Category: Musings

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?

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.

 

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!

James Joyce, husband and father

From the “Good Artist ≠ Good Person” Department:

1907: Joyce, living on a negligible salary as a bank clerk and funds borrowed from his brother, with a young son and a pregnant wife, eluding creditors and moving from one shabby apartment to another, gives notice to his employer. On his last day of work,

he drew a month’s salary (250 lire) at the bank and went on a farewell spree—a drunken adieu to the Eternal City, which he had come to consider ‘vulgar’ and ‘whorish.’ When [he was] suitably drunk, two congenial bar-flies took him to a backstreet and relieved him of his bulging wallet. He returned home penniless and completely soaked from an evening downpour.

In 1922, Joyce and his friends celebrate the first printing of 1,000 copies of Ulysses, published by Sylvia Beach, owner of the Shakespeare & Co. bookshop. Joyce

presented copy no. 1,000 to Nora who immediately offered to sell it to Arthur Power who was present, a joke which Joyce pretended to find amusing. Although it was widely believed that Nora had never read Ulysses, according to Power it was evident that she had. She admitted to McAlmon that she had read the last pages of the book, adding, ‘I guess the man’s a genius, but what a dirty mind he has, surely!’ When McAlmon told her that it was her down-to-earth presence that had transformed her husband from ‘the word-prettifying bard’ and ‘martyred sensibility,’ Stephen Dedalus, she told him, ‘Go along with you! What they’ll be saying next is that if it hadn’t been for that ignoramus of a woman, what a man he would have been! But never you mind, I could tell them a thing or two about him after twenty years of putting up with him, and the devil take him when he’s off on one of his rampages!’

. . . When one young man approached him in a restaurant and asked, ‘Could I kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses?’ he replied, ‘Oh no, don’t do that; it did other things too.’

On the other hand, the family goes on holiday in Brittany in 1923:

. . . Touring the countryside with Lloyd Morris, the American critic, and his mother, they came across a field of druidic stones. When they stopped for lunch Joyce took Morris aside and said that if the womenfolk were to comment on the shape of the stones no mention should be made of their phallic significance. Such talk among ladies, Morris concluded, was taboo for Joyce.

. . . [Stuart] Gilbert decided that the problem with the Joyces was that they lived empty lives, forming only fleeting attachments to things and making few real friends. That was why Joyce filled his life with pointless campaigns . . . . He was, thought Gilbert, deeply cynical about human intentions, and other people’s troubles left him unmoved, except for those of close family members.

[1936] The sound of warplanes exercising over Paris was an intimation of the change which was slowly transforming European consciousness. On 19 July civil war erupted in Spain and the approaching Berlin Olympics would show to the world the assertive face of the dictatorial right. The young were engaged in war and words of war, and their literary interests were reflecting that change of mood and commitment. Joyce, on the other hand, felt he had more personal enemies with whom to contend, and talk of war simply did not interest him. . . .

[On a visit to Denmark with Nora] Everything centred around himself. ‘He was,’ wrote Vindling, ‘like a spoiled boy with his quiet, eternally permissive mother’ . . . .

[1938] In March he had received an appeal from Jewish acquaintances, to whose friendship and rich culture he owed so much, to help friends and fellow-Jews evade the clutches of the rampaging Nazis. Now, in June, at the prompting of Daniel Brody and through a friend at the French Foreign Office, he helped Hermann Broch, the Austrian novelist (and author of a book about Joyce) escape from Vienna to Paris. In May, Edmund Brauchbar and Gustav Zumsteg (whose mother owned Zurich’s Kronenhalle) asked him to assist friends and family members to escape to Ireland or England. In October, having sought the assistance of Benjamin Huebsch in New York, he helped the family of Paul Pèrles, son of a Viennese bookseller, who was Brauchbar’s cousin, get to America via London. The following year he would assist the son of Charlotte Sauermann, a soprano at the Zurich opera, to escape to the West. In all he helped some fifteen or sixteen Jews escape to safety. To Jacques Mercanton he said pityingly, ‘Those poor Jews!’ Here was a man finally awake and ready to help, faced with the barbarism that negated art and human kindness. 

—Gordon Bowker, James Joyce: A Biography

The Value of Poetry

Most people today believe that poetry has little or no value. Along with other literature, the arts, and everything that academics call “the humanities,” poetry has been dethroned in the 21st-century league tables by science, mathematics, engineering, economics, business administration, finance, and technology. These practical subjects have value, so we are told, because they produce results that can be quantified and monetized. In the 21st century, money-value is the only value we recognize. We even say that something is important only if it “counts.” Music, novels, and films are important only as entertainment, and they are admired only if they make their producers a lot of money.

Practical subjects like science also have value because they ask questions that produce answers.

Poetry (which will stand here for all literature, music, dance, visual art, etc.) raises questions that have no answers—and what could be more useless, worthless, and pointless than that? We shall see.

In Small Is Beautiful (1973), the statistician and economist E. F. Schumacher writes, “The true problems of living . . . have no solution in the ordinary sense of the word. They demand of man not merely the employment of his reasoning powers but the commitment of his whole personality. . . . They demand . . . forces from a higher level, thus bringing love, beauty, goodness, and truth into our lives.” He goes on:

Science and engineering produce ‘know-how’; but ‘know-how’ is nothing by itself; it is a means without an end, a mere potentiality, an unfinished sentence. . . . At present . . . the whole of mankind is in mortal danger, not because we are short of scientific and technological know-how, but because we tend to use it destructively, without wisdom. More education can help us only if it produces more wisdom. 

In other words, poetry inspires us to think about the unanswerable questions that lead us toward wisdom, not just “know-how.” Who are we? Where are we? What are we doing, and what should we be doing? Schumacher notes that wrestling with such questions “tends to be exhausting, worrying, and wearisome. Hence people try to avoid it and to run away from it.” 

You may recognize that impulse in your own response to questions without answers like, “Who are we?” Perhaps it is reassuring to know that this is a normal response. Searching for wisdom isn’t easy. It’s a lifetime project. There is no guarantee of success. But without the wisdom that poetry, etc., may bring us, we will have no idea how to live; why to live; what to do with all our science and technology.

And that is the value of poetry.

[Image: https://wordart.com/get/image/8ohz8dol55xd.png]

A tiny minority

In The Republic and elsewhere, Plato famously divides human nature into three parts: appetite, will, and reason. If you picture an isosceles triangle divided by two horizontal lines, the biggest of the three sections that result is appetite, at the base of the triangle. The middle portion is will. The smallest part, at the tip of the triangle, is reason. Appetite and reason are self-explanatory. Will (sometimes translated as “spirit”) is that part of us that determines to do something, just because. Think of the dog who insists on jumping up onto dad’s favourite chair, which has been forbidden to him, even though there are plenty of other comfortable spots available.

Plato thought that we share the lower two parts of our nature, appetite and will, with the other animals. Reason, exclusive to humans, was the part that made us different from other animals, and better. Christian theologians adopted Plato’s scheme. In Dante’s Inferno, Hell is imagined as a giant cone with its point at the centre of the earth. Look at it in cross-section, and it is Plato’s triangle, upside-down. In the upper sections are the sins of the appetite—lust, gluttony, greed, etc. Lower down, in the middle section, are sins of the will—violence, most notably. At the very bottom are the worst sins, those resulting from perversion and misuse of our reason—fraud, deceit, and treason. Those sins are the worst because they take the highest, best, and most god-like part of our nature—reason—and use it for evil purposes.

As Dante makes his way through Hell, he continually exclaims at how many damned souls he sees—multitudes, crowds, hordes, and so on. I have been thinking about Plato’s triangle and Dante’s Inferno more and more often. How many people do you know who live mostly to gratify their appetites and their will? How many cultivate their intellects? And of those who cultivate their intellect, how many of them use that faculty of reason for good purposes? In Dante, the damned are described as those who have “lost the good of intellect” (Canto III), and the souls of the damned are countless.

Dante’s Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven are, of course, mirror images of the living world. Those who are not consumed by appetite and will, who use their reason, and use it to do good . . . are a tiny, tiny minority.

Tolkien’s childlike world

The Tolkien books are “restful,” as A. S. Byatt is said to have remarked,* because they are free of sex, and of money. In this respect they are childlike. The people in the stories are seen in the ways that children—privileged children, at any rate—see people. Money exists, but without much regard for where it comes from or how it is earned. Travellers are welcomed into comfortable homes where abundant food appears on the table and soft beds await them when the evening meal has finished. Everyone seems to be independently wealthy, or on summer holiday, without any hint of a servant underclass. The hobbits seem to be farmers, mostly, but we never see them working. Butterbur runs his inn, but who prepares the food, and who washes the dishes or cleans the rooms or launders the linens? Like young children, we readers rarely or never consider such matters: we unthinkingly accept the delicious food and comfortable lodgings. We are grateful and happy, but we do not inquire into the sources of all these comforts.

The people in Tolkien’s stories fall into the categories used by children to classify grown-ups. Old people are either gruff and grumpy, or kindly and wise; some of them start out appearing to be gruff but are revealed in time to be kindly. Men are sorted by their jobs: farmer, gardener, innkeeper, soldier, etc. Unmarried women are young and beautiful; married women are nurturing and motherly; old women are wise and caring, with an occasional witchy character like Lobelia Sackville-Baggins. Many modern readers and critics have pointed out that these roles and stereotypes belong to an era and a culture and a social class that can be traced to Tolkien’s own life as a middle-class Catholic and an Oxford don nearly a century ago..

Children today, no doubt, see adults rather differently. But there remains that period of life before adolescence when one sees the world without thinking about sex or money. That innocence, much regretted once one crosses the threshold into the adult world, naturally appeals to us when we have had some experience of the stress, anxiety, and heartache that follow inevitably from becoming a sexual creature who must earn a living and pay for everything. Tolkien’s world offers a respite from such concerns. We imagine the delight of being welcomed as guests and never needing to think about who pays for it all or who cleans the toilets (another item completely absent from Tolkien’s world). We take a holiday from lust, jealousy, and sexual envy. It is, as Byatt says, restful.

And then, the kings and queens. Fathers and mothers. Aged, in the child’s eyes, and yet ageless. All-wise, all-powerful, always protecting their children, their people. Sometimes we have stories recounting the child’s nightmarish fears, stories of evil kings, evil queens, reassuring stories that always end with the overthrow of the wicked and the establishment of a new order under new, benign monarchs. The true king is restored. All is well. The child in us does not long for democracy, but for the benign rule of a father-king and mother-queen. This longing explains much of what we read in the news. We long to be ruled by the true king.

*Byatt is quoted in this Wikipedia article, but the source is not clearly indicated.

How to be successful, respected, and well-liked

Ask any professional musician, “Who gets hired?” and they will all give the same answer. It isn’t the most talented player; it’s not the one who can play more notes, or play faster than anyone else. It’s the one who shows up on time; the one who plays what is needed for the music; the one who is reliable; the one who is pleasant and friendly and gets along with others.

You don’t need to be a super-talented musician. You don’t need to be a star athlete, or a top student.

To be respected and well-liked, to feel good about yourself, you need only do what every one of us can do:

  • Be a good friend; a good classmate; a good teammate.
  • Be reliable. Show up on time, and whatever the work is, give it your best effort.
  • Think of others, not just yourself, and help out when you can.

Doing these simple things will earn the respect of all who know you, and the self-respect that will make you feel good about who you are. That’s a pretty good description of genuine success.

Leviticus, progressive humanitarian

Leviticus 24:17-20 reads as follows:

Whoever takes a human life shall surely be put to death. . . .If anyone injures his neighbour, as he has done it shall be done to him, fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth; whatever injury he has given a person shall be given to him.

Man, that Old Testament sense of justice was tough, eh? Let’s see.

On October 7th, according to Israeli data, 1,139 Israelis were killed.

Since then, news reports estimate 27,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza.

That means that almost 24 Palestinians have been killed for every Israeli killed on October 7th.

If we round that number down to 20, we can revise Leviticus as follows:

Whoever takes a human life shall surely be put to death, along with 19 of his friends, neighbours, and family members. . . . If anyone injures his neighbour, as he has done it shall be done to him, 20 fractures for every fracture, 20 eyes for every eye, 20 teeth for every tooth; whatever injury he has given a person shall be given to him, 20 times over.

Makes you glad you weren’t born into that primitive Old Testament world, don’t it?

Well-educated, intelligent, and primitive

Recent events recall this passage from Sinclair McKay’s book about the fire-bombing of Dresden in February 1945. In the years following the war, those who had been involved in the operation wondered about the necessity and the morality of what they had done.

The young scientist Freeman Dyson, who had worked in Bomber Command and who had come to feel a revulsion especially for the raids carried out towards the end of the war, found himself discussing the Dresden bombing raids with a ‘well-educated and intelligent’ wife of a senior air force officer. Dyson asked her if it was right that the Allies should be killing large numbers of German women and babies. She told him: ‘Oh yes. It is good to kill the babies especially. I am not thinking of this war but of the next one, twenty years from now. The next time the Germans start a war and we have to fight them, those babies will be the soldiers.’ There was something quite extraordinarily primitive about this exterminating impulse that stayed with Dyson for decades.

—from Dresden: The Fire and the Darkness, by Sinclair McKay, p. 294

“Pigeon Tunnel,” by John Le Carré

John Le Carré’s memoir, Pigeon Tunnel (or is it David Cornwell’s memoir?) teems with con-men, fraudsters, spies, criminals, assassins, political subversives, and a gaggle of celebrities and one-percenters with whom they rub elbows at cocktail parties. I have never met any of the above, to my knowledge. Le Carré a.k.a. Cornwell’s elegantly-recounted anecdotes fascinated me, but the fascination gradually wore down to a residue of annoyance. Are there no ordinary people in Le Carré’s world? No loving mothers and fathers who do honest work, raise their kids as best they can, follow the rules, abide by the laws, and try to be the best people they can be? No. Such people do not make for exciting novels, which is why they are largely absent from Le Carré’s spy thrillers. Weirdly, though, they seem to have been equally absent from David Cornwell’s life. 

Immediately upon finishing Pigeon Tunnel, however, I listened to the most recent episode of Rob Reiner’s podcast series, Who Killed JFK?, and there they were again: spies, assassins, criminals, political subversives. Then I recalled reading somewhere that the three most valuable commodities in world trade were petroleum, weapons, and illegal drugs—all of which required the services of often-crooked lawyers and international bankers—and the world began to look again more like David Cornwell’s world. And I remembered one of my favourite Chinese phrases, 他们都是流氓: they are all gangsters. I am reminded, too, of Harry Lime in The Third Man, when he meets Holly Martins in Vienna’s Prater and looks down from the top of the Riesenrad at the tiny figures below. “Victims? Don’t be melodramatic. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax – the only way you can save money nowadays.”

So, are we deluded and naïve, we ordinary people who go to school and go to work and read books and listen to music and watch movies—do we live in willful ignorance on the fringes of a world fueled by greed and criminality? Or are the drug dealers and arms dealers and crooked bankers the deluded ones, fatuously believing that diamonds and caviar make life worth living?

Who are the suckers? Discuss.

Trees, baby! Trees.

Bits and bobs from The Overstory, by Richard Powers:

“You’re a psychologist,” Mimi says to the recruit. “How do we convince people that we’re right?”

The newest Cascadian takes the bait. “The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.”

. . . which reminds me of e. e. cummings:

plato told

him:he couldn’t

believe it(jesus

told him;he

wouldn’t believe

it)lao

tsze

certainly told

him,and general

(yes

mam)

sherman;

and even

(believe it

or

not)you

told him:i told

him;we told him

(he didn’t believe it,no

sir)it took

a nipponized bit of

the old sixth

avenue

el;in the top of his head:to tell

him

Another debatable claim—

The world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.

—seems increasingly dubious as this long, sprawling novel continues. Powers moves us most when showing us how much we have been missing in our understanding of nature—

“We scientists are taught never to look for ourselves in other species. So we make sure nothing looks like us! Until a short while ago, we didn’t even let chimpanzees have consciousness, let alone dogs or dolphins. Only man, you see: only man could know enough to want things. But believe me: trees want something from us, just as we’ve always wanted things from them. This isn’t mystical. The ‘environment’ is alive—a fluid, changing web of purposeful lives dependent on each other. . . . Flowers shape bees as much as bees shape flowers. Berries may compete to be eaten more than animals compete to eat them. A thorn acacia makes sugary protein treats to feed and enslave the ants who guard it. Fruit-bearing plants trick us into distributing their seeds, and ripening fruit led to color vision. In teaching us how to find their bait, trees taught us to see that the sky is blue. Our brains evolved to solve the forest. We’ve shaped and been shaped by forests for longer than we’ve been Homo sapiens.”

—and by the end it is this overwhelming vision that sticks. The human dramas, which may have initially drawn us in to the story, have lost their power. We want to go into the woods, sit at the base of a tree, and just listen.

UC Santa Cruz, sort of

From The Overstory, by Richard Powers, p. 257:

He’s admitted to the new social psychology graduate program down at Santa Cruz. The campus is an enchanted garden perched on a mountainside overlooking Monterey Bay. It’s the worst place he can imagine for finishing a doctorate—or doing any real work whatsoever. On the other hand, it’s perfect for making interspecies contact with sea lions down by the pier, climbing the Sunset Tree naked and stoned at night, and lying on his back in the Great Meadow, searching for a thesis topic in the mad cloud of stars.

This parody, like all parodies, is founded on truth, in part. In my day (1969-72) we called Santa Cruz (the town, not just the university) Hippie Heaven. Plenty of flakiness—so much that when I moved to Oregon a few years later I had an immediate aversion to that state’s Santa Cruz simulacrum, Eugene, and happily continued north to the state capital, Salem, which was as much like a boring midwestern town as anything west of the Rockies. What a relief! When I was at UCSC two highly-touted professors recruited to the school left after just one year for East Coast schools where students were serious about their studies. Plenty of UCSC students and teachers were serious about their studies—I was one of them—but the tone of the place was definitely set by the “middle-class white-boy”* faux hippies and their silliness. I had a few great teachers; I learned a lot; but I was happy to drop out in the middle of my third year when they demanded that I declare a major, and I have never had the least desire to go back.

*”Middle Class White Boy” is one of Mose Allison’s inimitable classics.

The blackness behind us and before us

In W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn (1995), this prescient and evocative passage seems to speak directly to us in the summer of 2023:

Our spread over the earth was fuelled by reducing the higher species of vegetation to charcoal, by incessantly burning whatever would burn. From the first smouldering taper to the elegant lanterns whose light reverberated around eighteenth-century courtyards and from the mild radiance of these lanterns to the unearthly glow of the sodium lamps that line the Belgian motorways, it has all been combustion. Combustion is the hidden principle behind every artefact we create. The making of a fish hook, manufacture of a china cup, or production of a television programme, all depend on the same process of combustion. Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers. From the earliest times, human civilization has been no more than a strange luminescence growing more intense by the hour, of which no one can say when it will begin to wane and when it will fade away. For the time being, our cities still shine through the night, and the fires still spread. In Italy, France and Spain, in Hungary, Poland and Lithuania, in Canada and California, summer fires consume whole forests, not to mention the great conflagration in the tropics that is never extinguished. A few years ago, on a Greek island that was wooded as recently as 1900, I observed the speed with which a blaze runs through dry vegetation. A short distance from the harbour town where I was staying, I stood by the roadside with a group of agitated men, the blackness behind us and before us, far below at the bottom of a gorge, the fire, whipped up by the wind, racing, leaping, and already climbing the steep slopes. And I shall never forget the junipers, dark against the glow, going up in flames one after the other as if they were tinder the moment the first tongues of fire licked at them, with a dull thudding sound like an explosion, and then promptly collapsing in a silent shower of sparks.

Has any phrase ever conveyed the human condition more succinctly than the blackness behind us and before us?

Phil Freshman, my good friend

Phil Freshman, who I met in 1970, died yesterday.

There are so many good memories, and so many stories I could tell.

I first saw his name in a by-line on an article in the UC Santa Cruz student newspaper in the fall of 1969. The article was about freshman orientation; I thought the by-line was a pseudonym. A few months later this guy stuck his hand out and said, “I’m Phil Freshman.” I started laughing.

In 1981 I was living in Oregon when my little brother got married in our home town in San Diego. Wanting to surprise him, I told him I wouldn’t be able to make it, then got into my car and started driving south. In L.A. I stopped to pick up Phil, who was at home with his parents in Reseda. We arrived in time for the wedding, and Phil spent the entire afternoon talking with everyone at the reception. He had a way of meeting people I had known for years and finding out more about them in ten minutes than I ever knew. As the sun was setting and we started back north, I said, “So . . . what do you think?” There was a pause, then a sigh; then he shook his head. “I thought people in L.A. were superficial,” he said.

His original idea of a career in journalism turned instead into a career as a copy-editor who specialized in catalogues and other publications by art museums. Meticulous and stubborn (and almost always right), he was invariably embroiled in disagreements. In 1982, while working at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), two of his colleagues wanted to dispense with the hyphen in the name of their department. His memo to the boss on this topic is reproduced here for posterity. (“I was just trying to make people laugh, convince them via humor,” he said later. The hyphen in “Twentieth-Century Art” was retained, but no one seems to have laughed.)

To: Earl A. Powell III
From: Phil Freshman
Subject: Twentieth-Century Hyphens

As you know, a storm has lately been rattling teacups in the upstairs offices over what would seem to be an innocuous grammatical point. Maurice Tuchman and Stephanie Barron evidently abhor the presence of a hyphen when it is used to hook up the words Twentieth and Century when they appear adjectivally prior to the word Art. More specifically, the curators, formerly of the Department of Modern Art (formerly the Modern and Contemporary Art Department) are adamantly opposed to having their newly renamed department publicly known as the Department of Twentieth hyphen Century Art. I’m told they see the hyphen, in this location at least, as a blemish, an excrescence.

I confess that when I first heard of their assault on our language’s unsung little intelligibility-maker, my professional instinct was to rush unquestioningly to its defense. After all, wouldn’t our bearings be more difficult to find if we didn’t have the adjectivally employed hyphen to tell us we were about to see “sixty-odd works of art” rather than “sixty odd ones”? And how embarrassed we might feel if we were left, hyphenless, to divine the best way to approach an “ill favored woman”.

More angrily, and pointedly, I could have arisen, stuck an index finger down onto any properly punctuated book, newspaper, or magazine page where the subject of 15th-century poetry, 19th-century sculpture, or 20th-century anarchy was treated and then, folding my arms, let my case rest.

However, being a student who knows the language has a way of changing, sometimes radically, before our very eyes, and being an employee of an American museum in a time when more and more of those institutions’ modern art departments are adopting this century’s name for their very own, I decided to do a bit of digging. I called four major museums, each of which had, according to the 1981 Official Museum Directory, “20th Century Art” departments. Instead of phoning these museums’ editorial departments and collecting a pile of confirmations for my view, I spoke with members of the departments in question; if they felt as Maurice and Stephanie do, and had gotten their museums to condone the breaking of grammatical code, I wanted to hear from them how they had justified it.

The four museums I called were the Metropolitan in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Philadelphia Art Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

At the Metropolitan, a Mrs. Rubin, the assistant to one of the associate curators of Twentieth no hyphen Century Art, told me the department had had the name since the ’60s and that no one, certainly no editors, had to her knowledge ever questioned the usage. She said the department refers to itself in all public places hyphenlessly. “But now that you mention it,” she added, “yes, I guess you’re right. I wonder why no one has ever said anything?”

Next I called Boston. “Don’t mention that hyphen!” cried Debbie Emerson, the departmental secretary. “We all think it’s ugly, unsightly.” But does the Museum of Fine Arts use it? “Yes,” she admitted. “Our editors make us. On business cards, in the annual reports, everywhere. But around the office we avoid it like the plague.”

Then it was Philadelphia, where I talked with the curator herself, Ann d’Harnoncourt. “You tell Maurice and Stephanie I’m on their side,” she said. “I just can’t stand that hyphen, and I never use it in any of my letters.” But what about the museum’s official usage? “Well of course it’s correct and the museum includes it in the calendar of events, the annual report, you name it. But God, it’s so unaesthetic!”

Finally, Chicago. Susan Frio, the department’s secretary, was just as hot on the subject as her co-religionists in Boston and Philadelphia. “We despise that hyphen, but what are we going to do? We co-publish the University of Chicago Manual of Style [LACMA’s style bible], and so it would look pretty dumb if we deviated from that. So we make it Department of Twentieth hyphen Century Art consistently.”

What are we to conclude from all this? Seemingly, the law-abiding adjectival hyphen, just trying to do his job in the strife-torn world of modern language, is undergoing a death-dealing hail of abuse by other twentieth-century art departments than our own. However, he has, in most places, managed to survive. I want him to survive here. And so I recommend, consistent with both grammatical practice and the policies of reputable (though embattled) museums, that this museum recognize the legitimacy and necessity of linking Twentieth and Century with a hyphen whenever those two words publicly precede Art.

Naturally, I wouldn’t presume to suggest extending this rule to the private correspondence and paperwork of the Twentieth-Century Art curators, or anybody else. That would indeed be a less-than-reasonable, over-regimented, far-fetched, and even un-American policy.

In 2015 he came to visit me in Suzhou, China, where I had been living and working for a decade. Although we hadn’t seen each other for years, we picked up right where we left off, and Phil was the same curious, gregarious omnivore of new experiences that he had always been. I am so blessed to have known him, and I will miss him, as the saying goes, like salt.

Attention, for Donne, was everything

From Katherine Rundell, Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne, pp. 294-95:

It was very deliberately that he wrote poems that take all your sustained focus to untangle them. The pleasure of reading a Donne poem is akin to that of cracking a locked safe, and he meant it to be so. He demanded hugely of us, and the demands of his poetry are a mirror to that demanding. The poetry stands to ask: why should everything be easy, rhythmical, pleasant? He is at times almost impossible to understand, but, in repayment for your work, he reveals images that stick under your skin until you die. Donne suggests that you look at the world with both more awe and more scepticism: that you weep for it and that you gasp for it. In order to do so, you shake yourself out of cliché and out of the constraints of what the world would sell you. Your love is almost certainly not like a flower, nor a dove. Why would it be? It may be like a pair of compasses. It may be like a flea. His startling timelessness is down to the fact that he had the power of unforeseeability: you don’t see him coming.

The difficulty of Donne’s work had in it a stark moral imperative: pay attention. It was what Donne most demanded of his audience: attention. It was, he knew, the world’s most mercurial resource. The command is in a passage in Donne’s sermon: ‘Now was there ever any man seen to sleep in the cart, between Newgate and Tyburn? Between the prison, and the place of execution, does any man sleep? And we sleep all the way; from the womb to the grave we are never thoroughly awake.’ Awake, is Donne’s cry. Attention, for Donne, was everything. attention paid to our mortality, and to the precise ways in which beauty cuts through us, attention to the softness of skin and the majesty of hands and feet and mouths. . . .

[The quotation is from Donne’s Sermon XXV.]

Homeless people, empty office buildings. What to do?

Premise 1: There are lots of homeless people in the downtown area.

Premise 2: Since office workers got used to working from home during the height of the COVID pandemic, many of them prefer not to return to the office, and as a result we have lots of empty or half-empty office buildings . . . downtown.

Conclusion: Therefore we should continue ignoring the homeless problem, and force office workers to go back to their cubicles.

Pretty obvious, really.

Update: Here is an article detailing all the issues involved in converting offices to residences, written by a couple of people who actually know what they are talking about: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/analysis-heres-what-it-would-take-to-turn-empty-office-buildings-into-residential-housing.

Plato on old age

At the beginning of The Republic, Socrates walks from Athens to the port city, Piraeus, to see an old man named Cephalus and ask him what it’s like to be old.

“There is nothing which for my part I like better, Cephalus, than conversing with aged men; for I regard them as travellers who have gone a journey which I too may have to go, and of whom I ought to enquire, whether the way is smooth and easy, or rugged and difficult. And this is a question which I should like to ask of you who have arrived at that time which the poets call the ‘threshold of old age’–Is life harder towards the end, or what report do you give of it?”

“I will tell you, Socrates,” he said, “what my own feeling is. Men of my age flock together; we are birds of a feather, as the old proverb says; and at our meetings the tale of my acquaintance commonly is—I cannot eat, I cannot drink; the pleasures of youth and love are fled away: there was a good time once, but now that is gone, and life is no longer life. Some complain of the slights which are put upon them by relations, and they will tell you sadly of how many evils their old age is the cause. But to me, Socrates, these complainers seem to blame that which is not really in fault. For if old age were the cause, I too being old, and every other old man, would have felt as they do. But this is not my own experience, nor that of others whom I have known. How well I remember the aged poet Sophocles, when in answer to the question, ‘How does love suit with age, Sophocles,–are you still the man you were?’ ‘Peace,’ he replied; ‘most gladly have I escaped the thing of which you speak; I feel as if I had escaped from a mad and furious master.’ His words have often occurred to my mind since, and they seem as good to me now as at the time when he uttered them. For certainly old age has a great sense of calm and freedom; when the passions relax their hold, then, as Sophocles says, we are freed from the grasp not of one mad master only, but of many. The truth is, Socrates, that these regrets, and also the complaints about relations, are to be attributed to the same cause, which is not old age, but men’s characters and tempers; for he who is of a calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age, but to him who is of an opposite disposition, youth and age are equally a burden.”

—Plato’s Republic, B. Jowett (Translator). Book I.

Removing gender from athletics

A conversation today got me thinking about the current controversy in the U.S. and in international athletics about transsexual women and girls being banned from competing in women’s and girls’ teams and competitions.

Here’s my question: Why do we still have gendered athletic competitions at all? The standard answer, of course, is that most women and girls, in most sports, will not be able to compete successfully against men and boys, who in general are bigger and stronger. But is the current norm—separate teams and leagues based on gender—the best solution?

In the case of school team athletics, for example, why not simply have First Tier teams, Second Tier teams, and Third Tier teams? Placement would be determined by performance, not gender. The current nonsense of classifying athletes by gender identity and testosterone levels could be put aside. All interested students could participate on teams suited to their skill levels. Girls, boys, and trans students skilled enough to compete against the best athletes in the First Tier could do so; those lacking the skills to make the First Tier could still enjoy playing in the Second or Third Tier.

The same idea could be employed in individual sports like tennis or swimming or track and field. In the Olympics, for example, instead of male swimming competitions and female swimming competitions, why not have First Tier swimming, Second Tier swimming, and Third Tier swimming? If your performances reach a certain level, you qualify for the First Tier. Otherwise, you compete in the Second Tier, or the Third. The objection, undoubtedly, would be the same argument used in favour of gendered competition: many women and girls would be excluded because they would not be able to compete successfully against men and boys, even at the Second or Third Tier levels. Dishonest individuals who could not win in the First Tier would deliberately underachieve so they could be relegated to the Second Tier, where they could then capture all the gold medals.

Maybe. But measures could be taken to mitigate against unfairness. And fears of cheating are overblown. Cheating is already a part of every sport, and every sport has rules and sanctions to minimize dishonesty. Most athletes, however, want to test themselves against tough competition. Winning against opponents whose skills are clearly inferior would hold no satisfaction or pleasure for the vast majority of competitors.

I am “thinking out loud” here, and perhaps I have not thought hard enough or carefully enough about these issues. It does seem clear to me, however, that banning and stigmatizing transsexual athletes is cruel and unsustainable. There has to be a better way.

You couldn’t give me a billion dollars to get on an airplane.

The great Paul Motian, from Motian in Motion, a wonderful 2020 documentary of his life and career. Skip to the 41-minute mark for this:

Oh yeah. No, I won’t get on an airplane. Forget that. You couldn’t give me a billion dollars to get on an airplane. I’m serious. Give me a billion dollars—I will not get on an airplane. I just did so much of that, man, so much touring, wow, year after year after year after year. Planes. Airplanes. Hundreds of airplanes. Terrible! That’s terrible! Touring is a horrible life.

Years of international living and traveling have led me to exactly the same conclusion. Having said that, billion-dollar offers are welcome.

Cause of death

With AIDS, unlike COVID-19, you had to work pretty hard to be infected. Walking into a restaurant and breathing was not enough.

So when people died of AIDS, the reports would say, “died of complications from AIDS,” and everyone understood that having AIDS made you vulnerable to a host of other illnesses—pneumonia, for example.

COVID deaths, however, are being massively mis-reported and under-reported. If someone with COVID contracts pneumonia and then dies, the cause of death is reported as . . . pneumonia! Why? Because if COVID deaths were reported as “died of complications from COVID-19,” all holy hell would break loose. Lots of people would be more reluctant to walk into restaurants and breathe. Or to go to shopping malls, or go out to a nightclub, or go to a play or a concert.

That would be bad.

Gotta keep the economy going, y’know?

Casablanca American School Turns 50

Hala R. Mustafa Al Hassan
Casablanca American School
Casablanca, Morocco

Dear Hala,

I have been pondering what to say in response to your appeal for memories of CAS as part of the school’s 50-year anniversary celebrations.

My first thought was: it should not be all about me. It should be about you, Hala, and your classmates in 1986 when I arrived to teach all of the English courses, Grades 7-12. I remember the first time I asked students, “What do you think?” and seeing the looks of blank terror on their faces: having come from schools where “learning” was all about memorizing what the teacher said, they had never before been asked that question. I remember Hind arriving in Grade 10 with barely a word of English. At break one day she was sitting with her friends outside on a sunny fall day during a break. “How are you?” I asked. “Oooh,” she said, fanning herself, “C’est hot!” I remember my Indian students explaining the logic of arranged marriages to me and persuading me that arranged marriages made more sense than “love matches.” I remember Nita, Sanguita, and Meenakshi dressing me up as Krishna for “Indian Night” at the Churchill Club. Although my three years at CAS (1986-89) came near the beginning of my teaching career, I am still in touch from time to time with so many of my former students from Casa: Myriam and Kamal, Marcus and Pontus, Cat, Amal, Noura, Alia, Hind, Youness . . . . It speaks to the strength of the bonds we formed.

This little memoir should be about John Randolph, the best head of school I ever worked for across four decades and four continents and eleven schools. When I first met John, at a recruitment fair in San Francisco, I saw him sitting behind the table under the Casablanca American School sign and assumed from his looks that he was Moroccan. By now, I think he probably is! John showed me that a head of school could be fiercely principled, passionate about education, and utterly devoted to the best interests of his students. I could write a small book about John and his profound influence on me and my career. I remember him reciting Langston Hughes’ poem, “As I Grew Older,” at morning assembly in the courtyard of the old upper school. I am still teaching that poem, almost forty years later. John Randolph started out as my boss and became a dear, lifelong friend. I know that I am far from alone when I say that I could never thank him enough. 

My colleagues at CAS left lasting memories, and became lifelong friends. Mike Radow and I met on the plane returning home to Oregon from that San Francisco recruitment fair and ended up sharing a flat for the first year; or was it two? John Hall, Velma, Marcia, Orestes, Gayle, and then all the local staff who were so kind, generous, and helpful to us clueless expats. It was a vibrant, committed group of teachers. Anne Osman was a pillar of strength, along with her marvellous husband, Farid. Jack and Tricia Shepherd arrived in my second year and became essential members of the faculty. And through it all the indefatigable Marie Randolph, like a mother hen, took care of us all. We did not always agree, but we always cared about teaching and learning above all else.

In another sense, however, this little memoir should be about me, just as those of other CAS alumni should be about them, because that’s what Casablanca American School was always about: the students, teachers, staff members, and parents who made it the wonderful place it was, and is. I am sure that the 50th anniversary celebrations will provoke a tremendous response, because Casablanca American School has made a tremendous difference in the lives it has touched.

Sincerely yours,
Eric
(yes, you can call me Eric now, Hala!)

A purposeful life: Stephen Kotkin

“Having a purposeful life is actually not that hard. You’re in a school, you’re in a workplace, you’re somewhere where you can affect other people in a positive way. You can lead a life that can show others what good values are, and you can lead a life that dedicates yourself not only to your own material well-being but to the well-being and development of others around you. And it can be on a humble scale. It can be in a small classroom or a small workplace, a small work team. And having a positive impact, even on one other person, gives far greater meaning to your own life, and is profoundly satisfying.”

—Stephen Kotkin

Source: The very tail-end (2h41m) of a long discussion from May 2022 of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Slightly edited for clarity. Kotkin is a scholar (Princeton, Stanford) and historian who specializes in Russian history.

Plagues and uncertainty

In the three centuries when bubonic plague swept across Europe, no one understood that the disease was carried by fleas and rats. Many people died; some became ill but recovered; some never became ill at all. These apparently random events made no sense, and so people resorted to superstition, mysticism, bigotry, and hysteria.

How little has changed since then.

Despite modern science and medicine, we don’t understand why some people suffer serious illness or death from COVID-19, while others experience only mild symptoms, or none at all; why some may escape entirely; why some suffer long-term disability after surviving the acute phase of the disease. Popular responses to this fear and confusion are often medieval in their embrace of irrationality and superstition and pseudoscience.

Humans seek clear, simple answers to their questions. They do not respond well to uncertainty and ambiguity. Plagues kill, but the suffering is compounded by our determination to arrive at an answer in the face of contradictory or incomplete evidence. As uncomfortable as it may be, we will be better off acknowledging that we don’t know, and acting accordingly.

The Story of the Taoist Farmer

The following text was published on a website that no longer exists, and I am unable to contact its author, Duen Hsi Yen, so I am reposting it here.

Version 1:

This farmer had only one horse, and one day the horse ran away. The neighbors came to condole over his terrible loss. The farmer said, “What makes you think it is so terrible?”
A month later, the horse came home–this time bringing with her two beautiful wild horses. The neighbors became excited at the farmer’s good fortune. Such lovely strong horses! The farmer said, “What makes you think this is good fortune?”
The farmer’s son was thrown from one of the wild horses and broke his leg. All the neighbors were very distressed. Such bad luck! The farmer said, “What makes you think it is bad?”
A war came, and every able-bodied man was conscripted and sent into battle. Only the farmer’s son, because he had a broken leg, remained. The neighbors congratulated the farmer. “What makes you think this is good?” said the farmer.
As told by Executive editor, Elise Hancock, in the Johns Hopkins Magazine, November 1993, page 2, in section entitled Editor’s Note.
Version 2:
A man named Sei Weng owned a beautiful mare which was praised far and wide. One day this beautiful horse disappeared. The people of his village offered sympathy to Sei Weng for his great misfortune. Sei Weng said simply, “That’s the way it is.”
A few days later the lost mare returned, followed by a beautiful wild stallion. The village congratulated Sei Weng for his good fortune. He said, “That’s the way it is.”
Some time later, Sei Weng’s only son, while riding the stallion, fell off and broke his leg. The village people once again expressed their sympathy at Sei Weng’s misfortune. Sei Weng again said, “That’s the way it is.”
Soon thereafter, war broke out and all the young men of the village except Sei Weng’s lame son were drafted and were killed in battle. The village people were amazed as Sei Weng’s good luck. His son was the only young man left alive in the village. But Sei Weng kept his same attitude: despite all the turmoil, gains and losses, he gave the same reply, “That’s the way it is.”
As told by Chin-Ning Chu, in “The Asian Mind Game: unlocking the hidden agenda of the Asian business culture — a westerner’s survival manual,” New York:Macmillan Publishing Company, page 182. (1991)
Version 3:
A man who lived on the northern frontier of China was skilled in interpreting events. One day, for no reason, his horse ran away to the nomads across the border. Everyone tried to console him, but his father said, “What makes you so sure this isn’t a blessing?” Some months later his horse returned, bringing a splendid nomad stallion. Everyone congratulated him, but his father said, “What makes you so sure this isn’t a disaster?” Their household was richer by a fine horse, which his son loved to ride. One day he fell and broke his hip. Everyone tried to console him, but his father said, “What makes you so sure this isn’t a blessing?”
A year later the nomads came in force across the border, and every able-bodied man took his bow and went into battle. The Chinese frontiersmen lost nine of every ten men. Only because the son was lame did the father and son survive to take care of each other. Truly, blessing turns to disaster, and disaster to blessing: the changes have no end, nor can the mystery be fathomed.
The Lost Horse, a Chinese Folktale.
As told by Ellen J. Langer, in” The Power of Mindful Learning,” Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley, page 99-100. (1997).
Version 4:
近塞上之人有善術者，馬無故亡而入胡，人皆弔之。其父曰：「此何遽不為福乎！」居數月，其馬將胡駿馬而歸，人皆賀之。其父曰：「此何遽不能為禍乎！」家富良馬，其子好騎，墮而折其髀，人皆弔之。其父曰：「此何遽不為福乎！」居一年，胡人大入塞，丁壯者引弦而戰，近塞之人，死者十九，此獨以跛之故，父子相保。故福之為禍，禍之為福，化不可極，深不可測也。
Translation (see above link for annotations and comment):
Among the people who lived close to the border, there was a man who led a righteous life. Without reason, his horse escaped, and fled into barbarian territory. Everyone pitied him, but the old man said : “what makes you think this is not a good thing?”
Several months later, his horse returned, accompanied by a superb barbarian stallion. Everyone congratulated him. But the old man said: “what makes you think this is cannot be a bad thing?”
The family was richer from a good horse, his son enjoyed riding it. He fell and broke his hip. Everyone pitied him, but the old man said: “what makes you think this is not a good thing!”
One year later, a large party of barbarians entered the border. All the valid men drew their bows and went to battle. From the people living around the border, nine out of ten died. But just because he was lame, the old man and his son were both spared.
Version 5 (under construction)
“Explaining Conjunctions” from The Book of Lieh-tzu: A Classic of Tao, translated by Angus C. Graham, New York: Columbia University Press (1960, revised 1990)
Version 6:
THE KING AND HIS FRIEND
An African king had a close friend who had the habit of remarking “this
is good” about every occurrence in life no matter what it was. One day
the king and his friend were out hunting. The king’s friend loaded a
gun and handed it to the king, but alas he loaded it wrong and when the
king fired it, his thumb was blown off.
“This is good!” exclaimed his friend.
The horrified and bleeding king was furious. “How can you say this is
good? This is obviously horrible!” he shouted. The king put his friend in jail.
About a year later the king went hunting by himself. Cannibals captured
him and took him to their village. They tied his hands, stacked some
wood, set up a stake and bound him to it. As they came near to set fire
to the wood, they noticed that the king was missing a thumb. Being
superstitious, they never ate anyone who was less than whole. They
untied the king and sent him on his way.
Full of remorse the king rushed to the prison to release his friend.
“You were right, it WAS good” the king said.
The king told his friend how the missing thumb saved his life and
added, “I feel so sad that I locked you in jail.That was such a bad
thing to do”
“NO! this is good!” responded his delighted friend.
“Oh, how could that be good my friend, I did a terrible thing to you while I
owe you my life”.
“It is good” said his friend, “because if I wasn’t in jail I would have been
hunting with you and they would have killed ME.”
Source unknown
Version 7:
Taoist Farmer stories are based on the Chinese belief that life has its ups and downs, and does not always go up. Click on the following link to read a story I wrote about the ups and downs in the lives of some chickens, and one eccentric chicken’s interpretation of whether the farmer that feeds them is good or bad.
The Benevolent Farmer? [dead link]
Here is another related tidbit: When Communist era Premier Chou En-Lai was asked whether or not the French revolution was good or bad, his response was “It’s too early to tell.” (From “The Geography of Thought, How Asians and Westerners Think Differently…and Why,” by Richard E. Nisbett, NY:Simon and Schuster, 2003, page 13). When I first read this, I couldn’t stop laughing!
Version 8:
Three Questions, a short story by Leo Tolstoy, has a similar flavor. (From “Twenty-three Tales “published around 1872. This version, translated by L. and A. Maude and published by Funk & Wagnalls Company, New York, 1907. Other adaptations: 1, 2, 3
IT once occurred to a certain king, that if he always knew the right time to begin everything; if he knew who were the right people to listen to, and whom to avoid, and, above all, if he always knew what was the most important thing to do, he would never fail in anything he might undertake.
And this thought having occurred to him, he had it proclaimed throughout his kingdom that he would give a great reward to any one who would teach him what was the right time for every action, and who were the most necessary people, and how he might know what was the most important thing to do. And learned men came to the King, but they all answered his questions differently.
In reply to the first question, some said that to know the right time for every action, one must draw up in advance, a table of days, months and years, and must live strictly according to it. Only thus, said they, could everything be done at its proper time. Others declared that it was impossible to decide beforehand the right time for every action; but that, not letting oneself be absorbed in idle pastimes, one should always attend to all that was going on, and then do what was most needful. Others, again, said that however attentive the King might be to what was going on, it was impossible for one man to decide correctly the right time for every action, but that he should have a Council of wise men, who would help him to fix the proper time for everything.
But then again others said there were some things which could not wait to be laid before a Council, but about which one had at once to decide whether to undertake them or not. But in order to decide that one must know beforehand what was going to happen. It is only magicians who know that; and, therefore in order to know the right time for every action, one must consult magicians.
Equally various were the answers to the second question. Some said, the people the King most needed were his councillors; others, the priests; others, the doctors; while some said the warriors were the most necessary.
To the third question, as to what was the most important occupation: some replied that the most important thing in the world was science. Others said it was skill in warfare; and others, again, that it was religious worship.
All the answers being different, the King agreed with none of them, and gave the reward to none. But still wishing to find the right answers to his questions, he decided to consult a hermit, widely renowned for his wisdom.
The hermit lived in a wood which he never quitted and he received none but common folk. So the King put on simple clothes, and before reaching the hermit’s cell dismounted from his horse, and, leaving his bodyguard behind, went on alone.
When the King approached, the hermit was digging the ground in front of his hut. Seeing the King, he greeted him and went on digging. The hermit was frail and weak, and each time he stuck his spade into the ground and turned a little earth, he breathed heavily.
The King went up to him and said: ‘I have come to you, wise hermit, to ask you to answer three questions: How can I learn to do the right thing at the right time? Who are the people I most need, and to whom should I, therefore, pay more attention than to the rest? And, what affairs are the most important and need my first attention?’ The hermit listened to the King, but answered nothing. He just spat on his hand and recommenced digging.
‘You are tired,’ said the King, ‘let me take the spade and work awhile for you.’
‘Thanks!’ said the hermit, and, giving the spade to the King, he sat down on the ground.
When he had dug two beds, the King stopped and repeated his questions. The hermit again gave no answer, but rose, stretched out his hand for the spade, and said:
‘Now rest awhile — and let me work a bit.’
But the King did not give him the spade, and continued to dig. One hour passed, and another. The sun began to sink behind the trees, and the King at last stuck the spade into the ground, and said:
‘I came to you, wise man, for an answer to my questions. If you can give me none, tell me so, and I will return home.’
‘Here comes some one running,’ said the hermit, ‘let us see who it is.’
The King turned round, and saw a bearded man come running out of the wood. The man held his hands pressed against his stomach, and blood was flowing from under them. When he reached the King, he fell fainting on the ground moaning feebly. The King and the hermit unfastened the man’s clothing. There was a large wound in his stomach. The King washed it as best he could, and bandaged it with his handkerchief and with a towel the hermit had. But the blood would not stop flowing, and the King again and again removed the bandage soaked with warm blood, and washed and rebandaged the wound. When at last the blood ceased flowing, the man revived and asked for something to drink. The King brought fresh water and gave it to him. Meanwhile the sun had set, and it had become cool. So the King, with the hermit’s help, carried the wounded man into the hut and laid him on the bed. Lying on the bed the man closed his eyes and was quiet; but the King was so tired with his walk and with the work he had done, that he crouched down on the threshold, and also fell asleep — so soundly that he slept all through the short summer night. When he awoke in the morning, it was long before he could remember where he was, or who was the strange bearded man lying on the bed and gazing intently at him with shining eyes.
‘Forgive me!’ said the bearded man in a weak voice, when he saw that the King was awake and was looking at him.
‘I do not know you, and have nothing to forgive you for,’ said the King.
‘You do not know me, but I know you. I am that enemy of yours who swore to revenge himself on you, because you executed his brother and seized his property. I knew you had gone alone to see the hermit, and I resolved to kill you on your way back. But the day passed and you did not return. So I came out from my ambush to find you, and I came upon your bodyguard, and they recognized me, and wounded me. I escaped from them, but should have bled to death had you not dressed my wound. I wished to kill you, and you have saved my life. Now, if I live, and if you wish it, I will serve you as your most faithful slave, and will bid my sons do the same. Forgive me!’
The King was very glad to have made peace with his enemy so easily, and to have gained him for a friend, and he not only forgave him, but said he would send his servants and his own physician to attend him, and promised to restore his property.
Having taken leave of the wounded man, the King went out into the porch and looked around for the hermit. Before going away he wished once more to beg an answer to the questions he had put. The hermit was outside, on his knees, sowing seeds in the beds that had been dug the day before.
The King approached him, and said:
‘For the last time, I pray you to answer my questions, wise man.’
‘You have already been answered!’ said the hermit still crouching on his thin legs, and looking up at the King, who stood before him.
‘How answered? What do you mean?’ asked the King.
‘Do you not see,’ replied the hermit. ‘If you had not pitied my weakness yesterday, and had not dug these beds for me, but had gone your way, that man would have attacked you, and you would have repented of not having stayed with me. So the most important time was when you were digging the beds; and I was the most important man; and to do me good was your most important business. Afterwards, when that man ran to us, the most important time was when you were attending to him, for if you had not bound up his wounds he would have died without having made peace with you. So he was the most important man, and what you did for him was your most important business. Remember then: there is only one time that is important — Now! It is the most important time because it is the only time when we have any power. The most necessary man is he with whom you are, for no man knows whether he will ever have dealings with any one else: and the most important affair is, to do him good, because for that purpose alone was man sent into this life!’
1903.
Last updated 18 November 2006
Copyright © 1998-2006 by Duen Hsi Yen, All rights reserved.

Thinking about old age

Why do old people so often lament the state of the world today and speak nostalgically of the world as it used to be? Is the world really so different today than it was in the historical nano-second-ago that was our childhood and youth?

I think not.

We idealize the past and demonize the present, first, because we know how the past turned out, and we survived—an outcome we struggle to believe in with regards to the future. Second, we know so much more than we did. Had I known, growing up in the 1950s and early 1960s, of all the atrocities and crimes and injustice that had preceded my birth and were continuing through my early years, my optimism would have suffered. Third, we live today in a media environment that depends, economically, on a constant stirring of the pot. Chicken Little provokes clicks, views, ratings, and success. To the extent that we construct our view of the world through the media, we almost never hear good news.

In the essays attached to Christa Wolf’s remarkable 1983 novel, Cassandra, she includes diary entries from 1981 in which she and her friends debate how to live in a world that they expect to self-destruct in a nuclear war within three or four years. What’s the point, under such circumstances, of doing anything? Why go to work? Why read a book, or write one? Their discussions remind me of similar discussions in those years. I was bemused by the panicked excavation of backyard bomb shelters, fully equipped with bottled water and canned food. What folly! If there were a nuclear holocaust, the last outcome one could possibly wish for would be to survive the initial blast and have to live in the irradiated hell-scape that would result. Others around me were terrified at the mere thought of nuclear extinction. To me, there seemed little difference: whether one dies in his twenties, or in his eighties, one dies. The cause of death is incidental. As for the destruction of humanity as a whole, there would be much to lament in our extinction; but there would be much, too, of which one could only say, “Good riddance!” However we will die, the important question remains: How shall we live, in the meantime?

All such youthful ponderings of death, individual or collective, cease to be speculative in old age. “If it be now,” says Hamlet,

’tis not to come;
if it be not to come, it will be now;
if it be not now, yet it will come:
the readiness is all.

In old age we know that, whenever it comes, it won’t be long. It could be any moment, or it could be thirty years from now. The old question in the face of destruction—”Why do anything? What’s the point?”—seems now almost quaint. Why not?? What else should one do with life but to live it? In old age I see more clearly than ever before that life itself is the point. The morning cup of coffee, with its delicious odour and comforting warmth, is the point. It doesn’t need to mean anything; it simply is. And so am I. As long as I am here, I intend to savour every sip. And that’s not consolation—it’s pretty damn good!

Through stories we shape meaning

Gavin Francis, writing in the London Review of Books:

It’s through stories that we shape meaning, and we need to get better at explaining how pernicious and destructive the wrong stories can be.

The remark comes at the end of his review of a book about cases of mass hysteria or illness, The Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories of Mystery Illness, by Suzanne O’Sullivan.

But it resonates far beyond that context.

Unfortunately, most of us opt for binary thinking and simple stories that relieve us of the burden of critical thinking and the discomfort of ambiguity. The results are, as Gavin Francis says, pernicious and destructive.

History

Freedom, justice, education, and equality seem to have little to do with the ingredients required to produce a great civilization. Slavery, despotism, illiteracy, and inequality often help and certainly do not hinder the building of an empire. The essentials are low labour costs, abundant natural resources, abundant energy supplies, monopoly markets, military superiority, and social and political stability at home.

To concentrate all of these in a single society is difficult enough, which is why historians have no need of a calculator to count the “great civilizations.”

To hold on to them, however, is as unlikely as true love that lasts a lifetime, which is why even the greatest of great civilizations have dissolved in the blink of an historical eye.

The desire for freedom, justice, education, and equality, far from being among the essential causes producing a great civilization, appear to be the fruits of such greatness. Prosperous citizens of a dominant society begin in their affluence to acquire education, to philosophize, to yearn for freedom, justice, and equality. (Freedom and equality are incompatible, of course, as Will Durant points out in The Lessons of History: “Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies.”) Affluence, however, produces other, less benign fruits: corruption, decadence, laziness, self-indulgence. The dissolution begins at the same moment that the greatest heights are achieved. Sophocles writes his tragedies and Plato writes his dialogues as Athens descends into the imperial despotism of corrupt oligarchs. Phidias sculpts the gods out of marble as the slaves mine silver and row the Athenian galleys into a war with Sparta that destroys Pericles’ great society in a single generation.

Most people live their lives apart from these cyclical struggles. If lucky enough to avoid being swept up by wars and revolutions, they grow from children to adults, fall in love, find ways to earn a living, raise families, amuse themselves as they can, grow old, and die. In every society only a small percentage of people (men, mostly) strive obsessively to take more than their share, using the tools available to them, whether they be spears or hedge funds. From among these narcissists and sociopaths arise the “great men” of history with their compulsions to rule, to horde, and to erect monuments to themselves.

The immediate pleasures of life lie in physical health: strength, energy, movement, eating, sleeping, and sex. Longer-term consolations come from nature, art, music, literature, and the vast corridors of knowledge in all its forms. Ironically, most science and “high art” emerges from the wars, violence, and inequalities of great civilizations. As Orson Welles famously ad-libs in The Third Man, “In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed—they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love and five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!”

How many of us, I wonder, would hesitate to trade the Renaissance for five hundred years of democracy and peace? A few brave and noble souls venture into politics in the true spirit of public service to battle against the ambitious egotists who tend to dominate that world. Most people, however, simply pray to be left alone by the Caesars, Napoleons, and Rockefellers. Like Voltaire’s Candide, they long only to cultivate their gardens, happily leaving history to others. Most people, I am inclined to think, would gladly trade ten Renaissances for five hundred years of democracy and peace, if only they could.

Democracy

When it comes to selecting players for the Major League Baseball all-star teams, letting the fans vote is almost universally derided as a surrender to popular ignorance. When it comes to selecting governors, congressmen, senators, and presidents, however, the same system is regarded as sacred.

Or, as Will Durant wrote in The Lessons of History,

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.

Machiavelli & friends: “the food which only is mine”

On the coming of evening, I return to my house and enter my study; and at the door I take off the day’s clothing, covered with mud and dust, and put on garments regal and courtly; and re-clothed appropriately, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them with affection, I feed on that food which only is mine and which I was born for, where I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their kindness answer me; and for four hours of time I do not feel boredom, I forget every trouble, I do not dread poverty, I am not frightened by death; entirely I give myself over to them.

And because Dante says it does not produce knowledge when we hear but do not remember, I have noted everything in their conversation which has profited me . . . .

Of my honesty there should be no doubt, because having always preserved my honesty, I shall hardly now learn to break it; he who has been honest and good for forty-three years, as I have, cannot change his nature; as a witness to my honesty and goodness I have my poverty.

—From Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527), “Letter to Francesco Vettori.” Tr. Allan Gilbert

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! . . .

—William Wordsworth

It was the dream itself enchanted me: . . .
Players and painted stage took all my love
And not those things that they were emblems of.

—W. B. Yeats, “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”

Binary thinking, again

April, 2024: Now it’s Palestine and Israel. Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza, so Israel is bad; the Palestinians are the victims of these crimes, so Palestinians are good. (This reverses the binary formulation that persisted for a hot minute in October, 2023, when Palestinians committed atrocities and were therefore bad, whereas Israelis, the victims of said atrocities, were good.) At the moment, since the Palestinians are good while the Israelis are bad, President Biden’s qualified support for Israel makes him bad. One dangerous consequence among many is the possibility that a statistically important slice of American voters will conclude that since Biden is bad, they cannot vote for him, thus tipping the balance in the Electoral College and giving the presidency back to Trump, god help us. As the late Kurt Vonnegut might have said . . . so it goes.

June, 2022: I wrote about binary thinking way back in 2018, here, and not so long ago in March, here. But people keep doing it, and I keep noticing it until the itch just has to be scratched.

The latest example comes out of Russia’s war on Ukraine. It seems that some people who generally identify themselves on “the left” politically have decided that they should write and speak in support of Putin’s attack on Ukraine, because the U.S. is supporting Ukraine.

The logic is classic binary thinking: We know that the U.S. has been guilty many times in the past of neo-imperialist wars, of invading small, weak nations, of supporting unpopular and corrupt governments in those small weak nations; we know that American armies have committed war crimes; that the U.S. government has lied and covered up its misdeeds; etc. Hence, the U.S. is bad. If the U.S. is bad, then its ally (in this case, Ukraine) must be bad, too, and its adversary (Russia) must be good. Therefore, go Vlad!

Binary thinking attracts us because it is so simple, and clear, and consoling. Alas, the truth, far too often, is complex, and muddy, and confusing. But it’s still the truth. In this case, the nasty Pentagon is on the right side. Perhaps next time, the nasty Saudi leader will do something good. Or Boris Johnson will say something true, sensible, selfless, and profound. This is life, folks, and unless we simply prefer to be deluded, we have to accept complexity, muddiness, and confusion.

Frank Sinatra, by many accounts, did terrible things, especially when drunk, which was apparently pretty common. He also was a phenomenal singer. Binary thinkers have to choose: they either love Sinatra for his music and overlook his bad behaviour, or they cannot overlook his bad behaviour and so are forced to hate his music, too. The rest of us are stuck with complicated thoughts and feelings. We keep repeating to ourselves Bryan Stevenson‘s wise dictum: “Each of us is more than the worst thing we have ever done.”

That goes for nations, too.