Dope.

In 1725, Voltaire was thirty one years old. He'd established himself at the great houses by this time, where the Names could enjoy the dangerous turn of his epigrams. His wildly successful plays were thought to be the successor of Racine's (although now they are considered the last clunk of classic theater, heading for the garbage chute). He had, it was true, spent time in the Bastille in 1717 for writing verses that satirized the Regent. It was also true that he was the prematurely wizened child of a conseiller de roi, a bourgeois, and that his father did not count his poet son among his worldly successes - in the Arouet family the ornament was the older son, Armand, a lawyer like papa.

Voltaire, however, considered himself the peer of his titled friends -- ennobled, so to speak, by his brain.

It is a sign of the times that Voltaire could so easily allow himself this presumption. In the seventeenth century, a Moliere could see a king, but couldn't sup with a prince. Voltaire, however, felt himself fully entitled to break bread with princes -- or, more usually, princesses. The habits of Louis XIV's regime, in which a conscious effort was made to codify, and so stabilize, the hierarchy in order to control the nobility, so inclined in the first half of the seventeenth century to frightening Frondes, had been swept away during the Regency. In particular, the Mississippi bubble, John Law's attempt to take a seventeenth century society into the age of floating currencies and stock options, had turned life upside down, bankrupting old houses and enriching outsiders, until it all came down with a crash. Law's paper currency was a real, if unintended, assault on the feudalist order, and succeeded in weakening that order even if it did not succeed in floating France's debt.

In December, 1725, Voltaire had an altercation with the Chevalier de Rohan-Chabot (the link has another version of this story) in the dressing room of an actress. Rohan-Chabot made a cutting remark, Voltaire replied in kind, the Chevalier raised his can, Voltaire raised his sword, friends intervened, and the broil was brought to a close.

A few days later Voltaire was at the table in the Duc de Sully's hotel, with the family, when a servant came in and told him he was wanted outside. In the street stood two closed carriages, to one of which Voltaire advanced. He was grabbed, thrust inside, and assaulted with sticks and fists. From the second carriage, the Chevalier de Rohan's voice was heard: "don't hurt his head, something good may come out of it." After being beaten, Voltaire was thrown back out into the street.

He made his way upstairs to the Duc de Sully's table, disheveled and presumably bleeding Let me quote from Jean Orieux's biography: "He called on them [the dinner guests] to help him -- first of all the Duc de Sully, whose guest he was, and on whose doorstep he had been assaulted. He begged Sully to go with him to lodge a complaint; his assailants had tried to murder him. But the duc calmly refused. The faces of all present were impassive; everyone was silent. Voltaire realized then that no one was going to aid him..."

I love this story. I, too, have seen those faces -- the face the established order shows the outsider. I saw it when I was a young man in Shreveport, Louisiana. In a way, it was a rare privilege. This story could have happened yesterday in any number of places: Russia, the Philippines, Indonesia... and Louisiana. It could happen anywhere, in other words, where the roots of civil society are weak; where clans are strong; where the monopoly of violence is not entirely conceded to the state, and where the state recognizes, in its daily working, the de facto right of groups to enforce extra-legal punishments. What Votaire saw, sealed in the impassivity of the circle of faces that confronted him, was the naked substructure of the very society he moved in. Rohan's henchmen woke him up. Voltaire made a leap in place that moment. He became the Voltaire we know, realizing, beyond his vanity, what the point was: the great target, really, of the whole Enlightenment project in the first half of the 18th century. The traditional order, the rule of authority rather than reason, was based on just this moment when the face closes. He realized that he could expect no quarter from these people. He'd have to forge his arms himself.

So he did. He operated under the aegis of satire, the downstairs weapon. Scapin's revenge. (actually, the denouement of this story does have a Scapin-esque feel - Voltaire made it known that he was consorting with underworld thugs, learning fencing, and Rohan, a notorious coward, prevailed on the king to issue a lettre de cachet, putting Voltaire in the Bastille again. A sign of the regime's essential weakness is that Voltaire was soon released -- there was a certain shame about what Rohan had done. Follow the shame - it is always a clue). To implant a sense of the judicial equality of persons in a society that doesn't, in its social tissues, feel that equality, requires more toxic methods than the arguments of rationality. It required all the tactics of ridicule, imprudence and pointed analogy that the philosophes inherited from the ancients, and from the kindred spirits of the century before: Montaigne and the libertine circle around St. - Evremond. Even in this early stage of modernity, shock was the weapon of choice, because the other weapons -- the closed carriages and the cudgels -- were all held by the other side. As we will see in my third tableaux -- you see, I am thinking of my posts about this subject as pictures in a triptych -- this ingrained habit of satire stood between Voltaire and Rousseau, making it impossible for either party to understand the other one. Satire, in other word, has its great historic moment in the 18th century. It is the dark star twinned with optimism in the Enlightenment program. That relationship contains in itself the seed of its own dialectical destruction.

Remora
Blogger wasn't working for me this morning. So I posted the same entry twice. Look to the entry below this one, please

Remora
I recommend reading the Far Eastern Economic Review this week -- a lot of the articles are on line, and the magazine, which is owned by Dow Jones, is pretty on spot about Asian issues. And the war or non-war or shadow war or whatever thing looming and lurching towards us like the as yet unseen serial killer in a teen slasher flick is definitely a classic, Kipling style East of the Suez deal.

There's a piece by Enzio von Pfeil which inadvertantly shows how tightly superstition and art are intertwined in economics:
THE 5TH COLUMN -- September 27, 2001

Economics, for the past two weeks, has publicly put on its consolatory face, while underneath the investors, the electronic herd once lauded by Tom Friedman, have been running off various cliffs. Like almost all post-Keynsian econ-masters, von Pfeil actually seems to believe in the hoary chestnuts of monetary theory, and retails such bogus analogies as the following:

"Policy mixes involve monetary and fiscal measures. On the monetary front, the world's leading central banks have been injecting more liquidity into the system, intensifying an existing excess supply of money. In the United States, the Federal Reserve pre-emptively slashed rates ahead of the stockmarket reopening. This was expected, and already had resulted earlier in even firmer bond prices, driving down yields. Lower yields mean even lower mortgage rates--and so, eventually, up go housing starts and with them, consumption. True, in the near term, people won't be spending. But once the dust settles, lower rates will fuel consumption. Looking back at the U.S. on its entry into World War II, we see that though consumption fell 2% in the first full year following, it accelerated each year after until 1945, by 2.6%, 3.6% and 7%, respectively. Slowing consumption will be a temporary setback. Like in World War II, people will adjust."
Anybody who believes the logic here is chemical -- just add element X to Element Y and get compund Z - should take a glance at Von Pfeil's proof. The WWII analogy is, to say the least, bizarre. In the US, the necessary gross expansion of military industrial output to meet the needs of the war in the 40-45 period was extraordinary. To think that the pattern of consumption had to do with the hypodermic of Fed policy -- the trickle trickle into the bloodstream of easy money -- is close to insane. And to think that the shadow war is going to cause the Government to rev up its old warplane factories in Washington State is so off the mark that one wonders if von Pfeil wrote this passage in his sleep. There is a kind of analogical desperation behind this -- one selects one's historical comparisons after one has one's theory down, rather like the alchemists used to do to prove that at some point in the past, some esoteric master did, after all, transform base metals into gold.

For a more reasonable analogy, look at what Japan's central bank did in the nineties -- an unprecedented amount of pump priming. That did no good -- and the reason? The Japanese consumer wasn't prepared to take on the kind of debts the American consumer doesn't even give a second thought to. The recession, if we have one, is not going to be managed by a Central Bank.

Remora:
Since the market Humpty-Dumptied last week, I thought readers might like a cheerful article from 1998 about the Asian collapse by Murray Sayle, a veteran journalist now settling into his bungalow years in Japan. It is from a Japanese English mag.
OutsideR Online -Nonember 1998
Sample grafs:

"Can it possibly be 1929 again, out East? Where are the suiciding stockbrokers, the criminal scandals uncovered by the falling markets? Well, six officials connected with the Finance Ministry and the Bank of Japan have hanged themselves (traditional swords having become scarce and expensive, like most Japanese objets de vertu) and so has a Japanese MP of Korean origin, not a good thing to be in Japan when trouble strikes. Two small-fry finance officials are out on bail for allowing themselves to be entertained by overlent bankers at something called a No Pants shabu-shabu, a raunchy restaurant whose waitresses serve at table
minus underwear (in the Shoguns days, silk-robed officials met with favour-beseeching merchants in brothels, hence the Japanese euphemism for a bribe, sodenoshita, a little something in the sleeve. So what else is new?) But it all does rather fit, no?"

Remora.
The US has finally decided to abandon the extremely dumb position it took last week. You'll remember, when the Taliban demanded evidence that bin Laden was involved in the assault on the WTC, the administration refused, saying it 'wasn't going to negotiate.' The refusal was puzzling and stupid. Puzzling, because presumably it wouldn't be hard to provide evidence linking bin Laden to terrorism. Stupid, because, once again, an American government was treating a non-European people like second class humans. If France or Germany or Lithuania had demanded evidence before turning over a wanted individual, the US would have done it unhesitatingly. That is what extradition procedures are all about. Since if we attack Afghanistan, whether to extract bin Laden from his camp or to overrun the country extensively, we are going to have to rely on Pakistan, this was not a good way to start that kind of tricky operation. Back in America, where any mindless display of defiance is now greeted with cheers, the administration might be looking good, but this is a ploy that will ultimately cost American lives.
Hey Presto: Condoleeza R. and Colin Powell, who between them hold the brainpower of the entire tBush administration, woke up. A little too late, but let's not bitch.
NYT has the story:
U.S. to Publish Terror Evidence on bin Laden

lede graf: "WASHINGTON, Sept. 23 � The Bush administration plans to make public evidence linking Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda network to the terror attacks on the United States in an effort to persuade the world, and particularly Muslim nations, that a military response is justified.
The evidence will embrace new information gathered by law enforcement and intelligence agents on the Sept. 11 attacks, as well as material used in indictments against Mr. bin Laden in the bombing of American Embassies in East Africa in 1998, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said today."

Comments
Alan recommends this link to the New Republic today, with this comment:

I have no sympathy with this guy's attack on "the left and its candlelight
vigils," or for the jingoism that the New Republic has displayed in the last
couple of issues. Robert Fisk is a journalist who has my particular
admiration for having once picked up the pieces of an exploded shell that
had killed two Palestinian women, noting the serial number and
manufacturer's name, and taking it back to the engineer who had designed it.
I'm just curious about what you guys think about what he has to say about
the embargo on Iraq & its effects on the civilian population thereof. What
he says sounds plausible to someone like me who is shamefully uninformed
about the issue.
BTW, Roger, great post today.

Lorin wrote, re the tears post:

"That is wonderful. You know Jean Starobinski has a big chapter on Rousseau and
the political meaning of tears in HmmHmm and Transparency?"

Which I didn't. Google search reveals that to be Transparency and Obstruction (Chicago, 1988).

I'm planning, this week, to do two or three posts on The Earthquake of Lisbon, with references to the Current Crisis. I thought I'd prepare my faithful readers.

Now, my thoughts have been straying to the literature about the Lisbon earthquake ever since the collapse of the WTC. Some might say that comparing the two situations is unsound -- the Lisbon quake was a natural event, the WTC assault was thoroughly man-made. What I am hunting for, though, is not an exact comparison of the events themselves, but of their effects on the cultural mood.

The Enlightenment was a definite cultural mood -- a mix of sentiment and intellectual habits self-consciously promoted by an amorphous group with definite self-selecting initiatory practices and habits. One of its most salient features was the optimism that came from the at first muted, and then more self-confident, announcement of modernity -- modernity as a virtue, modernity that dared to speak its name. This was the kind of thing savaged by Swift in Tale of the Tub, with passages like this one:

"When I consider how exceedingly our illustrious moderns have eclipsed the weak glimmering lights of the ancients, and turned them out of the road of all fashionable commerce, to a degree, that our choice town wits,[1] of most refined accomplishments, are in grave dispute, whether there have been ever any ancients or no in which point we are like to receive wonderful satisfaction from the most useful labours and lucubrations of that worthy modern, Dr. Bentley: I say, when I consider all this, I cannot but bewail, that no famous modern hath ever yet attempted an universal system in a small portable volume of all things that are to be known, or believed, or imagined, or practised in life."

Swift's satire predicts an enterprise he would have heartily disapproved of -- The Encyclopedia. What was happening in Swift's time, and Montesquieu's, and Voltaire's, was a distinct change in Time-sentiment. The past, with its source, literally, in paradise, was slowly losing its position as the ultimate arbitor of legitimacy. The belief in the Garden at the beginning of the world was wilting. This transformation entailed a further transformation in the perception of the modern -- it became not the unfolding of the fall, but an interval within an inevitable progress. An interval that had to anchor its organization in something beyond precedent. This something, of course, was reason.

Although a culture is greater than the people who write the books and attend court functions, it is this change in time-sentiment and the definite set of assumptions, the overriding mood of optimism, which concerns me -- or will, for the next couple of posts. From such events as the Battle of the Books (to which Swift refers -- a controversy that started in France, with the querelle des anciens et des modernes that whirled around Perrault's address to the Acadamie Francais in 1670, but which truly found a language and an attitude around 1720, and began to be attacked around 1760. The Lisbon Earthquake happened on November 1, 1755. It isn't too far fetched to connect the change in mood with the event.

While the 90s certainly do not form an epoch, the optimism of the 90s, at least from 96 on, was also unmistakeable. Granted, cultural moods are hard to define, hard to test, and easy to get wrong. They are supremely soft objects -- fuzzy parameters. But anybody who trolls through an internet search on Google can find the ruins and monuments of that time, from the 30,000 Dow people to the bleached bones of biztech zines featuring teen millionaires. If the phrase, "America is changed forever," is being repeated like a zombie mantra by every perky pundit within hearing distance of a tv mike, that doesn't mean the phrase is wholly wrong (although I am always reminded, when I use a cliche, of what Leon Bloy said in Exegese des lieux communs -- cliches are only true when you read them through a mirror, darkly). There's a change in the air, though, we all know it, even if everything isn't changed, changed utterly. The optimism is gone. While it is too soon to call this pessimism, it feels ominous, like an alcoholic's thirst for the next binge. We have gone back to sucking down the biles and salts of the Reagan era, the stupid prejudices and kneejerk patriotism, even though we know, in the back of our minds, that this is not a good idea. Yes, it isn't a good idea, people. The modish word in the 90s was smart -- smart business, smart tech, smart people, etc., ad nauseum. Think: when was the last time you heard someone use smart like that? It is a small thing, but when a term disappears from the population of buzz words, there's usually a reason.

Remora
This story is going to come out in pieces, and the alert reader will have to do the cut and paste. The intelligence failure that allowed the successful hijacking of four planes has a backstory, but we haven't heard it yet. So like some jigsaw puzzle, we will have to look around for the odd news item to piece it together. This article.
FBI Knew Terrorists Were Using Flight Schools (washingtonpost.com) in the WP is extremely noteworthy. Graf two:
"Three days after the attack on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III described reports that several of the hijackers had received flight training in the United States as "news, quite obviously," adding, "If we had understood that to be the case, we would have -- perhaps one could have averted this."

Graf three:
"A senior government official yesterday acknowledged law enforcement officials were aware that fewer than a dozen people with links to bin Laden had attended U.S. flight schools. However, the official said there was no information to indicate the flight students had been planning suicide hijacking attacks."

The last sentence has more than the whiff of deniability. Oh, so there might have been indications that they were planning plain vanilla hijackings?