Patrick gets the answer right

A parable of education

I was working at the YMCA’s daycare centre. It was summertime, so the kids were there all day. My boss was not happy with the programme for 4- and 5-year-olds, so she asked me to spend some time with those classes and just observe what was going on.

Patrick was the youngest of the 4-year-olds. He was skinny, pale, and freckled, with a large bush of orange hair and enormous blue eyes. He looked like a little clown. He was usually off in his own world somewhere, oblivious to everyone else. His mum dropped him off quite early, and when the teacher arrived he was already deep into a box of Legos and far away on Planet X. The teacher would greet him, “Good morning, Patrick!” and Patrick, as if awaking from a dream, would turn briefly from his toys and reply, “Hi, honey!” Everyone found this amusing, but when Patrick’s mum found out she sat him down and explained that his teacher had a name—Mrs. Johnson—and he should call her by her name. The next morning, greeted by the teacher, Patrick replied, “Hi, Johnson!”

On swimming day the 4s and 5s had the pool together. There was some sort of holdup with the snacks, though, so while the teacher of the 5-year-olds sorted out the problem, the teacher of the 4-year-old class had both groups sitting in a circle, waiting. She began talking about colours in a syrupy, sing-songy voice. She had a few sheets of coloured construction paper. “Yesterday we learned our colours, didn’t we?” she began. “Georgia, do you remember the colour you learned?” She continued around the circle in this way, and finally got to Patrick, who was way off on Planet X as usual, returning only when he heard his name at the end of the teacher’s question. “Do you remember the colour you learned, Patrick?” Startled out of his reveries, he looked up to find everyone staring at him expectantly. He knew he had been asked a question; he knew everyone was waiting for him to answer; but he had no idea what the question was. He bent his head and began balling his fists up inside his striped t-shirt.

A helpful and sympathetic girl from the 5-year-old class asked, “Is it on his shirt?” Patrick’s eyes went to his shirt, searching desperately for the answer. “No,” the teacher said, “it isn’t on his shirt. But it is on his shoes.” 

Patrick was wearing red sneakers. His eyes leapt from his shirt to his shoes. Everyone waited, hardly breathing. Suddenly, Patrick had the answer. His body relaxed. He lifted his head up, smiled, and answered triumphantly, “Dogshit!”

And he was right.

“The Glass Key,” by Dashiell Hammett (1931)

There are no normal people in this novel: only gangsters, ward bosses, corrupt politicians and corrupt government officials and corrupt cops and corrupt journalists. No children, no young lovers, no happy married couples, nobody going to work or shopping in the neighbourhood or picnicking in the park. Noir, noir, noir.

There is a murder—or at least an accidental death—to solve in this novel, but there is no detective, per se. Instead, the protagonist is a political operative and collection of incongruities, Ned Beaumont. He takes a multiple-day beating that makes the typical knock-out of classic detective fiction seem a mere love-tap, but never reciprocates. He has been in the town where the story is set for only a year and a half, and yet he is best friends with his boss, the town’s political kingpin, and on very affectionate terms with his boss’s mother and sister—besides knowing everyone, down to the last punk and cab driver and speakeasy operator. Relentlessly stoical and transcendently astute, he is nevertheless addicted to gambling. Irresistibly attractive to every woman in the story, he never shows the slightest interest in them and seems as much the career loner as any mysterious cowboy gunslinger in a Wild West novel; and yet he leaves town with the best of the women at the end. And despite an extended stay in hospital after that beating, he seems to suffer no long-term effects: no limp, no scars, no kidney damage, no chronic weakness.

But still there is something compelling in Hammett’s grim, stripped-down, laconic narrative style. Like his protagonist, Hammett never lets up, never gives in, and we are pulled into his narrative’s irresistible current.

Baseball Clichés

There’s a lot of ballgame left to be played. It hasn’t been a textbook start. They’re trying to chip away at the deficit. A two-run blast! The game has really sped up on him. He hasn’t got his best stuff tonight. He threw a rocket to first base. Let’s right the ship. That was way upstairs. It’s a game of inches. He came to play. It’s getaway day. He got squeezed on that pitch. He left the yard. His first trip to the plate. They’re playing him to pull. That’s two gone. Two out, nobody on. He’s clutch at the plate. At the top of the zone. A chopper to short. His baseball I.Q. is very high. He plays the game right. He sends it down the right-field line. It hugs the line. A big turn around first. He takes the base—a two-out free pass. No defence against a walk. He smacks one to left field. He found a hole. He’s tipping his pitches. With two strikes he needs to shorten up. That swing is too long. It caromed off the wall. They swept the series. They went wire-to-wire. The count is even. A walk-off! He rounds the bases. It ran inside. Jammed him. It’s a different team today. He lays off that pitch. Peaking over his shoulder at the runner. You can feel the momentum. It’s a hitter’s count. The stars are aligning. It’s a pitcher’s count. He’s on the bump. He kicks and fires. Strike ’em out throw ’em out. That was just a bad at-bat. Don’t let the ball play you. Play a clean game. He’s trying to find the strike zone. Back-to-back K’s. Picks it up on one hop. He steps up to the dish. Power hitters. Those bats are warming up. He misses downstairs. The tying run is at the plate. The count is even. He ran through a red light. There’s traffic on the base paths. Station to station. Top of the lineup. Bases loaded. He’s throwing smoke. He challenged him with a fastball. Swing and a miss! Don’t expand the strike zone. Clips the outside corner. He’s dealing. High-leverage arms. Back-to-back hooks. On deck. Waiting in the wings. In the hole. Comes in with a heater. Right at the knees. Threw it right by him. Struck him out looking. A pitcher’s pitch. He rings him up. He swings through it. Busted him up and in. A little chin music. Tough to do damage. Make him throw strikes. He was taking all the way. One pitch one out. The runner was stranded. The last nine outs are the toughest. He picked his pocket. He goes back to the warning track, he’s out of room, looks up, and it’s gone! A sky-scraping home run! A monster home run. A bomb! A no-doubter. The right fielder just turns and watches it go. An insurance run. They’ve blown the game open. They’re putting up some crooked numbers. He’s taking one for the team. The bottom of the order. The seventh-inning stretch. Retired at first base. They haven’t cashed in on their opportunities. Struggling offensively. Buzzed his tower! Up and in. Down and away. The inner part of the plate. The outer part of the plate. A defensive swing. Drifting foul. Couldn’t get there in time. He misjudged it. The series finale. They’re playing match-up. A 1-2-3 inning. Retired in order. A bloop hit. A lazy fly ball. An ice-cream cone catch! He closed the door. He missed the bag. It’s a new ballgame. The wheels have come off. It’s all about getting outs. That first out is so important. He scorched it! His bat’s starting to heat up. Right at the centerfielder. Right back through the box. A rocket off his bat. He gave it a ride but the ballpark held it. A long out. Very playable. Popped him up. That’ll find the seats. He fires to first. He might have chased Ball 4. He’s battled through injuries. Ahead in the count. Just got a piece of it. Just wide of the chalk. Another big inning. Down the stretch. One game at a time. Brushed him back. Taking all the way. Can o’ corn. Another goose egg. Did he go around? A productive out. Move the runner. Putting up zeroes. Down to their last out. Down to their last strike. He went up there hacking. The lead held up. A dandy of a pitching duel. It was a team win.

 

Nothing like us

Very few people study Ancient Greece these days.

For one thing, the Greeks were terrible misogynists. They seemed always to be at war. Their politicians were mostly driven by personal ambition, and many of them were plainly corrupt.

The richest of the Greek city-states, Athens, founded its wealth on slave labour and the economic exploitation of its smaller and weaker neighbours.

And yet, out of all that mess came great art, mathematics, literature, philosophy, and even science and medicine.

The Greeks were, in short, nothing at all like us.

Addendum: Greek words that are completely irrelevant today:

Misogyny, democracy, oligarchy, plutocracy, autocracy, demagogue, sophistry . . . well, you get the idea.

Every form of government tends to perish

Here’s more Will Durant, paraphrasing Plato’s Republic in The Story of Philosophy:

Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principle. Aristocracy ruins itself by limiting too narrowly the circle within which power is confined; oligarchy ruins itself by the incautious scramble for immediate wealth. In either case the end is revolution. When revolution comes it may seem to arise from little causes and petty whims; but though it may spring from slight occasions it is the precipitate result of grave and accumulated wrongs; when a body is weakened by neglected ills, the merest exposure may bring serious disease (556). “Then democracy comes: the poor overcome their opponents, slaughtering some and banishing the rest; and give to the people an equal share of freedom and power” (557).

But even democracy ruins itself by excess—of democracy. Its basic principle is the equal right of all to hold office and determine public policy. This is at first glance a delightful arrangement; it becomes disastrous because the people are not properly equipped by education to select the best rulers and the wisest courses (588). “As to the people they have no understanding, and only repeat what their rulers are pleased to tell them” (Protagoras, 317); to get a doctrine accepted or rejected it is only necessary to have it praised or ridiculed in a popular play (a hit, no doubt, at Aristophanes, whose comedies attacked almost every new idea). Mob-rule is a rough sea for the ship of state to ride; every wind of oratory stirs up the waters and deflects the course. The upshot of such a democracy is tyranny or autocracy; the crowd so loves flattery, it is so “hungry for honey,” that at last the wiliest and most unscrupulous flatterer, calling himself the “protector of the people” rises to supreme power (565). (Consider the history of Rome.)

The lust for the spoils of office

From the “Plus ça change” Dept—

Will Durant, in The Story of Philosophy, paraphrasing Plato’s Republic:

[After describing a rural paradise of simple, healthy, peaceful life] he passes quietly on to the question, Why is it that such a simple paradise as he has described never comes?—why is it that these Utopias never arrive upon the map?

He answers, because of greed and luxury. Men are not content with a simple life: they are acquisitive, ambitious, competitive, and jealous; they soon tire of what they have, and pine for what they have not; and they seldom desire anything unless it belongs to others. The result is the encroachment of one group upon the territory of another, the rivalry of groups for the resources of the soil, and then war. Trade and finance develop, and bring new class-divisions. “Any ordinary city is in fact two cities, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich, each at war with the other; and in either division there are smaller ones—you would make a great mistake if you treated them as single states” (423). A mercantile bourgeoisie arises, whose members seek social position through wealth and conspicuous consumption: “they will spend large sums of money on their wives” (548). These changes in the distribution of wealth produce political changes: as the wealth of the merchant over-reaches that of the land-owner, aristocracy gives way to a plutocratic oligarchy—wealthy traders and bankers rule the state. Then statesmanship, which is the coordination of social forces and the adjustment of policy to growth, is replaced by politics, which is the strategy of party and the lust for the spoils of office.

Clerihews

Definition
“A clerihew is a whimsical, four-line biographical poem of a type invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875 – 1956).

Form
“A clerihew has the following properties:

  • It is biographical and usually whimsical, showing the subject from an unusual point of view; it mostly pokes fun at famous people
  • It has four lines of irregular length and metre for comic effect
  • The rhyme structure is AABB; the subject matter and wording are often humorously contrived in order to achieve a rhyme, including the use of phrases in Latin, French and other non-English languages.
  • The first line contains, and may consist solely of, the subject’s name. According to a letter in The Spectator in the 1960s, Bentley said that a true clerihew has to have the name “at the end of the first line”, as the whole point was the skill in rhyming awkward names.

“Clerihews are not satirical or abusive, but they target famous individuals and reposition them in an absurd, anachronistic or commonplace setting, often giving them an over-simplified and slightly garbled description.” 

—From Wikipedia

Samples (by E. C. Bentley)

Sir Christopher Wren
Said, “I am going to dine with some men.
If anyone calls
Say I am designing St Paul’s.”

The younger Van Eyck
Was christened Jan, and not Mike.
The thought of this curious mistake
Often kept him awake.

Some Original Clerihews
1.
Young Winnie Churchill
Thought, “A career in the Church’ll
Surely drive me barmy.
I think I’ll join the army.”

2.
The philosopher Socrates
Said, “I try not to mock at these
Tedious fools, but they all take a fall
‘Cuz they’re such know-it-alls.”

3.
Miss Florence Nightengale
Ditched her farthingale
And thought, “I will hie me a
Ways down the road, perhaps to Crimea.”

4.
Steven Jobs
Threw away gobs
Of mess and fuss
And designed a computer for the rest of us.

5.
Miles Davis
Thought, “God save us
From slavish imitation.
Let’s try some innovation.”

6.
Thelonious Monk
Was in a deep funk
Until he manufactured
Chords that were fractured.

More of E. C. Bentley’s clerihews can be found at Project Gutenberg, here: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/46691/pg46691-images.html

Oligarchy, the anti-democratic sentiments of the wealthy classes, and the rise of authoritarian leaders: 2025? 1930? Try the 5th century B.C.E.

Yes, history keeps rhyming, and yes, the more things change the more they stay the same. Here is Will Durant setting the stage for the teachings of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle:

[As for the Sophists,] there is hardly a problem or a solution in our current philosophy of mind and conduct which they did not realize and discuss. . . . In politics they divided into two schools. One, like Rousseau, argued that nature is good, and civilization bad; that by nature all men are equal, becoming unequal only by class-made institutions; and that law is an invention of the strong to chain and rule the weak. Another school, like Nietzsche, claimed that nature is beyond good and evil; that by nature all men are unequal; that morality is an invention of the weak to limit and deter the strong; that power is the supreme virtue, and the supreme desire of man; and that of all forms of government the wisest and most natural is aristocracy.

No doubt this attack on democracy reflected the rise of a wealthy minority at Athens which called itself the Oligarchical Party, and denounced democracy as an incompetent sham. . . . The Athenian oligarchic party, led by Critias, advocated the abandonment of democracy on the score of its inefficiency in war, and secretly lauded the aristocratic government of Sparta. Many of the oligarchic leaders were exiled: but when at last Athens [was defeated in the Peloponnesian War], one of the peace conditions imposed by Sparta was the recall of these exiled aristocrats. They had hardly returned when, with Critias at their head, they declared a rich man’s revolution against the “democratic” party that had ruled during the disastrous war.

—From The Story of Philosophy, by Will Durant

My favourite memory of science class

It was in Grade 7.

Our teacher was a no-nonsense fellow who addressed us as Mr. This and Miss That.

We were having a lesson about the properties of matter.

Steve Brodhag, sitting in the back row, had dozed off.

The teacher, noticing this, called out in a loud voice, “Mr. Brodhag, what’s matter?”

Steve, wakened suddenly, groggily replied, “Uh, nothin’.”

The Harlem “Renaissance”

In 1927, there were perhaps 300.000 African Americans living in the vicinity of Fifth and Seventh Avenues, roughly from 130th to 155th Streets. They lived, according to census and Urban League studies of the period, in housing designed for 16,000. . . . Many lived in tenements so “unspeakable” and “incredible,” in the words of a 1927 city housing commission report, “the state would not allow cows to live in some of these apartments.”

—Black and Blue: The Life and Lyrics of Andy Razaf, by Barry Singer

“Spinoza: A Life,” by Steven Nadler

This is an excellent biography of an extraordinary man. Benedict Spinoza, a lapsed Jew excommunicated by his synagogue and living in a Holland rancorously divided between Calvinists and Catholics, republicans and monarchists, was far ahead of his time. Even the most liberal of his contemporaries could not stomach his sceptical views of religion. The only major work that he published (anonymously) in his lifetime made him the target of vicious attacks, to the point that his grand opus, the Ethics, was published only after his death. Besides being brilliant, Spinoza lived very modestly, never sought public attention, and was known for his kindness and even temper. He died young of a respiratory illness exacerbated by years of grinding lenses and inhaling glass dust, but he may have been lucky to die when he did. Just five years before his death in 1677, the De Witt brothers, Jan and Cornelis, were beaten to death by an angry mob that stripped them naked, mutilated their bodies, and hung them up by their heels. Spinoza’s insistence on logic and reason put him at odds with his own age, and indeed with almost any place or time, and it is not hard to imagine him becoming another victim of the mob. I wish I could have met him, and shook his hand . . . and warned him about inhaling glass dust.

Zane Grey, Louis L’Amour, and Tony Hillerman

Zane Grey’s writing is corny, clunky, and amateurish.

“Out of date” is a polite way to describe his language and attitudes, which are casually racist. His characters, at best barely better than cartoonish, adhere to age-old sexist stereotypes.

The historic popularity of Zane Grey’s work can only be understood as his readers’ recognition of their own values in the “Old West” mythology of white settlers, ranchers, rustlers, and gunmen as the heroes of a white-supremacist melodrama. (Or else, if you came to Grey’s stories in your youth, you might have a nostalgic love of them.)

The anti-Mormon screed in Riders of the Purple Sage, too, would have appealed to most of his original readers.

Louis L’Amour adopted Grey’s basic ideas, created a formula, and cranked out a prodigious number of stories built on it.

The Old West in the novels of Grey and L’Amour is a largely lawless Hobbesian state of nature in which evil men seek to rule and dominate by any means necessary, while good men band together under the leadership of a hero to defeat the villains and protect their land, property, and families. These novels are quintessential boys’ fiction, allowing male readers to wonder if they would be wise, brave, and strong enough to defeat the bad guys.

Tony Hillerman’s detective novels, set in the same region a century later and featuring Navaho policemen Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, are much better on all counts. Within the conventions of the genre (we still have melodramatically evil villains) Hillerman introduces realistic, well-rounded characters, authentic portrayals of indigenous people and their cultures, and female characters who are something more than patriarchal caricatures. If you enjoy detective fiction, I warmly recommend Dance Hall of the Dead as a good introduction to Hillerman’s work.

Sailboats

“Sailboats” —a poem for teachers

Like children with toy sailboats,
we launch students into the water.
Carried by the current,
most disappear from view,
their fates obscure.

A few return nostalgically
to find their places taken by
younger, unknown faces,
their teachers preoccupied
with tests, papers, lessons to prepare.
We see their surprise
as they realize that nothing has changed,
but everything has changed.

Pleased, or saddened, or both
by their visits to the past,
they launch back into the waters,
resuming their journeys to
uncharted futures.

—February/March 2025

Spinoza: the consolations of recognizing necessity

From The Ethics, Part IV:

Human power is extremely limited, and is infinitely surpassed by the power of external causes; we have not, therefore, an absolute power to adapt things outside us to our use. Nevertheless, we shall bear calmly all that happens to us . . . so long as we are conscious that we have done our duty, and that the power which we possess is not sufficient to enable us to protect ourselves completely; remembering that we are a part of universal nature, and that we follow her order. If we have a clear and distinct understanding of this . . . the better part of ourselves will assuredly acquiesce in what befalls us . . . . For, in so far as we are intelligent beings, we can want nothing except what is necessary, nor be absolutely satisfied with anything except what is true.

And Part V:

The more this knowledge that things are necessary is applied to particular things . . . the greater is the power of the mind over the emotions . . . . For the pain arising from the loss of any good is mitigated as soon as the man who has lost it perceives that it could not by any means have been preserved.

Spinoza explains the origin of religious belief

Because people, writes Spinoza,

find in themselves and outside themselves many means which assist them . . . , for instance, eyes for seeing, teeth for chewing, herbs and animals for yielding food, the sun for giving light, the sea for breeding fish, etc., they come to look on the whole of nature as a means for obtaining such conveniences. Now as they are aware that they found these conveniences and did not make them, they think they have cause for believing that some other being has made them for their use. As they look upon things as means [to an end], they cannot believe them to be self-created; but, judging from the [way they themselves do things to achieve some purpose], they are bound to believe in some ruler or rulers of the universe . . . who have arranged and adapted everything for human use. They are bound to estimate the nature of such rulers (having no information on the subject) in accordance with their own nature, and therefore they assert that the gods ordained everything for the use of man, in order to bind man to themselves and obtain from him the highest honor. Hence also it follows, that everyone thought out for himself, according to his abilities, a different way of worshipping God, so that God might love him more than his fellows, and direct the whole course of nature for the satisfaction of his blind cupidity and insatiable avarice. Thus the prejudice developed into superstition, and took deep root in the human mind; . . . but in their endeavor to show that nature does nothing  . . . which is useless to man, they only seem to have demonstrated that nature, the gods, and men are all mad together.

Consider, I pray you, the result: among the many helps of nature they were bound to find some hindrances, such as storms, earthquakes, diseases, etc.: so they declared that such things happen because the gods are angry at some wrong done to them by men, or at some fault committed in their worship. Experience day by day protested and showed by infinite examples, that good and evil fortunes fall to the lot of pious and impious alike; still they would not abandon their inveterate prejudice, for it was more easy for them to class such contradictions among other unknown things of whose use they were ignorant . . . than to destroy the whole fabric of their reasoning and start afresh. They therefore laid down as an axiom, that God’s judgments far transcend human understanding.

. . . If a stone falls from a roof on to someone’s head, and kills him, they will demonstrate by their new method that the stone fell in order to kill the man; for if it had not by God’s will fallen with that object, how could so many circumstances (and there are often many concurrent circumstances) have all happened together by chance? Perhaps you will answer that the event is due to the facts that the wind was blowing, and the man was walking that way. “But why,” they will insist, “was the wind blowing, and why was the man at that very time walking that way?” If you again answer, that the wind had then sprung up because the sea had begun to be agitated the day before, the weather being previously calm, and that the man had been invited by a friend, they will again insist: “But why was the sea agitated, and why was the man invited at that time?” So they will pursue their questions from cause to cause, till at last they take refuge in the will of God—in other words, the sanctuary of ignorance.

—Benedict de Spinoza, The Ethics, Part One, Appendix

Spinoza (1632 – 1677) wisely stipulated that his work be published only after his death.

Robert Graves, “Good-bye to All That” (1929, 1957)

Robert Graves, born in England in 1895, enlisted as a second lieutenant in August 1914, rising to the rank of captain by October 1915. He was badly wounded at the Battle of the Somme (July to November, 1916). He was expected to die but, sent back to England, he recovered. He nearly died again in the flu epidemic of 1918.

He went on to become one of the most notable and controversial writers of the twentieth century: critic, poet, novelist, and memoirist. In 1921 Graves and his wife moved to a village outside of Oxford.

. . . The Rector . . . asked me to speak . . . at a War Memorial service. He suggested that I should read war-poems. But instead of Rupert Brooke on the glorious dead, I read some of the more painful poems by [Siegfried] Sassoon and Wilfred Owen about men dying from gas-poisoning, and about buttocks of corpses bulging from the mud. I also suggested that the men who had died . . . were not particularly virtuous or particularly wicked, but just average soldiers, and that the survivors should thank God they were alive, and do their best to avoid wars in the future. Though  [some in the audience] professed to be scandalized, the ex-service men had not been too well treated on their return, and liked to be told that they stood on equal terms with the glorious dead. They were modest men: I noticed that, though respecting the King’s [request that they] wear their campaign medals on this occasion, they kept them buttoned up inside their coats.

Amen! But let’s hope we have not been “doing our best” in the last century to avoid future wars . . . . If we have, then God help us.

From Beethoven to Taylor Swift: How to Earn a Living Making Music?

The Life of Beethoven (1998), by David Wyn Jones, revived for me an old question about how we pay for art, and the consequences of that choice. Consider the words of Christian Gottlob Neefe, Beethoven’s first teacher of any note:

A composer should not concern himself with the plebeian listener, who never knows what he wants, and understands virtually nothing . . . . Woe betide the composer who wants to address such people. He will spoil his talent, that has been given to him, by having to compose minuets, polonaises, and Turkish marches. And then—good night talent, genius, and art.

In Neefe’s day and in Beethoven’s younger years, “plebeian” listeners could be more easily ignored, as musicians were hired—not for “gigs,” as they are today, but on salary—by noblemen, for whom a retinue of court musicians was as necessary as coachmen and gardeners:

For Neefe and Beethoven princes and patrons had a moral duty to support the work of the artist, something that would earn them respect; if they did not offer this support they deserved, and in Beethoven’s case were to receive, contempt.

This comfortable situation was disrupted for Beethoven when Napoleon’s armies occupied Bonn in 1794, turning Beethoven’s patron into an out-of-work aristocratic refugee. That particular cataclysm was part of a general trend, however, and Beethoven spent most of his career earning his living by selling his work—which required him to pay attention to the tastes of “plebeian listeners,” as seen in this letter he wrote turning down a request to write music for an opera because the popular taste had turned to realistic plots in contemporary settings:

If your opera had not been an opera with magic I would have snatched it with both hands. But the public here is now as prejudiced against a subject of that kind as it formerly looked for and desired it.

Today, a full-time musician must cater to popular taste. The jazz saxophonist Lou Donaldson, asked why he had abandoned avant-garde music for rhythm and blues, said, “I like to eat.” The theoretical alternatives are these: 1) find a patron, either a wealthy individual or a foundation or government body dedicated to supporting the arts; 2) inherit enough wealth that earning a living is unnecessary; 3) resign yourself to poverty; or 4) play what will sell. Each of these options is problematical in ways similar to other aspects of life. David Wyn Jones writes of Beethoven,

As a musician he wanted to compose only the greatest of music, but was also obliged to compose for money; as an individual he wished to maintain the highest ethical and moral standards but continually fell short.

In some semi-mythical community of yesteryear, music was a pastime, not a profession. In the evenings or on holidays people would put aside their work and pick up their instruments. Music was also at the centre of religious services. The resulting “folk music” was simpler than anything Beethoven or Duke Ellington composed, but occasional virtuosos of a kind would emerge. The blind singer or musician, like the limping blacksmith, is a familiar figure from ancient Greece to our own time—though blacksmiths have all but disappeared. These days, most people do not pick up an instrument or join a community sing when work is done—they listen to professionally produced music, usually by themselves, with tiny speakers stuck in their ears. And most of the professionally produced music they listen to, though composed and performed by immensely skilled musicians, is written to appeal to “plebeian listeners” who have, for the most part, zero musical education, and whose tastes are predictably unrefined.

As patrons, like blacksmiths, have virtually disappeared, musicians determined to play and compose “only the greatest of music” are left with few options. On the margins, a few serious jazz and classical musicians are still able to find work, supported by small but devoted audiences, but almost all of them must supplement their performance income with teaching jobs, either privately or in universities or music schools, or both—or with other “revenue streams” generated by “creating a brand” on social media. Or they depend on their spouse’s income. Or they do some other kind of work on the side to support their music-making.

Since we are now in a world run by billionaires, it would be nice if the super-rich “had a moral duty to support the work of the artist, something that would earn them respect.” So far, however, that does not seem to be happening.

Bebop, 1945

Left to right: Dizzy Gillespie, Harold “Doc” West (I think) on drums, Slam Stewart (I think) on bass, Charlie Parker, at (I believe) the legendary Town Hall concert, NYC, June 22, 1945. Unseen pianist is probably Al Haig.

The height of West’s drum throne is remarkable, as is the setup of the drum kit, which resembles an early New Orleans style: snare drum low and strongly tilted, big bass drum, rack tom on the side of the bass drum, and small cymbals. A more modern setup à la Kenny Clarke would feature a smaller bass drum; much less tilt to the snare drum, which sits higher and flatter; larger cymbals, especially the ride cymbal; and a much lower, more natural seating position.

 

Kenny Clarke ca. 1955 in (I believe) Rudy van Gelder’s house, converted into a recording studio.

Plus ça change . . . (Nostradamus edition)

1789:

Among all the possible causes for the French Revolution that historians have proposed over the past two centuries, three stand out. First, the financial irresponsibility of Louis XVI severely limited his options when the crisis arrived. Second, the French nobility, blinded by their arrogance, failed utterly to understand that a few short-term accommodations might, in the long-run, preserve their status. Third, a series of droughts and other agricultural disasters pushed the country from a general depression into a disastrous situation in which thousands faced ruin and starvation, while the government failed to take any useful action. Other factors may have played a role, but these three seem sufficient to explain the cataclysmic events of 1789.

2025:

Among all the possible causes for the collapse of the Fifth Republic, three stand out. First, the financial irresponsibility of several successive governments severely limited President Macron’s options when the crisis arrived. Second, the French elite, blinded by their arrogance, failed utterly to understand that substantive change was required. Third, the COVID-19 pandemic combined with the impacts of climate change to prolong a dismal economic situation, while the government failed to take any useful action. Other factors may have played a role, but these three seem sufficient to explain the cataclysmic events of 2025.

Go pound sand, Ezra (wisdom comes, but too late)

A cautionary tale for those who so willingly proclaim the latest discoveries of the literary promoters to be masterpieces.

In Humphrey Carpenter’s 900-page biography of Ezra Pound, A Serious Character: the life of Ezra Pound, the man is nearly as annoying a century later as he must have been in real life. Half-literate, sloppy, hyperactive, supremely egoistical (even when promoting other artists); a young man whose eccentricities, confined to the harmless realm of literature, turned toxic in middle age when he left letters for politics. A narcissist incapable of admitting error. A flinger of insults when criticized, or just to claim superiority, but also a kind and generous friend. A man who, aspiring to be regarded as an intellectual, lacked the discipline to become truly learned about anything. In short, an American snake-oil salesman purveying poetry and invented poetic movements with all the boastful ignorance of a circus promoter. And the exact model of millions of obsessives today who embrace crackpot theories and bigotries and spread them enthusiastically on social media.

Immediately after his meeting with Mussolini he began a period of frenetic activity, in which he set himself up as a prophet of salvation through right economics, an interpreter of history who could save the world from its errors, a scourge of government who could unmask international conspiracies. . . .

It might be supposed from this that he had lost his sense of proportion; yet he was only behaving in character. The fervour he now devoted to questions of economics and government was the same with which he had pushed himself into the London literary world in 1909, had set up Imagism, promoted Vorticism, and championed Gaudier-Brzeska, Joyce, and Eliot. 

Pound’s internet was, of course, the radio, and his infamous wartime broadcasts from Italy got him arrested, charged with treason on dubious grounds, and confined to a mental hospital on dubious grounds for more than twelve years. Within five years he was receiving regular visits from a fan club of flaky young groupies: proto-hipster would-be poets, neo-Nazis, and anti-Semites. 

And yet this jackass did somehow produce a few lines of memorable poetry, was credited by William Butler Yeats and William Carlos Williams as having a fine ear for rhythm, and by T. S. Eliot for editing “The Waste Land” into what came to be regarded as the poster-poem of Modernism. Having said that . . . if one were inclined to skepticism about Modernism, a closer acquaintance with its leading lights is unlikely to change that inclination. Even Eliot, whose public persona was downright priggish, turns up here writing silly letters to Pound and exchanging ridiculous nicknames with him (Possum for Eliot, Brer Rabbit for Pound). These are men in their 30s, not schoolboys. Modernism’s rebellion against traditions and conventions may have aired out literary salons that had grown staid and stuffy; but it also opened the doors to a boatload of half-baked nonsense pretending to be art, supported by equally half-baked claims that artistic judgment itself is nonsense, that whoever proclaims himself an artist is one, and that whatever claims to be art is immune from critical appraisal.

All the attempts of later avant-garde enthusiasts to find profundity in his work are rebuked by Pound himself. At 81, asked to explain the structure of his Cantos, he answers, “It’s a botch. . . . I knew too little about so many things. I’ve read too little and I read very slowly. . . . I picked out this and that thing that interested me, and then jumbled them into a bag. But that’s not the way to make . . . a work of art.” His defenders have claimed alternately that a) he said no such thing, or that b) the poet’s judgment of his own work has no value. To which I say, well, o-o-okay! A year or two later he tells Allen Ginsberg, “At seventy I realized that instead of being a lunatic, I was a moron.” When Ginsberg praises Pound’s poetry, Pound says, “A mess. . . . Stupid and ignorant all the way through. Stupid and ignorant.” He also renounced the anti-Jewish calumnies in which he had indulged.

Thus in his dotage Ezra Pound seems to have arrived, finally, at a kind of wisdom and self-knowledge, à la King Lear—reminding me of that time-tested definition of tragedy: wisdom comes, but too late.

The Magic Mountain, then and now

Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924) stands at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th as Dante’s Divine Comedy stands at the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance. The threadbare plot is merely a framework within which Mann’s characters can indulge in long undergraduate arguments (“undergraduate” because of their enthusiasm, but undergraduate at a very high level—Oxford or Cambridge, for example) about history and philosophy, and his narrator can linger, endlessly it seems, over the minute details of weather, landscape, a lady’s dress, or Hans Castorp’s intricate thoughts and feelings. The history and philosophy debates sum up the Western tradition to that point—Greeks, Hebrews, Romans, Christianity, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the bourgeois anxieties of the 19th century—while somehow anticipating the insanities of the 20th century in which, as Mann foresaw, the brutalities of far-left ideologies would be matched blow-for-blow by the brutalities of far-right ideologies. There is more than a whiff of Dostoyevsky, too, blowing through Mann’s tuberculosis resort, both in the violent oscillations of the arguments and in the dark forebodings of the future. The Karamazov brothers would fit right in with the hypersensitive patients of The Magic Mountain. Inevitably, the novel includes an evening séance, but without a ouija board or certified Theosophist in attendance. These pampered folk, perpetually bored, search for entertainment just as their progeny do, three or four generations later. The only artists among them are dilettantes. The only intellectuals, Settembrini and Naphta, talk and talk and talk, without effect, until their comic-opera duel and the symbolic suicide of the Jesuit Bolshevik, Naphta. The fecklessness of the Magic Mountain’s inhabitants mirrors that of Chekhov’s Three Sisters (1901); the pointlessness of their lives, that of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953).

The scoundrels, criminals, gangsters, and swindlers who actually make things happen never appear on the Magic Mountain. They are down below, cooking up the catastrophe we call World War I. A century later, what has changed, essentially?

The failure of the Left

The left-of-centre parties in Western democracies are failing because both their economic policies and their social policies have alienated the majority of middle-class voters. 

By embracing globalization and deregulation of financial markets they have spiked the income- and wealth-gaps, leaving the middle class, at best, treading water; more usually, actually losing wealth and income against inflation; and at worst, jobless and unemployable after the export of manufacturing jobs to developing economies overseas. 

At the same time they have adopted increasingly marginal social policy reforms that have alienated many voters, generated backlash, and left the minority groups they aimed to help little better off than before. The two trends go together, of course: economic resentments feed social resentments, and vice versa. 

Meanwhile the upper-class elites of the Left have been padding their stock portfolios, planning their next exotic holiday travel, and hobnobbing with celebrities at gala dinners. The geniuses who championed globalization seemed utterly oblivious to the families thrown into poverty by the closure of factories. All they noticed, apparently, was the cleaner air and water. They have allowed public education to flounder for generations, while sending their own children to private schools. They have failed to lift marginalized communities—indigenous people, immigrants, people of colour—out of endemic poverty, while they and their families live in posh suburban communities equipped with parks, recreation facilities, and state-of-the-art security systems. 

These failures have produced apathy among marginalized minorities, along with a majority population dominated by low-information, low-skilled citizens ready to welcome populist demagogues and vote for them—and decidedly not ready to listen to well-reasoned policy discussions by guys in $500 suits who seem to know nothing at all about the way most people are living. The populist demagogue in the $500 suit who sounds like he is just as pissed off as they are seems a better bet. 

And that’s the way it is, as Walter Cronkite used to say, in December 2024.

The “Sad Truths” Dept., from H. L. Mencken et al

No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby. The mistake that is made always runs the other way. Because the plain people are able to speak and understand, and even, in many cases, to read and write, it is assumed that they have ideas in their heads, and an appetite for more. This assumption is a folly.

—H. L. Mencken, in the Baltimore Sun, Sept. 18th, 1926

Approximately 32 million adults in the United States can’t read, according to the U.S. Department of Education and the National Institute of Literacy. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that 50 percent of U.S. adults can’t read a book written at an eighth-grade level.

—everylibrary.org, June 2017

Democracy is the most difficult of all forms of government, since it requires the widest spread of intelligence, and we forgot to make ourselves intelligent when we made ourselves sovereign.

—Will Durant, The Lessons of History (1968)

The Canada Post strike

As Adam King has explained in his article in The Conversation, here—

https://theconversation.com/canada-post-strike-highlights-labour-struggle-over-gig-economy-and-precarious-work-244469

—the strike by Canada Post workers results largely from the proliferation of “gig economy” businesses that to date have successfully evaded the usual requirements to pay their workers properly, provide benefits, and allow them to unionize.

The government needs to regulate these businesses and force them to treat their employees properly instead of pauperizing them by calling them “independent contractors” and thereby dragging down the entire system of social welfare that generations have fought so hard to establish.

I strongly support the Canada Post strikers, and I urge both federal and provincial governments to take action immediately to end the exploitative practices of “gig economy” businesses.

500 years, two technologies, similar chaos

1520s

In Germany, respect for traditional authority figures—the Pope, the Emperor, and other nobles—has broken down under an assault led by Martin Luther. Into that vacuum of authority hundreds of voices arise, each contending with the other. The vicious attacks made initially against the Pope are now turned by various Protestant factions against other Protestant factions, with verbal violence more than occasionally turning into physical violence. No one, including Luther himself, is excluded from the most extreme accusations and absurd slanders. All this vitriol is spread by a new technology—the printing press—which accelerates the spread of lies, rumours, calumnies, and hysteria of every sort. Where before there was one truth, now there are hundreds of truths, or none at all.

2020s

Throughout the West, respect for traditional authority figures has broken down. Ten thousand voices contend, with the same accusations—traitor! racist! fascist! etc.—hurled by opposing factions at each other. Verbal violence more than occasionally turns into physical violence. No public figure is excluded from the most extreme accusations and absurd slanders, and even private persons are not safe from attack. A new technology—social media—accelerates the spread of lies, rumours, calumnies, and hysteria of every sort. Where before there was a rough standard for establishing the truth, now there are hundreds of truths, or none at all, and no agreed standard for judging.

The authorities who lost control in each of these cases were different, of course. In the first case, the corruptions of the Papacy in Rome and the Church in general are well-known: ersatz “indulgences” and relics foisted on an ignorant populace and used to raise funds; scandalous personal behaviour and extravagant expenditures by popes, cardinals, and their monarchical retinues; and bad behaviour in local areas by priests, monks, friars, and nuns who were ill-suited to a religious vocation. Such criticisms were well-known, and had been documented by writers like Chaucer a hundred years earlier, but it was Luther who brought things to a crisis with his defiance of Rome and the Pope’s excommunication. The nobility, meanwhile, were doing their usual work of soaking the peasantry while they lived in luxury. Five centuries later in the post-WWII West, the orthodoxies that would be overthrown were more diffuse: a media elite who dominated a largely centralized system of major newspapers and major TV and radio networks; a political elite who worked hand-in-hand with this media elite; and a general agreement that some form of capitalism (with a larger welfare state favoured by the centre-left and a smaller one favoured by the centre-right) would lead to prosperity and progress for almost everyone. These orthodoxies and their representatives began to lose credibility in the 1980s when a “globalized” economy featuring free-trade agreements, fewer regulations of the financial system, and the exportation of manufacturing and heavy industries to developing countries where labour was much cheaper. The result was the rise of a new billionaire class whose wealth was generated by manipulation of financial instruments like hedge funds, while the middle and working classes saw their income and wealth stagnating or falling. These trends were only exacerbated by the rise of internet billionaires around the turn of the century. Despite their policy differences, all the mainstream political parties participated in this massive shift of wealth.

In both cases, the peasants (16th century) and the working-class (21st century) rose up in revolt, with violence in the earlier period (the Peasants’ War) exceeding—so far—violence in our own time (the truckers’ protests, the jaunes gilets in France, the January 6th attack on the Capitol in 2021). These revolts against the elites spilled over into attacks on other perceived enemies like the Jews (16th century) and the Jews and the immigrants (21st century). (The 21st century movements of immigrants into the prosperous nations of Europe and North America were impelled, of course, by that same “globalized” economy that led to soaring wealth and income gaps, job losses, and economic stagnation in Europe and North America.) In both cases, too, the earlier proponents of change (Luther, Reagan Republicans) were pushed aside by more radical voices. As in the French, Russian, and Chinese Revolutions, yesterday’s revolutionaries became today’s counter-revolutionaries and enemies of the people. The fanaticism set in motion by Luther led to the Wars of Religion in France (1562 – 1598) and the Thirty Years’ War (1618 – 1648).

The loathing between Catholics and Protestants, and between nations, was so great that when the antagonists finally agreed to negotiate it took five years to bring the carnage to an end. The Peace of Westphalia, signed on October 24th, 1648, ended more than a century of religion-stoked violence dating back to the first executions of Luther’s followers in the Netherlands in the early 1520s. The fanaticism and savagery set off by the Reformation had led to the dispossession, maiming, execution, and slaughter of millions of people. . . .

“I have often wondered,” Spinoza observed Erasmically in his Preface [to his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670)], that persons who make a boast of professing the Christian religion should quarrel with such rancorous animosity and daily display towards one another such bitter hatred.”

—Michael Massing, Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther, and the Fight for the Western Mind

(Note 1: It is also arguable that Luther’s violent attacks and slanderous accusations against the Jews embedded anti-Jewish hatred in German culture in a particular way that made Germany the birthplace of the Holocaust four centuries later. Note 2: That “religion-stoked violence” ended in 1648 seems a highly dubious claim. Note 3: When I lived in Morocco in the 1980s I often heard that Islam, its theology rooted in the Middle Ages, needed a “Protestant Revolution.” I assume that the “slaughter of millions of people” was not included in this proposal.)

It is tempting (as always, given the limited perspective of a single human lifetime) to see the 1520s and 202s as separate cases. I prefer to see them as parts of the same story, in which civilization undergoes periodic corrections or adjustments—diastolic / systolic alternations—either when the established order’s corruption becomes unbearably oppressive, or when the chaos has gone on too long and most people are willing to give up some freedoms in exchange for peace, order, and stability.

My question: Is this process simply an endless oscillation, similar to the Greeks’ idea of a repeating move from monarchy to tyranny to oligarchy to democracy and back again? Or are we making slow progress toward a society in which both the oppressive inclinations of elites and the violent reactions of the masses are contained within some kind of acceptable range?

The most pernicious race of little odious vermin

“. . . As for yourself,” continued the king, “who have spent the greatest part of your life in travelling, I am well disposed to hope you may hitherto have escaped many vices of your country. But by what I have gathered from your own relation, . . . I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”

—Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels

Part II, A Voyage to Brobdingnag, Chapter 6

Confluences: jazz, immigrants, and Martin Luther

As I am reading W. H. Kenney’s Jazz on the River I am also listening to the audiobook of Michael Massing’s Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther, and the Fight for the Western Mind. Martin Luther, when he wasn’t blowing up Catholicism or excoriating the Jews, wrote many significant hymns that became central to Lutheran worship and helped to create a musical culture in Germany that was exported to the U.S. by German immigrants in the 19th century. One group of such immigrants, the Streckfus family, saw the decline of the packet boat industry along the Mississippi River in the 1890s and, perhaps because of that German musical culture, conceived the idea of converting their vessels into excursion boats featuring live orchestras and huge dance floors. It was on Streckfus steamers that Fate Marable spent fifty years leading Black orchestras, introducing New Orleans jazz to white audiences and teaching scores of notable jazz musicians (with Louis Armstrong at the top of that list) to read music fluently enough to make them employable when they (part of the Great Migration of Black Americans out of the South) moved on to a bit of fame, if not fortune, in Chicago and New York. And another German immigrant, Bix Beiderbecke, growing up on the Mississippi shore in Davenport, Iowa, caught the jazz bug after hearing the riverboat orchestras, and became one of the first notable white jazz musicians. Martin Luther, no doubt, would have been appalled by Beiderbecke’s music.

It’s the same old song . . .

Summarized from Jazz on the River, by William Howland Kenney (2005), pp. 107-108:

  • 1896: The American Federation of Musicians is founded with forty-four local unions. Local #44 is the Black musicians’ union in St. Louis, Missouri. For three decades Local 44 prospers, with Black musicians playing the venues that white musicians didn’t want: dance halls, nightclubs, and riverboats.
  • 1927: With the end of silent movies, the white musicians who formerly played in movie theatres lose those jobs and begin moving in on the riverboat jobs, throwing Black musicians out of work.
  • 1929: With the Depression, white musicians lose most of their other jobs playing  vaudeville, stage shows, opera houses, and concert halls.
  • 1930: The A.F.M. revokes Local 44’s charter, making it impossible for Black musicians to negotiate for contracts playing on the riverboats. Subsequently, three-quarters of the remaining riverboat jobs go to white musicians, leaving most Black musicians playing in marginal venues for non-union wages. Similar stories played out in cities across the nation.
  • 1944: the A.F.M. finally charters a new union for Black musicians in St. Louis, Local 197.
  • 1971: Local 197 is dissolved when the St. Louis musicians’ union is finally integrated.

Mama Lou

I just came across this lovely piece by Eric McHenry in The American Scholar that seems to provide the definitive story behind “Mama Lou” and the origins of songs like “Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-De-Ay” and “Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight”:

“Queen of the Castle: Looking for Mama Lou, the legendary singer whose work helped inspire American ragtime”

Bessie Smith’s recording of “Hot Time” may be the closest we will ever get to Mama Lou’s original version, but the UK’s Ottilie Patterson and Chris Barber do a great job with it, too.

Like a heartbeat: why man-made systems fail

Utopians, ideologues, and system-builders of all sorts run aground when they forget that life is biological. Systems needs to breathe. They need to slow down or speed up, contract or expand, in response to changing conditions, like a heartbeat. Too much freedom? Increase order. Too much order? Increase freedom. Too little regulation? Too much regulation? Adjust as needed.

Far easier said than done, but inelastic systems guarantee failure, like medieval Christian attempts to fix “permissible” interest rates, aiming to avoid usury while still allowing for normal economic activity, and failing at both—because actual interest rates fluctuate with the money supply, like a heartbeat fluctuating to meet the needs of the body.

The more that man-made systems imitate this biological elasticity, the more they will succeed.

Can real men live in a peaceful society?

In 19th-century Europe the growing middle class generated by the Industrial Revolution developed a new way of life. In bourgeois towns the streets were lit at night; policemen ensured order, supported by judges, courts, juries, and jailers. City parks provided pleasant Sunday walks, and perhaps even a brass band playing music in a pavilion. Fathers went to work each morning. Some returned home for the midday meal, along with the children home from school; all returned home for supper with the family. Mothers stayed at home to care for the children, maintain the house, and prepare the meals. In wealthier families they were assisted by servants who helped with the cooking, cleaning, shopping, and care of the children. The men worked in shops and offices, as clerks or salesmen, or as managers in one of the local factories. Physical labour was left to the working class in towns, and to farmers in the countryside. Wars were a thing of the past, or took place only at the remote edges of the continent. 

In this new bourgeois society, new male stereotypes emerged: the pompous banker; the crafty lawyer; the doctor who might cure you or might kill you with his primitive treatments; the dandy, with his fancy clothes and smooth talk for the ladies; the mousy clerk; the fawning salesman. None of these male figures were strong candidates for the army. No, the army’s officers were from the upper classes—the noblemen who for countless generations had been bred for war. The ordinary soldiers and sailors were from the working classes. The bourgeois men were too soft to make good soldiers. They were peacetime creatures, better suited for commerce than for combat. Sport was the only aspect of bourgeois life where the old warlike masculine virtues were still cultivated, with boxing and wrestling most prominent. (In the 20th century the role of sport in bourgeois life exploded, with multiple forms of team sports and an entire industry of exercise and fitness for people who rarely exercised their bodies on the job.) 

When it came to love and marriage, this bourgeois society produced a whole new set of stereotypes. The young bourgeois man was not very attractive to the girls whose attention went to the “bad boys” with bulging muscles and scars from brawling. These “dangerous” guys seemed much more exciting to girls than the well-behaved, well-dressed, well-spoken boys they knew from school. Despite their attractions as lovers, however, these “dangerous” men rarely made good husbands—if they married at all—and so most of the bourgeois girls eventually got over such passing infatuations and settled on some reliable fellow who could be counted on to provide her with a comfortable life and be a good husband and father. In the 20th century, similar dissatisfactions with the lack of excitement in bourgeois life led teenagers of both sexes to experiment with “wild” behaviours featuring music offensive to their parents, crazy fashions and hairstyles, tattoos, motorcycles, boyfriends or girlfriends their parents would not approve of, drug and alcohol abuse, and sexual adventures—anything and everything, in short, to violate bourgeois norms and conventions. 

At the heart of this new bourgeois life and its dissatisfactions was the new bourgeois man who, despite his education and sophistication, was decidedly unexciting. The stereotypical man of earlier times, by contrast, performed physical labour that kept him fit and strong; was ready at a moment’s notice to use his fists or pick up a weapon to wield against enemies or wild beasts; but could also play a fiddle or sing a song or build a house, and wanted to marry a good woman and raise a family. He combined, in short, the traditional masculine virtues with a dedication to home and family.

These traditional masculine virtues go way, way back. In Homer’s Odyssey we hear the tale of Ares, the god of war, having an affair with Aphrodite, the goddess of love who has been married to the crippled smith god, Hephaistos, in a failed attempt to tame and domesticate her. Ares is hyper-masculine: a strong, handsome warrior who loves the battlefield even more than he loves women. Aphrodite is hyper-feminine: beautiful, sexy, and unfaithful. In bourgeois society Ares would be a low-class thug, and Aphrodite a shameless whore. Their extremes of masculinity and femininity are taboo in a middle-class world. The problems of respectable middle-class women managing their inner Aphrodites deserve attention, and the consequences of middle-class women violating sexual taboos are serious and well-known: scandal, disgrace, sexually-transmitted disease, unwanted pregnancies, abortions, single motherhood, etc. But our focus here is on the marginalization and condemnation of hyper-masculinity in bourgeois society, because the consequences of men violating bourgeois taboos around masculinity range from the personal (e.g., assaults, domestic violence, rape) to the collective (e.g., gangs, fascism, and war). We see these pathological versions of manhood today in politics and society around the world: authoritarian leaders, tribal and national chauvinism, celebration of “bro culture”; pop music stars who are misogynistic in both their art and their lives; politicians who ramp up male fear that the women are “taking over.”

In William James’s 1910 essay, “The Moral Equivalent of War,” he writes of  “manly virtues,” of which he approves and wishes to preserve while at the same time avoiding their ultimate testing-ground, war. Society may have changed, James writes, but human nature remains: “modern man inherits all the innate pugnacity and all the love of glory of his ancestors.” That “love of glory” reminds us, perhaps, of sport as both preparation and substitute for war. “We are the champions!” cry the winners. Sport having failed to end war, James proposes his “moral equivalent”: mandatory conscription of all young men for a period of service dedicated to arduous tasks that are needed but usually regarded as undesirable vocations: “To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dishwashing, clothes-washing, and window-washing, to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, and to the frames of skyscrapers, would our gilded youths be drafted off, according to their choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them . . . .” Working in teams, they would toil and sweat together, help each other, learn brotherhood and comradeship, and have the satisfaction of giving themselves to a cause greater than their own petty, personal desires. James, writing in the last year of his long life, asserts that “Such a conscription . . . would preserve in the midst of a pacific civilization the manly virtues which the military party is so afraid of seeing disappear in peace.” In closing he writes, “I have no serious doubt that [we] are capable of organizing such a moral equivalent as I have sketched, or some other just as effective for preserving manliness . . . .”

Without doubt James’s scheme would achieve a good deal, as we have seen in the United States in the Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps, or in John F. Kennedy’s Peace Corps. These programs, however, though inspired by James’s essay, were both voluntary—the universal conscription proposed by James has never been tried. Without such an experiment, we cannot know whether James’s idea could indeed so satisfy the noble and positive aspects of war that war itself would forever end. Is it possible to tame the urge to make war? One thinks of chivalry, the medieval attempt to civilize roaming bands of armed brigands plaguing towns and cities by inspiring them to be noble, brave, honest knights upholding Christian morality and defending the weak and defenceless (especially if they were beautiful ladies). We may scoff at this chivalric myth, but it has had some staying power. Millions of young men, admonished by their mothers to behave “like gentlemen,” have learned to stand when a lady enters a room, to offer their seats to the elderly, to remove their hats at the supper table, to speak without swearing, and to defend others against bullies. 

On the other hand, a few minutes spent browsing social media may lead to serious doubts about chivalry’s staying power. And while many young men may still learn good manners from their parents, it is hard to see this as more than surface behaviour that quickly evaporates under stress—or when using an encrypted account. Underneath any polite bourgeois surface that still exists, the hyper-masculine spirit of Bertran de Born (ca. 1140 – 1215), the Occitan poet-warrior, still lurks:

Maces and swords, colourful helms,

shields riven and cast aside:

these shall we see at the start of the battle,

and also many vassals struck down,

the horses of the dead and wounded running wild.

And when he enters the combat,

let every man of good lineage

think of nothing but splitting heads and hacking arms;

for it is better to die than to live in defeat.

 

I tell you, I find no such savour

in eating or drinking or sleeping

as when I hear the cries of “attack!”

from both sides, and the noise

of riderless horses in the shadows;

and I hear screams of “Help! Help!”

and I see great and small alike

falling into the grassy ditches

and the dead

with splintered lances, bedecked with pennons

through their sides.

—from “Be’m plai lo gais temps de pascor”

The ladies of Eleanor of Aquitaine’s court, according to the legend, invented chivalry to tame the violence of the men around them. Can we do better? Can we have manhood without murderous violence, or are the two inseparable? If humans are indeed highly evolved animals rather than aspiring angels, perhaps other animals can help with these questions. A male dog who cannot be trained out of his violent behaviour is sometimes castrated. The same procedure is used with stallions and other farm animals that are no longer needed for breeding. From the Wikipedia page on gelding:

Castration allows a male animal to be more calm, better-behaved, less sexually aggressive, and more responsive to training efforts. Additionally, it is known for making the animal quieter, gentler and generally more suitable as an everyday working animal, or even as a pet (in the case of companion animals).

A drastic solution, but apparently it works. Would it be a violation of human rights? Cruel and unusual punishment? Or a natural consequence for people whose repeated anti-social violence poses a grave threat to society? Surely there must be less drastic solutions. Are prison and castration our only options for controlling anti-social hyper-masculinity, or can men learn to express their virility in positive ways that make them better people and make their communities stronger and safer? Will future scientists devise a way to adjust the hormone levels of an anti-social male without emasculating him? Or must we expect that war and violence, as they have always been part of human experience, will remain with us as long as there are humans?

I am reminded once again of that triangular diagram of human nature, as imagined by Plato and Aristotle, and recycled by Dante in his vision of Hell. The diagram shows Appetite and Will as the base of the triangle. Reason, the highest and best part of human nature, according to the Greeks, and for Christians the most divine part of our nature—the part that distinguishes us from other animals—is the small bit at the top of the triangle. Optimists have argued that we can use our reason to restrain our appetites and master our will. Recent studies in neuroscience, however, have suggested that our choices are made long before they reach the level of articulation, and that while we may think we are using our reason to make decisions, we are actually using our reason to ratify decisions already made unconsciously. Politics and current events in the 21st century would seem to support this view, especially when one considers the perverse reasoning used to justify bigotry, hatred, discrimination, and an appalling variety of atrocities.

Dante’s Hell is this same diagram, flipped upside down. As Virgil guides the Pilgrim down into the pit of Hell, they begin with the less serious sins—sins of the appetites—pass through the sins of willfulness, and finally reach the bottom of the pit, where the worst sins are punished: those that involve perversion of Reason, that divine gift of God to humans, for evil purposes. The logic is clear, but I am beginning to think that Dante got it wrong. When I consider the most pernicious human evils—racism, religious hatred, sexism and misogyny, and the hyper-masculinity that transforms these negative emotions into murderous violence—they seem to be rooted deep in our nature, in our appetites and our willfulness, in our psycho-biology. Reason has little to do with these dark impulses. We fear the Other, a fear based in our own insecurities, and that fear easily turns to hatred. Men’s insecurities respond to threats, as discussed above, with hyper-masculine violence both individual and collective. Can we be kind, loving, generous, even selfless? Of course . . . but only, it seems, if we have been blessed with situations in which our insecurities are not threatened. Here is Hamlet’s take:

What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form, in moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? . . .

Use every man after his desert, and who should ‘scape whipping?

—II.ii

Ah, but Hamlet, as we know, was prone to melancholy.

Paradise lost

When I was a boy, bird poop was everywhere. Cars parked on the street would be covered with it. More than once I was hit on the head while riding my bike or walking down the street. I remember, too, digging my hands into wet sand at the beach and bringing up scores of sea creatures: tiny crabs, shells of all kinds (many inhabited), sand dollars, etc. As a young man home from university years later I did the same thing and brought up nothing but sand. And today, bird droppings are rare items. I cannot remember the last time I was concerned about birds overhead doing their business on me.

A passage from the biography of Alexander von Humboldt (1769 – 1859) that I have been reading brought these memories to mind. In February 1803, von Humboldt was voyaging by ship from Guayaquil, Ecuador, to Mexico:

The Pacific was full of life—it was as though the sea was paved with fish. Pods of dolphins passed by, ‘resembling herds of swine.’ There was a plethora of birds, too: pelicans, gulls, sea swallows, so that ‘the sea looked like a huge pond covered in birds.’

—Maren Meinhardt, Alexander von Humboldt: How the Most Famous Scientist of the Romantic Age Found the Soul of Nature (2018)

A huge pond covered in birds! Roadkill of the Industrial Revolution. Lord, what have we done?

Roy and Lou

On November 9th we lost Lou Donaldson (November 1, 1926 – November 9, 2024), and today we lost Roy Haynes (March 13, 1925 – November 12, 2024), two giants of music who gave so much to us, and who proved that the good do not always die young. As Roy told Jon Batiste in an interview a few years ago, every day is Thanksgiving. Thank you, gentlemen. The world is a better place because you were here. As for the rest of you: go listen to their music!

Don Quixote’s wise words

The inspiring words of Don Quixote, seeking to console Sancho Panza:

All these squalls to which we have been subjected are signs that the weather will soon improve, and things will go well for us, because it is not possible for the bad or the good to endure forever, and from this it follows that since the bad has lasted so long a time, the good is close at hand.

—Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (Part I, Chapter XVIII)

In the next moment he learns that their saddlebags have been stolen and they have nothing to eat.

Nonsense in a Strange Land

I revisited Robert Heinlein’s novel, Stranger in a Strange Land after half a century by listening to the audiobook, which, mercifully, is based on the shorter version first published in 1962, rather than the “uncut” version published in the 1990s by Heinlein’s widow.

At its worst, the novel is a hodgepodge of nonsense interspersed with offensive and mildly offensive artifacts of the time when it was written and the gender of its author. At its best it does indeed (as Heinlein claimed) raise fundamental questions worth considering about who we are as a species, and how we ought to live. It’s something like the People Magazine version of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Are the questions worth the nonsense? No. But the nonsense is just treacly enough to keep the book in print and selling for another fifty years, I fear.

 

November 2024

To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places — and there are so many — where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory. . . .

Whenever I become discouraged (which is on alternate Tuesdays, between three and four) I lift my spirits by remembering: The artists are on our side! I mean those poets and painters, singers and musicians, novelists and playwrights who speak to the world in a way that is impervious to assault because they wage the battle for justice in a sphere which is unreachable by the dullness of ordinary political discourse.

—Howard Zinn,

from A Power Governments Cannot Suppress and “Artists of Resistance”

Clown, madman, thug: the appeal of fascism

Hitler’s power and success never ceased to astonish Mussolini. There was something unreal, something that didn’t make sense about the triumph of this Bohemian psychopath. In his heart of hearts, Mussolini saw Hitler’s success as a bizarre freak, an aberration on the part of world history. . . .

Novikov . . . [after seeing a Nazi army officer on the street] said to himself three words he would remember again and again. “Clown!” Then correcting himself: “Madman!” Then correcting himself once more: “Thug!”

—Stalingrad, by Vasily Grossman (1952)

Hitler, Hinkel, Drumpf, Trump: variations on a theme. Why does the fascist clown madman thug appeal to millions of people? All our astonishing science and technology will mean nothing if we cannot answer this question and put fascism finally, permanently in the past.

Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels

Think of Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby, with Nick Carraway observing his dubious friends and acquaintances—part of their story but always on the margin of the action.

Think of Marcel Proust’s endless reconsiderations of everything.

Turn the narrator into a woman, who adds to endless reconsiderations endless and peculiarly feminine doubts, self-doubts, waxing and waning of self-confidence.

Begin the story with two girls in a working-class neighbourhood of post-World War II Naples and its collection of petty criminals, gangsters, shopkeepers, and fascists whose wartime activities are never mentioned but permeate the air.

Is Lila/Lina Elena’s best friend? enemy? doppelganger? evil twin? Will Elena, like Nick Carraway and Melville’s Ishmael, escape the fate of the others, or will she be dragged down with them? The novels present an exhausting yet hypnotic four-volume, slow-motion train wreck covering half a century of these fascinating, frustrating, sometimes infuriating, occasionally hilarious lives.

In the background we get the Sixties, political upheaval, Cold War, the sexual revolution, etc.

P.S.: The men, with rare exceptions, do not come off well. Not at all.

P.P.S.: The narrator’s name is Elena, as is the author’s, and in the novels Elena becomes a novelist who writes about her best friend . . . but the novelist’s name is a nom de plume. And . . . the rumour mill has it that the author may actually be a man, writing under a woman’s name! Mon dieu!