230. A walk 'round SOMA

Almost winter 2017

I felt like a nice long walk today -- we have a long gap in the rains that finally arrived -- so I did my little architectural tour of SOMA. Here are some highlights.

A view of Salesforce Tower from Market, looking like an actual building,

Looking south down 1st street with Salesforce Tower on the left and the trees in the park now visible atop the Transbay Transit Center,

The other side of Salesforce (now on the right) with the start of the tram system that will lift people from this plaza up to the top of the TTC at the left,

Official details of the TTC,

The trains in the basement are a joke as there's no funding for either system, and the High Speed Rail scheme probably won't survive the end of this final Brown gubernatorial administration.

Yet another tower going up on the north side of the Temporary Transbay Terminal,

The support tower for the bus roadway that links TTC with I-80 and the Bay Bridge,

The completed (east) end of the new Moscone South extension. The phase that's now underway might be a little more attractive,

I do like that they left the seismic structure visible to some extent,

Phase 2 just getting started. Here you can see most of the seismic structure that I'm sure will be hidden when the building is completed. If I read this correctly, this will be a large atrium space tying the wings together and leading down to the main, subterranean hall,

This wall will probably be opened up when the new structure is finished,

229. A hint of Arendt

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The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Harcourt, originally published 1971

Wow! Is this a book I want to read. The Introduction alone could be a semester philosophy class. I don't even mind her talk about the "death of philosophy and metaphysics," since she also covers the death of "God." Like Disco, none of these concepts will ever really die.

A key part of the introduction is her re-translation of Kant's "verstand" to mean "intellect" not "understanding." I have to read this at least one more time. I'm not sure I agree with her on this or with where she's going with this, but this is the reason I think it's wise to pick the best translator rather than to try to learn a language and do an indifferent (at best) job yourself. Since she's started out with so much about the usual 19th century Germans, and, not surprisingly, Heidegger, I can't wait to see if she can help me understand what he's about.

It's not surprising, you could almost say it is on the banal side, that she starts by talking about the "banality of evil." It is interesting to see her parse that phrase. One thinks one knows what she meant, but of course she actually meant more... or at least the phrase came to mean more to her.

     

The gig economy

This being San Francisco, I can't walk to Peet's without seeing a couple ads for the latest start-up bringing something or other (or anything at all) to your door. What struck me today, for some reason, is that in many ways this is a return to the past. Think of all the "independent contractors" of the past who would bring vegetables or ice or pots and pans to your door no matter where you were. Or they would sharpen your knives or provide other services. The best literary record I know of that era, is when Proust writes about all the street vendors he could hear from the window of Marcel's parent's house in Paris.

It's like we are in some sort of cycle. All those people with their push carts or horse drawn wagons disappeared long ago due to the world wars or changes in the economy. But now the streets here are filled with bicycles carting coffee beans or meals or Goat knows what all over town, while there are probably even more cars stealthily doing the same thing. You can use an app to find a person to change a light bulb or walk your dog. I'm not sure I would call it progress, but as work goes, these jobs are probably better than many others in the service or even manufacturing sector. 

228. Jean Jaurès & Blade Runner

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Jean Jaurès

Reflections on Violence by Georges Sorel

Due to a tragic beverage accident, there will be no more of Reflections on Violence until my copy of the book dries out and I can un-stick the pages. (This could well be the first time a copy of Reflections and an issue of Dwell magazine have been damaged in the same incident.) This delay doesn't especially bother me as I really wanted to talk about Jean Jaurès. 

By chance, I just ran into an article about Jean Jaurès and his assassination at the start of the Great War. I have to say I tend to prefer Jaurès to Sorel in what little I've read. And what does Sorel mean by,

"Jaurès, who was very much mixed up in all the ups and downs of Dreyfusim, had rapidly judged the mentality of the upper middle class, into which he had not yet penetrated"

Jaurès was clearly haute-bourgeois. He had admirals in the family, for God's sake. I'm tempted to switch to a book about Jaurès, if I can find a good one. His philosophical background and his pacifism appeal to me, but then I suppose that's because I'm a timid middle class boy.

I do wonder what Sorel said at the time of Jaurès' assassination. I'm sure he was in favor of war. And the claims that Russia assisted the election of Poincare sound awfully familiar. History is so interesting.

Blade Runner 2049

The original Blade Runner is one of my favorite films. It's the movie I probably know best, line for line and scene by scene, which is why I had reservations about seeing this sequel. 

I finally saw it at the multiplex closest to me (the Metreon, which I've written about before). By chance, I picked the 6:30pm showing which was in theater 13, which happens to be the new Dolby Cinema. If I had known this was an option I would have actively selected it, but my online movie guide doesn't distinguish the Dolby Cinema the way it does IMAX. So there I was in a theater with the most comfortable seats, probably the best screen, and most amazing sound watching a film that was so much more polished and perfect than the original... and by the end I just wanted to see the original in that venue.

What does it mean that Ridley Scott has been involved in the recent sequels to what I believe are his two best films -- Alien and Blade Runner -- and yet neither film comes close to recreating the magic of the original. (And here I hear the words of Deckard's boss at the beginning of the film coaxing, and then compelling him to return to his Blade Runner job, 

Deckard: I don't work here anymore. Give it to Holden, he's good.
Bryant: I did. He can breathe okay as long as nobody unplugs him. He's not good enough, not good as you. I need you, Deck. This is a bad one, the worst yet. I need the old Blade Runner, I need your magic.)

But I would love to hear that Vangelis soundtrack in this new theater.

I hate to say this, because Joss Whedon is enough of an ego maniac as it is, but he probably would have been a better choice to have taken on this project. Firefly had the same, gritty, dirty, believable look and feel at the original Blade Runner. He would have needed to work with an exceptional cinematographer, visual artist, and composer... He probably would have botched it, too.

The android/AI/slavery theme is probably the best thing in the new film, but since I haven't seen other recent films that deal with this subject, I don't know how original or profound this take is. It worked for me mostly because of my recent reading of Absalom! Absalom! 

Blade Runner

I re-watched my VHS tape copy of Blade Runner. A friend -- we were planning on seeing the new film together -- had just watched one of the more recent edits and had complained about how dark it was. My tape version was low-res, dark, smokey, and, of course, very wet -- the essence of Ridley Scott's style at that time. It was so good.

Yes, there are sloppy details you just have to ignore, but the look and sound and feel of the original just works so much better for me than the recent film did. Also, I realized last night, the story is nice and simple. Deckard is tasked with hunting down four replicants and we follow his progress with that. At the same time we are following the replicant's efforts to get to their maker, Tyrell. These two simple stories cut back and forth. Rachel, the sixth replicant, becomes the wildcard and new focus of Deckard's life, and of the film, by the middle, and this is even more true at the end. 

This was one of the first things Sean Young (Rachel) was in, and she instantly had a reputation for being "difficult" which works perfectly for this character. Was that just lucky casting or were they looking for someone who was a bit of a bitch? 

I also like that the film sticks to central LA rather than roaming all over the west. I figure the flame belching towers of the opening are supposed to be Torrance, so I think that's as far south as the film goes and most of it is set downtown. And of course the film gets extra credit for using the Bradbury Building as a shooting location.

The heart of the film is the relationship between humans and replicants. (I don't think the film is as effective if Deckard is a replicant. Plus, that would make him a really shitty replicant, given how both Leon and Roy hand him his ass.) The crucial, semi-rape scene in the first film has an echo in the semi-three-way of the new film with replicants interacting with an AI (Joi). But this is, while interesting, a little confusing since aren't replicants really just "wet" AIs? The notion of a replicant "needing" the company of an AI is certainly interesting. And what happens with Deckard's dog in the new film? We have no idea.

227. Training the classes

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Cafes

Another Cafe is the only cafe at my level of my hill. I've written about it in the past, and I do like it, but it's a little more expensive (and I'm cheap) and it's often over-crowded. Today it's raining but I still needed to go out and do some shopping and thought I would give it a try. Alas, it was too crowded for me to get a seat. I am happy for them -- they are not in an obvious location for a cafe, so it's good to see them getting so much trade. I just wish I could get a seat too.

I had to walk three more blocks to this Starbucks.

Chapter 2

Violence and the Decadence of the Middle Classes 

Reflections on Violence by Georges Sorel

Dear God! That wasn't what we covered in the last chapter?

p81  ...Civil war has become very difficult since the discovery of the new firearms, and since the cutting of rectilinear streets in the capital towns. [The end of effective barricades.] The recent troubles in Russia seem even to have shown that Governments can count much more than was supposed on the energy of their officers. Nearly all French politicians had prophesied the imminent fall of Czarism at the time of the Manchurian defeats, but the Russian army in the presence of rioting did not manifest the weakness shown by the French army during our revolutions; nearly everywhere repression was rapid, efficacious, and even pitiless. The discussions which took place at the congress of social democrats at Jena show that the parliamentary Socialists no longer rely upon an armed struggle to obtain possession of the State. [The Great War YouTube series has recently covered the 100th anniversaries of both Russian revolutions in 1917, so Sorel was only right about this up to a point. All governments have tipping points.]
...

p82 Everything becomes a question of valuation, accurate estimation, and opportunism; [he's talking about Jean Jaurès here] much skill, tact, and calm audacity are necessary to carry on such a diplomacy, i.e. to make the workers believe that you are carrying the flag of revolution, the middle class that you are arresting the danger which threatens them, and the country that you represent an irresistible current of opinion. The great mass of the electors understands nothing of what passes in politics, and has no intelligent knowledge of economic history; they take sides with the party which seems to possess power, and you can obtain everything you wish from them when you can prove to them that you are strong enough to make the Government capitulate...
...

p85 Jaurès, who was very much mixed up in all the ups and downs of Dreyfusim, had rapidly judged the mentality of the upper middle class, into which he had not yet penetrated. He saw that this upper middle class was terribly ignorant, gapingly stupid, politically absolutely impotent; he recognized that with people who understand nothing of the principles of capitalist economics it is easy to contrive a policy of compromise on the basis of an extremely broad Socialism... [Édouard] Vaillant does not possess those remarkable qualities of suppleness of mind, and perhaps even peasant duplicity, which shine in Jaurès, and which have often caused people to say that he would have made a wonderful cattle-dealer.
...

I'm assuming this isn't a charming Gallic complement.

He restates what Marx has to say about the end of capitalism and the evolution to the proletarian stage,

p88 Socialists should therefore abandon the attempt (initiated by the Utopians) to find a means of inducing the enlightened middle class to prepare the transition to a more perfect system of legislation; their sole function is that of explaining to the proletariat the greatness of the revolutionary part they are called upon to play. By ceaseless criticism the proletariat must be brought to perfect their organizations; they must be shown how the embryonic forms which appear in their unions may be developed , so that, finally they may build up institutions without any parallel in the history of the middle class; that they may form ideas which depend solely on their position as producers in large industries, and which owe nothing to middle-class thought; and that they may acquire habits of liberty with which the middle class nowadays are no longer acquainted. 

This doctrine will evidently be inapplicable if the middle class and the proletariat do not oppose each other implacably, with all the forces at their disposal; the more ardently capitalist the middle class is, the more the proletariat is full of warlike spirit and confident of its revolutionary strength, the more certain will be the success of the proletarian movement.

p89 The middle class with which Marx was familiar in England was still, as regards the immense majority, animated by their conquering, insatiable, and pitiless spirit, which had characterized at the beginning of modern times the creators of new industries and the adventurers launched on the discovery of unknown lands. When we are studying the modern industrial system we should always bear in mind this similarity between the capitalist type and the warrior type; it was for very good reasons that the men who directed gigantic enterprises were named captains of industry. This type is still found today in all its purity in the United States...

...If... the middle class, led astray by the chatter of the preachers of ethics and sociology, return to an ideal of conservative mediocrity, seek to correct the abuses of economics, and wish to break with the barbarism of their predecessors, then one part of the forces which were to further the development of capitalism is employed in hindering it, an arbitrary and irrational element is introduced, and the future of the world becomes completely indeterminate.

p90 This indetermination grows still greater if the proletariat are converted to the ideas of social peace at the same time as their masters... 

...Jaurès is as enthusiastic as the clericals about measures which turn away the working classes from the idea of the Marxian revolution... he founds his own hopes on the simultaneous ruin of the capitalistic and revolutionary spirit.

I haven't invoked Naphtha, but I have been thinking about him, and also the monks of The Brothers K. Naphtha would not be with Jaurès on this point, but, as keen as he was to see the fall of the middle class, I don't think the Marxist revolution depicted here would suit him either, as it would seem to preserve the machinery of the industrial/scientific age. I don't believe the Soviet Union was what he was hoping for.

...how can they hope to give back to the middle class an ardor which is spent?

It is here that the role of violence in history appears to us as singularly great, for it can, in an indirect manner, so operate on the middle class as to awaken them to a sense of their own class sentiment...

p91 To repay with black ingratitude the benevolence of those who would protect the workers, to meet with insults the homilies of the defenders of human fraternity, and to reply by blows to the advances of the propagators of social peace... is a very practical way of indicating to the middle class that they must mind their own business and only that.

I believe also that it may be useful to thrash the orators of democracy and the representatives of the Government, for in this way you insure that none shall retain any illusions about the character of acts of violence. But these acts can have historical value only if they are the clear and brutal expression of the class war: the middle classes must not be allowed to imagine that, aided by cleverness, social science, or high-flown sentiments, they might find a better welcome at the hands of the proletariat.
...

...Must we believe that the Marxian conception is dead? By no means, for proletarian violence comes upon the scene just at the moment when the conception of social peace is being held up as a means of moderating disputes; proletarian violence confines employers to their role of producers, and tends to restore the separation of the classes...

Proletarian violence not only makes the future revolution certain, but it seems also to be the only means by which the European nations -- at present stupefied by humanitarianism -- can recover their former energy... A growing and solidly organised working class can compel the capitalist class to remain firm in the industrial war; if a united and revolutionary proletariat confronts a rich middle class, eager for conquest, capitalist society will have reached its historical perfection.

...Let us add... if properly conducted... [proletarian violence] will suppress the Parliamentary Socialists, who will no longer be able to pose as the leaders of the working classes and the guardians of order.


In terms of class identity, Sorel reminds me a bit of Foucault, except that I'm not sure if Sorel is always saying what he really means. He's laying down the rules for propagating class war, but isn't he also giving away too much if that's the outcome he really wants? You can also take what he says here as a guide to undermining class war. 

And I'm particularly confused about his attitude towards his own, middle, class. Is he trying to buck it up or destroy it?

226. Middle-class cowardice

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The Glory of France

Reflections on Violence by Georges Sorel

p72 [Discussing the social/political arbitration of labor disputes] ...Conciliators stake their vanity on succeeding, and they would be extremely hurt if industrial leaders prevented them from making social peace. The workmen are in a much more favorable position, because the prestige of the peacemakers is very much less with them than with the capitalists... It is noticeable that these proceedings very rarely succeed when the matter is in the hands of workmen who have become rich: literary, moral, or sociological considerations have very little effect upon people born outside the ranks of the middle class.

...In the course of conciliation meetings more than one revolutionary has shown that he aspires to become a member of the middle class, and there are many intelligent people who imagine that socialistic and revolutionary conceptions are only accidents that might be avoided by establishing better relations between the classes... they imagine that harmony would be established if a better social education were given to the citizens.

Or today it would seem that the strategy is to simply uproot and disperse the working class. To destroy, in the name of progress and redevelopment, the community in which they previously thrived.

Capitalists resolve disputes by finally agreeing to terms they had first claimed to be impossible, which leads to, ...the notion of the inexhaustibly of production, which is one of the postulates of the theory of class war in the Socialism of Marx.

p74 Why then speak of social duty? Duty has some meaning in a society in which all the parts are intimately connected and responsible to one another; but if capitalism is inexhaustible, joint responsibility is no longer founded on economic realities and the workers think they would be dupes if they did not demand all they can obtain; they look upon the employer as an adversary with whom one comes to terms after a war. Social duty no more exists than does international duty.
...

This is very similar to the thinking behind the Japanese car unions which (I think I recall this correctly) are not industry wide but specific to a corporation. They see themselves as, if not an ally, at least a parasite with a keen sense of self-interest. Like a lamprey concerned to not undermine the feeding of the fish it's living off of.


...it must be noticed that our Latin countries present one great obstacle to the formation of social peace; the classes are more sharply separated by external characteristics [?] than they are in Saxon countries; these separations very much embarrass Syndicalist leaders when they abandon their former manners and take up a position in the official or philanthropic circles...  their comrades distrust them. In France this distrust has become much more definite since a great number of anarchists have entered the Syndicalist movement; because the anarchist has a horror of everything which recalls the proceedings of politicians -- a class of people devoured by the desire to climb into superior classes, and having already the capitalist mind while yet poor.[Footnote: Some years ago Arsène Dumont [slighted by both the English and the French Wikis] invented the term social capillarity to express the slow climbing of the classes. If Syndicalism submitted to the influence of the pacifists, it would be a powerful agent of social capillarity.]
...

It seems that the leadership of the lower classes is indistinguishable in nature from the other classes while I seem to recall that he thinks the lower classes as a whole are entirely different? I know I'm jumping way ahead here, but I can't help speculating that it would be the leaders, and not the average workers, that Sorel would have most come into contact with.

p77 One of the things which appears to me to have most astonished the workers during the last few years has been the timidity of the forces of law and order in the presence of a riot; magistrates who have the right to demand the services of soldiers dare not use their power to the utmost, and officers allow themselves to be abused and struck with a patience hitherto unknown in them. It is becoming more and more evident every day that working class violence possesses an extraordinary efficacity [sic] in strikes... [This could have been written this year with regard to the violence of anarchists and White Supremacists in America.]

Trades union leaders have not been long in grasping the full bearing of this situation... They endeavor to intimidate the prefects by popular demonstrations which might lead to serious conflicts with the police, and they commend violence as the most efficacious means of obtaining concessions...

p78 I cannot refrain from noting down here a reflection made by Clemenceau with regard to our relations with Germany, which applies equally well to social conflicts when they take a violent aspect (which seems likely to become more and more general in proportion as a cowardly middle class continues to pursue the chimera of social peace): "There is no better means," he said (than the policy of perpetual concessions), "of making the opposite party ask for more and more. Every man or every power whose action consists solely in surrender can only finish by self-annihilation. Everything that lives resists; that which does not resist allows itself to be cut up piecemeal" (Aurore, Aug 15, 1905).

...every conflict which gives rise to violence becomes a vanguard fight, [he means this in the military sense. The engagement between Union cavalry and the left wing of the Army of Northern Virginia on the first day of Gettysburg is a prime example of a vanguard engagement.] and nobody can foresee what will arise from such engagements; although the great battle never comes to a head, yet each time they come to blows the strikers hope that it is the beginning of the great Napoleonic battle (that which will definitely crush the vanquished); in this way the practice of strikes engenders the notion of a catastrophic revolution.

Very interesting. Napoleon (and Nelson) invented a new approach and language for modern war that, as the Japanese endlessly announced, required a decisive battle of annihilation. This was especially true for Imperial Japan because success had to come quickly as their resource base was so modest -- Germany had the same basic problem in both World Wars. But I had never thought of a political use of this terminology.

Sorel is describing class war as a form of what we would today call asymmetric warfare. The war in Vietnam was a good example of exactly what he's talking about here. And the history of the downfall of the Romanov Dynasty in Russia is a good example of the political equivalent Sorel sees. Except that I don't see that as being the spineless, middle class, Sorel was talking about. I'm beginning to think that the middle classes are for Sorel what the Germans were for Clemenceau. I wonder if Sorel would have been able to make peace with the middle classes to the extent that Mussolini did? 

A keen observer of the contemporary proletarian movement has expressed the same ideas: "They, like their ancestors (the French revolutionaries), are for struggle, for conquest; they desire to accomplish great works by force. Only, the war of conquest interests them no longer. Instead of thinking of battles, they now think of strikes; instead of setting up as their ideal a battle against the armies of Europe, they now set up the general strike in which the capitalist regime will be annihilated.[" Ch. Guieysse. There's no end quote in the text but I think that's where it belongs.]
...

p79 Middle-class cowardice very much resembles the cowardice of the English Liberal party, which constantly proclaims its absolute confidence in arbitration between nations: arbitration nearly always gives disastrous results for England. But these worthy progressives prefer to pay, or even to compromise the future of their country, rather than face the horrors of war. The English Liberal party had the word justice always on its lips, absolutely like our middle class; we might very well wonder whether all the high morality of our great contemporary thinkers is not founded on a degradation of the sentiment of honor.

This is certainly not what I was expecting from Sorel. Mussolini had to at least to struggle with his socialistic and nationalistic impulses when the Great War came, but Sorel seems to be entirely a nationalist who is open to allying himself with socialists in the war against the middle classes.

I predict that Sorel is with Clemenceau when it comes to the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. At least he didn't live to see the Battle of France.





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...

225. Class War

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Introduction

Reflections on Violence by Georges Sorel

Introduction to the First Publication -- Sorel
...

p58 Socialism is a philosophy of the history of contemporary institutions, and Marx has always argued as a philosopher of history when he was not led away by personal polemics to write about matters outside the proper scope of his own system...
...

Each time an outrage occurs, the doctors of the ethico-social sciences, who swarm in journalism, indulge in reflections on the question, Can the criminal act be excused, or sometimes even justified, from the point of view of the highest justice. Then there is an irruption into the democratic press of that casuistry for which the Jesuits have so many times been reproached.
...

p59 It is not the business of the historian to award prizes for virtue, to propose the erection of statues, or to establish any catechism whatever; his business is to understand what is least individual in the course of events... And so I am not at all concerned to justify the perpetrators of violence, but to inquire into the function of violence of the working classes in contemporary Socialism. 

...

Chapter 1 - Class War and Violence
p65 A. To most people the class war is the principle of Socialist tactics. That means that the Socialist party founds its electoral successes on the clashing of interests which exist in an acute state between certain groups, and that, if need be, it would undertake to make this hostility still more acute; their candidates ask the poorest and most numerous class to look upon themselves as forming a corporation, and they offer to become the advocates of this corporation; they promise to use their influence as representatives to improve the lot of the disinherited. Thus we are not very far from what happened in the Greek states; Parlimentary Socialists are very much akin to the demagogues who clamoured constantly for the abolition of debts, and the division of landed property, who put all the public charges upon the rich, and invented plots in order to get large fortunes confiscated. "In the democracies in which the crowd is above the law," says Aristotle, "the demagogues, by their continual attacks upon the rich, always divide the city into two camps . . . the oligarchs should abandon all swearing of oaths like those they swear to-day; for there are cities in which they have taken this oath -- I will be the constant enemy of the people, and I will do them all the evil that lies in my power." Here certainly is a war between two classes as clearly defined as it can be; but it seems to me absurd to assert that it was in this way that Marx understood the class war, which, according to him, was the essence of Socialism.

I wonder that he references the Greeks and not the Roman Tribunes. But I'm not that familiar with Parliamentary Socialism at this time. And I wonder what Sorel (and Aristotle and Marx) would think of Trump's popular core constituency? The (economically) disenfranchised supporting a party furthering the interests of the wealthiest class. It is a sort of "class war," or at least a spite war, against the middle classes, which would make some kind of sense to Marx and Sorel except that the wealthiest class is itself the highest rung of the middle classes.

I believe that the authors of the French law of August 11, 1848, had their heads full of these classical reminiscences when they decreed punishment against all those who, by speeches and newspaper articles, sought "to trouble the public peace by stirring up hatred and contempt amongst the citizens." The terrible insurrection of the month of June was just over, and it was firmly believed that the victory of the Parisian workmen would have brought on, if not an attempt to put communism into practice, at least a series of formidable requisitions on the rich in favor of the poor; it was hoped that an end would be put to civil wars by increasing the difficulty of propogating [sic] doctrines of hatred, which might raise the proletariat against the middle class.

Nowadays Parliamentary Socialists no longer entertain the idea of insurrection... but the means of acquiring power may have changed without there being any change of mental attitude. Electoral literature seems inspired by the purest demagogic doctrines... It [Parliamentary Socialism] makes its appeal to workmen, to small employers of labor, to peasants; and in spite of Engels, it aims at reaching out to farmers; it is at times patriotic; at other times it declares against the Army... 

p66 In the end the term "proletariat" became synonymous with oppressed; and there are oppressed in all classes... Henri Turot... has written a book on the "proletariat of love," by which title he designates the lowest class of prostitutes. If one of these days the suffrage is granted to women, he will doubtless be called upon to draw up a statement of the claims of this special proletariat.

1848 was also at the heart of Dostoevsky's concerns in The Brothers K. I would guess that, as little historical knowledge as the average American has, he or she would be particularly in the dark about 1848. I would further guess this ignorance would extend even to the descendants of liberals who fled Europe for America at the time -- like me. In France, 1848 restarted the peculiar political dance the French kept performing in these years. In Germany 1848 began setting the stage for the even more disastrous 2nd and 3rd Reichs. And in America, applying what I'm learning from Sorel about Protestantism, it reinforced the state with a populous force of liberal, mostly non-Calvinist Germans -- like my Catholic ancestors. (The migration of Catholic Irish at this time was also important, though slightly less politically motivated.)

224. Pessimism

Pessimism

Continuing Reflections on Violence by Georges Sorel

p33 Pessimism... is a philosophy of conduct rather than a theory of the world; it considers the march towards deliverance as narrowly conditioned, on the one hand, by the experimental knowledge that we have acquired from obstacles which oppose themselves to the satisfaction of our imaginations (or, if we like, by the feeling of social determinism),  and, on the other, by a profound conviction of our natural weakness. These two aspects of pessimism should never be separated, although, as a rule, scarcely any attention is paid to their close connection. 
...

2. The pessimist regards social conditions as forming a system bound together by an iron law which cannot be evaded, so that the system is given, as it were, in one block, and cannot disappear except in a catastrophe which involves the whole. If this theory is admitted, it then becomes absurd to make certain wicked men responsible for the evils from which society suffers; the pessimist is not subject to the sanguinary follies of the optimist, infatuated by the unexpected obstacles that his projects meet with; he does not dream of bringing about the happiness of future generations by slaughtering existing egoists.
...

p35 In primitive Christianity we find a fully developed and completely armed pessimism: man is condemned to slavery from his birth -- Satan is the prince of the world -- the Christian... awaits the glorious second coming of Christ...

Sixteenth-century Calvinism presents a spectacle which is perhaps even more instructive; but we must be careful not to confuse it... with contemporary Protestantism; these two doctrines are the antipodes of each other... [how is contemporary Protestantism a single doctrine?] Pessimism, which formed no part of the current of ideas which characterized the Renaissance, [Footnote: "At this epoch commenced the struggle between the Pagan love of life and the Christian hatred of this world and avoidance of it" (Hartmann...)] has never been so strongly affirmed as it was by the Reformers. The dogmas of sin and predestination which correspond to the two first aspects of pessimism, the wretchedness of the human species, and social determinism, were pushed to their most extreme consequences. Deliverance was conceived  under a very different form to that which had been given it by primitive Christianity; Protestants organized themselves into a military force wherever possible; they made expeditions into Catholic countries, expelled the priests, introduced the reformed cult, and promulgated laws of proscription against papists. They no longer borrowed from the apocalypses the idea of a great final catastrophe, of which the brothers-in-arms who had for so long defended themselves against the attacks of Satan would only be spectators; the Protestants, nourished on the reading of the Old Testament, wished to imitate the exploits of the conquerors of the Holy Land; they took the offensive, and wished to establish the kingdom of God by force. In each locality they conquered the Calvinists brought about a real catastrophic revolution, which changed everything from top to bottom.

Where's Ivan K. when you need him? So, I'm in heaven with this topic, but where and when is he talking about? Aside from the Puritans in England, I thought most of the violence of this period started with the Catholics attempting to reassert orthodoxy. As in France. Perhaps the Swiss Protestant cantons? The Dutch? I'm going to have to hit Wiki. (Not obvious to me. Though I hadn't really been aware before that most of the European Colonists of Mid-Atlantic America and New England were Calvinist dissenters of one denomination or another including the Dutch, the Huguenots, and the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians of the Appalachians -- like Thomas Sutpen.)

But to just stick with the Puritans, I'm eager to see how these pessimistic paragons of the Reformation turn into the bedrock of the Bourgeoisie of his time.

Calvinism was finally conquered by the Renaissance; it was full of theological prejudices derived from medieval traditions, and there came a time when it feared to be thought too far behind the times; it wished to be on the level of modern culture, and it finished by becoming simply a lax Christianity. [Footnote: If socialism comes to grief it will evidently be in the same way, because it will have been alarmed at its own barbarity.] To-day very few people suspect what the reformers of the sixteenth-century meant by "free examination," the Protestants of to-day apply the same method to the Bible that philologists apply to any profane text; Calvin's exegesis has been replaced by the criticisms of the humanists.

Wendell Berry has made a point very similar to this about texts being considered as if they don't matter. I also don't know what he means by "free examination" and a quick Google search doesn't discover anything. Perhaps there's a problem with the translation?

There follows quite a bit about Pascal with a comment about how Calvinist he was.

p39 The people who believe in natural right are not always implacable enemies of civil struggles, and certainly not of tumultuous rioting; that has been sufficiently shown in the course of the Dreyfus question. When the force of the State was in the hands of their adversaries, they acknowledged, naturally enough, that it was being employed to violate justice, and they then proved that one might with a good conscience "step out of the region of legality in order to enter that of justice" (to borrow a phrase of the Bonapartists); when they could not overthrow the government, they tried at least to imitate it... all the revolutionary disturbances of the nineteenth century have ended in reinforcing the power of the State.

Proletarian violence entirely changes the aspect of all the conflicts in which it intervenes, since it disowns the force organized by the middle class, and claims to suppress the State which serves as its central nucleus. Under such conditions, it is no longer possible to argue about the primordial rights of man. That is why our parliamentary socialists, who spring from the middle classes and who know nothing outside the ideology of the State, are so bewildered when they are confronted with working-class violence. They cannot apply to it the commonplaces which generally serve them when they speak about force, and they look with terror on movements which may result in the ruin of the institutions by which they live. If revolutionary syndicalism triumphs, there will be no more brilliant speeches on immanent Justice, and the parliamentary regime, so dear to the intellectuals, will be finished with -- it is the abomination of desolation! We must not be astonished, then, that they speak about violence with so much anger. 
...

Foucault must have loved Sorel. Though one wonders if Sorel would have changed his views had he lived to see the 1930s-60s.

Sorel has something to say about Joseph de Maistre which sent me to Wiki... shit, someone else I have to read. And Ernest Renan. And Henri Bergson.

p52 ...For a long time people have been struck by the fact that religious convictions are unaffected by criticism, and from this they have concluded that everything which claims to be beyond science must be a religion. It has been observed also that Christianity tends at the present day to be less a system of dogmas than a Christian life, i.e. a moral reform penetrating to the roots of one's being; consequently, a new analogy has been discovered between religion and the revolutionary Socialism which aims at the apprenticeship, preparation, and even reconstruction of the individual, -- a gigantic task. But Bergson has taught us that it is not only religion which occupies the profounder region of our mental life; revolutionary myths have their place there equally with religion...

Renan was very surprised to discover that Socialists are beyond discouragement. "After each abortive experiment they recommence their work: the solution is not yet found, but it will be. The idea that no solution exists never occurs to them, and in this lies their strength." ... by the side of the Utopias there have always been myths capable of urging on the workers to revolt. For a long time these myths were founded on the legends of the Revolution, and they preserved all their value as long as these legends remained unshaken. To-day the confidence of the Socialists is greater than ever since the myth of the general strike dominates all the truly working-class movement. No failure proves anything against Socialism since the latter has become a work of preparation (for revolution)...

p53 The works of my friends have been treated with great contempt by the Socialists who mix in politics, but at the same time with much sympathy by people who do not concern themselves with parliamentary affairs. We cannot be suspected of seeking to carry on a kind of intellectual industry, and we protest every time people profess to confuse us with the intellectuals, who do, as a matter of fact, make the exploitation of thought their profession. The old stagers of democracy cannot understand why people should take so much trouble unless they secretly aim at the leadership of the working classes. However, we could not act in any other way. [I'm puzzled by this, too.]

... we... have invented nothing at all, [in the way of Utopias] and even assert that nothing can be invented; we have limited ourselves to defining the historical bearing of the notion of a general strike. We have tried to show that a new culture might spring from the struggle of the revolutionary trades unions against the employers and the State; our greatest claim to originality consists in our having maintained that the proletariat can emancipate itself without being compelled to seek the guidance of the middle classes which concerns itself professionally with matters of the intellect. We have thus been led to regard as essential in contemporary phenomena what was before regarded as accessory, and what is indeed really educative for a revolutionary proletariat that is serving its apprenticeship in struggle. It would be impossible for us to exercise any direct influence on such a work of formation.

We may play a useful part if we limit ourselves to attacking middle-class thought in such a way as to put the proletariat on its guard against an invasion of ideas and customs from the hostile class... 

How is this not arrogant paternalism? And how are these ideas not from the "hostile class"? 

Where does this blind faith in the proletariat come from? Why are they assumed to me so morally different from the nobility and the middle classes? And how is this faith in the dictatorship of the proletariat not another Utopian ideal? It reminds me of the Noble Savage. And since Sorel wants to go back to Christianity and Calvinism, isn't he really asserting that the proletariat is somehow immune from the consequences of "The Fall of Man?" By that standard he is even denying them their humanity.

p54 ... I have said that art is an anticipation of the kind of work that ought to be carried on in a highly productive state of society... this observation has been very much misunderstood by some of my critics, who have been under the impression that I wished to propose as the socialist solution -- an aesthetic education of the proletariat under the tutelage of modern artists. This would have been a singular paradox on my part, for the art that we possess to-day is a residue left to us by an aristocratic society, a residue which has, moreover, been corrupted by the middle class... so little did I think of asking the École des Beau-Arts to provide a teaching suitable to the proletariat, that I based the morale of the producers not on an aesthetic education transmitted by the middle class, but on the feelings developed by the struggles of the workers against their masters.
...

223. Georges Sorel

Link to Table of Contents

Reflections on Violence

by Georges Sorel
Dover Publications, Inc - published 1906

This time I did read the Introduction (by Edward A. Shils) first. The introduction is so rich in material I could play with it for days. But I'm going to refrain until I read at least some of the man himself. My reading these days is being determined by what I can locate in local bookstores, and City Lights had this and Hannah Arendt's The Life of the Mind. I started with this because it was shorter, but, regardless of the reason, I chose correctly. This book should be perfect. And it looks like it will fill the gap between Dostoevsky and Mann. 

Introduction - by Sorel
Letter to Daniel Halevy

He starts with a defense of his style of writing addressed to Halevy. This book is going to be a daunting task as I can't go more than a page without finding something I need to quote. Here he's defending the "defects of my method of writing,"

p27 It is only recently that the rules of the art of writing have imposed themselves in a really imperative way; contemporary authors appear to have accepted them readily, because they wished to please a hurried and often very inattentive public, and one which is desirous about all of avoiding any personal investigation. These rules were first applied by the people who manufacture scholastic books. Since the aim of education has been to make pupils absorb an enormous amount of information, it has been necessary to put in their hands manuals suitable to this extra rapid instruction; everything has had to be presented in a form so clear, so logically arranged, and so calculated to dispel doubt, that in the end the beginner comes to believe that science is much simpler than our fathers supposed. In this way the mind is furnished in a very little time, but it is not furnished with implements which facilitate individual effort. These methods have been imitated by political publicists and by the people who attempt to popularize knowledge. Seeing these rules of the art of writing so widely adopted, people who reflect little have ended by believing that they were based on the nature of things themselves.

I am neither a professor, a popularizer of knowledge, nor a candidate for party leadership. I am a self-taught man exhibiting to other people the notebooks which have served for my own instruction. That is why the rules of writing have never interested me very much.

During twenty years I worked to deliver myself from what I retained of my education; I read books, not so much to learn as to efface from my memory the ideas which had been thrust upon it. It is only during the last fifteen years that I have really worked for the purpose of learning, but I have never found any one to teach me what I wanted to know. I have had to be my own master, and in a way to educate myself. I make notes in which I formulate my thoughts as they arise; I return three or four times to the same question, adding corrections which amplify the original, and sometimes even transform it from top to bottom; I only stop when I have exhausted the reserve of ideas stirred up by recent reading...
...

p29 ...it is a good thing that some are content to work, simply that they may submit their reflections to a few studious people, whilst others love to address the great mass of busy humanity. All things considered, I do not think mine the worst lot, for I am not exposed to the danger of becoming my own disciple, as has happened to the greatest philosophers when they have endeavored [I'm going with American spelling simply to curtail the nagging of my spellchecker] to give a perfectly symmetrical form to the intuitions they brought into the world... 
...

People have often laughed at Hegel's belief -- that humanity, since its origins, had worked to give birth to the Hegelian philosophy, and that with that philosophy Spirit had at last completed its development... [Good to know this wasn't just me.] ...philosophy is after all perhaps only the recognition of the abysses which lie on each side of the footpath that the vulgar follow with the serenity of somnambulists. [That metaphor certainly works well for phenomenology.]

p30 ...There is probably in the mind of every man, hidden under the ashes, a quickening fire, and the greater the number of ready-made doctrines the mind has received blindly the more is this fire threatened with extinction; the awakener is the man who stirs the ashes and thus makes the flames leap up... ...I have sometimes succeeded in liberating the spirit of invention in my readers; and it is the spirit of invention which it is above all necessary to stir up in the world...
...

p32 The optimist in politics is an inconstant and even dangerous man, because he takes no account of the great difficulties presented by his projects; these projects seem to him to possess a force of their own, which tends to bring about their realization all the more easily as they are, in his opinion, destined to produce the happiest result. [This would seem to support Burke, in opposition to what Shils said about Sorel in his introduction. It also sounds Faustian.] He frequently thinks that small reforms in the political constitution, and above all, in the personnel of the government, will be sufficient to direct social development... to mitigate those evils of the contemporary world which seem so harsh to the sensitive mind. As soon as his friends come into power, he declares that it is necessary to let things alone for a little, not to hurry too much... [this sounds more like what Shils was saying] The optimist passes with remarkable facility from revolutionary anger to the most ridiculous social pacificism. [sic] 

If he possesses an exalted temperament, and if unhappily he finds himself armed with great power, permitting him to realize the ideal he has fashioned, the optimist may lead his country into the worst disasters. He is not long in finding out that social transformations are not brought about with the ease that he had counted on; he then supposes that this is the fault of his contemporaries, instead of explaining what actually happens by historical necessities; he is tempted to get rid of people whose obstinacy seems to him to be so dangerous to the happiness of all. During the Terror, the men who spilt most blood were precisely those who had the greatest desire to let their equals enjoy the golden age they had dreamt of, and who had the most sympathy with human wretchedness; optimists, idealists, and sensitive men, the greater desire they had for universal happiness the more inexorable they showed themselves. [Back to Burke]

p33 Pessimism... is a philosophy of conduct rather than a theory of the world; it considers the march towards deliverance as narrowly conditioned, on the one hand, by the experimental knowledge that we have acquired from obstacles which oppose themselves to the satisfaction of our imaginations (or, if we like, by the feeling of social determinism),  and, on the other, by a profound conviction of our natural weakness. These two aspects of pessimism should never be separated, although, as a rule, scarcely any attention is paid to their close connection.
...

Totally lost me there. And I have to pause here as we are about to get into a discussion of Pessimism and Protestantism which I need to be refreshed to handle.