the breaks

Breakes on a bus, brakes on a carBreaks to make you a superstar

Breaks to win and breaks to lose

But these here breaks will rock your shoes

And these are the breaks

According to Robert Craven’s 1980 article on Pool slang in American speech, breaks – as in good break, bad break, those are the breaks – derives from the American lingo of pool, which is distinct from  British billiard terms. The difference in terminology emerged in the 19^th century, but  he dates the popular use of break (lucky break, bad break, the breaks) to the 20s. I love the idea that this is true, that the Jazz age, the age of American modernity and spectacle, saw the birth of the breaks. If the word indeed evolved from the first shot in pool – when you “break” the pyramid of balls, a usage that seems to have been coined in America in the 19^th century, as against the British term  – then its evolution nicely intersects one of the favored examples in the philosophy of causation, as presented by Hume.

Hume’s work, from the Treatise to the Enquiry, is so punctuated by billiard balls that it might as well have been the metaphysical dream of Minnesota Fats – excuse the anachronism – and it has been assumed, in a rather jolly way in the philosophy literature, that this represents a piece of Hume’s own life, a preference for billiards. However, as some have noted, Hume might have borrowed the billiard ball example from Malebranche – whose work he might have read while composing the Treatise at La Fleche. But even if Hume was struck by Malebranche’s example and borrowed it, the stickiness of the example,  the way billiard balls keep appearing in Hume’s texts, feels to the reader like tacit testimony to Hume’s own enjoyment or interest in  the game. Unfortunately, this detail has not been taken up by his biographers. When we trace the itinerary of Hume as he moved from Scotland to Bristol to London to France, we have to reconstruct ourselves how this journey in the 1730s might have intersected with billiard rooms in spas and public houses. In a schedule of coaches from London to Bristol published in the early 1800s, we read that there is a coach stop at the Swan in St. Clements street, London, on the line that goes to Bristol, and from other sources we know that the Swan was famed for its billiard room. Whether this information applies to a journey made 70 years before, when the game was being banned in public houses by the authorities, is uncertain.  One should also remember that in Hume’s time, billiards was  not played as we now play American pool or snooker. The table and the pockets and the banks were different. So was the cue stick  – , it wasn’t until 1807 that the cue stick was given its felt or india rubber tip, which made it a much more accurate instrument. And of course the balls were hand crafted, and thus not honed to a mechanically precise roundness.

If, however, Hume was a billiard’s man, one wonders what kind he was. His biographer Hunter speaks of the “even flight” of Hume’s prose – he never soars too much. But is this the feint of a hustler? According to one memoirist, Kant, too, was a billiards player  – in fact the memoirist, Heilsberg, claimed it was his “only recreation” – and he obviously thought there was something of a hustle about Hume’s analysis of cause and effect, which is where the breaks come in.

There’s a rather celebrated passage in the abstract of the Treatise in which Hume even conjoins the first man, Adam, and the billiard ball. The passage begins: “Here is a billiard ball lying on the table, and another ball moving towards it with rapidity. They strike; and the ball which was formerly at rest now acquires a motion.” Hume goes on to describe the reasons we would have for speaking of one ball’s contact causing the other ball to acquire a motion. The question is, does this description get to something naturally inherent in the event?

“Were a man, such as Adam, created in the full vigour of understanding, without experience, he would never be able to infer motion in the second ball from the motion and impulse of the first. It is not anything that reason sees in the cause which makes us infer the effect.”

This new man, striding into the billiard room, Hume thinks, would not see as we see, even if he sees what we see. Only when he has seen such things thousands of times will he see as we see: then, “His understanding would anticipate his sight and form a conclusion suitable to his past experience.”

Hume’s Adam is an overdetermined figure. On the one hand, in his reference to Adam’s “science”, there is a hint of the Adam construed by the humanists. Martin Luther claimed that Adam’s vision was perfect, meaning he could see objects hundreds of miles away. Joseph Glanvill, that curiously in-between scholar – defender of the ghost belief and founder of the Royal Society – wrote in the seventeenth century:

“Adam needed no Spectacles. The acuteness of his natural Opticks (if conjecture may have credit) shew'd him much of the Coelestial magnificence and bravery without a Galilaeo's tube: And 'tis most probable that his naked eyes could reach near as much of the upper World, as we with all the advantages of art. It may be 'twas as absurd even in the judgement of his senses, that the Sun and Stars should be so very much, less then this Globe, as the contrary seems in ours; and 'tis not unlikely that he had as clear a perception of the earths motion, as we think we have of its quiescence.”

However, this is not the line that Hume develops. His Adam has our human all too human sensorium, and is no marvel of sensitivity. Rather, he belongs to another line of figures beloved by the Enlightenment philosophes: Condillac’s almost senseles statue, Locke’s Molyneaux, Diderot’s aveugle-né. Here, the human is stripped down to the basics. Adam’s conjunction with the billiard ball, then, gives us a situation like Diderot’s combination of the blind man and the mirror – it’s an event of illuminating estrangement.

It is important that these figures were certainly not invented in the eighteenth century. Rather, they come out of a longer lineage: that of the sage and the fool. Bruno and his ass, Socrates and Diogenes the cynic, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza – it is from this family that all these deprived souls in the texts of the philosophes are appropriated and turned into epistemological clockworks.  

Hume’s point is to lift the breaks from off our necks, to break the bonds of necessity – or rather to relocate those bonds. In doing so, he and his billiard balls are reversing the older tendency of atomistic philosophy, which was revived by Gassendi in the 17^th century. Lucretian atoms fall in necessary and pre-determined courses, the only exception being that slight inexplicable swerve when the atoms contact the human – hence our free will. Hume, who had a hard enough time  with Christian miracles, did not, so far as I know, discuss the Lucretian version of things even to the extent of dismissing it.

To be a little over the top, we could say that the eighteenth century thinkers disarmed necessity, exiled Nemesis, and the heavyweight heads of the nineteenth century brought it back with a vengeance, locating it – in a bow to Hume, or the Humean moment – in history. Custom. From this point of view, Hume was part of a project that saw the transfer of power from God and Nature back to Man – although we are now all justly suspicious of such capitalizable terms.

But the breaks survived and flourished. There is a way of telling intellectual history – the way I’ve been doing it – that makes it go on above our heads, instead of in them. It neglects the general populace, the great unwashed. Book speaks to book. To my mind, intellectual history has to embrace and understand folk belief in order to understand the book to book P.A. system.

Which is why we can approach the breaks in another way.

In 1980, I was going to college in Shreveport, Louisiana. I went to classes in the morning, then worked at a general remodeling store from 3 to 10. I worked in the paint department, mostly. At seven, the manager would leave for home, and Henry, the assistant manager, would let us pipe in whatever music we wanted to  - which is how I first heard Kurtis Blow’s These are the Breaks. I also first heard the Sugarhill Gang’s Rappers delight this way, and I still mix them up. I heard both, as well as La Donna and Rick James, at the Florentine, a disco/gay bar that I went to a lot with friends – it was the best place to dance in town. Being a gay bar, it was always receiving bomb threats and such, which made it a bit daring to go there. We went, however, because we could be pretty sure that the music they played would include no country or rock. It was continuously danceable until, inevitably, The Last Dance played.

At the time, I was dabbling a bit in Marx, and thought that I was on the left side of history. At the same time, 1980 was a confusing year for Americans. The ‘malaise’ was everywhere, and nothing seemed to be going right – from the price of oil to the international order. There were supposedly communists in Central America, African countries were turning to the Soviet Union, and of course there was the hangover from the Vietnam War – the fantasy that we could have won that war had not yet achieved mass circulation, so it felt like what it was, a plain defeat.

I imagined, then, that the breaks were falling against a certain capitalist order. In actuality, the left – in its old and new varieties – was vanishing. Or you could say transforming. The long marches were underway – in feminism, from overthrowing patriarchy to today’s “leaning in”; in civil rights, from the riots in Miami to the re-Jim Crowization of America through the clever use of the drug war; and in labor organization, from the union power to strike to the impotence and acceptance that things will really never get better, and all battles are now rearguard.  

My horizons were not vast back then – I didn’t keep up with the news that much, but pondered a buncha books and the words of popular songs. But I knew something was in the air. As it turned out,  Kurtis Blow’s breaks were not going to be kind to my type, the Nowhere people, stranded socially with their eccentric and unconvincing visions. However, after decades of it, I have finally learned to accept what Blow was telling me: these are just the breaks. That is all they are.

You’ll live.

Reporting on the Ukraine - the man in the devil suit did it!

I have this sick, deja vu feeling about the u.s. ukraine reporting:it shares the same vices and mindframe as the reporting on Iraq in 2002-2003.

It is important to be clear about what happened. The former president was deposed - and he was deposed, apparently, by groups that were opposed to him in the previous election. Unfortunately, none of these groups seemed to have any roots in those areas that voted overwhelmingly for Yanukovych. This kind of thing happens all the time in countries that have no democratic tradition or institutions - one party, faced with the victory of another party, kicks that party out. It certainly is not an instance of overthrowing tyranny. That both sides are corrupt is pretty much a given in oligarchy ridden Ukraine. One doesn't have to be for I think running away was probably a good way not to get killed.

Unfortunately, the reporting in the NYT, the NYorker (with its pathetic series by Jon Lee  Anderson, the LRB (with its pathetic reporting by James Meek) and the NYRB on Ukraine has pitted good guy Maidan protesters against Putin. as the whole story - when it is a sideshow This is convenient to the American mindset, but it eclipses the reality of what is happening in the Ukraine. The regions that voted overwhelmingly for Yanukovych are not being hypnotized by Putin - they are understandably disgusted by a Kiev centered political operation that has negated their political will. Over and over again, you read that they neither want to be part of Russia - nor accept the Kiev government as legitimate. Why is this position - which is pretty simple - simply ignored in this "series of portraits"? Because it inconveniences what Joan Didion once called the "narrative" - the way establishment newsmakers have determined a news story should go, whether it reflects reality or not. In fact, what is being missed is the framework for what is happening. To make it good Kiev versus bad Kremlin is a disservice to American readers. It will lead to Americans not being able to understand events in the Ukraine. It is overwhelmingly reminiscent of American reporting about Iraq, which similarly so mislead readers that the insurgency was wholly unexpected, and the whole unwinding of the occupation was a big enigma. If the press had done its job, that wouldn't have been so much the case.

But the press has long substituted one job - reporting - for another - lobbying - when it comes to foreign news reporting in the U.S. Thus, Ukraine is given to us in two historical periods - it appeared in the 1930s, when a georgian born dictator, Stalin, starved to death its people, and it appears in February 2014, when the Maidan protests gathered steam. However, a less supernatural view of the Ukraine would assume that it also existed in 2013, and 2012, and 2011, and 2010. From this angle, the question is who voted for the party of the Regions and where, A look at the map would show you that the Party of the Regions was extremely popular in the East. Here's the wiki map of the presidential election (the percentages are part of the total of the 48.95 percent that Yanukovych got in the second round of voting). This map indicates pretty strongly where the overthrow of Yanukovych is going arouse unhappiness. You don't need to posit some hypnotic power by Putin. Evidently, the power in Kiev is either going to have to compromise with these areas or occupy them. Or the Ukraine will split. This isn't really that hard to see or understand. The project of not understanding it, of ignoring it, of pretending that 2010 didn't happen, is a strong indicator that what we are getting in the mainstream media and the thought journals about the Ukraine is simply propaganda. Easy to swallow, since after all, Putin is a dick and a war criminal (and also the unexpected result of the last massive U,S. intervention in Russia, when the US aided and dragged Yeltsin to victory in 1995 in Russia). 

But don't believe the man in the devil suit is the main actor here.   

sphinxes

Perhaps Yeats was right, and beggary and poetry appear and disappear together. The argument for their deep connection can be divined in Daniel Tiffany’s argument for the form and function of obscurity in poetry, made in Infidel Poetics (see review here). Or at least I can borrow certain of his images and arguments to support the Yeatsian intuition.

First, however, one has to concede that poetry does something – it in fact does something about the way one thinks about doing things, what that activity if for, the matrix of exchanges in which it is enmeshed. To switch to Hegel-ese for a moment, beggary, outside of traditional society – the ancien regime stretching back to the paleolithic – loses its form, not its substance. It loses its hobo honor. Poetry, another artifact of that regime, is rivaled in modernity by journalism (under which I would include novels) and driven into a corner, where to save its form it has to resort to dodges that begin to displace its substance. Like the beggar, the poet doesn’t do anything for money. Money does something for the beggar and the poet – reward honors their rewarders. All of which collapses for the usual reasons given by the big thinkers.

Climbing down from these often scaled heights – I was struck by this riff on the rhapsode in Tiffany, which provoked the above thought:.

“The submerged affi nities of the rhapsode reach still further into the

well of the anonymous and indigent poet, touching the most ancient

artifact of poetic obscurity, the riddle: Sophocles called the Sphinx a rhapsode,

while Euripides and other commentators called her deadly riddle

a “song.” The Sphinx, who has no proper name, is called a rhapsode

because she was said to wander the streets of Thebes, homeless, reciting

her queer “demaunde” to strangers—habits recalling the vocation of Presocratic

thinkers such as Parmenides, who made his living as an itinerant

philosopher and composed his baffl ing treatise on Being in epic hexameters,

thereby adopting practices associated with the rhapsode.”

What a marvelous hybrid image – this Sphinx! I can definitely see the Sphinx sniffing around the streets not only of Thebes, but of where I currently live in Santa Monica, California.  Santa Monica needs a sphinx: with its definite edge that ocean – and its box of jigsaw puzzle pieces gathered from different puzzles and thrown all together. Here we have the rich, the aspiring techie, the screenwriter, the leisured, the shoppers, the tourists, the aged – often wheeled about with their heads at a disturbing cant and their mouths open, jaws too weak now to resist gravity – and the hobos everywhere – bums under trees in the park, mumbling to themselves on the steps of office buildings, amazingly weathered women sprawled by curbs under some vagary of palm shadow, sign welding white beards, many clothed in their entire wardrobe – I run into them every day as I wheel Adam about in his stroller. The tribe of the sphinx, except that rhapsody had definitely been downshifted, and the Sphinx can no longer riddle even the mere toddler of privilegem much less his pa.

But I do not write off the possibility that chthonic forces will one day emerge again – to put it in Yeatsian terms, the Great Year will not be gainsaid, neither will time stop. 

on being cowed

In the footnotes to his 1780 edition of Johnson’s life of Joseph Addison, John Hawkins took the opportunity to defend his own character sketch of Addison, which had appeared in a book published in 1770, against the accusation that he had besmirched Addison’s character by describing him as "sheepish".  In his defense, Hawkins reported  two anecdotes about Addison's time as the under-secretary of State under Queen Anne. In the first anecdote, the Secretary of State gave Addison the job of writing the official announcement of Queen Anne’s death to  Hanover (George I). Apparently, faced with the idea of announcing something so grave to a personnage so high, Addison agonized over the wording to the extent that he was paralyzed. After a couple of days had passed and he still hadn’t composed the communication, the Secretary of State gave the task to Addison’s secretary, Southwell, who dispatched it with ease. The second anecdote concerns the time Addison was summoned to testify before the Parliament. I imagine the periwig, the papers, the briefcase, the heals of his shoe, the carriage he arrives in, the clopping of horse hooves on the cobblestones of the street. And there he is, and now he arises to speak. Supposedly he looked at the committee, then down at his papers, then looked back at the committee and said – I conceive… And then fell silent. Again he looks at his papers,  again looks up, again says, I conceive, and again falls silent. After a minute one of the wittier members of the committee said Mr. Under-secretary, we agree that you conceive – but will you please now bring forth.

Addison, as Hawkins puts it, was a man who was easily cowed in his personal relations.  I have an image of Addison as one of those stick-in-the-mud writers who tamed the wild and glorious English of the 17^th century and transformed it into polite literature. However, these anecdotes present Addison in another light. He is not here the author of sententious Augustan essays. He is suddenly a character in Kafka.  More than that – he is my brother. For I, too, am a man easily cowed in personal dealings, who suffers, afterwards, with enormous shame and gnashing of teeth over my stupid cowardices.

Here’s a recent instance.

About three weeks ago, I had a strange pain in my left leg. Whenever a pain shows up in my body, I immediately jump to the conclusion that this is it: the hidden chronic disease that I always knew was there is finally showing its hand.  For a while, I decided that this must be some embolism, some cardiac warning, and I was seeing myself keeling over while changing Adam’s diapers. So I went to a doctor who seemed not at all concerned by my story and told me that no doubt the fact that I was intermittently carrying around a twenty three pound toddler had caused the sciatica nerve to act up, on the principle of the neck bone being connected to the back bone, etc. etc. In his opinion, a few exercises would make me as good as new. One hundred dollars please.

Relieved that the death sentence had been lifted, I noticed immediate improvements in the leg until the leg went through the day doing all the things legs do without complaining. Finally, last Monday, I decided to get a massage, thinking that any remnant of a problem would be taken care of by the soothing manipulation of my musculature. I walked up to Montana street, mentally calculating the necesssary tip – it was one of those places where the charge for the massage is cheap, but one is expected to tip the workers handsomely for the massage that one had enjoyed.

My massage, it became immediately evident, was designed to avoid any hint of enjoyment. When I began to explain about the leg, my masseur cut me off immediately, telling me: “I’ve been doing this for forty years.” At that moment I should have got off the table, or at least made a protest. Instead, I turned over and put my head down and let my masseur get to work. It became obvious that at least ten of those forty years were spent in the employ of the CIA at Guantanomo, extracting info from poor Afghan peasant boys. I was ready to give up all I knew, or make up all I knew and give it, in about four minutes. When the pain was too much, I would stop panting and grasp out in a pleading voice, please don’t do that. That was usually two hundred pounds of masseur pressing into my thigh or ankle muscle. I’d paid for an hour, and for an hour I was beat up. The piece de resistance was doing with my legs what I’d done to the legs of baked chickens – pulling them violently outward at a strategic angle. Sometimes, however, the masseur would say things like, tell me when it hurts.

When I limped out of the room, my assailant came out and, assuming a certain air of concern, asked if I was all right. I said I was fine, overtipped, and left.

As I hobbled around the next day and the deep pain in my legs slowly abated, I was bothered by one thing: why didn’t I make that guy stop? What could I have been afraid of that was more painful than being plucked and restrung? Why did I let him cut me off at the very beginning?

Why, in other words, couldn’t Addison simply bring forth?

To be cowed is to be afraid – that seems obvious. But fear, though it may be felt as quickly as touching or heart beat, develops along different lines, and is expressed in different modes. Being cowed is one of those modes in which the sum total of the pain of avoiding the fearful object is greater than the pain which may result from confronting said object. In other words, it is definitionally neurotic. Addison, gnawing his lip and lingering over the wording of his communication (passed away? Ascended to a far larger and better sphere?) was no doubt aware that as time passed, he was becoming ridiculous. He was making a fool of himself. But what if he made a fool of himself positively, by making some mistake? The knowledge that he was losing face didn’t help.

I sometimes take an extraordinarily aggressive tone as a writer; perhaps this is to make up for the extraordinarily cowed stance I take as a man.

The first instance of “cow” in the English language comes in the tragedy of Macbeth. Macbeth, you’ll remember, considers himself invincible, since he can only be brought down, the witches have told him, by a man who is not born of woman.  But as he is battling Macduff, Macduff drops the coin: that he was “from his mother’s womb untimely ripped.” This sufficiently fulfills the tricky condition contained in the witch’s prophecy, as Macbeth immediately sees. In response, Macbeth says: “accursed be that tongue that tells me so/for it has cow’d my better part of man.”

This is a pretty rich way for a word to introduce itself into the linguistic corpora. Etymologists are still puzzled about a verb that seems to be derived from an old Norse word, since Mr. Shakespeare, although excellent in many respects, had not only little Latin and less Greek, but surely no old norse at all.

I’m no blabbermouth in Old Norse myself. I associate the verb quite naturally with the noun. I think of this moment of freezing as something cow-like within me, something pasture fed and unable to realize my own weight against heard dogs and coyotes – not to speak of herdsmen and the technicians in the abbatoir. That frozenness is not broken by the application of a stick to my thick hide. On the contrary, I go in the direction that the stick wants me to go.

Yet the cow in being cowed doesn’t quite cover all the case, because to be cowed has definite connections to embarrassment. To be cowed is to come up against an invisible but almost overwhelming barrier. An electrified invisibility – one fears the shock, though one knows, rationally, that there is no calculating the shock. This is a state of being that is surely characteristic of developed countries, where the invisible barriers multiply along with the visible ones, and the taboos once associated with totems are now associated with a certain solitude – a lack of totems, in fact. In such a society, why one does what one does becomes a pressing question, which one has to constantly answer – along with why one doesn’t do what one doesn’t do. And not being able to explain the latter make one ashamed.

It all makes me want to sadly moo in some misty valley in the morning.  

an op ed from a mouse hole

As allegories move towards some threating point

Where fact and magic clutch at your throat

Remember – you don’t get the dynamics of this joint

-        Don’t even think you have a vote.

They call it homeland – cast a firelit glow

Over the dude peeing in his pants

On the corner – he’d been the first to go

When they were downsizing the urban peasants.

Yes, the bottle is now uncapped

But we aren’t stuffing genies back inside it.

You think you’re so special? You’ve just relapsed.

That fucked over feeling, you’ll just have to hide it.

delusions in economics

This week, Ezra Klein reprinted an old speech given by the economist  Thomas Sargent in 2007 under the title: “This graduation speech teaches you everything youneed to know about economics in 297 words.”  Given that Sargent is a “clintonian democrat”, I don’t think Klein meant to mock the man. However, the speech is a disaster, a series of bromides that do tell us a lot about the current intellectually bankrupt state of economics. For political reasons, about 1980, economics began to experience a huge increase in prestige. Although economists have long felt that their discipline was the physics of the social sciences, few other people did. But in the era of Reaganomics, when every big newspaper was adding a business section to the sports news and ‘living’, other people began to take the physics idea seriously. Sargent does us a favor by stripping down economics to the inspirational truisms that make it apparent that this is less about physics than about Babbitry, gussied up with models.

 

I could have an enjoyable time driveby shooting at the inanities in Sargent’s “list of lessons that our beautiful subject teaches. But I’d like to take one item on the list out of line and especially maltreat the thing – no. 3: “ Other people have more information about their abilities, their efforts, and their preferences than you do.” I’m sure Sargent thinks this is an axiom with no need for proof. In fact, economists have never even tried to prove it. But in other corners of social science, this assumption has long been shown to be wholly fallacious as stated. Our self-assessments, going from the way we remember the past to the way we predict our correctness in the future, is subject to severe cognitive biases that make it the case, generally, that ‘other people’ tend to either overestimate or underestimate their abilities, tend to define their efforts in different, self-defensive ways, tend not to understand their social and economic contexts very well, and certainly tend not to line up their preferences in good transitive order a la the Arrow theorem.

 

Everywhere in the social and cognitive sciences – except in economics – the myth of the unified individual, who can be certain of his thoughts, beliefs, memories, and intentions, has been shown to be insufficient. From Freud to Prospect theory, cognitive biases and theories about the unconscious have been found whenever the laboratory met the social scientist. Sargent, who won the Nobel prize for economics in 1991, has apparently never encountered the work of the winners of the Nobel prize for economics in 2002, Kahneman and Tversky. Rather, he seems here to cling to the musings of Hayek and other ideologues of the cold war period.

 

In economic life, as opposed to economics, people aren’t that stupid. Evey advertiser knows of the parodox of parity products – that blind taste tests often show that people cannot really tell one brand of coffee, wine, or soft drink from another. Yet this doesn’t prevent the formation of ‘preferences’ – which is where advertising comes in. One of the few economists who even considered the effect of advertising was John Kenneth Galbraith, and he was roundly attacked for it.

 

I’ll end this with a quote from a 1988 study of illusion and well being:  

 

Decades of psychological wisdom have established contact with reality as a hallmark of mental health. In this view, the wcU-adjusted person is thought to engage in accurate reality testing, whereas the individual whose vision is clouded by illusion is regarded as vulnerable to, if not already a victim of, mental illness. Despite its plausibility, this viewpoint is increasingly

difficult to maintain (cf. Lazarus, 1983). A substantial amount of research testifies to the prevalence of illusion in normal human cognition (see Fiske & Taylor, 1984; Greenwald, 1980; Nisbett & Ross, 1980; Sackeim, 1983; Taylor, 1983). Moreover, these illusions often involve central aspects of the self and the environment and, therefore, cannot be dismissed as inconsequential.”

our Seneca

I know little about Seneca. In the back of my mind, I have the idea that his plays are disgusting and his moral philosophy derivative, although where these judgments come from I cannot tell. I know that he was studied by all the greats – Machievelli, Montaigne, Bacon – but I put this down to an exaggerated enthusiasm for Rome. So I had little reason to plunge into the article about Seneca’s and Nero’s suicides, Dying Every Day, by James Romm, in the winter Yale Review. Yet every once in a while I like to dive into a scholarly topic that I’m really not interested in, in the hope that I’ll broaden my horizons. I am an incorrigible optimist re those horizons, which – being horizons – are probably geographically and mathematically impervious to the broadening motivation. Nevertheless…

Well, Romm’s article is excellent. Of course, I recognize that much of it regurgitates what every historian of the period knows – but it plays the facts to create a kind of Lehrstueck about tyranny and what you could call the trivialization of the sage.

Our sages now roam the popular blogs and newspaper columns and tv opinion shows without, oddly enough, being questioned about their expertise. What in particular does a Tom Friedman or a Christopher Hitchens do? What is the skill set? Usually there is a retreat to the idea of “reporting”  - but they aren’t reporting in the sense that the stringer or the semi-anonymous AP person reports. In most cases, they are opining. Their opinions, moreover, are based on a sort of assumed greater ethical sensibility. Hitchens, for instance, in his declining years, would often fill his columns for Slate or Vanity Fair with opinions in which he triangulate his feelings – his disgust, his righteous joy – to some object in the world, as though he were some moral litmus test.

Long ago, William James, in an excellent, disgruntled essay on the moral philosopher, dispatched the breed, which even then was turning up at Chatauquas and writing for the highfallutin’ quarterlies.

The ancestor of this type is surely Seneca. Although Cicero, too, was a sorta stoic philosopher in his off hours, for Seneca, there was a bond between the prestige he garnered as a sage and his heady position in the world of Roman politics. Having landed the job of tutor to Nero, he milked it for all it was worth.

Romm sets up his story by pointing to the ambiguous reputation of Seneca (who, spookily, willed his imago to his friends – as if his reputation, the image of his life, was some kind of separate creature). On the one hand there is a long tradition that sees Seneca in the terms he created for himself in his treatises and letters – as the moderate in all things Stoic sage, tragically doomed by having as his pupil a sort of armed Id. On the other hand, there was another version of Seneca:

“These are the opposing ways in which Romans of the late first century a.d. regarded Seneca, the most eloquent, enigmatic, and politically engaged man of their times. The first is taken largely from the pages of

Octavia, a historical drama written in the late decades of that century, by whom we do not know. The second is

preserved by Cassius Dio, a Roman chronicler who lived more than a century after Seneca’s death but relied on earlier writers for information. Those writers, it is clear, deeply mistrusted Seneca’s motives. They believed the rumors that gave Seneca a debauched and gluttonous personal life, a Machiavellian political career, and

a central role in a conspiracy to assassinate Nero in  a.d. 65.”

Romm, as the essay develops, doesn’t think that Seneca’s life was debauched, and he thinks that his role in the assassination plot – a role that led to his death – was, as was much in his life, the result of trying to have it both ways. But he does seem to think that there was something Machiavellian about Seneca – that in effect he was like Thyestes, the hero of his most famous play. Thyestes the sage was also, by the will of his father, supposed to share the kingship with his brother Atreus. Rather than do so, he retired to the countryside. Atreus however lured him back with the promise of the throne. Actually, Atreus had in mind the extermination of Thyestes line, and he had a clever way of going about it – he slew and cooked Thyestes children, while getting Thyestes drunk and promising him a feast fit for his new royal function. Thyestes is shown revelling in his vision of power, and mightily enjoying the meal that, it turns out, consists of his children. Romm examines Thyestes as a projection of Seneca – a warning, perhaps, that Seneca issued to himself. And at the same time a reference, via Atreus, to the wicked Nero.

Even so, Seneca had not opposed the wicked Nero when he murdered his mother, or began murdering all the descendents of Augustus that he could find.

There’s something compelling about the duel between the Ubu-esque emperor and the Imperial pontificator. We have no Neros, but we have created a sort of plutocratic Neropolis in the US, with Senecas all over the place – and I kept thinking how mysteriously relevant this story is.  Romm develops a nice little dialectical picture of the two sides of Seneca by contrasting two physical images of Seneca. One is  statue that used to be considered to be of Seneca – a bust  of a man who is “gaunt, haggard, and haunted, its eyes seemingly staring into eternity. Its features had served as a model for painters depicting Seneca’ s death scene on canvas, among them Luca Giordano, Peter Paul Rubens, and Jacques-Louis David.” The other is a bust  dug up in  Rome in 1813: “The bust shows a full-fleshed man, beardless and bald, who bears a bland, self-satisfied mien. It seems the face of a businessman or bourgeois, a man of means who ate at a well-laden table.”

1813 – ah, just in time for the birthpangs of the modern socio-economic world! Seneca, the bourgeois. I can see him in my minds eye, and hear him 24/7 on cable or talk radio.