A LITTLE LEARNING IS A DANGEROUS THING

Like most folks who hang out in my quartier of the Realm of Ideas, I have heard of the great library at Alexandria, and about the fire that destroyed it, thereby [or so I understood] depriving us of much of ancient literature and science.  But to be honest, that was about all I knew.  Indeed, I had only the vaguest idea where Alexandria was or is [it turns out to be on the western end of the Nile delta, maybe 100 miles northwest of Cairo.]  So after racing through J. K. Rowling’s latest detective novel, and exhausting the schlock left by renters of my apartment, I went to the Abbey Bookshop and bought The Library of Alexandria, a 2004 collection of ten original essays mostly by Australian classical scholars, edited by Roy MacLeod.  I am now more than halfway through the book [it only runs to 179 pages], and I confess that it is in many ways fascinating.  It would be a grave understatement to say that I did not know most of what I am reading.  Good grief.  I did not know that Aristotle’s library is thought to have ended up in the library at Alexandria.  Indeed, I did not even know that Aristotle had a personal library important enough to feature in such scholarly discussions.

[Wikipedia was less than helpful in filling me in about the book’s editor, by the way.  When I typed in “Roy McLeod” – misspelling his name – the following wonderful bit of information popped up:  “McLeod was the second head football coach for the Dickinson State Blue Hawks located in Dickinson, North Dakota and he held that position for the 1927 season. His coaching record at Dickinson State was 1 wins, 0 losses, and 1 ties.  As of the conclusion of the 2009 season, this ranks him #13 at Dickinson State in total wins and #1 at the school in winning percentage (.750)” ]

It seems that writing was invented about 5000 to 5400 years ago in the Mesopotamian city of Uruk, in what is now southern Iraq [you understand that I am simply repeating what I have just read – I am completely at the mercy of the authors whose essays I have now finished.]  D. T. Potts tells us that writing was “devised, purely and simply, as a solution to an accounting-technical problem [namely, how to manage the state lands and wealth that the rulers had extracted from their subjects], not for the perpetuation of myths, epics, hymns, historical records, or royal propaganda.”  The first real library – that is to say, a systematic collection and indexing of texts, either on tablets or papyrus or parchment – dates from a bit less than three thousand years later.  An Assyrian king named Asurbanipal [how many of you have heard of him?  I certainly had not] seems to have assembled a sizable collection of “books” – perhaps as many as 5,000 distinct titles, albeit represented by 30,000 or more tablets, fragments of tablets, and other archeologically recovered remains.

But the great library at Alexandria, established in the 4^th century B.C., is said to have held as many as four hundred thousand scrolls, some containing one work alone, others containing several works.  I was staggered when I read that.   That is the equivalent of a first-rate modern American college library.  Now, to be sure, not all the books in the Great Library of Alexandria were of the quality of Aristotle’s Physics.  But then, neither are all the books in the Frost Library at Amherst College!

One of the distinct charms of reading a collection of essays like this about a subject one knows nothing about [as opposed to a book-length treatise by a single scholar] is that whereas everything in the first essay is news, by the fourth or fifth essay, you find yourself encountering again and again the same relatively small budget of juicy stories and quotes.  Ptolemy III Euergetes [there were fifteen Ptolemys, the thirteenth of course being Cleopatra’s half-brother, defeated by the combined military forces of Elizabeth Taylor and Claude Raines] apparently made it a practice to seize whatever books could be found on ships entering the harbor at Alexandria, thereby augmenting the holdings of the Library.  The first time one encounters this story, it is enchanting.  The third time, one says with world-weary ease, “Oh yes, Ptolemy III Euergetes – I know all about him.”  The Great Fire, by the way, started either deliberately or accidently by Caesar, may not have actually the preponderance of holdings of the Library, although it does seem to have knocked a hole in them.

Let me close with a wonderful quote from Seneca the Younger in the first century A. D., of which I was also unaware.  “What is the point of countless books and libraries, whose titles the owner can barely read through in his lifetime?  The sheer number of them burdens and does not instruct the one who wants to learn, and it is much better to entrust yourself to a few authors than to wander through many.”

EPIPHANY

When I was two, my parents enrolled me in the Sunnyside Progressive School in Queens, NY [see my autobiography for the seamy details.]  I went to school for the next twenty-one years, until, in June, 1957, I was awarded the doctorate in Philosophy by Harvard University.  After a six months hiatus for active duty in the U. S. Army, as part of my obligation to the Massachusetts National Guard, I began a teaching career that lasted exactly half a century.  Thus, when I retired in August 2008 I had been in school, one way or another, for seventy-two years.  The last months of my fifty-year career were devoted to packing up and moving to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, but when the last box was unpacked and the last book put up on the shelves of my new home office, I complained to Susie that I needed to find something to do. 

Oh, I tried.  I taught four courses in Duke University's "learning in retirement" program;  I taught a graduate seminar in UNC's Public Policy Department.  I edited my published and unpublished papers in four volumes and put them on Amazon as E-books.  I even spent a year as an unpaid professor at Bennett College trying unsuccessfully to develop a program to address the low graduation rate.  Fretfully, urgently, anxiously, I was trying to find a new job.

All the while, more or less on the side, I was running this blog.  The day before yesterday I had an epiphany -- or, as we say in this neighborhood, an eclaircissement.  THIS is my job!  Writing regularly for a blog is a job, at least for someone who thinks of himself as a writer.  All along, I have had a job.  I don't get paid for it, of course, but I have a pension, so that is not a problem.  I can stop worrying about what I am going to do in retirement.  I have been doing it for six years.

Susie is very relieved.

A DISASTER SLOWLY UNFOLDING

As readers of this blog know, I am on a very large distribution list maintained by my old Harvard colleague William Polk.  Several times I have posted or linked to important essays written by Bill on world affairs.  This morning I received an email from him with a link to a deeply troubling essay by Israeli politician and commentator Uri Avnery.  I urge you to read it here.

An additional thought about Avnery's essay.  If Hillary Clinton is elected President in 2016, which seems increasingly likely, she will, I am certain, be completely in bed with Netanyahu or whatever expansionist militarist Israel politician is in office then.    One of the bitter ironies of contemporary American politics is that the only presidential aspirant in either party of whom that cannot be said is Rand Paul.

These are difficult times even for a sentimental Tigger like me.

QVELLING

On June 30, Obama held a White House celebration of Gay Pride month.  Here is the fifth paragraph of his remarks:

"Three other people I want to mention.  First of all, Tobias Wolff, who's been advising me since my first presidential campaign and has had a great impact on my administration and how we've thought about a bunch of issues.  Please give Tobias a big round of applause.  (Applause.)"

I am so proud I could burst.  as I have often observed, I really have trophy sons.

THINGS CHANGE

Juhani Yli-Vakkuri  offers a fascinating comment on my post about the differences among academic disciplines.  His description of present-day practices among analytic philosophers is utterly distinct from my experiences [with analytic philosophers as well as those of other persuasions].  Since I have been out of touch with academic philosophy for a quarter of a century, and out of sympathy with it for a good deal longer, I accept his description as an accurate portrayal of the current state of affairs.

Let me explain why I find the world he describes so alien.  The greatest work in what the Germans call geisteswissenschaften and the eighteenth century English called Moral Philosophy [as opposed to Natural Philosophy, or science] has always seemed to me to depend essentially both on reason and on what literary critics call voice.  It is through his or her distinctive voice that great philosophers, historians, sociologists, and yes even economists communicate their distinctive vision of the human condition.  Aristotle's voice is completely different from that of Plato, Hume's voice is nothing like that of Kant, and Marx's voice is utterly unique in the Western intellectual tradition.  Whatever cavils you may have about the teaching of A Theory of Justice, there is no denying that Rawls achieves a distinctive voice in that influential work, as did Jean-Paul Sartre, Willard van Orman Quine, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ludwig Wittgenstein in theirs.  All my life, I have striven for a literary voice that would capture my complex understanding of contemporary public affairs.

Necessarily, it seems to me, a co-authored work, growing as Yli-Vakkuri suggests out of collaborative discussion and intellectual exchange, cannot have an authentic and distinctive voice.  Inevitably, unless one author completely dominates the others, it will be written in the flat, correct, acceptable one-dimensional language of the Academy.  There will be no dark recesses or ironic overtones, no multi-dimensional representations of a complex, perhaps even internally contradictory social reality.  In short, in literary style, it will be indistinguishable from a journal article in Microbiology.

But if that is true, why bother?  Philosophers do not, qua philosophers, know anything in particular, save perhaps the history of their own field.  They do not do experiments, they do not make observations, they do not prove anything [although logicians do, of course].  It is for this reason, as I have observed here before, that there is little value in workmanlike uninspired Philosophy, even though there is great value in workmanlike uninspired research science.

SUMMER READING

The shelves in my Paris apartment are home to what any objective observer would, I believe, judge to be a rather odd collection of books:  A forty-three volume set of the complete works of Marx and Engels in German, one copy each of every edition and translation of every book I have ever published [some seventy or so volumes in all], a nine-volume paperback set of the works of Kant in German together with twenty or thirty secondary works on the philosophy of Kant, thirty old somewhat tattered and much underlined works of medieval and French history in French, a vast collection of Paris maps and guide books, and perhaps seventy schlock spy, action, and detective novels which latter, taken together, have little or no redeeming social value.  I can say with confidence that I have read every one of the schlock novels and all of the original English language versions of the books by me, and I have actually, over a lifetime, read all of the French language history.  Beyond that, things are a bit spotty.

In the airport while waiting for the flight to London on June 16th, I bought a Frederick Forsyth page turner, which I started on the plane and finished here in Paris.  That was followed by several more schlock novels picked up at Abbey books, a little second-hand English language bookshop behind Eglise St Severin.  After that I read the good book [as I think of it] recommended by my sister, and commented on a few days ago on this blog. 

Somewhat at loose ends for diversionary reading, I shelled out twenty dollars at Shakespeare and Co. for the second J. K. Rowling detective novel published under her momentary pseudonym Robert Galbraith.  The Rowling book was marvelous.  Everyone knows the story of the trouble she had finding a publisher for the first Harry Potter book -- eight houses turned it down before Rowling's second agent sent it to Bloomsbury.  In The Silkworm, the novel I read last week, Rowling settles accounts in spectacular and gory fashion with the world of authors, agents, and publishers.  Rowling is a wonderfully accomplished writer, and I recommend the book to you whole-heartedly.

But that was then.  What now?  Well, a former renter left a copy of the first of the Jack Reacher series by Lee Childs, Killing Floor.  Inasmuch as I had already read three or four Jack Reacher pot boilers, I grabbed it and am now about halfway through its 524 pages.  Reacher, for those of you who have not yet sunk this low, is described as a 6'5" former military policeman.  In the recent film version, he is played by Scientology cultist Tom Cruise, who tops out at 5'6".  I think the Head of Casting may have been dyslexic.

USA USA AND OTHER THINGS

Last night Susie and I went to dinner at Antinea, a little pizza restaurant directly across the street from our apartment.  When we entered, every eye was fixed on the large TV screen, watching France play Nigeria in the Round of Sixteen of the World Cup.  We sat down at the 79th minute, with the score 0-0.  Six minutes later France scored on a little header, and the restaurant erupted.  Down the street I could hear the cheers from The Long Hop, a bar favored by young folks who spill out onto the sidewalk most evenings.  In the third minute of the five minute extended play period France scored again, knocking Nigeria out of the tournament.  After France's disastrous World Cup last time around, the whole country has been electrified by her success thus far.  Tonight the U. S. plays Belgium.

When we got back to our apartment, I turned on my computer to check the news, and learned of the pair of decisions handed down by the Supreme Court.  That both decisions are disastrous goes without saying, but I think they have quite different significances.

The Hobby Lobby decision granting to certain businesses the legal right to claim protection of their "religious beliefs" against The Affordable Care Act is by any measure the more grotesque of the two, and Justice Ginsburg is clearly correct in warning that the majority has opened the door to an endless series of meretricious claims of conscience by those fictional persons we call corporations.  Only someone with Marx's mordant satirical bent could fully appreciate the decision to confer personhood on corporations while robbing actual persons of the elementary right to medical protection.  But despite the grotesquerie of the Court's behavior, I am convinced that they are in this instance fighting a losing battle.  Capitalism does not need modern women to stay at home barefoot and pregnant while their husbands command a "family wage" from their employers.  Capitalism needs well-trained, educated women in the workplace receiving a fraction of the wages paid to comparable men and thus lowering the cost of labor.  The religious obsessions of the devout are an impediment to profit, and hence will in time give way to capitalist rationality.

 The decision concerning labor union agency fees is quite another matter.  That decision is manifestly in the interest of capital, and will therefore stand unless there is a tectonic shift in the composition of political forces in the United States.  The full-scale assault on unions is now thirty-five years old, and there is very little evidence even in the Democratic Party of a will to reverse it.  Surely no serious effort to re-invigorate collective bargaining will issue from a Clinton presidency.

There have been times during my life when progressive forces could look to the courts to advance our cause beyond what we were able at that moment to win through elections, but this is not one of those times.  There really is no alternative to large-scale mass organization [violence being no more than a late-night fantasy, regardless of want we might imagine.] 

I await reports of today's USA-Belgium game with a heavy heart.