AN IMPORTANT POST REPOSTED

I am currently engaged in the tedious task of creating the 2014 volume of Pebbles From the Philosopher's Stone, a selection of things I wrote last year [the five previous volumes are available on box,net.]  I just came across this appreciation, in February of last year, of the fine new book by Professor Jacqueline Jones, one of America's best historians.  I think it is worth re-posting.  Here it is:

Back on January 25th, when I was confined to one finger on my IPhone, I promised to write about Jacqueline Jones' new book, A Dreadful Deceit, when I returned home and could type with both of my forefingers. The time has come to fulfill that promise.

Jacqueline Jones is one of the most distinguished and accomplished scholars now writing American History. Intellectual disciplines go through moments of extraordinary accomplishment separated by long deserts of mediocrity. I have many times observed that Philosophy, far and away the oldest of the disciplines, has had stretches of five hundred years or more when nothing much seems to be happening, interrupted by eruptions of sheer brilliance. Think of fifth and fourth century B. C. Athens, twelfth and thirteenth century Europe and North Africa, Seventeenth and Eighteenth century Great Britain and France and Prussia. The same seems to be true for the younger disciplines. Sociology, now mired in the tedium of opinion surveys and statistical manipulations, was, somewhat more than a century ago, the most exciting of the Social Sciences, with Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Karl Mannheim and many others transforming our understanding of the social realm. There have been moments [not now, I think] when Literary Criticism sparkled. Economics has flourished, especially when Karl Marx was alive. Even Political Science, which is not really a discipline at all, has had its moments. This seems to be American History's time. The depth, richness, complexity, and sophistication of the work now being done by the best American Historians, especially on the story of African-Americans, is worlds better than what is being written by philosophers, economists, sociologists, political scientists, and literary critics these days. And in this moment of its flourishing, Jackie Jones is one of the very best. Two of her previous books, American Work andLabor of Love, Labor of Sorrow, are among the best things ever written about America.

The subtitle of A Dreadful Deceit is "The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama's America." Jones presents her book as the detailed stories of six individuals, ranging in historical time and place from seventeenth century colonial Maryland to 1970s Detroit, but these stories are a device for organizing a sweeping survey of the entire history of race in America. It is, contrary to superficial appearances, a book with a strong driving thesis that informs Jones' selection of the stories and of the vast amount of historical detail of time and place that she weaves around those stories. The thesis is nicely summarized exactly halfway through the book:

"The notion of racial differences between blacks and whites would provide a guiding principle for postwar [i.e., post Civil War] political relations and create a social superstructure to replace the legal institution of slavery. Southern yeoman farmers could ignore the material similarities between themselves and freedpeople and embrace a notion of whiteness that guaranteed them considerable privileges and legal rights, without altering their lowly class status. Politicians could appeal to their impoverished white neighbors and exalt solidarity among white men, all the while exploiting the labor of tenants, sharecroppers, and field hands regardless of color. Yet despite (or perhaps because of) the widespread acceptance of the notion of race, that notion did not necessarily lend itself to proof -- or to rational discussion for that matter" [p. 151]

The seventeenth century colonialists who sought to make their fortunes on land granted to them by the English King needed labor to transform the virgin forests into fields on which they could grow cash crops for the home market [tobacco, rice, later cotton.] Their first solution was to bring the labor with them in the form of indentured English workers, but though they continued to use these workers for almost two centuries, they posed certain problems. The indentured workers were English subjects and hence had legal protections that the courts set up in the New World were bound to observe.

The colonists tried to use the labor of the indigenous peoples, but this also posed problems. These "Indians" were often members of powerful nations ["tribes"] with whom the colonists entered into political and military alliances, and to whom they could appeal for protection when their "masters" sought to exploit them. One of the many fascinating elements in the early chapters of Jones' book is her detailed account of the political negotiations and shifting alliances between the colonists and the various indigenous nations. These relationships were really no different in motivation from those into which European nations entered with one another in their endless jockeying for power and material advantage.

The men and women captured, or sold into bondage, in West Africa and brought to Virginia and Maryland also belonged to nations, some them powerful, but those nations were too far away to offer protection, and so the Africans could be exploited and subdued to bondage more easily.

Race played virtually no role in all of this. As Jones says early in her first chapter, "Local political economies and labor demands shaped by military imperatives -- not racial prejudices -- account for the origins of slavery in the colonies." [p. 7] So long as slavery was legal, the slave owners had no need to justify their treatment of their slaves, any more than they had a need of an elaborate ideological rationalization for their treatment of their livestock, their horses, or, for that matter, their tables and chairs. But with the defeat of the South in the Civil War and the end of slavery, a situation emerged that was anomalous and required justification. "[W]hites -- surrounded by a group of people toiling at ill-paid tasks, the men deprived of the right to vote and the women limited to domestic service -- devised a racial ideology from a harsh reality, an ideology that justified the immiseration of black men, women, and children, all in the name of racial difference. [p. 135]

The implications of this central insight, which Jones pursues through four centuries in the pages of her book, are profound, and of the very greatest importance for our understanding of contemporary politics. The subordinated position of African-Americans, and now of Hispanic Americans, was inflicted upon them and exists today not because of the subjective, private, irrational prejudices of White Americans, but because it has served the economic interests of the rich while placating exploited Whites, whose disadvantaged status is made more or less palatable to them by the knowledge that their condition is at least superior to that of their black and brown neighbors. So long as that subordinated economic position remains essentially untouched, not even the ascension to the White House of one of their own will address the roots of what today we call "racism."

It would be foolhardy of me to attempt to summarize Jones' book, for its real strength lies in the rich detail with which she fortifies and elaborates its central thesis. This is not a quick read. Indeed, it took me more than a month to read the entire book, even though it is only 301 pages long. But it is a book of the very greatest importance, and I recommend it to you most strongly.

SE HABLA ESPANOL

Once again the cry goes up in Republican circles for people living in this country to speak English.  The same people who are unnerved by anyone who dresses differently or has a different skin tone or worships a different god are driven to despair by the realization that some of their neighbors actually speak a different language.  I think it might be useful to recall a little history.

Let us begin with the founding of the American Republic.  Some of you may be surprised to learn that in the late eighteenth century, a lively debate took place concerning what ought to be the new nation's official language.  English was of course a popular option, but in some colonies, such as Pennsylvania, German gave English a good run for its money .  There was even a small town that decided a new nation needed a new language, and went about creating an entirely new tongue for the fledgling Republic [I do not actually know their creation, but I suspect it was not much more imaginative than Pig Latin.  Making up a really new language is rather a difficult task, as J. R. R. Tolkein could have attested.]

In the latter nineteenth century, immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe began to pour into the United States.  They tended to settle in welcoming neighborhoods, with the result that entire areas were completely dominated by new arrivals speaking something other than English.  In the big cities of the Northeast, there were Italian neighborhoods, Polish neighborhoods, and German neighborhoods.  Everyone was Roman Catholic, of course, but in the neighborhood churches, the sermons were preached in Italian, Polish, or German.  [This was well before Vatican Two, so the Mass itself was celebrated in Latin no matter what the neighborhood.]

The transformation of newcomers to "Americans" has tended to be a three generation process.  The first generation -- the adults who got off the boats at Castle Garden or Ellis Island, continued to speak their mother tongues, shopping in local grocery stores in Italian or German or Russian, or Chinese, and learning no more than a few words of English in many cases.  The mother tongue was spoken at home, so the children grew up learning it fluently, but in order to make their way in school, they had to master English.  They quite often married the sons or daughters of immigrants from different countries, to the great distress of their parents, so they in turn spoke English at home, even though they spoke German or Italian or Chinese when they took the grandchildren to see the old folks.  Their children -- the third generation -- were native English speakers and very often knew no more than a few words of the traditional language.

When my grandfather, Barnet Wolff, ran for office on the Socialist Party ticket, his schedule of appearances was listed in The Call, the leading English language Socialist newspaper.  The paper listed him as speaking sometimes in English and sometimes in "Jewish" -- what we would call Yiddish.  Other candidates were announced as speaking in Italian, for example.  Readers of The Call could choose the street corner that suited their linguistic preferences.

This has been the story of America from its founding and before.  The current nativist abhorrence of Spanish-speaking Americans is both ugly and ignorant.  Donald Trump's mother was born in Scotland.  His father's parents were German immigrants.  Piyush Jindal, who goes by  the name of Bobby, was in utero when his parents immigrated from India [thus making him an anchor baby.]  Rick Santorum's father came to America at the age of seven from Italy.  Only the Native Americans can lay claim to being indigenous, and even in their case, of course, the migration was just a trifle earlier.

HUMBLE THANKS

NotHobbes and NoComment have honored me by responding with great generosity to my self-indulgent post  "Donald Winnicott and Me."  My thanks to both of them.  I have followed NotHobbes' progress for some years now, and was even privileged to read his impressively scholarly Master's Essay on a topic in Scottish history hitherto entirely unknown to me.  Both of them have reminded me of what I ought not to have needed to be reminded, that for a writer, any writer, what matters is not numbers of books sold nor royalty receipts nor even prizes and honors, but rather the opportunity to reach out to and touch a man or woman or child somewhere in the world with one's words.  How long after I am gone will my words continue to find reception?  That scarcely matters, considering that the entire human comedy is just the story of one mid-sized mammal in the latter Cenezoic Era.

As Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof

YOU REALLY CANNOT MAKE THIS STUFF UP

It turns out that the County Clerk in Kentucky who is refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples because of "God's law" -- and, indeed, is refusing to issue any marriage licenses at all to any couples -- has been married four times.  I defy The Onion to write a satirical piece that tops that!

"THE PAST IS NOT DEAD. IT IS NOT EVEN PAST" -- WILLIAM FAULKNER

Today Senator Barbara Mikulski announced her intention to vote in favor of the recently negotiated deal with Iran, bringing the number of Democratic senators to thirty-four and thus ensuring that the Congress will not overturn the agreement.  I want to offer some perspective on the Iran deal, which has produced the extraordinary spectacle of a group of U. S. Senators writing to the Iranian government warning them not to trust the United States Secretary of State, and which has seen the Prime Minister of Israel invited to condemn the negotiations from the podium of the United States Senate.

Let me begin by reminding everyone that 2015 is the one hundred fiftieth anniversary of the end of the American Civil War.  One hundred and fifty years is an enormously long time in the lives of human beings, for all that it is a blink of the eye for redwood trees.  I am eighty-one, and I have vivid childhood memories of my father's father, who was born in Paris in 1879 and came to these shores the next year , but even that birth, far beyond the reach of my memory, was fourteen years after the end of the Civil War in America.

And yet, in parts of this country, as we well know, the Civil War lives on in the collective memories of some Americans, seemingly as though it were only yesterday.  Civil War Re-enactors dress up in costumes, take out antique muskets, and march across the fields and up and down the hills where, a century and a half ago, battles were fought between the Blue and the Grey.  For whatever reason -- regional pride, racist hatreds, inherited resentments -- those events are a living part of the daily consciousness of millions of Americans.  Those of us whose forebears were not even on this side of the Atlantic when those events played out may find it odd that what happened so long ago can live so powerfully in the memories of our fellow Americans, but surely we can, with an effort of sympathetic imagination, at least understand what they feel, though we cannot share it.  To the French, the Chinese, the Brazilians, the Malaysians, or the Japanese, this obsession with the Civil War must be utterly mysterious, and yet they would be ill advised to ignore it in their dealings with America.

Now let me turn to another event, not a century and a half old, but a mere sixty-two years ago.  In 1951, the Iranians elected a progressive secular Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh.  Mossadegh committed the unpardonable sin of attempting to renegotiate the agreements that gave the lion's share of Iran's oil income to Western oil companies.  In response, the British, conspiring with the Central Intelligence Agency, overthrew Mossadegh and imposed a puppet ruler, Mohammad Reza Pahlevi, on Iran, backed by the Western Powers.  It was this puppet who was in turn overthrown by a popular revolution in 1979.  Thus it was America whose illegal and violent intervention in the internal affairs of Iran set the stage for the establishment of the present theocratic regime.

Now, this was all a long time ago.  In 1953 I was just graduating from college.  Any American in his or her twenties, thirties, forties, or fifties was not even born when Mossadegh was overthrown by the CIA.  Surely, sensible Americans will think, if indeed they even know this history, that that is all in the distant past, and has nothing to do with modern day events. 

To these willful amnesiacs, I say, "Think of our Civil War."

 

 

DONALD WINNICOTT AND ME

My daily walk this morning was uneventful -- no Blue Herons, no deer, not even a rabbit.  With nothing of note to observe, I found myself musing about what trace, if any, would be left after I pass away by the writings to which I have devoted my life.  I have often joked that the world does not need mediocre philosophers any more than it needs mediocre poets, but there is a deep truth in that joke, one that I brooded on as I walked.  Not surprisingly, my thoughts turned to the work of the British analyst and therapist Donald Winnicott. 

It was Winnicott, you will recall, who introduced the psychoanalytic world to the concept of the pretty good mother.  Psychoanalysis had had a great deal to say about all the ways in which mothers and fathers could inflict crippling neuroses on their children -- by weaning them too soon, or too late, by toilet training that was excessively punitive or dangerously lenient, by a too distant and disapproving father or an overly intrusive and clinging mother.  The effect of all this was to produce a generation of men and women perpetually anxious about a role, that of parent, that had somehow managed to survive and perpetuate itself for several hundred millennia.  Winnicott suggested, on the basis of his observations, that normal mothers are naturally inclined to do pretty well what the normal baby needs, with the result that pretty good mothers can relax and assume that their pretty good mothering will suffice to raise reasonably happy and healthy children.  This stands in reassuring contrast to the impossibly demanding standard of the Tiger Mother or Helicopter Parent evident these days in the upper middle-class enclaves of Manhattan's West Side or Hyde Park or Cambridge.

The human race requires that ordinary people simply be pretty good at the various jobs on which we all depend for survival.  We do not need a constant flow of Luther Burbanks, just some folks who are pretty good farmers.  Nor do we need to be treated for our illnesses by Jonas Salks or guided through our home purchases and divorces and last wills and testaments by Oliver Wendell Holmeses.  We just need a steady supply of pretty good doctors and pretty good lawyers.  We do not even need to be led by George Washingtons and Abraham Lincolns [although a little improvement in that line of work would be reassuring.]

But we really have no use for pretty good philosophers.  Philosophy that is just O.K. is like poetry that is so-so.  Leaving to one side Hallmark Greeting Cards, there is simply no good use to which one can put mediocre poetry.  And as for mediocre philosophy, beyond fortune cookies, what's the point?

Now, I think I am a pretty good philosopher.  Of course, we all tend to rate ourselves a bit on the favorable side.  Studies show that a large majority of Americans think they are unusually good drivers, but only in Lake Woebegone are all the children above average.  Still and all, I really do think I am pretty good at philosophy.  Not great, not immortal, not even top ten, just pretty good.  And although that is just fine for mothers, as Winnicott showed us [and for fathers too, I warrant], it is really not just fine for philosophers.

I did not set out to be a pretty good philosopher, sixty odd years ago.  Not at all.  I set out to become one of the immortals.  I mean, does anyone ever seriously try to write mediocre poetry?  Now that I have entered what, by even the most optimistic of projections, cannot be more than the last twenty years of my life, I know that my best work, such as it is, lies behind me.  I had some things I wanted to say and I said them pretty well.  Perhaps Marc Antony was right when he said that the good men do is oft interred with their bones.

I congratulate myself that I have been a pretty good father, a pretty good husband, a pretty good teacher.  And that is, after all, as much as can be asked of any man.  That will have to suffice.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF

In 1959, Norman Mailer published a collection of short pieces and fragments to which he gave the evocative title Advertisements for Myself.  Yesterday, as I was spending an idle hour and a half cleaning up and sorting out the Excel spreadsheet on which I record the sales of my books, that title popped into my head.  It captured, for me, a certain self-referential obsession that afflicts me and, I would imagine, some other authors.

I only saw Mailer in person once, at a 1960's chi-chi gathering of New York intellectuals called The Theater for Ideas, to which I had been invited by Robert Silvers, the founder and then editor of the NY Review of Books.  [I was introduced to Shapiro by Robert Heilbroner, who really was a friend of mine.]  The event was an evening devoted to "The Hidden Philosophy of Psychoanalysis," and the speakers included my Columbia colleague, the irrepressible Sidney Morgenbesser, and the great but quirky psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim.  [I tell the story  in my Autobiography.  It was quite a night.]  Mailer was there, along with Susan Sontag, Sidney Hook, the composer William Schuman, Sander Vanocur, and a variety of other leading lights of the New York cultural scene.  During the question period, Mailer, dressed in a three piece suit that made him look like a Bantam cock, rose and delivered an interminable and very spirited attack on his then-analyst [who was not present], while the audience, who were apparently familiar with Mailer's outbursts, looked on in amusement.

The thing is, those of us who have spent a lifetime as writers really care a good deal more than perhaps we ought about just how many people have bought our books [which we take as a measure, however imprecise, of how many have actually read them].  My first book appeared in 1963, and though it did not actually earn any money for several years [those were Harvard University Press's terms, and who was I to argue!], it did sell some copies in the tiny world of Kant scholars who were my target audience.  Early on, I set up a filing system for my annual and semi-annual royalty reports, and some time after Excel was created in the mid-80's, I transferred it all to that program, the great virtue of which of course is that one can perform arithmetic operations on the entries.  Fifty-two years later, I am still entering the sales figures from each royalty report as it arrives  Yesterday, having nothing better to do, I cleaned things up on the spreadsheet and did some summations and conversions, just to see how I had done over a lifetime.

Twenty-one of my books have actually been published in hard or soft covers [another ten or a dozen exist only in electronic form.]   A number of my books have been translated into a variety of languages.  It is always difficult to keep track of these things, and one never gets sales reports from foreign editions [at least I never do -- I imagine J. K. Rowling does], but as near as I can tell, my books have appeared in German, Swedish, Italian, Japanese, French, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, Norwegian, Korean, Croatian, Malaysian, Chinese, Hungarian, and Greek.

If my records are correct, a total of 856,131 copies of my various books have been sold in their American editions.  That is not bad for a philosopher.  Considering the subject matter, the audience is probably pretty classy.  I don't know any one famous who has read one of my books, but from time to time I hear from young people in Brazil or Croatia or Spain or Australia or India who have found something of interest in one of them, and that pleases me a very great deal indeed.  By comparison, in fifty-three years of teaching, I imagine no more than six or seven thousand students passed through my classes, despite all the moonlighting and summer teaching I did.  When I find myself wondering What's it all About? [to quote the theme song from the great 1966 Michael Caine movie], it is comforting to remind myself that these bottles I toss into the sea filled with my notes to the world have indeed washed up on a number of shores.

Having completed my tabulation, it occurred to me [as it well might occur to you] to wonder how much money all these book sales have amounted to.  That is a tricky question because of the steady inflation of the past half century, so I had first to sum the royalties for each year and then, using the Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI Calculator, convert them all to 2015 dollars.

I was rather startled to discover that the grand total, as of today, is $2,528,929. 

Is this fascination on my part with the sales of my books a debased and shameful interest?  No more so than the typical one year old's fascination with its own feces, which it very much resembles. 

Tomorrow, I shall return to the serious and elevated consideration of the contest for the American presidency.