GIANTS IN THE EARTH

There were giants in the earth in those days [Genesis 6:4]

I had a dream last night in which I found myself talking to a group of Harvard students [prompted, perhaps, by the telephone chat with my son, Tobias, who is teaching this semester at Harvard Law School.] When I woke up, the dream was still vivid in my mind, and it prompted me to think back to my time as an Instructor at Harvard, in the late '50s and very early '6os [of the twentieth, not the nineteenth, century!] I ended up looking back at my course files from that period, including the file on the tutorial that I taught jointly with Barrington Moore, Jr. in the first year of a new interdisciplinary undergraduate major, Social Studies, now about to celebrate its fiftieth year in operation. I was the first Head Tutor of Social Studies, appointed by McGeorge Bundy, who the next year left Harvard to become John Kennedy's National Security Advisor. Social Studies was intended to give a select group of students an opportunity to study the social sciences in an integrated fashion, without regard for the disciplinary boundaries that at that time so markedly divided the several branches of the sozialwissenschaften from one another. The program has been a considerable success, and is now, I believe the third or fourth largest major field at Harvard.

Moore and I took charge of six sophomores, for whom, it should be noted, this tutorial was an ungraded add-on to their normal course load. Oncde a week, we met in my rooms in Winthrop House, where I was a resident tutor, for two hours. It was a bit like tag-team wrestling. Moore would start in ion them for a while, quizzing them about the reading for that session. When he flagged, he would tap me and I would jump in, picking up the pace. After two hours, the students were wrung through.

To give you some idea of how intense it was, let me simply reproduce, from my notes, the year's reading list [there were, that first year, three tutorial groups of six students each, taught by pairs of faculty so selected that each pair represented two different disciplines.]

The first reading was Adam Smith's WEALTH OF NATIONS -- all 900 pages of it! This was followed either by Schumpeter's THEORY OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT or John Stuart Mill's two-volume POLITICAL ECONOMY [the choice Moore and I made.] Next up was a volume of Marx's writings edited by Lewis Feuer, and then Alexis de Tocqueville's THE OLD REGIME AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION [a relatively light bit of reading.] Students now then did an abrupt turn, and tackled the two volume PRIMITIVE CULTURE by Sir Edward Tylor [some groups substituted Maine's ANCIENT LAW.] We were also supposed to go through Franz Boas' THE MIND OF PRIMITIVE MAN, but Moore and I took a pass on that one -- I think we had lingered too long on Marx. This was followed by Nietzsche's GENEOLOGY OF MORALS and Freud's CIVILIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS. The Nietzsche was drawn from a large collection edited by Walter Kaufman, and students were advised, parenthetically, that they should read other selections from the volume. Whether any of them did, I do not recall. Well, after that light Freud break, it was back to Emile Durkheim's SUICIDE and 350 pages of Marx Weber [the merest scratching of the surface, as those who are familiar with Weber weill recognize.] The year-long tutorial wrapped up with R. G. Collingwood's THE IDEA OF HISTORY and Alfred North Whitehead's MODES OF THOUGHT [I was opposed to that choice, never having found Whitehead's philosophy, as opposed to his mathematical logic, of much interest, but as the only non-tenured member of the Social Studies Committee I was overruled, even though I was the only philosopher in the group.]

Well, as the Emperor Joseph says in AMADEUS, there it is.

In those days, tuition at Harvard was a couple of thousand dollars a year. I think the students got their money's worth.

OBAMA'S BIG SPEECH

I am not gay, and even though I have a deep personal interest in the status of the LGBT community [my son, Tobias, is gay, and I long for the day when I can attend his wedding], I think I need to exhibit a certain restraint and circumspection in offering my judgment about Obama's speech to the Human Rights Campaign meeting in Washington. That said, I would like to explain why I think the speech was an extremely important positive moment in the long struggle for LGBT equality.

Both by his choice of words and by his choice of venue, Obama, in that speech, put the full faith and credit of the presidency behind the agenda of the LGBT community. Many of the specific items on the agenda -- most notably the repeal of DADT and DOMA -- will require congressional action, and that, as is made obvious by the current health care reform battle, is going to be complex and messy. But I think Obama deliberately and knowingly backed himself into a corner with that speech. He made it impossible for him NOT to fulfill those promises without totally alienating one of his strongest sources of political support. Presidents do not do that unless they fully intend to come through.

How should the LGBT community and its supporters respond? Obama had an answer, and it was the correct answer -- by putting even more pressure on him and on Congress to accomplish everything on their agenda. In every possible way, during his campaign, Obama made it clear that he believes change requires bottom-up pressure, not top-down largesse. The ball is in our court.

SPONTANEITY IS OVER-VALUED

Spontaneity of wit can be over-valued, I think. The carefully crafted zinger, trotted out when the perfect occasion arises, gives a greater pleasure than the cleverest riposte thrown out on the moment. Oscar Wilde's greatest bon mot, though it appears nowhere in his writings and survives only through the reports of those who heard it, was obviously lovingly shaped in the privacy of his chambers, and held back by him until the moment was right. I refer, of course, to his immortal literary evaluation of one of Charles Dickens' most famous scenes: "One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing."

My old friend and Columbia Philosophy Department colleague Sidney Morgenbesser, now sadly departed, was the author of countless repeatable quips. One of my favorites, not all that well known, concerned the New York Jewish pompous, self-important, faux English literary critic, Lionel Trilling, who taught for many years at Columbia. Morgenbesser came upon him one evening at a social gathering where Trilling was, in his customary fashion, pontificating about something or other and trying as hard as he could to seem to be an Oxford Don. Sidney walked up to him and, in his loud, penetrating voice, said, "Ah, Lionel. Incognito, ergo sum, eh?"

Sidney published almost nothing in his life, but a line like that is worth a dozen academic journal articles.

THE NOBEL

Any prize whose anointees includes Henry Kissinger must be welcomed with some caution, but the Nobel Prize Committee's choice of Obama for this year's Peace Prize is to be enjoyed, if only for the frenzy into which it has driven the Republicans. You have to feel some measure of sympathy for them. They are having a really bad decade.

PERSONAL STUFF

Several years ago, when I first considered starting a blog, I said to several of my students that it would not have personal stuff on it. "But then it won't be a blog!" they replied. Inasmuch as I am the student of my students in all things relating to contemporary culture [my sons are way too sophisticated to be reliable in this regard], I have from time to time attempted to include reports and reflections that do not rise to the level of political or philosophical commentary. Herewith a few more efforts in that direction.

I begin with the subject of pet cats. Susie and I have two cats: Murray, named after the dog on the old TV show MAD ABOUT YOU, starring Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt, and Christmas Eve, so called because she was found as a stray kitten up a tree and turned over to us in a Whole Foods parking lot by a friend on Christmas Eve thirteen years ago. Christmas is in renal failure, and must receive twice a week subcutaneous infusions of a saline solution. She is underweight, and we are desperately trying to encourage her to eat. Murray, who is eleven, is in fine health, but seriously overweight [he gives new meaning to the expression "fat cat"], and we have put him on a diet at the suggestion of our Vet. Trying simultaneously to get one cat to eat more and the other to eat less is considerably more difficult than anything I had to do when I was the father of two small boys. Murray scarfs his food down and then stares longingly at Christmas while she slowly eats part of what she has been given. If one of us does not stand guard to snatch the bowl up the moment she wanders away, he is on it in a flash. He lies on the dinner table during meals staring longingly and fixedly at the food on our plates. He has indeed lost weight -- 12 ounces in a week, which, proportional to his size, is rather fast. But since the whole point of having pets is to spoil them rotten in all the ways one could not justificably spoil one's children, the strain on Susie and me is monumental. As for Murray, all I can say is that Michael Douglas' famous "greed is good" speech in the movie WALL STREET barely scratches the surface of the emotion that Murray is visibly consumed by.

And now to muscle pain. I do a four mile power walk each morning in an effort to retard the inevitable decay of age. I plow on up and down some significant hills along a path that takes me from Meadowmont Village, where I live, to the edge of the UNC campus, and back again. Despite the fact that I encounter many runners and joggers either passing me or coming the other way, I have for months not been tempted to break into a trot. Ever since I was a boy, running has been difficult for me -- not for any particular physical reason; it is simply antipathetic to who I am. Well, three days ago, in an effort to shave some minutes off my regular time for the walk, I started jogging down the half-mile long hill that constitutes the last portion of the outward half and the first portion of the return. There were two results. First, I managed to cut my time by three or four minutes; and second, my upper legs, from knee to hip, were in such pain that I could not sit down or stand up without using my arms to assist me. Tylenol in massive doses did not even touch it. Now, I used to have serious back trouble, for which I went to a chiropracter, Keith McCormack, who earlier in life had been an Olympic athlete. He explained to me that some substance [I think it is acetylcholine, but I am not sure] builds up on the muscle sheath, and causes the muscles to go into a permanent and very painful spasm. Deep, focused, and painful massage can literally strip the accumulated chemical from the muscle and slough it off, so that the muscle goes out of spasm. Last night, awakened by the pain, I lay in bed and, with my thumbs, dug deep into the large muscles of both upper legs, repeatedly stripping them, or so it seemed to me, of the accumulation. Believe it or not, it worked! I am still hurting, and I shall take a day off this morning, but the severe and crippling muscle ache is gone.

With the public option hanging by a thread, and Afghanistan in the balance, there is not the slightest chance that either of these mini-essays will be of the slightest interest to anyone, but I feel that I have fulfilled the injunction of my students. Now if I could only learn to instant message!

FYI

You high minded types probably don't spend much time bottom feeding on the internet, so you may have missed this story, unless you live in Central Pennsylvania. [See Josh Marshall's TPM site for details.] A soccer mom had her gun permit revoked for wearing a revolver on her hip to her child's soccer game. A higher court reversed, but observed that it was a dumb thing to do. She sued the sheriff who arrested her, charging that the entire affair had caused her great distress. Tragically, she and her husband have just been found dead in their home, apparently a double suicide.

This is a terrible thing for their three children, who were home at the time, and of course for them. But the tag line of the story caught my eye. There is really no possioble comment. Here it is:

The way people look at me sometimes when I am out running errands, I feel as if I am wearing a scarlet letter, and really it’s a Glock 26."

EVEN TIGGER GETS DEPRESSED

Fair warning. This is likely to be a long, rambling, brooding blog post. Even Tigger gets depressed from time to time, when the half acre wood is no longer offering its customary delights.

The news leaking out of the White House is that Obama has ruled out drawing down U.S. forces in Afghanistan, but is still debating the requests by the military for troop increases. I have the sinking feeling that he has wandered into that quagmire, and cannot bring himself to take the bold, unpopular, but ultimately politically wise step of winding it down. I think Judith Baker is right, but I also think that there is simply nothing I or others like me can do about it.

It would take a president possessed of divine arrogance to cut our losses. I think Obama has many impressive traits of character, and many gifts of intellect, but that sort of arrogance is, I fear, not one of them.

At the same time, the health care reform effort is stumbling toward a moderately satisfactory conclusion. There will be a bill. It will be a massive improvement on what we have now. It will have something that looks like a public option in it. And it will essentially leave the inefficient, dysfunctional, unsatisfactory American health care delivery system intact.

I do not at all blame this one on Obama. He has handled himself with enormous skill in this effort, and he will be rewarded with a better bill than could have issued from the efforts of any other politician in America today. In this case, the problem is that the source of the dysfunction is not characterological but structural. The decision made at the end of World War II to tie health care to employment, a decision that worked pretty well for three or four decades when lifetime employment by a single employer was much more common, has left us with a vast system of insurance companies, HMOs, capitalist drug companies, and pay for play doctors that now yields inferior results for an exorbitant price.

[Footnote: My French cousin, Andre Zarembowich, retired Physics professor and, like me, a man of the left, tells me that the French system that is so often cited as an example in these debates actually owes its existence to the power and influence of the French Communist Party at the end of the Second World War. So the Republicans who call reform proposals socialistic are essentailly right. What they neglect to mention is that in this case, socialism has yielded a far superior result. Why am I not surprised?]

It was Marx who taught us that revolutionary change occurs when, as he put it, the new order grows in the womb of the old. That is how capitalism displaced feudalism, and it is how Marx hoped and expected that socialism would displace capitalism. To think otherwise is to fall into what Engels labeled "utopian socialism," for which he and Marx shared a contempt with the naysayers of the right. There are many interesting new formations growing in the womb of capitalism, most obvious among which is the transformation of information dispersal and authority structures by the Internet. But nothing remotely resembling such nascent change can be seen in the health care delivery sector of the American economy. That is why the entrenched interests have such an easy time of it resisting reform, and why the reforms proposed so often have the air of utopian fantasies.

I said, a few days ago, that I was tired of being perpetually angry. I also long to be able to hope. How long, O Lord, how long?