169. Eisenhower

Previous - 168. Francis Perkins

Link to Table of Contents

Eisenhower

Here's something I missed first time around,
p33 That concept -- conquering your own soul -- was a significant one in the moral ecology in which Eisenhower grew up. It was based on the the idea that deep inside we are dual in our nature. We are fallen, but also splendidly endowed. We have a side to our nature that is sinful -- selfish, deceiving, and self-serving -- but we have another side to our nature that is in God's image, that seeks transcendence and virtue. The essential drama of life is the drama to construct character, which is an engraved set of disciplined habits, a settled disposition to do good. The cultivation of Adam II was seen as a necessary foundation for Adam I to flourish.

Adam2 as essential for Adam1 - Let me start with that bit at the end. This makes much more sense to me than seeing Adam2 as seeking a more profound connection with the meaning of life. The goal here is to create better, more successful bourgeoisie.

God's image - Now back to what first attracted my attention to this passage. What if our nature isn't "dual" at all? What if we haven't "fallen?" What if we are just naturally "sinful" in these terms, and the purpose of religion is to create, out of whole cloth, this other side of our nature that is in "God's image?" Not only do we invent God but we invent a nature for ourselves that is not really natural in any meaningful sense of the word.

I can't think of any argument against this kind of moral indoctrination... up to the point where the indoctrination starts to include hate and intolerance. Ida Eisenhower, as she is presented here, is actually the perfect exemplar for this interpretation of religion, down to her own tolerance and refusal to wear a silly bonnet.

p36 He goes on to talk about the importance of and cures for various sins in a community like Abilene, Kansas. He starts with anger (Dwight's problem) and lust. This pairing makes me think of Dmitri Karamazov. Dostoevsky would agree with Brooks about sin. And we can see in Dmitri a life at the mercy of his uncontrollable tendency to sin -- his Karamazov nature. And then there's lovely young Lise, the poster child for sin run wild. Dostoevsky does a poor job of making Russian Orthodox Christianity seem like the cure for sin in the Russian people. It almost looks like sin thrives in that context. 

...adultery, bribery, and betrayal are more like treason than like crime; they damage the social order... 

And speaking of the social and economic order, neither of these authors really addresses the correlation between behavior and the economic realities people exist in. In Russia this included the master and serf dynamic but also the status of women, not to mention the rising middle class influence Dostoevsky hated so much.

And then we get a picture of Dwight in the military that makes it sound like all this upbringing did him little if any good. Still struggling with his anger. Not particularly happy in his own skin. Certainly not a person I would want to be.


Moderation
p69 I actually stopped reading this section yesterday to resume fresh today, because I wasn't getting what Brooks meant by moderation. In political terms he's talking about something very similar to Edmund Burke's position, where the danger of going to extremes is so... extreme that you have to seek a middle course that isn't too radical or too reactionary. Conservative in the true (my) sense of the term.

But, interestingly, he's going beyond this macro level to a micro level of the personal commonwealth, as it were. A radical personality like Dmitri can't achieve anything because he is swept away by his passions. But a person who completely locks down his passions can't achieve anything either. You need a middle position where the passions are harnessed. That's if you want to achieve anything significant. 

I have to credit Brooks here as I hadn't thought of moderation in these terms before. On the other hand, it may have been the Gay Pride festivities over the weekend that brought to my attention that much of what Brooks has said about character "building" and "pruning" would apply to closeted homosexuals not letting their true character show. If you re-read this chapter substituting "gay feelings" for "sin" you get a playbook for gay conversion therapy.

And having said what I did above about moderation and Burke, it should come as no surprise that I agree with Eisenhower's moderation vs JFK's optimism in their respective speeches in January 1961. Kennedy's inauguration speech did what such a speech is supposed to do, inspire the electorate toward the creation of a better nation and world. Eisenhower warned about the military-industrial complex, the scientific-technological elite, and warned, "avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow." Look who was playing Casandra?

And look how easy it is to see Faust in this. What Eisenhower warned against (and Dostoevsky, too) was the middle class, Faustian striving with its ever ignored or downplayed unintended consequences/side effects/collateral damage. And isn't JFK a perfect Faust? Ambitious, striving for both exuberant life and great achievements. Willing to make unscrupulous compromises for power (like staying in Vietnam.)

Next - 170. Dorothy Day

149. Candide, God, and Evil

Previous - 148. Kafka and memory

Link to Table of Contents

A new year

I survived the first weekend of Cherry Blossom Festival. Aside from my allergies, it was no problem. And everyone on our crew had experience from last year, so things went smoother than normal. And we didn't get rained on this year -- like last year -- so that was a plus. 

The good thing about double dosing myself with antihistamines was that I felt less homicidal when it came to attendees and vendors not following the sorting rules. Perhaps I'm also growing as a person. Ha. 

It was my intention starting out to be as mellow as possible, but at the end of the day when the "fuck you" bags start coming in from the vendor -- the ones where they don't even pretend to follow any of the rules, throw everything into one black bag and then bury it in a random bin -- the antihistamines might have helped. The vendors even wait until the last minute, right before their trucks pull away to play this, their final card of the day.

Next week I'm only working CBF Saturday and I picked up an event in Golden Gate Park for Sunday. That was a ploy to get my usual middle of the day shift for CBF, but it hasn't worked as yet. I don't have any objection to spending Sunday in lovely Hellman Hollow. 

Your tax dollars at play

I believe I've mentioned the Van Ness Bus Rapid Transit scheme now under construction here. This was years in the planning (I stopped attending meetings years ago because I thought it was stupid) and now it seems that they failed to anticipate birds nesting in the spring. So now they are having to work around trees with nests. 

This means that the same crews, that have now cleared most of the median, will have to return in the future to clear the little islands of green they had to leave behind. 

Looking north from Sutter where the median has been excised.

Looking south from Sutter, island of green mid-block.

And while I'm showing the ever changing face of SF, here's Salesforce Tower, now topped out and just waiting to be fully enveloped in steel and glass.

Salesforce Tower topped out from the street above mine.

And, just because it was in my camera, here's a shot up the street showing that I have a thing for old lighting fixtures,

Powell @ Washington.

Candide

"The Quality of Candide" by J. G. Weightman
...

p156 ...Voltaire was never at any time fair-minded, and there seems every reason to believe that he did not bother to reread, or even read, Leibniz's Theodice before writing his satire. As both [Andre] Morize and [W.H.] Barber point out, he mixes up the two main forms of the theory of optimism: the belief that evil is an effect of the human angle of vision, and the belief that evil is a necessary part of creation... Leibniz neither denied the existence of evil nor held the simple finalistic views which Voltaire attributes to Pangloss. Also, as Barber shows, Leibniz was an activist whose purpose was to encourage men to virtuous initiative withing the all-embracing framework of God's will, and as such he was, in a sense, on Voltaire's side...
...

The Angel Jesrad in Zadig, which comes before Candide, is on the whole Leibnizian in his statement that a world without evil would be another kind of world... In other works of his later years... Voltaire contradicts himself, saying in one place that God is obviously limited and repeating in another that evil exists only from the human point of view and must be unknown to God in His perfection. 

...Here was a man who... gradually came to be obsessed with the scandal of the presence of evil in the universe. At the same time, with his clear and vigorous brain he could only suppose that God was an immeasurably greater Voltaire who had organized the universe on rational lines and was not, ultimately, responsible for evil. How could God have willed evil since Voltaire, like any decent person, found it intolerable? Yet evil existed, and God must be good. But how could a good God . . . etc... The lesson of Candide is the permanent one that there is no... intellectual solution to the problem of evil, but that we go on living even so, and even when we think we have no faith.

p157 ...He himself [Voltaire] is Pangloss, just as he is Candide, Martin, and Pococurante. The book is a transposition of his inner debate... To the question: 'Why, if God is good (and we must suppose that He is), does evil exist?' there is no articulate answer which is not a juggling with words. Book VII of St Augustine's Confessions is quite elaborate, but are its logical fallacies not obvious? Chapter VII of Book III of St Thomas's Summa Contra Gentiles seems no less purely verbal. And when we open Leibniz to see how Voltaire misunderstood him, we find this sort of argument:

For God sees from the beginning of time that there will be a certain Judas... in general one can say that since God found it proper that he should exist in spite of the sin He foresaw, it must be that this evil will be repaid with interest somewhere else in the universe, that God will derive a greater good from it, and in short it will be found that the sequence of events which includes the existence of this sinner is the most perfect of all those which is possible. But to explain... the admirable economy of a particular choice, that cannot be done while we inhabit this transitory sphere; it suffices to know it without understanding it. 

Sounds like Pangloss to me.
...

p158 ...As Barber says:

Leibniz . . . never really abandons a priori argument. He bases his knowledge of God's nature on a priori rational considerations . . . and once God's infinite goodness and wisdom have thus been established, all else follows deductively... To all [Pierre] Bayle's paradoxes he [Leibniz] has... only one reply... the world as it is is God's creation, therefore no better would is possible.

Why am I going on and on about this? Mostly because it's fun to see other people supporting positions I've held since my undergraduate days. I always found this a priori reasoning about God infuriating. 

On the other hand, reading about 18th century philosophy is similar to reading about 18th century chemistry, in that there are still other shoes left to drop. I have the feeling Voltaire, while rejecting so much, still clings to some remnant of a belief in moral phlogiston.

...Candide is not... a message of hope, or at least not exactly in the way suggested by some critics who take a favorable view of it. Morize, Barber and René Pomeau, the author of La Religion de Voltaire, all seem to me to underestimate the virulence of the work. Morize writes:

The world is in shambles, blood flows, Jesuits and Molinists rage, innocents are slaughtered and dupes exploited; but there are in the world delicious asylums, where life remains possible, joyous, and sweet: let us cultivate our garden.

This suggests an ability to shut out the spectacle of the world which Voltaire never possessed... According to Barber:

p159 The practical philosophy to which Candide finally attains is the application to the limited field of personal activity of that esperance {hope} which Voltaire had offered to humanity on a transcendental level in the conclusion of the Poeme sur le desastre de Lisbonne.

In rejecting the doctrines of Pangloss and his like . . . he is seeking . . . a safe foundation in an insecure world for that profound belief in the value of activity which is characteristic of European man and was particularly strong in him. 

Am I mistaken in reading a bit of Faust into that?

... There is no evidence in Candide, and very little in his biography, that he [Voltaire] had a profound belief in the value of activity. He believed in man's need for activity and he himself had a tremendous urge to be active... Would it not be more plausible to suppose that his feverish busyness was the only relief he could find for his acute awareness of evil? Pomeau speaks of the "epicurean motive for action which is the last word of the tale" and says that Voltaire "will make a philosophy of activity . . . A lesson revolutionary in its banality." No doubt, Voltaire borrowed the image of the garden from Epicurus, [Footnote: "Epicurus, the classical philosopher who made pleasure the supreme goal of life, had a famous garden where he lived an impressively moderate and contemplative existence {Editor}. Well put.] but he has no trace of Epicurean serenity or moderation. 

I have to pause here... Faust and Goethe and Epicurus are shouting in my ear. Epicurus's garden was an alternative to the life of action, of seeking wealth and power and status. It was also a statement about the times in which he lived and reminds me of a quote from Confucius, "...When the Way does not prevail in your land, then count it a disgrace to be rich and honored." And this was exactly what Lucullus was doing when he returned from Asia -- though he dropped the moderation. Voltaire, at his estates around Geneva, does seem to have been living in this tradition, though more like Lucullus, with his theater and large dinner parties, and with a striving to transform the world through his writing that almost suggests Faust.
...

Only one critic appears to have stressed unequivocally the strength of the dark side of Voltaire's temperament, which is so obvious in Candide and in the correspondence. This is Andre Delattre, in his stimulating little book, Voltaire l'impetueux, where we read:

p160 It is only when, in Candide, he accepts certain perspectives of Pascal's, it is only when he ceases to strain against a dark and healthy pessimism, and ceases to hold open the empty sack of his optimism, that he finally creates, after his sixtieth year, his real masterpiece.

...Candide is not just a clever, unfair satire on optimism which concludes with the bracing recommendation that we should do what we can to improve matters in our immediate vicinity. It is a work in which an unappeasable sense of the mystery and horror of life is accompanied, at every step, by an instinctive animal resilience... [This sounds like The Brothers K] Voltaire has a faith, but it is not a political faith nor an easily defined religious one. It is the sort of faith that keeps the severed fractions of a worm still wriggling...
...

p162 ...Candide has, of course, a clear literary ancestry; he is adapted from the hero of the picaresque novel of adventurer... More immediately, he is Voltaire himself, who was declasse {a social outcast} like the picaresque hero, had been beaten and snubbed... {"trembled like a philosopher"} and had been frequently on the move. But he is also a symbol of the central part of the human soul which never loses its original innocence and, as Simone Weil says, always goes on expecting that good will be done to it rather than evil... he is {the outsider}, a fatherless bastard whose cozy sense of belonging to a coherent society and a comprehensible universe is a childhood illusion, soon to be shattered at the onset of puberty. Cunegonde is at first Eve who tempts him, with the result that he is driven out of the early paradise by the irate master of his little world. Then Conegonde becomes the symbol of a lost happiness which will be recoverable in the future, when the world falls again into some pattern reminiscent of the patriarchal social cell which preceded adulthood. But gradually it becomes clear that the world has no pattern... and the best Candide can do is to reconstitute the battered Westphalian society of his childhood as a refugee colony on the borders of barbarism, with himself as its disillusioned head... The second half [following the stay in El Dorado] is... different from the first in two important respects. Candide is no longer an underdog; he has acquired money and he sees the world from a new angle... The hero has mastered life to some small extent... but this... leaves him freer to contemplate the sufferings of others. ...Candide has become a spectator, but it is psychologically true... that adulthood involves awareness of general evil.

p163 ...Each [character] is killed once or more but bobs up again with heartening inconsequentiality. Voltaire expresses the strength of man's unconquerable soul by making Pangloss and the Baron... step out of the galley and begin at once behaving with characteristic  foolishness... A minority of human beings are, like... [Candide], decent and well-meaning, the majority are selfish and stupid, but the implication is that all are involved in evil in more or less the same way. In this respect, Candide is both fiercely critical of human nature and curiously tolerant.
... 

p166 ...it is remarkable that, in Candide, the distinction between evil which is an act of God (and therefore from the human point of view gratuitous) and evil which is an effect of human wickedness or stupidity, is not clearly maintained... [I have a problem with this distinction since I don't recognize the "evil" that derives from "acts" of God. For me, the significant thing here is that Voltaire is opposed to "the Church" and not a true atheist. Which point is made even more clearly if Pennsylvania is substituted for El Dorado.] It seems almost as if Voltaire were unwilling to come out into the open and accuse God... That happy country [El Dorado], where the inhabitants never quarrel and worship God without a church, does not provide a fair contrast with the ordinary world; how would the people of El Dorado retain their serenity if their capital were shattered by an earthquake? [There are any number of religions and philosophies that handle disasters of this sort well by subtracting the element of "evil" from them by denying God or through the fiction of a wrathful God.] The only way to justify the El Dorado chapters is to suppose that they are really a conscious or unconscious criticism of God. They occur as a sunny interlude... to show how happy and pious we might have been, had God not given us our ungovernable natures and put us into a world containing inexplicable evil... Voltaire, like Diderot, had not made up his mind about free-will, because the determinism/free-will dilemma is just another formulation of the God/no-God issue... 

I don't see that at all -- though it might well have been true for them. What I do see is that no-God implies no-Evil, just as Dostoevsky feared.
...

p167 ...in this short tale... [Voltaire] managed to hold fundamental opposites in suspense and so produced, from the heart of a century that wished to deny evil, an allegorical prose poem about evil which is still perfectly apt... two hundred years later. 

But only if you believe in God.

Next - 150. Original sin

130. Proust Was a Neuroscientist

Previous - 129. Travelers

Link to Table of Contents

Call me Nostradamus...

Yes, I am sore today. Putting on and taking off my jacket now comes with sound effects. 

I compounded Having finally made it to the gym; Being sore the day after the gym; and Discovering that the local (Chinatown) branch library isn't open until 1pm on Fridays (noticed when I tried to open the door at Noon) to excuse my ignoring both my budget and diet for lunch. Since I needed to hang around for about an hour, I went to my usual North Beach haunt (Caffe Puccini) for something different (their eggplant sandwich) and a glass of red. Now I'm worried about the place as it was empty at the lunch hour.

Proust Was a Neuoscientist

By Jonah Lehrer - Houton Mifflin Company 2007

My reason for going to the library was to pick up a copy of our next book club book. I would have been happy if the book had only been about Proust, but in fact Proust is just one of the artists sampled for their contributions to neuroscience.

From the Prelude
The author writes about his days as a lab technician,

pix It was simple manual labor, but the work felt profound. Mysteries were distilled into minor questions, and if my experiments didn't fail, I ended up with an answer. The truth seemed to slowly accumulate, like dust.

At the same time, I began reading Proust. I would often bring my copy of Swann's Way into the lab and read a few pages while waiting for an experiment to finish. All I expected from Proust was a little entertainment, or perhaps an education in the art of constructing sentences. For me, his story about one man's memory was simply that: a story. It was a work of fiction, the opposite of scientific fact.

But... I began to see a surprising convergence. The novelist had predicted my experiments. Proust and neuroscience shared a vision of how our memory works. If you listened closely, they were actually saying the same thing.
...

pxi We now know that Proust was right about memory, Cezanne was uncannily accurate about the visual cortex, Stein anticipated Chomsky, and Woolf pierced the mystery of consciousness; modern neuroscience has confirmed these artistic intuitions...

pxii The moral of this book is that we are made of art and science. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, but we are also just stuff.... 


Walt Whitman
I learned two interesting things reading this first section: The phrase "Leaves of Grass" is a printing term where "leaves" are pages and "grass" is "compositions of little value." The other interesting thing is that Whitman continued to revise both his poems and his book (adding more to it) from 1855 until just before his death in 1891. When his body was examined after his death it was discovered that nearly every organ in his body was ravaged my tuberculosis.

So what I now want to know is how does what he wants to say in 1891 differ from what he wanted to say in 1855, and how much of the change is a result of age and illness? Has anyone published an edition that includes both versions so you can see the young and old poet juxtaposed?

This would be interesting for any writer, but the reason he is included in this book is because he is "a self-described poet of the body..." who argued that "... the soul is made of flesh." To the extent that this is true, the soul -- and thus the poetry -- of a young and healthy man must vary a great deal from the soul of an old and very ill man. How could it be otherwise? 

Vertigo

Have I mentioned how interminable Sebald's paragraphs are? They sometimes go on for pages. And they may cover a number of subjects and include what could be many transitions. You come to a point that should be a good place to stop and resume later, but there is no paragraph break to make it easy to relocate your place. It occurs to me now that I just need a post-it to use to mark where I'm stopping. 

We just came to the point where he finally makes his way to Verona and checks into a hotel under the name of someone from the 19th century, Jakob Philipp Fullmerayer. Fullmerayer was from a town on the other side of the Alps (and Austria) from Sebald's hometown in Bavaria. They certainly have something in common, though I'm not sure what Sebald is getting out here. (As usual.) Fullmerayer is an interesting character but Sebald merely adopts his name for a moment. He doesn't say any more about him.

Candide

P109 ...He [Voltaire] has been inspecting his new estate at Ferney and finding that there is more involved than the cultivation of plants. He has acquired peasants who depend on him. What is the state of the community? Half the land lies fallow, the curé has celebrated no marriages in seven years, the countryside is depopulated as people rush to nearby Geneva. Taxation (especially the salt-tax) destroys those who remain; either the peasants pay and are reduced to abject poverty, of they evade payment and are clapped in jail. ‘It is heartbreaking to witness so many misfortunes. I am buying the Ferney property simply in order to do a little good there. . . . The prince who will be my liege lord should rather help me to drag his subjects out of the abyss of poverty, than profit from his ancient feudal rights....

P110 This is a new voice in Voltaire’s letters. We have seen how many times he had sought to intervene on the social or political scene and been frustrated. Here at last the right opportunity in time and place comes to hand. By acquiring seigneurial rights he is freer, he says, than when he possessed only his home in Lausanne and his ‘country cottage {guinguette}’ in Geneva, where the people were ‘a little arrogant’ and the priest ‘a little dangerous’... Already before he is even installed at Ferney he has taken up the cudgels against the curé of Moens, who is the malefactor extorting money from Voltaire’s peasants and forcing them to sell their own lands...

P111 At the end of 1758, Voltaire tells d’Argental with pride that he has created for himself ‘a rather nice kingdom’ (D7988). At last he has his new principality: he is now both roi and philosophe. His installation at Tournay on Christmas Eve 1758 was of fitting dignity and pomp,with sound of cannon, fife and drum, all the peasants bearing arms and girls presenting flowers to his two diamond-bedecked nieces. ‘M. de Voltaire’, writes a spectator, ‘was very pleased and full of joy . . . He was, believe me, very flattered’... As Candide begins to enjoy, a few weeks later, the success which has never deserted it, so too does Voltaire enter at last into his kingdom. In his sixty-fifth year, François-Marie Arouet has finally realized himself as M. de Voltaire. [Footnote: François-Marie Arouet is the name of an insignificant Paris bourgeois; M. de Voltaire (wherever his name comes from) is a gentleman, a seigneur, a person of European repute.]

So when Candide speaks of cultivating his garden he really does have in mind a good Tory existence. And I suppose Ford Madox Ford’s having Christopher turn his back on Groby is to make his point that, in the bourgeois age of the Great War, there is no longer a place for the seigneur. In the 20th century one can only cultivate a very small, private garden and even then it must be supported by trade (the antique business).


But now I must turn to the other book that shares the name of its protagonist: Faust. You can see Goethe ending his book with Faust also cultivating his garden -- ripped from the sea and funded by piracy. What I haven’t repeated above are the passages about how Voltaire disliked the British Navy because they were interfering with his trade -- capturing and selling either ships he had an interest in or ships carrying cargo he had an interest in. I also skipped the passage about his attack on the slave trade (and the sugar trade) which was inserted in Candide at the last moment. Ferney wasn’t ripped from the sea, but I suspect Voltaire’s wealth (all wealth) came with some unsavory write-offs. Mephisto’s Violent Men always have a hand in these transactions. Still, to give Faust his due, his intention was similar to Voltaire’s. But just as Voltaire was participating in the economic system that would soon lead to the French Revolution, Faust’s efforts caused as much harm as they offered future promise. Faust really is Goethe’s Candide in some ways.

Next - 131. Walt Whitman

118. Evola & the Alt-right

Previous - 117. The Dashwoods

Link to Table of Contents

Social Contract

I keep coming back in my mind to America's Social Contract. Regardless of where John Locke and the guys may have wanted to start, the American Social Contract started with protecting the right of Europeans to view Native Americans and Africans as being less than human. As not having legal standing except as chattel.

The next American "revolution" was when abolitionists attacked this notion with regard to Africans which lead to the Civil War and the end of "slavery" as an institution. But when it comes down to it, it seems like Americans are not that interested in other "people's" interests when their own economic interest is involved. Many of the "Sagebrush Rebellion" issues have to do with continued exploitation of Native lands. 

The problem, in a world of robot manufacturing and the land being stressed by human population growth, is how are non-tech savvy Americans to be made whole? And this is far more than just an American problem. Because someone will find something for these people to do, just as Mussolini and Hitler did.


Perhaps, just as we need a multitude of gods and religions to suit our individual or group needs, there is no one political system that suits all people. It sounds like you're joking when you point out that the weakness of Italian Fascism was the need to pit Italian nationalism against some external force, but this does seem to be an essential requirement for all forms of extreme nationalism, and I'm sure America First-ism will tend in the same direction. I'm not even in a position to say that this isn't a necessary feature. This comes down to cultural anthropology and sociology. It may well be that the EU has pushed peace in Europe, for example, about as far as it can go. Perhaps radical pruning isn't an accident, but a necessity for European success. It certainly looks like something periodically pushes Europeans toward war.

Continued...

I've been holding onto this for days because I'm still dwelling in The House of Phlegm... (now with minimal hearing in my left ear due to congestion. Dr. Time seems to finally be getting the better of this vile plague. Maybe.)

But now I need to make this already too long post even longer as I just ran into not one, but two intriguing pieces from Medium. I will include the links below. 

I guess I'm going to start with this piece on "The Alt-right Is a Doomsday Cult." It's almost like the author has been reading my blogs. There are references to Nietzsche and to Mussolini -- and I now I have to do some research on Julius Evola. There's even a new (to me) use of "kali" to describe the period of time when Kali dances. (How have I missed Evola? His connection with Hermetic philosophy links straight back to the original Faust writings.) 

Here's a striking quote from Wiki: 

"The Jews were stigmatized, not as representatives of a biological race, but as the carriers of a world view, a way of being and thinking—simply put, a spirit—that corresponded to the ‘worst’ and ‘most decadent’ features of modernity: democracy, egalitarianism and materialism."^[20]

And:

Paul Furlong wrote that "The complete Evola held views that it is fair, if somewhat summary, to categorise as elitist, racist, anti-semitic, misogynist, anti-democratic, authoritarian, and deeply anti-liberal."^[7]

And finally, the real shocker:
Evola died unmarried, without children, on 11 June 1974 in Rome.

I did a quick search and found this link where the internet, in it's occult wisdom, reveals that 63% of respondents think Evola was gay. That's what I was thinking as well. And not just because he was a Barone.

Now to our second piece on the suppression of science in Franco's Spain. Now here we see exactly what I thought we should see in fascism in general, if its enemy was truly the bourgeoisie (Evola is quite clear on this in his theory of "castes.") Some quotes,

The new council ["the central agency responsible for advancing Spanish science research and exchanges with foreign scientists"] was meant to bring back a view of science that would make it compatible with conservative Catholic values, mandating it to “restore the classical and Christian unity of the sciences that was destroyed in the 18th Century.” In other words, he wanted to turn back the clock to pre-Enlightenment times...

“The Franco regime defended the literalism of the Bible, which was considered an infallible account, inspired by the word of God,” said Manuel Castillo Martos, a professor at the University of Seville and co-author of Education, Science and Ideology in Spain (1890–1950). “Scientific ideas that contradicted it, such as Darwinist evolution, were considered unacceptable.”

Now we have Naphta's doctrine made law. Given that The Magic Mountain was published in 1926 and Franco came to power 1936-1939, and that we know (from Primo Levi) that "everyone" was reading the book after it was published, one has to wonder just how influential it really was. 

The Nazis were not in a position, during the late 1930s and 1940s, to be purists when it came to bourgeois science, since they had a war to lose. But was there a long term plan to adapt something similar to (though less Catholic than) the Spanish approach to science? How would I.G. Farben have felt about that? Again, I'm not quite interested enough in this to actually read National Socialist texts. There should be a way to leave idea seeds on Medium in hopes that someone else will do your work for you.

No power to the slaves

I included a Franco quote above and then removed it because it didn't relate to what I was addressing just then, but I want to come back to it now.

“We do not believe in government through the voting booth,” he said. “The Spanish national will was never freely expressed through the ballot box. Spain has no foolish dreams.”

And this goes nicely with Evola's thoughts on caste,

In Revolt Against the Modern World, Evola developed a "general objective law: the law of the regression of the castes", claiming that "[t]he meaning of history from the most ancient times is this: the gradual decline of power and type of civilization from one to another of the four castes - sacred leaders, warrior nobility, bourgeoisie (economy, "merchants") and slaves - which in the traditional civilizations corresponded to the qualitative differentiation in the principal human possibilities."^[13]

I don't think Fyodor Dostoevsky would have much of a problem with this. And neither would Naphta, of course. Though I imagine there would be some debate about who decides what between the "sacred leaders" and the "warrior nobility." And isn't it interesting that he chose the word "slaves" for the lowest caste (I'm assuming this is a decent translation.) I imagine Ford Madox Ford was familiar with Evola, I do wonder what he thought of these, Tory-er than thou views.

I do notice a couple problems for the Alt-right in installing these ideas in the New World. As Dostoevsky was aware, the U.S.A. is a pure bourgeois state. Getting rich regardless of the cost has always been the true American Dream and when Trump speaks of Making America Great Again, I'm sure that's what his followers are hearing. How do you introduce finer thoughts regarding the sacred and the noble in a land of the bourgeoisie?

And then there's religion. For Spain and Italy going to their sacred place was simply adhering to the Catholic Church -- just as it was Orthodox Christianity for Dostoevsky. But what is the sacred standard for the U.S.A? Evangelical Christianity? Who's brand? And whichever one you pick the Catholics and Mormons and Goat knows how many other sects will scream. America hasn't yet seen a good religious war, wouldn't it be amusing if the fight against Radical Islam resulted in a new 30 Years War among Christian sects?

Next - 119. Catching up

104. Goethe in Derbyshire

Previous - 103. Best laid plans

Link to Table of Contents

Little Dribbling

Why aren't there photographs in this book? Even a few photos would make the reading experience so much better. I've been driven to Google Image and Map to see the places and some of the things Bryson talks about. The problem with this is that, seeing the areas for myself, I have to go on to be critical of things he fails to mention or emphasize. 

He gave the impression that the bizarre English holiday traditions at Skegness were mostly a thing of the past, but viewing the area from above, there seems to be an amazing expanse of camps still around. And some of them really do look like concentration camps.

He gave the impression that the port of Grimsby was pretty derelict, but that's just the fishing port. Next door is a very active port that appears to mostly deal with transporting cars. The other interesting thing about this port -- also Hull and Liverpool -- is that, because the rivers are not always navigable due to the tides, the actual port facilities are separated from the rivers by locks. 


When I bought myself this book for Christmas I never expected to write anything about it. I read Bryson for laughs -- that's not entirely true, since he's written a number of books like At Home and A Short History of Nearly Everything that are content rich -- but after making the notes above I hit a patch about the Peak District -- which makes me think of Pride and Prejudice, of course -- which I have to both quote and comment on. It never ends!

p272 About the Headstone Viaduct on the Monsal Trail which crosses, or rather tunnels and trenches it's way across, the Monsal Dale. ...When the viaduct was built in 1863, the art critic John Ruskin [especially here] famously raged against it, saying that a setting of tranquility and beauty had been cruelly sacrificed just so that "every fool in Buxton can be in Bakewell in half an hour and every fool at Bakewell in Buxton." Headstone Viaduct is often used as an example of how things that are hated when new later become treasured. Well, sure, that sometimes happens. But there is a difference here in that the Headstone Viaduct was from the start a thing of actual beauty, carefully built, which is rarely the case with intrusions on the landscape today.

As fond as I am of 19th century infrastructure, I'm sure I would love the walk along this old railroad right of way as much as Bryson did. But, again, I'm looking at the scene from Google Map and I have to sympathize with my old pal Ruskin here. The non-map view (satellite? aerial photo? whatever) is particularly fine of the Monsal Dale and it looks to be a lovely place to walk across, as one can imagine Elizabeth Bennett doing with her aunt and uncle in Austen's novel. That is until you come to the trench dug for the railroad. The viaduct itself, and the tunnel at one end of the viaduct, are almost beside the point. The problem is that trench running across the landscape as though a huge boar had been running loose. 

This is a prime example of a landscape where, for thousands of years you could wander at random until the 19th century when you were suddenly forced to find the few places where you could cross either over or under the tracks. Even now that it is just a walking trail and there is no danger of being run down by a steam engine, the barrier exists in the same way. And even Ruskin (probably) didn't consider the environmental side effects of dividing communities of wild animals by this arbitrary line. 

(It's worth noting that some of Ruskin's design ideas even apply to software interface design. I've considered his views, and sometimes gone against them -- with reservations -- more than once when designing software.)

But it doesn't stop there, Not far from Monsal Dale is a view nearly as good as, and even more historic than, the one that so exercised Ruskin, where the trail emerges from a long tunnel into a green valley. Holding a commanding position at the valley head is a white Georgian building that looks at first sight like a stately home. In fact, it is Cressbrook Mill, built by Richard Arkwright in 1779... to spin cotton. It is quite the most handsome factory you will ever see and possibly the most important, for it changed the world. Along with Cromford Mill, built a few miles away near Matlock, this was where the factory system started. Everything that is manufactured on Earth today traces its beginnings back to this tranquil corner of Derbyshire. Arkwright built his mills in the narrow valleys of Derbyshire because they had plenty of water to power his machines and because the remote location made it less likely that they would be besieged by angry spinners put out of work by his new methods. It also made it easier for him to exploit his workers. Cressbrook Mill was operated mostly by orphans who were treated worse than abysmally.

p273 Within half a century, the cotton industry employed over four hundred thousand people. Nearly everything that followed and made Britain great -- shipbuilding, finance, the building of canals and railroads, the growth of empire -- had its foundations here... Derbyshire's spell at the center of all this didn't last terribly long. As the cotton industry grew, larger factories and bigger rivers were required, and the work moved to more urban places like Manchester and Bradford. Derbyshire sank back into a picturesque oblivion. Today Cressbrook Mill is upmarket apartments."

Never-mind Ruskin, now I'm imagining Goethe here. (The Goethe of the last sections of Faust, the Developer sections.) Not reclaiming land and engaging in piracy, unless you interpret piracy to include the vicious exploitation of labor -- either "free" as here or slave as in Absalom, both are contemporary with Cressbrook Mill. The slaves producing the cotton to be spun by the orphans. 


When I first mentioned P&P it was because that's the first thing I think of when I hear the words "Peak District," but that association turns out to be prescient. On a hunch, I just did a quick Google search and learned two things: 1. There's a Wiki entry for "Pemberley," and 2. The fictional Pemberley was set in the vicinity of Bakewell -- also, like Cromford, near Matlock. I would love to know if Austen picked this neighborhood because it's romantically scenic or because it was coming to be associated with the new wealth of the Industrial Revolution. (Not easy to determine the source of the wealth of the Dukes of Devonshire. Seems to be something one doesn't speak of. Rents, I suppose?)

So Ruskin, Goethe, Austen, and Bryson -- I should have had them walking into a pub. 

Next - 105. Tower of Power

75. Life + History

Previous - 74. Going to the dark side

Life goes on

The world may be going to hell but I just had my favorite vegan breakfast at the Pork Store and now I'm having tea at Coffee to the People, so life is good for the moment. 

Leaving home this morning I ran into the owner of the lower level unit, she was overseeing the dance of vehicles in our alley as four or five cars and trucks pulled out into the street so that the van with her new carpet could get back to our building. For some reason, the people doing construction next door work even longer hours on Saturday than on weekdays. Sometimes, and this was true yesterday as well, the alley is blocked even after the normal quitting time of 4pm. My latest plan for "landscaping" our back yard is to put down tarps and observe how they drain until the construction is complete next door, or until I have a much better idea when we can schedule a delivery of 60 bags of gravel and not run into an alley parking jam.

Speaking of construction, yesterday I walked past a guy finishing some newly replaced cement on a Grant street sidewalk. The rest of the sidewalk there has an unusual pattern and he was doing a skillful job of matching it. The reason I noticed him was that he had brought his dog to the work site. The dog was lying comfortably on a blanket the guy had laid out on the sidewalk adjacent to where he was working. Nice gig for everyone concerned. 

Not again!

As if things weren't bad enough this week. Walking past Union Square on my way to breakfast this morning I was shocked to see the big Christmas tree is already up and decorated. I'm interested to see if we will get our subway construction zone streets back for the shopping season -- as we always have in the past. Now that they are working on the station, I don't think they can just cover everything up with fake grass for a few weeks. Hope I'm wrong. 

History!

I just ran into something amazing on Medium. This relates both to the Holocaust and to the subject of the Faustian/Mephistophelian character of the Jewish bourgeoisie. I'm amazed I've never heard about this. HERE's the link. Only think what Goethe could have done with this story. Or Dostoevsky. 

Next - 76. The New Financial Distric

71. Election 2016 + Alice

Previous - 70. A new book

Link to Table of Contents

Preparing to vote

I spent a large portion of Sunday working through my Voter Information Pamphlet & Sample Ballot. At least I have an easy choice at the top of the ballot, but the rest is a total mess. I like my candidate for U.S. Senate and State Assembly. I have to vote for Pelosi, my U.S. Representative. I refuse to vote for my City Supervisor but can't really vote for the person running against him either. In the other races I have to choose the lesser evil -- as at the top -- or follow endorsements for the minor offices with candidates I've never heard of. Such is democracy. And that's the easy part.

Next we come to the State and City Propositions. There are 17 State Propositions but I've only voted (yes or no) for 13 of them -- the others I either can't make sense of or I could go either way on. Then there 25 City and BART or School District propositions where I've voted for 22. 

I'm proud to say that in a number of these cases I've voted against my inclination because the Proposition would set a bad example or cause problems in addition to what it's intended to fix. In some cases it's really hard to know if voting yes or no would reflect my true opinion or achieve what was possibly intended. And of course they throw all these Propositions at us because our elected officials can't do their jobs and settle this themselves. In some cases I'm hoping I'm sending a message about what I really want or don't want, but in other cases I'm not sure what message, if any, I'm sending. 

And if Tuesday goes as I expect, no one will be paying much attention to these local issues anyway.

A Century of Wisdom

I'm up to Chapter three and now Alice and her young son are in a camp -- though a very nice one where she continues to perform on the piano. 

Back in Prague she was raised in a quintessentially bourgeois-Jewish family with Franz Kafka as a close family friend. Most of her immediate family escaped to Palestine on the last train out of Czechoslovakia. She, and her husband and child, remained behind with her mother for what seemed like good reasons before Munich.

What do I mean by "quintessentially bourgeois-Jewish family?" They were well educated, very musical, well connected, involved in trade. Her mother was raised Orthodox, her father was a merchant. A year or two ago I would have thought nothing of this, but now I can't help viewing them -- along with Primo Levi's family in Turin and Oliver Sacks' family in London -- through the eyes of Dostoevsky and Ford. Thus I have to ask, To what extent were the Jews hated for being ur-bourgeois as opposed to being religious. (Sorry for the German prefix to a French adjective.) 

I know this sounds far-fetched, but stick with me a moment. I've never paid much attention to what anti-semites were saying, going all the way back to that Austrian red-neck Morton covers in A Nervous Splendor. So what do I know? First, there's Fernand Braudel's argument that the origin of European capitalism is intertwined with the history of the Jews displaced from Iberia after 1492. Then there's an account I read a long time ago of anti-Jewish riots in the south of Germany back in some earlier century. (Sorry I can't be more specific.) There was a pattern to the violence against the Jews back then: The wandering Jews would settle in a community and offer credit. Things would be fine for a time but then the economy would go south, and when the local Christians could no longer keep up with their payments, it would be discovered that some Jew or other had tricked a Christian into smuggling a wafer (the body of Christ) out of a church and giving it to the Jew who then proceeded to torture it. The Jews implicated were attacked and the rest of the Jewish community fled. 

Now this sounds completely nonsensical, of course, but what I read into it is that religion was just a tool the locals used to attack people they had a grudge against for economic reasons. Dostoevsky and Ford are not blatantly antisemitic, but it is clear in both The Brothers Karamazov and Parade's End that Jews are a part of -- and possibly a symbol of -- the bourgeois values they see as undermining the natural, Tory order. And, with Braudel in mind again, this is not wrong. (Mann is less interested in this line of reasoning -- Naphtha not withstanding -- because he was raised in an equally bourgeois, though, gentile, family.) 

I really don't want to do the research -- read antisemitic writings of the time, and Nazi dogma -- but I'm curious about how much the Nazis were opposed to other aspects of bourgeois life like science and technology and the importance of merit vs birth. 

A Faustian history of WW2

It would be impossible to pick the strangest section of Part 2 of Faust, but the battle section right after Faust returns to Germany from Greece would have to be in the running. If we accept that Faust (with Mephisto's assistance) represents the bourgeois spirit, then you can almost see this passage as an allegory for the Allied victory in both theaters in WW2. Wait, stay with me for just a minute...

The Allied victory was based largely on technological/scientific magic: The Bomb is the most obvious example of this, but there's also crytoanalysis, radar (by the end of the war radar sets small enough to fit in artillery shells), and the by then routine magic of modern industry with the exploitation of coal, oil, and everything else that can be mined from the Earth. 

And it's worth remembering that deception played an important role in both Faust's battle plans and in the Allied battle plans (the British at the 2nd Battle of El Alamein and the American crossing of the Rhine being two good examples.)


Faust - Part 2 - Act IV Scenes I-III (Headland:Battle)

FaustNow, powerfully, streams pour on streams,10725

Sweeping from gorges with redoubled gleams,

A river now throws up an arching veil:

Pours over the rocky level in a tide,

Runs foaming down, on every side,

And, stepwise, hurls itself into the dale.10730

What use their fine, heroic resistance?

The vast wave roars, and fills the distance.

I shudder myself at this wild waterfall.

MephistophelesI can see nothing of these watery lies,

They only serve for fooling human eyes,10735

I delight instead in wonders that befall.

In companies, their men plunge down,

The fools imagine that they’ll drown,

While free to breathe, on solid ground,

With swimming strokes, they run around.10740

It’s bewildering them all.

(The Ravens return.)

I’ll praise you to the noble Master: but see,

If you’d like to display your own mastery,

Hurry to the glowing smithy,

Where the dwarf folk never weary,10745

Hammering sparks from steel and stone.

Ask for, once you’ve chattered first,

A fire to shine: sparkle, and burst,

The finest that man’s ever known.

It’s true that far off lightning flashes,10750

And stars that fall in sudden dashes,

Can happen any summer’s night:

But lightning in the tangled bushes,

And stars that fizzle in the rushes,

They’re not such a common sight.10755

Don’t trouble about my command,

Ask first, then afterwards demand.

(The Ravens fly off. All takes place as ordered.)

Darkness cloaks the enemy!

Their footsteps meet uncertainty!

Everywhere are wandering flares,10760

And those sudden blinding glares!

It’s all beautiful indeed,

Now some noise is what we need.

-Source

Next - 72. Election night 2016