ADVERTISEMENT FOR MYSELF

In 1959, Norman Mailer published a collection of short pieces to which he gave the deliciously ironic title Advertisements for Myself. This morning, I was re-reading my little book, Moneybags Must Be So Lucky, in preparation for the class I shall teach Wednesday evening on Chapter One of Das Kapital. Moneybags is a very short book, a mere 82 pages, consisting of the Romanell-Phi Beta Kappa Lectures, delivered at the University of Massachusetts in 1984-85, and published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 1988.


In 1739-40, David Hume published anonymously the three volumes of A Treatise of Human Nature, far and away the greatest work of philosophy ever written in the English language. Desperately eager for literary success, he was deeply disappointed by its reception, and later said of it that it "fell still-born from the presses," a phrase that will resonate with every author who has ever anxiously awaited reviews.


My little book cannot even be said to have had an unfavorable reception, for it had virtually no reception at all. It was not noticed, save for one rather favorable review by George Scialabba in The Village Voice [!!], and if the royalty reports are to be trusted, has not yet managed, twenty-two years later, to sell one thousand copies.


And yet, and yet. If I am any sort of judge of literary and intellectual merit, it is, page for page, the best thing I have ever written. It is also, I am absolutely confident, the best thing anyone has ever written about the literary, philosophical, and theoretical dimensions of the first several chapters of volume one of Marx's great work.


Even in the select circle of close friends and former students who form the readership of this blog, I cannot assume much awareness of my little failed book, so let me quote several passages that I think are especially well-written. This entire blog post is so embarrassingly and nakedly self-promoting that I shall not even attempt a feeble excuse. Put it down, if you must, to an old man's intimation of mortality.

In the first chapter, I am talking about the relationship between the literary resources of a language and the conception of reality that the language is being used to articulate. I choose as an example the language of the metaphysical poets of the 17th century:

"The metaphysical poets conceived the universe as having been created by God in such a way,and according to such a plan, as to establish an endless series of correspondences or parallels among the most disparate elements of the creation. As the moon shines by the reflected light of the sun, so the subjects of a great monarch shine by his reflected glory, and so too does the lover live in light or shadow as his beloved bestows upon him the radiance of her smile. As the sun rises in the East, heralding the start of an earthly day, so the crucified Christ, God's Son, rose in the East to heaven, heralding thereby the dawn of a new day in the spiritual life of the world; so, eventually, do we hope to rise to heaven to begin the endless day that awaits us beyond the night of the grave."

And here is a second passage, from near the end of the third lecture. I am trying to explicate Marx's difficult and puzzling claim that the concepts of "commodity" and "value," though verruckt [crack-brained, crazy], are nevertheless socially real and therefore objectively valid. Throughout the early chapters of Capital, Marx repeatedly uses religious metaphors and allusions to communicate his conviction that the marketplace is as fully mystified as the altar ever was.

"Economic efficiency demands that both entrepreneurs and merchants abstract entirely from the natural properties of the commodities they produce and sell, attending only to their exchange value. The prudent capitalist cannot allow his economic decisions to be influenced by his normal human responses to the accidents of his wares. The tailor in love with his worsteds is no better than a whiskey priest drunk on sacramental wine. A sensuous affection for fine cloth, lingering on from a precapitalist craft pride, may incline him to a more costly suiting than the market demand justifies. Soon he will find himself driven to the wall by rational tailors whose fingers are numb to the feel of good wool, but whose metaphysical consciousness can discern the exact quantum of value in each yard of goods."

Nobody, I think, has ever written like this about Marx. And no one else has ever deciphered, as I do in the final chapter, the famously mysterious discussion of the Relative Form and the Equivalent Form of Value, all while explicating it by means of an old Jewish joke.

By way of contrast, my best known book, In Defense of Anarchism, has sold more than 200,000 copies in English, and exists now in fifteen languages, including Croatian, Korean, and Malaysian.

Sigh. I am reduced, as Norman Mailer would have it, to taking out advertisements for myself.

STRUGGLING TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD IN WHICH I LIVE

Markos Moulitsas, founder and proprietor of THE DAILY KOS website, recently commissioned a poll of 2000+ self-identified Republicans in an attempt to find out what they believe. 36% think Obama was not born in the United States and 22% aren't sure. 63% think Obama is a socialist and 21% are not sure. 21% believe ACORN stole the 2008 election and 55% are not sure. And so forth.

There is a quite natural tendency to conclude that there are scores of millions of truly insane people in America [and that is just on the right!] Now, I do not take a back seat to anyone in my despair at the mindset of my fellow Americans, but as I mulled over the results of this poll, I found myself thinking both about the earlier poll showing that most Americans have no idea that it takes 60 votes in the Senate to block a filibuster, and about an old article on public opinion polling by David Riesman, an important sociologist of an earlier time. [I actually knew Riesman when I was at Harvard, but that is four or five other stories.]

So bear with me, as I try very hard to interpret all of this in a way that does not lead to the conclusion that America is a looney bin.

Riesman first. Very early on in the development of public opinion polling, Riesman pointed out that there is an important element of face and social standing lying behind the results of polls. What interested him was the fact that public opinion could swing so dramatically from one side of a question to the other in no more than a few weeks. His explanation was this: When a pollster comes to the door and asks for the homeowner's opinion about Red China or the Middle East or Health Care Reform, there is a good chance that the respondent won't know anything at all about the subject and will have no opinion, at least as we ordinarily understand having an opinion. But the poll taker is likely to present himself or herself as a middle class professional [we are talking 1950's here], and the person who has come to the door will be embarrassed simply to say, "I have no idea." He or she will know perfectly well that having opinions about things like that is a sign of social status. Rich people, upper class people, have opinions. So the respondent will cough up an answer, possibly choosing one of the offered possibilities on the basis of something vaguely recalled from television or the newspaper headlines. Two weeks later, when another poll is conducted, if in the interim something has caught everyone's attention that inclines in the other direction, the poll will seem to show a big sudden shift of opinion. But in fact, all it shows is that neither the respondents to the first poll nor the respondents to the second poll actually have any sort of opinion at all.

This idea is supported, I think, by that poll about filibusters in the Senate. If three quarters of the people polled don't know that it takes 60 votes to stop a filibuster, then I think we can conclude that that 75% really know next to nothing about what is going on in the public world.

Now look at the poll commissioned by Moulitsas. There are a great many self-identified Republicans who are very, very unhappy about America. They hate the fact that Obama is president, they hate the fact that people are talking openly about same sex marriage, they hate the fact that people are losing their jobs and their houses. And someone calls them on the phone [I don't think people knock on doors any more] and asks them a series of questions,. They may be ignorant, but these folks are not stupid. They understand perfectly well that a "no" to the question, "Was Obama born in the United States?" is an anti-Obama answer. They know that "socialist" is a swear word, and one that one is permitted to use in public. So, not being offered the opportunity to say, "Yes, Obama is an a**hole," they do the next best thing and say "Yes, Obama is a socialist and he was not born in this country." The informational content of that answer is nil, but the emotive content is rich and full.

I venture to guess that if Moulitsas had commissioned a poll that asked, "Do you think Obama kills little white babies and drinks their blood," some significant non-trivial percentage would have said "yes," and a much larger percentage would have answered "I don't know." It goes without saying that there would have been a big yes vote for "Is Obama in league with the Devil?" but that might just indicate a particular theological orientation.

Polls are frequently a good indicator of feelings, if properly interpreted, but they are often no indicators at all of informed opinion. On the other hand, a poll asking which American Idol candidate the respondents support, or who is going to win the Super Bowl, may very well elicit genuinely informed opinions.

Does this make me feel any better? Well, ignorant is better than crazy [I think].

HOME AGAIN

I am home after a quick, very busy, exhausting, but quite rewarding visit to Marist College in Poughkeepsie, NY. I gave two talks, both of which were videotaped and recorded. I have been told that they will be posted on a Marist server, and that I will be given links to them. If that in fact happens, I shall review them, and if they are not totally appalling, I will post the links.

The first talk was a great success and a total failure. It was supposed to be a very high level technical discussion of a paper I have written on Kant's ethical, legal, and political theory. I sent the paper ahead to the Philosophy Department, and they discussed it in anticipation of the session. But when I showed up Tuesday evening, I discovered that the audience was utterly different from what I had expected, and that almost none of them even knew about the paper. A large group were students taking an on-line philosophy course and using my textbook, ABOUT PHILOSOPHY. They were there to meet their Instructor for the first time, as well as to meet the author of their textbook. It was wonderful and rather comic to see the Instructor say, "Hello, I am your Instructor, and here is the author of your textbook." In the thirty-five years that the textbook has been in existence, I have never met a group of students using it! So it was wonderful for me. Another group of people simply came to hear me because my talk was announced locally. And then there were the handful of people who really expected a serious discussion about Kant.

How on earthy was I going to speak to this heterogeneous group in such a way as not totally to mystify and alienate most of them? I decided to wing it. The first question got me started. A man sitting near the back of the group [there were maybe thirty or more people in the audience] asked, "Are you an atheist?"

That gave me an opening to deliver a long monologue on the nature of religious faith. A student taking a course on Marx, among other authors, asked me what people meant when they said Marx had stood Hegel on his head. Well, I could handle that one! By the end of the evening, I think everyone had had a pretty good time, even though the philosophers never did get the serious Kant discussion they came for.

The second talk, on Wednesday, was much more straightforward. I gave a formal lecture on "What Good is a Liberal Education?" that draws on ideas in the writings of Freud, Marx, and Marcuse to answer the question. I hope I can post that one. It really might provoke an interesting discussion on this blog.

Many, many thanks to Ann Davis for arranging all of this.

Oh, by the way, it was no colder in Poughkeepsie than it was when I left in Chapel Hill!

OFF TO POUGHKEEPSIE

Tomorrow well before the crack of dawn, I shall head to Marist College in Poughkeepsie to give two talks. The second one, "What Good is a Liberal Education?," has some rather unusual ideas in it, drawing on Marx, Freud, and Marcuse. Indeed, it is in its way a good example of the Frankfort School project of achieving a union of the insights of Marx and Freud. When I get home, I shall post on this blog the part of the talk that deals directly with those ideas. I will be very interested to see both what sort of response it gets at Marist and what reaction it provokes on this blog.

Meanwhile, I wait forlornly for the Congressional Democrats to do SOMETHING about health care reform.

IS DEMOCRACY POSSIBLE

There are times when I wonder, seriously, whether this country is ready for self-rule. The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press conducted a poll. Here are two results: Twenty-six percent of those polled knew that it takes sixty votes to break a filibuster in the Senate. Thirty-two percent knew that no Republican Senators had voted for the health care reform bill [estimates by those polled ranged from five or ten to twenty and more].

Now, it is popular on the left to claim that the mass media are in the pocket of conservative corporate interests dedicated to keeping the truth from the American people, who, it is imagined, would rise up and demand immediate change if only they knew the facts. But let us be serious. For almost a year now, the dominant story in the mass media has been one variant or another of the struggle by the Democrats to find and hold that sixtieth vote so that the health care bill could not be filibustered. The endless stories about the Al Franken Norm Coleman election, the countless Olympia Snowe stories, the Lieberman fiasco. This was not just a secret well-kept by Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow, for God's sake! Fox News was full of it. I don't care what slant they put on it -- whether the Republicans were mindless obstructionists or fearless defenders of the faith. All of those stories were built on the simple fact, endlessly repeated, that it takes sixty votes to break a filibuster in the Senate. And the net result of all of that newsprint and air time is that three-fourths of Americans DON'T KNOW THAT IT TAKES SIXTY VOTES TO BREAK A FILIBUSTER.

Under these conditions, democracy as political philosophers analyze it is simply not possible. It is pointless to cavil about the slant of Rahm Emmanuel or the nuances of Obama's tactics.

Here is a factoid to send shivers up your spine: Only forty-five percent of college graduates knew that it takes sixty votes to break a filibuster. MORE THAN HALF OF THOSE WHO HAVE SOMEHOW SURVIVED FOUR YEARS OF COLLEGE DO NOT KNOW THAT SIMPLE FACT.

I have spent most of my life defending the philosophical doctrine known as anarchism. But I am beginning to understand, for the first time, the great appeal in Communist circles of something known as Democratic Centralism, which means, more or less, Politbureaucracy [i.e., rule by the Politburo].

IN MEMORIAM

Two men with whom my life intersected have passed away in the last forty-eight hours. The first, Howard Zinn, is, I am sure, known to most of you. Howard was for half a century and more a voice of all that is good and decent and sane on the left. He worked in a World War II shipyard before going to college, and there became deeply involved with working class movements in a way that persisted until his death, at the age of eighty-seven. Many people on the left knew Howard much better than I, and beautiful tributes have appeared from the pens of Bob Herbert of the NY TIMES and Daniel Elsberg. When I was young, in the 50's, there were few men and women of mature years on the left who could serve as role models to those of us who were unwilling to believe that to grow old was to turn to the right. For all the decades since, Howard offered young people that model.

The second man who has just died is Dr. Bertram Schaffner, who passed away peacefully at ninety-seven. Those who read this blog will know that Schaffner was my psychiatrist in the late 40's when, as a troubled teenager, I was sent to him by my parents to treat obsessive and terrifying fears of death. In ways I could never have anticipated, his life and mine crossed and recrossed. Like me, he went to Harvard at an early age [he at fifteen, I at sixteen]. Like my sister, he completed his undergraduate education at Swarthmore College in their splendid Honors Program. Like my son, Tobias, Schaffner was gay, and although he was forced to keep that fact secret for many, many years, he worked with gay patients and was among the first psychiatrists to treat patients who had contracted the AIDS virus. He was a gentle, decent man.

Erik Erikson has a beautiful passage in his great work, Childhood and Society, that can serve as a fitting epitaph to the lives of both Howard Zinn and Bertram Schaffner:

"[The possessor of integrity] knows that an individual life is the accidental coincidence of but one life cycle with but one segment of history; and that for him all human integrity stands or falls with the one style of integrity of which he partakes."

requiescat in pace

THE INCORRIGIIBLE OPTIMIST

It seems I cannot sustain a serious funk for more than a few days. I really am a Tigger. I just spent a few moments while eating my lunch watching Obama field questions at a Republican retreat [no snarky puns, please]. He is so smart, so cool, so balanced, and has so many facts and figures at his fingertips, that he simply outclasses them all. He needs to do as many of these as the Republicans are dumb enough to allow him to do. He is even better in that sort of back and forth than he is giving a set speech.

And the Joint Chiefs are now moving to end DADT ["don't ask, don't tell," for those of you who are not totally inside the Beltway.]

Well, hope springs eternal. On the other hand, check out Krugman today. America is in deep long term trouble, economically.

Oh yes, by the way, the Tea Party Convention is in bad trouble. Bachman has pulled out [that gives you some idea], and Palin, who is getting big bucks for her appearance, is going to be left holding the teabag.

Meanwhile, a big winter storm is heading for North Carolina, and this time we may actually get snow. In anticipation, all school has been cancelled until 2013. [Just kidding].

I will try to return to serious blogging soon.