This spring we're on our own: the end of the cult of the savior billionaire and the battle of Columbia

 

As the revolutionary fevers of the sixties were calming in the seventies, the Right Wing was alarmed by what they took to be the sneaky new strategy of subversion by the New Left, the so called “long march through the institutions”.  The Modern Age, a magazine that was proudly to the right of National Review, published an article by a certain Helmut Schelsky (translated by Edward Shils) in 1974 that laid out the program in the most apocalyptic terms possible: “The unity of “left-wing radicalism” which resides in this consensus regarding strategy embraces the German Communist Party and its university affiliate “Spartakus”, as well as the most diverse anarchist grups, the leadersip of the Young Socialists, as well as important sections of the Young Democrats.” Schelsky’s message was not just for Germans (West Germans, who lived in a country, incidentally, where the Communist party was as illegal as it had been in the 1930s, under the Nazis), but for all defenders of the West. Schelsky puts upfront the fact that the systematic strategy of subverting the system is about “the conquest of the universities and of teacher training colleges…”

Schelsky’s sense of the Long March through the institutions was not exactly an illusion. Indeed, in the seventies, the return of student radicals to graduate programs was a long event. In many ways, the second wave of feminism was nurtured in English departments – to my mind, one of the great triumphs of liberal civilization. Similarly, gay civil rights was an exercise in both the streets and the classrooms.

Although I am quoting an article from 1974, I could be quoting Chris Rulfo in 2023. He even uses the verb conquest in his articles and podcast about how the “radical left conquered everything.” It is a curious thesis – in the year 2023, without a peep from the Democrats or the “radical left”, billionaire wealth surged by 2 trillion dollars. Not, from this “radical leftist”, a banner year in our conquest. But if one keeps in mind that the conquest has a nub of truth – the oppression of women, of gays, of blacks, Hispanics, etc in America was, at the very least, discredited, even if out there in the fields it was still doing its work – and one looks at that surge of wealth for those at the top, it was obvious that the so called “cultural war” – which is really a civil rights struggle, disguised as a struggle against “woke censorship” – was about to take a new turn. The universities and schools simply cannot hold out in their aging liberal sensibility against the massive changes in the composition of wealth not only in America but throughout the “West”. The American liberal cult of the savior “billionaire” – the ex of Bezos, or Bezos himself, or Soros, or some other moneybags – signals that everything has gone wrong. The long march had become a wholly owned subsidiary, in the standard centrist Democratic party narrative, of the “good rich people”.

Thus, the Potemkin villages were easy targets of destruction. Much easier than anybody thought. The news channels, newspapers and universities have been rolling over at speed in a mere three months due to the efforts of the truly stupidest collection of bozos ever to have used the Oval office to sell baseball caps.

When a collective collectively loses its backbone like this, one must look at more than individual vice. The long march of plutocracy through the parties, starting with the Dem surrender to Reaganism, has borne its poisoned fruit.

There is some relief, I suppose, in knowing who you can’t rely on. In this acid test of American democracy, we can see the savior billionaire groupies looking for some win-win figleaf, some way of making retreat and surrender look like the most reasonable thing ever done by a Democratic politico in the gym basement of the Senate building. In other words, we see the sheer comedy and parody on display of the woke-lite brigade. They will, when the cards are down, join the Trumpies.

Tin soldiers and Columbia folding/this spring we’re on our own, to parody an old song.

We are on our own.

 

1917, War, democracy and conscience: on Franz Rosenzweig's Vox Dei

 

1.

Franz Rosenzweig was stationed in Macedonia, in a German unit that was in liaison with the Austro-Hungarian army, in 1917.  In January of that year, his parents sent him Kafka’s The Judgment, which he read and tried to analyse. Over the course of that year, Rosenzweig was very productive: he wrote extensively on the philosophy of politics, and sketches of the thinking that went into Star of Redemption. In one of his letters to his parents (the most oracular letters to one’s parents one can imagine: only an adoring, highly cultivated Central European mother and father could have endured them), Rosenzweig wrote: Truth is a sea into which only he may dive whose heart has a specific gravity greater than “truth”, that is, a heart full of irreducible reality.”

Which I think is a pretty straightforward methodological statement. I can’t imagine what the parents thought. Those parents! Kafka’s, Benjamin’s, Rosenzweig’s!

The essay Vox Dei?, which came out of this period, was first published in the “Little Writings” in 1937. A fuller version was published in the Collected Works in 1984. It has been translated into French. But I cannot find a translation into English. Pity.

Rosenzweig, at this time, was pulled between Zionism, of which he had a vague idea, and the fierce anti-zionism of Hermann Cohen, the most famous Jewish philosopher of the time – who visited Rosenzweig’s parents in 1917. Cohen told Rosenzweig, in listing the deficiencies of Zionism, that the Zionists wanted to be happy. This was a putdown indeed.

Rosenzweig visited with the Sephardic Jews of Greece, and wrote about them to his parents with a mixture of sympathy and condescension. His experience, however, was important to his thinking about community and the meaning of “the people” in political discourse.

Rosenzweig’s friend, Martin Buber, would later develop his political philosophy, vis a vis Zionism, by an extended meditation on the Jews as a nomadic people, and the Jews as a nation, with the latter characterized by the fact that the Jews demanded a King. The relevant passage here is 1 Samuel 8:

4 “So all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah. 5 They said to him, “You are old, and your sons do not follow your ways; now appoint a king to lead us, such as all the other nations have.”

6 But when they said, “Give us a king to lead us,” this displeased Samuel; so he prayed to the Lord. 7 And the Lord told him: “Listen to all that the people are saying to you; it is not you they have rejected, but they have rejected me as their king. 8 As they have done from the day I brought them up out of Egypt until this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so they are doing to you. 9 Now listen to them; but warn them solemnly and let them know what the king who will reign over them will claim as his rights.”

Rosenzweig, in 1917, does not cite this passage in his essay; but he surely knew of it. Thus the irony encoded in the term Vox dei, entitling the essay, and the ending sentence, which quotes the entire phrase: vox Populi, vox Dei.

The subtitle of the essay is: Democracy’s question of conscience. Or in the French translation: the case of conscience in democracy.

The essay is structured around three slogans. The term in German is Schlagwort, and Rosenzweig plays with the meaning of Schlag – a blow. Slogans are blows, necessarily making a point without trailing or incorporating the long course of reflection that stands behind them.

The slogan that he is, perhaps, closest to is at the beginning: Everything for the people, everything by the people. This is, he takes it, the slogan of democracy, of democrats. The problem with it is: what does it mean by the people? The second slogan takes that problem into a reactionary point of view: Everything for the people, nothing by the people. However, Rosenzweig points out, this is not an escape from the problem of the people. Finally, after balancing reaction against democracy (a democracy with an anarchist slogan, as that is where the everything for the people, everything by the people has its root), Rosenzweig considers the middle way: “Everything for the people, everything under the concurrence [Mitwirkung] of the people.” Out of the slogan of the middle way emerges the legislative moment, legitimated not by the monarchical or authoritarian instinct for the people, and not out of the people themselves somehow autonomously self-governing.

Thus, a rather liberal shaping of the problem of the people. Rosenzweig’s next move, however, is rather surprising. It is the introduction of the temporal dimension that defines the people. The people of yesterday, or the day before yesterday? The people of tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow? Or the people defined by the today?

Here Rosenzweig makes an complicated case that requires quoting a long paragraph:

The today is violent in both cases. Its power makes itself felt against the habits and wishes of the practical life of the “people as well as against the history and determination replete souls of the leaders of the people [Volkheit]. These yesterdays and tomorrows, these days before yesterday and days after tomorrow fall as victims of sacrifice to the today in the same manner. All politics is putting into action the claims of today against these. And while the people and the leaders of the people express their will to political action, they declare themselves prepared to sacrifice these resistances to the command of today. Politic proves itself as sacrifice, as self-denial as much for the people as the leaders of the people. Both must throw the whole sum of their being – than what other is the collective of memory and hope – into the melting pot of the moment. The people would love to live its good days in its usual circle, in peaceful development: and the leaders of the people would like to make the living race a ship, that carrying the cargo of the fullness of the past steers towards undiscovered coasts of the future; but the moment calls for something else. It will have its own rights respected and carried out,; nothing, neither human life nor the cultural property of the people, is as valuable to it as death for the fatherland. Thus is compounded in the today the legitimacy [Rechtsgrund] for the whole indivisible state reality of the people in both senses, and opens itself at the same time to the possibility that both kinds after their different concepts of the people in the moment that they step out of their essence into action fall together as one. The sacrifice, that they bring to the moment, the sacrifice of yesterday and tomorrow, and of the day before yesterday and the day after tomorrow, is exactly the sacrifice of that which divides them. A naked, pure today, they now both stand before the alter of the mighty goddess, the moment. In the sacrifice is thus realized the union of the people with the state, to which it has an unconditional right.”

Given this reconciliation of opposites in a pure negation that affirms their existence in the moment, both the reactionary and the democrat are led to a paradox – not the liberal “all for the people, all with the concurrence of the people”, but a more tragically paradoxical slogan that accounts for this sacrifice: everything by the people, everything against the people. “Thus are loosened the knots of the polyvalent people concept.”

Opfer – the word I am translating as sacrifice – means, as well, victim. The universal victimhood of the people, in the name and by the hand of the people, is a logic that probably looks a lot more plausible on the corpse strewn fields of battle in the Southern front of the First World War. Yet, there is something powerful about Rosenzweig’s idea as a way of getting us to those corpse strewn fields – or to our own reality of corpse strewn cities shown on a million screens, and always on the “periphery” of states, evil empires in which we as people who want a good day and have memories of good days and hopes for good days in the future have to cope.

“No people want war. And firstly for the simple reason that no people want action, but rather, being.” If being means something as simple as taking all the moments of one’s life as one’s being, then we can perhaps say that no people want, more broadly, sacrifice. But the people live in the State – or as the elders of Israel put it, having a king, like other people have.

Up to this point, we have moved from anarchy to reaction to liberalism to something like de Maistre’s state, or de Sade’s. And if sacrifice is the ultimate and ever present condition of politics, we are, I’d say, good and fucked - that is, Sade’s old fuckers rule. But this is not the whole story of the Voice of God and the Voice of the People. There is, as well, conscience, which is the subtitle of Rosenzweig’s essay, after all.

2.

“Ain’t gonna study war no more” – a verse in a folksong popular in my boyhood – pretty much encapsulates my position vis-à-vis war. When I first heard that song, I had little idea of what nuclear armaments were. I had no notion that somewhere, an ICBM had my name (or at least my part of the world, my bit of the U.S., my Atlanta metro area) inscribed in its program. Of course, it did.

Back in that boyhood, the good old days of the sixties, the Communist tactic was simple and seductive: advancing the program of peace. Peace even penetrated the iron curtain and became a byword among some of the bloodiest “statesmen” of the century, like Nixon and Kissinger. And of course peace for the Soviets was twinned with oppression. But the communists were, I still think, right. Peace is good.

Peace, however, was not such an absolute good to Franz Rosenzweig, writing Vox Dei? In 1917. To a man or woman in a World War, the world seems, indeed, to be a war.  The war seemed to represent some truth about the pre-war world – namely, that the prewar world was not wholly real. It was missing some core.

Vox Dei is supposed to give us some guide to the conscience in a democracy. That’s a good thing to have. It is topical: I am not in a world war, but a world in which institution after institution is collapsing due to force exerted by the stupidest people in the world. People who have so little sense of disguise that they parade their stupidity and ignobility as if it were charming. And institution after institution is showing a complete lack of conscience, which I take to be a sense of integrity, of the worth of their cause such that they would resist, with the utmost effort, the collapse of their collective history as it is embodied in these institutions.

Rosenszweig’s essay, unfortunately, leads us to a certain fascinating point in the understanding of the state and democracy – and then leaves us there. The end of the essay, it must be admitted, is a proto-Spenglerian mess, a tour d’horizon of England, Russia, Germany, and Austro-Hungary that rises to the level of a newspaper feuilleton – a bad one, one of the one’s victim to Karl Kraus’s cutting judgment. Or to Robert Musil’s, whose criticism of Spengler’s method, style, and anti-scientific method is a thing of beauty and a joy forever.

But even given these codicils to reading the essay, it is worth following for its dialectical teasing out of the slogans underlying anarchism, reaction, and liberalism.

Which, to recall yesterday’s little ditty of mine, were: ‘everything for the people, everything by the people’;”everything for the people, nothing by the people’; and ‘everything for the people, everything with the concurrence of the people’. The last slogan is awkward, as awkward as the liberalism it encodes. This is the style of the middle way, and somewhere in that middle way style itself will become suspect – the liberal hates nothing more than a killer prose style. It’s a mutual hatred.

But this is by the by. As my man Musil shows, a killer prose style is no substitute for an awkward but logical argument.

Remember, too, Rosenzweig’s methodology, which recalls Hegel’s remark, in the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, that you can’t learn to swim on dry land. Rosenzweig imagines himself as the diver into the sea of truth, whose specific gravity – his skin, breath, dreams, etc. – is an actuality that allows him to plunge. Every dive has its deepest point, at which his actuality directs him back up to the surface. The sea itself cannot rise above its surface, cannot breathe – the truth to that extent cannot set itself free.

The deepest point in the dive into political philosophy (I am not going to call this political theology – since I think that phrase is horseshit) is reached when the slogans we are dealing with turn into actualities of state power. It is then that we reach a paradoxical slogan: “everything for the people, everything against the people.”

A man in a war sees the world as a war, and the state as a war formed entity. This is the case with Rosenzweig. He begins to ask about war from the viewpoint of the people: “no people want war.” The folksinger who aint gonna study war no more would say that this is because people basically don’t want to kill each other or be killed. But in Rosenzweig’s view, a view from within a total war, the desire of the people for peace is a desire for inertia – for the ordinary life, with its yesterdays and its tomorrows. The German word “Ruhe”, for peace, is also the word for rest – and it is on that lexical play that Rosenzweig builds his case (even as peace as Ruhe and peace as Frieden uneasily alternate in the essay) It is not that far from Marx’s remarks about rural idiocy. The traditional people are, as it were, encased in a world that is ritually organized. But the state – and the statesman – has discovered something different: a today, a moment [Augenblick] that not only overshadows the yesterday and tomorrow that gives ordinary sense to time – but also demands the sacrifice of that ordinary sense of time.

The goddess Moment  stands in, here, for the introduction of the simultaneous and the contemporary into ordinary life – the introduction of news, the twin of politics. It is to Moment that the politician sacrifices the people for the sake of the people.

In order to do this, the people must be pulled from their being (Sein) into existence (Dasein). Although Rosenzweig is writing in 1917, before Heidegger, this vocabulary was in the air – partly from Hegel, partly from expressionism and the culture of critique, etc. ‘The people do not want to acknowledge [wahrhaben] the moment, because if the moment becomes true for them, Being must be disturbed: it wants to have its ‘peace’, wants the same course of the familiar and the pleasure-borne work in its everyday, its self-satisfaction in the mirror of its holidays, its self-celebration and its vows. The people do not want war. The state does.”

Now comes a curious twist. If the state is lead by people who identify with the people, why would it want what the people don’t want? The twist is overcome here by the transition from Being to Da-sein by way of consciousness. The state, then, makes the people conscious.

Rosenzweig puts this in terms of the word – the state gives the people, or makes the people, conscious of the word. Historically, the state takes on the task of educating the population. The moment, the contemporary, the new, only emerges as a force in an educated population. Underneath that seemingly progressive goal is another one: to get the people to want War.

Just as in the unconscious, everything is desire, so to in the consciousness of the state, everything is war.  “Even peaceful acts are painted in the image of struggle, of conflict, and the equaling out of conflicted strivings, of blow and counter-blow, of the insistent and the resistant, of act and pay-back. It is with such eyes that the statesman views the stockpiling of world-historical tensions.”

So the world looked in 1917. But if the world looks like this, the statesman and the state have a big problem. How to end a war? For the end of the war sees the reversal of the leader of the state and the people. The people now demand the word, they have seized the word, they will have their say.

Thus, the dive. Having dived into the war, the state must come back to the surface. But this is a tricky business.

To my mind, Rosenzweig’s essay, here, goes off the tracks into, as I said above, a proto-Spenglerian look at the powers at war. What is lacking, here, is the conscience. Rosenzweig has viewed the question of democracy through the question of war, but his very terms have disallowed the leap to the other level, which is the question of peace – the question, that is, of conscience. For consciousness of the actual, of the moment, must come, if there is to be peace, if ethics is indeed possible, with the formation of conscience – with the Gewissensfrage which is never put.

 

On the hedgehog

In a famous essay, the Fox and the Hedgehog, Isaiah Berlin creates a taxonomy of thinkers based on a line from Archilochus: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’ The thinkers who know one thing are, in Berlin’s view, systematic thinkers. All thought tends to the center, among them, the one big thing that explains the world. The Foxes are anti-systematic. They are essayists, explorers of the intersections of thought and experience, from the scope of which they take it no principle can absorb experience without something stubborn and unabsorbed remaining from that experience – what Thomas Nagel calls the quality of “what it is to be like”…

Now evidently, Berlin is using the hedgehog image as a way into talking about the mindset of certain writers, and in particular, of Tolstoy. Tolstoy has to an extreme degree the fox’s virtue, which is to understand the difference made by experience, by what it is to be like – and he has to an extreme degree the hedgehog’s vice, which is a thirst for the god’s eye view that will not rest until everything has been settled according to some central principle.

However, what gets a little lost here is why Archilochus chose the hedgehog, of all creatures, to represent the systematic viewpoint – if Berlin’s interpretation is right.

There is, perhaps, another way of looking at the hedgehog’s emblematic meaning. In Schlegel’s Fragments – which is, among other thing, a defense of the Fragment as a genre of philosophical knowledge - the hedgehog, Igel in German, reappears – perhaps in some reference to Archilochus’s line:

“A fragment must be like a tiny artwork, wholly sundered from the surrounding world and complete in itself like a hedgehog.”

What Schlegel’s image proposes is not that the one great thing the hedgehog knows absorbs the world – rather, it separates a tiny, particular experience from the world and completes it. The paradoxical stress, here, is between the fragment and perfect or complete closure [in sich selbst vollendet sein]. While Berlin’s does not begin his essay by asking about what it is, in the hedgehog, that leads to the “one big thing’ he knows, Schlegel – whether consciously referencing Archilochus or not – returns to the ethological, or perhaps I should say ethnological, base of the comparison. [After I wrote this, I discovered that Anthony Grafton had been here before me – noticing this echo, too, in an essay on fragments in the classical tradition]

Stephen Gould, writing about Archilochus’s image, quotes Erasmus’s latin translation, which preserved the image in the humanist curicculum: multa novit vulpes, verum echinus unum magnum. Gould also, rightly, goes to Pliny for some sense of what the hedgehog meant to the ancients. However, Pliny deserves to be quoted at length, for it is in Pliny that we get a sense of the hedgehog figuring in a certain kind of game or work – that of hunting. This aspect is neglected in Gould’s essay.

“When they perceive one hunting of them, they draw their mouths & feet close togither, with all their belly part, where the skin hath a thin down: & no pricks at all to do harme, and so roll themselves as round as a foot-ball, that neither dog nor man can come by any thing but their sharpe-pointed prickles. So soon as they see themselves past all hope to escape, they let their water go and pisse upon themselves. Now this urine of theirs hath a poisonous qualitie to rot their skin and prickles, for which they know well enough that they be chased and taken. And therefore it is a secret and a special pollicie, not to hunt them before they have let their urine go; and then their skin is verie good, for which chiefly they are hunted: otherwise it is naught ever after and so rotten, that it will not hang togither, but fall in peeces: all the pricks shed off, as being putrified, yea although they should escape away from the dogs and live still: and this is the cause that they never bepisse and drench themselves with this pestilent excrement, but in extremitie and utter despaire: for they cannot abide themselves their own urine, of so venimous a qualitie it is, and so hurtfull to their owne bodie; and doe what they can to spare themselves, attending the utmost time of extremitie, insomuch as they are ready to be taken before they do it.”

This habit of the hedgehog – or at least this trait attributed to the hedgehog – puts us closer to the particular knowledge possessed by the hedgehog, in Archilochus’s verse. It is knowledge in a field – the field of hunting – and the hedgehog, far from being the systematic master, is the victim, the object of the chase. The domain of hunting seems to be behind the fables that Archilochus uses as his references – fables now obscure to us, although we still know the stock of them labeled with the name of their supposed author, Aesop.

One of the reasons Berlin poses the question of Tolstoy’s philosophy of history and how seriously we are to take it is that he is concerned, as one of the premier Cold War intellectuals, with Marx’s philosophy of history. What he wants to know is whether it is possible to get the hedgehog’s view of history outside of the reification of history – that is, outside of an explanation of causes (attributed to “history’’) that is merely an affirmation of effects. The nineteenth century in which he places Tolstoy was hypnotized by the verb, ‘determine’. That x ‘determines’ y seemed to say something more profound about y’s connection to x than to say x causes y. Determine – in German, Bestimmung – announces a power relationship that quickly slides into myth – the myth of the relation between creator, who shapes, and the creature, who lives within the creator’s lines, the creator’s survey plat.

“History alone – the sum of empirically discoverable data – held the key to the mystery of why

what happened happened as it did and not otherwise; and only history, consequently, could throw light on the fundamental ethical problems which obsessed him as they did every Russian thinker in the nineteenth century.What is to be done? How should one live? Why are we here?What must we be and do? The study of historical connections and the demand for empirical answers to these proklyatye voprosy1 became fused into one in Tolstoy’s mind, as his early diaries and letters show very vividly.”

Berlin is moving his pieces forward in the essay in broad, easy gestures, which has the advantage of making his essay accessible and interesting, and the disadvantage that comes from refusing to nitpick: that is, gliding over certain philosophically important issues. In particular, the junction of empirical and positivist does a lot of work for Berlin in the essay, even as one has to question its self-evidence. Positivism was not simply about the empirical – it was about progress. It was about a pattern in history that is above the empirical, the scatter of facts. Similarly, the romantic protest against the great anti-metaphysical writers of the eighteenth century was not, as Berlin actually knew, simply a rejection of science. Schlegel was not rejecting science so much as questioning its universal application – the fragment, in Schlegel’s view, presents a sort of monadic block to the statistical method of science. It doesn’t transcend the empirical – far from it. It dwells in the empirical, it weighs down experience with all its force, it presents its ‘bristles’ to the world like a hedgehog. And it does so in the consciousness that it is being hunted. For science, here, is no neutral social mechanism – it is used with definite aims.

One of those aims, as Berlin sees, is to prop up egotism. Tolstoy is a great deflator of egotism, and in this is the heir of the moralistes – of, especially, Pascal. But Pascal does retain the ego, the hateable “I” – and Tolstoy has his doubts. Perhaps in fact egotism precedes the ego: we have a theory of the I that precedes the I. Schlegel’s fragment and Tolstoy’s rage against the illusions on which are propped further illusions – egotism propping the ego – keep company with each other, in as much as the fragment is about its opposite – a perfect self-enclosure, a perfect completion – and the critique of egotism is about the nourishment of this thing that does not exist, the ego. And yet, and yet … something, something is stuffed into that great dark bag that is Ivan Ivanovich’s last terrifying experience on earth…

The American maladjustment, Trump-Schumer episode

 Mark Twain made fun of a common enough fantasy: imagining your own death and what people around you would say about you. That fantasy is kin to another that you often bump into on social media: imagining what historians of the future will say about your time. Unsurprisingly, these future historians will mouth the opinions of the fantasizer. If you hate deficits, you will imagine future historians all in a fluster over deficits. And so on.

But you don’t need a historian to know which way the wind blows. Especially when you have the newspapers.

This is why I think that Chuck Schumer’s interview in the NYT is not only a grim portent of what is to come (spoiler: Trump triumphs, Dems roll over), but a window into what went before.

Imagine the first decade of this century – the century of the American maladjustment. It begins with an election that the Democrats won, and then graciously let the Supreme Court decide against them. Thus, we begin with George Bush, who soon enough shows an incompetence even beyond our imagination by fundamentally letting 19 rednecks from the Middle East hijack planes and ram them into the WTC and Pentagon. Bush was warned, but he was not going to follow in the footsteps of his predecessor, Clinton, and do the elementary work of paying attention to warnings issued to him by the CIA. Not our rancher.

And so we were off on both the global war on terror and Bushonomics – in which Bush did follow his predecessor, Clinton, and basically staved off the recession that would have followed the collapse of the tech bubble by a combination of tax cut driven deficits and using the expanded and deregulated credit powers of the financial sector to allow each and every individual household to pile up on its own deficit. And thus, like Vulcans, America fucked up Afghanistan, Iraq and its own domestic economy.

The 00s were a uniquely flatline when it came to the rise of American incomes – the only rise was in the incomes and wealth of the top ten percent.

Now into this abyss of mismanagement and murderous externalities, think back to the resistance. Doesn’t bring anything to mind? Oh surely you remember the Daschles, the Gephardts, the Dem party in full ham mode! In the midst of this was the senator from New York, Chuck Schurmer. Who, as we know from his interview, was just backslapping and getting views from his Republican colleagues as they exercised in the Senate gym. A pastoral scene in the midst of Bushian bliss.

Here’s the Senator himself: “The last time he [Trump] was president, which is the closest experience we have with him — and admittedly, the world has changed some, particularly on the media side, how it works — we kept pushing and pushing and pushing and chipping away. And when he went below 40 percent in the polls, the Republican legislators started working with us. He was at 51. He’s now at 48. We’re gonna keep at it until he goes below 40. Look, I talk to a lot of these Republican legislators. I’ve worked with them. Some of them are Trump devotees. But many of them don’t like him, don’t respect him and worry about what he’s doing to our country. Right now he’s so popular they can’t resist him. I mean, so many of them came to me and said: “I don’t think Hegseth should be defense secretary or R.F.K. should be H.H.S. But Trump wants him. He won.” The Republicans would like to have some freedom from Trump, but they won’t until we bring him down in popularity. That happened with Bush in 2005. It happened with Trump in 2017. When it happens, I am hopeful that our Republican colleagues will resume working with us. And I talk to them. One of the places is in the gym. When you’re on that bike in your shorts, panting away next to a Republican, a lot of the inhibitions come off.”

This is a rather incredible summing up of our current history by a man who played a role in it. And that role is, ostensibly, that of a politician. But the astonishing lack of urgency, or a sense that politics is anything more than a game without serious stakes, played between GOP and Democratic boys in the gym, is what flashes out.

Why is Schumer even in politics?

It makes you wonder. Did something, perhaps, happen between 2001 and 2005? Well, in Schumer’s account, what happened is: his GOP colleagues started working with him, over at the end there. That’s all that counts!

I lived through the Bush years and spent way to much time thinking about the things that count. It drove me a little crazy. And what drove me even crazier than Bush was the Democratic Party’s complete and utter lack of urgency. It was revelatory. The Democratic Party emerged from the Clinton presidency with no discernible ideological project. And the Democratic appartchiks seemed to be happy with that. From Schumer’s account, they were just waitin’ around for their GOP buddies in the gym.

Which is what I thought, way back then. It is as if the firemen in the firehouse decided that their main job was to play cards, and to heck with all those people rushing in reporting fires. Fires come and go! Don’t get your pants in a wad. Now say, what should I do with this full house? Maybe bet fitty cents on it?

At random, I’ll quote this story from October 7, 2002 from the Houston Chronicle.

“Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., said the Democratic-led Senate, over the next week or so, will overwhelmingly approve a resolution giving Bush the go-ahead to invade Iraq if necessary to eliminate any effort to develop or use weapons of mass destruction.

"We've got to support this effort," Daschle said during an appearance on NBC's Meet the Press. "We've got to do it in an enthusiastic and bipartisan way." Daschle said the vote would be lopsided, with roughly 75 senators or so supporting the resolution.

But lawmakers are nervous about handling the issue correctly, Daschle said. "This is the first pre-emptive, unilateral authorization of the use of force that we've ever passed."

Luckily for all of us, Daschle had only two years left in the Senate gym, when his place was taken by a Republican who walloped him in the Senate election that year. But those two years – they actually went by. Historians of the future will note that two years is 730 days. 730 days of watching the Republicans clobber Democrats whose only belief was in the corny rhetoric they’d been taught by consultants was the cat’s meow, really moving to the voters, those “hard working people” (never ‘not so hard working people’ – those latter, also called your billionaire donors, don’t get a shout out in the speeches).

In the aftermath of the 2004 elections, I wrote something that I feel was touched by the spirit of the future, not that I knew it – writing does have that automatic, channelling side:

“This was more than an election – this was the reversal of the Civil War. Jeff Davis, through one of those ironies of history, won through the party headed by his old enemy, Abraham Lincoln.

So what does it mean that the strongest power in the world, at the moment, is the Confederate States of America?”

My summing up of the CSA was that it meant inevitable badness. And the CSA party then gave birth to the CSA party now, led by Trump. There was little good news as the boys in the Senate gym were sweating out their fundraising dinners. But I did find a little good news. Which, God willing, we will find reproduced in 2028:

“Even I see one 'ray of hope' in the election -- Tom Daschle, a leader of utmost smallness, a stunted mediocrity whose instincts have lead the Democrats from defeat to defeat, was defeated himself.”

God bless us every one.

Political science?

 Noam Chomsky, in an interview with Alexander Cockburn, said an interesting thing about models:

“When you study natural objects you have to abstract away from irrelevant phenomena that can obscure nature. This is called idealization (which is a bit misleading because it actually carries you closer to reality). If you study the planets, for example, it helps to think of them as points which have mass and move in elliptical trajectories around other points. Of course, the planets are not points-a point has no dimensions-but if you treat them as such, you can predict and understand the solar system more clearly. That is a model. Scientists have to do this all the time when studying complex phenomena-which is why they do experiments instead of taking photographs of whatever is outside their windows.”

So much for observatories.

But… I actually like this idea of this person taking photographs of whatever is outside the window. Who does that? Is it a discipline? Is it art?

Is the picture outside the window an irrelevancy? Does it have a place in political science?

There was, in the sixties, an idea that the novelist – especially a novelist named Norman Mailer – could look out the window and use his sixth sense, his novelistic sense, to tell you what was going on in the culture. You didn’t need a weatherman to tell you where the wind blows – you need a novelist.

Science is immanently routinizable. You don’t need an Einstein to work the computers at CERN. Once you have the formula, it can go into a program and then you “experiment”. The novelist’s equipment, though, is not so routinizable. Mailers spawn Tom Wolfes, and Tom Wolfes intuit on a very reactionary platform, rolling out doorstoppers for the country club crowd.

Yet yet yet – my own intuitions about the political have long been bent by what I want – the form of justice I would like to see established, given the capitalist/folkloric machinery at play. And I have corrected for this by thinking that I am so out of sorts, such an exception, that my view must be a minority view, and I would have to eat neolib pablum the rest of my life.

I think that we are all choking on that pablum now. In the U.S., in Europe, in South America, in India, in East Asia, the rejection of choices pushed by the right has presented itself as one way out, while the center keeps asking: do you want a little more pablum?

But the solution to Oliver Twist’s problem surely can’t be: a little more gruel, sir.

the paranormal rhapsode: Thomas Mann, 1922

 

In 1922, Thomas Mann was invited to observe and confirm an experiment in Fernbewegung, or telekinesis, at the  Munich mansion of a well known paranormal impressario, Dr. Albert Freiherr von Schrenck-Notzing, in Munich. Schrenck Notzing, the “Spirit baron” as Mann, and the newspapers, called him, had the ability to indulge his quest for the paranormal due to a marriage that made him a wealthy man. He had accordingly fitted up a “laboratory” of sorts in his home. Mann was just one of several celebrities – for instance, Gustav Meyrink (author of The Golem) and Ludwig Klages (an important figure in the science of graphology, and a graphomaniac in the accepted German scholarly style – his book on the divide between intellect and soul, runs to 1,400 closely printed pages, which I’ve save my eyes from toxic myopia and my mind from clutter by never reading) – who made their way to Schrenk Notzing’s Palace on Max-Joseph-Strasse to witness his mediums, his repertoire of paranormals, perform their acts – events that were part experiment, part party spectacle.

The Palace was not very far from Mann’s own residence in Munich. And Mann, who in his essay on the experiment describes himself as “falling into the hands of occultists”, was always fascinated by the erotics of the divide between the here and the beyond – the Diesseits and the Jenseits

Heather Wolfram, in her book The Stepchildren of Science, about the German interest in the paranormal from the Wilhelmine Empire to the Nazi era, begins with Mann’s visit as either a dialectical image or a cautionary tale.

I’d speculate that what piqued Mann’s interest here was that the medium who was spotlighted for the evening was a young adolescent named Willy Schneider.

“The aim of this experiment, conducted amidst an eclectic mix of household items, medical instruments and photographic equipment, was to observe, record, and analyse the strange psychological and physical phenomena associated with the experimental subject: an Austrian medium named Willy Schneider (1903–71). Seated in a semi-circle facing the young man, the participants held hands, talked and sang, straining their eyes in the dim red light that enveloped the laboratory in the hope of seeing an ectoplasmic limb or a telekinetic movement.”

A Tadzio in another Venice completely, where the canals were filled with ectoplasm and the city hovered above them as a phantom. To complete the picture, Willy’s contact spirit was named Mina.

In the essay Mann wrote about this experience, he turns to imagery based on class – in particular, the protoclass of servants. Occultism, in fact, he labels a “maid’s room metaphysics”, and he notices that few of the spirits that are conjured up in the rooms where seances are held are plebes. There is something classical in this. Mann references the famous case of a Mr. Krall in Ebersfeld, who claimed his horse, Mohammed, could mentally calculate the cube roots of numbers:

“Is human value a criterium of the truth? In a certain sense: yes. I overheard a man, whose behavior and costume put him on the border of the occult region, Herr Krall from Elberfield, he of the calculating horse, say: “If there are spirits, we have reason to wish ourselves a long life, because nothing could be more childish, senseless, confused and pitiful as the kind of existence led by these thing, as we can judge after their supposed manifestations.” Which is reminiscent of the famous utterance spoken by the shadow of Achilles on the Cimmerian beach, at the spiritist séance of Odysseus: “Worthless and senseless the Pelidian calls the existence of the dead, and the pagan sense likes to always so view the idea of life after death, without at the same time mistaking this life as a truth, a credo, a fact. Against this, the innate Christian mindset has a hard time taking on board a beyond in which everything is dumb, miserable and useless as on our familiar plane: and as it not infrequently happens that a medium at the table channels an intelligence, as the spirit of Aristostle or Napoleon Bonaparte, but we are soon satisfied on the grounds of taste to justify the judgment that this is not Aristotle or Napoleon at all, but only act, as if they were, which is why human values have a standing in studying these manifestations.”

Mann’s mind, wandering from the calculating horse to the poor spirit of Achilles conjured up on the Cimmerian shore, does something to my mind. It is something that is outside of criticism – it is an act, a brief act, of falling in love. To fall in love with an image is no argument, no claim to truth – but it is very much a part of the novelist’s art. This may be why Mann was willing to see the medium, why he “fell into the hands of the Occultists”, with all his bourgeois equipment and class prejudices. Mann saw the relationship between the artist and the rhapsode, shameful as this might be in the age of mustard gas and movies.

Of course, everything eventually ends up in Mann’s real work, and so too did the visit to Schrenck-Notzing end up in The Magic Mountain, in the chapter near the end entitled: Highly Questionable. The sexual and the beyond, here, eros and Thanatos, Tadzio and Willy Schneider, join hands here:

“Edhin Krokowski’s lectures had taken an unexpected turn after all these little years. His researches, dedicated to psychic dissection and the dream life of his patients, had always had a subterranean character, the whiff of the catacomb. Of late, however, although the transition had been so gradual his audience had scarcely noticed, his interests had moved in a new direction, toward magical, arcane matters; and his fortnightly lectures in the dining hall—the sanatorium’s main attraction, the pride of its brochure—which were always delivered from behind a cloth-covered table in an exotic, drawling accent, to an immobile audience of Berghof residents and for which he always wore a frock coat and sandals, no longer dealt with masked forms of love in action or the transformation of illness back into conscious emotion, but with the abstruse oddities of hypnotism and somnambulism, the phenomena of telepathy, prophetic dreams, and second sight, the wonders of hysteria; and as he discussed these topics, philosophic horizons expanded until suddenly his audience beheld great riddles shimmering before their eyes, riddles about the relationship between matter and the psyche, indeed, the very riddle of life itself, which, so it appeared, might be more easily approached along very uncanny paths, the paths of illness, than by the direct road of health.”

Convalescence – the Nietzschian plunge into illness as the road to knowledge – takes us to strange places.

Dyslexia, ma belle! the writer and the gestalt of the written

 Does it help that Yeats was dyslexic?

The editors of his letters, where the texts are raw, have decided that Yeats’ spelling was idiosyncratic. That’s a good word. It doesn’t have the same word-injuring psychosis, the same serial killer among the letters, that is baked into dyslexia. Rather, it understands that spelling is a curious procedure, full of mirrors and disorientations. A spell, as Yeats (who at one point belonged to the same organization as Aleister Crowley, the Golden Dawn) was always aware, was a matter of magical summoning. Spelling, too, is a magical summoning, made domestic by our schoolrooms and four hundred years of rules, so that the words appear under our pens. That the first words we learn to spell are often animal names makes complete sense from this point of view, for animals were, after all, the first things humans drew. But there’s a certain graffiti impulse that lies just outside the spelling book, under which we run away from the rules concerning what to write on and how to write it, and go cave man for real.

Edmund Wilson once remarked that F. Scott Fitzgerald mispronounced more words than any other educated person he knew. And Fitzgerald took as his orthographic guide his own sense of how a word should look, and sometimes how he remembered how it should look. I don’t think he cared. As Mencken points out in his survey of American orthography, from Benjamin Franklin to Noah Webster, Americans have been going at the English language as one in need of the American stamp. “Grounding his wholesale reforms upon a saying by Franklin that “those people spell best who do not know how to spell, i.e. who spell phonetically and logically, he [Webster] made an almost complete sweep of whole classes of silent letters…”

Dyslexia, of course, is not simply a matter of phonetically adjusted lexical alterations, but a sort of difference in the regard cast on the printed or written word that sees bushes and entanglements where we who are lexic have been taught to see only the flow and the norm.

In M.J. Philpott’s A Phenomenology of Dyslexia:The Lived-body, Ambiguity, and the Breakdown of Expression, he gives a succinct description of the condition:

“Dyslexia is marked by delay in acquiring advanced linguistic functions such as grammar, and general slowness in completing written and reading tasks . With some variations, the key features of dyslexia are widely accepted as entailing difficulties in learning to read and/or spell, much of which stems from problems of ordering and sequencing letters/words/digits, e.g., reversing the letters within a word. Other problems that can occur as a correlate of these difficulties could involve trying to locate abstract notions, such as identifying a left or right side of a perspective, or trying to locate the days of the week.”

Philpott’s article takes seriously the subjective end of the dyslexic situation – he is, himself, a dyslexic. Between the ages of six and seven, he had to deal with his school’s disapproval of his “laziness” – after which his parents found a school that dealt with dyspraxias of various kinds. But, as he writes, “although I have learned to cope through various self-monitoring strategies, my handling of structuring a piece of writing, the time it takes to complete, and elementary writing/spelling and reading mistakes are still highly problematic.”

Here, though, is the part that interests me the most in this phenomenologically oriented account:

“A second, and perhaps deeper phenomenon, involves problems related with maintaining the flow or sequencing of language. This is associated with problems I have with the slowness of my linguistic tasks, for although I am not necessarily distracted from my task, it is as though the momentum of my work starts to slow right down, or even stop altogether. As I experitence this phenomenon—although I can be composing a sentence quite easily and lucidly, and although it feels as if a certain momentum is underpinning my composition quite unknown to myself, and through no effect of what could be crudely termed “inattention”—I will suddenly realize that the composition process, indeed the page/screen itself has lost all its vivacity, and the momentum that carried me before has completely broken down.”

I recognize this. Not only in my own writing practice, but in the letters of writers like Flaubert and Virginia Woolf and Franz Kafka. In the career of Pessoa and Robert Walser. And it makes me wonder if there is not some distinct, historically conditioned dyslexic instance in the field of writing that comes into play in the nineteenth century, at the same time as the thick realistic novel, where the loss of vivacity is part of the drama of composition. Flaubert’s letters are an extended witness to this loss and recovery, this dyslexic instance.

That instance is a great secret watermark in, for instance, the poetry of modernism, in the working towards failure which so often seems to be summoned by it to, as it were, countermand it.