The "we" of stupidity

Robert Musil once gave a famous talke entitled “On stupidity” [Ueber Dummheit]. The title is doublesided, at once about a topic and a citation of a previous talk entitle On stupidity given given by a Dr. Johan E. Erdmann, a Hegelian philosopher, in 1866. Erdmann developed a theory of stupidity in this talk that is articulated around the metaphor of the keyhole. The stupid person, in this metaphor, sees things through a keyhole, and from this vision generalizes without limit. Thus, the stupid person sees something about sickness – or reads it in a newspaper – and immediately generalizes what he has seen. Stupidity, in Erdmann’s view, is a curious amalgam of narrowness and absolutism.

“… one’s own I would be the only keyhole, through which he looks into the stocked hall that we name the world. Stupidity is thus to be defined as the spiritual circumstance in which the particular itself and its relationship to itself figures as the single mesure of truth and value, in short: everything is judged according to its own particularity.”

Erdmann appeals to his intuition: surely one could statistically pick out the stupid person through an enumeration of the times certain expressions (always instead of often, all instead of many, and “we” [Man] instead of I) crop up in this person’s speech. Paradoxically, the egotism – the self assertion without self-consciousness – is expressed not by the “I”, which indicates partiality, but the “we”, which indicates absoluteness.

Musil’s talk was given in 1937 – an ominous year in Austria. Already, Austria was ruled by a quasi-Fascist government. The strong labor movement of the 20s had been bloodily quashed. Those who could feel how things were going were searching for tickets out. Musil places his talk in a curious non-genre – it is neither scientific nor artistic. It is speculative, and not generalizable. In short, it is essayistic, a bounding and rebounding between opposites.

In 1937, it was not “clever” to call up, by name, the stupid or the powers of the stupid. This plays a role in Musil’s essay:

“… it can be dumb, to praise oneself as clever, but it is not always clever, as well, to maintain a reputation as stupid. Nothing here allows us to generalize; or rather, the single generalization that seems to apply, must be, that it is cleverest to allow oneself to be remarked in this world as little as possible! And really, this line under all wisdom has been drawn often. Yet more often is half-use or symbolic-representative use made of this misanthropic conclusion, and then it leads our observation into the circle of the commandments against pride and yet more expansive commandments, without letting us leave the realm of dumbness and cleverness completely.”

In 1937, the wisest were becoming aware that there are moments when exiting history turns out to be impossible, and being unremarked does not matter when being remarked is not the question: only being on the list is the question.

There has been a number of literary studies about the emergence of “betise” as a modernistic theme – Roberto Calasso has noticed a lineage between Flaubert, Leon Bloy, and Karl Kraus on the subject. 

Certainly, Erdmann’s essay seems to echo traits in the paper media world, as seen by Kraus: a narrowing “we” that promotes received ideas as eternal truths. Flaubert and Bloy both associated stupidity with the bourgeoisie, the privileged audience of the press. There is another story about the rise of the paper press that is just the opposite – about the broadening of the “information flow”, the globalization that comes with the newspaper. The newspaper embodied a whole new temporal dominant: that of simultaneity. Its very layout made, say, the marriage of a princess and the sex murders of an insane criminal coexist on the front page, which gives us a very different sense of time than the traditional chronicle, where the social hierarchy is reflected in the flow of the narrative.

I would speculate that the history of stupidity in the modern era – from the nineteenth century until now, the era of capitalism – is marked by the separation of the fool from the stupid. The fool – that figure in Erasmus and Shakespeare – is, supremely, a trickster. Being a fool is a vast joke, as well as a form of what you might call transgressive simplicity: it is represented by the fool in King Lear. One of the marks of Lear’s fallen state is that he can be effected by what his fool says – as the fool shrewdly remarks.
That trickster function continues on into the era of mass circulation papers, but is very much on the margin. From the margin, what the fool sees is the power of stupidity, in which the media is complicit. Or perhaps one might say, in which the media is caught up. For Kraus, that meant that all times were end-times – because all times were filled in by stories and comments by the press, by “Zeit-ung”, which was a debasement of Zeit [“time”] itself. 

In the kind of logical paradox that Musil knotted over, this state of perpetual alarm disarmed him before the rise of Hitler, about whom he had “nothing to say.” There are dead-ends everywhere: even in calling out stupidity.

Measuring Progress by refusing to cry

Tränengruss – the greeting by tears – is a ritual that fascinated a number of anthropologists in the early 20th century, especially Georg Friederici, who wrote a monograph entitled Tränengruss der Indianer. Friederici gathered material from the oldest European – Indigenous encounters. The colonialist and exotic fascination was a factor in his descriptions, but clearly the weeping greeting was not a myth:

[Among the Tupi] The women of the family performed the chief role in this ceremony. When a foreigner or even a native of the same tribe neared one of their huts as a visitor, he was allowed to enter and take his place on one of the hammocks. The naked women placed themselves strategically around him, laid both their hands before their faces and began to vigorously weep and lament, pitying the overcome fatigue and dangers of the way of the guest, and making him compliments. The rule demanded that the guest also cry, or, if he, as a European, had no stock of tears on hand, that at least he acted as though he did.”

The naked women and the dry eyed Europeans – it is a powerful colonialist image, no? Marcel Mauss, whose essay, L'expression obligatoire des sentiments, written in 1921, concerned not only about the ritual of tears described by ethnologists but also, as was pointed out by Chris Garce and Alexander Jones (2009), the mass mourning and numbness that was felt across the world after World War I – the European lack of tears – pointed out that the weeping greeting was also known in Australia. Garce and Jones speculate that Mauss was thinking hard about how to mourn the unknown soldier, the unknown flu victim, the unknown civilian casualty, the massacred and the massacre-ers. This was both the obvious question, post-war, and the buried question. Buried, repressed, and returning like the repressed on a national scale with the Nazi seizure of power in Germany. As Garce and Jones put it:

“Mourning for those who never returned from the battlefields--i.e. those masses of individuals whose deaths could not be assimilated within the logic of national sacrifice--quickly assumed a spectral quality of unresolved political significance. "The obligatory expression of feelings" thus symptomatically draws attention to "our much missed Robert Hertz and Emile Durkheim" and to these fallen compatriots' studies of Australian funerary rituals. In re-reading his colleagues' ethnological works, Mauss would rediscover Hertz's and Durkheim's arguments that aboriginal women, more than other segments of so-called "archaic societies," occupied a mediating role between the living and the dead. He also noticed the prevalence of "greeting by tears" not just in Australia, but sheer across the ethnological record.”

We’ve seen a return of the idea that women mediate between the living and the dead in the notion that the female leaders of states have been much more competent in dealing with the Coronavirus pandemic. At the same time, the neo-liberal ban on tears – except when shed by men, who are, de facto, brave men, preferably with military service – has still been the norm, and has had its effects in the settler countries – the U.S., for instance – as well as elsewhere. Such is the rule that forbids the stock of tears that when the lockdown comes to an end, the story will all be about “rebuilding” the economy, and the dead will have to bury their dead.

It poses a question, doesn’t it? When did the Europeans and all those societies upon which they put their heavy hand lose their stock of tears?

Midlife crisis of the oracle

“To Serapion of Athens, the stoic, who was himself a poet and who criticized the bad literary taste of his times in sustaining the point of view that the verses of the oracles, since they were authored by Apollo, chief of the Muses, could only be excellent, Boethius the Epicurien replied, pertinently and impertinently: have you heard the story of the painter Pauson?

“No”, responded Sarapion.

“You should know this story. Having received a commission to paint a horse rolling on the ground, he painted one that represented a horse running; as the buyer got angry, Pauson began to laugh and turned the canvas upside down: thus, the bottom became the top, and the horse no longer seemed to gallop, but to roll on the ground. This, according to Bion, is the fate of certain trains of reasoning, when they are reversed. Thus some, instead of pretending that the verses of the oracles are beautiful because they are written by God, would say, on the contrary, that God was not their author because they are so bad. The first claim may be uncertain, but what is certain is that the oracles are composed in a manner that is unworthy of divinity.” – The oracle controversy, Robert Flacelière

The oracle is bored, finally, of the future

Ablution in the cold water of the spring  

Autopsy of the victim, the signature

In the disposition of the organs, fate’s writing.

The wisecracks from all the golden codgers on the wall

The epsilon, the laurel wand, moving down the hall

To the chamber where you get your meds and electroshock

So little and so much makes a poet

When the gods have decided to put in their hand

Just as the city’s sack is found where nobody knows it

In the spilled guts of the sacrificed ram

Oh Popeye when you play upon your guitar

Do you play the things that will be or that are?

She sees ambiguity shaped by ambiguity

and that wisdom is hidden in a children’s joke

or in some stray, scrawled obscenity

in a jakes or toted in a poke.

To pose riddles and not ever guess her own

Has turned her voice into a frog’s voice, and her heart into a stone.

A review of Tadeusz Szczeklik’s Catharsis: On the art of Medicine

Asclepius was the child of Apollo and Coronis, a mortal princess. Out of jealousy, Apollo struck Coronis with a lightning bolt when she was pregnant, but rescued the child in her womb. Medicine  begins with a femicide. We've always suspected as much.  But as always in the heavily redacted and montaged world of myth (where all that is deep is condensed with all that is shallow, where the cartoon apes the archetype), there is another story too: that Chiron the Centaur, who taught Achilles, also taught Asclepius. He taught music as well, which is how Achilles cured himself of his anger towards Agamemnon. As well, he taught the virtues that calmed the soul. Thus, as is pointed out in Tadeusz Szczeklik’s Catharsis: On the art of Medicine, Chiron taught medicine, music and justice as entangled one with the other and, ultimately, one.

There’s a certain kind of medical essay, a book-like essay, that obscurely keeps the faith with that unity. Lewis Thomas in the U.S. is the best known practitioner – Szczeklik was that figure in Poland.

One expects, from these essays, certain doxa: information that has the righteous aura of believe it or not. You will learn, in Catharsis, for instance, that there are 82 distinct terms for different types and properties of the pulse listed in Dorland’s Medical Dictionary. There’s paradoxical pulse, there’s bigeminal pulse, there’s thread pulse, and so on.

The music in Catharsis begins, literally, with the heart beat, and goes through myth and personal experience – the case studies, patient’s whose histories are eccentric, revelatory – and science.

Before the Internet there was Indra’s net. There was as well Ananke’s – Ananke, the Greek goddess of fate. Although Goddess is not quite right – the net of fate was stronger than the Gods. This is the starting point.  The essays in Catharsis are oriented to the modern mythographerk, Roberto Calasso,k taking myth as a soundtrack, lifetrack, culturetrack. In the vocabulary and procedures of medicine,  Szczeklik sees a thousand ties to what lies outside the “science of medicine”. In order to see this, Szczeklik seizes on the terms and practices of the doctor, for instance the “anamnesis” – the name for the patient’s recounting of his history – which Szczeklik associates with Plato’s notion that memory precedes perception in the order of knowledge. In medical terms, the patient’s story precedes the doctor’s observation. The net in which all cause and effect is caught, where memory and observation converge, is what medicine is always going to be about, at least practically. Ethically – which is to say socially and politically – it is about catharsis, purification. 

“Some people have assumed that the text about katharsis in the Poetics has been amputated by an “unknown censor”; others have expressed the view that it was the subject of a separate, irretrievably lost essay. Some have even said in hushed tones that the Stagirite deliberately left the crucial issue of art open ended, because it eludes unambiguous intertpretation. Did he perhaps notatice that in the first syllable of the word he meant to define an ancient, unfathomed mystery lay spellbound? We fist find “Ka” at the beginning of the history of ancient Egypt as “one of the most difficult concepts for the Wewstern mind to grasp”. It was associated with the force that sustains life, the power of creation, and the soul of man. Centuries earlier, at the dawn of Hindu civilization, Kas was the name of the father of the gods, the life-giving element that pervaded the world. The god’s name Ka meant “Who?” – and the first reaction to it was “boundless awe”?”

This is the theme that links Szczeklik’s humanism to his Catholicism. It is a seductive idea that Szczeklik presents without presenting its opposite – something like Bataille’s notion that filth (can) make us free. Something like the feminist notion that the construction of the virtue of purity has participated in that original, Apollonian femicide. The anti-humanistic theme is not addressed or even very addressable from Szczeklik’s point of vantage. 

The strong tones that contrast pollution and purity slow down Catharsis as it travels from Paracelsus to modern discussions of, say, doctor assisted suicide, which prompts credal negations that are all the more disappointing in as much as we know the vast referential pharmacopiea that Szczeklik deals in earlier is dispensed with abruptly by references to Pope John Paul.

Still: I’d recommend this book to anyone looking for medical essays this plague season. It should be cut, I think, with the harsher diatribes of James Le Fanu’s The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine, which I reviewed in 2001, here. 

Is it like fun

“Is it like fun? Writing

was always hard hard for me, but I think I’d love love

to be a writer.” To be a poppy, though…

The green pod bending

the bristly, slim green stem, or

- “right right right, I bet it must be

like a fucking orgasm if like everybody reads

your book” -

Look

how a stem shoots out from the others

mission creeps the pod forward which stick out horizontal

to the ground

rather than the stem bearing the curling weight of

those downward pods.

They are built for wind,

for distribution, for coverage.

Can one imagine

(“what’s the name of your book?”)

what they imagine if such things  flicker

in the green vegetative soul? A world of poppies.

A utopia of poppies.

Every flower is an aggressor.

- Karen Chamisso

what is herd immunity?

What is herd immunity?

A lot of old fights continue long after they should in science, if science were this instrument that the positivists extol. We are seeing one now, which is all about epidemiology and “herd immunity”.

It is worth noticing that the groups attacking epidemiology are using the same instruments that were honed in the fifties. In 1951, Doll and Hill, in Britain, published a famous epidemiology paper linking cigarette smoking to cancer. This was the first of a flood of studies linking the two. The cigarette companies, under the guidance of certain genius advertisers, found many a compliant scientist to batter against the whole idea of using the statistical models employed by Doll and Hill. These people made one of the most significant discoveries of the 20th century: in the interest of ideology and profit, you can legally obfuscate mass murder and get away with it. Thus, as cancers connected to smoking regularly swept away half a million peeps per year all through the late sixties, seventies, eighties, government did nothing but put warnings on cigarette packs. While Cold War scholars regularly brought up Lysenko to show how ideology crazily led to terror in Stalin’s Russia, they simply ignored these figures and this social phenomenon.

Their heirs have made it impossible for the world’s second largest economy, the U.S., to do the least thing towards averting the climate catastrophe we know is coming. And they are the same peeps who are behind the “let’s open the economy” crowd. Having those cancer deaths under their belt, the Corona-virus deaths will be as nothing.

One of the weapons that they bring to this battle is an unexamined notion called “herd immunity.” From the halls of George Mason University to the streets of Stockholm, this “mathematical model” is supposed to show that lockdowns are poopy ways of dealing with a minor problem.

So, what is herd immunity? A simple definition is that it is the resistance of a population to the invasion and spread of an infection. We should contextualize this definition – it arose from considerations of the level of vaccination needed to suppress an infection. Thus, for instance, they vaccinate against the hoof and mouth disease among cattle trying to firewall that disease so it does not have relays to get into the unvaccinated part of the population. There are new cows being born all the time, so there is, de facto, a new unvaccinated population coming into the picture. And the disease itself is evolving in relation to the vaccine, so that if enough of the population is not vaccinated it is possible that the evolution of the microbe will lead to resistance that overwhelms the vaccine.

Notice that all of these situations depend upon a vaccine. They also depend on the situations of the population, which can be determined by many factors. Among humans, sanitation and nutrition are pretty strong factors in the spread or suppression of infection. The percentage of the vaccinated in terms of the suppression of a disease can vary. For polio, for instance, Jonas Salk thought that an 85 percent level was needed. In practice, 70 percent was achieved in most countries, and even then there were occasional outbreaks. Still, by 2016, one of the most common oral poliovirus medicines was withdrawn, because it was no longer considered necessary. Still, other polio vaccines are in place and have been implemented in mass.
Compare this regime to the regime of having no drug to cure the disease. In this case, herd immunity means something like: the herd will be culled so that the resisters will survive. Or as George Scott said in Dr. Strangelove, I’m not saying our hair won’t be mussed, 15 to 20 million casualties tops!

The traditional method of fighting against infection, in the absence of a vaccine, has been quarantine. Quarantines are notoriously hard to enforce, since they require coordinated action by a large group of people, some of whom might find it in their interest to violate the quarantine. This is especially true if the population is composed of groups with different levels of vulnerability. This kind of thing is embodied in, say, infrastructure. In the late nineteenth century, many cities embarked on enormous and ambitious sewage projects, because sewage was a well known vector for disease. Though the wealthy had alternatives, they as a group were still vulnerable in cities, so they cooperated. Contrast this with AIDS, where one group is most affected, and a whole population can get by without too much worry about catching it. In this case, the vulnerabilities of one group can be seized by others as a political ploy, or they can be ignored, etc.

When we hear the comforting words, mathematically modeled, we have to remember that the modeling is only as good as the empirical data, and that is not very good. So far, mortality rates have differed considerably. Testing rates which are supposed to give us samples of the larger disease picture often end up giving us pictures of how much testing is going on – especially when we have wildly different samples.

What is brought into focus in these times of crisis is the expendability of a population in terms of the larger socio-economic system. In the 50s, when the AEC became aware that fallout was spreading a potentially lethal radiation load on a population located hundreds of miles from the bomb sites, they came up with a phrase that beautifully condensed the way established power thinks: the low use population. Indeed, is only a matter of time before some rightwing economist dances on the heads of all our dead parents and crows about the silver lining in terms of entitlement for all these old folks dying. Not to speak of the white settler offspring who have absorbed the idea that the virus has much more severe consequences in African American communities – communities that have seen their asset growth basically frozen or in decline from 2000 – and starts celebrating.
And this is the lesson of herd immunity in the C-Virus era: the herders don’t care.

The game of dress up: male novelists/female characters

Angela Carter once wrote that she read novels when growing up for, among other things, insights into being a woman. She read the English writers of the period – a period when Leavis’s “Great Tradition” – and naturally she read D.H. Lawrence – the Leavisite candidate for the truly great English writer (Virginia Woolf being bashed for snobbishness and Joyce for being not sound). As Carter writes, “I smelled a rat in D.H. Lawrence pretty damn quick.”

This does not mean she dismissed Lawrence as an artist. But he was the kind of novelist she wanted to pit herself against, moving aside that stone on the English novel – up to and including my quasi Christian metaphor of the stone being moved aside, the kind of resurrectionary theme Lawrence was all about.

One of her insights into Lawrence involves, well, the same problems that I think about when writing fiction with female characters. 

It has to do with dress-up.

If you read Raymond Chandler, you will notice that, for all of Marlowe’s tough guy gestures, he has the heart of a clothier, a Hollywood costumer. Take this from The High Window:

‘She was wearing a brownish linen  coat and skirt, a broadbrimmed straw hat with a brown velvet band that exactly matched the color of her shoes and the leather trimming on the edges of her linen envelope bag.”

Her linen envelope bag! The fetishizing aura overflows – as auras tend to – when we reach that fashion accoutred bag. Freud isn’t in it, brother.  How many of us know what an envelope bag even is? On the other hand, Marlowe is a product of Hollywood, no bones about it, so that we read these heroic descriptions without wondering too much about this information, as why does Marlowe even know about an envelope bag?

Lawrence, as Carter notices, is also indefatigably fussy about women’s clothing. For all that he was after an encounter with the dark gods buried in Etruscan vases, he was always going on about what his women were wearing. Carter has some great remarks about Women in Love, his “most exuberantly clothed novel” which  “furthermore, is supposed to be an exegesis on my sex,

trusting, not the teller but the tale, to show to what extent D. H. Lawrence personated women

through simple externalities of dress; by doing so, managed to pull off one of the greatest con

tricks in the history of modern fiction; and revealed a more than womanly, indeed, pathologically

fetishistic, obsession with female apparel. Woman in Love is as full of clothes as Brown's, and

clothes of the same kind. D. H. Lawrence catalogues his heroine's wardrobes with the loving care

of a ladies' maid. It is not a simple case of needing to convince the reader the book has been

written by a woman; that is far from his intention. It is a device by which D. H. Lawrence

attempts to convince the reader that he D.H.L., has a hot line to a woman's heart by the

extraordinary sympathy he has for her deepest needs, that is, nice stockings, pretty dresses and

submission.

Yet Lawrence clearly enjoys being a girl. If we do not trust the teller but the tale, then the

tale positively revels in lace and feathers, bags, beads, blouses and hats. It is always touching to

see a man quite as seduced by the cultural apparatus of femininity as Lawrence was, the whole

gamut, from feathers to self-abnegation. Even if, as Kate Millett suggests, he only wanted to be a

woman so that he could achieve the supreme if schizophrenic pleasure of fucking himself, since

nobody else was good enough for him. (The fantasy-achievement of this ambition is probably

what lends Lady Chatterley's Lover such an air of repletion.)”

I’m sure that my own games of dress up, as much as I research them and try to think of the clothing in terms of the choice of the wearer rather than the judgement of the observer, as much as I agonize over the style of the clothing and the styling it evidences, are cons as well.  On the other hand (he said, defensively)  the way my male characters dress is, as well, a bit of a con, in as much as these are fictions. Clothing is so helpful because it is, as well, a an attempt to fictionalize – wearing clothes might warm us, but it also shields us, helps us stagemanage our bodies, gives us a feeling of being ourselves as characters.  It is true, often, that there are breakdowns in the clothing game in fiction. To give a movie instance – I just rewatched  Terminator (yes, this lockdown is dragging) and the Schwarzenegger character successfully clothes himself in pants and shirt that come from a person maybe four sizes smaller than him, without ripping, while the human from the future – I forget his name – steals trousers from a drunk tramp without noticing once that these trousers are well pissed in. They even fit him, the human from the future, I mean.

This is supremely not having an eye for clothes, and it is unusual in a Hollywood film.

The clothing option doesn’t necessarily make the character. I can know and feel many of Dostoevsky’s characters without remembering his descriptions of their clothing, because they are perfunctory – unlike Tolstoy’s, or Lawrence’s. That is the deal with characters, male or female, and what they wear – wearing is meaningmaking. I think that we go from the clothing in when we make characters. I don’t think of my female characters, oddly enough, as naked. And that is perhaps a fault. God, as he made abundantly clear in Genesis, definitely meant us to be naked.

“Who told you that you were naked?” asked the LORD God. “Have you eaten of the tree from which I commanded you not to eat?”

And thus the Lord God learned that his characters do have their own lives.