CLIFFSNOTES

[As a young man befuddled by my time at Harvard, I imagined these were "Cliffe Notes," short for "Radcliffe Notes."  Google informs me that they were originally CliffsNotes, named for the man, Cliff Hillegass, who originated them.]

I am only 85 pages into Irving Finkel's The Ark Before Noah, but I am enjoying it so much that I feel the need to issue the first of what will undoubtedly be several interim reports.  I do not think I have ever laughed out loud so much while reading a serious work [although the time I tried to read Hegel's Philosophy of History comes close.]  My delight at Finkel's wit and the clarity of his exposition is heightened by the fact that this is a subject -- Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets -- about which I knew absolutely nothing before opening his book.

There are countless wonderful passages I could quote at length, but that would be de trop, as they say in these parts, so I will content myself with this footnote to a passage in which Finkel is introducing the reader to the ancient Sumerians of the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers [hence Mesopotamia] whose capital city, Ur, was located in what is now Iraq.

"During the last invasion of Iraq, a high-flown American official, interviewed on the radio about damage to archeological sites on which military installations had been imposed, referred to this city as 'Umm,' evidently confusing one convention for 'I can't think what to say' with another."

BOOKS

Blogging about the books I have been reading got me thinking about books in general, which, as you might imagine, have played a very big role in my life.  The first book of which I have a vivid memory is the initial Dr. Seuss publication, And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street [which I quite mistakenly thought referred to the Mulberry Street in Greenwich Village on which my parents lived before Barbara and I were born, until a more knowledgeable reader of this blog corrected my error.]  But my favorite childhood book was a fat red copy of the complete Sherlock Holmes stories – four novels and fifty-six short stories in one volume.  After taking it out of the Jamaica Public Library during an outing with my father, I became so enamored of Holmes and Watson that my parents bought me a copy the next Christmas.  I actually subscribed for a while to the journal of the Baker Street Irregulars, an organization of adults [so to speak] named after the team of street urchins who kept Holmes apprised of the news from the London underworld.

Like many writers and serious readers, I have an intense sensory relationship to certain of my books, grounded as much in their smell and look and feel as in their contents.  The stubby black-covered Selby-Bigge edition of David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature is my favorite book, as much because of its rough-textured paper as for its splendid index [a book in its own right] and, of course, Hume’s beautifully clear, elegantly simple statement of his world-shattering arguments.  Even though I long ago all but committed sections of it to memory, I still like to take it down from time to time and simply turn the pages lovingly.

The Oxford University Press translations of the works of Aristotle, many volumes of which I acquired second-hand for absurdly low prices while a young Instructor at Harvard, seem to me magisterial in their authority, although I am of course utterly incompetent to judge their scholarly accuracy.  My original copy of the Kemp-Smith translation of the Critique of Pure Reason was a graduation gift from my undergraduate fellow madrigalists, Michael Jorrin and Richard Eder.  It is inscribed “For Bob Wolff   Each even page from Michael Jorrín  Each odd page from Richard Eder  May 28 1953.”  The margins are filled with comments and questions in many different inks.  On occasion, I will question a passage in one ink; then in a later ink, write “oh yes, I see.”  All these years later, I can no longer recall my original puzzlement or my subsequent eclairecissement.  I read and re-read the volume until its covers fell off and I was forced to buy a substitute.  The original, nicely re-bound, now sits on my shelves here in Paris, a memento of my youth.

Susie and I have a joint treasure, a collection of the poems of e. e. cummings which we read to one another when we were courting in the late ‘40s.  Since it technically was hers, I lost sight of it for thirty-four years until we married in 1987, when it became in law as in spirit our joint property.

As I sit here writing this blog post, arrayed above me on the shelves of our Paris apartment are the complete works of Marx and Engels in forty-four handsomely German bound volumes, the product of the East German Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus.  For many years, I had a standing order with Blackwell’s in Oxford.  As each volume appeared, they would send it to me and I would add it to the growing row of matching books.  The last volume arrived in 1960, price eighteen shillings. [Eighteen shillings in 1960 was roughly $36 in 2014 prices – a decent bargain for 538 pages of letters and 130 pages of notes and indices.]  The Werke are a curious combination of Germanic scholarship and proletarian consciousness.  The scholarship is impeccable, as we might expect.  But since the volumes are officially intended for an audience of workingmen [not, perhaps, of working women], the personenregister identifies everyone whose name appears in the letters, including such world historical figures as Napoleon Bonaparte and Abraham Lincoln, with whom a bourgeois readership might be expected to be familiar.

I have had some odd experiences with books, one of which occurred as Susie and I were packing up to leave Pelham, MA seven years ago and move to Chapel Hill.  Since we were moving from a big house to a small apartment, a good deal had to go, and we decided that one of the rejecta would be the many-volumed classic eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica that Susie had purchased when her boys were little and had brought with her as a dowry to our marriage.  Youthful readers will perhaps not understand the special role that the Britannica played in the intellectual coming of age of America.  Published in 1911, the Eleventh edition laid claim to being the assembled scholarly wisdom of the great tradition of European letters.  Many of its articles, its authors tastefully identified only with their initials, were written by the most famous Oxbridge scholars of the time.  Salesmen went door to door in rural America peddling sets to aspiring upwardly mobile immigrant parents, eager that their children should have access to the secret knowledge that seemed to have catapulted WASPs into positions of wealth and power.

Amherst, MA had a recycling center, of course, in one corner of which was a wooden shack containing shelves of books that residents no longer wanted but were loathe simply to throw away.  One was welcome to browse the collection and take what one wanted.  Think of it as a sort of academic dumpster-diving.  When I showed up with the Britannica volumes in my car trunk, the imperious guardian of the shack informed me that I could not leave them there since “no one will want them.”  I cannot adequately express the shame I felt that my garbage was not good enough for the town dump.  Over the next week, I slunk around Amherst, surreptitiously tossing a volume at a time into trash bins in town or on the UMass campus.

The life histories of the books I myself have written or edited are replete with odd and unanticipated turns of fate.  A textbook imaginatively entitled About Philosophy, which I wrote in the summer of 1974 for an advance big enough to enable my first wife to finish a serious scholarly work, is now in its fortieth year and eleventh edition, having earned fully half of all the money I have made from my books.  Since I was not even sure Prentice-Hall would actually published it, I allowed myself to say in it exactly what I thought about philosophy rather than what I imagined Instructors teaching Introduction to Philosophy might wish to find in a textbook.  Quite unexpectedly, that self-indulgent approach proved appealing.  The one book for which I am widely known, In Defense of Anarchism, started life just shy of half a century ago as a contribution to an ill-fated, never published, volume tentatively titled The Harper Guide to Philosophy, edited by the late Arthur Danto.  Eventually published in its present form five years after it was written, it acquired a bizarre fame – universally read, almost universally reviled, translated into languages as far afield as Croatian, Korean, and Malaysian.

To an extent I did not anticipate when I set out on life’s path, books have provided many of the joys and satisfactions I have encountered.  I am constantly grateful to the scholars and thinkers who have written, and continue to write, the books from which I derive such pleasure, both the great authors of the past – Hume, Marx, Kant, Plato, Kierkegaard, and the rest – and those less exalted – Erving Goffman, Erich Auerbach, Henri Pirenne, W. E. B. DuBois, Jacqueline Jones, and many, many more, to which list I may now be adding the name of Irving Finkel.

 

YET ANOTHER GOOD BOOK

As I have often had occasion to report on this blog, my big sister Barbara [Dr. Barbara Searle, Ombud of the World Bank, retired] is my inexhaustible source for splendid reading suggestions.  The range of her reading is extraordinary, extending as it does beyond microbiology and evolutionary theory to literature, history, and much else besides.  Her response to my brief post about the collection of essays on the Great Library at Alexandria was to tell me about her latest find, The Ark Before Noah by Irving Finkel, an expert on Sumerian cuneiform at the British Museum in London.  To my surprise and delight, Shakespeare & Co. had two copies, one of which I bought this afternoon before taking Susie to The Tea Caddy nearby for a bite to eat.  In time I shall report on the book more fully, but after reading just the first fifteen pages, I can say that it is the most charming scholarly book I have encountered in a very long time.  Finkel's style [and appearance] remind me of Israel Sacks, with whom I am sure many of you are familiar.

These are difficult times for those of us on the left, and I think it is not shameful for us to escape from time to time into the life of the mind.  There will be much to say after I have finished all 387 pages of Finkel's book, but [spoiler alert] it seems the original specifications for the Ark, from which the biblical account derives, called for a round boat.  One can but wonder about the filiations with the legend of Wynken, Blynken, and Nod.

AVERSES

In Sabrina, Audrey Hepburn tells Humphrey Bogart that the first time he sees Paris it must be in the rain.  Well, if you are Humphrey Bogart and you have Audrey Hepburn waiting for you, I am sure that is very good advice, but it has been raining for three days [no morning walks, needless to say] and charming as it no doubt is, enough is enough.  Besides, I see myself more as Cary Grant flying over from Paris for an intimae dinner with Ingrid Bergman. 

TWO CONCEPTS OF DEMOCRACY

While I have been wrestling FranceTelecom to the mat and idly following the World Cup, a good many more important events have crossed the threshold of my consciousness.  Some, like the bloody struggles in the Middle East, the “honor” killings of women who married without the approval of their male relatives, the murder of three Israeli boys, and the revenge burning to death of a Palestinian boy, have been simply awful.  Others, like the US Supreme Court ruling in the Hobby Lobby case, have been deeply troubling.  And still others, like the Republican primary runoff in Mississippi, can best be described as curious.  The purpose of this blog post is to attempt to place them all in a conceptual framework that may help me, and my readers, to make sense out of what has been happening.

Broadly speaking, there are two very different traditions of democratic theory in the modern world.  The first, whose roots can be found in the writings of a variety of French, English, and American authors, takes as given the existence of conflicting private interests -- primarily, but not exclusively, economic in nature –and conceives the function of representative democracy to be the accommodation and adjustment of those conflicts through a series of compromises arrived at by elected representatives charged with advancing the interests of their constituents.  The device of periodic elections is deliberately designed to make the private interest of the representatives in being re-elected depend on their success in serving the public interest by successfully accommodating the conflicts between the interests of their constituents and the interests of the constituents of other representatives.

The second tradition has its roots in the great treatise of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Of the Social Contract.  Rousseau conceives of private interests as the enemy of true democracy.  In order for a democratic state to achieve legitimacy, Rousseau argues, individuals must set aside their private interests and each one take as his goal [or hers, although Rousseau assumes that all the citizens are men] the general good.  Only insofar as all individuals make this fundamental adjustment do they become citizens, and only then do the decisions they collectively agree upon become genuine laws binding on the citizenry.

According to the first conception of democracy, the public discourse is a series of negotiations, a never-ending effort to arrive at satisfactory compromises of conflicting private interests.  According to the second conception, the public discourse is a debate about the correct answer to a single question:  What is the general good?

Those, according to the first conception, who bargain from a position of weakness or with insufficient skill will emerge from the public sphere with unsatisfying bargains.  Those who are voted down, according to the second conception, have failed to persuade their fellow citizens of their vision of the general good – indeed, Rousseau actually claims [though his supporting argument is fallacious] that those who lose the vote are by that fact shown to have been incorrect in their conception of the general good.

Negotiations over conflicting interests are, by their nature, capable of adjustment, of accommodation, of re-negotiation when the relative strengths of the negotiating parties have altered.  Half a loaf is better than none, as the old saying has it.  Debates about the general good are inherently irresoluble save by one party conceding that it was wrong – not that it overreached, seeking more than could be expected, but that it was wrong. 

It is religion in the first instance and ethnic identification secondarily that most often give rise to irresoluble disagreements about the nature of the general good.  The great promise of the Enlightenment and its capitalist underpinnings was that society would slowly become secularized, that religious disagreements would fade and ethnic/national differences would evaporate, leaving a society robbed perhaps of immortal longings [or, more precisely, of longings for immortality] but free also of the ineradicable divisions that had engendered so many bitter and interminable conflicts.

American novelists have had a good deal of fun lampooning the characteristic banal figure of the businessman – a smile of welcome on his face for all comers, a hearty hollow laugh, a two-handed handshake for those he barely knows.  My personal favorite of this familiar type was my first father-in-law, Jim Griffin, a self-made Irish Catholic corporate executive who worked his way up the ladder to become Vice-President for Public Relations of Sears, Roebuck and Co.  Despite being a loyal son of the Catholic Church, a Knight of Malta for his fund-raising and at one time President of the Catholic Boy Scouts of America, Griffin was as malleable as a chameleon.  I will never forget him in Cambridge, MA at my wedding to his daughter, smiling and chatting amiably with David Riesman and Barrington Moore, Jr. as though leftie Harvard social circles were his natural habitat.  There was of course a deep logic to this inauthenticity.  Your competitor one day may be your customer the next, and you never want to alienate a potential customer over something as irrelevant to business as religion or ethnic pride.

Many of the violent conflicts now savaging the Middle East are disputes about what can, in a broad sense, be described as the general good, rather than unmediated conflicts of private interest.  No doubt there are conflicts of economic interest at stake in the war between Sunni and Shi’a Muslims, and those are certainly amenable of negotiation, but competing religious convictions are by their nature non-negotiable.  Even when a period of religious toleration has emerged from a long-standing religious conflict, those on both sides continue to be deeply convinced that their opponents are damned in the eyes of God, and when the opportunity presents itself, they rush back into battle.

Contrast that with what appears to have happened in Mississippi in the run-off of the Republican primary to select a candidate for the U. S. Senate.  Tea Party favorite Chris McDaniel edged longtime Republican incumbent Thad Cochran in the initial primary, neither getting the 50% + 1 needed to secure the nomination.  In the run-off, the previously rather lethargic Cochran made open appeals to the 40% Black Mississippi vote, which has for a long time been virtually 100% Democratic.  Enough Black voters, recognizing that Cochran was indeed more likely to serve their interests than McDaniel, voted for Cochran in the Republican primary run-off to give Cochran a narrow victory.  [The Democratic candidate has no chance whatsoever of actually winning the seat.]  This is classic interest-group politics.  There is even some reason to hope that the large Black minority may maneuver itself into the position of king-maker, gaining thereby the power to secure some measure of responsiveness to its interests.

Ideological politics is exhilarating, with its commitment to inflexible principles and the consequent in-fighting among former comrades who have strayed a hairsbreadth from the world historical truth, and Lord knows I am by conviction and lifelong practice more an ideological warrior than a Rotary Club glad hander, but the events unfolding in the Middle East remind me of just what is lost when accommodation gives way to calls for a rush to the barricades and one reaches for improvised explosive devices.

In my youth, I genuinely believed that the promise of the Enlightenment was being fulfilled, and that religion and ethnic divisions were fading from the world.  Half a century farther on, I feel as though I had stumbled into seventeenth century Europe.

WIPEOUT

Germany obliterated Brazil in the World Cup semi-final, 7-1, with five goals in the first half, an unimaginable result.  France can take comfort from the fact that it held Germany to a 1-0 loss.  There is something peaceful and satisfying about observing a sport one neither follows nor understands.  A bit like hearing news of a theological dispute at Brigham Young University.  I recall in 1955 attending an incomprehensible cricket match at Lord's in London.  Somewhere, far in the distance across a beautifully manicured lawn, were several figures doing something mildly athletic.  Every so often the chaps around me would put down their tea cups, applaud politely, and say, rather languidly, "Well done."  The English student who had persuaded me to accompany him explained that it would all be over in two or three days.

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton has been quoted as saying that "Bill never stopped reaching out to the Republicans," an implied rebuke of Obama.  I fear my old age is not going to be the triumphant ideological consummation I eagerly anticipated in my youth.

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.”