A SHAMELESS PLEA FOR SYMPATHY

I'm not sure you youngsters know just how hard it is for me to keep writing light, amusing things on this blog while the world around me is going to hell.  There is so much to be angry about -- legitimately morally outraged -- at home and abroad that I can scarcely get through the day without encountering six or seven reasons to despair.  It requires an advanced utilitarian calculus just to decide how to rank order them.  I am not talking about natural disasters like tornados and hurricanes and droughts and new strains of deadly diseases.  I am talking about genuine man-made evils [and they do seem to be mostly man-made rather than woman-made, by the way.]  Sometimes they spring from religion, such as the barbarism of ISIS or the oppression of the Palestinians.  Sometimes they are rooted in bureaucratically entrenched racism, like the murder of Michael Brown.  Often they are grounded in the very structure of our political economy, like the obscene inequalities of wealth and income.

And the worst of it is that at least in this country, many of those evils could be eliminated or at least lessened if the people most harmed by them would just get off their Barcaloungers and bother to vote.

Why, you may ask, do I not fulminate more, as many bloggers and political commentators do?  Well, I am eighty years old, and it seems I have been angry at the evils of the world for all but the first twelve or thirteen of those years.  I feel as though I came into the world angry, and I really would rather not go out the same way.  Besides, any decent composer will tell you that you cannot write all four movements of a symphony fortissimo.  There has to be a rondo or a minuet or a gigue, and at least an occasional passage piano.   Not even Wagner made everything loud.

But it is hard, it is hard.

So let's have a little sympathy for the old guy, apoplectic though he may be.

SOME THOUGHTS ON 9/11

America's attention has been focused on ISIS for some time now, culminating in the address by President Obama to the nation concerning the actions he has decided to take.  Always remembering that I am mostly ignorant of the history of the region, totally ignorant of its languages, and only fitfully aware of the details of the religious beliefs being invoked as a justification of the actions of ISIS, I should like to raise a question that I have not heard discussed.  I welcome comments, particularly from any readers who are more knowledgeable than I [which doesn't require much!]

In the decades after World War Two, international relations was dominated by a state of mutual nuclear deterrence between the United States and the Soviet Union, under which umbrella of relative safety both empires pursued a variety of regional expansions, interventions, and wars, some successful, such as the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran by the United States and the long-run domination of eastern Europe by the Soviet Union, some not successful, such as the Viet Nam War and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, a quite different situation emerged, posing a serious challenge to those in the United States who wished to continue the enormous investment in the U. S. war machine even in the absence of a credible threat to the United States [assuming, for the sake of argument, that the Soviet Union ever posed such a threat, something I seriously doubt.]  Out of the confusion of those early post-Cold War years there emerged the doctrine of "asymmetric warfare" involving threats from, and wars against, what were called "non-state actors."

The central idea of asymmetric warfare, pushed especially by Donald Rumsfeld and in many ways adapted from the thought of Mao, is that in conflicts between great powers like the United States and stateless collections of "terrorists" like Al Qaida, it is, counterintuitively, the weaker party that has certain advantages.  As interpreted by the neo-cons, this asymmetry demands even greater defense expenditures [naturally] together with a fundamental reconfiguration of U. S. military forces -- more Special Forces, and Psy-Ops programs, less in the way of big muscle-bound agglomerations of hardware designed to win World War Two.

There is much to challenge in this vision of the new world order, but the central insight is not at all stupid.  Whether one considers attacks by small groups of individuals against the persons and property of large states -- such as the 9/11 attacks we memorialize today -- to be a form of warfare or not, it is quite true that the attackers, despite their small numbers and material weakness, have certain advantages.  The most obvious advantage they possess is that they have no home address, if I may speak somewhat facetiously.  Precisely because they are not the forces of territorial states, the target nation has great difficulty knowing against whom to retaliate, or indeed even where to direct that retaliation.

Enter the ISIS, which alone among all of the "terrorist' groups that have launched attacks against people and property, aspires to be a state, indeed, to be a Caliphate.  ISIS looks now to be making a strenuous effort to seize, hold, and transform into a state a fairly large swath of contiguous territory some of which is in Iraq and some of which is in Syria. [I keep putting the word terrorist in scare quotes because it is a matter of political evaluation and ideology, not of fact, whether a group of people are terrorists, as opposed, let us say, to freedom fighters.  That said, ISIS seems to me from the reports I have read to be a group completely without any redeeming social value whatsoever, so I would be quite happy to see them killed.]

My question, to put it as simply as I can, is this:  If ISIS succeeds in its ambition to become a state, do they not then become easier rather than more difficult to deal with?  As a stateless "terrorist" group, it is amorphous, difficult to locate, difficult to engage.  As a state, it would be a small, militarily weak regional power that ought to be quite susceptible to the usual sorts of military, economic, and diplomatic pressures and containments.  It would still be a horror to the population it ruled, but that would not be a problem for the United States.  It would pose a threat to the surrounding Muslim nations, but that would be their problem, and one that perhaps they would finally do something about.

This is, to be sure, a cold-eyed heartless view, but I think that is an appropriate attitude for the United States to take to the rest of the world, at least until that longed-for day when this country can be counted on to weigh in on the correct side of disputes abroad, rather than always on the wrong side.

I would be curious to hear your reactions.

A RESPONSE TO TONY COUTURE

Pretty clearly Tony Couture's involvement with podcasting and such like things is way, way beyond mine.  I would hate to think that I was following in the footsteps of Leo Strauss on anything!  Oddly enough, Strauss and I overlapped at Chicago.  I taught there from 1961-63 when he was in full flower.  I never met him, but I did have a run-in with his acolyte, Joseph Cropsey, who was then, if I recall correctly, an Assistant Professor in the Political Science Department.  As part of my deep involvement in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the late '50s and early '60s, I had made a study of the relationship between military strategy and foreign policy, actually writing a book about the subject [The Rhetoric of Deterrence] which I was unable to get published [although Noam was very encouraging and said he thought it should be published.]  I had gotten to know the grand old man of the Political Realist school of foreign affairs, Hans Morgenthau, at Chicago, and he suggested I offer a course on military strategy and foreign policy in the Political Science Department.  [Chicago in those days was endlessly receptive to people teaching in departments other than their own.]  When I submitted a proposal to the Department Chair, Cropsey opposed it vehemently [he was no dope], but Morgenthau prevailed, and in the Fall quarter of 1962, I did indeed offer the course to fifteen students or thereabouts.

That same Fall, I offered the same course in U of C's adult education program in downtown Chicago.  October '62 was of course the occasion of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when John F. Kennedy brought the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation.  Since I was teaching the theoretical, technical, and historical materials that served as background for the crisis, I was as aware perhaps as anyone else in Chicago just how close to disaster we were coming.  I had our little VW bug loaded up with dried food, water, and a Geiger Counter, and plane reservations for my wife and myself to Canada and Mexico [depending on which way the prevailing winds would be blowing the radioactive fallout.]

As the Russian ships sailed closer to Cuba, I received a call from Marc Raskin, who was then serving on Mac Bundy's staff in the Old Executive Office Building.  Marc asked what I was doing about the crisis [!]  I said I had a Geiger Counter in my car.  He was very disapproving of me, and told me I should be doing whatever I could to deflect the coming confrontation.  I had no idea what he thought I could accomplish as an unknown Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago [and an E-3 enliksted man in the Illinois National Guard, but he did not know that.]  "What are you doing?" I asked.  He leaned closer to the phone [I swear I could hear him do it] and said, sotto voce, "We are trying to reach the Pope."

I think it was at that point that I decided we were lost.

THANK YOU ALL

Thank you all, Tony Couture, Jim Westrich, and Jerry Fresia, for your advice on  how to proceed in my Marx course.  Tony, my problem with your suggestion [which I take to be itself a complicated joke!] is that I would need to color code certain passages with all three colors, which would produce one godawful blur.

Jim, Value, Price, and Profit is essential to my story, because it proves that Marx could have written like Ricardo had he wanted to [contrary to what I have elsewhere called the Childhood Polio theory of his writing style, which has it that he contracted a nearly fatal case of Hegelism as a child and hence cannot be expected to write like an Englishman.]  I am tempted to start with Smith and Ricardo [which I did in my book Understanding Marx] except that I would then be weeks into the course before the students read a word by Marx, which seems to me not a good idea.  But NO idea is a good idea!

Jerry, in Moneybags Must Be So Lucky I actually introduce the idea of ironic discourse by talking about a Donne sonnet and then some analysis of the discourse of a lapsed Catholic, before I tackle Marx.

But I have made a perhaps fateful decision:  For once in my entire sixty-year-long teaching career, I am not going to pander to the students and try to explain difficult concepts to them by making references to Lady Gaga and the Kardashians.  God damn it, I am for once going to show them what a real intellectual sounds like.  When I talk about the relation between language and reality, I will refer them to Auerbach's Mimesis, and on the very first day, when they can still drop the course, I am going to warn them that I am doing this, and ask them to decide whether they want the real thing for once rather than a watered down, warmed up, debased simulacrum of the real thing.  If only one of them remains, then he or she will get the best  course ever taught at UNC Chapel Hill, and the rest can eat their hearts out.

All of which reminds me of the old joke about the guy who has a flat tire out in the sticks and has to walk five miles to a gas station for a jack.  As he walks, he has an increasingly angry interior dialogue with the station attendant who, he imagines, will not allow him to borrow the jack.  By the time he actually gets to the gas station he is steaming.  As he walks up to the pump, the smiling owner says, "Good evening, sir.  May I help you?" to which the man responds, snarling, "You can keep your damned jack!"

I think I better go and have a glass of Cabernet.

HUM A FEW BARS AND I'LL FAKE IT

One of my very favorite movies is the 1984 Milos Forman version of the 1979 Peter Shaffer play Amadeus [which Wikipedia tells me was inspired by a Pushkin play!  Who knew?]  If you have crawled out from under a rock too recently to have seen it, Amadeus is the story of the tragic life of Antonio Salieri, a quite competent and legitimately celebrated composer in the 18th century court of the Emperor Joseph II who has the devastating misfortune to reside in Vienna at the same time as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.  I have always identified with the central character, Salieri, who, having committed his life to music and made quite a respectable run of it, is utterly overshadowed by the truly divine music that pours seemingly effortlessly from the young, boorish lout Mozart.  [I trust no one will be so lacking in elementary literary critical skills as to imagine that it is Mozart, not Salieri, who is the focus of the play and movie.]

At one point in the movie, the young Mozart is trying to explain to the Emperor and his little circle of court composers why he wants to write an opera based on the scandalous Beaumarchais play The Marriage of Figaro.  Rather excitedly, Mozart says that in a play, if you have three or four characters speaking at once, each saying something different, the result is an incomprehensible babble.  But in an opera, one can have two, three, four, five, even six characters all singing at once, each one singing a different text, and the result is perfect harmony.  The Emperor and his coterie are clearly unimpressed, but in the end relent, thank heavens, and allow Mozart to write one of the most glorious works in the operatic repertory.

I thought of that scene yesterday as I sat in my study with a pad on my lap, beginning to map out my Marx course.  Even though it is almost four months until the first meeting, I have been brooding for some while on how to organize the course, and finally decided to try putting something on paper.  My problem is this:

Thirty-eight years ago, in the Fall of 1976, while teaching a graduate course at UMass on Classics of Critical Social Theory, I had an idea, an epiphany, an eclaircissement.  On the reading list was Volume One of Capital, a book I had last read in 1960 in preparation for the inaugural Sophomore Tutorial of Social Studies at Harvard.  As I re-read this famous, and famously difficult, book, I suddenly understood, with a flash of insight, what Marx was doing.  Translating that act of comprehension into clear, simple expository prose took me a good deal of effort over the next twelve years and involved, among other things, learning Linear Algebra, reading my way through an entire library of works on mathematical economics, plowing through endless volumes of Marx's letters and less important writings, and telling the story to myself over and over until each element of it was clear.

Although the understanding came to me in an instant, it is exceedingly complex, for Marx's thought in Capital is deeper, richer, more multi-faceted than anything I have ever studied, not excluding Kant's First Critique.  Unlike the Critique or any other great work I have read, save perhaps the Republic, Capital is a book that cannot be understood unless one attends carefully to its literary style and works out why Marx chose to write in a fashion utterly unlike that adopted by any other social scientist who has ever lived.  As I recognized in a flash and eventually was able to explain in clear, simple language, Marx believed that his complex vision of capitalist society and economy could only be captured by a language simultaneously precisely technical and thoroughgoingly ironic, for in Marx's understanding, it is capitalist society itself that has an ironic structure.  Hence, if I may speak paradoxically, I could only capture Marx's vision if I could find a way to build the irony into the equations.  This I did, I believe, in the two books and several articles I wrote between 1976 and 1988.

I have determined to communicate the entire multi-dimensional complexity of my understanding of Marx in my course next Winter and Spring.  But where do I begin?  The story is not linear, as have been so many of the theoretical stories I have told in my philosophical writings.  Every part of it requires for its comprehension a grasp of all the other parts.  Shall I begin with the political and economic situation into which Marx was born, or with Marx's own life story, or perhaps with a history of the Political Economy of Smith and Ricardo?  Or shall I begin with a lecture on the relationship between literary style and an author's conception of reality, making reference to Erich Auerbach's Mimesis.  At what point in the semester do I actually open Capital to page 1 and read aloud the deep, evocative, complex first sentence:  "The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as "an immense accumulation of commodities," its unit being a single commodity."   To steal a line from The King and I, it is a puzzlement.

Sigh.  Perhaps I should sing it.

SHEER FUN

While I was agitating myself about what I should blog about today, I happened in Brian Leiter's blog on a link to "The Harshest Philosopher-on-Philosopher Insults in History".  In these terrible times, each of us deserves a few moments of what the Mikado called innocent merriment.  I shan't ruin the fun by quoting Harshest Insult Number 1 [in the usual fashion, the thirty insults are listed in reverse order of harshness.]  But here is:

12. Karl Popper on Ludwig Wittgenstein“Not to threaten visiting lecturers with pokers.” (On being challenged by a poker-wielding Wittgenstein to produce an example of a moral rule; the discussion degenerated quickly from there.)

I will tell you right now that my favorite, as indeed it should be, is Number 1.

THE SIGNATURE OF ALL THINGS

I do not read many serious novels.  I don't suppose I have read more than half a dozen in the past twenty years, not counting the re-reading of several of Jane Austen's works.  However, I learned long ago to trust my big sister Barbara's recommendations, so when she suggested that I take a look at The Signature of All Things, by Elizabeth Gilbert, I surfed over to Amazon.com and ordered a copy.  Shortly thereafter the novel arrived on my desk with a thunk, all 499 pages of it.  I have just closed the book after reading the last page, my eyes tearing up as I did.  I most warmly recommend it to all of you.

What is it about?  Well, in one sense, it is about frustrated sexuality and Botany, especially Botany.  I take that back.  It would be more accurate to say that it is especially about frustrated sexuality.  No, let me say that it is about both frustrated sexuality and Botany.  But then, it is also about the pharmaceutical industry and Tahiti.  It is the story of the long life of a wealthy and intellectually curious American woman.  To be sure, it is also, in a manner of speaking, about Richard Dawkins and the selfish gene.  And a good deal of it is about mosses.

It is one of the most extraordinary novels I have read.