MORE FREUD

Okay, here it is, the second lecture on Freud.  Let me know what you think.

A MEDITATION ON BLOGGING

Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

3 To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:

² A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;

³ A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;

⁴ A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;

⁵ A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;

⁶ A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;

⁷ A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;

⁸ A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

This is a meditation on blogging.  I take as my inspiration the immortal passage from Ecclesiastes because it expresses so beautifully what Erik Erikson, in Childhood and Society, called the life cycle. 

Once I was young, now I am old.  Once every idea was an illumination, every book an adventure, every argument a call to arms.  Now, each idea echoes with a lifetime of reflection, each book takes its place in the bookshelf of my mind next to countless others remembered as old friends, each argument brings the weary thought, “Have we not yet settled that old fight?”

Each book I have written is forever marked by the moment in life’s journey that I had reached as I wrote.  In Defense of Anarchism is a young man’s book, a gauntlet flung in the face of overreaching authority.  Moneybags Must Be So Lucky, despite its provocative subject, is a mature reflection, rich in attention to irony and metaphor and the literary shaping of thought.

When I was young, my university lectures were studied, neatly outlined, presented as though carved in stone.  But as I grew older, more and more often memories, stories, allusions to matters far afield would creep in, until now, I am as garrulous as any old man sitting by the fire and remembering earlier days.

When I retired nine years ago, I launched this blog in an effort to continue a lifetime of teaching.  At first, terrified that my active life had ended, I plunged into a lengthy autobiography and then into a series of tutorials, mini-tutorials and appreciations so extended that very soon I had written more than half a million words.  But blogging is unlike teaching.  It is lonely, impersonal, episodic.  There are no faces, no eyes widening or narrowing, no sense of the passage of human time.  Each post is, as it were, born yesterday.  I recall with longing the master classes I have watched in which an old cellist or violinist listens to a young, eager aspirant and breaks in from time to time to shape a phrase or correct a bowing, offering his or her lifetime of experience to help the young student transmute notes into music and music into art.

To be sure, through a blog I can reach in one day more minds than I would have encountered in a decade of teaching, but how much more satisfying it would be to sit quietly and talk with just one or two, shaping a thought, offering a phrase, drawing a parallel with an old memory and seeing in the eyes a flash of understanding, a realization of possibilities newly opened.

This is what the young Marx had in mind when he wrote so beautifully, in the fragment on alienated labor, of the way in which the capitalist organization of the factory routinizes and dehumanizes the natural human activity of collective production.  I fear the Internet is the factory of the mind.

TODAY

I did something unusual in my lecture today.  To illustrate Freud's process of dream interpretation, I recounted a dream I had last night together with my associations to different elements of it, some of which were quite personal and sexual.  I did this in order to illustrate what Freud himself did, and to show the students why he was so violently attacked by the medical establishment for doing so.  I will be interested to see how viewers respond to it.

TIME OUT

I will be honest.  I do not enjoy the argument I have been having with the people who comment on this blog, and since none of us can do anything about what we have been arguing about [we agree on our goals and on all available practical steps to reach them] I am just going to stop posting comments on these matters.  Lord knows, there is no shortage of such comments in the blogosphere, so my words will not be missed.   I simply do not want to go on.  It is hard enough to have to live with the reality to which I seem to have been condemned for much, if not all, of the rest of my life.

As Hannah Arendt remarked to me after my lecture on Mill, when I told her I was writing  a book on Kant's ethics, "It is so much more pleasant to spend time with Kant."

Feel free to continue the argument in this comments section.  I will faithfully read what you write, but I just will not join in.

HI HO, HI HO, IT'S OFF TO WORK I GO

Well, enough about world-historical matters.  I must go off and give the second of my Freud lectures.  In this one I finally get around to sex, sort of.  Spread the word.

CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER, AS THE REVEREND DODGSON SAID

It seems The National Enquirer has a front page story to the effect that Trump has caught out General Flynn as a Russian agent in the White House.  When one considers the long and intimate relartionship between Trump and the editor of the Enquirer, it looks as though plans are under way to throw ole Mike under the bus, and blame him for any appearance of collusion between Putin and the Trump campaign.

But of course, everyone must be presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, and besides the Enquirer did, after all, break the story of John Edwards' affair.

You gotta love it.

HOW COME?

I am genuinely puzzled by something.  Let me explain.  I have a number times written about Trump’s links to Russia, as well as the links to Russia of many in his campaign.  Just yesterday I described the FBI investigation as dealing with treason, no less.  In response to my remarks, a number of commentators on this blog have written long rebuttals emphasizing the lack of the sort of hard, irrefutable evidence one would need in order to get a conviction in court.  At least one commentator has described me as having been taken in by anti-Russia hysteria being pushed by centrist Clintonite Democrats.  I was counseled to recall that one must be presumed innocent until proven guilty. Okay.  I freely acknowledge that I have no direct knowledge of the sort one could present in court.  All of my opinions are based on circumstantial evidence and hearsay twice removed, as it were.

But these same people seem not to have adopted this evidentiary stance when discussing the alleged corruptions and other evils of the Clintons.  Why not?  I don’t know.

Now, let me be clear.  I hold the Clintons to the same standard to which I hold Trump.  Do I think it is significant that Hillary Clinton gave richly compensated speeches to Wall Street firms?  You bet.  Do I believe she was in the tank, as they say, for Wall Street?  Yup.  Do I also think Trump is in the tank for Putin?  I do, on the basis of roughly the same sort of public information.  Do I hope that Trump is revealed to have been literally paid off by Putin?  I certainly do.  Is there a difference?  I think so.  The Clintons are, as it were, ideologically aligned with Wall Street.  They were not simply bought off.  Absent those fat honoraria, they still would have parroted Wall Street’s line.  But Trump, I believe, has no ideological alignment at all.  He really is just bought and paid for.  Is one worse than the other?  Not necessarily. 

So maybe someone will explain to me why the difference.  How come the exquisite jurisprudential nicety when talking about Trump and the easy rush to judgment when talking about Clinton?