seems to astonish American journalists, but it would be a familiar situation to anyone who lived through the liberalization of the economy in any Latin American country. While most of the country, which wipes the baby’s ass, mends the roads, serves the chickpeas, and so on, struggles under the twin burdens of unemployment and inflation, the segment of the country in whom Americans find their own lifestyle mirrored suddenly can afford vacations and digital toys, as the money floods in, either from immense foreign loans or from the sales of public properties -- sales that always go awry. In this case, it is a much juicier cash stream, direct from our government. Nothing is as sweet as 165 billion of Federal money. And so the Hindo family has attached itself, diverting a little stream to its own businesses. Voila, wealth.
Discovering these mirror Americans, the journalist typically emits tears of joy in the Washington Post, or NYT – and five years later there is a running series of backstories about collapsing governments and World Bank loans.
The crucial grafs are on the fifth page of the piece. Tierney quotes an obvious favorite, Zakaria, who has been a staunch defender of holding elections in places like Iraq in the year 2121, or some such time, after the healthful wash of free enterprise ideology has rooted out the dissatisfied and given everyone a cell phone for Christmas. Here, we think, is the heart of the American case, and the American dilemma:
''Iraq's civil society is so weak and decimated that there's a great danger of a new state abusing its power,'' says Larry Diamond, a political scientist at the Hoover Institution and co-editor of the journal Democracy. He, Zakaria and other experts say it would be better to wait at least two or three years, or ideally as long as five, before holding national elections. Such a delay is probably impractical, but it would suit at least one bourgeois family in Baghdad.
During a rare moment off from their many enterprises, Nader and his parents sit around the conference table at their office debating when Iraq should hold national elections.
''Maybe in a couple of years,'' Nader says. ''We need Iraqi administrators to guarantee stability and contracts and property rights, but until we develop parties that are based on ideas instead of religion or ethnicity, we should hold off on elections.''
''Five years,'' his father says. ''That's enough time for a new generation to go through college.''
''Never,'' Nader's mother says, and it's hard at first to tell if she's kidding.
''Well, someday,'' Nidhal says, ''but I can't imagine when. People here have been through so much turmoil they're just not ready to vote.''
The “Never” obviously startles Tierney. The mirror Americans seem so … American. The maids, the rubber plants, the SUVs, the English, the jokes, the M.B.A.s, it all seems so refreshingly familiar and then… and then they emit some opinion that sounds like something some German businessman in 1938 would say about needing a strong hand to crack down on the Bolsheviks and Jews. There’s that small, telling crack in the mirror.
But isn't that why the Tierneys are there? The whole goal of mainstream American journalism is to make sure we don’t see the cracks in the mirror, even if the journalist can't quite hide it, that eerie sensation that the cracks make on him or her. And so, what better reference with which to finish off this post than Freud, god bless him, who explained the dialectically necessary return of the repressed in one of his great essays, Die Unheimliche. Read it -- in English, children, in English -- here.
It’s rare to find every ideological position LI is allergic to on display in one article, but the NYT Magazine’s John Tierney comes close. The utopian conservative dream of an Iraq that is democratic (but without elections), that is prosperous (without a social net, and with a seventy percent unemployment rate), and that is, above all, privatized to the gills – this is what the Douglas Feiths and Paul Wolfowitzes of the world have been working towards.
The heroic unit in the piece is a business family led by Nader and Wathiq Hindo who have come back from exile in the States to make potloads in Iraq. That you can make potloads always seems to astonish American journalists, but it would be a familiar situation to anyone who lived through the liberalization of the economy in any Latin American country. While most of the country, which wipes the baby’s ass, mends the roads, serves the chickpeas, and so on, struggles under the twin burdens of unemployment and inflation, the segment of the country in whom Americans find their own lifestyle mirrored suddenly can afford vacations and digital toys, as the money floods in, either from immense foreign loans or from the sales of public properties -- sales that always go awry. In this case, it is a much juicier cash stream, direct from our government. Nothing is as sweet as 165 billion of Federal money. And so the Hindo family has attached itself, diverting a little stream to its own businesses. Voila, wealth.
Discovering these mirror Americans, the journalist typically emits tears of joy in the Washington Post, or NYT – and five years later there is a running series of backstories about collapsing governments and World Bank loans.
The crucial grafs are on the fifth page of the piece. Tierney quotes an obvious favorite, Zakaria, who has been a staunch defender of holding elections in places like Iraq in the year 2121, or some such time, after the healthful wash of free enterprise ideology has rooted out the dissatisfied and given everyone a cell phone for Christmas. Here, we think, is the heart of the American case, and the American dilemma:
''Iraq's civil society is so weak and decimated that there's a great danger of a new state abusing its power,'' says Larry Diamond, a political scientist at the Hoover Institution and co-editor of the journal Democracy. He, Zakaria and other experts say it would be better to wait at least two or three years, or ideally as long as five, before holding national elections. Such a delay is probably impractical, but it would suit at least one bourgeois family in Baghdad.
During a rare moment off from their many enterprises, Nader and his parents sit around the conference table at their office debating when Iraq should hold national elections.
''Maybe in a couple of years,'' Nader says. ''We need Iraqi administrators to guarantee stability and contracts and property rights, but until we develop parties that are based on ideas instead of religion or ethnicity, we should hold off on elections.''
''Five years,'' his father says. ''That's enough time for a new generation to go through college.''
''Never,'' Nader's mother says, and it's hard at first to tell if she's kidding.
''Well, someday,'' Nidhal says, ''but I can't imagine when. People here have been through so much turmoil they're just not ready to vote.''
The “Never” obviously startles Tierney. The mirror Americans seem so … American. The maids, the rubber plants, the SUVs, the English, the jokes, the M.B.A.s, it all seems so refreshingly familiar and then… and then they emit some opinion that sounds like something some German businessman in 1938 would say about needing a strong hand to crack down on the Bolsheviks and Jews. There’s that small, telling crack in the mirror.
But isn't that why the Tierneys are there? The whole goal of mainstream American journalism is to make sure we don’t see the cracks in the mirror, even if the journalist can't quite hide it, that eerie sensation that the cracks make on him or her. And so, what better reference with which to finish off this post than Freud, god bless him, who explained the dialectically necessary return of the repressed in one of his great essays, Die Unheimliche. Read it -- in English, children, in English -- here.
Friday, December 19, 2003
Bollettino
The Washington Post reports on the Ashcroft version of ethnic cleansing – arresting anybody named Mohammed – that was allowed after 9/11. Many of the detainees were held in a Brooklyn jail and were routinely bounced off walls – meaning rammed into walls, kicked, held in restraints for up to seven hours, and had their conferences with their lawyers illegally taped and eavesdropped upon.
These were charges denied by the officials of the prison – a Federal prison – until a stash of videos were found recording it all. The videos, according to the director of the prison, had been ‘recycled.” During the investigation, prison officials blankly denied the charges. Are these prison officials going to be fired? That’s a good question.
The second and third grafs:
“An investigation by Inspector General Glenn A. Fine also found that officials at the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn, N.Y., which is run by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, improperly taped meetings between detainees and their lawyers, and used excessive strip searches and restraints to punish those in confinement.
The report concluded that as many as 20 guards were involved in the abuse, which included slamming prisoners against walls and painfully twisting their arms and hands. Fine recommended discipline for 10 employees and counseling for two others who remain employed by the federal prison system. He also said the government should notify the employers of four former guards about their conduct.”
Of course, this is lenient to the point of lunacy. Fine was systematically lied to in his investigation, and the lies lead to the head of the prison, Michael Zenk. Zenk should certainly be fired and charged with assault.
Who is this Zenk, and why are we putting up with him?
He is a big advocate of that torture known as solitary confinement. Last year, he defied a judge’s order to release Peter Gotti from solitary.
There’s a glimpse of the bureaucrat in this account of an Indian man kidnapped by the FBI after 9/11 and stashed in Brooklyn. The man, Mohammad Azmath Jaweed, was taken off a train in Fort Worth, interrogated with the presumption that he was a terrorist, shuffled to Brooklyn with no charges or evidence to justify imprisonment, shackled, thrown against walls, awakened at night in his cell, which was kept perpetually lighted, and subjected to freezing cold – all, as he says, because “The warden used to tell his men not to show us any mercy.” Jaweed, who seems to be an utterly reasonable man, wrote to Zenk about this, and received this reply: “You are under investigation for terrorism. We have information from intelligence agencies you have terrorist links. This is the reason you are kept in solitary confinement.” Not, mind you, because you are being investigated in any particular act of terrorism. Not because of your individual behavior. No, solitary comes out of the accusation that is being investigated – an accusation that could be leveled at anyone.
At, say, Zenk himself, if he was put in prison for the complicity in assault and corruption – not to say that he is guilty of these things. We’d suggest that during the investigation to determine if he is guilty, however, he be put in solitary, shackled, and prevented from sleep. Don't slam him into any walls though! (wink, wink)
As for the system he serves – future Foucault’s might want to peruse this fascinating document, released this summer by the DOJ, full of contradictions and false information, but more importantly full of the most astonishing exculpatory language and classifications. Here, for instance, is the DOJ talking to itself in that inimitable mumble of acronyms that always results in injury and state sponsored terror for someone:
“The BOP initially classified all September 11 detainees it housed as Witness Security, or WITSEC, inmates.91 Witness Security inmates generally are individuals who agree to cooperate with law enforcement, judicial, or correctional authorities by providing evidence against persons or groups involved in illegal activities. Because their cooperation with the Government can place their lives in jeopardy, the BOP takes significant precautions to ensure the safety of WITSEC inmates. Accordingly, any information about WITSEC inmates is closely guarded, such as their identity, location, and status.
Normally, the arresting agency would inform the BOP of the person's status and the need for WITSEC protection, but the BOP classified the detainees in this category without any individual assessment of the circumstances of their arrests.
When applied to the September 11 detainees, the WITSEC classification resulted in MDC officials withholding information about the detainees' status and location.”
Is this clever or what? Witness protection used against witnesses who witnessed nothing, and were protected against their own use of their constitutional rights. Whoever thought this one up would have been promoted quickly in Stalin NKVD: it was just the kind of mindfuck Beria loved.
The Washington Post reports on the Ashcroft version of ethnic cleansing – arresting anybody named Mohammed – that was allowed after 9/11. Many of the detainees were held in a Brooklyn jail and were routinely bounced off walls – meaning rammed into walls, kicked, held in restraints for up to seven hours, and had their conferences with their lawyers illegally taped and eavesdropped upon.
These were charges denied by the officials of the prison – a Federal prison – until a stash of videos were found recording it all. The videos, according to the director of the prison, had been ‘recycled.” During the investigation, prison officials blankly denied the charges. Are these prison officials going to be fired? That’s a good question.
The second and third grafs:
“An investigation by Inspector General Glenn A. Fine also found that officials at the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn, N.Y., which is run by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, improperly taped meetings between detainees and their lawyers, and used excessive strip searches and restraints to punish those in confinement.
The report concluded that as many as 20 guards were involved in the abuse, which included slamming prisoners against walls and painfully twisting their arms and hands. Fine recommended discipline for 10 employees and counseling for two others who remain employed by the federal prison system. He also said the government should notify the employers of four former guards about their conduct.”
Of course, this is lenient to the point of lunacy. Fine was systematically lied to in his investigation, and the lies lead to the head of the prison, Michael Zenk. Zenk should certainly be fired and charged with assault.
Who is this Zenk, and why are we putting up with him?
He is a big advocate of that torture known as solitary confinement. Last year, he defied a judge’s order to release Peter Gotti from solitary.
There’s a glimpse of the bureaucrat in this account of an Indian man kidnapped by the FBI after 9/11 and stashed in Brooklyn. The man, Mohammad Azmath Jaweed, was taken off a train in Fort Worth, interrogated with the presumption that he was a terrorist, shuffled to Brooklyn with no charges or evidence to justify imprisonment, shackled, thrown against walls, awakened at night in his cell, which was kept perpetually lighted, and subjected to freezing cold – all, as he says, because “The warden used to tell his men not to show us any mercy.” Jaweed, who seems to be an utterly reasonable man, wrote to Zenk about this, and received this reply: “You are under investigation for terrorism. We have information from intelligence agencies you have terrorist links. This is the reason you are kept in solitary confinement.” Not, mind you, because you are being investigated in any particular act of terrorism. Not because of your individual behavior. No, solitary comes out of the accusation that is being investigated – an accusation that could be leveled at anyone.
At, say, Zenk himself, if he was put in prison for the complicity in assault and corruption – not to say that he is guilty of these things. We’d suggest that during the investigation to determine if he is guilty, however, he be put in solitary, shackled, and prevented from sleep. Don't slam him into any walls though! (wink, wink)
As for the system he serves – future Foucault’s might want to peruse this fascinating document, released this summer by the DOJ, full of contradictions and false information, but more importantly full of the most astonishing exculpatory language and classifications. Here, for instance, is the DOJ talking to itself in that inimitable mumble of acronyms that always results in injury and state sponsored terror for someone:
“The BOP initially classified all September 11 detainees it housed as Witness Security, or WITSEC, inmates.91 Witness Security inmates generally are individuals who agree to cooperate with law enforcement, judicial, or correctional authorities by providing evidence against persons or groups involved in illegal activities. Because their cooperation with the Government can place their lives in jeopardy, the BOP takes significant precautions to ensure the safety of WITSEC inmates. Accordingly, any information about WITSEC inmates is closely guarded, such as their identity, location, and status.
Normally, the arresting agency would inform the BOP of the person's status and the need for WITSEC protection, but the BOP classified the detainees in this category without any individual assessment of the circumstances of their arrests.
When applied to the September 11 detainees, the WITSEC classification resulted in MDC officials withholding information about the detainees' status and location.”
Is this clever or what? Witness protection used against witnesses who witnessed nothing, and were protected against their own use of their constitutional rights. Whoever thought this one up would have been promoted quickly in Stalin NKVD: it was just the kind of mindfuck Beria loved.
Thursday, December 18, 2003
Bollettino
(These two posts are to be read together)
My friend, H., sent me an article about Leo Strauss and urged me to write a post about it for LI. Unfortunately, I know very little about Leo Strauss, and H. knows so much more that I feel a little ridiculous taking the pontifical chair.
For what it is worth: whenever his adherents quote Mr. Strauss, the words always seem disturbingly shallow – either platitudinous encomiums of Plato and Aristotle, one of the habits of German philosophers that the analytics had the good taste to do away with, or else exhortations that are the starting points for arguments that aren’t, in the event, ever made. I am simply giving you my impression of Strauss – but I admit, I’ve never really seriously read him.
However, I – and everybody else – has read a lot about Straussians. And I do think that there is one strain among the Straussians that exerts an improbable influence on American foreign policy today. Strauss had a great reverence for the American Constitution. He was a man, too, who felt that reading certain canonical texts was identical with thinking – with the discovery of truth itself. It all depended on the density of the reading, the concentration one brought to it. There is an obvious analogy, here, with the way a Judge, ideally, makes a judgment about the application of a law. For the Judge, too, the Constitution is a sort of set of truths – or a set of norms to which the formation of laws and regulations, and their applications, must conform. Perhaps it is this analogy that drew Strauss’s attention to the Constitution. In any case, he was hog wild for the thing, and his followers are, accordingly, also hog wild for the thing. His followers have extended this reverence, in fact, to the very idea of a constitution, in which they have invested a mystical and mystifying enthusiasm that distinguishes them, as a group, from the usual Burkean conservative. Burke was no enthusiast for theorists of Republics. He thought the craze for writing constitutions in his time was symptomatic of the way late Enlightenment thinkers had misunderstood the ‘science of government:” a science that he believed must mirror the natural adaptations of the relations of power and property in a given society. For Burke, the idea of a founding document – some text that exerts an ultimate shaping force upon those relations in a society, creating them, so to speak – is pernicious, mistaking the subservient document for the spirit of the laws. The American constitution did not, in this view, create America. It has, rather, exerted the local influence that such a document could exert upon a society that was organizing itself according to laws that are not meant to be boiled up and listed in a text, like so many items on a menu. America, for the Burkean, made the Constitution.
However, as we can see from the recent mania, among Americans, for writing a constitution in Iraq – a mania that must be puzzling to Iraqis, who have experienced many constitutions, and seen that all of them mysteriously permitted dictators or factions or tribes to do exactly what they wanted in the way of murdering their opponents – Leo Strauss’ enthusiasm is now a semi-official cause of at least one department of the Executive Branch.
To please H., then, we will write about, not Strauss, but Straussians. And, in particular, about a conflict that has sprung up between two noted Straussians, Harvey Mansfeld and Harry Jaffa, over the issue of the Declaration of Independence vs. the Constitution. There’s an essay about the controversy on the Claremont College website, written by Thomas G. West, apparently a student of Jaffa’s.
West’s essay makes the orthodox Straussian moves. First and foremost, the tics are assembled. The tics concern the embattled state of the real thinkers in a world in which the liberal establishment lays down the orthodoxy. This is always good – instead of being a humble thinker, one is an embattled remnant. Myself, I appreciate the dramatic value of this rhetorical penchant. It is just that I have a hard time conceiving of a bunch of tenured profs as the heirs of the Trojan warriors.
If you have an embattled remnant, surely you have a conquering army of evil. For the Straussians, this is the current orthodoxy of liberalism. Which is another way of saying, relativism. Relativism is the enemy.
(These two posts are to be read together)
My friend, H., sent me an article about Leo Strauss and urged me to write a post about it for LI. Unfortunately, I know very little about Leo Strauss, and H. knows so much more that I feel a little ridiculous taking the pontifical chair.
For what it is worth: whenever his adherents quote Mr. Strauss, the words always seem disturbingly shallow – either platitudinous encomiums of Plato and Aristotle, one of the habits of German philosophers that the analytics had the good taste to do away with, or else exhortations that are the starting points for arguments that aren’t, in the event, ever made. I am simply giving you my impression of Strauss – but I admit, I’ve never really seriously read him.
However, I – and everybody else – has read a lot about Straussians. And I do think that there is one strain among the Straussians that exerts an improbable influence on American foreign policy today. Strauss had a great reverence for the American Constitution. He was a man, too, who felt that reading certain canonical texts was identical with thinking – with the discovery of truth itself. It all depended on the density of the reading, the concentration one brought to it. There is an obvious analogy, here, with the way a Judge, ideally, makes a judgment about the application of a law. For the Judge, too, the Constitution is a sort of set of truths – or a set of norms to which the formation of laws and regulations, and their applications, must conform. Perhaps it is this analogy that drew Strauss’s attention to the Constitution. In any case, he was hog wild for the thing, and his followers are, accordingly, also hog wild for the thing. His followers have extended this reverence, in fact, to the very idea of a constitution, in which they have invested a mystical and mystifying enthusiasm that distinguishes them, as a group, from the usual Burkean conservative. Burke was no enthusiast for theorists of Republics. He thought the craze for writing constitutions in his time was symptomatic of the way late Enlightenment thinkers had misunderstood the ‘science of government:” a science that he believed must mirror the natural adaptations of the relations of power and property in a given society. For Burke, the idea of a founding document – some text that exerts an ultimate shaping force upon those relations in a society, creating them, so to speak – is pernicious, mistaking the subservient document for the spirit of the laws. The American constitution did not, in this view, create America. It has, rather, exerted the local influence that such a document could exert upon a society that was organizing itself according to laws that are not meant to be boiled up and listed in a text, like so many items on a menu. America, for the Burkean, made the Constitution.
However, as we can see from the recent mania, among Americans, for writing a constitution in Iraq – a mania that must be puzzling to Iraqis, who have experienced many constitutions, and seen that all of them mysteriously permitted dictators or factions or tribes to do exactly what they wanted in the way of murdering their opponents – Leo Strauss’ enthusiasm is now a semi-official cause of at least one department of the Executive Branch.
To please H., then, we will write about, not Strauss, but Straussians. And, in particular, about a conflict that has sprung up between two noted Straussians, Harvey Mansfeld and Harry Jaffa, over the issue of the Declaration of Independence vs. the Constitution. There’s an essay about the controversy on the Claremont College website, written by Thomas G. West, apparently a student of Jaffa’s.
West’s essay makes the orthodox Straussian moves. First and foremost, the tics are assembled. The tics concern the embattled state of the real thinkers in a world in which the liberal establishment lays down the orthodoxy. This is always good – instead of being a humble thinker, one is an embattled remnant. Myself, I appreciate the dramatic value of this rhetorical penchant. It is just that I have a hard time conceiving of a bunch of tenured profs as the heirs of the Trojan warriors.
If you have an embattled remnant, surely you have a conquering army of evil. For the Straussians, this is the current orthodoxy of liberalism. Which is another way of saying, relativism. Relativism is the enemy.
West begins by asking a good question:
“What were the original principles of the American Constitution? Are those principles true?”
Then we have the inevitable gathering of the tics:
“Many historians and political scientists write about the first question. Scholars are never shy about telling us what happened in the dead-and-gone eighteenth century. But few of them think it is even worth discussing whether the Founders' principles are true. For example, in a review of my book Vindicating the Founders, historian Joseph Ellis accuses me of having committed "sins of presentism." My error, as he cleverly puts it, is believing "that ideas are like migratory birds that can take off in the eighteenth century and land intact in our time." Ellis does not even try to refute the Founders' principles or their arguments, summarized in my book, regarding property rights, women's rights, and welfare policy. For him, it is enough simply to dismiss my endorsement of their arguments and ideas as "bizarre."1 “
Then, the stating of the anti-relativist position:
“But what if some ideas — I mean true ones — really are like migratory birds that can land intact in any century? What if the principles of the founding are as true today as they were two centuries ago?”
So far, there is nothing unusual about the procedure here. The ‘founding” is a little scary, I admit – it makes the Constitutional convention and the rest of it sound like a very select meeting of the Order of the Golden Fleece. However, West makes a good point. If he was really a political philosopher, he might even consider that the point has an obverse side: what if some ideas – I mean true ones – that are current are like migratory birds that can land intact in the eighteenth century? For instance, the idea of the equality of women? But he isn’t a political philosopher – he is a Straussian. They don’t ask such questions.
“Students and admirers of Leo Strauss are among the few political scientists who write seriously about whether the Founders' principles are true. Strauss made this possible by convincing them that political philosophy in the classical sense is possible, that human reason may be capable of discovering the truth about the good society. Anyone who approaches the Founders from this perspective is likely to be open to their way of thinking, which took for granted that reason can figure out the principles of justice by observing and reflecting on the human condition.”
The truth is, everybody appeals to the human condition. Ellis, for example, is certainly appealing to it. His idea is that the human condition can accommodate such leaps that some political principles in the 18th century don’t hold in the 20th century. In fact, however, West isn’t going to argue about historical conditions, or the concrete situations that the human condition, embodied in humans, finds itself in. He is going to turn Straussian on us in his next sentence: “Strauss argued that the principles of classical political philosophers like Plato and Aristotle remain the standard for us today.”
This is the defining characteristic of the Straussian, as far as I can see. The appeal to truth is answered not by observing and reflecting on experience, but by appealing to the masters. The masters encode the human condition for all time.
Now, if we look closely at this habit, we can discern in it a familiar, and fundamental, objection to modernity. The idea that to discover a truth, reason must submit to experience – to the historically concrete event – instead of deriving truth from its own nature is pretty much the basis of the Enlightenment, and certainly the program of the natural “philosophers” of the seventeenth century, from which the positive sciences derive. In a sense, the Age of Reason was all about the dethronement of reason. That dethronement – that elevation of experience, or the Other of Reason – is what made the ‘experimental method’ so revolutionary. Truth, in other words, became dependent on the tests that distinguished what was true from what was false. This was the guiding idea for the eighteenth century’s political anthropology. But this, for the Straussian, is a bad and fatal thing, mixing together the contingent and the absolute. Rather, the truth must be segregated from the historically concrete. Which is why West can begin his essay with an appeal to the truth, and then foreclose on that appeal like this: “When his [Strauss’s] students approach the founding, therefore, they tend to judge it against the standard of the classics.” So much for observing the human condition.
After this prologue, we proceed to the topic, which is a dispute between Harry Jaffa and Harvey Mansfeld about the meaning of equality. This is not a dispute that refers to any recent sociological literature about equality, or takes an analytic approach to it and describes, for instance, the difference between juridical and economic equality. No, in this dispute, the contestants bring out their favorite texts. Jaffa refers to the Declaration of Independence and the speeches of Abraham Lincoln. Mansfeld prefers the Constitution and de Tocqueville.
Roughly, Jaffa maintains that the enforcement of civil equality is a “true’ principle of the human condition, considered from the point of view of politics, and that this truth was expressed by the Declaration of Independence and acted upon, rightly, by Lincoln. Mansfeld maintains that the Declaration of Independence was rightly curbed by the Constitution, and that De Tocqueville righly warns us of the cultural mediocrity attendent upon too much enforcement of civil equality.
Neither of these are bogus positions. What is interesting, however, is that both sides eventually, shyly, have to appeal to something beyond the standard of the classics. Even an anti-modernist philosophy is so infiltrated by the positivist spirit that its arguments are conducted with, well, some acknowledgement of the real consequences of the arguments.
Here, for instance, is Mansfeld by way of West.
“Mansfield argues that Locke, following Machiavelli, believed he had invented a kind of government in which no one really rules. The government never does what it wants; it is always carrying out the will of somebody else, namely, of the people….
But Mansfield says — and he believes he is following Aristotle here — that this hope of nonpartisanship is a vain dream. People will always disagree about the good. Even a regime that is designed to be nonpartisan will turn out to be as partisan as any other. This, Mansfield believes, is the lesson of Tocqueville's Democracy in America, a book that he and his wife, Delba Winthrop, translated. In their introduction, Mansfield and Winthrop call Tocqueville's book "the best book ever written on democracy and the best book ever written on America." According to Tocqueville, as summarized by Mansfield and Winthrop, America is "middle class, thus timid and mediocre, and lacking in both virtue and greatness." It is true that Tocqueville does not scorn this bourgeois way of life in the manner of Rousseau and Stendhal. But he does argue that a democratic nation, in which public opinion dominates, becomes a partisan political regime "without meaning to be." The majority comes to believe in "the infallibility of majority reason." Yet the majority is a "collection of self-consciously weak individuals." The democratic citizen is at once proud of his independence and aware of his weakness. "In this extremity," writes Tocqueville, "he naturally turns his regard to the immense being that rises alone in the midst of universal debasement." Mansfield and Winthrop explain: "The immense being — replacing God — is the state."
This is well done. West explains that Mansfeld sees, in the danger of Leviathan, a solution that emerges accidentally from the Constitution: “The Constitution was written to secure the natural rights named in the Declaration. But once written, it took on a life of its own, independent of the doctrine that gave rise to it. The Constitution, and no longer the principle that "all men are created equal," now became our regime, our arche or principle, our authoritative beginning that shapes and forms us and makes us what we are. We now understand ourselves (or once did), Mansfield argues, as a constitutional people, no longer as a revolutionary people.”
However, under the strain of segregating the truth and the historically concrete, Mansfeld actually buttresses his argument with … history.
“According to Mansfield, the result of this transformation from a natural-rights republic to a constitutional republic is that our politics are much less vulnerable to the kind of destructive moralism that we see in the French Revolution. The French, in Mansfield's view, made the mistake of taking the idea of equality too seriously. They tried to "finish" the modern revolution initiated by Locke and the other adherents of social compact theory. They failed to put an end to their revolution by constitutionalizing it, as the American Founders did. As a result, the French lived out the full destructive implications of the modern doctrine, while the Americans were spared that destruction. In Mansfield's analysis, sober forms take the place of dangerous moral absolutes. That is, the form and formalities of constitutionalism take the place, in America, of insatiable appeals to a standard of "natural rights [held] over the government."14 “
The appeal to the historically concrete rather ruins the Straussian preference for the standards of the classics, because it opens a space for questions deriving from history. In particular, one wants to ask, what about the destructive consequences of the slavery that was legitimated in the Constitution at the “founding”? Americans were not spared that destruction. And if we want to blame the Terror on taking Locke’s contractual notion of the state too seriously, couldn’t we blame the bias towards property, no matter what the cost to the human condition, inscribed in the Constitution for the total violence visited on Afro-Americans? It is here that equality becomes more than merely something deriving from the standards laid down by the classics, since, of course, there are classics and there are classics. Here, for instance, is an excerpt from a classic by one Conneau, published in 1854, entitled “Captain Canot; or, Twenty years an African slaver”
" A few days before the embarkation takes place the head of every male and female are shaven. They are then marked . . . with a hot pipe sufficiently heated to blister the skin. Some [purchasers] use their initials made of silver wire. . . . . this disagreeable operation is done only when several persons ship slaves in one vessel . . . . [The branding] is done as lightly as possible, and just enough for the mark to remain only six months; when and if well done, it leaves the skin as smooth as ever. This scorching sign is generally made on the fleshy part of the arm to adults, to children on the posterior" (Theophilus Conneau, A Slaver's Logbook or 20 Years' Residence in Africa [Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1976), pp. 81-82
Do I discern, in those slave marks, truths that, like birds, have migrated from the 19th century to this one?
I could stop here, and leave the impression that the Straussians are the usual racist pigs. But that wouldn’t be true. It is part of the confusion that surrounds the Straussians that West’s record of the dispute between Mansfeld and Jaffa accommodates the historic experience of slavery. Jaffa, it turns out, has his eyes on the prize. He is against slavery. But, being a Straussian, he can’t make an argument against slavery that doesn’t squeeze the juice from Plato, Aristotle and all the rest of them:
Even if we admit that there is some tiny number of men who are sufficiently godlike that they could be trusted with absolute power without consent, it would still not establish a politically relevant claim. For, Jaffa writes,
Plato's Republic is imaginary precisely because, according to Plato himself, philosophers do not wish to rule, and anyone wishing to rule is not a philosopher. Anyone who asserts a right to rule on the basis of his claim to wisdom is accordingly condemned in advance as a charlatan by philosophy itself. . . . Philosopher-kings are not possible, and genuine philosophers will always prefer a regime of equality under the law.19
Jaffa is saying that the classical argument for government without consent is refuted by the classics themselves, leaving us with the conclusion that the esoteric teaching, as it were, of the classics is that all men are created equal! This paradoxical claim should not perhaps come as a surprise. For Jaffa had said many years ago that according to Aristotle no normal human being is a natural slave.20
And so it goes. There is something comically satisfying about the members of the order of the founding finally coming round to the idea that slavery is bad in 2002, and defending that proposition as the conclusion of the esoteric teaching. As long as it can be interpreted out of Plato and Aristotle, there you have it: the truth.
The Straussians are very American in their anti-modernism. This is the same current of fundamentalism that Mencken had such fun with back in the twenties. The accusation of fascism and the like is wildly off the mark. This stuff is in the American grain. It is the kind of clubjoining, text-quoting thing that delights the Mason, brings tears to the eyes of the A.A. guy reverentially citing the 12 steps, and has always made your average suburban bürger feel a little bit special. Why not? I'm certainly not opposed to this kind of thing...
However, as a guide to the ‘truth,’ this falls well short of the modern philosophical standard
“What were the original principles of the American Constitution? Are those principles true?”
Then we have the inevitable gathering of the tics:
“Many historians and political scientists write about the first question. Scholars are never shy about telling us what happened in the dead-and-gone eighteenth century. But few of them think it is even worth discussing whether the Founders' principles are true. For example, in a review of my book Vindicating the Founders, historian Joseph Ellis accuses me of having committed "sins of presentism." My error, as he cleverly puts it, is believing "that ideas are like migratory birds that can take off in the eighteenth century and land intact in our time." Ellis does not even try to refute the Founders' principles or their arguments, summarized in my book, regarding property rights, women's rights, and welfare policy. For him, it is enough simply to dismiss my endorsement of their arguments and ideas as "bizarre."1 “
Then, the stating of the anti-relativist position:
“But what if some ideas — I mean true ones — really are like migratory birds that can land intact in any century? What if the principles of the founding are as true today as they were two centuries ago?”
So far, there is nothing unusual about the procedure here. The ‘founding” is a little scary, I admit – it makes the Constitutional convention and the rest of it sound like a very select meeting of the Order of the Golden Fleece. However, West makes a good point. If he was really a political philosopher, he might even consider that the point has an obverse side: what if some ideas – I mean true ones – that are current are like migratory birds that can land intact in the eighteenth century? For instance, the idea of the equality of women? But he isn’t a political philosopher – he is a Straussian. They don’t ask such questions.
“Students and admirers of Leo Strauss are among the few political scientists who write seriously about whether the Founders' principles are true. Strauss made this possible by convincing them that political philosophy in the classical sense is possible, that human reason may be capable of discovering the truth about the good society. Anyone who approaches the Founders from this perspective is likely to be open to their way of thinking, which took for granted that reason can figure out the principles of justice by observing and reflecting on the human condition.”
The truth is, everybody appeals to the human condition. Ellis, for example, is certainly appealing to it. His idea is that the human condition can accommodate such leaps that some political principles in the 18th century don’t hold in the 20th century. In fact, however, West isn’t going to argue about historical conditions, or the concrete situations that the human condition, embodied in humans, finds itself in. He is going to turn Straussian on us in his next sentence: “Strauss argued that the principles of classical political philosophers like Plato and Aristotle remain the standard for us today.”
This is the defining characteristic of the Straussian, as far as I can see. The appeal to truth is answered not by observing and reflecting on experience, but by appealing to the masters. The masters encode the human condition for all time.
Now, if we look closely at this habit, we can discern in it a familiar, and fundamental, objection to modernity. The idea that to discover a truth, reason must submit to experience – to the historically concrete event – instead of deriving truth from its own nature is pretty much the basis of the Enlightenment, and certainly the program of the natural “philosophers” of the seventeenth century, from which the positive sciences derive. In a sense, the Age of Reason was all about the dethronement of reason. That dethronement – that elevation of experience, or the Other of Reason – is what made the ‘experimental method’ so revolutionary. Truth, in other words, became dependent on the tests that distinguished what was true from what was false. This was the guiding idea for the eighteenth century’s political anthropology. But this, for the Straussian, is a bad and fatal thing, mixing together the contingent and the absolute. Rather, the truth must be segregated from the historically concrete. Which is why West can begin his essay with an appeal to the truth, and then foreclose on that appeal like this: “When his [Strauss’s] students approach the founding, therefore, they tend to judge it against the standard of the classics.” So much for observing the human condition.
After this prologue, we proceed to the topic, which is a dispute between Harry Jaffa and Harvey Mansfeld about the meaning of equality. This is not a dispute that refers to any recent sociological literature about equality, or takes an analytic approach to it and describes, for instance, the difference between juridical and economic equality. No, in this dispute, the contestants bring out their favorite texts. Jaffa refers to the Declaration of Independence and the speeches of Abraham Lincoln. Mansfeld prefers the Constitution and de Tocqueville.
Roughly, Jaffa maintains that the enforcement of civil equality is a “true’ principle of the human condition, considered from the point of view of politics, and that this truth was expressed by the Declaration of Independence and acted upon, rightly, by Lincoln. Mansfeld maintains that the Declaration of Independence was rightly curbed by the Constitution, and that De Tocqueville righly warns us of the cultural mediocrity attendent upon too much enforcement of civil equality.
Neither of these are bogus positions. What is interesting, however, is that both sides eventually, shyly, have to appeal to something beyond the standard of the classics. Even an anti-modernist philosophy is so infiltrated by the positivist spirit that its arguments are conducted with, well, some acknowledgement of the real consequences of the arguments.
Here, for instance, is Mansfeld by way of West.
“Mansfield argues that Locke, following Machiavelli, believed he had invented a kind of government in which no one really rules. The government never does what it wants; it is always carrying out the will of somebody else, namely, of the people….
But Mansfield says — and he believes he is following Aristotle here — that this hope of nonpartisanship is a vain dream. People will always disagree about the good. Even a regime that is designed to be nonpartisan will turn out to be as partisan as any other. This, Mansfield believes, is the lesson of Tocqueville's Democracy in America, a book that he and his wife, Delba Winthrop, translated. In their introduction, Mansfield and Winthrop call Tocqueville's book "the best book ever written on democracy and the best book ever written on America." According to Tocqueville, as summarized by Mansfield and Winthrop, America is "middle class, thus timid and mediocre, and lacking in both virtue and greatness." It is true that Tocqueville does not scorn this bourgeois way of life in the manner of Rousseau and Stendhal. But he does argue that a democratic nation, in which public opinion dominates, becomes a partisan political regime "without meaning to be." The majority comes to believe in "the infallibility of majority reason." Yet the majority is a "collection of self-consciously weak individuals." The democratic citizen is at once proud of his independence and aware of his weakness. "In this extremity," writes Tocqueville, "he naturally turns his regard to the immense being that rises alone in the midst of universal debasement." Mansfield and Winthrop explain: "The immense being — replacing God — is the state."
This is well done. West explains that Mansfeld sees, in the danger of Leviathan, a solution that emerges accidentally from the Constitution: “The Constitution was written to secure the natural rights named in the Declaration. But once written, it took on a life of its own, independent of the doctrine that gave rise to it. The Constitution, and no longer the principle that "all men are created equal," now became our regime, our arche or principle, our authoritative beginning that shapes and forms us and makes us what we are. We now understand ourselves (or once did), Mansfield argues, as a constitutional people, no longer as a revolutionary people.”
However, under the strain of segregating the truth and the historically concrete, Mansfeld actually buttresses his argument with … history.
“According to Mansfield, the result of this transformation from a natural-rights republic to a constitutional republic is that our politics are much less vulnerable to the kind of destructive moralism that we see in the French Revolution. The French, in Mansfield's view, made the mistake of taking the idea of equality too seriously. They tried to "finish" the modern revolution initiated by Locke and the other adherents of social compact theory. They failed to put an end to their revolution by constitutionalizing it, as the American Founders did. As a result, the French lived out the full destructive implications of the modern doctrine, while the Americans were spared that destruction. In Mansfield's analysis, sober forms take the place of dangerous moral absolutes. That is, the form and formalities of constitutionalism take the place, in America, of insatiable appeals to a standard of "natural rights [held] over the government."14 “
The appeal to the historically concrete rather ruins the Straussian preference for the standards of the classics, because it opens a space for questions deriving from history. In particular, one wants to ask, what about the destructive consequences of the slavery that was legitimated in the Constitution at the “founding”? Americans were not spared that destruction. And if we want to blame the Terror on taking Locke’s contractual notion of the state too seriously, couldn’t we blame the bias towards property, no matter what the cost to the human condition, inscribed in the Constitution for the total violence visited on Afro-Americans? It is here that equality becomes more than merely something deriving from the standards laid down by the classics, since, of course, there are classics and there are classics. Here, for instance, is an excerpt from a classic by one Conneau, published in 1854, entitled “Captain Canot; or, Twenty years an African slaver”
" A few days before the embarkation takes place the head of every male and female are shaven. They are then marked . . . with a hot pipe sufficiently heated to blister the skin. Some [purchasers] use their initials made of silver wire. . . . . this disagreeable operation is done only when several persons ship slaves in one vessel . . . . [The branding] is done as lightly as possible, and just enough for the mark to remain only six months; when and if well done, it leaves the skin as smooth as ever. This scorching sign is generally made on the fleshy part of the arm to adults, to children on the posterior" (Theophilus Conneau, A Slaver's Logbook or 20 Years' Residence in Africa [Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1976), pp. 81-82
Do I discern, in those slave marks, truths that, like birds, have migrated from the 19th century to this one?
I could stop here, and leave the impression that the Straussians are the usual racist pigs. But that wouldn’t be true. It is part of the confusion that surrounds the Straussians that West’s record of the dispute between Mansfeld and Jaffa accommodates the historic experience of slavery. Jaffa, it turns out, has his eyes on the prize. He is against slavery. But, being a Straussian, he can’t make an argument against slavery that doesn’t squeeze the juice from Plato, Aristotle and all the rest of them:
Even if we admit that there is some tiny number of men who are sufficiently godlike that they could be trusted with absolute power without consent, it would still not establish a politically relevant claim. For, Jaffa writes,
Plato's Republic is imaginary precisely because, according to Plato himself, philosophers do not wish to rule, and anyone wishing to rule is not a philosopher. Anyone who asserts a right to rule on the basis of his claim to wisdom is accordingly condemned in advance as a charlatan by philosophy itself. . . . Philosopher-kings are not possible, and genuine philosophers will always prefer a regime of equality under the law.19
Jaffa is saying that the classical argument for government without consent is refuted by the classics themselves, leaving us with the conclusion that the esoteric teaching, as it were, of the classics is that all men are created equal! This paradoxical claim should not perhaps come as a surprise. For Jaffa had said many years ago that according to Aristotle no normal human being is a natural slave.20
And so it goes. There is something comically satisfying about the members of the order of the founding finally coming round to the idea that slavery is bad in 2002, and defending that proposition as the conclusion of the esoteric teaching. As long as it can be interpreted out of Plato and Aristotle, there you have it: the truth.
The Straussians are very American in their anti-modernism. This is the same current of fundamentalism that Mencken had such fun with back in the twenties. The accusation of fascism and the like is wildly off the mark. This stuff is in the American grain. It is the kind of clubjoining, text-quoting thing that delights the Mason, brings tears to the eyes of the A.A. guy reverentially citing the 12 steps, and has always made your average suburban bürger feel a little bit special. Why not? I'm certainly not opposed to this kind of thing...
However, as a guide to the ‘truth,’ this falls well short of the modern philosophical standard
Bollettino
My friend, H., sent me an article about Leo Strauss and urged me to write a post about it for LI. Unfortunately, I know very little about Leo Strauss, and H. knows so much more that I feel a little ridiculous taking the pontifical chair.
For what it is worth: whenever his adherents quote Mr. Strauss, the words always seem disturbingly shallow – either platitudinous encomiums of Plato and Aristotle, one of the habits of German philosophers that the analytics had the good taste to do away with, or else exhortations that are the starting points for arguments that aren’t, in the event, ever made. I am simply giving you my impression of Strauss – but I admit, I’ve never really seriously read him.
However, I – and everybody else – has read a lot about Straussians. And I do think that there is one strain among the Straussians that exerts an improbable influence on American foreign policy today. Strauss had a great reverence for the American Constitution. He was a man, too, who felt that reading certain canonical texts was identical with thinking – with the discovery of truth itself. It all depended on the density of the reading, the concentration one brought to it. There is an obvious analogy, here, with the way a Judge, ideally, makes a judgment about the application of a law. For the Judge, too, the Constitution is a sort of set of truths – or a set of norms to which the formation of laws and regulations, and their applications, must conform. Perhaps it is this analogy that drew Strauss’s attention to the Constitution. In any case, he was hog wild for the thing, and his followers are, accordingly, also hog wild for the thing. His followers have extended this reverence, in fact, to the very idea of a constitution, in which they have invested a mystical and mystifying enthusiasm that distinguishes them, as a group, from the usual Burkean conservative. Burke was no enthusiast for theorists of Republics. He thought the craze for writing constitutions in his time was symptomatic of the way late Enlightenment thinkers had misunderstood the ‘science of government:” a science that he believed must mirror the natural adaptations of the relations of power and property in a given society. For Burke, the idea of a founding document – some text that exerts an ultimate shaping force upon those relations in a society, creating them, so to speak – is pernicious, mistaking the subservient document for the spirit of the laws. The American constitution did not, in this view, create America. It has, rather, exerted the local influence that such a document could exert upon a society that was organizing itself according to laws that are not meant to be boiled up and listed in a text, like so many items on a menu. America, for the Burkean, made the Constitution.
However, as we can see from the recent mania, among Americans, for writing a constitution in Iraq – a mania that must be puzzling to Iraqis, who have experienced many constitutions, and seen that all of them mysteriously permitted dictators or factions or tribes to do exactly what they wanted in the way of murdering their opponents – Leo Strauss’ enthusiasm is now a semi-official cause of at least one department of the Executive Branch.
To please H., then, we will write about, not Strauss, but Straussians. And, in particular, about a conflict that has sprung up between two noted Straussians, Harvey Mansfeld and Harry Jaffa, over the issue of the Declaration of Independence vs. the Constitution. There’s an essay about the controversy on the Claremont College website, written by Thomas G. West, apparently a student of Jaffa’s.
West’s essay makes the orthodox Straussian moves. First and foremost, the tics are assembled. The tics concern the embattled state of the real thinkers in a world in which the liberal establishment lays down the orthodoxy. This is always good – instead of being a humble thinker, one is an embattled remnant. Myself, I appreciate the dramatic value of this rhetorical penchant. It is just that I have a hard time conceiving of a bunch of tenured profs as the heirs of the Trojan warriors.
If you have an embattled remnant, surely you have a conquering army of evil. For the Straussians, this is the current orthodoxy of liberalism. Which is another way of saying, relativism. Relativism is the enemy.
Let’s turn to the text.
West begins by asking a good question:
“What were the original principles of the American Constitution? Are those principles true?”
Then we have the inevitable gathering of the tics:
“Many historians and political scientists write about the first question. Scholars are never shy about telling us what happened in the dead-and-gone eighteenth century. But few of them think it is even worth discussing whether the Founders' principles are true. For example, in a review of my book Vindicating the Founders, historian Joseph Ellis accuses me of having committed "sins of presentism." My error, as he cleverly puts it, is believing "that ideas are like migratory birds that can take off in the eighteenth century and land intact in our time." Ellis does not even try to refute the Founders' principles or their arguments, summarized in my book, regarding property rights, women's rights, and welfare policy. For him, it is enough simply to dismiss my endorsement of their arguments and ideas as "bizarre."1 “
Then, the stating of the anti-relativist position:
“But what if some ideas — I mean true ones — really are like migratory birds that can land intact in any century? What if the principles of the founding are as true today as they were two centuries ago?”
So far, there is nothing unusual about the procedure here. The ‘founding” is a little scary, I admit – it makes the Constitutional convention and the rest of it sound like a very select meeting of the Order of the Golden Fleece. However, West makes a good point. If he was really a political philosopher, he might even consider that the point has an obverse side: what if some ideas – I mean true ones – that are current are like migratory birds that can land intact in the eighteenth century? For instance, the idea of the equality of women? But he isn’t a political philosopher – he is a Straussian. They don’t ask such questions.
“Students and admirers of Leo Strauss are among the few political scientists who write seriously about whether the Founders' principles are true. Strauss made this possible by convincing them that political philosophy in the classical sense is possible, that human reason may be capable of discovering the truth about the good society. Anyone who approaches the Founders from this perspective is likely to be open to their way of thinking, which took for granted that reason can figure out the principles of justice by observing and reflecting on the human condition.”
The truth is, everybody appeals to the human condition. Ellis, for example, is certainly appealing to it. His idea is that the human condition can accommodate such leaps that some political principles in the 18th century don’t hold in the 20th century. In fact, however, West isn’t going to argue about historical conditions, or the concrete situations that the human condition, embodied in humans, finds itself in. He is going to turn Straussian on us in his next sentence: “Strauss argued that the principles of classical political philosophers like Plato and Aristotle remain the standard for us today.”
This is the defining characteristic of the Straussian, as far as I can see. The appeal to truth is answered not by observing and reflecting on experience, but by appealing to the masters. The masters encode the human condition for all time.
Now, if we look closely at this habit, we can discern in it a familiar, and fundamental, objection to modernity. The idea that to discover a truth, reason must submit to experience – to the historically concrete event – instead of deriving truth from its own nature is pretty much the basis of the Enlightenment, and certainly the program of the natural “philosophers” of the seventeenth century, from which the positive sciences derive. In a sense, the Age of Reason was all about the dethronement of reason. That dethronement – that elevation of experience, or the Other of Reason – is what made the ‘experimental method’ so revolutionary. Truth, in other words, became dependent on the tests that distinguished what was true from what was false. This was the guiding idea for the eighteenth century’s political anthropology. But this, for the Straussian, is a bad and fatal thing, mixing together the contingent and the absolute. Rather, the truth must be segregated from the historically concrete. Which is why West can begin his essay with an appeal to the truth, and then foreclose on that appeal like this: “When his [Strauss’s] students approach the founding, therefore, they tend to judge it against the standard of the classics.” So much for observing the human condition.
After this prologue, we proceed to the topic, which is a dispute between Harry Jaffa and Harvey Mansfeld about the meaning of equality. This is not a dispute that refers to any recent sociological literature about equality, or takes an analytic approach to it and describes, for instance, the difference between juridical and economic equality. No, in this dispute, the contestants bring out their favorite texts. Jaffa refers to the Declaration of Independence and the speeches of Abraham Lincoln. Mansfeld prefers the Constitution and de Tocqueville.
Roughly, Jaffa maintains that the enforcement of civil equality is a “true’ principle of the human condition, considered from the point of view of politics, and that this truth was expressed by the Declaration of Independence and acted upon, rightly, by Lincoln. Mansfeld maintains that the Declaration of Independence was rightly curbed by the Constitution, and that De Tocqueville righly warns us of the cultural mediocrity attendent upon too much enforcement of civil equality.
Neither of these are bogus positions. What is interesting, however, is that both sides eventually, shyly, have to appeal to something beyond the standard of the classics. Even an anti-modernist philosophy is so infiltrated by the positivist spirit that its arguments are conducted with, well, some acknowledgement of the real consequences of the arguments.
Here, for instance, is Mansfeld by way of West.
“Mansfield argues that Locke, following Machiavelli, believed he had invented a kind of government in which no one really rules. The government never does what it wants; it is always carrying out the will of somebody else, namely, of the people….
But Mansfield says — and he believes he is following Aristotle here — that this hope of nonpartisanship is a vain dream. People will always disagree about the good. Even a regime that is designed to be nonpartisan will turn out to be as partisan as any other. This, Mansfield believes, is the lesson of Tocqueville's Democracy in America, a book that he and his wife, Delba Winthrop, translated. In their introduction, Mansfield and Winthrop call Tocqueville's book "the best book ever written on democracy and the best book ever written on America." According to Tocqueville, as summarized by Mansfield and Winthrop, America is "middle class, thus timid and mediocre, and lacking in both virtue and greatness." It is true that Tocqueville does not scorn this bourgeois way of life in the manner of Rousseau and Stendhal. But he does argue that a democratic nation, in which public opinion dominates, becomes a partisan political regime "without meaning to be." The majority comes to believe in "the infallibility of majority reason." Yet the majority is a "collection of self-consciously weak individuals." The democratic citizen is at once proud of his independence and aware of his weakness. "In this extremity," writes Tocqueville, "he naturally turns his regard to the immense being that rises alone in the midst of universal debasement." Mansfield and Winthrop explain: "The immense being — replacing God — is the state."
This is well done. West explains that Mansfeld sees, in the danger of Leviathan, a solution that emerges accidentally from the Constitution: “The Constitution was written to secure the natural rights named in the Declaration. But once written, it took on a life of its own, independent of the doctrine that gave rise to it. The Constitution, and no longer the principle that "all men are created equal," now became our regime, our arche or principle, our authoritative beginning that shapes and forms us and makes us what we are. We now understand ourselves (or once did), Mansfield argues, as a constitutional people, no longer as a revolutionary people.”
However, under the strain of segregating the truth and the historically concrete, Mansfeld actually buttresses his argument with … history.
“According to Mansfield, the result of this transformation from a natural-rights republic to a constitutional republic is that our politics are much less vulnerable to the kind of destructive moralism that we see in the French Revolution. The French, in Mansfield's view, made the mistake of taking the idea of equality too seriously. They tried to "finish" the modern revolution initiated by Locke and the other adherents of social compact theory. They failed to put an end to their revolution by constitutionalizing it, as the American Founders did. As a result, the French lived out the full destructive implications of the modern doctrine, while the Americans were spared that destruction. In Mansfield's analysis, sober forms take the place of dangerous moral absolutes. That is, the form and formalities of constitutionalism take the place, in America, of insatiable appeals to a standard of "natural rights [held] over the government."14 “
The appeal to the historically concrete rather ruins the Straussian preference for the standards of the classics, because it opens a space for questions deriving from history. In particular, one wants to ask, what about the destructive consequences of the slavery that was legitimated in the Constitution at the “founding”? Americans were not spared that destruction. And if we want to blame the Terror on taking Locke’s contractual notion of the state too seriously, couldn’t we blame the bias towards property, no matter what the cost to the human condition, inscribed in the Constitution for the total violence visited on Afro-Americans? It is here that equality becomes more than merely something deriving from the standards laid down by the classics, since, of course, there are classics and there are classics. Here, for instance, is an excerpt from a classic by one Conneau, published in 1854, entitled “Captain Canot; or, Twenty years an African slaver”
" A few days before the embarkation takes place the head of every male and female are shaven. They are then marked . . . with a hot pipe sufficiently heated to blister the skin. Some [purchasers] use their initials made of silver wire. . . . . this disagreeable operation is done only when several persons ship slaves in one vessel . . . . [The branding] is done as lightly as possible, and just enough for the mark to remain only six months; when and if well done, it leaves the skin as smooth as ever. This scorching sign is generally made on the fleshy part of the arm to adults, to children on the posterior" (Theophilus Conneau, A Slaver's Logbook or 20 Years' Residence in Africa [Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1976), pp. 81-82
Do I discern, in those slave marks, truths that, like birds, have migrated from the 19th century to this one?
I could stop here, and leave the impression that the Straussians are the usual racist pigs. But that wouldn’t be true. It is part of the confusion that surrounds the Straussians that West’s record of the dispute between Mansfeld and Jaffa accommodates the historic experience of slavery. Jaffa, it turns out, has his eyes on the prize. He is against slavery. But, being a Straussian, he can’t make an argument against slavery that doesn’t squeeze the juice from Plato, Aristotle and all the rest of them:
Even if we admit that there is some tiny number of men who are sufficiently godlike that they could be trusted with absolute power without consent, it would still not establish a politically relevant claim. For, Jaffa writes,
Plato's Republic is imaginary precisely because, according to Plato himself, philosophers do not wish to rule, and anyone wishing to rule is not a philosopher. Anyone who asserts a right to rule on the basis of his claim to wisdom is accordingly condemned in advance as a charlatan by philosophy itself. . . . Philosopher-kings are not possible, and genuine philosophers will always prefer a regime of equality under the law.19
Jaffa is saying that the classical argument for government without consent is refuted by the classics themselves, leaving us with the conclusion that the esoteric teaching, as it were, of the classics is that all men are created equal! This paradoxical claim should not perhaps come as a surprise. For Jaffa had said many years ago that according to Aristotle no normal human being is a natural slave.20
And so it goes. There is something comically satisfying about the members of the order of the founding finally coming round to the idea that slavery is bad in 2002, and defending that proposition as the conclusion of the esoteric teaching. As long as it can be interpreted out of Plato and Aristotle, there you have it: the truth.
The Straussians are very American in their anti-modernism. This is the same current of fundamentalism that Mencken had such fun with back in the twenties. The accusation of fascism and the like is wildly off the mark. This stuff is in the American grain. It is the kind of clubjoining, text-quoting thing that delights the Mason, brings tears to the eyes of the A.A. guy reverentially citing the 12 steps, and has always made your average suburban bürger feel a little bit special. Why not?
However, as a guide to the ‘truth,’ this falls well short of the modern philosophical standard.
My friend, H., sent me an article about Leo Strauss and urged me to write a post about it for LI. Unfortunately, I know very little about Leo Strauss, and H. knows so much more that I feel a little ridiculous taking the pontifical chair.
For what it is worth: whenever his adherents quote Mr. Strauss, the words always seem disturbingly shallow – either platitudinous encomiums of Plato and Aristotle, one of the habits of German philosophers that the analytics had the good taste to do away with, or else exhortations that are the starting points for arguments that aren’t, in the event, ever made. I am simply giving you my impression of Strauss – but I admit, I’ve never really seriously read him.
However, I – and everybody else – has read a lot about Straussians. And I do think that there is one strain among the Straussians that exerts an improbable influence on American foreign policy today. Strauss had a great reverence for the American Constitution. He was a man, too, who felt that reading certain canonical texts was identical with thinking – with the discovery of truth itself. It all depended on the density of the reading, the concentration one brought to it. There is an obvious analogy, here, with the way a Judge, ideally, makes a judgment about the application of a law. For the Judge, too, the Constitution is a sort of set of truths – or a set of norms to which the formation of laws and regulations, and their applications, must conform. Perhaps it is this analogy that drew Strauss’s attention to the Constitution. In any case, he was hog wild for the thing, and his followers are, accordingly, also hog wild for the thing. His followers have extended this reverence, in fact, to the very idea of a constitution, in which they have invested a mystical and mystifying enthusiasm that distinguishes them, as a group, from the usual Burkean conservative. Burke was no enthusiast for theorists of Republics. He thought the craze for writing constitutions in his time was symptomatic of the way late Enlightenment thinkers had misunderstood the ‘science of government:” a science that he believed must mirror the natural adaptations of the relations of power and property in a given society. For Burke, the idea of a founding document – some text that exerts an ultimate shaping force upon those relations in a society, creating them, so to speak – is pernicious, mistaking the subservient document for the spirit of the laws. The American constitution did not, in this view, create America. It has, rather, exerted the local influence that such a document could exert upon a society that was organizing itself according to laws that are not meant to be boiled up and listed in a text, like so many items on a menu. America, for the Burkean, made the Constitution.
However, as we can see from the recent mania, among Americans, for writing a constitution in Iraq – a mania that must be puzzling to Iraqis, who have experienced many constitutions, and seen that all of them mysteriously permitted dictators or factions or tribes to do exactly what they wanted in the way of murdering their opponents – Leo Strauss’ enthusiasm is now a semi-official cause of at least one department of the Executive Branch.
To please H., then, we will write about, not Strauss, but Straussians. And, in particular, about a conflict that has sprung up between two noted Straussians, Harvey Mansfeld and Harry Jaffa, over the issue of the Declaration of Independence vs. the Constitution. There’s an essay about the controversy on the Claremont College website, written by Thomas G. West, apparently a student of Jaffa’s.
West’s essay makes the orthodox Straussian moves. First and foremost, the tics are assembled. The tics concern the embattled state of the real thinkers in a world in which the liberal establishment lays down the orthodoxy. This is always good – instead of being a humble thinker, one is an embattled remnant. Myself, I appreciate the dramatic value of this rhetorical penchant. It is just that I have a hard time conceiving of a bunch of tenured profs as the heirs of the Trojan warriors.
If you have an embattled remnant, surely you have a conquering army of evil. For the Straussians, this is the current orthodoxy of liberalism. Which is another way of saying, relativism. Relativism is the enemy.
Let’s turn to the text.
West begins by asking a good question:
“What were the original principles of the American Constitution? Are those principles true?”
Then we have the inevitable gathering of the tics:
“Many historians and political scientists write about the first question. Scholars are never shy about telling us what happened in the dead-and-gone eighteenth century. But few of them think it is even worth discussing whether the Founders' principles are true. For example, in a review of my book Vindicating the Founders, historian Joseph Ellis accuses me of having committed "sins of presentism." My error, as he cleverly puts it, is believing "that ideas are like migratory birds that can take off in the eighteenth century and land intact in our time." Ellis does not even try to refute the Founders' principles or their arguments, summarized in my book, regarding property rights, women's rights, and welfare policy. For him, it is enough simply to dismiss my endorsement of their arguments and ideas as "bizarre."1 “
Then, the stating of the anti-relativist position:
“But what if some ideas — I mean true ones — really are like migratory birds that can land intact in any century? What if the principles of the founding are as true today as they were two centuries ago?”
So far, there is nothing unusual about the procedure here. The ‘founding” is a little scary, I admit – it makes the Constitutional convention and the rest of it sound like a very select meeting of the Order of the Golden Fleece. However, West makes a good point. If he was really a political philosopher, he might even consider that the point has an obverse side: what if some ideas – I mean true ones – that are current are like migratory birds that can land intact in the eighteenth century? For instance, the idea of the equality of women? But he isn’t a political philosopher – he is a Straussian. They don’t ask such questions.
“Students and admirers of Leo Strauss are among the few political scientists who write seriously about whether the Founders' principles are true. Strauss made this possible by convincing them that political philosophy in the classical sense is possible, that human reason may be capable of discovering the truth about the good society. Anyone who approaches the Founders from this perspective is likely to be open to their way of thinking, which took for granted that reason can figure out the principles of justice by observing and reflecting on the human condition.”
The truth is, everybody appeals to the human condition. Ellis, for example, is certainly appealing to it. His idea is that the human condition can accommodate such leaps that some political principles in the 18th century don’t hold in the 20th century. In fact, however, West isn’t going to argue about historical conditions, or the concrete situations that the human condition, embodied in humans, finds itself in. He is going to turn Straussian on us in his next sentence: “Strauss argued that the principles of classical political philosophers like Plato and Aristotle remain the standard for us today.”
This is the defining characteristic of the Straussian, as far as I can see. The appeal to truth is answered not by observing and reflecting on experience, but by appealing to the masters. The masters encode the human condition for all time.
Now, if we look closely at this habit, we can discern in it a familiar, and fundamental, objection to modernity. The idea that to discover a truth, reason must submit to experience – to the historically concrete event – instead of deriving truth from its own nature is pretty much the basis of the Enlightenment, and certainly the program of the natural “philosophers” of the seventeenth century, from which the positive sciences derive. In a sense, the Age of Reason was all about the dethronement of reason. That dethronement – that elevation of experience, or the Other of Reason – is what made the ‘experimental method’ so revolutionary. Truth, in other words, became dependent on the tests that distinguished what was true from what was false. This was the guiding idea for the eighteenth century’s political anthropology. But this, for the Straussian, is a bad and fatal thing, mixing together the contingent and the absolute. Rather, the truth must be segregated from the historically concrete. Which is why West can begin his essay with an appeal to the truth, and then foreclose on that appeal like this: “When his [Strauss’s] students approach the founding, therefore, they tend to judge it against the standard of the classics.” So much for observing the human condition.
After this prologue, we proceed to the topic, which is a dispute between Harry Jaffa and Harvey Mansfeld about the meaning of equality. This is not a dispute that refers to any recent sociological literature about equality, or takes an analytic approach to it and describes, for instance, the difference between juridical and economic equality. No, in this dispute, the contestants bring out their favorite texts. Jaffa refers to the Declaration of Independence and the speeches of Abraham Lincoln. Mansfeld prefers the Constitution and de Tocqueville.
Roughly, Jaffa maintains that the enforcement of civil equality is a “true’ principle of the human condition, considered from the point of view of politics, and that this truth was expressed by the Declaration of Independence and acted upon, rightly, by Lincoln. Mansfeld maintains that the Declaration of Independence was rightly curbed by the Constitution, and that De Tocqueville righly warns us of the cultural mediocrity attendent upon too much enforcement of civil equality.
Neither of these are bogus positions. What is interesting, however, is that both sides eventually, shyly, have to appeal to something beyond the standard of the classics. Even an anti-modernist philosophy is so infiltrated by the positivist spirit that its arguments are conducted with, well, some acknowledgement of the real consequences of the arguments.
Here, for instance, is Mansfeld by way of West.
“Mansfield argues that Locke, following Machiavelli, believed he had invented a kind of government in which no one really rules. The government never does what it wants; it is always carrying out the will of somebody else, namely, of the people….
But Mansfield says — and he believes he is following Aristotle here — that this hope of nonpartisanship is a vain dream. People will always disagree about the good. Even a regime that is designed to be nonpartisan will turn out to be as partisan as any other. This, Mansfield believes, is the lesson of Tocqueville's Democracy in America, a book that he and his wife, Delba Winthrop, translated. In their introduction, Mansfield and Winthrop call Tocqueville's book "the best book ever written on democracy and the best book ever written on America." According to Tocqueville, as summarized by Mansfield and Winthrop, America is "middle class, thus timid and mediocre, and lacking in both virtue and greatness." It is true that Tocqueville does not scorn this bourgeois way of life in the manner of Rousseau and Stendhal. But he does argue that a democratic nation, in which public opinion dominates, becomes a partisan political regime "without meaning to be." The majority comes to believe in "the infallibility of majority reason." Yet the majority is a "collection of self-consciously weak individuals." The democratic citizen is at once proud of his independence and aware of his weakness. "In this extremity," writes Tocqueville, "he naturally turns his regard to the immense being that rises alone in the midst of universal debasement." Mansfield and Winthrop explain: "The immense being — replacing God — is the state."
This is well done. West explains that Mansfeld sees, in the danger of Leviathan, a solution that emerges accidentally from the Constitution: “The Constitution was written to secure the natural rights named in the Declaration. But once written, it took on a life of its own, independent of the doctrine that gave rise to it. The Constitution, and no longer the principle that "all men are created equal," now became our regime, our arche or principle, our authoritative beginning that shapes and forms us and makes us what we are. We now understand ourselves (or once did), Mansfield argues, as a constitutional people, no longer as a revolutionary people.”
However, under the strain of segregating the truth and the historically concrete, Mansfeld actually buttresses his argument with … history.
“According to Mansfield, the result of this transformation from a natural-rights republic to a constitutional republic is that our politics are much less vulnerable to the kind of destructive moralism that we see in the French Revolution. The French, in Mansfield's view, made the mistake of taking the idea of equality too seriously. They tried to "finish" the modern revolution initiated by Locke and the other adherents of social compact theory. They failed to put an end to their revolution by constitutionalizing it, as the American Founders did. As a result, the French lived out the full destructive implications of the modern doctrine, while the Americans were spared that destruction. In Mansfield's analysis, sober forms take the place of dangerous moral absolutes. That is, the form and formalities of constitutionalism take the place, in America, of insatiable appeals to a standard of "natural rights [held] over the government."14 “
The appeal to the historically concrete rather ruins the Straussian preference for the standards of the classics, because it opens a space for questions deriving from history. In particular, one wants to ask, what about the destructive consequences of the slavery that was legitimated in the Constitution at the “founding”? Americans were not spared that destruction. And if we want to blame the Terror on taking Locke’s contractual notion of the state too seriously, couldn’t we blame the bias towards property, no matter what the cost to the human condition, inscribed in the Constitution for the total violence visited on Afro-Americans? It is here that equality becomes more than merely something deriving from the standards laid down by the classics, since, of course, there are classics and there are classics. Here, for instance, is an excerpt from a classic by one Conneau, published in 1854, entitled “Captain Canot; or, Twenty years an African slaver”
" A few days before the embarkation takes place the head of every male and female are shaven. They are then marked . . . with a hot pipe sufficiently heated to blister the skin. Some [purchasers] use their initials made of silver wire. . . . . this disagreeable operation is done only when several persons ship slaves in one vessel . . . . [The branding] is done as lightly as possible, and just enough for the mark to remain only six months; when and if well done, it leaves the skin as smooth as ever. This scorching sign is generally made on the fleshy part of the arm to adults, to children on the posterior" (Theophilus Conneau, A Slaver's Logbook or 20 Years' Residence in Africa [Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1976), pp. 81-82
Do I discern, in those slave marks, truths that, like birds, have migrated from the 19th century to this one?
I could stop here, and leave the impression that the Straussians are the usual racist pigs. But that wouldn’t be true. It is part of the confusion that surrounds the Straussians that West’s record of the dispute between Mansfeld and Jaffa accommodates the historic experience of slavery. Jaffa, it turns out, has his eyes on the prize. He is against slavery. But, being a Straussian, he can’t make an argument against slavery that doesn’t squeeze the juice from Plato, Aristotle and all the rest of them:
Even if we admit that there is some tiny number of men who are sufficiently godlike that they could be trusted with absolute power without consent, it would still not establish a politically relevant claim. For, Jaffa writes,
Plato's Republic is imaginary precisely because, according to Plato himself, philosophers do not wish to rule, and anyone wishing to rule is not a philosopher. Anyone who asserts a right to rule on the basis of his claim to wisdom is accordingly condemned in advance as a charlatan by philosophy itself. . . . Philosopher-kings are not possible, and genuine philosophers will always prefer a regime of equality under the law.19
Jaffa is saying that the classical argument for government without consent is refuted by the classics themselves, leaving us with the conclusion that the esoteric teaching, as it were, of the classics is that all men are created equal! This paradoxical claim should not perhaps come as a surprise. For Jaffa had said many years ago that according to Aristotle no normal human being is a natural slave.20
And so it goes. There is something comically satisfying about the members of the order of the founding finally coming round to the idea that slavery is bad in 2002, and defending that proposition as the conclusion of the esoteric teaching. As long as it can be interpreted out of Plato and Aristotle, there you have it: the truth.
The Straussians are very American in their anti-modernism. This is the same current of fundamentalism that Mencken had such fun with back in the twenties. The accusation of fascism and the like is wildly off the mark. This stuff is in the American grain. It is the kind of clubjoining, text-quoting thing that delights the Mason, brings tears to the eyes of the A.A. guy reverentially citing the 12 steps, and has always made your average suburban bürger feel a little bit special. Why not?
However, as a guide to the ‘truth,’ this falls well short of the modern philosophical standard.
Wednesday, December 17, 2003
Bollettino
My friend, H., sent me an article about Leo Strauss and urged me to write a post about it for LI. Unfortunately, I know very little about Leo Strauss, and H. knows so much more that I feel a little ridiculous taking the pontifical chair.
For what it is worth: whenever his adherents quote Mr. Strauss, the words always seem disturbingly shallow – either platitudinous encomiums of Plato and Aristotle, one of the habits of German philosophers that the analytics had the good taste to do away with, or else exhortations that are the starting points for arguments that aren’t, in the event, ever made. I am simply giving you my impression of Strauss – but I admit, I’ve never really seriously read him.
However, I – and everybody else – has read a lot about Straussians. And I do think that there is one strain among the Straussians that exerts an improbable influence on American foreign policy today. Strauss had a great reverence for the American Constitution. He was a man, too, who felt that reading certain canonical texts was identical with thinking – with the discovery of truth itself. It all depended on the density of the reading, the concentration one brought to it. There is an obvious analogy, here, with the way a Judge, ideally, makes a judgment about the application of a law. For the Judge, too, the Constitution is a sort of set of truths – or a set of norms to which the formation of laws and regulations, and their applications, must conform. Perhaps it is this analogy that drew Strauss’s attention to the Constitution. In any case, he was hog wild for the thing, and his followers are, accordingly, also hog wild for the thing. His followers have extended this reverence, in fact, to the very idea of a constitution, in which they have invested a mystical and mystifying enthusiasm that distinguishes them, as a group, from the usual Burkean conservative. Burke was no enthusiast for theorists of Republics. He thought the craze for writing constitutions in his time was symptomatic of the way late Enlightenment thinkers had misunderstood the ‘science of government:” a science that he believed must mirror the natural adaptations of the relations of power and property in a given society. For Burke, the idea of a founding document – some text that exerts an ultimate shaping force upon those relations in a society, creating them, so to speak – is pernicious, mistaking the subservient document for the spirit of the laws. The American constitution did not, in this view, create America. It has, rather, exerted the local influence that such a document could exert upon a society that was organizing itself according to laws that are not meant to be boiled up and listed in a text, like so many items on a menu. America, for the Burkean, made the Constitution.
However, as we can see from the recent mania, among Americans, for writing a constitution in Iraq – a mania that must be puzzling to Iraqis, who have experienced many constitutions, and seen that all of them mysteriously permitted dictators or factions or tribes to do exactly what they wanted in the way of murdering their opponents – Leo Strauss’ enthusiasm is now a semi-official cause of at least one department of the Executive Branch.
To please H., then, we will write about, not Strauss, but Straussians. And, in particular, about a conflict that has sprung up between two noted Straussians, Harvey Mansfeld and Harry Jaffa, over the issue of the Declaration of Independence vs. the Constitution. There’s an essay about the controversy on the Claremont College website, written by Thomas G. West, apparently a student of Jaffa’s.
West’s essay makes the orthodox Straussian moves. First and foremost, the tics are assembled. The tics concern the embattled state of the real thinkers in a world in which the liberal establishment lays down the orthodoxy. This is always good – instead of being a humble thinker, one is an embattled remnant. Myself, I appreciate the dramatic value of this rhetorical penchant. It is just that I have a hard time conceiving of a bunch of tenured profs as the heirs of the Trojan warriors.
If you have an embattled remnant, surely you have a conquering army of evil. For the Straussians, this is the current orthodoxy of liberalism. Which is another way of saying, relativism. Relativism is the enemy.
To be continued
My friend, H., sent me an article about Leo Strauss and urged me to write a post about it for LI. Unfortunately, I know very little about Leo Strauss, and H. knows so much more that I feel a little ridiculous taking the pontifical chair.
For what it is worth: whenever his adherents quote Mr. Strauss, the words always seem disturbingly shallow – either platitudinous encomiums of Plato and Aristotle, one of the habits of German philosophers that the analytics had the good taste to do away with, or else exhortations that are the starting points for arguments that aren’t, in the event, ever made. I am simply giving you my impression of Strauss – but I admit, I’ve never really seriously read him.
However, I – and everybody else – has read a lot about Straussians. And I do think that there is one strain among the Straussians that exerts an improbable influence on American foreign policy today. Strauss had a great reverence for the American Constitution. He was a man, too, who felt that reading certain canonical texts was identical with thinking – with the discovery of truth itself. It all depended on the density of the reading, the concentration one brought to it. There is an obvious analogy, here, with the way a Judge, ideally, makes a judgment about the application of a law. For the Judge, too, the Constitution is a sort of set of truths – or a set of norms to which the formation of laws and regulations, and their applications, must conform. Perhaps it is this analogy that drew Strauss’s attention to the Constitution. In any case, he was hog wild for the thing, and his followers are, accordingly, also hog wild for the thing. His followers have extended this reverence, in fact, to the very idea of a constitution, in which they have invested a mystical and mystifying enthusiasm that distinguishes them, as a group, from the usual Burkean conservative. Burke was no enthusiast for theorists of Republics. He thought the craze for writing constitutions in his time was symptomatic of the way late Enlightenment thinkers had misunderstood the ‘science of government:” a science that he believed must mirror the natural adaptations of the relations of power and property in a given society. For Burke, the idea of a founding document – some text that exerts an ultimate shaping force upon those relations in a society, creating them, so to speak – is pernicious, mistaking the subservient document for the spirit of the laws. The American constitution did not, in this view, create America. It has, rather, exerted the local influence that such a document could exert upon a society that was organizing itself according to laws that are not meant to be boiled up and listed in a text, like so many items on a menu. America, for the Burkean, made the Constitution.
However, as we can see from the recent mania, among Americans, for writing a constitution in Iraq – a mania that must be puzzling to Iraqis, who have experienced many constitutions, and seen that all of them mysteriously permitted dictators or factions or tribes to do exactly what they wanted in the way of murdering their opponents – Leo Strauss’ enthusiasm is now a semi-official cause of at least one department of the Executive Branch.
To please H., then, we will write about, not Strauss, but Straussians. And, in particular, about a conflict that has sprung up between two noted Straussians, Harvey Mansfeld and Harry Jaffa, over the issue of the Declaration of Independence vs. the Constitution. There’s an essay about the controversy on the Claremont College website, written by Thomas G. West, apparently a student of Jaffa’s.
West’s essay makes the orthodox Straussian moves. First and foremost, the tics are assembled. The tics concern the embattled state of the real thinkers in a world in which the liberal establishment lays down the orthodoxy. This is always good – instead of being a humble thinker, one is an embattled remnant. Myself, I appreciate the dramatic value of this rhetorical penchant. It is just that I have a hard time conceiving of a bunch of tenured profs as the heirs of the Trojan warriors.
If you have an embattled remnant, surely you have a conquering army of evil. For the Straussians, this is the current orthodoxy of liberalism. Which is another way of saying, relativism. Relativism is the enemy.
To be continued
Monday, December 15, 2003
Bollettino
The Sock Army
Patrick Cockburn, who wrote the best book about the Post Gulf War survival of Saddam H, pens the best horrorscope of his regime for the Mirror today. You know Cockburn is going for the gusto from his first sentence:
�WHEN one of Saddam's most notorious prisons was captured by rebels after the Gulf War they found a human ear nailed to the wall.�
This is one of the classic stories � like the story of Caligula, or of Nero. Saddam the H. was not a tyrant in the Stalin or Hitler vein. The Ba�ath party never played the role of the Communist or Nazi parties, but were window dressing for legitimating a peculiarly virulent family.
Cockburn�s summary of how Saddam won the Intifada in 91 is concise and to the point:
�And it was in the aftermath of this war that Saddam faced his greatest challenge from the Iraqi people.
A tank gunner retreating to the southern Iraqi port of Basra, infuriated by the defeat, fired a shell into a portrait of Saddam. The city erupted. Almost all of Iraq south of Baghdad rose in rebellion and a few days later there was another rebellion by the Iraqi Kurds in the northern mountains.
At one moment, 14 out of 18 Iraqi provinces were in revolt. But the US, while keen to get rid of Saddam Hussein, did not want a revolution in Iraq.
It particularly did not want one in which the winners would be Shi'ite Muslims, belonging to the same Islamic tradition as Iran.
WASHINGTON allowed Saddam to use his helicopter gunships against the rebels and the rebellion was crushed in blood. I was in Kerbala, one of the holy cities of the Shia, just after Iraqi tanks had moved in and I remember people trapped in their houses screaming for help from behind closed doors.�
The continuity in D.C. foreign policy between then and now is centered on the fear of a Shi�a block. There is constant feedback about this fear � it moves from Kuwait and Lebanon and the Saudis to D.C. and back. Its pantomime hero is Chalabi, who is like a bad sit com � he has the Shiite credentials, they must have thought, so he�ll go down like champagne. That he is a swindler seems to have been no bar to his advancement � quite the contrary. American Intelligence groups are used to installing swindlers into high office in various countries, especially Latin America.
Unfortunately for the game plan, so far he�s gone down like cod liver oil.
There�s one other delicious detail in Cockburn�s story that we have to cite. Cockburn explains the Iraqi army�s terrible shape with this anecdote:
�A few years ago I watched Saddam reviewing a parade of supposedly elite troops in Baghdad. From a distance it all looked very impressive in their white gloves.
It was only when I got closer that I realised that the Iraqi army was as short of gloves as it was of everything else and then men were wearing white sports socks on their hands.�
The Sock Army
Patrick Cockburn, who wrote the best book about the Post Gulf War survival of Saddam H, pens the best horrorscope of his regime for the Mirror today. You know Cockburn is going for the gusto from his first sentence:
�WHEN one of Saddam's most notorious prisons was captured by rebels after the Gulf War they found a human ear nailed to the wall.�
This is one of the classic stories � like the story of Caligula, or of Nero. Saddam the H. was not a tyrant in the Stalin or Hitler vein. The Ba�ath party never played the role of the Communist or Nazi parties, but were window dressing for legitimating a peculiarly virulent family.
Cockburn�s summary of how Saddam won the Intifada in 91 is concise and to the point:
�And it was in the aftermath of this war that Saddam faced his greatest challenge from the Iraqi people.
A tank gunner retreating to the southern Iraqi port of Basra, infuriated by the defeat, fired a shell into a portrait of Saddam. The city erupted. Almost all of Iraq south of Baghdad rose in rebellion and a few days later there was another rebellion by the Iraqi Kurds in the northern mountains.
At one moment, 14 out of 18 Iraqi provinces were in revolt. But the US, while keen to get rid of Saddam Hussein, did not want a revolution in Iraq.
It particularly did not want one in which the winners would be Shi'ite Muslims, belonging to the same Islamic tradition as Iran.
WASHINGTON allowed Saddam to use his helicopter gunships against the rebels and the rebellion was crushed in blood. I was in Kerbala, one of the holy cities of the Shia, just after Iraqi tanks had moved in and I remember people trapped in their houses screaming for help from behind closed doors.�
The continuity in D.C. foreign policy between then and now is centered on the fear of a Shi�a block. There is constant feedback about this fear � it moves from Kuwait and Lebanon and the Saudis to D.C. and back. Its pantomime hero is Chalabi, who is like a bad sit com � he has the Shiite credentials, they must have thought, so he�ll go down like champagne. That he is a swindler seems to have been no bar to his advancement � quite the contrary. American Intelligence groups are used to installing swindlers into high office in various countries, especially Latin America.
Unfortunately for the game plan, so far he�s gone down like cod liver oil.
There�s one other delicious detail in Cockburn�s story that we have to cite. Cockburn explains the Iraqi army�s terrible shape with this anecdote:
�A few years ago I watched Saddam reviewing a parade of supposedly elite troops in Baghdad. From a distance it all looked very impressive in their white gloves.
It was only when I got closer that I realised that the Iraqi army was as short of gloves as it was of everything else and then men were wearing white sports socks on their hands.�
Sunday, December 14, 2003
Bollettino
The Saddam H. capture is being touted as the next step in the re-election of George Bush. We don�t think so.
We do think the capture is great news. It is a definitely a moment � one of those political moments Montesquieu discussed in �Considerations sur la cause de la grandeurs des Romains:� an event that suddenly signals the loosening of the grip of fate.
LI thought, after the fall of Baghdad, that Saddam must surely be dead. In the last couple months, however, that theory was clearly wrong, dependent as it was on an exaggerated sense of what the American military can do with their laser directed bombs. But that Saddam the Meat Hustler still existed in the flesh (and, pixilated, on video) has burdened the resistance much more than the occupiers. In spite of the American media�s insistence that the fear of Hussein in the souks was the final impediment to the flowers and candy that the American occupiers naturally deserved, we thought, on the contrary, that the inability of the resistance to capitalize, politically, on the three major aspects of the Occupation�s rule: 1., the power invested in a non-Iraqi proconsul, Paul Bremer, 2., the appearance of power invested in a rabble of exile frauds, the Council, and 3, the destruction of the bases of the political economy of Iraq since the fifties, demonstrated the ideological vacuum created by the wholesale corruption and homicide that characterized Saddam H.�s reign. It was, on a deep level, a more complete surrender than the fall of Baghdad.
With Saddam rendered irrelevant, the third factor in Iraqi politics can now come into play � and come into play in such a way as to disturb Wolfowitz�s dream of Pax Chile on the Euphrates. That third factor is the Shi�ite demand for elections. Americans have been blocking this demand, because the American backplan is to somehow thrust a Chalabi or Chalabi like figure on Iraq. This thrusting was to be called democracy, not rape. So far, with Chalabi, it has pretty much failed � except of course with that old warhorse, Washington Post�s Sally Quinn, whose birdbrained paen to Chalabi we have already commented on (or is it stomped to death?).
In our opinion, the combinations now at work in Iraq are about to tumble to a new configuration. And this is not going to make the Pentagon happy. Our bet, right now, is that the following will emerge as the combination of forces in Iraq in the next, oh, two or three months:
The resistance will continue. It is a headless resistance. Whether it gets a brain will make a lot of difference, here. Our bet is that it won�t.
The Council is going to have to over-reach or dissolve. They�ve been put in an impossible middle position by the Americans. The question of who and how and for what Saddam H. is tried is going to be a point around which the Council will have to concentrate, for good or ill. We think that the Council, which is as brainless as the resistance, will try to over-reach and submit at the same time, and that it just won�t work any more. Alienating its patron, and alienated from its land, the Council will change radically.
Southern Iraq, assured by Saddam�s capture, will finally show a restiveness that America can ill afford. This, we think, will shape whatever happens next in Iraq. As to what that shape will be --- we have no idea. In truth, the Bushies have been so blinded to what is happening in Iran that they don�t realize that the conservative mullahs are, ideologically, their best friends. We think the clerical Shi�a elite, which has obtained a considerable amount of capital, is eager to find an excuse to privatize, and to inject its capital into the global monetary flows. Whether that influences the Shi�a elite in Iraq is something we don�t know enough about to predict.
Montesquieu, in the Considerations, makes a very shrewd remark: Ce qui g�te presque toutes les affaires, c�est qu�ordinairement ceux qui les entreprennent, outre la r�ussite principale, cherchent encore de certains petits succ�s particuliers, qui flattent leur amour-propre et les rendent contents d�eux.
(What spoils almost all affairs is that ordinarily, those who undertake them seek, outside of the principle goal, certain small particular successes, which flatter their amour-propre and make them satisfied with themselves).
This is the history of the last six months of the occupation of Iraq.
The Saddam H. capture is being touted as the next step in the re-election of George Bush. We don�t think so.
We do think the capture is great news. It is a definitely a moment � one of those political moments Montesquieu discussed in �Considerations sur la cause de la grandeurs des Romains:� an event that suddenly signals the loosening of the grip of fate.
LI thought, after the fall of Baghdad, that Saddam must surely be dead. In the last couple months, however, that theory was clearly wrong, dependent as it was on an exaggerated sense of what the American military can do with their laser directed bombs. But that Saddam the Meat Hustler still existed in the flesh (and, pixilated, on video) has burdened the resistance much more than the occupiers. In spite of the American media�s insistence that the fear of Hussein in the souks was the final impediment to the flowers and candy that the American occupiers naturally deserved, we thought, on the contrary, that the inability of the resistance to capitalize, politically, on the three major aspects of the Occupation�s rule: 1., the power invested in a non-Iraqi proconsul, Paul Bremer, 2., the appearance of power invested in a rabble of exile frauds, the Council, and 3, the destruction of the bases of the political economy of Iraq since the fifties, demonstrated the ideological vacuum created by the wholesale corruption and homicide that characterized Saddam H.�s reign. It was, on a deep level, a more complete surrender than the fall of Baghdad.
With Saddam rendered irrelevant, the third factor in Iraqi politics can now come into play � and come into play in such a way as to disturb Wolfowitz�s dream of Pax Chile on the Euphrates. That third factor is the Shi�ite demand for elections. Americans have been blocking this demand, because the American backplan is to somehow thrust a Chalabi or Chalabi like figure on Iraq. This thrusting was to be called democracy, not rape. So far, with Chalabi, it has pretty much failed � except of course with that old warhorse, Washington Post�s Sally Quinn, whose birdbrained paen to Chalabi we have already commented on (or is it stomped to death?).
In our opinion, the combinations now at work in Iraq are about to tumble to a new configuration. And this is not going to make the Pentagon happy. Our bet, right now, is that the following will emerge as the combination of forces in Iraq in the next, oh, two or three months:
The resistance will continue. It is a headless resistance. Whether it gets a brain will make a lot of difference, here. Our bet is that it won�t.
The Council is going to have to over-reach or dissolve. They�ve been put in an impossible middle position by the Americans. The question of who and how and for what Saddam H. is tried is going to be a point around which the Council will have to concentrate, for good or ill. We think that the Council, which is as brainless as the resistance, will try to over-reach and submit at the same time, and that it just won�t work any more. Alienating its patron, and alienated from its land, the Council will change radically.
Southern Iraq, assured by Saddam�s capture, will finally show a restiveness that America can ill afford. This, we think, will shape whatever happens next in Iraq. As to what that shape will be --- we have no idea. In truth, the Bushies have been so blinded to what is happening in Iran that they don�t realize that the conservative mullahs are, ideologically, their best friends. We think the clerical Shi�a elite, which has obtained a considerable amount of capital, is eager to find an excuse to privatize, and to inject its capital into the global monetary flows. Whether that influences the Shi�a elite in Iraq is something we don�t know enough about to predict.
Montesquieu, in the Considerations, makes a very shrewd remark: Ce qui g�te presque toutes les affaires, c�est qu�ordinairement ceux qui les entreprennent, outre la r�ussite principale, cherchent encore de certains petits succ�s particuliers, qui flattent leur amour-propre et les rendent contents d�eux.
(What spoils almost all affairs is that ordinarily, those who undertake them seek, outside of the principle goal, certain small particular successes, which flatter their amour-propre and make them satisfied with themselves).
This is the history of the last six months of the occupation of Iraq.
Friday, December 12, 2003
Bollettino
Our friend T. in New York City just sent us a letter about The Book of the Prick. This surprised us, as we had been thinking of the review of that book ever since we read it in the December 8th New Yorker. The reviewer was the biographer of Colette, Judith Thurman, and she expressed a common prejudice in her review:
�Cazzo is the vulgar Italian word for the male organ, hence the title, whose "closest English rendering," Moulton writes, "is probably 'cockery'-but that is too close to 'cookery.' . . . 'Prickery' might work, but it lacks the specificity of the Italian word. In English, 'prick' is a word with many meanings; in Italian, 'cazzo' can mean only one thing. In the text, I have translated 'cazzo' as 'cock,' but 'Book of the Cock' sounds like it might have something to do with poultry, so for the working English title, I settled on 'Book of the Prick.' " Anglo-Saxon sexual slang, however, has a much harsher impact on the ear than its mellifluous Romance counterpart, and equivalent terms don't carry the same charge. The percussive monosyllables and/or double final consonants of cock, balls, shit, dick, buttocks, jerk-off, prick, cunt, and fuck have a blunt, expletive force that isn't rendered by (and betrays the puckish delicacy of) cazzo, potta, culo, fica, scopare, merda, coglioni, and cacca. The verbs incazzare and inculare, especially used reflexively, are certainly rude, but hardly so heavy-handed as "to take it up the ass." It's the difference, perhaps, between Ariel's nimble tongue and Caliban's thick one.�
This is an old college wife�s tale, one that we have all heard. Yes, English is devoid of the subtlety vis-�-vis ars amore, especially in comparison with those French and Italians. This clumsiness � Caliban at the bat, so to speak � is, according to Ms. Thurmon, all in our velars. Instead of the harem like slither and insinuation of the sibilant, English vulgarities come right at you like the most vulgar of car salesmen drunkenly serenading a stripper jumping out of a cake.
Ourselves, we doubt the puckish delicacy of cacca is lost in the steaming pile of shit it becomes in English. In fact, lately � doubting much -- we�ve certainly doubted the whole sexual divide that notoriously mirrors the English channel.
Let�s take the yeoman �fuck,� which is, in its way, a general stripping off of the overalls. Is it really so �heavy-handed,� or is it that our squeamishness has found an intellectual excuse, a compromise between the responsibility of fuck and the Puritanism endemic to certain parts of our culture? We�ve been reading a biography of Robert Burns, and the one striking thing about Burns is how willing he was to strip off the overalls � there�s fuck all over his letters and poetry. In fact, if you compare him to almost any of the 19th century French poets � the ones who lifted the seal, so to speak � he comes off surprisingly well. Here�s Nine Inches will please a lady:
Come rede me dame, come tell me, dame,
My dame come tell me truly,
What length o' graith, when weel ca'd hame,
Will sair a woman duly?
The carlin clew her wanton tail,
Her wanton tail sae ready -
I learn'd a sang in Annandale,
Nine inch will please a lady.
But for a like mine,
In sooth, we're nae sae gentle;
We'll take tway thumb-bread to the nine,
And tha's a sonsy pintle;
O leeze me on my Charlie lad,
I'll ne'er forget my Charlie!
Tway roarin handfu's and a daud,
He nidge't it in fu' rarely.
But weary fa' the laithron doup
And may it ne'er ken thrivin!
It's no the length that maks me loup,
But it's the double drivin.-
Come nidge me, Tam, come nidge me Tam,
Come nidge me o'er the nyvel!
Come lowse and lug your battering ram,
And thrash him at my gyvel!
What, we wonder, would Thurmon make of the double drivin' of Burns� �souncy pentle�?
This, remember, comes from a very hardcore Presbyterian culture. But one, perhaps significantly, that is still very gaelic. We suspect that the erotic lacuna in our literature after the eighteenth century owes more to the class system and less to the percussive sound of �dick,� as opposed to, say, the lilting sound of �cul�.
By the way, Walt Whitman wrote a very nice essay on Burns -- of course, it was on the nineteenth century's Burns, for whom there was no such a poem as Nine Inches, not to speak of the rest of Burns' smut. Still, Whitman saw what was interesting about Burns as a koontrie cunt:
His brightest hit is his use of the Scotch patois, so full of terms flavor'd like wild fruits or berries. Then I should make an allowance to Burns which cannot be made for any other poet. Curiously even the frequent crudeness, haste, deficiencies, (flatness and puerilities by no means absent) prove upon the whole not out of keeping in any comprehensive collection of his works, heroically printed, "following copy," every piece, every line according to originals. Other poets might tremble for such boldness, such rawness. In "this odd-kind chiel" such points hardly mar the rest. Not only are they in consonance with the underlying spirit of the pieces, but complete the full abandon and veracity of the farm-fields and the home-brew'd flavor of the Scotch vernacular. (Is there not often something in the very neglect, unfinish, careless nudity, slovenly hiatus, coming from intrinsic genius, and not "put on," that secretly pleases the soul more than the wrought and rewrought polish of the most perfect verse?)
Our friend T. in New York City just sent us a letter about The Book of the Prick. This surprised us, as we had been thinking of the review of that book ever since we read it in the December 8th New Yorker. The reviewer was the biographer of Colette, Judith Thurman, and she expressed a common prejudice in her review:
�Cazzo is the vulgar Italian word for the male organ, hence the title, whose "closest English rendering," Moulton writes, "is probably 'cockery'-but that is too close to 'cookery.' . . . 'Prickery' might work, but it lacks the specificity of the Italian word. In English, 'prick' is a word with many meanings; in Italian, 'cazzo' can mean only one thing. In the text, I have translated 'cazzo' as 'cock,' but 'Book of the Cock' sounds like it might have something to do with poultry, so for the working English title, I settled on 'Book of the Prick.' " Anglo-Saxon sexual slang, however, has a much harsher impact on the ear than its mellifluous Romance counterpart, and equivalent terms don't carry the same charge. The percussive monosyllables and/or double final consonants of cock, balls, shit, dick, buttocks, jerk-off, prick, cunt, and fuck have a blunt, expletive force that isn't rendered by (and betrays the puckish delicacy of) cazzo, potta, culo, fica, scopare, merda, coglioni, and cacca. The verbs incazzare and inculare, especially used reflexively, are certainly rude, but hardly so heavy-handed as "to take it up the ass." It's the difference, perhaps, between Ariel's nimble tongue and Caliban's thick one.�
This is an old college wife�s tale, one that we have all heard. Yes, English is devoid of the subtlety vis-�-vis ars amore, especially in comparison with those French and Italians. This clumsiness � Caliban at the bat, so to speak � is, according to Ms. Thurmon, all in our velars. Instead of the harem like slither and insinuation of the sibilant, English vulgarities come right at you like the most vulgar of car salesmen drunkenly serenading a stripper jumping out of a cake.
Ourselves, we doubt the puckish delicacy of cacca is lost in the steaming pile of shit it becomes in English. In fact, lately � doubting much -- we�ve certainly doubted the whole sexual divide that notoriously mirrors the English channel.
Let�s take the yeoman �fuck,� which is, in its way, a general stripping off of the overalls. Is it really so �heavy-handed,� or is it that our squeamishness has found an intellectual excuse, a compromise between the responsibility of fuck and the Puritanism endemic to certain parts of our culture? We�ve been reading a biography of Robert Burns, and the one striking thing about Burns is how willing he was to strip off the overalls � there�s fuck all over his letters and poetry. In fact, if you compare him to almost any of the 19th century French poets � the ones who lifted the seal, so to speak � he comes off surprisingly well. Here�s Nine Inches will please a lady:
Come rede me dame, come tell me, dame,
My dame come tell me truly,
What length o' graith, when weel ca'd hame,
Will sair a woman duly?
The carlin clew her wanton tail,
Her wanton tail sae ready -
I learn'd a sang in Annandale,
Nine inch will please a lady.
But for a like mine,
In sooth, we're nae sae gentle;
We'll take tway thumb-bread to the nine,
And tha's a sonsy pintle;
O leeze me on my Charlie lad,
I'll ne'er forget my Charlie!
Tway roarin handfu's and a daud,
He nidge't it in fu' rarely.
But weary fa' the laithron doup
And may it ne'er ken thrivin!
It's no the length that maks me loup,
But it's the double drivin.-
Come nidge me, Tam, come nidge me Tam,
Come nidge me o'er the nyvel!
Come lowse and lug your battering ram,
And thrash him at my gyvel!
What, we wonder, would Thurmon make of the double drivin' of Burns� �souncy pentle�?
This, remember, comes from a very hardcore Presbyterian culture. But one, perhaps significantly, that is still very gaelic. We suspect that the erotic lacuna in our literature after the eighteenth century owes more to the class system and less to the percussive sound of �dick,� as opposed to, say, the lilting sound of �cul�.
By the way, Walt Whitman wrote a very nice essay on Burns -- of course, it was on the nineteenth century's Burns, for whom there was no such a poem as Nine Inches, not to speak of the rest of Burns' smut. Still, Whitman saw what was interesting about Burns as a koontrie cunt:
His brightest hit is his use of the Scotch patois, so full of terms flavor'd like wild fruits or berries. Then I should make an allowance to Burns which cannot be made for any other poet. Curiously even the frequent crudeness, haste, deficiencies, (flatness and puerilities by no means absent) prove upon the whole not out of keeping in any comprehensive collection of his works, heroically printed, "following copy," every piece, every line according to originals. Other poets might tremble for such boldness, such rawness. In "this odd-kind chiel" such points hardly mar the rest. Not only are they in consonance with the underlying spirit of the pieces, but complete the full abandon and veracity of the farm-fields and the home-brew'd flavor of the Scotch vernacular. (Is there not often something in the very neglect, unfinish, careless nudity, slovenly hiatus, coming from intrinsic genius, and not "put on," that secretly pleases the soul more than the wrought and rewrought polish of the most perfect verse?)
Sunday, December 07, 2003
Bollettino
LI�s readers should check out Umberto Eco�s essay on the fate of books at al Ahram, an Egyptian weekly. The re-commencement of the Library of Alexandria (a silly, theme park project, in LI�s view � what was burned in 600 is good and gone, and by no Humpty Dumpty tricks are we going to piece that civilization back together again) is the occasion for Eco�s meandering meditation on the meaning of texts, and the chances for their survival as texts in the age of the Net. He begins with a marvelous classification of memory: organic, mineral, and vegetal:
�WE HAVE THREE TYPES OF MEMORY. The first one is organic, which is the memory made of flesh and blood and the one administrated by our brain. The second is mineral, and in this sense mankind has known two kinds of mineral memory: millennia ago, this was the memory represented by clay tablets and obelisks, pretty well known in this country, on which people carved their texts. However, this second type is also the electronic memory of today's computers, based upon silicon. We have also known another kind of memory, the vegetal one, the one represented by the first papyruses, again well known in this country, and then on books, made of paper. Let me disregard the fact that at a certain moment the vellum of the first codices were of an organic origin, and the fact that the first paper was made with rugs and not with wood. Let me speak for the sake of simplicity of vegetal memory in order to designate books.�
This is marvelous but, we think, conceptually dubious, for two reasons: one is that these memories do seem to interpenetrate into one another, the mineral crystallizing in our nervous systems, the vegetal being interwoven with chemical synthetics, and the whole system being subordinate to function rather than substance, which is where the real distinction lies. Of course, there�s an Aristotelian echo here: he postulated three souls: the vegetal, the rational, and the animal. A long dead classification, but not completely bogus. The superstition that the human body is conducted by the brain as an orchestra of automatons might be conducted by a conductor with numerous switches ignores such anomalies as the immune system, which is certainly net plugged into some cerebral oversoul, and might well be considered separate souled. But I digress�
From LI�s painfully Derridean point of view, the second problem with Eco's memories is with the very idea that a text is a memory. Of course, a defender of Eco might say that memory is a metaphor. But a little Derridean delving would reveal that the metaphor is deeply implicated both in the way we conceptualize memory and the way we conceptualize writing. Eco recapitulates the gesture of the Pharmakon of Plato, going back to the Greeks (in fact, back to the story in the Phaedrus to which Eco, later in his essay, explicitly refers). It is under the sign of myth that the definitional contract is sealed. Yet that seal doesn't hold in practice. I hold a book in my hand, say Deity and Dirt, the biography of Robert Burns that I am currently reading. I have read fifty pages. I have not read page 62. Is page 62 somehow part of my potential memory? Is page 62 part of some general consciousnesses memory � l�esprit du bibliotheque, or Uber-Seele, or some such thing? What, then, is it a memory of? The obvious answer would seem to be that the book �remembers� Robert Burns. But this is a memory without a subject � insofar as the biographer doesn�t claim to �remember� Robert Burns, but to report on his life, and interpret it according to the norms of biography. There are books � called memoirs � that claim to be written out memories, but they are a small subset of books. They pose their own problems. However, that they have become paradigmatic for he way we think about texts is interesting � in this sense, autobiography, not poetry, is at the center of the literary cosmos.
The claim that a text is a memory is part of a larger ideological program, one in which literature is the �memory� of a culture, while memory becomes the written, the code, and eventually the essence. We recognize this as the old White Mythology� it is, in general, what we call liberalism. Memory works in this ideology to displace an older ideology, I think � in which literature is merely a tool of redemption, and the memory of a culture is taken care of by the Creator. Of course, my story, there, is way too simple. But there is some part of it that seems valid. The debased reverence that is given to books might have something to do with traces of this older religious framework.
Eco�s does make a more solid distinction later on in the essay, between books that exist to be referred to and books that exist to be read � between the dictionary and the detective story, to use his examples. I might, at some later time, comment on what he has to say about the story in the book.
LI�s readers should check out Umberto Eco�s essay on the fate of books at al Ahram, an Egyptian weekly. The re-commencement of the Library of Alexandria (a silly, theme park project, in LI�s view � what was burned in 600 is good and gone, and by no Humpty Dumpty tricks are we going to piece that civilization back together again) is the occasion for Eco�s meandering meditation on the meaning of texts, and the chances for their survival as texts in the age of the Net. He begins with a marvelous classification of memory: organic, mineral, and vegetal:
�WE HAVE THREE TYPES OF MEMORY. The first one is organic, which is the memory made of flesh and blood and the one administrated by our brain. The second is mineral, and in this sense mankind has known two kinds of mineral memory: millennia ago, this was the memory represented by clay tablets and obelisks, pretty well known in this country, on which people carved their texts. However, this second type is also the electronic memory of today's computers, based upon silicon. We have also known another kind of memory, the vegetal one, the one represented by the first papyruses, again well known in this country, and then on books, made of paper. Let me disregard the fact that at a certain moment the vellum of the first codices were of an organic origin, and the fact that the first paper was made with rugs and not with wood. Let me speak for the sake of simplicity of vegetal memory in order to designate books.�
This is marvelous but, we think, conceptually dubious, for two reasons: one is that these memories do seem to interpenetrate into one another, the mineral crystallizing in our nervous systems, the vegetal being interwoven with chemical synthetics, and the whole system being subordinate to function rather than substance, which is where the real distinction lies. Of course, there�s an Aristotelian echo here: he postulated three souls: the vegetal, the rational, and the animal. A long dead classification, but not completely bogus. The superstition that the human body is conducted by the brain as an orchestra of automatons might be conducted by a conductor with numerous switches ignores such anomalies as the immune system, which is certainly net plugged into some cerebral oversoul, and might well be considered separate souled. But I digress�
From LI�s painfully Derridean point of view, the second problem with Eco's memories is with the very idea that a text is a memory. Of course, a defender of Eco might say that memory is a metaphor. But a little Derridean delving would reveal that the metaphor is deeply implicated both in the way we conceptualize memory and the way we conceptualize writing. Eco recapitulates the gesture of the Pharmakon of Plato, going back to the Greeks (in fact, back to the story in the Phaedrus to which Eco, later in his essay, explicitly refers). It is under the sign of myth that the definitional contract is sealed. Yet that seal doesn't hold in practice. I hold a book in my hand, say Deity and Dirt, the biography of Robert Burns that I am currently reading. I have read fifty pages. I have not read page 62. Is page 62 somehow part of my potential memory? Is page 62 part of some general consciousnesses memory � l�esprit du bibliotheque, or Uber-Seele, or some such thing? What, then, is it a memory of? The obvious answer would seem to be that the book �remembers� Robert Burns. But this is a memory without a subject � insofar as the biographer doesn�t claim to �remember� Robert Burns, but to report on his life, and interpret it according to the norms of biography. There are books � called memoirs � that claim to be written out memories, but they are a small subset of books. They pose their own problems. However, that they have become paradigmatic for he way we think about texts is interesting � in this sense, autobiography, not poetry, is at the center of the literary cosmos.
The claim that a text is a memory is part of a larger ideological program, one in which literature is the �memory� of a culture, while memory becomes the written, the code, and eventually the essence. We recognize this as the old White Mythology� it is, in general, what we call liberalism. Memory works in this ideology to displace an older ideology, I think � in which literature is merely a tool of redemption, and the memory of a culture is taken care of by the Creator. Of course, my story, there, is way too simple. But there is some part of it that seems valid. The debased reverence that is given to books might have something to do with traces of this older religious framework.
Eco�s does make a more solid distinction later on in the essay, between books that exist to be referred to and books that exist to be read � between the dictionary and the detective story, to use his examples. I might, at some later time, comment on what he has to say about the story in the book.
Saturday, December 06, 2003
Bollettino
As readers of LI know, we think there�s a lot of bull in the analogies between the occupation of Iraq and anything that occurred after World War II that are put about in the media sphere, promoted by Bush�s apologists. The confused idea that Iraqi resistance is equivalent to the German resistance after the American occupation, which was expressed by Donald Rumsfeld, is peculiarly insane. Bush�s Rush Limbaugh equivalent on the Internet, Instapundit, has taken to higgledy-pigglety references to WWII, calling the bloodshed in November �The Battle of the Bulge� (which, of course, means we are fighting WWII backwards in Insta�s opinion. Soon we will be inching up the Italian peninsula, then invading North Africa, and then comes the Battle of Britain).
However, we�ve been reading a book about Japan (Japan, a reinterpretation) by Patrick Smith that richly evokes certain American policies in Iraq, and we do see analogies � or rather, continuities in the way the U.S. foreign policy establishment does business. Smith is a revisionist � disagreeing with the old school of Japanese interpreters, or as he calls them, the Chrysanthemum Club, that was headed by Edwin Reischauer, and dedicated to the proposition that Japan, after the American occupation, was another anti-communist free market democracy in the service of the free world. Smith records two stages in the early occupation. The first, which involved the writing of the Japanese constitution, was heralded by its organizer, General MacArthur, as a new and revolutionary stage in the �normalization� of Japan. Others have doubted the �newness� of the constitution, since it seemed to incorporate large parts of the older Japanese constitution of 1889 and 1890. What the MacArthur constitution did do, however, was break decisively with the military structure of Japan. This was felt as a liberation. And this was why the sense of opening was crushed when the Americans went back on their own constitutional suggestions � that is, when they started to treat Japan as, in the words of one Japanese prime minister, a huge aircraft carrier. The security treaty signed with the U.S. in 1951, and the American demand that Japan field a military or support the American one, was part of what Smith labels (from, apparently, a common Japanese phrase) the �reverse course.� The reverse course stopped the war crimes trials, for instance. The set of Japanese officials accused of war crimes were released in 1948 without trial. One of these alleged war criminals, a high official in the Imperial Japanese Empire, became a figurehead for the interlocking groups of fascists, big businessmen, criminal gangs and rightwingers and was �elected� Prime Minister in Nobusuke Kishi, who was an enthusiastic American ally.
Smith�s is a sad story, because the strangling of the democratic impulse in Japan, and the reinforcement of the corporationist capitalism that dominated the post-war scene, resulted in an increasingly rigid and unsupportable system � one that has been crumbling ever since the end of the Cold War.
There are similarities, here, to what is happening in Iraq � although the forces at play are so different that we doubt the outcome will be similar. The American scheme has been, and still seems to be, putting an exile group at the head of Iraq, radically privatizing its wealth, and then internationalizing it. To do this, the Americans seem to have believed that they could use Iraqi good will � that, indeed, Iraqis, like the Dallas Chamber of Commerce, would find such a win-win proposition so scrumptious that G.O.P. lobbyists would soon be on the hustings in Basra, collecting a majority of votes from the adoring electorate. After all, this is what happened in Mississippi.
This hasn�t happened. You might have noticed.
The pull back from the exile groups has been partial � D.C. has definitely not given up on making Chalabi its Kishi. But, most depressingly, instead of adapting to the evident unenthusiasm, indeed repulsion, for the American model of Iraq (no doubt made out of sugarcubes deep in some Pentagon cachot), the Coalition Authority and D.C. are still trying to ignore it. The latest news about the refusal of Bremer�s dictatoriate to countenance elections is a farcical proof of same. Why has Bremer opposed elections? Because there isn�t a census that would allow a clean election. Why isn�t there a census? Because Bremer opposes taking a census until after the American authorities appoint various local councils to appoint higher councils to elect an American approved government that can authorize a census that the Americans approve of. As in Japan, the American idea is to create the face of democracy, and not the reality.
Here�s a graf from the NYT story, by Joel Brinkley
Iraqi census officials devised a detailed plan to count the country's entire population next summer and prepare a voter roll that would open the way to national elections in September. But American officials say they rejected the idea, and the Iraqi Governing Council members say they never saw the plan to consider it.
Worst case scenario would be something like this: because the core of the resistance seems to be solely about power, these are the kinds of people the American privatizers might be able to deal with. The exiles on the Council are using their power to enrich themselves as much as possible, but they aren�t winning over the hearts and minds of the Iraqis � which, in the privacy of their own mansions, they probably find a laughable American obsession. So who can bring the Sunni�s over? Why not the Ba�ath infrastructure, without Saddam? It would be surprising if feelers aren�t out to them already. If a full reverse course happens, make no mistake � as one man, the pro-Bush contingent in the press will discover the genius of the solution. Slap Chalabi�s face on it and, hey presto � you got a win-win deal!
As readers of LI know, we think there�s a lot of bull in the analogies between the occupation of Iraq and anything that occurred after World War II that are put about in the media sphere, promoted by Bush�s apologists. The confused idea that Iraqi resistance is equivalent to the German resistance after the American occupation, which was expressed by Donald Rumsfeld, is peculiarly insane. Bush�s Rush Limbaugh equivalent on the Internet, Instapundit, has taken to higgledy-pigglety references to WWII, calling the bloodshed in November �The Battle of the Bulge� (which, of course, means we are fighting WWII backwards in Insta�s opinion. Soon we will be inching up the Italian peninsula, then invading North Africa, and then comes the Battle of Britain).
However, we�ve been reading a book about Japan (Japan, a reinterpretation) by Patrick Smith that richly evokes certain American policies in Iraq, and we do see analogies � or rather, continuities in the way the U.S. foreign policy establishment does business. Smith is a revisionist � disagreeing with the old school of Japanese interpreters, or as he calls them, the Chrysanthemum Club, that was headed by Edwin Reischauer, and dedicated to the proposition that Japan, after the American occupation, was another anti-communist free market democracy in the service of the free world. Smith records two stages in the early occupation. The first, which involved the writing of the Japanese constitution, was heralded by its organizer, General MacArthur, as a new and revolutionary stage in the �normalization� of Japan. Others have doubted the �newness� of the constitution, since it seemed to incorporate large parts of the older Japanese constitution of 1889 and 1890. What the MacArthur constitution did do, however, was break decisively with the military structure of Japan. This was felt as a liberation. And this was why the sense of opening was crushed when the Americans went back on their own constitutional suggestions � that is, when they started to treat Japan as, in the words of one Japanese prime minister, a huge aircraft carrier. The security treaty signed with the U.S. in 1951, and the American demand that Japan field a military or support the American one, was part of what Smith labels (from, apparently, a common Japanese phrase) the �reverse course.� The reverse course stopped the war crimes trials, for instance. The set of Japanese officials accused of war crimes were released in 1948 without trial. One of these alleged war criminals, a high official in the Imperial Japanese Empire, became a figurehead for the interlocking groups of fascists, big businessmen, criminal gangs and rightwingers and was �elected� Prime Minister in Nobusuke Kishi, who was an enthusiastic American ally.
Smith�s is a sad story, because the strangling of the democratic impulse in Japan, and the reinforcement of the corporationist capitalism that dominated the post-war scene, resulted in an increasingly rigid and unsupportable system � one that has been crumbling ever since the end of the Cold War.
There are similarities, here, to what is happening in Iraq � although the forces at play are so different that we doubt the outcome will be similar. The American scheme has been, and still seems to be, putting an exile group at the head of Iraq, radically privatizing its wealth, and then internationalizing it. To do this, the Americans seem to have believed that they could use Iraqi good will � that, indeed, Iraqis, like the Dallas Chamber of Commerce, would find such a win-win proposition so scrumptious that G.O.P. lobbyists would soon be on the hustings in Basra, collecting a majority of votes from the adoring electorate. After all, this is what happened in Mississippi.
This hasn�t happened. You might have noticed.
The pull back from the exile groups has been partial � D.C. has definitely not given up on making Chalabi its Kishi. But, most depressingly, instead of adapting to the evident unenthusiasm, indeed repulsion, for the American model of Iraq (no doubt made out of sugarcubes deep in some Pentagon cachot), the Coalition Authority and D.C. are still trying to ignore it. The latest news about the refusal of Bremer�s dictatoriate to countenance elections is a farcical proof of same. Why has Bremer opposed elections? Because there isn�t a census that would allow a clean election. Why isn�t there a census? Because Bremer opposes taking a census until after the American authorities appoint various local councils to appoint higher councils to elect an American approved government that can authorize a census that the Americans approve of. As in Japan, the American idea is to create the face of democracy, and not the reality.
Here�s a graf from the NYT story, by Joel Brinkley
Iraqi census officials devised a detailed plan to count the country's entire population next summer and prepare a voter roll that would open the way to national elections in September. But American officials say they rejected the idea, and the Iraqi Governing Council members say they never saw the plan to consider it.
Worst case scenario would be something like this: because the core of the resistance seems to be solely about power, these are the kinds of people the American privatizers might be able to deal with. The exiles on the Council are using their power to enrich themselves as much as possible, but they aren�t winning over the hearts and minds of the Iraqis � which, in the privacy of their own mansions, they probably find a laughable American obsession. So who can bring the Sunni�s over? Why not the Ba�ath infrastructure, without Saddam? It would be surprising if feelers aren�t out to them already. If a full reverse course happens, make no mistake � as one man, the pro-Bush contingent in the press will discover the genius of the solution. Slap Chalabi�s face on it and, hey presto � you got a win-win deal!
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