Dyneslines

The high-rise conundrum

2012-01-27T07:04:00.000-08:00

In the film “Shame,” currently in cinemas, the Anglo-German hunk Michael Fassbender plays a sex addict who can never seem to get any satisfaction. His quandary is symbolized by his sterile, high-tech apartment located in a luxury high-rise in lower Manhattan. Just as the suburbs almost automatically symbolize familial dysfunction in the movies, so do residential high-rises signal anomie.

Some high-rise buildings are clearly problematic places to live, but others are not. How did they become so stigmatized? The bum rap is due in the first instance to the writer Jane Jacobs (1916-2006), who fifty years ago published her “Death and Life of the Great American Cities,” a book that proved incredibly influential. Earlier Jacobs had taken on the formidable New York City planner Robert Moses. She organized a coalition to oppose his Lower Manhattan Expressway and won. Then she took on an even more powerful adversary, the French-Swiss starchitect Le Corbusier.

In the 1920s Corbu sought to address the ilots insalubres (slum blocks) in Paris and other older French cities through his Radiant City concept. Put simply, this is the formula of the “skyscraper in the park.” By in essence verticalizing the street, Corbu sought to provide light and air for everyone at higher densities than heretofore.

The Radiant City ideal found little favor in interwar France, but it was widely adopted in Britain and the US. The mistake made by Corbu was a kind of Pavlovian one: the assumption that a change in housing configuration would be instrumental in reconditioning behavior. Instead, existing behavioral patterns tend to reassert themselves in the new settings. Ironically, Jacobs made a similar mistake, though her candidate for the reshaping situation was different: low rises with ready access to busy streets.

Jacobs’ larger context was her excoriation of modernist planning policies on the grounds that they were devastating existing inner-city communities. She maintained that modernist urban planning disrespects the city, failing to recognize the actual situation of human beings living in a community characterized by layered complexity and seeming chaos. The modernist planners used deductive reasoning to find principles by which to plan and reconstruct cities. Among these policies the most destructive was urban renwal, then widely touted as the solution to many urban ills. Nonsense, said Jacobs. These policies, she claimed, destroy communities and innovative economies by creating isolated, unnatural urban spaces.

Ever since the appearance of Jacobs’ pathfinding 1961 book, residential high-rises have had an unsavory reputation. Some do seem to deserve this critique, while others do not. The reasons are complex, but the argument so eloquently set forth by Jacobs cannot be readily dismantled by adducing a few success stories and setting aside the many failures. That tactic borders on anecdotal evidence.

Another source of the common disparagement of residential high-rises is more specific--the housing projects that sprang up in many American cities after World War II as places for the poor to live. The sites were usually created by aggressive slum clearance, euphemistically termed “urban renewal.” Many fine old buildings were lost in this way. But eventually the projects themselves became, in many instances, notorious for crime, drugs, and general misery. Many have been torn down as hopeless.

The emblematic instance of this fate is the the Pruitt-Igoe houses in Saint Louis. Designed by George Hellmuth and World Trade Center architect Minoru Yamasaki (of Leinweber, Yamasaki & Hellmuth), the 33-building complex opened in 1954, its modernist towers touted as a remedy to overcrowding in the city’s tenements. Yet rising crime, neglected facilities, and fleeing tenants led to its demolition-—in a spectacular series of implosions—-less than two decades later. One event was televised, and vivid photos have circulated ever since.

A current revisionist film seems to argue that this destruction was unnecessary. I have not seen the “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth,” only the trailer (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7RwwkNzF68), but I gather that the documentary attempts to reframe the conventional wisdom, suggesting that Pruitt-Igoe might have thrived under different circumstances. No prizes for guessing what the culprit is alleged to have been: institutionalized racism. In fact, as I noted above in discussing Le Corbusier’s fallacy, new residents of such buildings do not generally experience the change as transformational. Instead, they bring with them their own existing culture. And the culture of the rural South, whence many of the black residents had come, provided little preparation for this bewildering new environment.

Focusing on one such project may make for a gripping documentary, but the decline and destruction of Pruitt-Igoe has been paralleled over and over again in American cities. Surely the accounts of the decline of these buildings cannot all be “myths.” In Chicago no fewer than seventy-seven dangerous and dilapidated projects have been demolished in recent years.

On March 30, 2011, the final high-rise of the infamous Cabrini-Green housing project in Chicago came down. The building-by-building dismantling of Cabrini-Green had unfolded over ten painstaking years. Originally constructed in the post-war era to accommodate the massive influx of African Americans from the South, the Chicago housing projects had become symbols of violence and poverty. Once home to 15,000 residents, Cabrini-Green in particular stood as an example of failed urban planning. Life was chaotic and often violent for residents of the poorly-maintained buildings. The housing project gained notoriety in 1981 after a spree of gang shootings left eleven residents dead in only three months. The violence continued, claiming the life of a seven-y ear old in 1992, slain by a stray bullet as he walked to school. The most violent attack occurred in 1997, when a nine-year old girl was brutally attacked, raped, choked, and poisoned in the complex, leaving her unable to walk or talk. In 1981 mayor Jane Byrne moved into the complex for a few months to signal the seriousness of the housing project’s problems. But to little avail. It took three more decades for the monstrosity finally to disappear.

In summary, the continuing disparagement of residential high-rises stems from two causes: the Jacobs campaign against modernist planning in general, and the more specific issues stemming from the morass of public-housing projects. Obviously the latter is a subset of the former. Yet there is a spill-over phenomenon that affects our judgment of even luxury buildings such as the one the Fassbender character inhabits in “Shame.” Probably these negative sentiments should be more nuanced, but one documentary film won't do it.

Epictetus

2012-01-21T06:30:00.000-08:00

Several years ago, when I was experiencing a time of grief, I found great consolation in the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, which I had never read before. I was aware that the Roman emperor relied on the teachings of Epictetus for many of the ideas and precepts he expressed. Only now, though, have I found the opportunity to make a close (well, fairly close) study of that thinker.

Epictetus (ca, 55 CE-135 CE) was a Greek sage affiliated with the Stoic movement. He was born a slave at Hierapolis in Asia Minor, and resided in Rome until banishment when he went to Nicopolis in northwestern Greece where he lived and taught for the rest of his life. His teachings were recorded and published by his pupil Arrian in the Discourses. Philosophy, he held, is a way of life and not just a theoretical discipline. Epictetus believed that there was a fundamental distinction between the relatively restricted sphere that is within our control, and the vastly larger realms that are not. Still, in keeping with the concept of prohairesis or volition, we must act forthrightly when we can, as happiness depends on this All the same, external events are beyond our control, and we must accept whatever happens calmly and dispassionately. Suffering arises from trying to control what is uncontrollable, or from neglecting what is within our power. However, this realism does not mean a kind of monastic retirement from the world. As part of the universal city that is the cosmos, human beings have a duty to care for all fellow humans.

After some reflection, I have concluded that there are two obstacles to my signing on to this program.

1) Epictetus recommends a highly constricted sphere of human agency. While we may experience sympathy, we shouldn’t even think of trying to affect the larger sphere of affairs that lies outside our control. Among other things, the minimalism thus commended would discourage engaging in movements for social change (something that has been important to me), or indeed making any large commitments. As regards human action, small is beautiful. But is it? Isn’t it better to have fought the good fight, even though what was sought did not turn out to be fully attainable?

2) The observable regularities of the cosmos provide, the Stoics generally believed, the template for personal morality. Observing such profound consonances will secure the benefit of “living in accord with nature.” This attempted derivation looks very much like an improbable journey from the realm of is to that of ought--a philosophical mistake trenchantly pointed out by David Hume. Moreover, the notion of living according to nature means the downgrading of living “unnaturally,” however defined. Over the course of European intellectual history, the dubious concept of the unnatural has been deployed to forbid all sorts of harmless, even rewarding behavior, including same-sex love. The whole construction, sometimes termed Natural Law, must be rejected.

A final caveat has occurred to me. Now that I have reached old age, with its necessarily more limited opportunities, maybe I can subscribe to the two precepts just noted more easily. To do that, though, would be to betray my earlier self.

PS. One iconoclastic Internaut has come up with the following summary of Epictetus' teaching: "Some things are up to us and others are not. Up to us are opinion, impulse, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever is in our own action. Not up to us are body, property, reputation, office, and, in a word, whatever is not our own action." A caricature? Probably, but so be it.

Creative destruction

2012-01-18T07:54:00.000-08:00

Lately the term “creative destruction” has gone viral. The concept received its classic formulation in the work of Joseph Alois Schumpeter (1883 –1950), who taught at Harvard University in his later years. in his 1942 book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Schumpeter used the term to describe the disruptive process of transformation that accompanies radical innovation.

In Schumpeter's vision of capitalism, innovative entry by entrepreneurs was the force that sustained long-term economic growth, even as it destroyed the value of established companies and laborers that enjoyed some degree of monopoly or oligopoly power derived from previous technological, organizational, regulatory, and economic paradigms. Schumpeter’s thinking can be traced back to his 1939 book Business Cycles. Here the Western world first learned about Nikolai Kondratieff and his long-wave concept with its cyclical patterns. Such cycles, Schumpeter believed, were caused by innovations.

Current examples include the decline of the Kodak firm, occasioned by the rise of the digital camera, and the insecure status of print newspapers, threatened by Internet sites such as the Huffington Post and the Daily Beast. Not so long ago, the cassette tape replaced the 8-track, only yield in turn to the compact disc, itself being undercut by MP3 players. These are technological manifestations of the process of creative destruction.

Sometimes the traditional form does not disappear, but becomes marginal. In this way legitimate theaters, once found in virtually every American city and town, were eclipsed by movie theaters, now threatened by Netflix. Still, we can expect to retain some theaters of both kinds for the foreseeable future.

To be sure, creative destruction can cause temporary economic distress. Layoffs of workers with obsolete skills can be one consequence of new innovations valued by consumers. While a continually innovating economy generates new opportunities for workers who can acquire the necessary skills to participate in the newer enterprises, creative destruction can cause severe hardship in the short term--and in the long term for those who cannot acquire the skills and work experience.

This downside must be frankly acknowledged. Yet some analysts have pointed out that in the long run society as a whole enjoys a rise in overall quality of life due to the accumulation of innovation. For example, 90% of Americans were farmers in 1790, while the number had declined to 2.6% in 1990. Over those 200 years farm jobs were destroyed by exponential productivity gains in agricultural technology and replaced by jobs in new industries. Today farmers and non-farmers alike enjoy much more prosperous lifestyles than their counterparts in 1790.

Schumpeter’s concept might be called the Kali Principle, after the Hindu goddess who presides over both destruction and creation. Significantly, Hinduism is imbued with a cyclical concept of history.

Schumpeter’s theory has been compared with Karl Marx's idea of the recurring crises of capitalism. Yet Marx thought that these crises were propelling the present economic system to its its doom, when it would be replaced by socialism. By contrast Schumpeter held that the situation was normal: superannuated things were constantly yielding to newer ones, thus assuring the continuity of the system. In this way the overall picture is homeostatic. Paradoxically, stability is achieved by instability.

Full disclosure requires me to state that Joseph Schumpeter is one of the modern economists I most admire.

A pivotal summer

2012-01-09T06:28:00.000-08:00

Looking over my Memoirs (at the allied site, Homolexis), as I have been doing these days, I noted an extraordinary coincidence. In the summer of 1973 I had too unrelated experiences that shaped the rest of my life.

In July I went to San Francisco for a month, to assist in recovering from a serious illness. I was lucky enough to stay (actually I was cat sitting) for a very intelligent Danish woman who was away for the month. Lili J. was an enthusiast for libertarianism. At the time, I had a very stereotyped and negative view of that political philosophy, but I couldn't help picking up the books. The more I read, the more sense it made. Once I got back, I read everything I could find by Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, and Milton Friedman, among others.

I have since moderated my adhesion to libertarianism (some enthusiasts never do). I do believe that there is a role for (limited) government, and efforts to achieve privatization must be carefully calibrated. But I remain staunchly opposed to attacking foreign nations militarily and I hold that the use of recreational drugs should be decriminalized--with adequate safeguards, to be sure.

The second thing that happened was that I read a news item about the formation of a new gay lib group, the Gay Academic Union. I joined immediately after I returned. GAU is long gone, but my concern with homostudies has persisted.

I don't know what would have happened to me if I did not go to San Francisco that summer. No, it wasn't the "summer of love"--that had happened some years before. But it was a double turning point for me. First, my political philosophy became more complex. I was too mature and cynical to "convert" to libertarianism. And second, I started on a long, occasionally meandering journey towards a career in gay studies. I am heartily glad that both these things happened to me.

Moral panics and sex panics

2012-01-07T09:12:00.000-08:00

The term moral panic has been popularized by the British sociologist Stanley Cohen (beginning in 1972). Cohen took the term over from his colleague Jack Young, who developed it in relation to the popular reaction to drug users in London’s Notting Hill district. Moral panic is commonly ascribed to the intensity of feeling a given population exhibits in response to something that appears to threaten the social order. In Cohen’s view, a moral panic occurs when "[a] condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests." Adherents of this concept term those who foment the panic "moral entrepreneurs," while individuals who supposedly threaten the social order are characterized as "folk devils."

Typically, episodes of moral panic are characterized by absence of the "objective correlative." That is to say, the intense emotion displayed is disproportionate to its ostensive cause.

The media have long harbored elements of moral indignation, even when they are not self-consciously engaged in crusading or muckraking. In some cases, simply reporting the facts can be enough to generate concern, anxiety, or panic. Of course supermarket tabloids are more directly and explicitly responsible for inciting mass concern, for that is one of the main ways they make their living.

Some sociologists, especially in Britain, ascribe the outbreaks of moral panic to the contradictions of capitalism. This manner of framing the issue shows the way in which it is capable of being politicized.

Examples of moral panic include the Red Scare of the early 1920s in the US, anti-Semitic pogroms in tsarist Russia, witch-hunts in medieval and Renaissance Europe, and attacks on Muslims in Western countries today. As this list suggests, the researchers generally focus on instances in which the victims are sympathetic, while the instigators of the phenomenon are much less so.

There is some reason to detect a political agenda--something bordering on political correctness, to be blunt about it--behind the selectivity involved. This factor is set in relief if we turn to some other possible candidates. Cannot organized opposition to Wall Street be regarded as a form of moral panic? As a sympathizer of the Occupation movement, I would say that, if so, the campaign is well justified. During the late ‘thirties, my parents, as “premature anti-fascists," tried to sound the alarm against Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. It took quite a while, but thank goodness people in this country eventually "panicked." Another example is the concern about climate change, sometimes manifested with a fervor that resembles moral panic.

In short, as a tactic of popular mobilization. panic may be wisely as well as unwisely mobilized.

Recently, some have sought to extend the scope of the concept into the erotic realm--as regards human trafficking, for example. Moreover, some speak, negatively, of concerns about pedophilia as “sex panic.” This last topic has been explored in what appears to be a thoughtful book by Roger Lancaster that is just out from the University of California Press. I hope to return to this book later, after I have obtained and read it.

The issues are evidently complex, but I think that one must acknowledge that not all opposition to human trafficking and pedophilia is panicky or unwarranted.

The vast wastelands of intolerance

2012-01-06T06:40:00.000-08:00

When I first joined gay liberation some forty years ago, I found that adhesion to "progressive" politics was mandatory. This position had, we were told, a rational basis because since gay men and lesbians were only 10% of the population, we must ally with other groups for success. There wasn't much prospect for allying with Wall Street or Christian evangelicals, so we had to seek our allies among disadvantaged ethnic groups and students--as Herbert Marcuse had recommended.

It wasn't so much this view strategy I objected to, but the tendency to suppress other viewpoints--left-liberal intolerance in short. PC ruled. I fell afoul of this mandatory progressiveness with my Encyclopedia of Homosexuality which was prematurely declared "out of print" because of pressure on the publisher. That is a long story that I won't repeat here. Suffice it to say that the effort at suppression was not wholly successful, for the Encyclopedia of Homosexuality is still available on Amazon and at several electronic sites.

Still, weary of being muzzled, I decided to join a conservative gay group with a closed list on the Internet. I soon found (no surprise there!) that these folks were even more intolerant than my erstwhile progressive comrades. So I dropped out.

Recently, along with many others, I created an ad hoc group of friends on Facebook. As it happens, they are, most of them, "progressives." These people speak pretty much in unison, and ignore my dissenting posts.

This urge to ignore and suppress has now come to a head with the candidacy of Ron Paul, who seems to be hated by all sides, even though he has important things to say. I take the liberty of quoting a portion of a recent email by my friend David McReynolds:

"I belong to the Socialist Party. I will support Stewart Alexander, our candidate. I do understand the Libertarians, much better than . . . a number of other liberals and left-wing good folks who, once they find that Ron Paul doesn't fit their politically correct image of the world, decide he is a fascist.

"Let's me clear. I do not support his NRA positions. I am for gun control. I do not approve of his position on AIDS (which is due in part to his age - younger people lost whole phonebooks of friends - older people, particularly if they are not gay, didn't feel touched by this). I strongly support the needed federal laws to protect the voting rights of minorities. One reason I am a socialist and not a libertarian. I support social security, socialized medicine, a higher minimum wage and, yes, socialism!

"But it is bluntly nuts - no better word - to accuse Ron Paul of being anti-gay. The Libertarians (including two friends on my GLBT list) have long welcomed gays. It is worse that nuts to accuse Ron Paul of anti-Semitism. It turns out (and I've checked the "sources" that rabid anti-Paul folks sent me) that his "anti-Semitism" amounts to his being critical of Israel and favoring cutting off aid to it. I am among
those who strongly favor ending all aid to Israel - and am part of a growing movement, led by comrades within the Jewish community.

"What caused the real "panic" about Ron Paul? Why did the mainstream media (except, God bless him, for Jon Stewart) ignore Ron Paul until very recently? It was because he put himself firmly outside the garrison state to which liberals and conservatives both pledge allegiance - the armed might of America, willing and eager to go to war across the world in defense of corporate interests, and to provide, in the process, billions of taxpayer dollars to the corporate arms folks.

"Why did Newt Gingrich say he wouldn't vote for Ron Paul if he won the nomination? Do you think it was because of Paul's conservative positions on gun control, abortion, etc.? No - it was Ron Paul's peace position and - of great importance - the clear break with the "security state" nonsense we have bought into, the Patriot Act, the various attacks on our constitutional rights. Things that Obama supports.

"Again, I ain't voting for Ron Paul, but I thank God there is at least one voice of reason in the GOP primary - it helps those of us who want to "rethink" the domestic and foreign policies of this country."

END of McReynolds quotation.

The contradictions of liberalism once more

2012-01-01T10:54:00.000-08:00

Many find my reservations about modern liberalism appalling. Only a Neanderthal would abandon the last, best hope of humanity, they opine. I tend to locate the (to my mind) disabling contradictions in the contrast between 19th-century laissez-faire liberalism of the John Stuart Mill type and the interventionist trend signaled by the beginning of the triumph of Britain's Labour Party in the election of 1911.

However, Matt Stoller finds more recent origins:

"Modern liberalism is a mixture of two elements. One is a support of Federal power – what came out of the late 1930s, World War II, and the civil rights era where a social safety net and warfare were financed by Wall Street, the Federal Reserve and the RFC, and human rights were enforced by a Federal government, unions, and a cadre of corporate, journalistic and technocratic experts (and cheap oil made the whole system run.) America mobilized militarily for national priorities, be they war-like or social in nature. And two, it originates from the anti-war sentiment of the Vietnam era, with its distrust of centralized authority mobilizing national resources for what were perceived to be immoral priorities. When you throw in the recent financial crisis, the corruption of big finance, the increasing militarization of society, Iraq and Afghanistan, and the collapse of the moral authority of the technocrats, you have a big problem. Liberalism doesn’t really exist much within the Democratic Party so much anymore, but it also has a profound challenge insofar as the rudiments of liberalism going back to the 1930s don’t work.

"This is why Ron Paul can critique the Federal Reserve and American empire, and why liberals have essentially no answer to his ideas, arguing instead over Paul having character defects. Ron Paul’s stance should be seen as a challenge to better create a coherent structural critique of the American political order. It’s quite obvious that there isn’t one coming from the left, otherwise the figure challenging the war on drugs and American empire wouldn’t be in the Republican primary as the libertarian candidate. To get there, liberals must grapple with big finance and war, two topics that are difficult to handle in any but a glib manner that separates us from our actual traditional and problematic affinity for both. War financing has a specific tradition in American culture, but there is no guarantee war financing must continue the way it has. And there’s no reason to assume that centralized power will act in a more just manner these days, that we will see continuity with the historical experience of the New Deal and Civil Rights Era. The liberal alliance with the mechanics of mass mobilizing warfare, which should be pretty obvious when seen in this light, is deep-rooted.

"What we’re seeing on the left is this conflict played out, whether it is big slow centralized unions supporting problematic policies, protest movements that cannot be institutionalized in any useful structure, or a completely hollow liberal intellectual apparatus arguing for increasing the power of corporations through the Federal government to enact their agenda. Now of course, Ron Paul pandered to racists, and there is no doubt that this is a legitimate political issue in the Presidential race. But the intellectual challenge that Ron Paul presents ultimately has nothing to do with him, and everything to do with contradictions within modern liberalism." www.nakedcapitalism.com

Korea

2011-12-20T12:23:00.000-08:00

The death of Kim Jong-il has started some new conversations and reawakened some old ones. Among the latter are several leftist myths, including the notion that the Korean war was started by the South invading the North. Over the years more and more evidence has come to light that the opposite is the case.

For a fair-minded account, one should consult the book by John Lewis Gaddis on the Cold War, summarized at several places on the Internet.

Hitchens love

2011-12-17T07:20:00.001-08:00

The tributes have been pouring in for Christopher Hitchens, who has just died of esophageal cancer. I find that I cannot fully share this positive emotion. Not that Hitchens was a bad person, just inconsistent and generally shallow in his analysis. During his TV appearances--and apparently in person--he masked this shallowness with clever quips. In the end, though, he seemed to be mostly about "getting over" on someone, whether it was Bill Clinton, Mother Teresa, or whomever, but never offering analysis at any depth. This cleverness was nurtured, of course, by the Oxford Union and other places where clever English people develop a taste for it, many never to recover.

I found his support for Bush's invasion of Iraq disgusting beyond belief.

His militant atheism exhibited all the faults of that trend: the self-righteousness, arrogance, and of course outright mimicry of the intolerance of the religionists themselves.

On the CNN blog Stephen Prothero, a respected scholar of comparative religion, makes some telling points about Hitchens' atheist blather. Here are some excerpts.

Prothero: "My love/hate relationship with Christopher Hitchens started when I read “God Is Not Great.” Before that, he was a hero of mine. I loved his slashing style, his intelligence, his learning, his self-possession and, above all, his passion. But I hated this book.

"So I panned it in the “Washington Post.” “I have never encountered a book whose author is so fundamentally unacquainted with its subject,” I wrote, before taking Hitchens to task for demonstrating one of his own pet themes: “the ability of dogma to put reason to sleep.”

"I panned the book because I knew Hitchens could take it, and because he deserved it. But what really motivated me was disappointment. I had disagreed with him before, of course. But in every other case I had the sneaking suspicion he knew more than I did about the subject. And even if he didn’t, I didn’t care, because he was always so much fun to read. . . .

"Everyone has a blind spot, however, and for Hitchens it was religion. I remember being confused when I began reading “God Is Not Great,” chiefly because I agreed with virtually everything he was saying. Of course, religious institutions have visited all manner of horrors on humanity. Of course, theological writing is often literally incredible. And yes the whole enterprise can be poisonous.

"But what I finally saw was that Hitchens wasn’t really dynamiting, as he believed, the whole world of “religion.” He was just blowing up, over and over again, his little corner of a little vacant lot in his own little neighborhood and imagining he was leveling Mecca and Rome.

"The problem with Hitchens’ writing on religion is that he did what many preachers do; he let his emotions get the best of him, and then he started preaching to the choir. In the process, he helped to lead a whole generation of New Atheists down a rabbit hole of their own imagining.

"Inside that fantasy world, the atheists are always the smartest boys in the class, and around every corner there is a new religious sin to sneer and chuckle at. In the real world, there are millions of intelligent Christians and Muslims, Hindus and Jews sneering and chuckling at precisely the same stuff. The criticism of religion begins, believe it or not, with embarrassment in the pews."

Christmas conflicts

2011-12-14T06:13:00.000-08:00

Once again Christmas is upon us. I am not a big fan, as I do not enjoy the souped-up versions of carols that are so insistently and monotonously played in stores. (Some go so far as to term this musical junk "ear rape.") Luckily I am exempt, pretty much, from the obligation to buy presents. I have no children and my surviving friends are beyond that sort of stuff.

For various reasons, though, myths seem to thrive at this time of year. One which we have not heard much of lately is the notion that Christmas is just a survival of the Roman Saturnalia. I will have more to say about that notion presently.

Another myth, common among secularists these days, is that there is an insidious plot to compel people to say “Merry Christmas” instead of “Happy Holidays,” which is more appropriate, given the mosaic of observances that occur this time of year. I do not say "Merry Christmas," and feel no compulsion to do so. Speech must be free.

While the expression “War on Christmas” is an exaggeration, it is important to remember the origins of this conflict. A decade ago, Wal-Mart and some other big stores deleted the salutation Merry Christmas from their advertising, using Happy Holidays (HH) instead. Apparently, it was felt that some people who are not Christians were offended by the salutation. The imposition of this seemingly neutral, “ecumenical” wording was intended to address their feelings. In reality this outbreak of Verbal Correctness is not very different from the Michigan school which deleted the word “gay” from “Don we now our gay apparel.”

Heaven forbid that in our multicultural society anyone should be offended by anything. But the HH solution did not resolve the problem, for a different group, traditional Christians, came forward to say that they were offended. After the imposition of the “ecumenical” greeting became common knowledge, there was a fire storm of protest, and the stores that had forbidden “Merry Christmas” allowed it to come back.

The motives of those who are (still) fervently backing “Happy Holidays” as the only truly appropriate greeting merit some attention. In my view, they are seeking to relativize Christmas--and by extension Christianity itself--by promoting this expression. I am not a Christian and I am not an advocate for that faith. But I am a historian, and having investigated the background, I have concluded that the relativizing approach is not defensible. Here is some background (partially recycling some parts of an account from 2004).

It is generally acknowledged that no one can determine the actual day of the birth of Jesus Christ. Several candidates enjoyed popularity in various parts of the late Roman world, some in the spring. The most popular choice, though, was January 6, Epiphany. Yet the Roman Church adopted December 25. Why?

One view regards Christmas as a hijacking of the Saturnalia, a somewhat raucous pagan event, which started on December 17 and extended to from three to seven days thereafter—but never, it seems, reaching as far as the 25th. In addition, some have suggested the winter solstice as a source, but that is fixed at December 22, though some astronomical wobbliness has been detected. Near misses don’t qualify, for the Romans insisted on precision in these calendrical matters. The reason for this emphasis is that astrology, then widely accepted, required determination not just of the actual day of one’s birth, but the hour. (By the way, has anyone ever calculated Jesus’s horoscope based on the several candidates for his proposed birth?)

To make a long story short, Christmas actually coincides with an observance established by the emperor Aurelian in AD 274: December 25 was fixed as the birthday of the Unconquered Sun (Sol Invictus).

Late antiquity saw the rise of a contentious welter of religions. Of Middle Eastern origin, the Unconquered Sun came to enjoy wide appeal because of its lack of specificity. While it connoted potency, the Sol Invictus otherwise had a kind of neutrality that gave it appeal to a number of competing religious factions. It was cosmic, not anthropomorphic, at least not necessarily so. For traditional pagans Sol Invictus was identical with Apollo, originally a Greek import. The Mithraists saw it as a manifestation of their Mithras Helios. Christians could honor the solar deity as a metaphor for the "Sun of Righteousness," that is, Jesus Christ. Interestingly, the soil underneath the basilica of St. Peters has yielded a mosaic, apparently of the early 4th century, showing Christ as a sun god riding a chariot.

While the Roman Church, and eventually the entire Latin West, adopted December 25 to mark the Nativity, the eastern holiday of Epiphany was retained as well. Today the 6th of January is observed in Hispanic countries as the day of the Three Kings (the Magi), when gifts are exchanged. In this way, the old Roman observation of New Year’s Day, the first of January, was bracketed by Christmas, on the one hand, and Epiphany, on the other. They were two bookends, as it were, enclosing the older date for the beginning of the civil year. (For the Church Christmas was the beginning of the year.) The combination attests a widely ramifying process: retention of traditional holidays—providing that their pagan character was not overt--while mingling them with the new.

As part of this inquiry I looked into one of the major sources for late Roman festivals, the Calendar of 354. This richly illustrated volume, made for a cultivated Christian named Valentinus, is actually a composite reference book recording the public religious festivals in Rome (roughly the first half), together with Christian parallels (the second half). While this combination may at first sight seem schizophrenic, or at best a shotgun marriage, it actually accords well with an era of transition. Valentinus, the book’s owner, wished to have a record of the festivals of his ancestors, as well as the holy observances of his own faith. Many of the old festivals were falling into desuetude in his own day, and new deities, more acceptable to Christians and those adhering to other salvific religions, came in, favored because of their relative neutrality. These included Roma Aeterna, a personification of the city; Salus, or public safety; and the aforementioned Sol Invictus.

The original copy of the Calendar of 354, our best source for these matters, has been lost. Yet it has been reconstructed by several generations of classical scholars. The results of these labors have been summed up by Michele Renee Salzman in her fine monograph, “On Roman Time” (Berkeley, 1990).

Now for a fast forward. Somewhat analogous to the transitional picture recorded by the Calendar, we can observe changes in our own practice. Since 1954, Armistice Day, devised to commemorate the end of World War I on November 11, has been renamed Veterans Day. Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthday get rolled together as President’s Day, while a new holiday has appeared to honor Martin Luther King.

Today controversy surrounds Christmas. For some time it has had two rivals, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa. While the events commemorated in Hanukkkah took place before the birth of Christ, the actual commemoration is recent. in the 1870s, when Christmas was beginning to come into its own as a mass-market phenomenon in the US, two Cincinnati rabbis, looking for a way to cheer up Jewish kids who felt left out, launched the first big Hanukkah festivals, with games, music, and food. The concept proved popular, soon spreading across the country. So says Dianne Ashton, a religious scholar and author of the coming book "Hanukkah in America." Competition with Christmas is the main reason for the prominence of the festival. Kwanzaa. observed by some African Americans, thrives for similar reasons.

Today in many of the "blue" (liberal) states it is no longer fashionable to say "Merry Christmas"—-one should call out "Happy Holidays" instead. In some cases Nativity scenes and Christmas carols have been banned from public observance, ostensibly on grounds of separation of church and state. While these changes do not add up to an actual War on Christmas, they do represent an effort to relativize Christmas--and in fact Christianity itself.

Christmas is a national holiday in the United States. Yet in its origin it is a religious observance, as I have shown. In a sense we have come full circle, back to the duality of late Roman times. The day of the Unconquered Sun was a holiday in the perfected version of the official (pagan) calendar. Yet Roman Christians could also accept this figure as the avatar of their own founder. Hence Christmas as we know it.

As with everything else in human culture, holidays evolve. As in 4th-century Rome, these changes can occasion controversy, with some urging radical change and others defending the status quo. Whatever the case, it seems that Christmas will be with us a good deal longer.

UPDATE. The reductio ad absurdum of the relativist argument is this list (from rationalwiki.org):

"Late December celebrations"

* Alban Arthuan
* Boxing Day
* Chrismukkah
* Festivus
* Hanukkah
* Inti Raymi
* Kwanzaa
* Holiday (Pastafarianism)
* Lenaea
* Merlinpeen
* New Year's Eve
* New Year's Day (also celebrated on the first of April, by fools)
* Ramadan has recently fallen during this time of year, though since Islamic holidays are on a lunar calendar it is progressing backwards through the calendar.
* Eid Al Adha (Islamic New Year) currently falls during this time of the year, but like Ramadan, progresses backwards through the calendar.
* Saturnalia
* Second Rite of Belial
* Solstice (winter in the northern hemisphere, summer in the southern)
* Thanksgiving (in some places)
* The Long Night
* Xmas
* Yule (or Juul)
* Newtonma

Tom Who?

2011-12-08T06:55:00.000-08:00

Some of the columnists at the New York Times (think Paul Krugman) are mind-numbingly soporific. Not so Thomas Friedman. With his endless stream of mixed metaphors and gee-whiz happy talk, he is always good for a laugh. And then there are his actual theories: the world is flat (when it is not); the purported inverse correlation between petroleum and liberty; the magical effect of having a McDonald's on not going to war (NOT), and so forth.

In a couple of hilarious Rolling Stone pieces Matt Taibbi has had a go at taking Tom down. Now we have a whole book with that aim: Belén Fernández, The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work (Verso, 2011). Just reading the first fifty pages is an amazing experience; it is hard to believe that one writer could generate so many howlers. Somehow I can't summon the energy to peruse the hundred pages that follow. Fernández has got this bozo covered.

I am not so sure about her larger points. There is much wrong with American journalism today, but Friedman does not, as she suggests, personify it, for he is in a league all his own. Fernández is writing from a left-leaning, anti-imperialist point of view, so she seeks to convict him of familiar sins as viewed from that camp. Yet Friedman is so inconsistent, often shamelessly so, that it is hard to detect any sustained doctrine in the corpus his copious writings.

PS In the book the publisher has made a mistake with the author's first name, writing it Bélen, instead of Belén, with the accent mark correctly placed on the second syllable. The word means "Bethlehem" in Spanish, a fact that (curiously enough) I learned in the third grade by memorizing a Christmas carol in that language. I don't want to play the Schadenfreude card too harshly, but it is curious that leftist publishers like Verso have trouble with the orthography of "third world" languages.

The group-intelligence controversy revisited

2011-12-07T06:54:00.000-08:00

In some recent postings at his Daily Dish site, Andrew Sullivan has returned to the matter of group differences in intelligence, reflecting his most controversial decision when he edited The New Republic quite a few years back. The conversation continued at his Facebook spot, but I have been unable to retrieve it again.

The discussion is basically a dialogue of the deaf, with opinions splitting along familiar right-left lines. One left-leaning commentator insists that we are all members of the human race. Yes, indeed, but that does not mean that there are not aggregate differences among population groups. In a series of studies, Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza has shown that, based on mitochondrial and other DNA evidence, there are significant differences among population groups or pools. In this way, he has been able to construct evolutionary trees, showing how these differences arose and were confirmed.

Another common argument among the left-leaning faction is that one can measure individual intelligence but never group intelligence--between blacks and whites, women and men, and so forth. Well, if we can study differences in height and eye color on a group basis, why not do the same for intelligence? This taboo seems political, with no discernible objective basis.

Left-leaning observers often complain, with much justice, that conservatives who deny evolution and climate change are anti-science. In this matter of group intelligence, though, it is the left-leaning people who are anti-science. Both groups seem to adhere to a cafeteria approach to scientific evidence.

I confess that I have doubts about reducing the question of intelligence to g (or general intelligence). There are other aspects of intelligence, such as can-do knowledge and sensitivity to the needs of other people, that are not included under this rubric. Still, no one has been able to work out an acceptable pluralistic theory of intelligence(s) that would include all the significant variables.

The return of James Burnham

2011-12-04T09:17:00.000-08:00

James Burnham (1905–1987) was an American political theorist, best known for his "The Managerial Revolution" (1941). That book advanced conjectures about the new form of society ostensibly emerging to replace capitalism. Controversially, Burnham saw many common features that linked the economic formations of Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and the United States under Franklin D. Roosevelt with his New Deal.

More generally, Burnham held that a new society had emerged in which a ruling elite of managers--not a ruling class in the traditional sense--had began to amass all power and privilege. In a later book "The Machiavellians," he acknowledged that the emerging new élite would seek to retain some democratic trappings or camouflage — political opposition, a nominally free press, and a controlled "circulation” of the cadres of dominant individuals.

Writing in 1941, Burnham took note of the early victories of the Axis powers. He concluded that Germany was bound to win the war in Europe, with Japan becoming the major force in Asia. Separated from the Old World by its oceans, the US would remain independent, perhaps retaining Britain as an outpost. At the time George Orwell took careful note, incorporating the idea of the three great powers into his powerful novel "Nineteen-eighty Four."

Most observers thought that Burnham’s geopolitical predictions had been falsified. As he himself noted, the Soviet Union survived and triumphed over Nazi Germany.

Today, however, the USSR is no more, and Germany is resurgent. To be sure, the center of Asian power has shifted to China. It does appear, though, that the world is ruled from three great power centers: Berlin, Beijing, and Washington DC. (Possibly to be termed, BBB--Berlin, Beijing, and the Beltway.)

In essence Burnham seems to have been right after all,

Memoirs

2011-12-04T06:19:00.000-08:00

In the course of the past few weeks I have been composing my memoirs, covering the whole period from 1934 to 2011. The demands of this task have meant that I have neglected blogging--or perhaps been addressing it by other means.

I thought that I should attempt this job while I am still (relatively speaking) compos mentis.

I have now completed the text in draft form. Doubtless I will expand these observations later, but the main lines of my life story are discernible.

The full text is now available at my allied blog: www.homolexis.blogspot.com. For access, it may be more convenient simply to consult the sidebar on the right.

In the meantime, here are the opening pages of the Memoirs.

"Prologue"

I have never been a believer in the formative role of childhood experiences. Instead, I have fashioned my own version of the existentialist concept of the self-creation. This process, I believe, takes place over many years. For better or worse, I am the one who has made me what I am.

Moreover, I have never been very interested in genealogy (though I am not averse to acknowledging biological elements in human behavior). Here is what I know. My ancestors have been on this continent for several generations, going back for the most part to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century in the American south. They were chiefly of Protestant Irish stock. Yet they were not Scotch Irish, as they seem to have mainly come from southern Ireland. This combination would appear to be something of an anomaly. Further inquiry into the matter might be interesting, but it strikes me as otiose.

Both my biological parents came from families engaged in agriculture. The Conways, my father’s folks, maintained a large dairy farm near Fort Worth, Texas. The Colemans, my mother’s family, grew cotton at a place called Fate, east of Dallas.

Early on Brant, my biological father. showed an inclination for the natural sciences. Accordingly, he studied physics at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. My mother Jean, who had come to Fort Worth to work as a secretary, met my father when she took some extension classes at the university. Unlike my father, she never completed her course work, but continued all her life to have a strong interest in literature. Between the two of them, then, my parents incarnated the binarism of the “two cultures”: science and the humanities.

After trying teaching for a while, Brant ended up as a guided-missiles specialist for the US Navy. He really was a rocket scientist, though a person I rarely saw.

For reasons that are not entirely clear, my parents divorced when I was three years old. My mother then sent me to live with my paternal grandparents on their dairy farm, where I was surrounded by a happy throng (or so it seems to me now) of aunts and uncles.

This idyll ended in 1939. My mother had decided to remarry and to go to live with her new husband in southern California. Accordingly, she collected me from the farm, and we went by train to San Diego, where Grady Dynes, the new husband, met us. First we lived in San Bernardino, and then in Los Angeles. It didn’t seem so at the time, but moving to California was probably much to my benefit. Later I took my adoptive father’s surname, changing from (Robert) Wayne Conway to Wayne R. Dynes.

It turned out that my stepfather, who had been educated at Pomona College, had been a Communist in the 1930s. Eventually, he converted my mother to these beliefs, and ipso facto me too. Yet fortified by reading the writings of Arthur Koestler and George Orwell I rebelled, becoming an “ex-Communist” at the tender age of 14.

On only one occasion (the funeral of my grandmother) can I ever remember being taken to a church. My parents were atheists, a creed I found arid--and an excuse, most years, for denying me Christmas presents. So this upbringing had an effect that was opposite to the one intended, giving me a strong interest in religion. Young people find things that are taboo inherently attractive. Yet this interest was not strong enough to make me convert to a particular faith.

When I was about six years old, a neighbor boy Jimmy (who was about twelve years old) inducted me into his male harem. Assembling in his parents’ garage, we would take our clothes off and play with each other’s penises. Some would say that these early experiences--which were enjoyable and never exposed to public knowledge--”made me” a homosexual. That I doubt.

Was it pedophilia? No, because we were all prepubertal kids. Above all, there was no penetration, not even digitally.

We all have our own personal horrors. One of them, to me, is the idea that a child might be subjected to penile penetration of the mouth, anus, or vagina. As for nonpenetrative intergenerational sex, it presents its own problems, but they strike me as being of lesser magnitude.

What I experienced with Jimmy and his charges was erotic play, but not sex in any fundamental sense. It was more akin to “playing doctor.”

In my view, one of the problems with the current concern with pedophilia, from whatever side, is that it tends to conflate categories that need to be carefully distinguished.

[And so on.]

"inappropriate"

2011-11-23T05:31:00.002-08:00

One observer has termed the pepper spraying of peaceful students at UC Davis "inappropriate."

I have not been able to find much evidence that permits the tracing of this usage. My recollection, though, is that it came into vogue in a bureaucratic context in universities--in my case at Hunter College. According to President Jacqueline Wexler, the student occupation of the campus some thirty years ago was "inappropriate."

The appeal of the adjective as a replacement for "bad" is that it appears to be objective. The usage also seems to accord with a popular version of situation ethics, where something that would be acceptable in one context is deemed not to be so in others.

Thus wearing dirty jeans or using four-letter words at a job interview would not be the appropriate thing to do. On a beer bust, though, they might be.

By this standard when is it ever appropriate to pepper spray peaceful protesters? Perhaps it is with nonpeaceful ones, though that is by no means clear.

One can also imagine insidious variations. Thus the Rev. Paul Shanley's serial acts of pedophilia were "inappropriate." Bush's invasion of Iraq was "inappropriate." Qaddafi's conduct during his regime was "inappropriate." And so forth.

Civlility

2011-11-15T16:59:00.000-08:00

As is well known, the Internet is rife with wrangling of all sorts. Some of it has occurred in these pages. That's life, I would suppose.

But some people say that there is a simple rule that will obviate most of this stuff: criticize ideas and opinions, not persons.

This is a noble ideal, but it is not always practical. If someone says, e.g., "Adolf Hitler has been misjudged. He was a great man who did much for Germany and the world"--surely it is not enough to refute this obviously wrong view. It is appropriate to ask pointed questions about the mental make-up and character of someone who could make such a bizarre claim. In such cases, it is better to be forthright than to adhere to a purist position: "just criticize the idea."

Moreover, many sometimes feel, not always without reason, that when their views are criticized there is some personal animus involved. This is particularly a problem when person A keeps criticizing the views of person B. In principle, I suppose the sense could be alleviated if person A indicated from time to time that (s)he holds person B in high regard. But such assurances could seem insincere.

In such matters there does not seem to be any universal rule, to be followed in every instance.

Another faulty adage

2011-11-15T08:40:00.000-08:00

Now widely current, the admonition, "Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made" (Aus so krummem Holze, als woraus der Mensch gemacht ist, kann nichts ganz Gerades gezimmert werden) stems from Immanuel Kant's "Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose" (1784). It was popularized by the British liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin.

Today, "Crooked Timber" is a popular blog.

Like many current cliches, the term “crooked timber” reflects an obsolete technology. In Kant’s time, lumber was normally hewn ad hoc with an adze or other instrument.

Beginning in the 1840s, however, lumber mills became the standard source for wood. They produced regular planks, allowing for what is termed balloon-framing construction. This technique produces the wooden skeleton of uniform frames that we normally see as a house is going up.

Perhaps the metaphor is valid about crooked timber. Yet there is no need actually to make use of crooked timber, unless you think it looks picturesque. Instead, go to a lumber yard. Out of this timber, carefully hewn according to exacting standards, lots of straight things have been made.

Mangled translation

2011-11-11T19:13:00.000-08:00

[I couldn't resist reproducing some paragraphs from a translation of an earlier posting of mine on Claude Levi-Strauss, apparently into Russian and back again. It is from a site called russianbrides, where you can read the whole thing. -- Ah, the days when we were enchanted together!]

In college in the fifties I [WD] hew down in with a grouping of graduate students who were sociologists and anthropologists who half convinced me that, enchanted together, these disciplines sufficed to apprehend the over the moon marvellous. Sociology (then at the replenish of its prestige) explained advanced industrial societies, while anthropology took complaint in deep trouble of the tea. I was continually uneasy that both seemed to pass up the highest achievements of magnanimous sensation of values to assail together on the homespun. Of plainly the methodological problems posed in the locality anthropology and sociology had not surfaced, in spite of a not divers were hyperopic, even-tempered in those Pollyannaish days. For divers, I postulate, this lay plaice was an advantage; to me it was not. Epigrammatically, W.

Auden attach it first-rate, with his eleventh commandment, "Thou shalt not allocate a sexually transmitted approach." Nonetheless in 1955 I dutifully acquired chestnut of the required bibles, a behemoth tome entitled Anthropology Today: An Encyclopedic Inventory, edited in the locality the distinguished Americanist Alfred L. H. Kroeber. I was struck, in spite of, in the locality an identical in the soft-cover in the locality Claude Lйvi-Strauss, a maverick who attracted me in the locality his autonomy. As I cancel (the soft-cover has recently disappeared during a needed triage of my library), this tome had essays in the locality hither fifty specialists, mostly representing the consensus of American Anthropology at the outdated, dominated in the locality the unwritten law established in the locality Franz Boas. in cross This was in details my primordial introduction to structuralism, a taxpayer to which I settle upon replacing in a tick.

[snip]

Lйvi-Strauss, in studying the mythologies of untaught tribes, transformed the scheme the 20th century came to apprehend mores itself. "A important pundit, Mr. Tribal mythologies, he argued, Вlan remarkably smarmy systems of dialectics, showing normal bananas qualities as chichi as those of Western societies. Lйvi-Strauss rejected the end that differences between societies were of no consequence, but he focused on the down aspects of humanity's attempts to apprehend the over the moon marvellous. . . . He became the primordial agent of 'structuralism,' a ready of compassion in which cosmic 'structures' were believed to underlie all magnanimous be disadvantaged by, giving decree to possibly disparate cultures and creations.""His manage was a complete power even-tempered on his critics, of whom there were divers. And his article - a ragout of the chop-logic and the rapturous, fullest extent of unafraid juxtapositions, knotty Donnybrook and cultivate metaphors - resembles trivial that had awaken formerly in anthropology."Lйvi-Strauss is such a justly known sketch that the cornerstone facts of his lumpen may be lickety-split summarized.

There has been no comparable successor to him in France. Born into a acclaimed French-Jewish artistic corm, he started in tenets. In the 1930s he had the distribute possessions of being invited to appropriate with a look on a professor at the University of Sгo Paulo in Brazil. Finding this taxpayer too arid, he switched to anthropology. From this about he launched his review trips to the reach of the Amazonian Indians, his merely the sack manage. After the decline of France he made his scheme to Marseille where he was proficient to put into place a speedboat to the French Caribbean. disparaging. Having returned to France, he was fleetingly mobilized at the start of World War II.

[snip]

As he remarked, in spite of, the manage can clear-headed as plainly be characterized as the dealing of men. I made my primordial apprehensive agreement with the French scholar's manage in 1955, in spite of I had trivial kink of the scheme he on into what capability be termed the "map of information." In the plainly of the following decade a dissimilar of translations of exposed books made his ideas more rambler in the English-speaking over the moon marvellous. As I acclaimed. Two handle absent from, and appease ballast as distribute introductions. in cross More unqualifiedly connected to structuralism was The Savage Mind, translated into English in 1966. The primordial is his amply illuminating pilgrimages recollections Tristes Tropiques (1955).

When I was teaching at Columbia University in the untaught seventies I got the end of bothersome to reshape structuralism into ancient history. I formed a trivial grouping of graduate students to hit this conversion. Lйvi-Strauss had unmistakable the scheme with his studies of the masks of the Northwest Coast Indians. As with other such attempts in this the sack, our efforts did not greatest ballast to much. I conclude with a not divers words hither structuralism itself.

[And so forth.]

A London memory

2011-11-11T14:27:00.000-08:00

At the beginning of my London years (1963-67) I was fortunate to attend some lectures of Karl Popper, the noted philosopher of science. This experience changed my life. During his lectures Popper, who was a small man, sat as if enthroned under the proscenium of the lecture hall at the London School of Economics. He was flanked by two disciples, who sat on chairs at either side as if serving as sergeants of arms.

The occasion I remember most vividly was when he held up a newspaper, saying: I read today in The Times that those of us in the academic world must all strive to be as good as Oxford and Cambridge. Nonsense, he declared. We must do a great deal better than Oxford and Cambridge. He was referring to the emergent orthodoxy of analytic philosophy at the two leading British universities. Quite correctly, he did not think much of the analytic trend, which was in his view obsessed with minor linguistic quibbles, while neglecting the major problems of philosophy.

Sir Karl Popper (1902-1994) was born in Vienna, a city that could then claim to be the foremost center of innovation in the Western world. As a young man, Popper worked for a time with the psychiatrist Alfred Adler, who was then concerned with helping troubled children. On one occasion Popper discovered a boy whose symptoms did not conform to Adler’s dogmatic theories; he then dared to confront his chief with this exceptional case. Somewhat impatiently, the great man explained how the boy did indeed fit in with his theories. Cheekily, the young assistant asked: “How do you know that, Dr. Adler.” To which his interlocutor replied “That I know from thousand-fold experience.” To which Popper retorted: “Now you know if from thousand-and-one-fold experience.” In other words, Adler's interpretation was an example of confirmation bias--showing how we are prone to interpret each new occurrence of a phenomenon in terms of our existing preconceptions.

This early encounter anticipated one of Popper’s main discoveries, that is, that we establish the validity of truth not by a series of verification experiences ("proofs"), but rather through exposing theories to the risk of falsification.

As a young man he was impressed by a lecture that Albert Einstein gave on relativity theory. The dominance of the critical spirit in Einstein, and its absence in Marx, Freud, and Adler, struck Popper as a contrast of fundamental importance. The latter three, he came to think, couched their theories in terms which made them amenable only to confirmation, while Einstein's theory, crucially, had implications which, if false, would have demolished the theory itself. In other words, the triumph of Einstein’s theories stemmed, paradoxically enough, from their initial vulnerability. By contrast Marxist and Freudian concepts are formulated in a way that insulates them from critique.

The dominant philosophical group in Vienna at the time was the Wiener Kreis, the circle of “scientifically-minded” intellectuals focused around Moritz Schlick, who had been appointed Professor of the philosophy of the inductive sciences at Vienna University in 1922. The group included Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neurath, Viktor Kraft, Hans Hahn and Herbert Feigl. The principal objective of the members of the Circle was to unify the sciences, in their view the only real source of knowledge. To this end, they sought to exclude from philosophy everything that they considered to be useless. The primary target of their eliminationist campaign was metaphysics, which they hoped to destroy by showing that metaphysical propositions are meaningless. The overall tendency was called logical positivism.

After showing some initial interest in the Circle--he shared their affinity with science--Popper became increasingly critical of the main tenets of logical positivism, especially of what he considered to be its misplaced focus on the theory of meaning in philosophy and upon verification in scientific methodology. He articulated his own view of science, and his criticisms of the positivists, in his first work, published under the title Logik der Forschung in 1934. An English version, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, appeared in 1959.

Yet storm clouds were gathering. The growth of Nazism in Germany and Austria compelled him, like many other intellectuals who shared his Jewish origins, to leave his native country. In 1937 Popper took up a position teaching philosophy at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, where he was to remain for the duration of World War II.

The growing threat of fascism prompted him to reorient his research interests towards social and political philosophy. This became the theme of his magnum opus, "The Open Society and Its Enemies." In this two-volume work Popper developed a critique of historicism and a defense of the open society, liberal democracy. Volume one is subtitled "The Spell of Plato",and volume two, "The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx, and the Aftermath.”

Popper’s iconoclastic critique of Plato as an authoritarian excited the ire of many classicists. For his part, Popper held that most Plato interpreters through the ages have been seduced by his greatness. In so doing, Popper argues, they have taken his political philosophy as a benign idyll, rather than regarding it correctly as a horrific totalitarian nightmare of deceit, violence, master-race rhetoric and eugenics. Popper held that Plato reacted against the growing humanism of Athenian society in his own day. In his view, Plato's historicist ideas are driven by a fear of the change that comes with such a liberal world view. Popper also suggests that Plato was the victim of his own vanity——that he had designs to become the supreme Philosopher King of his vision.

Much later I was to find that Popper’s approach helped to understand Plato’s shift from an early fervent appreciation of male same-sex love to a denunciation of it, as seen in his late work, The Laws.

In volume two, Popper moves on to examine Hegel and Marx, tracing back their ideas to Aristotle, and arguing that, as arch-historicists, the two were at the root of 20th century totalitarianism. By historicism he means: "an approach to the social sciences which assumes that historical prediction is their primary aim, and which assumes that this aim is attainable by discovering the 'rhythms' or the 'patterns', the 'laws' or the 'trends' that underlie the evolution of history.” ("The Poverty of Historicism," p. 3). This approach claims that history exhibits an inevitable, deterministic pattern,. The overriding force of this supposed pattern serves to elide the democratic responsibility of each of us to make our own free contributions to the evolution of society. This way of thinking leads to totalitarianism.

nother of Popper’s targets is what he calls "moral historicism," the attempt to derive moral values from the course of history. This tendency has taken several forms, including conservatism, positivism, and futurism. The latter position holds that what is right and just will inevitably prevail. In this way of thinking Popper anticipated Sir Isaiah Berlin’s critique of the “Inevitability of Historicism,” as seen in his influential paper of 1954.

After its publication in England, the success of "The Open Society and Its Enemies" brought Popper an invitation to teach at the London School of Economics," where he moved in 1946.

For Popper the growth of human knowledge proceeds from problems and from our attempts to solve them. These attempts involve the formulation of theories which, if they are to address anomalies infesting earlier theories, must go beyond existing knowledge; they therefore require a leap of the imagination. For this reason, Popper places special emphasis on the role of creative imagination in the formulation of concepts. Devising our theories with as much verve as possible, we must nonetheless recognize that they may turn out to be false. In this way, Popper dramatically declared, our theories die in our place.

While at the London School of Economics Karl Popper allied himself with the great economist Friedrich Hayek, whose libertarian thought was later to exercise a great influence on me. Yet since Hayek moved to Chicago in 1950 I never met him.

Popper’s ideas attracted opposition from various quarters. I have already noted the displeasure of Plato scholars because he had disparaged their hero--and also perhaps because of their horror that a non-classicist should dare to venture into their territory. Yet I have always been encouraged by this incursion, this poaching if you will, and others like it. After all, at one time the experts were almost unanimously certain that homosexuality was perversion. They were wrong, and this needed saying.

Popper also transgressed against some cherished views of the Left. He freely criticized Karl Marx. Not unlike his friend Friedrich Hayek, Popper opposed the ideal and practice of universal social planning. Yet he allowed for carefully targeted “piecemeal planning.”

Popper continued to be intellectually active until the end of his life, producing a number of new books, which I eagerly devoured as soon as they appeared. From his teaching I derived one great lesson: be bold in formulating conjectures--and be ready to abandon them whenever their lack of viability might become evident.

Talking about the dead--and the living

2011-11-09T06:39:00.000-08:00

"De mortuis nihil nisi bonum" is a Latin phrase indicating that one should only say good things about the dead--literally,"of the dead, nothing unless good," The maxim does not derive from Latin literature but from the Greek writer Diogenes Laërtius in his Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, where he attributes it to Chilon of Sparta. Since both men were Greek, the original aphorism was rendered as τὸν τεθνηκóτα μὴ κακολογεῖν ("Don't badmouth a dead man"). In 1432 Italian theologian Ambrogio Traversari translated Diogenes' work into Latin, establishing the now familiar wording.

In practice the admonition only seems to apply to the recently deceased, for few would aver that one should say only good things about, say, Attila the Hun, Torquemada, or Adolf Hitler, As with many such pieces of advice it is to be used with discretion.

On learning of the decease of her arch-rival Joan Crawford, Bette Davis is reputed to have remarked: “'My mother told me never to speak badly of the dead. She's dead.... Good.”

Witty, but it doesn’t address the issue head on. Why s h o u l d n ‘ t one speak ill of the dead? One clue is that the current formulation, by Traversari, comes from a time when belief in Purgatory was still common, in fact obligatory in the Christian world. Prayers and masses were offered for the departed who resided in that harrowing place of purgation in hopes of speeding their liberation. By the same token, emphasizing the faults of a dead person could delay his or her departure from Purgatory

Why then should modern secular persons follow this principle of denial? It beats the hell (sic) out of me.

I would like to propose the following principle. As far as possible, we should refrain from saying negative things about the living. Such comments are hurtful. After folks are gone, though, they have no sentience and cannot feel any anguish about things that are said about them. Of course this does not mean that one should simply reverse the motto: De mortuis nihil bonum--say nothing good about the dead. That would be extreme. But one should be free to mingle observation of the good with the bad. If it is feasible, though, the living should be spared.

PS I admit that for me this principle is more a thought experiment than anything else. My sharp tongue and pen have long been notorious. But perhaps I could try harder.

The "Gaybe" question revisited

2011-11-04T06:39:00.000-07:00

Six years after its appearance, C.A. Tripp’s book “The Intimate Abraham Lincoln” (2005) still ranks as the most serious and inclusive roundup of arguments for the homosexuality of the 16th president of the United States. Initially the volume elicited a frosty reception from the community of Lincoln scholars, though today, in 2011, a couple of cracks may be detected in the edifice of nonreception.

Before turning to these, let us examine one of the assertions of “new evidence,” something that Tripp did not know about. In 1994, Larry Kramer claimed to have a trump card, a smoking gun in the form of a hitherto unknown Joshua Speed diary, as well as a stash of letters in which Speed writes explicitly about his love affair with Lincoln. The secret pages, which were discovered hidden beneath the floorboards of the old store where the two men lived, now are said to reside in a private collection in Davenport, Iowa.

Kramer refused to share any portions of these documents, and five years later he abandoned the claim. What became of the purported diary and papers is unknown. This debacle has not prevented him from engaging in further speculations to the effect that Lincoln's murder may have been a kind of gay-bashing, resulting from a kinky sexual set-up. "There's some evidence that shows that Speed presented Booth to Lincoln as a 'present' and the young Booth, who was a gorgeous man, was virulently homophobic, like the men who killed Matthew Shepard," he stated. "If the murder turns out to have had a homosexual underpinning, that's going to freak everybody out."

I turn now to two more serious contributions, both by respected scholars. One comes from John Stauffer, chair of Harvard University’s Department of American Civilization. In his book “Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglas and Abraham Lincoln,” he supports the thesis that Joshua Speed was, as he states, “Lincoln’s soul mate and the love of his life.” In a subsequent article in the scholarly journal "Reviews of American History," Stauffer wrote,“In light of what we know about romantic friendship at the time, coupled with the facts surrounding Speed’s and Lincoln’s friendship, there is no reason to suppose they weren’t physically intimate at some point during their four years of sleeping together in the same small bed, long after Lincoln could afford a bed of his own. To ignore this, as most scholars do, is to pretend that same-sex carnal relationships were abnormal. It thus presumes a dislike or fear about such relationships, reflecting a presentist and homophobic perspective.”

This assertion seems to amount to a definite “maybe.” At all events, Stauffer doesn’t seem to have any new evidence, as the Speed connection was one of the chief features of Tripp’s book.

There is also a second respected scholar, the octogenarian William Hanchett, professor of history emeritus at UC San Diego. In an article in the “Lincoln Herald,” Hanchett challenged historians to take Tripp’s book seriously, either confirming it or refuting it. Hanchett claimed to break new ground when he alluded to the Memo books kept by Lincoln’s law partner William Herndon. Whether these really add new information is uncertain.

The most recent scholarly contribution is “Was Abraham Lincoln Gay?” in the "Journal of Homosexuality," 57:9 (2010), pp. 1124-57. This article, by Michael Ferguson, collects evidence that male same-sex behavior was more common in mid-19th century American than has usually been assumed. Yet the evidence is circumstantial, and application to Lincoln is tenuous.

Thus we are left with the sense that we have not moved much beyond Tripp’s book of six years ago. It may be that the coming years will see some real advance, but that is impossible to know now.

A new turn

2011-11-02T07:39:00.000-07:00

Reader alert. Dyneslines may be about to move in a new direction. My best friend, who is writing his memoirs, suggests that I do the same.

I am now 77 and have had a fairly interesting life. I grew up in genteel poverty in a fairly good neighborhood in Los Angeles. My parents were poor not for any cultural reason--both had gone to college--but because of the huge medical bills that had to be paid for my mother.

When I moved to New York to go to graduate school in 1956 I observed big differences between LA and NYC, as well as the closeted gay scene here. The biggest effect, though, was the enormous benefit of being taught by great scholars of the Transatlantic Migration, German-Jewish professors who had escaped from Hitler. We shall not see their like again.

Then I lived in Italy and England for substantial periods. But I came back to the US because that is where the action was--and is. Specifically for me, it was the gay and lesbian liberation movement. That led to my actual scholarly mission, centering on the Encyclopedia of Homosexuality.

If I can muster the appropriate moxie, some chapters will follow.

Occupy Wall Street holds on

2011-10-26T06:20:00.000-07:00

A major principle followed by the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement is that it is non-hierarchical, that is to say, there are no identifiable leaders.

At first the media tried to ignore OWS; then they ridiculed it. Now, though, late-night television is witnessing a scramble to find eminentoes who will explain the phenomenon to the clueless (a group that is all too often represented by the TV host him or herself).

Some of these interpreters are well chosen, while others are not. A good example of the appropriate type is Amy Goodman, who created and sustains the incisive news program called Democracy Now! While she clearly sympathizes with the movement, Goodman conducts herself as a reporter, seeking to identify, clarify, and spread factual knowledge.

In my view, a prominent example of the opposite kind is the egregious grandstander Michael Moore, whose counter-charisma is much admired in some circles.

Yet is Moore one of the 99% or the 1%? The latter appears to be closer to the truth.

Until recently, MM has openly flaunted his worldly success. "I'm a millionaire, I'm a multi-millionaire. I'm filthy rich. You know why I'm a multi-millionaire? 'Cause multi-millions like what I do. That's pretty good, isn't it?"

He dwells in a million-dollar apartment, and boasts of that as well. "I walk among them. I live on the island of Manhattan, a three-mile-wide strip of land that is luxury home and corporate suite to America's elite..... Those who run your life live in my neighborhood. I walk in the streets with them each day" (Michael Moore, "Stupid White Men," p. 51). For vacations he maintains another million-dollar property, a beachfront house in Michigan.

"You would think that he's the ultimate common man. But he's money-obsessed," noted one associate.

He sends his child to a private school--no sense hanging out with the working class-- and has some trouble associating with them himself. The New York Post has reported a tantrum he threw in London. "Then, on his second-to-last night, [Michael Moore] raged against everyone connected with the Roundhouse and complained that he was being paid a measly $750 a night. 'He completely lost the plot,' a member of the stage crew told the London Evening Standard. 'He stormed around all day screaming at everyone, even the 5 pound-an-hour bar staff, telling them how we were all con men and useless. Then he went on stage and did it in public.' At his last appearance, staffers refused to work or even open the theater's doors." (New York Post, January 8, 2003).

Not content with the handsome box-office returns from his movies, Moore supplements his "meager income" with speaking tours. During his 2004 pre-election tour he charged Utah Valley State College $40,000, Xavier $25,000, and the University of New Mexico $35,000. Not inaptly, he has been termed the ultimate Limousine Leftist. Some on the left, it appears, are appalled by Moore's antics; if so they have failed to make their voices heard.

Another Limousine Leftist (discussed in the previous posting) is Gore Vidal. He is now confined to a wheel chair, where he is assisted by his own private version of Justin Bieber, a long--haired French youth. One can expect the pair soon to appear in Zuccotti Square.

And there are broader issues. The enormous salaries achieved by Wall Streeters attract scorn, and rightly so. But how about the huge incomes generated by Hollywood performers and celebrities, as well as by some sports figures? What is sauce for the goose should be sauce for the gander.

Well, now that I have finished venting about the hypocrisy I perceive, let me turn to a serious internal problem at OWS. That is this. Before long the OWS folk may have trouble maintaining their non-hierarchical stance. In fact as I remember from personal experience, we have been here before. I refer to procedural issues that arose in the protest movements of the 1970s.

First, horizontal organizations of this type find that obtaining consensus is a protracted process in which everyone must patiently wait for all the voices to be heard. On some occasions it is those who have the stamina to wait it out who prevail. Their views may not be the best ones to adopt, but they gain the advantage by default.

Moreover, some subgroups--cliques if you will--perceive an advantage in this weakness. They organize privately to become a kind of power structure that operates clandestinely behind the scenes. In this way the organization becomes covertly hierarchical, a situation that is arguably worse than the open type. At least with blatant hierarchies, one knows who to go to.

In short the main problem faced by OWS may not be the invasion of grandstanders like Michael Moore (not to mention several opportunistic politicians who have shown up there), but internal structural problems, stemming from the commitment to non-hierarchy. Admirable in itself, this democratic commitment may contain the seeds of serious problems as the movement matures.

PS. For a different view, see http://www.alternet.org/vision/152863/don%27t_diss_the_drum_circles:_why_hippie_culture_is_still_important_to_our_protests/?page=2

Anticapitalist rhetoric

2011-10-23T10:43:00.000-07:00

Quite a few years ago, together with several other people, I went to dinner in Los Angeles, with Gore Vidal. After a number of other ex cathedra pronouncements that brooked no dissent, Vidal declared that no American corporations paid any taxes--none at all. No one rose to challenge him on this unlikely claim. One can certainly argue--and should argue--that US corporations benefit from many unjustified loopholes and exemptions, especially those secured by lobbyists based on K Street in DC. But they do pay s o m e taxes.

After many years in the wilderness, this kind of anticapitalist rhetoric has resurfaced in the wake of Occupy Wall Street, which I basically support. It is, to be sure, a diverse movement.

Such exaggerations, it seems to me, are not doing the cause any good.

Let us continue a bit more with Gore Vidal, who elicits a degree of sustained enthusiasm from the US Left that does not cease to baffle me.

There is the matter of the Gorester's wierd infatuation with the mass murderer Timothy McVeigh, whom Vidal terms a "sane" and "noble" man. (I derive the following comments from an interview published on October 7, 2009 in a British newspaper, The Independent, by Johann Hari, who is generally sympathetic to the American magus.)

Here is the background, On April 19, 1995, Timothy McVeigh planted a massive truck bomb outside a government building in Oklahoma City. In the explosion some 168 people died, including a kindergarten full of children. After he was apprehended, McVeigh wrote to Vidal, saying he had been inspired, in part, by studying the writer's work.

He held that the US Constitution had been usurped by a National Security State that had to be opposed by force. Vidal wrote back and they became pen pals. Increasingly drawn into the scam, Vidal began to mount passionate defenses of the bomber, maintaining that he was not crazy, but "too sane for his place and time."

"He was a dedicated student of the American way, of the Constitution itself," he asserted. "You should read his writings--they're very good. Particularly on the Posse Comitatus Act of 1876, which forbids the Federal government ever to use its troops against the American people – but which they proceeded to do at Waco [a compound used by a religious cult that was attacked by federal troops in 1993]. They killed more people than he managed to kill when he blew up that building in Oklahoma City. He was a noble boy."

At this point Hari, the interviewer, balked. How could one describe as noble the man who consorted with far-right militia groups, and proceeded to blow up all those children? Vidal scowled, almost hissing: "He didn't kill them deliberately! But the American government killed all those people at Waco, men, women and children deliberately! It was his gesture against the government he loathed. You know, he swore to me he had no idea there were children there. He said 'How would I know? I walked by the place once and I knew that there was some kind of dining room, families might be there, or they might not be there. . . He was trying to deliver a message to the government: "look, you have done this arbitrarily, contrary to the Posse Comitatus Act, contrary to American law, you've killed American citizens.' Remember, he was an army boy, and he loved it, and he was longing to get back in the army and the army was longing to get him back; he was the best sharpshooter they'd seen in years. But it was not meant to be."

Hari protested: he must have known he would kill scores of innocent people. Didn't that show a callous disregard for human life? "So did Patton, so did Eisenhower!" Vidal riposted angrily. "Everybody's rather careless about it once you start getting involved in wars. He saw this as a war to preserve the Constitution! You know what he said? But you don't, so I'm going to tell you. The judge [at his trial] quite liked him, and he was intrigued by the fact that this rather talkative kid who wrote tons of pieces for the press had not defended himself. So he said – Mr McVeigh, could we hear more from you? [McVeigh] said, 'Well, your honor, I will base my case on Justice Brandeis, one of our most brilliant jurists, in his opinion in Olmstead. There, he writes that when government ceases to lead by example and actually provides a bad example, anything can happen. Government is the last teacher. Everything I did, I learned from my government.'"

Vidal's position is patently monstrous. Apart from the overall wrongheadedness, there is also a characteristic error. The Waco assault killed 76 people--bad enough, but certainly not more than the 168 who are known to have died in Oklahoma City.

News item

2011-10-18T06:43:00.000-07:00

This just in.

Now that both shows have appeared back to back on Logo, it has been revealed that the cast members of the A-List: New York and the A-List: Dallas will join the OWS demonstrators in Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan. Among other things, they will protest their inadequate remuneration for the TV shows.

As the Occupiers generally decry any attempt at take-over by outsiders, some displeasure was expressed. However, the newcomers will be bringing discarded high-fashion items, together with tips on appropriate dress at the site. They are also seeking to join the media committee.

At the outset an unfortunate incident was narrowly avoided, as Austin had to be restrained from hitting another demonstrator.

Whatever you may think of this development, it shows that OWS is truly for everybody!

[This is a spoof, of course.]

People who "vote wrong"

2011-10-15T06:18:00.000-07:00

A recent post on the Internet asked why so many people of modest background and income are voting Republican. Don't they understand that this is against their own interest? Such voting, the assumption seems to go, is a form of self-damaging behavior (itself a rather murky concept).

The issue of why the large sectors of the proletariat have not rallied to "progressive" parties, where ostensibly their true interests lie, was discussed in extenso by Marxist theorist in the 1930s, under the rubric of "false consciousness." If the workers had a true consciousness of their situation they would not behave in this way. But they are beguiled by the media and other instruments of capitalist propaganda to desert their true interests. If this cloud of misinformation could be lifted then they would start voting as they should.

Marxists have sometimes framed the issue in terms of commodity fetishism. In my view this latter dubious concept is not helpful, so I will not explore it further here.

One reason why people vote "against" their (present) interest, is that they have hopes of economic mobility. That is to say, they expect that they will be able to move from their present lowly state to a more prosperous one. Putting into place the restrictions and taxation on this sector that progressives seem to want would harm their long-term interest.

Interpretations of upward mobility are contradictory. However, it is sufficient to note that many people b e l i e v e that they have this capacity.

Another fallacy is that interests are solely economic. Many people believe that "values," however defined, may trump pure economic motives. Thus those who decry false consciousness are imposing an inappropriate monistic model of the economic man,
which is not universally valid.

Finally, most of this handwringing about people voting "against their own interest" is performed by outsiders, by intellectuals who do not share the experiences of the voters in question. It would be more useful to hear from the people themselves who are allegedly voting wrong.

Frank Kameny

2011-10-12T07:04:00.000-07:00

The gay activist Frank Kameny died at his home in Washington DC on October 11, 2011; he was 86, The passing of Frank Kameny, whom I knew for some 30 years, has elicited copious tributes, many richly deserved.

As I am about to make some critical remarks, let me first state a few facts. A native New Yorker, Frank Kameny early developed an ambition to become an astronomer. Yet his academic progress at Queens College was interrupted by his being drafted.. He served in World War II in the Netherlands and Germany, returning to complete his education with a Ph.D. in astronomy at Harvard University (1956).

He then secured employment in the Army Map Service in Washington DC. Only a few months after starting this job he was arrested after a public sexual encounter and labeled a “sexual pervert.” He was then fired by the federal government (1957). At the time, under an executive order signed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953,“sexual perversion” was grounds for dismissal from government employment. Frank Kameny contested his firing through level after level of legal appeal, until the US Supreme Court declined to hear his case in 1961.

He was never again to hold a regular job in his field. As with some other early gay activists, he spent most of his life in poverty. Finally, two years ago, he received a formal apology--but no back pay--from the United States Office of Personnel Management, which formally apologized for his dismissal.

With some others, in 1961 he started the Mattachine Society of Washington, an offshoot of the major California gay-rights organization that Harry Hay had founded in 1950. He thus came to a movement that already existed, though it remained relatively small until the Stonewall events of June 1969.

In a 1999 book “Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America.” Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney summed up his personality in this fashion:
“Franklin Kameny had the confidence of an intellectual autocrat, the manner of a snapping turtle, a voice like a foghorn, and the habit of expressing himself in thunderous bursts of precise and formal language,” the authors wrote. “He talked in italics and exclamation points and he cultivated the self-righteous arrogance of a visionary who knew his cause was just when no one else did.”

Here is a pithy statement from Frank himself: “If I disagree with someone,” he said, “I give them a chance to convince me they are right. And if they fail, then I am right and they are wrong and I will just have to fight them until they change.” In the course of many exchanges, though, I found that (like many people) he was very reluctant to admit that he was wrong, when he clearly was. At times he seemed even to merit the derisory label of the Pope of the Potomac.

After his loss and his subsequent dedication to the cause of gay rights, Frank Kameny recognized that the American Psychiatric Association’s classification of homosexuality as a sickness posed a serious obstacle to the advance of the movement. He was among those who lobbied for the reversal of this stigmatizing provision. Finally, in December 1973, the association’s board of trustees approved a resolution declaring that homosexuality, “by itself, does not necessarily constitute a psychiatric disorder.”

I turn now to some critical remarks that address more directly some of the exaggerations that have begun to circulate since Kameny's death. Regrettably, some of these fibs stem from Frank’s irrepressible yearning for self-publicity.

He was not in fact one of the Founders of the modern American gay movement. That honor belongs to a small, courageous group of residents of Southern California, headed by Harry Hay who started the Mattachine Society in 1950. Other prominent individuals in this first cohort in Los Angeles included Lisa Ben, Dorr Legg, and Don Slater. When eleven years later, Kameny and Jack Nichols started their own Mattachine group in Washington, DC, they were echoing what Hay had done.

As he saw it, Kameny’s first priority in the gay cause developed when he sought to counsel federal employees who had lost their jobs because of their sexual orientation. Even though he was not legally qualified, Kameny requested substantial payments for this representation. As far as I know, none of the discharged employees got their jobs back by this intervention. Naturally, some bitterness ensued.

Kameny did not organize the first public gay picket, as he maintained; that was done by New York activist Randy Wicker when on September 18, 1964 he organized a picket of the army induction center (Whitehall) in New York City.

Kameny claims to have coined the expression “gay is good” in 1968. My recollection is that the phrase was in common use before Kameny adopted it. At all events, it is based on Stokely Carmichael’s “black is beautiful." One reason that the claim seems improbable--though not impossible--is that in 1968 Frank (like many others) preferred "homosexual" or "homophile," not "gay," then regarded as a slang term.

His most sweeping claim is that he rescued the gay movement from the doldrums in the 1960s by introducing a more assertive style, one that demanded radical innovation. This assertion is unlikely on a number of grounds. First, no one could have been more radical than Harry Hay who started the movement in 1950. A number of courageous individuals rallied to the cause in those days, but Kameny was not among them. It took a later arrest, and his meditation on the results, to bring him out of his shell.

Kameny's actions in the 1960s were relatively tame, in keeping with the generally conformist nature of the times. For example, at the July 4 Reminder Day observances that he organized with Barbara Gittings in Philadelphia, he insisted that men wear jackets and ties and women dresses. The idea of the Reminder had originated with Craig Rodwell, not with Frank.

It was the Stonewall Rebellion that ushered in a new phase of radicalism. By his own account Kameny was not at that life-changing event in Greenwich Village in 1969. Yet he improbably sought to claim responsibility for it because of some flyers that had been distributed for his Reminder Day gathering. As I have noted, that observance had a very different character, much more subdued and conformist.

The truth was that in those days, and in fact ever since, Frank Kameny was an assimilationist. That is, he believed that gay rights could be attained by adjusting American customs and conventions, not by overthrowing them. There is nothing wrong with this position per se, but it sorts ill with his claim to have been a radical firebrand.

In short, Frank Kameny told some tall tales, most of them it seems about himself.

After posting some of these remarks on another site, a friend admonished me that I should not say such things at the time of a person's death. Perhaps so, but in many emails to Frank himself I offered the same criticisms. In my view, his responses were inadequate.

APPENDIX. As these incisive comments from Stephanie Donald (from her site) may be a little hard to find, I take the liberty of reproducing them here.

"The Death of a Gay American Icon: Frank Kameny 1925-2011"

Even when Frank Kameny was still alive his actual place in history was much debated and I even participated in the controversy.

Was Frank a pioneer in gay rights or was he an assimilationist?

I’m sure that future generations will debate these issues and more but for now the fact of the matter is that I lost a friend yesterday on National Coming Out Day. How ironic could that possibly be?

Frank was a World War II veteran who, once discharged from the military, went back to school and earned his PhD and went to work for the Army corps of Engineers as an astronomer.

However, in 1957, Frank was arrested in Lafayette Park in Washington D.C. for “immoral acts”, photographed and released. At first it didn’t seem that anything would come of the incident and for many weeks things seemed pretty much normal.

But as they say, all good things must come to an end. A member of the civil service commission came around to ask Kameny about his arrest and Frank didn’t lie.

Perhaps when history reflects upon Dr. Franklin Kameny they will place him upon the mantle with George Washington and the story of the cherry tree because Frank couldn’t tell a lie and he paid dearly for it through the years.

For those of you who take it for granted now, back in the 1950s, the government declared that homosexuals couldn’t hold security clearances because (wait for this ridiculous reason) because if foreign agents found out they could blackmail the person into revealing secrets because of their homosexuality.

Frank was fired instantly and spent the next 20 years trying to get that rule changed. In 1977 President Jimmy Carter signed an executive order declaring that homosexuals may hold even the highest level security clearance with no prejudice.

Frank stood next to Jimmy Carter when the order was signed.

In those years between 1957 in the McCarthy era when homosexuals were actually considered lower than communists, unless of course you happened to be communist and homosexual like my friend David McReynolds, Frank met up my other good friend, Jack Nichols, and the two embarked on the greatest adventure two friends could hope for. The started the Washington D.C. chapter of the Mattachine Society in 1961.

In those years Frank met many civil servants who were terrified of losing their jobs because of their “dirty little secret” and during those years the police often didn’t even arrest people in gay bars but just photographed them and released them. The next morning those pictures and their names would appear in the Washington Post and the Evening Star newspapers for the entire world to see.

Frank became a . . . paralegal expert and confidant, friend and morale expert to dozens of people at the meetings of the Mattachine.

I guess one of the things I didn’t like about what Frank did was to charge these people for filing their civil service appeals because there was virtually no chance for those appeals to be successful and he never told those he helped (and charged them the equivalent of what attorneys of the day were charging to represent their clients) that he had never won a single case. He gave them hope when there was literally none for them and there are some people I’ve run into through the years who held a grudge against him for the money they spent in futility.

But I suppose that when one looks at all those years that Frank spent in selfless service to the gay rights movement that he deserved to get at least a little back from our community.

And selflessly he did give and fought through many of the hardest years that homosexuals existed in the United States.

While he, Jack Nichols, Lige Clarke, Barbara Gittings, Kay Lahusen, Randy Wicker and so many others marched and asked for others to march with them the thousands of other homosexuals who huddled in dark bars, gathered in the bushes of Lafayette Square and led double lives to hide their sexuality ran and hid while a few brave souls like Frank stood in the light and with a warm smile said, “Gay is good!”

It took people like Frank to show that if you stood up and admitted that you were gay to the world that your life wouldn’t come to an end. He was a leader in every sense of the word and an icon to everyone who knew him even to the end.

In 1977 his struggle to end the witch hunt against gay and lesbian civil servants ended with an executive order from President Jimmy Carter even if he didn’t get a formal apology until June 24, 2009 when John Berry, also an openly gay man, serving as the Director of the Office of Personnel Management, formerly apologized to him for his firing from civil service.

I remember having a telephone conversation with Frank one time about what might have happened if he hadn’t been fired from his job in 1957. It was one of those wistful, “What if’s?” ramblings about how things might have turned out.

“I wanted to be part of NASA,” he said with straightforward tone. “I would have pushed to be one of the first people to land on the moon!”

I’ve never been one who believed that planting the American flag on the moon was a good idea. I always thought that it implied ownership even though the United States had signed a treaty with the Soviet Union and other nations stating that just because we got there first it didn’t mean or imply any ownership of the moon but still, it seemed like a nightmare of nationalism and I mentioned to Frank during the course of our conversation. He agreed off-hand but didn’t say anything else.

“What would you have taken to moon, Frank?” I asked coyly.

“I would have taken a copy of the Bill of Rights and a copy of Donald Webster Cory’s “Homosexuality in America!”

By Stephanie Donald

UPDATE (October 20): The CNN website published a eulogy of Kameny by David Carter, said to have been working for five years on a biography of him. This is how the piece begins: "America has lost her greatest leader in the fight for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality: Franklin E. Kameny," That is opinion, not fact. Very much to the contrary, Harry Hay was our greatest leader. In addition, when did Kameny ever stand up for transgender equality? That claim is anachronistic. Saying things like that comes from unreflecting acceptance of current rhetoric, retrojecting it back into the past.

The piece goes on to make other hyperbolic assertions.

If Carter has been working on the book for five years, and this piffle is the best he can come up with, then we might as well forget about it. He will never finish.

For many years the standard narrative of the homophile era (1950-69) was that there was an early radical phase under the guidance of several daring leaders, most of whom were or had been members of the Communist Party USA. Then in 1953 a counterrevolution occurred and an era of retrenchment and social acquiescence set in, a development only reversed by Stonewall in June of 1969. There are a number of difficulties with this received view, among them the discovery that 1953 was not as much of a watershed as has been thought. A good deal of the early radicalism persisted.

In order to promote the radicalism of his hero, Carter erases the genuine radicalism of the founding years. He also tries to make Kameny more innovative than he was. After all, he came into the picture during the period of supposed homophile acquiescence, an acquiescence well symbolized by the dress codes of Reminder Day. As Stephanie and I have pointed out he was an assimilationist, and such he remained.

Not only was Kameny less innovative than is claimed, he had a propensity for purloining the ideas of others and passing them off as his own. Reminder Day was the brainchild of Craig Rodwell.

Kameny was certainly not as courageous as Harry Hay, Chuck Rowland, Dorr Legg, Don Slater and many others who preceded him. They were the ones who smoothed the path for our "greatest leader."

To be sure, Kameny "fought poverty," fighting it by pretending that he was poor when he wasn't, sending his minions out on a quest for money. That cannot be said of Don Slater, Jack Nichols, JIm Kepner and many others who endured poverty without complaining.

And by the way, how did Kameny come to own a large house in an upscale district of Washington DC? I don't own a house, and I would wager that most of the people who are involved in this discussion do not. But the saintly Franklin owned a house.

CONCLUDING SUMMARY

Let us see if we can summarize the key points at issue. These are, I remark parenthetically, ones that should be central to David Carter's biography. Whether they will turn out to be such is anyone's guess.

1. In the decade since its launching in Southern California, the Mattachine meme had gone viral. Its reinscription in Washington DC in 1961 must be evaluated in this context of dependency. Outside of the federal triangle, Washington DC in those days was essentially a sleepy Southern town, unsuited to the fostering of any purportedly "revolutionary" movement. In fact, the Kameny group never consisted of more than seven or eight members, quite small in comparison with the contemporary MSNY--as I remember from the early sixties when it met on West 40th Street in Manhattan.

2. The nature of Kameny's finances needs to be examined and thoroughly aired. It appears that for a number of years a substantial portion of his income was supplied by the not inconsiderable fees he charged to his "clients" with regard to employment grievances. In some cases, it seems that sexual favors were part of the payment plan. These matters raise ethical issues that cannot be readily dismissed.

3. How did Kameny come into possession of the upscale residence at 5020 Cathedral Avenue N.W.? He seems to have moved in there in 1962, when he could scarcely have afforded to purchase such an abode. How did he acquire title?

4. What is one to make of Kameny's tendency to purloin the ideas of others, with the claim that he alone originated them?

5. To what extent is Kameny appropriately described as an assimilationist?

"Livable cities"

2011-10-09T07:11:00.001-07:00

In an age of mobility, urbanites like myself are much concerned with which city offers the best situation for us. Either we conclude that we are already living in the city with the best fit (having oftentimes come from some place else), or we pick out some spot like Portland or Santa Fe to which we would like to move.

Recently this issue has become encapsulated in attempts to rank “livable cities.” Two examples of this endeavor are the Mercer Quality of Living Survey and The Economist's World's Most Livable Cities (which borrows some data from Mercer ). Some employers use livability rankings when they assign hardship allowances as part of job relocation. The Economist’s list of top ten for 2011 is as follows: Melbourne, Vienna, Vancouver, Toronto, Calgary, Sydney, Helsinki, Perth, Adelaide, and Auckland.

To my mind, this is a very peculiar assemblage. Apparently, preference for the English language is a major criterion of livability, since it characterizes eight of the ten. Moreover, all the livable cities are in countries with fairly small populations. Cities in larger countries, such as Germany, Japan, and Great Britain (even though the latter is English speaking) need not apply. The characteristics posited for livability include widespread availability of goods and services, low personal risk, and an effective infrastructure. Not considered significant, curiously enough, are such factors as climate and the cost of living,

In the US Honolulu comes in first--at number 26, notwithstanding the fact that newcomers have a very hard time finding affordable housing in the Hawaiian city, where the cost of living is sky high. New York stands at 56th place.

In 2010 Monocle magazine came up with a different list of top cities. In order, they are Munich, Copenhagen, Zurich, Tokyo, Helsinki, Stockholm, Paris, Vienna, Melbourne, and Madrid.

These two very different results suggest that the criteria for making up the lists are conspicuously lacking in objectivity, They seem to be swayed by considerations of political correctness, Anglocentrism, Eurocentrism, and fashionability (as defined by the chattering classes).

While several criteria are proffered for assessing livability, the makers of the list don’t seem to be willing to consider why this concept, livability, should rule. In my view, such factors as creativity, access to cultural events, diversity, and architectural beauty are more significant. These features, and others like them, are what make certain cities exciting, inducing savvy young people to want to move to them. By contrast, “livability” seems to concentrate on things that please a dull bourgeois couple with 2.1 children. Increasingly, the old, staid nuclear family is not the norm any more. Yet the livable-cities paradigm seems to assume that it is.

Another aspect is this. The studies mentioned are snapshots based on the present; they do not reflect changes over time--the diachronic aspect. The cities change. For example, the Los Angeles of my youth in the 19450s and 50s was very different from what it is now. There was virtually no smog, the freeways hadn't been built, and there was an efficient public transportation system. Yet for a young person with ambitious cultural interests, LA seemed limited and provincial in those days, so I sought more stimulating environments.

The lesson is that cities change, and we, the citizens, change too. Deciding where to live involves a certain gamble: what will this place be like in ten or twenty years time? During the 1970s there was much pessimism about the future of New York City (where I live now), especially with regard to older people's prospects. "Fun City" was turning into "Run City." Or so the cliche went.

Now I'm glad I stayed in NYC, but once upon a time the choice seemed problematic as it seemed that crime rates could only go up and up. So the diachronic aspect bears with it an uncertainty principle. As Yogi Berra (I think) sagely remarked, predictions are hazardous, especially about the future.

In short, there are many criteria for choosing a city in which to live. Some involve individual propensities and habits. For example, it is difficult to operate and maintain an automobile in Manhattan where I live. Some individuals find this restriction inconvenient. To me it is a plus, because I don't need a car and can use public transportation. It depends on who you are.

Refracted through an iridescent spectrum of subjective factors, the controlling values are complex and incommensurable. Consequently any attempt to create objective rankings--ones that everyone would agree on--is vain.

ADDENDUM. A different approach stems from the work of Richard Florida, an influential American urban theorist. Florida is best known for his concept of the creative class and its implications for urban regeneration. This idea emerges in his best-selling books The Rise of the Creative Class; Cities and the Creative Class; and The Flight of the Creative Class.

Florida's theory asserts that metropolitan regions with high concentrations of technology workers, artists, musicians, lesbians and gay men, as well as a group he terms "high bohemians," exhibit a higher level of economic development than competing regions. Together, these groups constitute Florida's "creative class." As a rule, members of this group are not in search of the tranquility that livability provides, but rather gravitate to stimulating sociocultultural settings.

Richard Florida maintains that the creative class fosters an open, dynamic, personal and professional urban environment. This environment, in turn, attracts more creative people, as well as businesses and capital. He has devised his own ranking systems that rate cities according to a "Bohemian index," a "Gay index," a "diversity index" and similar criteria.

FURTHER NOTE. Perhaps the true parent of the livable-cities approach was Jane Jacobs (1916-2006), an American writer and activist whose primary interests lay in communities, urban planning, and decay. She is best known for her influential book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which marks its fiftieth anniversary this year. Modeling herself on her beloved Greenwich Village, Jacobs harshly critiqued the then-regnant culture of urban renewal, which was tearing so many neighborhoods apart.

She excoriated the anomie fostered by living in high-rise buildings, including the "projects" devised to warehouse the urban poor. By contrast, she idealized the mixed use prevalent in traditional, low-rise neighborhoods. Here she she neglected the fact that these spots could be, and not infrequently were, "mean streets." As often occurs, there may be a tradeoff.

Steve Jobs and our predicament

2011-10-06T05:20:00.000-07:00

In one of the Internet sites I formerly participated in I used to be termed "Cassandra" for my inveterate pessimism. So fair warning: I am in that mode this morning.

I take my starting point from one of the commentators on the premature death of Steve Jobs. This individual said that in some places today a few people were working in a garage on the Next Big Thing in the cyberworld. Well, I don't see any evidence for this claim. The wave of creativity in Silicon Valley that lifted us all in the closing years of the last century is not being carried forward.

Instead, we have disarray in most areas of American life, as anyone knows who has gone on a plane ride recently. In most economic sectors the US doesn't make things any more--at least not things that people want to buy. For its part, Washington DC has now attained total gridlock.

There is no need to go further with this recital: it is all too familiar. My fear is that the death of Steve Jobs is the end of an era. It is the era when innovative things worked, and the idea of customer service was vibrantly alive.

The Onion headline captures the situation perfectly: "Last American Who Knew What the Fuck He Was Doing Dies."

The spoof continues with a fake quotation from President Obama:

"Steve Jobs, the visionary co-founder of Apple Computers and the only American in the country who had any clue what the fuck he was doing, died Wednesday at the age of 56. "We haven't just lost a great innovator, leader, and businessman, we've literally lost the only person in this country who actually had his shit together and knew what the hell was going on," a statement from President Barack Obama read in part, adding that Jobs will be remembered both for the life-changing products he created and for the fact that he was able to sit down, think clearly, and execute his ideas—attributes he shared with no other U.S. citizen. "This is a dark time for our country, because the reality is none of the 300 million or so Americans who remain can actually get anything done or make things happen. Those days are over." Obama added that if anyone could fill the void left by Jobs it would probably be himself, but said that at this point he honestly doesn’t have the slightest notion what he’s doing anymore."

Weakness of European institutions: another facet

2011-10-05T09:13:00.000-07:00

Recently, the huge losses by the US Postal System have prompted alarmist predictions that the service will disappear altogether. While significant cutbacks are in store, I trust that these dire forecasts will not come to pass.

The situation may be worse abroad. The weakness of European institutions has become evident in the financial sector. What is not much discussed is the lack of a uniform continental postal system. For a long time, a national post office has been a symbol of sovereignty, long preceding, say, the national airlines.

For decades now, the Italian post office has been a laughing stock, with reports that undelivered mail was actually burned. Some friends living in Rome resorted to sending letters out from the Vatican, where the postal service was reliable.

Since I read Italian with ease, I have long been a consumer of Italian books--too much so for my own good. In recent years I have used an Italian bookseller (ibs.it) that sent the orders only by FedEx or some other private delivery service, at ruinous rates. Then, about three months ago, Amazon opened an Italian branch, proposing to send the books through the mail at cheap prices.

How could they do it? First, the books are concentrated at the warehouse in Montelimar in France. Thence the items required are sent by truck to Germany, where they are dispatched cheaply and safely by Deutsche Post, which has a superb record. I have received six packages now by this circuitous but secure route.

What do we learn from this example? First, Europe has no uniform postal service, which it badly needs, Second, the existing postal services are arranged in a hierarchy, with Germany at the top, France in the middle, and Italy at the bottom.

First-hand report on the Wall Street Occupation,

2011-10-02T07:56:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, Saturday, I was at Zuccotti Park for the first time. I went by a circuitous route, walking alongside the construction site (still!) of the World Trade Center; at its southeastern end it is abuts Zuccotti Park--an interesting conjunction. I was literally thrilled to be in the Park--very exciting. The occupiers now have a little 4-page newspaper, telling what some of them are thinking.

For some mysterious reason I wandered to the eastern end, where I found myself in a major march! I could have exited, but I didn't want to. I was particularly glad to be near the contingent protesting the execution of Troy Davis. We made our way slowly up to City Hall Park. That Park was completely closed off, but you could see the Sol Lewitt exhibition of abstract sculptures, a confluence of advanced art and, I trust, advanced political action.

In fact one supporter, Alexandre Carvalho, states: "Many of us in the movement believe we are at the brink of a new aesthetic school. A new historical art period, that reaches beyond the nihilism and hopelessness of post-modernism to a time of agency, belief, and hope. Virginia Woolf once wrote that 'around 1910 everything changed' to announce that modernism came to make a revolution. Maybe we, in 2011, a century after, may be entering the same flux."

However that may be, back to my own experience. Having come virtually within the shadow of City Hall, I was getting tired, so I opted to drop out at that point and just watch as the group made its way towards and onto the Brooklyn Bridge--luckily for me, since I would have been arrested. Maybe I should have been, though.

At last the media, who had been obtusely trying to ignore the Occupation, are forced to pay attention.

I don't know where all this is going--but it seems tremendously worth trying.

POSTSCRIPT. Why were the 700 people arrested? The police claimed that it was only because, once the marchers were on the bridge, they left the sidewalk where they were permitted, and went onto the roadway on the bridge. According to the demonstrators, though, the police actually encouraged them to go onto roadway. Then the cops turned around and arrested them. They were well prepared with handcuffs and buses waiting to take the arrestees away. This then would appear to be a case of entrapment.

It will take some time to get this all figured out, but my guess is that in the end the finding will not reflect glory on the cops, or on Mayor Bloomberg, who seems to be behind it all.

METACOMMENT (October 3), What are the actual aims of the Occupiers? It has been said that that they are too diverse to characterize. All the same, let me take a stab at it.

Many have felt that the Tea Party has hijacked the anger that should be aimed at the powerful fat cats who are responsible for the present mess. So the Occupiers are the Counter-Tea Party. Perhaps so, but both groups share a deep distrust of politics as usual and of the mainstream media. They are, or claim to be, grassroots movements.

There seem to be two things that galvanize the Occupiers: 1) the growing and indeed obscene gap in income and power in this country between the one percent and the ninety-nine percent; 2) the bailout of the banks and the major corporations, who have not been held accountable, and are in fact thriving while 25 million people are out of work.

Unexpected remarks from Michael Kinsley

2011-10-01T07:51:00.000-07:00

[The following comments have been edited and revised from a column in Bloomberg News.]

Michael Moore is just too fat.

That’s not a very liberal attitude. It’s discriminatory. It’s patronizing. It’s coercive. What business is it of ours whether Moore weighs too much (and who gets to define “too much”)? Why should we even care, as long as we like his policies?

Let me save you the trouble, boys and girls. I can write that column myself: “Liberals, who embrace diversity of all other kinds -- who demand quotas for transgender kindergarten teachers in public schools -- these selfsame liberals have the unmitigated gall to encourage discrimination against a truly oppressed group: people of weight.”

There is a theory, of course, that being fat benefits Michael Moore by authenticating his portrayal of Everyman -- just a regular fella, like so many others. Being overweight establishes Moore’s bona fides as a populist.

Controlling what you eat and how much is not easy, and it’s harder for some people than for others. But it’s not as difficult as curing a chemical addiction. With a determined, disciplined effort, Michael Moore could thin down, and he should -- because the obesity epidemic is real and dangerous.

Unfortunately, the symbolism of Moore’s weight problem goes way past the issue of obesity itself. It is just a too-perfect symbol of our country at the moment, with appetites out of control and discipline near zilch.

[Full disclosure: in addition to shortening the piece, I made one little change throughout: I switched "Christie" to "Moore." What's sauce for the goose ... ]

Human conduct and earthquakes

2011-09-30T06:54:00.001-07:00

Some wag with a dark sense of humor once remarked that peace could come, at least temporarily, to Israel-Palestine if only the disputants--Jewish, Christian, and Muslim--were to come together on one item of agreement: hatred of homosexuality. Some advance towards that dubious goal has been shown in responses to the East Coast earthquake.

Joseph Farah, founder of World Net Daily and a Christian of Syrian-Lebanese descent, has voiced the following view. "If America doesn't face judgment soon, God will have to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah. And God doesn't offer apologies. He does, however, offer second chances, third chances, fourth chances. He's trying to get your attention. Are you paying heed? What will it take? Will your world have to be turned upside down before you recognize what's happening? Would even that be enough? I know. I know. It was just a little earthquake – and just another hurricane. They happen all the time. What are you making such a big deal about, Farah? You're right. We escaped this time. No big deal. But when your world is shaking, you tend to think about the things that really matter. And what really matters is our relationship with our heavenly Father, our Creator, the Lord of the universe. He is trying to tell us something. His message is very clear. Don't say you weren't warned."

Rabbi Yehuda Levin has voiced a similar view, ascribing the belief to the Talmud. In Yerushalmi Berakhot (9;2). earthquakes may indeed be caused by engaging in gay sex, but other transgressions may trigger the events, including disputes and improper religious offerings. Or God may just choose to bring them on because he is distressed at the destruction of the Temple.

What is the source of this strange harmony, fortunately limited to the fringe of both groups?

As I have shown elsewhere, it is not a case of Christians borrowing from the Talmud, but the reverse. The idea that toleration of homosexual activity causes earthquakes may be traced to a law of the Byzantine emperor Justinian in the early sixth century. Doubtless his edict merely codified Christian folk belief.

So does ancient superstition live on, even today.

The old age of the New Age

2011-09-30T05:57:00.000-07:00

Recent revivals of the musical "Hair" have taken us back to an era some forty years ago when one couldn't go to a party or social gathering without having someone come up and ask "What's your sign?" There was no need to explain that the expression meant "astrological sign." Astrology and much else of an occult or hermetic nature was part of the New Age package encapsulated in the Counterculture,

I was never able to believe in astrology, or the other "sciences" of this kind, but I occasionally yielded to a sense that these notions might be metaphorical stand-ins for some vision of collective harmony that would supplant the everyday rat race. For some people there were opportunistic considerations. A horny friend used to say that he was willing to adopt whatever sign was needed to give an attractive interlocutor the rationale for going to bed with him.

While it survives here and there, most of this New Age stuff has faded. These thoughts were triggered by reading Wouter J. Hannegraaf's remarkable comprehensive survey "New Age Religion and Western Culture."

As an exercise in counterfactuality, I wonder what things would have been like had the New Age beliefs survived and thrived. For one thing, they probably would have incited the Christian Evangelicals to make them their target--instead of the secularism that nowadays mainly attracts their ire. And Nancy Reagan, consulting astrologers in the White House, would no longer be an anomaly.

Two types of media malfeasance--or one?

2011-09-28T17:12:00.000-07:00

The peaceful occupation of Liberty (aka Zuccotti) Square in the Wall Street district of Manhattan is completing its second week. Initially, there was a virtual news blackout. It was left to a foreign newspaper, The Guardian in Britain, to initiate serious coverage.

Through their misconduct, including the use of pepper spray on innocent participants, the NYC police made a backhanded contribution, one that made the events harder to ignore. Yet even though the movement has spread to a number of other US cities, coverage in the mainstream media remains spotty.

This looks like conservative bias.

In a different development, for some months flash mobs have been invading stores in a number of American cities. Most of these unruly crowds are made up of African-American and Hispanic young people. Overall, media coverage has been skimpy.

This looks like liberal bias.

A paradox? It may be, though, that there is a common denominator: the media are chary of reporting any cases of unrest stateside. I say stateside, because these folks went full throttle in the Arab Spring counties, not to mention Greece and England.

Why this reticence? It is almost excruciatingly notable in view of the absolute incompetence of the politicians in Washington, DC. That slow-moving disaster cries out for mass protest.

There I think is the key: the mainstream media and the politicians are two wings of the culture of corruption that is regnant in this country. It is high time that both were called out for it.

Our truly parlous economic situation

2011-09-26T09:31:00.000-07:00

The ongoing demonstrations in the Wall Street section of Manhattan emphasize that that the US economic problems are much more complicated than the struggle over the budget in DC, squalid and discouraging as that is. It is not yet clear what the actual stance--or stances--of the demonstrators may be.

I doubt that any of these courageous people read Dyneslines; they have more urgent tasks to accomplish.

Still, in the interest of bringing some clarity to the matter, I would like to share some pithy observations by the brilliant Canadian economic journalist Chrystia Freeland, as published in the NY Times blog.

 “. . . [T]he gap between rich and poor in the United States has widened in the past 30 years. In 2007 the top 1 percent of earners took home 18.3 percent of national income -- that is more than two and a half times their level in 1973, when their share was 7.7 percent. Those at the top haven’t enjoyed such a big slice of the national pie since 1929. The middle-class dominated nation that the Greatest Generation inhabited has become as polarized as the plutocracies of Latin America or as America itself was during its fevered Gilded Age.”

Further denial is useless. “The conservatives' argument that equality of consumption outweighed the inequality in incomes has been eviscerated. . . . The elite, particularly the conservative intellectuals who have dominated the national economic debate since the Reagan era, insisted that growing income inequality was propaganda invented by the class warriors on the left, and cited robust consumer spending as evidence. In a 1998 speech at Jackson Hole at the annual gathering of American economists and economic policy makers, Alan Greenspan, then chairman of the Federal Reserve, argued that what mattered was what people could buy, not what they earned.

“Inequality in consumption, when measured by current outlays, is less than inequality in income,” he said. Greenspan illustrated his point with some unusual measures of inequality -- ownership of consumer goods like dishwashers, microwaves and clothes-dryers. The comforting result? Even though inequality as measured in dollars was growing, when measured in dishwashers, microwaves and clothes dryers it was decreasing.

“The 2008 financial crisis and the prolonged economic downturn has eviscerated the consumption defense as ruthlessly as it has burst the credit bubble that allowed the middle class to feel richer than it was. Income inequality is today a fact of life, as essential to doing business as the rate of inflation: Proctor & Gamble executives study the Gini co-efficient, a technical measure of income inequality, to divine what is happening to their erstwhile middle-class consumer base, and have decided the best strategy is to give up on the center and to market instead to the top and the bottom.

“Citigroup advises investors to design their portfolios around income inequality. It calls this strategy the "Consumer Hourglass Portfolio" and has created an index of companies that serve the rich and the poor while avoiding the vanishing middle.

“Once income inequality has become a tool for marketing executives and stock pickers it becomes pretty hard to deny. But we can still argue over what is causing it.
The left likes to blame pro-rich tax policy. And it is certainly true that the gap in the U.S. has widened even as taxes on the rich have decreased. Today’s top tax rate, 35 percent, is half what it was 30 years ago. Capital gains taxes are even less than half of what they were 35 years ago -- 15 percent today, compared to 39.9 percent in 1977.

“Politics have tilted the playing field in favor of those on top in other ways, too. Unions are less powerful than they were 30 years ago, and an ever bigger gap between executive officers and the average worker has become acceptable to shareholders and boards: in 2010, C.E.O. pay at S&P 500 companies was 343 times the median wage.

Now Freeland comes to the truly important part. “But taxes, unions and compensation committees tell only part of the story. What’s also happening is an economic revolution -- actually, a pair of them -- that favors those on top and squeezes those in the middle. The technology revolution and globalization have allowed the very talented, the very lucky and the very brave to build companies and make fortunes nearly overnight. They have also created a highly numerate superclass of workers -- technologists, engineers, traders -- whose skills are in great international demand and whose salaries have soared accordingly.

“Meanwhile, a vast swath of jobs -- ranging from manufacturing, to clerical work, and now to routine law and accounting -- can be done much more cheaply by machines or by people in lower-income countries, and this is devastating the U.S. middle class, even as those at the top prosper.

“Justice is a central issue in American politics and in American society. That’s why it seems so important to figure out whether the rich are paying their fair share. It is a crucial question -- and the truth is that the rich are getting a better deal than they used to. But the even more central issue -- and it is one that both left and right are reluctant to acknowledge -- is that the fundamental forces shaping U.S. capitalism today are hostile to the middle-class majority, which defines U.S. democracy.

“The rancor and the paralysis that characterize American politics at the moment are the result of this conflict. Someone needs to admit that modern capitalism isn’t working for the middle class, and find a way to make it work better, before it is too late.”

END OF EXCERPTS FROM FREELAND.

Thus the middle class in this country may be well on the way to extinction, as we become an Hourglass Society. Taxing the rich may not do much to solve this problem, because that leaves two other huge problems: the growing use of technology, which makes many traditional white-collar jobs obsolete, and export of jobs to countries where labor is cheaper. Obvious remedies would be ludditism, restricting the use of technology' and erecting high trade barriers (protectionism). At this stage both seem quixotic. There remains the issue of what is to be done?

UPDATE (Sept. 27). An op-ed by economics correspondent Joe Nocera in today's NY Times provides two telling examples of the devastation that the application of technology is causing. In North Carolina two big new industrial plants are rising one in Charlotte for Siemens and other in Winston-Salem for Caterpillar. Yet since both rely heavily on robotics Caterpillar expects to employ only 500 people in its plant (notwithstandin some $14 million in incentives), while Siemens will have about 800 workers. Last year a major furniture manufacturer in Winston-Salem shut down, ending 900 jobs; the Caterpillar plant will not even make up for these.

Another piece of bad news is of broader import: an estimate that NC has lost 108,000 jobs (from the Economic Policy Institute, which implicates China).

FURTHER UPDATE (Sept. 29). In a piece in Slate yesterday ("The Bobots Are Coming!), Farhad Manjoo points up some of the changes that lie ahead:

"In the next decade, we'll see machines barge into areas of the economy that we'd never suspected possible—they'll be diagnosing your diseases, dispensing your medicine, handling your lawsuits, making fundamental scientific discoveries, and even writing stories just like this one. Economic theory holds that as these industries are revolutionized by technology, prices for their services will decline, and society as a whole will benefit. As I conducted my research, I found this argument convincing—robotic lawyers, for instance, will bring cheap legal services to the masses who can't afford lawyers today. But there's a dark side, too: Imagine you've spent three years in law school, two more years clerking, and the last decade trying to make partner—and now here comes a machine that can do much of your $400-per-hour job faster, and for a fraction of the cost. What do you do now?"

Is formal logic an instrument of male supremacy?

2011-09-24T07:03:00.000-07:00

During the 1970s many embraced the idea that “everything is political.” This statement is clearly too categorical, though there may be something to be said for the notion that many things are either tinged with politics, or are capable of such tincture.

A particular application of this notion is the idea that mathematics and formal logic, at least as we have known them in the West, are instruments of male supremacy. This is the central thesis of the magnum opus of the late Arthur Evans, “Critique of Patriarchal Reason” (1997).

Evans, who did graduate work in philosophy at Columbia University, seeks to trace the evolution of what he terms “the Parmenidean myth” from the fifth century BCE to the present. The sole surviving writing of Parmenides is a poem,,“On Nature.” There the Pre-Socratic thinker sets forth two views of reality. In "the way of truth" section of the work, he argues that reality (described as "what-is") is unitary, change is impossible, and existence is timeless, uniform, necessary, and unchanging. In the contrasting "way of opinion," he explains the world of appearances, in which one's sensory faculties lead to conceptions that are false and deceitful.

Evans pays little heed to Parmenides’ eccentric, counterintuitive view that change cannot occur. Yet he is much taken with the implications of the binary contrast, a principle that he calls “bivalance.” This point recalls Jacques Derrida’s postmodernist denunciations of binarism. Evans does not mention Derrida, but it seems that the idea was in the air at the time Evans conceived his book.

To the principle of bivalence, Evans adds to the purported Parmenidean heritage “the universal force of logical necessity” and “the inherent superiority of an impersonal static model of lnoledge and reality” (p. 94). Reverberating down the centuries, as seen in such figures as Leibniz, Frege, and Bertrand Russell, this malign triad has served as the preeminent support of male supremacy. Why should this be so? Surely it cannot simply be that “the Parmenidean myth” has been mainly espoused by men. This would be a rather transparent instance of guilt by association, one that would backfire since Evans is a man. If the adoption of a view by a man or men is sufficient to taint it, then the “Critique of Patriarchal Reason” must be rejected, together with the writings of all those other Western Civ icons.

Evans offers a familiar argument to the effect that absolute objectivity is rarely, if ever achieved. Just so, but we can strive to reduce the subjective element in accordance with striving for truth--something that does actually exist. Much of this subjectivity derives, to be sure, from one's gender, nationality, and social status. In this sense, all knowledge is situated knowledge.

Evans points out, persuasively in my view, that the homosexuality of Ludwig Wittgenstein affected his approach to philosophical problems. By contrast his mentor, Bertrand Russell, thought that homosexuality was the result of bad parenting, and was dismayed when his gay son John came out to him. How did Russell's orientation affect his views? Evans fails to explore this possibility. He is, however, admirably clear about the way the Wittgenstein establishment, fearing that the truth about the Austrian thinker's sexual orientation would damage his standing as a philosopher, attempted to squelch any discussion of the matter.

Evans seems particularly troubled by the either-or aspect of the principle of bivalence. It has, he believes, inflicted on us such pairs as male vs. female and heterosexual vs. homosexual. In these contrasts one pole tends to be viewed as superior to the other. However, if patriarchy is as pervasive as Evans believes, surely it is wily enough to survive without such props, It can find other rationales.

Moreover, a moment's reflection will show that even in ordinary thinking we are not hobbled by any such absolute principle of bivalence. Consider the binary “hot” vs. “cold.” Every sensible person recognizes that there is a spectrum of such thermic states: ice cold is different from cool and warm is not the same as hot.

Still Evans labors on. He thinks that we will be able to shed the sexist shackles of Parmenideanism if we adopt something he calls "gradient logic." This approach (sometimes unfortunately termed Fuzzy Logic) permits one to detect more than two points in a continuum. Yet this ploy has always been available, even to those who have not benefited from a college education, as the sequence cold-cool-warm-hot demonstrates.

Arthur Evans says that it took him nine years to write the book. Since it was published in 1996, the inception would go back to 1987, an interesting point in intellectual history.

Let us turn first to the feminist writer Sandra Harding’s “The Science Question in Feminism” (1986). In the following passage she begins with an interesting observation on a type of metaphor that occurs in some authors of the early modern period. But then she takes us on a wild ride.

“One phenomenon feminist historians have focused on is the rape and torture metaphors in the writings of Sir Francis Bacon and others (e.g. Machiavelli) enthusiastic about the new scientific method. Traditional historians and philosophers have said that these metaphors are irrelevant to the real meanings and referents of scientific concepts held by those who used them and by the public for whom they wrote. But when it comes to regarding nature as a machine, they have quite a different analysis: here, we are told, the metaphor provides the interpretations of Newton's mathematical laws: it directs inquirers to fruitful ways to apply his theory and suggests the appropriate methods of inquiry and the kind of metaphysics the new theory supports. But if we are to believe that mechanistic metaphors were a fundamental component of the explanations the new science provided, why should we believe that the gender metaphors were not? A consistent analysis would lead to the conclusion that understanding nature as a woman indifferent to or even welcoming rape was equally fundamental to the interpretations of these new conceptions of nature and inquiry. Presumably these metaphors, too, had fruitful pragmatic, methodological, and metaphysical consequences for science. In that case, why is it not as illuminating and honest to refer to Newton's laws as "Newton's rape manual" as it is to call them "Newton's mechanics"?”

Another example comes from the Belgian Francophone writer Luce Irigaray (“Parler n’est jamais neutre,” 1985).

“Is e=mc2 a sexed equation? Perhaps it is. Let us make the hypothesis that it is insofar as it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us. What seems to me to indicate the possible sexed nature of the equation is not directly its uses by nuclear weapons, rather it is having privileged what goes the fastest.”

Now that a quarter of century has passed, these effusions have come to seem quaint. Lengthy as it is (376 double-column pages), Evans' argument emerges as simply a gay-liberation counterpart of these extravagant feminist indictments.

POSTSCRIPT. In fairness I should note that, for a philosophy book, Evans' "Critique" is quite well written. It also contains useful analyses of the achievements of such figures as Gottlob Frege, Willard Van Orman Quine, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Dare one call them seminal? Oh, well.

Alternative bodies of knowledge--an introduction

2011-09-20T05:55:00.000-07:00

Many of us have been brought up to believe that the story of scientific progress is just that: the gradual victory of truth over error, so that Copernicus replaced Ptolemy, even as chemistry supplanted alchemy. However the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) has shown that the matter is often more complicated than that.

There are several approaches to SSK. For reasons that will become apparent, this essay will focus on only one of these. The Edinburgh strong program is a branch of the sociology of scientific knowledge, one that is particularly associated with such scholars as David Bloor, Barry Barnes, Harry Collins, Donald A. MacKenzie, and John Henry. Since its emergence in the 1970s, the strong program has been both influential and controversial. As regards its influence, few people active in studying the way science works would doubt the existence of scientific communities, bound together by allegiance to shared paradigms and rules of evidence; their functioning is essential for normal, productive scientific activity. (To be sure, this approach is shared by many who are not associated with Edinburgh University, but the label is convenient.)

We are probably on safe ground in agreeing with the Edinburghers in their reaction against previous sociologies of science, which restricted the application of the discipline to "failed" or "false" theories, such as phrenology or the phlogiston theory of combustion. In this older view, failed theories would be explained by citing the researchers' biases, such as covert political or economic interests. Taking the long view, the failure of such theories was inevitable: they were just wrong.

In this perspective (and by contrast), sociology would be only marginally relevant to successful theories, which came to prevail simply because they had revealed the true facts of nature. For its part, the strong program asserted that both "true" and "false" scientific theories must be treated the same way. So far, so good.

Yet the strong programmers entered more troubled waters when they held that the success of all scientific theories is heavily conditioned by social factors or conditions, such as cultural context and self-interest. This view seems to verge on relativism, a relativism in which truth is regarded as secondary, even unimportant. What matters are institutions, including cliques and interest groups. Sometimes the issue seems to come down simply to this: which theory has the most numerous and forceful body of supporters?

I am far from accepting whole hog this version of SSK. In fact I may even have caricatured it. Perhaps I can be pardoned, though, if I acknowledge that the approach may have something valuable to contribute, for it may help us to understand “alternative forms of knowledge"--such things as the denial of HIV as the cause of AIDS, and the Truthers’ assertion that the fall of the Twin Towers in lower Manhattan ten years ago was brought about by a conspiracy involving the US government.

For the purposes of this brief, introductory essay on knowledge pluralism, I will turn to something less momentous: the question of the authorship of the plays and other works commonly ascribed to William Shakespeare. Apart from Will himself, the main rivals for the honor are Christopher Marlowe, Francis Bacon, and the Earl of Oxford. In his entertaining new book “Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?" James Shapiro shows that supporters of the “other” claimants have included such figures as Sigmund Freud, Henry James, Mark Twain, and Helen Keller. In his concluding chapter, Shapiro, who is a professor at Columbia University, sets forth what he regards as pretty conclusive arguments for agreeing with the conventional wisdom that in fact Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. In the earlier chapters of the book, however, the author surveys the reasons why the alternative theories came into being. Their formulation was not a mere matter of caprice, but represented a series of particular outlooks and interests.

While I happily attend almost every performance I can, I am no Shakespeare scholar. What I am wondering, though, is whether the procedure of taking our cues from the Edinburgh version of methodological agnosticism might be further productive of insights about the plays and what we gain from them. That is, we might approach the issue in terms of “as if” (to cite the title of a once-famous German treatise), trying to dismiss from our minds, at least temporarily, the “inevitable” conclusion that the conventional wisdom in this matter of authorship is indubitably correct.

UPDATE (October 27, 2011). Since I wrote this piece a film has come out ("Anonymous") asserting the Oxford theory of Shakespearean authorship. See the thorough debunking by Ron Rosenbaum http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/the_spectator/2011/10/anonymous_a_witless_movie_from_the_stupid_shakespearean_birther_.single.html

Of zaps and demonstrations

2011-09-18T06:21:00.000-07:00

Surfing the net, I came across an old clip from forty years ago. The clip was recorded on one morning when a group of scruffy young men, members of the Gay Activists Alliance, occupied the offices of the Manhattan City Clerk. They were conducting a "zap," demanding an apology for some homophobic remarks the clerk had made. The invaders refused to leave or be quiet. I don't know what happened when the police arrived, but the demonstrators had made their point.

With today's security, no such group would be able even to get into the building.

Yet it is still possible to have demonstrations outside of buildings--or is it? Yesterday (Sept. 17) a coalition of groups turned up in lower Manhattan to occupy Wall Street (the street not the Stock Exchange itself) in what was billed as a US Day of Rage. The event was coordinated by the social media, a facility not available forty ears ago. But little came of the plan. Alerted in advance, the police were easily able to contain the demonstrators, and the event failed.

To be sure, the flash mobs have been able to use social media for their descents into stores. However, these incursions are not social protest, but smash and grab operations for personal gain. What will probably be the outcome are further restrictions on privacy and freedom of movement.

As an old timer, I confess to some nostalgia for the zaps and demos of yore. But it seems that we are living in a different world now. Nineteen-eighty-four has come a little late, but it appears to have come.

UPDATE (Sept. 25). I reproduce a perceptive analysis by David Graeber from today's The Guardian (UK]--

"Why are people occupying Wall Street? Why has the occupation – despite the latest police crackdown – sent out sparks across America, within days, inspiring hundreds of people to send pizzas, money, equipment and, now, to start their own movements called OccupyChicago, OccupyFlorida, in OccupyDenver or OccupyLA?

"There are obvious reasons. We are watching the beginnings of the defiant self-assertion of a new generation of Americans, a generation who are looking forward to finishing their education with no jobs, no future, but still saddled with enormous and unforgivable debt. Most, I found, were of working-class or otherwise modest backgrounds, kids who did exactly what they were told they should: studied, got into college, and are now not just being punished for it, but humiliated – faced with a life of being treated as deadbeats, moral reprobates.

I"s it really surprising they would like to have a word with the financial magnates who stole their future?

"Just as in Europe, we are seeing the results of colossal social failure. The occupiers are the very sort of people, brimming with ideas, whose energies a healthy society would be marshaling to improve life for everyone. Instead, they are using it to envision ways to bring the whole system down.

"But the ultimate failure here is of imagination. What we are witnessing can also be seen as a demand to finally have a conversation we were all supposed to have back in 2008. There was a moment, after the near-collapse of the world's financial architecture, when anything seemed possible.

"Everything we'd been told for the last decade turned out to be a lie. Markets did not run themselves; creators of financial instruments were not infallible geniuses; and debts did not really need to be repaid – in fact, money itself was revealed to be a political instrument, trillions of dollars of which could be whisked in or out of existence overnight if governments or central banks required it. Even the Economist was running headlines like "Capitalism: Was it a Good Idea?"

"It seemed the time had come to rethink everything: the very nature of markets, money, debt; to ask what an "economy" is actually for. This lasted perhaps two weeks. Then, in one of the most colossal failures of nerve in history, we all collectively clapped our hands over our ears and tried to put things back as close as possible to the way they'd been before.

"Perhaps, it's not surprising. It's becoming increasingly obvious that the real priority of those running the world for the last few decades has not been creating a viable form of capitalism, but rather, convincing us all that the current form of capitalism is the only conceivable economic system, so its flaws are irrelevant. As a result, we're all sitting around dumbfounded as the whole apparatus falls apart.

"What we've learned now is that the economic crisis of the 1970s never really went away. It was fobbed off by cheap credit at home and massive plunder abroad – the latter, in the name of the "third world debt crisis". But the global south fought back. The "alter-globalisation movement", was in the end, successful: the IMF has been driven out of East Asia and Latin America, just as it is now being driven from the Middle East. As a result, the debt crisis has come home to Europe and North America, replete with the exact same approach: declare a financial crisis, appoint supposedly neutral technocrats to manage it, and then engage in an orgy of plunder in the name of "austerity".

"he form of resistance that has emerged looks remarkably similar to the old global justice movement, too: we see the rejection of old-fashioned party politics, the same embrace of radical diversity, the same emphasis on inventing new forms of democracy from below. What's different is largely the target: where in 2000, it was directed at the power of unprecedented new planetary bureaucracies (the WTO, IMF, World Bank, Nafta), institutions with no democratic accountability, which existed only to serve the interests of transnational capital; now, it is at the entire political classes of countries like Greece, Spain and, now, the US – for exactly the same reason. This is why protesters are often hesitant even to issue formal demands, since that might imply recognising the legitimacy of the politicians against whom they are ranged.

"When the history is finally written, though, it's likely all of this tumult – beginning with the Arab Spring – will be remembered as the opening salvo in a wave of negotiations over the dissolution of the American Empire. Thirty years of relentless prioritising of propaganda over substance, and snuffing out anything that might look like a political basis for opposition, might make the prospects for the young protesters look bleak; and it's clear that the rich are determined to seize as large a share of the spoils as remain, tossing a whole generation of young people to the wolves in order to do so. But history is not on their side.

"We might do well to consider the collapse of the European colonial empires. It certainly did not lead to the rich successfully grabbing all the cookies, but to the creation of the modern welfare state. We don't know precisely what will come out of this round. But if the occupiers finally manage to break the 30-year stranglehold that has been placed on the human imagination, as in those first weeks after September 2008, everything will once again be on the table – and the occupiers of Wall Street and other cities around the US will have done us the greatest favour anyone possibly can."

The Solyndra debacle

2011-09-16T07:28:00.000-07:00

Recently in the news, the collapse of the Solyndra firm may offer some lessons. Solyndra was a manufacturer of cylindrical panels of CIGS thin-film solar cells based in Fremont, California. The company suspended all operations as of August 2011, leaving behind the United States government as its largest creditor of uncollected debt obligations.

In May 2010 the company was hailed by President Obama in his visit as a model for government investment in green technology. His administration approved a $535 million loan guarantee to Solyndra, claiming that it would create 4,000 new jobs. However, due to overseas price pressure coming from China in the period of constructing the new plant, the Fab 2, the company was forced to shut-down the original plant, Fab 1, ultimately reducing staff to approximately 1,000 employees at the time of declaring bankruptcy.

In fact there is a good deal of comparative evidence concerning the fate of government efforts to select and back winners in the field of technology. For a number of years this policy was associated with MITI, a branch of the Japanese government (a ministry in fact) founded in 1949. At first MITI's efforts had some success, though most observers believe that it was the tenacity and determination of Japanese business itself that were responsible for the remarkable rise of the economy in that country. Eventually, in fact, it became clear that MITI was backing more losers than winners. Today, the ministry is defunct.

From this evidence it is clear that we should be wary of these efforts to pick winners in the realm of technology, as they are repeatedly distorted by politics, cronyism, and ideology. In the Solyndra case the ideology is Green. If one slaps the label green on something it automatically becomes wonderful.

In this spirit I hereby declare Dyneslines a quintessentially green site!

POSTSCRIPT. David Frum is one of the few reasonable Republicans left. Here is what he says about green jobs at the Frum Forum.

"[T]he hope expressed by President Obama that the transition to a new energy future can double as a way to preserve the mass production workforce of the mid-20th century seems at best delusive, at worst a cruel hoax – and actually most of the time a distraction from other more immediate and relevant economic problems.

"The president’s talk of green jobs reminds me of how the “Atari Democrats” of the 1980s used to muse that the industrial workforce displaced by the economic changes of the 1970s could find work making semiconductors. The computer industry created millions of new jobs, yes, including some very exciting and well-paid new jobs. But instead of rescuing the embattled blue-collar middle class, the new jobs heaped additional rewards of higher pay and lower prices on the educated and the qualified.

"No predictions from me about the economic and social effects of green energy. But here’s what I would predict: we’re rapidly going to discover that new energy forms will destroy many more energy-sector jobs than they create.

"And we’ll (re)discover for the umpteenth time that the reason government fails as a venture capitalist is that government faces too many and too contradictory goals. Government effort to subsidize “green jobs” will emerge – not as a benefit from the spread of green energy – but as one of the greatest obstacles impeding the spread of green energy.?

Arthur Evans (1942-2011)

2011-09-15T06:51:00.000-07:00

My friend Arthur Evans died on September 11 in San Francisco, where had lived since 1974. A year ago, recognizing that he was in failing health, Arthur wisely composed his own obituary, which I reproduce below.

The Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) was the most vibrant and influential gay organization to emerge in New York City from the turbulent period that followed immediately after the Stonewall events in June of 1969,

A charismatic figure in those days, Arthur Evans was the last survivor of a quartet of men who were most instrumental in founding and sustaining GAA. The others were Arthur Bell, Evans’ lover, a journalist and author; Jim Owles; and Marty Robinson. The last two are perhaps best described as community organizers. Of the four, Arthur Evans particularly excelled in organizing “zaps”--demonstrations in which he assembled groups of activists to confront powerful homophobes in the media and public relations.

Arthur Evans and I got onto a wrong track when I wrote a negative review in Gay Books Bulletin of his 1978 book “Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture.” Since he lived in San Francisco and I in New York, we did not interact much. About five years ago, though, the two of us struck up an Internet friendship. Arthur was aggrieved, and rightly so, that the philosophy department at Columbia University refused to grant him the Ph.D. even though he had written a substantial monograph in the field, the last requirement for the honor (his book “Critique of Patriarchal Reason”). Evans hoped that the degree would allow him to assume a teaching position at a Bay Area College. This was not to be. Arthur was a favorite student of Paul Oskar Kristeller--no mean tribute since Kristeller was one of the great Renaissance scholars of the time. Since I live near the university campus, I invited him to come and stay with me. Together we would try to hold the university’s feet to the fire. For some reason the plan fell through, and I now regret that I didn’t go to see Arthur in his apartment in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco.

At all events he should be remembered now for his unwavering struggle and his many accomplishments. Here is his own statement..

Arthur Evans [1942-2011]

Arthur Evans was a gay activist, writer, and neighborhood activist
who lived at the corner of Haight and Ashbury Streets in San
Francisco since 1974. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he played
a pivotal role in the newly emergent gay liberation movement in
New York City.

A few weeks after the famous Stonewall Riot of June 1969 (which he
missed), Evans and his lover, Arthur Bell, joined The Gay
Liberation Front (GLF), a new group that proudly proclaimed itself
to be gay, countercultural, and revolutionary.

Within GLF, Evans and others created a cell called The Radical
Study Group to examine the historical roots of sexism and
homophobia. Many of the participants later became published
authors, including (besides Evans and Bell) John Lauritsen, Larry
Mitchell, and Steve Dansky.

A number of GLF members, including Evans, soon became dissatisfied
with the organization, complaining that it lacked a coherent,
ongoing program of street activism. At the suggestion of GLF
member Jim Owles and Marty Robinson, about twelve people met in
Arthur Bell's Manhattan apartment on December 21, 1969, and
founded The Gay Activists Alliance (GAA). Evans wrote the group's
statement of purpose and much of its constitution.

Acting on the principle that the personal is the political, GAA
held homophobes who were in positions of authority personally
accountable for the consequences of their public policies.
Accordingly, Robinson, Evans, and Owles developed the tactic of
"zaps." These were militant (but non-violent) face-to-face
confrontations with outspoken homophobes in government, business,
and the media. Evans was often arrested in such actions,
participating in disruptions of local business offices, political
headquarters, local TV shows, and the Metropolitan Opera.

In effect, GAA created a stunning new model of gay activism,
highly theatrical while also eminently practical and focused. It
forced the media and the political establishment to take gay
concerns seriously as a struggle for justice. Previously the media
treated gay life as a peripheral freak show. It also inspired gay
people themselves to act unapologetically from a position of gay
pride. This new model of activism inspired other gay groups across
the county, eventually triggering revolutionary improvements in
gay life that continue to this day.

In November 1970, Robinson and Evans, along with Dick Leitsch of
the Mattachine Society, appeared on the Dick Cavette Show. They
were among the first openly gay activists to be prominently
featured as guests on a national TV program.

It was a big change from Evans' earlier days in York, PA, where he
was born on October 12, 1942. His father worked most of his life
on assembly-lines, the last in a chain factory. His mother ran a
small beauty shop out of a front room in the family house.

When Evans graduated from public high school in 1960, he received
a four-year scholarship from the Glatfelter Paper Company in York
County to study chemistry at Brown University in Providence, RI.
While at Brown, Evans and several friends founded the Brown
Freethinkers Society, describing themselves as "militant atheists"
seeking to combat the harmful effects of organized religion.

The group picketed the weekly chapel convocation at Brown, then
required of all students (even though Brown is a secular
institution) and urged students to stand in silent protest during
the compulsory prayer. National wire services picked up the story,
which appeared in a local York newspaper.

As a result, the Glatfelter Paper Company informed Evans that his
scholarship would be canceled. For help, Evans turned to Joseph
Lewis, the elderly millionaire who headed the national
Freethinkers Society. Lewis threatened the paper company with a
highly publicized lawsuit if the scholarship were revoked. The
company relented, the scholarship continued, and Evans changed his
major from chemistry to political science.

Although obstreperous politically, Evans remained closeted
sexually and very lonely, not knowing any other gay person.
Throughout both high school and college, he often thought of
suicide. In 1963, after completing three years at Brown, he read
an article in a national magazine reporting that many
"homosexuals" lived in Greenwich Village in New York City. He
promptly withdrew from Brown and moved to the Village, a change
that he later described it as the best move he ever made in his
life.

In 1963 Evans discovered gay life in Greenwich Village and in 1964
became lovers with Arthur Bell (later a columnist for the Village
Voice). In 1966 he was admitted to City College of New York, which
accepted all his credits from Brown University. He participated in
his first sit-in on May 13, 1966, when a group of students
occupied the administration building of City College in protest
against the college's involvement in the Selective Service System.
A picture of the students, including Evans, appeared the next day
on the front page of The New York Times.

In 1967, after graduating with a B.A. degree from City College,
Evans was admitted into the doctoral program in philosophy at
Columbia University, specializing in ancient Greek philosophy. His
doctoral advisor was Paul Oskar Kristeller, then the world's
leading authority on Renaissance humanist philosophy. Kristeller
had studied under Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger in Germany but
fled to Columbia University after his parents were killed in the
Holocaust.

Evans participated in many anti-war protests during these years,
including the celebrated upheaval at Columbia in the spring of
1968. In the same year he also participated in the protests at the
Democratic Convention in Chicago. During this time, the poetry of
Allen Ginsberg had a powerful influence on the formation of his
values. While at Columbia, Evans joined the Student Homophile
League [founded by Robert A. Martin], although he was still closeted.

In 1971 Evans and Bell, by then a columnist for the Village Voice,
separated. Bell later died from diabetic complications in 1984.

By the end of 1971, Evans had become alienated from urban life and
the academic world. With a second lover, Jacob Schraeter, he left
New York in April 1972 to seek a new, countercultural existence in
the countryside.

Using Seattle as a base, Evans, Schraeter, and a third gay man
formed a group called The Weird Sisters Partnership. They bought a
40-acre spread of forest land on a remote mountain in northeastern
Washington State, which they named New Sodom. Evans and Schraeter
lived there in tents during summers.

During winter months in Seattle, Evans continued research that he
had begun in New York on the underlying historical origins of the
counterculture, particularly in regard to its sex. In 1973 he
began publishing some of his findings in a gay journal called
Out and later in Fag Rag. He also wrote a column on the
political strategy of zapping for the Advocate, a national gay
newspaper.

In 1974, Evans and Schraeter moved into an apartment at the corner
of Haight and Ashbury Streets in San Francisco, from which Evans
never moved. Schraeter returned to New York in 1981 and died from
AIDS in 1989.

In the fall of the 1975, Evans formed a new pagan-inspired
spiritual group in San Francisco, the Faery Circle. It combined
countercultural consciousness, gay sensibility, and ceremonial
playfulness.

In 1976 he gave a series of public lectures, entitled "Faeries,"
on his research on the historical origins of the gay
counterculture. In 1978 he published this material in his
ground-breaking book "Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture." It
demonstrated that many of the people accused of "witchcraft" and
"heresy" in the Middle Ages and Renaissance were actually
persecuted because of their sexuality and adherence to ancient
pagan practices.

At this time, Evans also was active in Bay Area Gay Liberation
(BAGL) and the San Francisco Gay Democratic Club, which later
became the vehicle through which Harvey Milk rose to political
prominence. He and his friend Hal Offen opened a small
Volkswagen-repair business, which they named "The Buggery."

In the late 1970s, Evans became upset at the pattern of butch
conformity that was then overtaking gay men in the Castro.
Adopting the nom de plume of "The Red Queen", he distributed a
series of controversial satirical leaflets on the subject. In a
leaflet of 1978, entitled "Afraid You're Not Butch Enough?" he
facetiously referred to the new, butch-conforming men of the
Castro as clones, initiating use of the now widely used term
"Castro clones."

In 1984 Evans directed a production at the Valencia Rose Cabaret
in San Francisco of his own new translation, from the ancient
Greek, of Euripides' play Bakkhai. The hero of Euripides' play is
the Greek god Dionysos, the patron of homosexuality. In 1988, this
translation, together with Evans' commentary on the historical
significance of the play, was published by St. Martin's Press in
New York under the name of The God of Ecstasy.

As AIDS began to spread in 1980s, Evans became active in several
San Francisco groups that later morphed into ACT UP/SF, although
he himself was HIV-negative. With his good friend, the late Hank
Wilson, he was arrested twice while demonstrating against the
drug-maker Burroughs-Wellcome, accusing them of price-gouging, and
once against a local TV station, charging them with defamation of
people with AIDS.

In 1988, Evans began work on a nine-year project on philosophy.
Thanks to a grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission, it was
published in 1997 as "Critique of Patriarchal Reason" and included
artwork by San Francisco artist Frank Pietronigro.

The book is a monumental overview of Western philosophy from
antiquity to the present. It shows how misogyny and homophobia
have influenced the supposedly objective fields of formal logic,
higher mathematics, and physical science. Evans' former doctoral
adviser at Columbia University, Paul Oskar Kristeller, called the
work "a major contribution to the study of philosophy and its
history."

In recent years, Evans devoted much time to improving neighborhood
safety in the Haight-Ashbury district. As part of that effort, he
penned a series of scathing and funny first-hand reports entitled
"What I Saw at the Supes Today," which he distributed free on the
Internet.

The reports recount many acts and comments of the city's
Supervisors, often of an embarrassing nature, which the
established media missed. The politicians were not amused, as when
Evans caught Jake McGoldrick and Chris Daly each snarling "Kiss my
ass!" at each other in front of the press box in the board's
ornate chamber. Altogether, the reports run to over a thousand
pages in length and provide a provocative look at the inner
workings of local politics at the time.

In 2010, Evans was instrumental in helping pass Proposition L, the
civil-sidewalks law. In addition to writing his own reports on the
matter, he worked behind the scenes to get favorable coverage in
various newspapers and on TV.

His support for the measure provoked intense criticism from many
of the city's self-styled progressives. To which, he replied:
"Neighborhood safety is a progressive issue. How can we make the
world a better place if we neglect improving our own
neighborhoods?"

The jargon of "authenticity"

2011-09-11T06:46:00.000-07:00

In article in today’s NY Times (Sunday Styles), Stephanie Rosenbloom assembles a collage documenting the recent plague of the adjective “authentic.” Here are a few examples:

TV anchor Anderson Cooper: “in everything I’ve done, I’ve always tried to just be authentic and real.” (Btw, if the Coop is so authentic why can't he make a public acknowledgment that he is . . . GAY?)

Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York: “if you fear what people think about you, then you are not being authentic.”

TV anchor Katie Couric: “I think I love to be my authentic self.”

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton:“I believe in being as authentic as possible.”

As a self-descriptor, the adjective is proliferating on dating sites. The immediate source may be, Rosenbloom avers, the ubiquitous Oprah Winfrey, who popularized the notion of discovering your “authentic self” in the late 1990s after reading Sarah Ban Breathnach’s “Something More.”

However the real source lies in Old Europe. A clue comes from a June statement by Pope Benedict XVI, entitled “Truth, Proclamation and Authenticity of Life in the Digital Age,” The pontiff said that increasing involvement in online life “inevitably poses questions not only of how to act properly, but also about the authenticity of one’s own being.” He added that “there is the challenge to be authentic and faithful, and not give in to the illusion of constructing an artificial public profile for oneself.”

In fact, authenticity figures importantly in the thinking of the controversial German thinker Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). Being authentic is a key aspect, or at least a potentiality of the mysterious Dasein (loosely translated as “existence”). According to one commentator, for Heidegger authentic existence can only come into being when individuals arrive at the realization of who they are and grasp the fact that each human being is a distinctive entity. Once human beings acknowledge that they have their own destiny to fulfill, then their concern with the world will no longer reside in eagerness to do as the masses do, but can become an "authentic" commitment to fulfill their real potential in the world.

An immediate objection arises. How can we know that a person has truly achieved authenticity, whether claimed by him or herself or by someone else? It seems that “authenticity” fails the refutability test. We can never be certain that it is there --or that it is not there. Nonethelesss, the concept turned out to have legs, gaining the support of such luminaries as Rudolf Bultmann, Paul Tillich, and Jean-Paul Sartre.

How in fact can we (so to speak) authenticate a claim of authenticity? Most of the time we must simply rely on the claimant's word for it. When all is said and done, it comes down to a simple assertion: "I'm authentic, and you're not--so there." At all events, Heidegger seems to have been the first to award himself the precious accolade of living authentically. Ipse dixit.

In his own day the idea did not go unchallenged. In "The Jargon of Authenticity" (1973) Theodor Adorno attacked Heidegger's obscurantist use of language, which sought to transform a "bad empirical reality into transcendence." Perhaps it is time to go back to Adorno’s book.

Berlusconi and co.

2011-09-10T14:06:00.000-07:00

Some Italian friends have been looking forward eagerly to the disappearance of Berlusconi from office in their country (may that event come soon!). However, I sense a dawning realization in the Peninsula that that will not be the end of their problems. Italy's difficulties are structural, and will persist.

We see something like this personalist approach in liberal tut-tutting about the Republican crazies--Bachmann, Perry, and the rest. To be sure, they could not go soon enough. One day they will though, but that will not signal a new Golden Age for liberalism in this country. Boiler-plate talk aside, the success of modern liberalism depends on liberality--on distributing benefits to union members, minorities, and others who make up the Democratic Party's base. Even if the wealth of the rich were confiscated (which is not likely to happen), the cupboard would soon be bare.

As with Italy our problems are not a matter of personalities; after all they come and go. Our problems are structural. All those jobs that went to Asia are not going back.

Cam we expect truth-telling about this situation? Yes--as soon as pigs learn to fly.

The 9/11 blues

2011-09-08T06:54:00.000-07:00

Since I retired from the teaching job that kept me (more or less) responsible, and started this blog, I have said many provocative things. Curmudgeonhood, ‘tis I. But now I may be going over the top--though please don’t send in the people with the white coats just yet.

At any rate, here it is. Even though the actual date of 9/11 has not yet come, I am heartily sick of the commemorations that are streaming out of all our media. Maybe foreign newspapers, such as the Times of India (an excellent resource, btw), would offer relief, but I doubt it.

Don’t you know Dynes that thousands of people died there? Well, many people die every second, some of them unjustly. We don’t expect to find that fact being used as an excuse for muzzling honest opinion. But in the vast empire of 9/11 Piety things are different.

With three unnecessary wars, and a meltdown of the economy, the country went seriously off track. We were supposed to be engaged in a vast struggle against Terror, which had “declared war" on us. Instead, with George Bush in the lead--truly the Manchurian Candidate--we came as close to destroying ourselves as we could. 9/11 triggered this process, but we keep on repeating the mistakes made in the last ten years. Now we are supposed to commemorate those ten years as if all we need to do is mourn.

The history of the site in lower Manhattan is both comic and tragic. Only one building is approaching completion, yet it already looks like a ruin, since no one can figure out how to cover over the vast wound in the lower floors.

On September 12 there will be closure (NOT), when two big square pits--holes in the ground--are dedicated. (A wag suggests the two square holes be named "Brad Pitt" and "Michael Pitt." But no matter.)

Here are some pertinent comments from Slate Magazine by the architectural critic Witold Rybczynski, dated Wednesday, Sept. 7, 2011.

“At New York's Sept. 11 Memorial, water-filled pits stand where the towers once were. Architect Michael Arad and landscape architect Peter Walker are credited with the design of the 9/11 memorial in New York City . . . [A]n unintentional third designer is Rudolph Giuliani, who as mayor supported the idea that the World Trade Center site was "hallowed ground" on which nothing should be built. By 2003, when a competition was held for the design of the memorial, the idea that the one-acre footprints of the twin towers should be preserved had hardened into a requirement. And that is what people will see on Sept. 12: two vast water-filled pits where the towers once stood.

“The design of what has turned into a $700 million memorial has been much simplified since the competition, which is all to the good. The underground museum remains, but no longer theatrically looks out through a veil of falling water. The names of the deceased, originally below ground, have been moved to the surface. The pits, 192 feet by 192 feet and 30 feet deep, are lined in black granite—black as death. Water cascades down the four walls and disappears into a square hole in the center of the pool.

“[By comparison with Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial,] there is nothing comforting about gazing into the vast pit—-or, rather, two pits—-of the 9/11 memorial, the water endlessly falling and disappearing into a bottomless black hole. The strongest sense I came away with was of hopelessness.”

Rybczynski has some more to say on a more positive note, but the comments reproduced above are the ones that resonated with me.

UPDATE. Tom Engelhardt says it better than I could:

"Let’s Cancel 9/11

Bury the War State's Blank Check at Sea

by Tom Engelhardt, September 09, 2011

"Let’s bag it."

"I’m talking about the tenth anniversary ceremonies for 9/11, and everything that goes with them: the solemn reading of the names of the dead, the tolling of bells, the honoring of first responders, the gathering of presidents, the dedication of the new memorial, the moments of silence. The works.

"Let’s just can it all. Shut down Ground Zero. Lock out the tourists. Close “Reflecting Absence,” the memorial built in the “footprints” of the former towers with its grove of trees, giant pools, and multiple waterfalls before it can be unveiled this Sunday. Discontinue work on the underground National September 11 Museum due to open in 2012. Tear down the Freedom Tower (redubbed 1 World Trade Center after our “freedom” wars went awry), 102 stories of “the most expensive skyscraper ever constructed in the United States.” (Estimated price tag: $3.3 billion.) Eliminate that still-being-constructed, hubris-filled 1,776 feet of building, planned in the heyday of George W. Bush and soaring into the Manhattan sky like a nyaah-nyaah invitation to future terrorists. Dismantle the other three office towers being built there as part of an $11 billion government-sponsored construction program. Let’s get rid of it all. If we had wanted a memorial to 9/11, it would have been more appropriate to leave one of the giant shards of broken tower there untouched.

"Ask yourself this: ten years into the post-9/11 era, haven’t we had enough of ourselves? If we have any respect for history or humanity or decency left, isn’t it time to rip the Band-Aid off the wound, to remove 9/11 from our collective consciousness? No more invocations of those attacks to explain otherwise inexplicable wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and our oh-so-global war on terror. No more invocations of 9/11 to keep the Pentagon and the national security state flooded with money. No more invocations of 9/11 to justify every encroachment on liberty, every new step in the surveillance of Americans, every advance in pat-downs and wand-downs and strip-downs that keeps fear high and the homeland security state afloat.

"The attacks of September 11, 2001 were in every sense abusive, horrific acts. And the saddest thing is that the victims of those suicidal monstrosities have been misused here ever since under the guise of pious remembrance. This country has become dependent on the dead of 9/11 — who have no way of defending themselves against how they have been used — as an all-purpose explanation for our own goodness and the horrors we’ve visited on others, for the many towers-worth of dead in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere whose blood is on our hands.

"Isn’t it finally time to go cold turkey? To let go of the dead? Why keep repeating our 9/11 mantra as if it were some kind of old-time religion, when we’ve proven that we, as a nation, can’t handle it — and worse yet, that we don’t deserve it?

"We would have been better off consigning our memories of 9/11 to oblivion, forgetting it all if only we could. We can’t, of course. But we could stop the anniversary remembrances. We could stop invoking 9/11 in every imaginable way so many years later. We could stop using it to make ourselves feel like a far better country than we are. We could, in short, leave the dead in peace and take a good, hard look at ourselves, the living, in the nearest mirror."

See the rest at antiwar.com.

A defective example

2011-09-06T08:07:00.000-07:00

There have been many attempts to define poverty on a comparative or world scale. One that is commonly cited is that people who must live on one dollar a day or less are definitely poor. That figure seems pretty convincing, even though a dollar (or its equivalent in rupees) goes farther in Bangla Desh than here in Manhattan. Even so, one would probably need to raise the floor higher. How much higher?

Here cultural factors intrude. Today most people in this country would surely regard absence of some common features of housing, such as indoor plumbing, as a mark of poverty. Yet in the early decades of the last century, my mother's parents lived with only an "earthen loo" (as an English friend tactfully calls it)--an outhouse--in the backyard. Yet they were prosperous cotton farmers in East Texas who owned a piano and a Ford. Their neighbors certainly did not regard them as poor.

As it happens, Adam Smith made a classic contribution to this discussion. First, some background. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, he wrote:

"Nature, when she formed man for society, endowed him with an original desire to please, and an original aversion to offend his brethren. She taught him to feel pleasure in their favourable, and pain in their unfavourable regard. The reason poverty causes pain is not just because it can leave people feeling hungry, cold and sick, but because it is associated with unfavourable regard."

He goes on to explain:

"The poor man . , , is ashamed of his poverty. He feels that it either places him out of the sight of mankind, or, that if they take any notice of him, they have, however, scarce any fellow–feeling with the misery and distress which he suffers. He is mortified upon both accounts; for though to be overlooked, and to be disapproved of, are things entirely different, yet as obscurity covers us from the daylight of honour and approbation, to feel that we are taken no notice of, necessarily damps the most agreeable hope, and disappoints the most ardent desire, of human nature. The poor man goes out and comes in unheeded, and when in the midst of a crowd is in the same obscurity as if shut up in his own hovel."

In this way, a person’s possessions function as signals of underlying personal characteristics, characteristics that others regard either favorably or unfavorably.

In the Wealth of Nations he wrote:

"A linen shirt, for example, is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably, though they had no linen. But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty, which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into without extreme bad conduct."

The notion that the Greeks and Romans had no linen is a major historical howler. As surviving mummy wrappings show, three thousand years ago the ancient Egyptians were perfectly familiar with the production and use of linen made from flax. From them the industry passed to the ancient Greeks and Romans. Roman togas, for example, were made of wool, but the tunic worn under them--the equivalent of a shirt--was generally of linen.

Without any attempt at verification, this Adam Smith gaffe is now crazily proliferating on the Internet. It is time to call a halt.

Does this error mean that Smith's overall concept is wrong? No, but it suggests that like any other author he should be subject to fact checking.

The three A's: the other side of the coin

2011-09-06T07:43:00.000-07:00

From time to time in these pages I have shared segments of my sweeping, acerbic critique of the three Abrahamic religions. When it is not expository (sometimes dully so), the narrative is relentlessly negative. The various parts are collected in my Abrahamicalia.blogspot.com.

Yet is this the whole story? Belatedly I have sought to set forth, very briefly, what might be termed the case for the defense, that is, some major positive 3-A contributions. What follows is just a sketch, and additions and comments are welcome.

A DIFFERENT VIEW

In Abrahamicalia.blogspot.com, emphasis has fallen on the prescriptive, often repressive aspects of the Abrahamic faiths. These are indeed salient. Still, there is another side of the coin: the creative harvest of these traditions in literature, music, and the visual arts. (There are also significant effects in the sphere of political theory and action, to be discussed at the end.)

The enumeration of the positive contribution requires some qualifications. Laudable as the cultural achievements are, most of them are, to be blunt, in the past tense. Today we cherish them as historical landmarks and not, for the most part, as components of living traditions. The explanations for this decline are complex, but one such reason, surely, is that they depended on a credulous and precritical understanding of the Abrahamic scriptures and the associated institutional structures that enforced them as norms. Then was then, and now is now. Such religion-based cultural endeavors are no longer in synch with the cyberuniverse that has come to dominate the twenty-first century.

In what follows I note, in the briefest possible compass, some salient aspects of this religion-based heritage. First come the cultural contributions, with a brief discussion of political ramifications at the end.

1. Literature. The Hebrew poets of medieval Spain, to take one example, drew upon the imagery and prosody of the Hebrew Bible. Yet prior to modern times, their writings had little impact outside of Jewish circles.

More massive was the impress on literature in Indo-European languages, those in use among Christian peoples. Already in pagan times, Longinus had noted the sublime effect of of one Biblical phrase: "Let there be light." In a different way, Jerome’s translation of the Vulgate introduced a new appreciation of simple, humble discourse, the Sermo Humilis, as Erich Auerbach has shown. Later, this text served as the vehicle for the first great monument of the art of printing, the Gutenberg Bible of 1450-55,

In the evolution of English literature, the King James version of the Bible (1611) ranks as the single most important influence. Three major poems of John Milton (1608-1674)--Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes--revisit Biblical subjects.

Yet the formal properties of the Hebrew Bible were not fully appreciated until the analysis of Bishop Robert Lowth (1710-1787). In 1754 he was awarded a Doctorate in Divinity by Oxford University, for his treatise on Hebrew poetry entitled Praelectiones Academicae de Sacra Poesi Hebraeorum (On the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews). Lowth seems to have been the first modern Bible scholar to have observed the poetic structure of the Psalms and much of the prophetic literature of the Old Testament. In Lecture 19 he sets forth the classic statement of parallelism which still today is the most fundamental category for understanding Hebrew poetry. He identifies three forms of parallelism, the synonymous, antithetic, and synthetic (i.e. balance only in the manner of expression without either synonymy or antithesis).

In modern times, the free verse of Walt Whitman stands out as the most influential exemple of dependence on Hebrew poetry--mediated of course by the King James Version.

2. Music. Quite naturally, the liturgy of the synagogue migrated into the monodic early Christian chant. Later, beginning in the twelfth century, Leoninus and his successor Perotinus, both associated with Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, introduced polyphony, a revolutionary achievement.

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), arguably the supreme composer of the Western tradition, preeminently composed Christian choral music (his B-minor mass, passions, and cantatas). Hymns and spirituals continue Biblical and Christian themes on the popular level.

Today, the influence of religion is less evident in classical music. Yet two living composers, the Estonian Arvo Pärt and the Englishman John Tevener, have achieved striking effects by returning to older religious modes.

3. Architecture. The emperor Constantine’s adaptation of the Roman basilica type set the course for all subsequent church architecture in the West, a tradition that achieved its highest flowering in the Gothic cathedrals (ca. 1150-1550).

4. Representational arts. In part based on Jewish exemplars, early Christian iconography became the norm for narrative cycles for at least one thousand years. These effects may be seen today in frescoes on church walls, panel paintings, metalwork, and monumental sculpture. Biblical scenes are central to the work of Giotto, Masaccio, Donatello, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, and countless other artists.

5. Film. At one time the genre of Biblical films occupied an important place in Hollywood’s array of production. For example, Lew Wallace’s 1880 novel Ben Hur has been filmed at least three times (1907, 1925, and 1959). Probably the supreme example of a religious blockbuster was The Ten Commandments (1956), Cecil B. DeMille’s tour de force.

Twenty years later the mood had decidedly changed, witness Norman Jewison’s Jesus Christ Superstar (1973). Based on the Andrew Lloyd Weber-Tim Rice musical, this entertainment gave a counterculture twist to the genre. This was followed by Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979), which was decidedly irreverent. Finally, in 2004 The Passion of the Christ, Mel Gibson’s controversial vision of the death of Jesus, seemed to have given new vitality to the genre of religion-themed films, but the effect did not prove lasting.

6. Islam and its arts. During the nineteenth century, Western awareness of Islam was mainly evident in the picturesque canvases of the Orientalist painters. In the following century, however, there was greater appreciation for the nonrepresentational works of the minor arts of Islam as seen in tiles, metalwork, carpets, and other such objects.

A FURTHER POINT

There is one other sphere, too vast to be adequately covered here, in which religion has made important positive contributions. That is the area of social change.

I begin with a somewhat remote example, the career of Pope Gregory VII, who died in 1085. Following in the path of some earlier reformers, Gregory confronted head-on the then-urgent problem of imperial domination of the church, and by extension the whole of Western European society. Boldly, he engaged Emperor Henry IV in a fundamental power struggle, with the aim of making the papacy supreme, not the imperial power. The result, fortunately for society, was a kind of compromise in which the principle of separation of powers emerged. Today, the churches have (or should have) withdrawn from institutional participation in public life, but the principle of separation of powers is enshrined in the very structure of United States government.

Another major issue is that of slavery. To be sure, the Bible has been used to defend the practice of chattel slavery. Yet in the latter part of the eighteenth century a group of prelates in England began to call for an end to the slave trade, on the grounds that all individuals are equally children of God. This tradition was picked up and carried further by the Abolitionists in North America. It reemerged later in the civil rights movement, where a major, probably indispensable role was played by Dr. Martin Luther King and other black clergy.

Dealbreakers

2011-09-04T06:59:00.000-07:00

While I haven't been following it too closely there seems to be an interesting series going on how disagreements over policy issues can end relationships, or even prevent them form forming at all (http://www.good.is/post/dealbreaker-he-s-anti-abortion-rights).

In this particular segment a woman reported that while she was attracted to a man named Jack, she could not continue when she learned that he was a pro-lifer, opposed to abortion rights. We all like to believe that we are willing to tolerate a variety of opinions, given the inevitable subjectivity of most of them. It may be though that the abortion issue ("reproductive rights" if you prefer) is, exceptionally, too intimately connected with our core identity to fit this model, but I fear that it is more generally applicable.

Here is an example from my own experience. About a year ago I made contact with a man who had been a close friend a quarter of a century ago, though over the years we had drifted away from each other. B. and I spent the day together, discussing various issues. Then, unfortunately, the topic of the state of Israel came up. B. is not Jewish (though he has a Jewish partner), but he is a fervent Zionist. Even though I am just as critical of the Palestinians as I am of the Israelis, B. could not tolerate my questioning the policies of the Jewish state. This difference proved to be a deal-breaker and he ceased all further contact. I would not have done so over this issue.

Now here is an opposite example. M., a friend until recently, turned out to have a number of far-left opinions. M. is Cuban but, unlike many exiles, is a supporter of the Castro regime. We are both gay, and I brought up the issue of the UMAP camps for the compulsory "reeducation" of homosexuals. M. claimed that these horrendous establishments had only been in existence for two years. I am not sure that this time frame is correct, but assuming that it is, the assertion is no excuse. After all, the Third Reich lasted "only" twelve years. Suppose that it had only lasted two years; that would be bad enough.

Then my Cuban friend launched into singing the praises of Joseph Stalin. He thought that the Gulag was unimportant, and defended the Soviet policy of vandalizing and destroying Russia's heritage of religious art. (This even though M. is studying Spanish colonial art, mainly religious, in Mexico.)

After the occasion (it was a dinner party three years ago) I concluded that the concatenation of absurdities was just too much for me to continue. I have not seen M. since.

"Right to protect"

2011-09-02T07:45:00.000-07:00

The foreign policy doctrine known as Right to Protect (R2P) goes back a decade, to discussions at the UN and elsewhere. Essentially, this is the idea that perceived human rights violations in foreign countries trump their national sovereignty. Some advocates go so far as to suggest, that at least for the smaller, more vulnerable nations, national sovereignty no longer exists.

However cloaked it may be in idealism, R2P is a grave threat to the international order. It has served, for example, as the pretext for intervening in Libya. There, as even many advocates acknowledged, the worthy ideal of protecting the civilian population quickly morphed into the goal of regime change, a task that has now apparently been achieved in that North African country.

I take no position on the Libya intervention; at all events that is done now. What concerns me is the use of this experience as a template for ambitious and costly attempts to extend the Pax Americana throughout the world, using "human rights" as a cloak. This strategy is not the same as the neocons' strong-arming, which came such a cropper in Afghanistan and Iraq, but the ultimate effect is the same: regime change.

A number of writers and scholars are active in the cause of propagating the dubious R2P doctrine. Perhaps the most prominent is Anne-Marie Slaughter, Dean of Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Along with her friend Hillary Clinton, she is a prominent member of the Neo-Wilsonian wing of the Democratic Party. (See my recent piece herein on the origins of Wilsonian interventionism.)

Slaughter also has links with the neocons, In 2004 she observed, chillingly, that "the biggest problem with the Bush preemption strategy may be that it does not go far enough."

Words

2011-09-01T07:50:00.000-07:00

Summer is a time when newspaper columnists, short on time because of vacation, nagging kids and other distractions, decide to dig out old essays that would have been better left unpublished. Such is (I think) David Brooks' effort of August 29 in the NY Times. A luxurious safari trip with his family to Kenya brings to mind a particular expression: "haimish. It’s a Yiddish word that suggests warmth, domesticity, and unpretentious conviviality."

Using a phrase that is curiously similar to "the color line," Brooks posits the existence of something he calls the haimish line. Settings and events that are on one side (ostensibly the right side) of this line are comfortable, modest, and pleasantly convivial. On the other side are upscale, hoity-toity, chilly venues in which people are discouraged from being friendly with one another. During his safari, Brooks spent both time on both sides of the line. Yet he doesn't deal with the situation of poor people who must always dwell on the haimish side; they can't afford to traipse off to the other, fancy one--as individuals of his class easily can. In this way there is an element of slumming in his praise of the modest, homey spots. One is reminded of the film "Down and Out in Beverly Hills," in which the wealthy hero opts to spend one night hobnobbing with homeless men at the beach, where he eats garbage. He pronounces the experience wonderful, but he never goes back.

As with so many purportedly distinctive Yiddish terms, haimish is a borrowing from high German, stemming from the noun "Heim," home. The English adjective would be "homey." Why not use this term? But Brooks opts for a cognate that will strike most readers as exotic, and hence the bearer of some special wisdom.

As it happens, German also supplies the antonym: "unheimlich," meaning uncanny, unexpected.

In life we need both the reassurance of particular things, the heimisch/haimish dimension, and also a sense of surprise and the unexpected: unheimlich.

BROADER QUESTIONS

Faithful readers of these pages will note that this latest comment reflects, in the context of my general interest in linguistics, a skepticism regarding the idealization of Yiddish in this country. Let me be honest: could it be that I am flagging these words simply because they are Jewish? Most of them, though, as in this example, are of German origin. Although I have become reasonably proficient in German, a requirement for my academic studies, the language has always retained for me a certain taint, based upon what we learned about National Socialism during and after World War II.

Well, that quirk aside, what is wrong with borrowing words? Much of the standard vocabulary of English is borrowed from French and Latin.

What really concerns me, I think, is the linguistic populism inherent in the wholesale importation of the such words, the idea that the ordinary language of the people contains some great repository of inherent wisdom. Since this country has many ethnic groups, there must be--according to this line of thinking--some unique Irish, Italian, or Hispanic folk wisdom. That is what seems to me uncertain. Almost without exception, our immigrant groups (and I stem from one) came to this country from a culture of poverty. That status meant limited cultural resources, not vast ones.

There is, of course, a contemporary sociological element: many of our most successful figures in the worlds of journalism and entertainment are of Askenazic Jewish heritage. Their achievements are due to merit, without question. If Italian-Americans were prominent in these fields in such numbers, we would expect a profusion of such words as gumbah and agita--and I would be compelled to ask what profound folk wisdom was being transmitted by the importation of this vocabulary. Not much, I fear--certainly very little in comparison to what is found in Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch.

It is an interesting fact that the tapping of this Jewish cultural heritage is limited to one particular segment of the Jewish people, the Ashkenazim. Where is the contribution of Mediterranean (sometimes inaccurately termed Sephardic) Jews? Historically, their achievements have been considerable; one need only think of Maimonides, Spinoza, and Cardozo. Moreover, greater knowledge of classical Hebrew would be useful in understanding Biblical concepts, which remain important in our civilization. King James I, the creator of our most influential version of the Bible, acknowledged this point by actually learning Hebrew and delivering speeches in that language.

Instead of such illumination, we get this plethora of German-Jewish argot terms, many of which, like "heimish" and "mensh," "shonder" and "nosh," have perfectly good English-language equivalents, and are therefore redundant.

NOTE. The concept in social theory known as the “culture of poverty” stems from the anthropologist Oscar Lewis, as seen in his groundbreaking ethnography "Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty" (1959). Lewis argued that although the burdens of poverty are systemic, being imposed upon specific strata of society, they foster the formation of an autonomous subculture as children are socialized into behaviors and attitudes that serve to perpetuate their underclass status.

Clearly this concept has transnational implications. As the various groups subject to the culture of poverty manage, some of them at least, to migrate to more prosperous nations, they nonetheless bring with them many social patterns, including language habits, that have been nurtured at home.

I recently came upon an acknowledgment of this transnational phenomenon in a book first published eighty years ago: Fontamara, a novel by the great Italian writer Ignazio Silone. The little village of Fontamara in the Abruzzi was a specific place, yet the things that occurred there have broader, perhaps universal application: “i contadini poveri, gli uomini che fanno fruttificare la terra e soffrano la fame, i fellahin, i coolies, i peones, i mugic [muzhiks], i cafoni, si somigliano in tutti i paesi del mondo.”

In the novel one of the peasants makes an interesting observation. He says that he had spent several years working as a laborer in Argentina. Out on the Pampa he and his fellow immigrants never had any trouble communicating with the local laborers and the gauchos, even though one group spoke in rudimentary Italian and the other in rudimentary Spanish. Yet when an educated official from the Italian consulate would show up once a week to see how they were doing, the poor immigrants just couldn't communicate with him.

The new Falwellism

2011-08-28T10:25:00.000-07:00

I am currently seeking to draw together some threads that have concerned me for some time. A couple of years ago, when I criticized homophobic elements in Islam (which are surely there), I was taken to task by some gay men residing in the Netherlands. In their view, oe must never criticize Muslims; that is Islamophobia.

Now, as I am coming to understand, this politically correct point of view has crystallized in the campaign against "homonationalism." The chief proponent of this view is a British Rutgers professor of South Asian origin, Jasbir Puar. Her views were recently echoed in a Berlin address by that high priest of postmodern obscurantism, Judith Butler. Earlier this year, an Amsterdam conference on the subject dissolved in acrimony.

With much effort, we have at last put the forces of homophobia into retreat in Western nations. But we are not supposed to advocate similar progress in the Third World: these people are simply different and we mustn't seek to impose our parochial Western norms on them. For their part, women and gays are perfectly content with their abject status in those countries. Therefore, let us not interfere; in fact, let us don sackcloth and ashes to atone for our hubristic efforts to interfere.

As we have had reason to understand in many countries, from China to Libya, human rights is not just a parochial Western value. It is something that all peoples seek to achieve. Let us not be cowed by these new apostles of Falwellism, who allege that homophobia is fine and dandy, as long as it is practiced by people of color.

Buddhism lite

2011-08-28T07:40:00.000-07:00

As an undergraduate majoring in art history, I felt a strong attraction to some Buddhist art, especially Chinese sculptures which conveyed an ethereal beauty and calm. Painted mandalas also appealed to me as mind maps.

In those days I read a few Buddhist scriptures in order to get some background for these aesthetic perceptions. I also fell into the Zen fad for a time. Only with my retirement did I begin to think seriously about becoming a Buddhist, and I read more deeply. At the end of the day, though, I found that I was not really ready for the renunciation that a true commitment would call for.

I have always suspected that many Western converts to the faith were only committed to a kind of “Buddhism lite” that did not call for any serious reformation of conduct, merely providing a gloss of confirmation for life patterns already adopted.

Now a new book seems to confirm this intuition. If is :The Bodhisattva's Brain" by Owen Flanagan.

Here is part of the book’s blurb: “If we are material beings living in a material world--and all the scientific evidence suggests that we are--then we must find existential meaning, if there is such a thing, in this physical world. We must cast our lot with the natural rather than the supernatural. Many Westerners with spiritual (but not religious) inclinations are attracted to Buddhism--almost as a kind of moral-mental hygiene. But, as Owen Flanagan points out . . . Buddhism is hardly naturalistic. Atheistic when it comes to a creator god, Buddhism is otherwise opulently polytheistic, with spirits, protector deities, ghosts, and evil spirits. Its beliefs include karma, rebirth, nirvana, and nonphysical states of mind. What is a nonreligious, materially grounded spiritual seeker to do? In The Bodhisattva's Brain, Flanagan argues that it is possible to subtract the "hocus pocus" from Buddhism and discover a rich, empirically responsible philosophy that could point us to one path of human flourishing. "Buddhism naturalized," as Flanagan constructs it, contains a metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics; it is a fully naturalistic and comprehensive philosophy, compatible with the rest of knowledge.”

I like the expression “opulently polytheistic,” which seems apt for Mahayana Buddhism, where such exuberance has long fostered the production splendid works of art. The caves at Dun Huang in Western China are just brimming over with examples. However, the idea of “subtracting the hocus pocus” seems banal and anticlimactic. After all, such lite versions of Judaism and Christianity have long been on offer; most of us find them unappealing. If science and secular philosophy provide the answers, why do we need the supposed confirmation of an emasculated theology to back them up?

Sam Harris, an atheist writer who has dabbled in Buddhism, holds that it can enrich the study of the human mind. However, Flanagan seems skeptical about this claim. Others who admire the book include the Christian religious thinker Alastair MacIntire, who maintains that this approach can throw light on “human flourishing,” and Patricia Churchland, a professor of philosophy who specializes in the study of the brain.

AS I pointed out in Abrahmicalia, one of the problems with the current attack on religion is that it is mainly restricted to the Abrahamic triad. Is Buddhism a viable alternative? Maybe, but not in this ghostly, etiolated form.

Bogeymen/bogeywomen

2011-08-27T19:11:00.000-07:00

The bogeyman is a monstrous imaginary figure parents and other care givers evoke in order to threaten children. The figure is archetypal, and takes various forms in the different cultures. In a famous print Goya depicted him as el Coco. Once, when I liviing in Rome, the distinguished archaeologist Massimo Pallottino told me that his mother had threatened him with a visitation from La Donna Olimpia, a formidable lady who actually lived in the seventeenth century.

The expression can also be used in an extended sense. During the 1990s, when direct mail solicitations had not yet been overtaken by the Internet, I would receive urgent funding appeals by our two major parties. The meme was always the same: you don’t want THAT/THOSE people to get in do you? Since we know you don’t, you better send us heap big wampum, pronto. As I recall, the Republican solicitations would often feature Reps. John Conyers (once a “card-carrying” Communist--gasp!) and Charley Rangel. Since Rangel, my own congressman, had once been very helpful to me when I ran into a problem with my telephone service, I wasn’t going for that one. Democrats would hammer away at the likes of Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove.

Now we have a new form of this ploy in the denunciation of the leading Republican candidates. Admittedly most are dismal, to say the least. Bachmann is weird, and Rick Perry can’t seem to establish a stable connection between his brain and his larynx. Santorum is still troubled by the obscene meaning that Dan Savage gave his name. And Ron Paul is ignored as much as possible, by both sides--probably because he is the only antiwar candidate.

The problem with all this scolding is that it provides an easy our for Obama in relation to his leftist critics. He is counting on the prospect that they will hold their nose and vote for him, so that one of THOSE doesn’t get in. This means that Obama can swing as far to the right as he wants to--and sometimes it seems pretty far. Harping on the Republican bogeymen makes this strategy possible, and so--from the point of view of progressive politics--is counterproductive.

The con of Irene

2011-08-27T09:00:00.000-07:00

It is raining here in Gotham City, forerunner of Irene. It is just noon, which means that the NYC transit system, both trains and buses, is shutting down, the first time that this has happened.

Having been through somewhat similar events, I predict that by the time Irene reaches our city it will not amount to much more than a summer storm.

Why then these extraordinary measures? My suspicion is that they are a dress rehearsal for some big disaster that may be looming--possibly on the tenth anniversary of 9/11. At all events, what appears to be a serious overreaction has served further to reduce my confidence in those who govern us. As that confidence is (I thought) almost infinitessimally minute, I wouldn't have thought that it could have diminished much further. But that is what has happened.

At any rate, I have plenty of food, water, and duct tape at hand. Having settled in for the weekend, I should be able to make great strides in my current project of reading all the works of Giordano Bruno in the original Latin and Italian.

The title of this posting, btw, reflects an old porno classic of the 1920s, Le con d'Irene, attributed to Louis Aragon.

UPDATE. As of 9 AM this morning (Sunday), Irene has been downgraded to the status of a tropical storm. There has been a bit of flooding in lower Manhattan, and significant damage elsewhere-but no more than with other such storms. Once again, I ask: why the hype?

SECOND UPDATE (Sunday afternoon).

This is by Tony Harnden, as published in The Telegraph:

QUOTE FOLLOWS

For the television reporter, clad in his red cagoule emblazoned with the CNN logo, it was a dramatic on-air moment, broadcasting live from Long Island, New York during a hurricane that also threatened Manhattan.

“We are in, right, now…the right eye wall, no doubt about that…there you see the surf,” he said breathlessly. “That tells a story right there.”

Stumbling and apparently buffeted by ferocious gusts, he took shelter next to a building. “This is our protection from the wind,” he explained. “It’s been truly remarkable to watch the power of the ocean here.”

The surf may have told a story but so too did the sight behind the reporter of people chatting and ambling along the sea front and just goofing around. There was a man in a t-shirt, a woman waving her arms and then walking backwards. Then someone on a bicycle glided past.

Across the screen, the “Breaking News: Irene Batters Long Island” caption was replaced by stern advice from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA): “Stay inside, stay safe.”

The images summed up Hurricane Irene – the media and the United States federal government trying to live up to their own doom-laden warnings and predictions while a sizeable number of ordinary Americans just carried on as normal and even made gentle fun of all the fuss.

There was almost palpable disappointment among the TV big guns rolled out for the occasion when Irene was downgraded to a mere ‘tropical storm”. In New York city, CNN’s silver-haired Anderson Cooper, more usually seen in a tight t-shirt in a famine or war zone, was clad in what one wag dubbed “disaster casual”.

He looked crestfallen fell briefly silent when a weatherwoman told him that the rain was not going to get any worse. “Wow, because this isn’t so bad,” he said. “It’s an annoying rain but it isn’t even a sideways rain.”

Then came the press conferences from the politicians, with Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey that his evacuation of the Jersey Shore was “a pre-emptive measure that I am confident saved lives” and there could still be damage worth “tens of billions” of dollars.

Janet Napolitano, the Homeland Security chief, declared that there was ” a ways to go with Irene” but “with the evacuations and other precautions taken we have dramatically decreased the risk to life”. Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York seemed thoroughly delighted with himself, as if he personally had calmed the waters and stifled the winds.

The truth is that the dire warning beforehand suited both politicians and journalists. Just as with the minor earthquake that shook the east coast last week causing no loss of life and virtually no damage, Irene became a huge story because it was where the media lived.

For politicians, Irene was a chance to either make amends or appear in control. The White House sent out 25 Irene emails to the press on Saturday alone.

There were photographs of President Barack Obama touring disaster centres and footage of him asking sombre, pertinent questions. With his poll ratings plummeting, Obama needed to project an aura of seriousness and command. He was all too aware that the political fortunes of his predecessor George W. Bush never recovered after the Hurricane Katrina disaster of 2005.

The press mostly reported the message the White House had carefully crafted: “Obama takes charge” read the headline of one wire service story.

At the state level, Irene was a chance for political redemption. Christie had been lambasted around the start of the year for taking a holiday during one of the worst snow storms in New Jersey history.

Bloomberg, who ordered a mandatory evacuation of residents in low-lying areas during Irene that thousands ignored, had been widely criticised for inadequate clean-up plans during the same blizzards.

There was some loss of life during Irene, though significantly less than during dozens of other weather events across the US this year.

Preparation for the worst-case scenario makes sense and could have saved hundreds during Katrina. But the worst-case scenario was largely portrayed as inevitable. Some of the footage of television reporters putting themselves in the most extreme position possible just to get the best “stand-up” live shot was beyond parody.

First prize went to Tucker Barnes, a reporter for Fox 5, who went live from Ocean City, Maryland amid a strange, brown foamy substance. He reported that it “didn’t taste great” and had a “sandy consistency”. Apparently, it was raw sewage:

As Howard Kurtz notes, The media and politicians enjoy a symbiotic relationship during possible impending disasters. The resultant perfect storm of hype over Irene runs the risk of making Americans even more like to ignore warnings in the future.

By lunchtime on Sunday, the sun was peeking through over New York. The TV anchors were expressing their relief at the good news that the east coast had “dodged a bullet” and Irene had not been the apocalypse they had predicted.

Perhaps it would be a bit too much to hope that they and certain politicians felt a little sheepish too.

END OF HARNDEN QUOTE

I especially love the point about the "strange brown substance." A cocktail of that should be served up to all who participated in this big farce.

Wilsonianism resurgent

2011-08-25T07:25:00.000-07:00

The presidency of Woodrow Wilson (1913-21) was not particularly successful. Nonetheless, it has left an enduring legacy that I find insidious,

Wilsonianism (sometimes honorifically termed “Wilsonian idealism”) holds that the internal political policy of a state should also find expression in its foreign policy. If one favors vigorous intervention in domestic affairs, as Wilsonian liberals generally do, then the same principle applies abroad: state building at home and abroad.

Those adhering to this trend are usually characterized by their belief in progress. In this light, they held that the system of international relations that had given rise to World War I could be reformed: it was capable of being reshaped into a more peaceful and just world order. This transformation would involve the awakening of democracy, a term often brandished, with little justification, in this discourse. At one time much hope was placed in the League of Nations, a hope transferred for a time to the United Nations. Now that the prestige of the latter body has dimmed, the hopes have been transferred to an amorphous entity known as the “world community.” For its own good, of course, that community must be managed by the United States. In fact, Wilsonians often embrace the ideal of American exceptionalism.

Stripped of the “idealist” rhetoric, this current of foreign-policy thought yields the imperative that the United States must be the world’s policeman. In taking us into Iraq, the neo-Conservatives displayed a muscular version of Wilsonianism. However, there is another version that relies more on soft-power, including diplomacy, arm twisting, and foreign aid. This version has long flourished within the ambit of the Democratic Party. In this way those who are skeptical of Wilsonianism are confronted with a kind of Tweedledum-Tweedledee problem: do we want the hard or the soft version? No other is on offer.

The disastrous adventure in Iraq should have produced a fundamental challenge to the Wilsonian project. However, just as in the case of the Vietnam catastrophe, the discomfort is proving to be only temporary. The marvelous sway of “idealism” is reasserting itself.

This point is brought out by the reaction of politicians and pundits to the Libya affair. To be sure, the neo-cons are not happy. According to the hawkish Senators McCain and Graham, Obama’s approach was too timid: "[We] regret that this success was so long in coming due to the failure of the United States to employ the full weight of our air power."

That aggressive approach reflects the old (Iraq) model. Yet our latter-day Wilsonians--those of the liberal stripe--take a different tack, among them Fareed Zakaria: “[T]he Libya intervention is so significant precisely because it did not follow the traditional pattern of U.S.-led interventions. Indeed, it launched a new era in U.S. foreign policy." That is a frightening prospect. In other words, as long as we can whomp up some indigenous rebellion and get some other foreign powers to take the (apparent) lead, even as we egg them on and provide the cash, then the US is set to pursue world domination for the foreseeable future. See Zakaria’s opinion piece in this week’s Time Magazine.

Michael O’Hanlon holds a similar view: "Obama can point to Libya now as a signature example of how to lead multilaterally [sic], encourage others to do more and avoid the Hobson's choice of doing everything ourselves or retreating into defeatism or isolationism."

As the saying goes, a little bit of sugar makes the pill go down. Yet this is a pill we should not be taking.

UPDATE (Aug. 27, 2011). There is more evidence of the prevalence of this troubling analysis. I quote from Josh Rogin in foreignpolicy.com.

[QUOTATION]

This week's toppling of the Qaddafi regime in Libya shows that the Obama administration's multilateral and light-footprint approach to regime change is more effective than the troop-heavy occupation-style approach used by the George W. Bush administration in Iraq and Afghanistan, a top White House official told Foreign Policy today in a wide-ranging interview.

"The fact that it is Libyans marching into Tripoli not only provides a basis of legitimacy for this but also will provide contrast to situations when the foreign government is the occupier," said Ben Rhodes, deputy national security advisor for communications, in an exclusive interview on Wednesday with Foreign Policy. "While there will be huge challenges ahead, one of the positive aspects here is that the Libyans are the ones who are undertaking the regime change and the ones leading the transition."

Despite criticism from Congress and elsewhere, President Barack Obama's strategy for the military intervention in Libya will not only result in a better outcome in Libya but also will form the basis of Obama's preferred model for any future military interventions, Rhodes said.

"There are two principles that the president stressed at the outset [of the Libya intervention] that have borne out in our approach. The first is that we believe that it's far more legitimate and effective for regime change to be pursued by an indigenous political movement than by the United States or foreign powers," said Rhodes. "Secondly, we put an emphasis on burden sharing, so that the U.S. wasn't bearing the brunt of the burden and so that you had not just international support for the effort, but also meaningful international contributions."

Rhodes said that the United States is not going to be able to replicate the exact same approach to intervention in other countries, but identified the two core principles of relying on indigenous forces and burden sharing as "characteristics of how the president approaches foreign policy and military intervention."

END OF QUOTE

The Twenty-Three Enigma

2011-08-24T06:14:00.000-07:00

In my investigations here and elsewhere I have sometimes addressed special numbers, such as the Biblical 40 and 666.

A more mysterious number is 23. As far as I can tell, this preoccupation stems mainly from the eccentric Berlin physician Wilhelm Fliess (1858-1928), who for a time exercised an important influence on Sigmund Freud.

Fliess developed several idiosyncratic theories, such as reflex nasal neuroses, postulating a connection between the nose and the genitals. This is in fact an older idea, as illustrated in the folk belief that one can determine the size of man’s penis by checking out the nose.

This theory played a notorious role in the case of Emma Eckstein, a patient referred to Fliess by Freud in 1895. Fliess sought to cure her of a tendency to premenstrual depression by anesthetizing her nasal mucosa with cocaine, followed by nasal surgery. The treatment turned into disaster because in concluding the operation the doctor neglected to remove some surgical gauze, causing chronic bleeding. Nonetheless Freud chose to back up his colleague, ignoring Eckstein’s complaints.

Together with the Viennese writer Otto Weininger, Fliess ranks as an early advocate of universal bisexuality.

Fliess was also a believer in vital periodicity, the forerunner of the today’s popular concepts of biorhythms. By tracing illnesses, the outbreak of fevers, and deaths back to birth. Fliess became convinced that two rhythms, one of 23 days and the other of 28 days, were fundamental. The latter number, which tends to be connected with the female gender, clearly stems from the menstrual cycle. It is not clear where the postulate of the 23-day (masculine) periodicity came from, though Fliess was interested in astrology together with some abstruse mathematical theories. In keeping with the theory of bisexuality, both cycles figure importantly in the life of every human being.

Adding the two figures together, Fliess also predicted Freud's death in or around the age of 51. Somewhat shaken by this prognosis, Freud nonetheless lived to be 83 years old. While Fliess’s life-cycle theories enjoy some popularity today, it seems that there is no independent evidence to support the 23-day cycle. Yet it remains mysteriously popular.

Evidently unaware of Fliess’s work, the science-fiction writer Robert Anton Wilson held that William S. Burroughs was the first person to focus on the number 23. In an article in Fortean Times, Wilson related the following story: “I first heard of the 23 enigma from William S Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, Nova Express, etc. According to Burroughs, he had known a certain Captain Clark, around 1960 in Tangier, who once bragged that he had been sailing 23 years without an accident. That very day, Clark’s ship had an accident that killed him and everybody else aboard. Furthermore, while Burroughs was pondering this crude example of the irony of the gods that evening, a bulletin on the radio announced the crash of an airliner in Florida. The pilot was another captain Clark and the flight was Flight 23."

During the 1930s Burroughs was briefly a medical student in Vienna. There he could have picked up Fliess's speculation, forgetting the source when he later recycled the enigmatic number.

At all events, in 1967 Burroughs published a short story entitled "23 Skidoo." In fact the expression "23 skidoo" goes back to the early 1920s, when it meant "it's time to leave while the getting is good." It has been traced in newspapers as early as 1906.

The number figures prominently in The Illuminatus Trilogy by Wilson and Robert Shea. In his book Challenge of Chance, Arthur Koestler also devoted some attention to it.

Skeptics suggest that, as with most numerological claims, the enigma can be viewed as an example of apophenia (the tendency to detect meaningful patterns in random data), selection bias, and confirmation bias. In interviews, Wilson acknowledged the self-fulfilling nature of the enigma, noting that when one start looking for something one tends to find it--provided that “sufficient cleverness” is deployed.

As poetic justice would have it, the preoccupation with the number 23 has returned to the apparent land of its birth. The 1998 German film "23," starring August Diehl as the hacker Karl Koch, portrays the real-life story of computer hackers inspired by Wilson's Illuminatus Trilogy. In addition, the German band Welle: Erdball referenced the 23 enigma in their song "C=64/23."

The 2007 American film "The Number 23," starring Jim Carrey, tells the story of a man who becomes obsessed with the number 23 as a result of reading a book of the same title that seems to be about his own life. The industrial music group Throbbing Gristle recounted the meeting of Burroughs and Clark, together with the significance of the number 23, in the ballad "The Old Man Smiled."

NOTE. If memory serves, there were originally 23 monumental statues of the Old Kingdom Egyptian pharaoh Khafra (builder of the second pyramid at Giza) in his funerary temple there. Only one of these survives (it is now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo), but the existence of the others is attested by the bases, which subsist. Sometimes it is surmised that there was a 24th element, perhaps an altar, to fill out the sequence in accordance with the hours of the day. However, it may be that the number 23 had a special significance for the ancient Egyptians that has eluded us so far.

Philosophy: does it matter?

2011-08-22T06:13:00.000-07:00

I miss many things about my colloquies with my late 'net friend Stephen Heersinck. His older views are still available at gayspecies.blogspot.com, but alas no dialogue is possible now.

Stephen had had extensive training in the field of analytic philosophy, and one of the matters we used to argue about was the value of that current of thought--and indeed any form of academic philosophy. I took the negative position, having been repeatedly disappointed over the years in my quest to find any enlightenment in what passes for contemporary philosophy. Obviously, such figures as Plato, Aristotle, and Kant are different, but their day is long past, alas.

Now this thread has been taken up by Stanley Fish, the maverick professor of English and Law, in a series in the Opiniator section of the NY Times online. Fish recognizes that philosophical reflection may keep the brain limber because it offers a mental workout. Yet he holds that it is inconsequential because it does not deliver answers to any of life's most important questions, In these matters philosophical arguments are generally marshaled only post quem, in an effort to justify conclusions previously attained by other means,

I will not try to summarize his arguments further, though perhaps this tidbit will help.

Stanley Fish:

"Philosophy is fun; it can be a good mental workout; its formulations sometimes display an aesthetically pleasing elegance. I’m just denying to philosophy one of the claims made for it - that its conclusions dictate or generate non-philosophical behavior ..." (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/08/does-philosophy-matter-part-two/#more-102109)

Some discussion has been elicited, in the comments sections after the pieces, and from Paul Boghossian who points (Scribd) to David Velleman's dissent.

I'm sorry that I can't supply a full set of URL pointers, but the pieces should be fairly easy to find.

Dame Frances Yates

2011-08-20T11:43:00.000-07:00

I was privileged to enjoy a very extended period of graduate education in such major intellectual centers as New York, London, and Rome. This idyll (as it now strikes me) lasted from 1956 to 1969, years of comparative tranquility in the world--certainly in relation to the convulsions that came after.

A lot of what I did was self-education conducted in major libraries. Over the years I had a number of impressive professors, whose high standards still seem to me a beacon of integrity. Sometimes, though, I think that the teachers who influenced me most were people with whom I did not formally study. Two of these figures (to whom I will return later) were Karl Popper and Meyer Schapiro Yet this piece is devoted to a third figure, Frances Yates.

After I went to London in 1963, I found it profitable to spend as much time as possible in the serene setting of the Warburg Institute. The Institute had been founded in Hamburg, Germany in the 1920s by the independent scholar Aby Warburg, who died in 1929. After the rise of the Nazis, Warburg’s successors managed to transfer the Institute, with its precious books, to England, where it was attached to the University of London. The stated purpose of the Warburg Institute was the study of the classical tradition. In practice, this meant an interdisciplinary approach to a whole range of cultural artifacts and survivals. (Because the organization issued a periodical together with the Courtauld Institute in London's West End, it is sometimes thought to have been concerned with art history; yet except for the director Ernst Gombrich, the professors and scholars there were generally not art historians. They were usually concerned with texts.)

How pleasant it was to stroll each morning from my modest digs to leafy Woburn Square where the Institute was ensconced! The building was located just north of the British Museum. Nearby was Dillon’s, then one of the finest bookstores in the world. There were plenty of pleasant spots to have lunch and tea, and other adventurous students to talk to.

Before going to London I knew, by reputation, the names of a number of luminaries at the Warburg Institute. But I had never heard of Frances Yates. In addition, her discipline seemed outlandish. The Hermetic Tradition, what the heck was that?

First, who was Yates? Dame Frances Amelia Yates DBE (1899-1981) was born in Portsmouth, Hampshire. Yates' father, a devout Anglican, was a naval engineer who began working in the shipyards as a teenager and supervised the construction of British warships in the years leading up to World War I. Although one of her older sisters attended Girton College, Cambridge, like many independent women scholars, Frances was educated at home by her mother, yet attended Birkenhead High School for some time.

During her Warburg years, she published frequently. Probably her signature books were the trio of Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964), The Art of Memory (1966), and The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (1972). The first was her breakthrough work. With the publication of her Bruno book she transformed Renaissance historiography. In it Yates revealed the hermeticism with which the Renaissance was, in her view, thoroughly and quintessentially imbued. In its heyday, this trend reinvigorated the strands of mysticism, magic, and gnosticism of late antiquity that survived the Middle Ages. Challenging the conventional wisdom of historians, Yates held that the itinerant Catholic priest Giordano Bruno was executed in Rome in 1600 for espousing hermetic ideas, and not for his affirmation of the heliocentric principle.

Yates’ central insight, if one can sum if up in a few words, is that the Western tradition that emerged in full flower in early modern Europe was characterized by a vital fusion of reason and unreason. Reason provides critical context, allowing us to sort out concepts that seem valid from others that must be set aside. For its part, however, speculative thought offers an indispensable store of stimulus. It is the caffeine of knowledge. This speculative vein took concrete form in the hermetic or occult tradition.

The two trends were often united in a single individual. For example, Sir Isaac Newton, when he was not developing the fundamental principles of modern physics, expended much energy on alchemy and on working out obscure aspects of Biblical chronology.

These findings indicate that the achievement of what we nowadays term knowledge was not reached by a straight-line progress from one (true) discovery to another, but by a complex interplay between the “normal” and the hermetic. Through her studies of the hermetic tradition, Yates uncovered a whole hidden dimension of European intellectual history. (The term “hermetic,” by the way, derives from Hermes Trismegistus, a legendary Egyptian sage of antiquity.)

Somewhat oddly, perhaps, Yates’ achievement has been compared to that of Michel Foucault, who has become portentously famous. Of the two, I prefer Yates.

Some commentators assert that Yates founded a paradigm, or gave out a grand narrative--the so-called Yates paradigm (sometimes termed the Yates Thesis). As such, her work has not gone without challenge. Her ideas are contested freely. One scholar who has addressed these questions is Wouter Hanegraaff,, who is serves as professor of History of Hermetic Philosophy and related currents at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and is also president of the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism (ESSWE). Hanegraaff acknowledges Yates as the first major scholar to treat Renaissance hermeticism, together with its offshoot Rosicrucianism, as a coherent aspect of European culture. He pinpoints a fascinating paradox, that of autonomous esotericism helping give birth to the scientific mentality that was to disown its own parent. There is some support for an intermediary position that holds that there was no unitary esoteric tradition, a notion that is only tenable on a selective reading of the evidence. The arguments surrounding this questioning of Yates include Lodovico Lazzarelli as not included; and the rival views of Antoine Faivre, who has proposed a clearer definition of esotericism.

Hanegraaff has further argued that the reception of the work of Yates was colored by the Zeitgeist. I fact, the 1960s, when her work made its first impact, saw the rise of all sorts of New Age trends. This was the era, to put it in a nutshell, when all sorts of people would ask, on first introduction, “what’s your sign?”

Hanegraaff further argues that essentialist rather than nominalist use of the very term "esotericism" has vitiated succeeding work. In his view, the Yates paradigm flourished in the 1970s but fell by the wayside in the 1980s. This view strikes me as too restrictive, for the influence of Frances Yates lives on.

NOTE. For biographical information, one should consult the monograph entitled Frances Yates and the Hermetic Tradition by Marjorie G. Jones (2008). A good many years ago E. H. Gombrich published a life of Aby Warburg. A kind of latter-day successor to the Warburg Institute, in published form, is Anthony Grafton et al., eds., The Classsical Tradition, Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2010.

Mental health break

2011-08-17T07:46:00.000-07:00

I know that I should resist temptation, but what can I say: it's the middle of August! This from the ever-acute borowitzreport.com.

ARIZONA (The Borowitz Report) – In a fledgling campaign that has already produced more than its share of gaffes, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn) today confused her ass with a hole in the ground during a campaign swing through Arizona.

Speaking to a group of supporters in Phoenix, Rep. Bachmann raised eyebrows when she said, “It’s great to be here in Arizona, the home of my ass.”

After her comment was greeted with confused murmurs from the crowd, Rep. Bachmann quickly added, “Oh wait, did I say my ass? I meant the Grand Canyon.”

Being unable to tell her ass from a hole in the ground, especially a prominent one such as the Grand Canyon, is only one of many challenges facing Rep. Bachmann in her quest for the Presidency, according to political science professor Davis Logsdon of the University of Minnesota.

“Michele Bachmann is a staunch believer in the theory of Intelligent Design,” he said. “However, Intelligent Design cannot explain Michele Bachmann.”

But Dr. Logsdon added that Rep. Bachmann remains an attractive candidate, especially for those Republican voters who find former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin “too cerebral.”

“When Sarah Palin looks at Michele Bachmann, she must feel the way the Jonas Brothers feel about Justin Bieber,” he said.

Poetry, the dismal art

2011-08-16T05:16:00.000-07:00

As a teenager I aspired for a time to become a poet. Eventually, I decided that my ear was not good enough, and I was not prepared to endure the life of poverty that this career choice almost inevitably entailed.

Still, based on this interest, I have checked in from time to time on current poetry production. The most discouraging feature is its formal poverty: no rhyme, rhythm, imagery, or intertexuality: just indifferent prose with the lines chopped off.

Of course there is content of a sort, but most of it counts as "confessional," that is, the airing of tedious personal experience, usually in the service of some grievance or other. The high priestess of this trend was of course the late Sylvia Plath. Plath's life was indeed tragic, but that fact doesn't make her verse exemplary or even interesting.

Then there is the plague of popular culture, as seen in the trend sometimes known as camp: "Lana Turner Has Collapsed!" That last gem is by a leading gay poet, Frank O'Hara, but the fact that he was gay does not reconcile me to his junk verse.

I am not alone in espousing these negative views.

Responding to the latest poet-laureate appointment, that of the pedestrian Philip Levine, Anis Shivani has some blunt, but appropriate words (huffingtonpost.com for 8/13):

"The truth about American poetry is that it is in very bad shape. The professional poetry establishment has taken care to mark serious criticism coming its way as sour grapes, but the quality of poetry being produced by American poets regularly awarded the highest prizes in the land and recognized as the equals of past masters is not meant to last this pathetic moment of self-absorption and lassitude.

"One reads Sharon Olds, Jorie Graham, Louise Glück, Philip Levine, and their camp followers to come away diminished, as a reader and as a human being. Their very project is to participate--as the front guard of a regressive political elite--in the annihilation of common decency at all levels. Their poetry is garish, troublingly content-free, indecorous, and emotionless. Readers are smart not to read this trash."

The writer goes on--but you get the point.

Of cell phones and flash mobs

2011-08-14T09:12:00.000-07:00

I am not a fan of cell phones. Four years ago when I had to leave the apartment for extensive remodeling, I got one, but discarded it almost as soon as service on my land line was restored. Today like many other folks on the “wrong” side of the digital divide, I walk the city streets in dismay. I am disconcerted by the fetish-like attachment young people show towards the devices. Constantly yapping into them about nothing much at all, they seem desperate to convey the message: “See I’m not a loser; I have FRIENDS.”

Of course, there are exceptions. Two people I know have serious medical conditions, and require the cell phone in case of necessity when they are out of their homes. Significantly, these people are not cell-phone addicts, but use the instruments only when there is good reason to do so.

I do give cell phones credit for one thing: they have helped to cut down on street crime. When a mugging is threatened, either the victim or a good Samaritan standing by can call the police. The criminals seem to know this. But now they are adapting, as I will explain.

A flash mob is a group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual and sometimes seemingly pointless collective act for a brief time, then disperse. These actions started as harmless pranks, reviving perhaps the long-dormant spirit of Dada.

Reputedly, the first flash mobs were organized in Manhattan in 2003 by Bill Wasik, a senior editor of Harper's Magazine. On June 3, 2003, som 130 people converged upon the ninth-floor rug department of Macy’s, gathering around an expensive carpet. Anyone approached by a sales assistant was advised to say that the gatherers lived together in a warehouse on the outskirts of New York City, that they were shopping for a "love rug, and that they made all their purchase decisions as a group. Subsequently, 200 people flooded the lobby and mezzanine of the Hyatt Hotel engaging in synchronized applause for about 15 seconds, and a shoe boutique in SoHo was invaded by participants pretending to be tourists on a bus trip.

Ostensibly, this and other such events were designed to target conformity, but it has been observed that they also exhibit conformity, since the participants are acting according to a script devised by the convener. Flash mobs have also been hailed as a form of performance art. The resemblance to political demonstrations is only superficial, since there is no underlying agenda of social change.

About two years ago, however, the flash mob phenomenon morphed into something else: groups of young people, in numbers of twenty or more, would suddenly rush into a convenience store or other business and grab things, leaving quickly before they could be apprehended. In other cases, the mobs, usually consisting of people of color would attack white people.

Because of the racial element, the US media has been slow to cover these events. Not long ago, however, the outrage at the Wisconsin state fair in Milwaukee were too big to ignore. White people were simply attacked at random. The authorities seem reluctant to label the event a hate crime, though if it had been white people beating up blacks, there would have been no such hesitation.

For some time Philadelphia has been a major scene of these criminal outbreaks. Now, wisely, Michael Nutter, the city’s black mayor, has denounced them and imposed a curfew.

This sinister metamorphosis of the flash-mob phenomenon provides the immediate background of the outbreaks in London and other English cities where, once again, the gatherings were coordinated by the so-called social media. Here is one typical postings from Blackberry: "Bare SHOPS are gonna get smashed up so come get some (free stuff!!!)." Another read: "If you're down for making money, we're about to go hard in east London."

It seems that there are issues of ethnicity in the British events, but it is not simple black-and-white ones. Instead, there is interethnic tension, with properties owned by South Asians, who are resented because of their relative prosperity, often being targets. Some white people have also been seen among the looters.

Nonetheless, the events cast a harsh light on the British interpretation of multiculturalism, which has encouraged ethnic minorities to evolve separately, sometimes under the influence of extremist spokespeople who sow anger and disunity.

To be sure, this is not an original observation on my part. In his recent commentary, prime minister David Cameron denounced thirty years of multiculturalism in Britain. He asserted that multiculturalism was incubating extremist ideology. More specifically, it was contributing to home-grown Islamic jihadism. He said,” We have failed to provide a vision of society [to young Muslims] to which they feel they want to belong. We have even tolerated segregated communities behaving in ways that run counter to our values. All this leaves some young Muslims feeling rootless. And the search for something to belong to and believe in can lead them to extremist ideology.”

Cameron is not alone in his strictures on multiculturalism and its failure to accommodate Muslims. In October 2010, Angela Merkel the German Chancellor, unequivocally declared: “The approach of saying, ‘Well, let’s just go for a multicultural society, let’s coexist and enjoy each other,’ this very approach has failed, absolutely failed.”

Not everyone will assent to these harsh remarks. Still, it is hard to deny that in Europe multiculturalism has not succeeded in delivering on the promises of its proponents. They envisaged that it would protect minority communities from the intolerance and discrimination perpetrated by society, while at the same time fostering a healthy sense of group identity.

In principle, multiculturalism is supposed to reflect respect for diversity and pluralism, ostensibly key elements of a secular society. Certainly, combating discrimination and opposing unequal treatment under the law were worthy efforts. Yet as time passed, left-leaning and liberal thinkers sought to extend the boundaries of pluralism, pressing for disadvantaged groups to be granted greater opportunities to enhance their religious and cultural identity in all aspects of societal life. In short the policy promoted separatism. Yet instead of reconciling the minority groups to society by recognizing their grievances, this approach served only to alienate them.

In Britain this trend has been traced to some seemingly persuasive remarks uttered by the politician Roy Jenkins in 1966. He said, “I do not think we need in this country a ‘melting pot’ which will turn everybody out in a common mould, as one of a series of carbon copies of someone’s misplaced vision of the stereotyped Englishman… I define integration therefore, not as a flattening process of assimilation but as equal opportunity, coupled with cultural diversity, in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance.”

This became known as Jenkins formula. Policy makers adopted it to establish guidelines and laws for multiculturalism. In the course of the next forty years, this interpretation of multiculturalism seeped into almost every aspect of British public life. Yet it was tough going, for subsequently relations between the host and immigrant communities rapidly deteriorated. While many resist this conclusion, clearly there is a need to examine the wisdom and practicality of multiculturalism, British style. As a panacea for social cohesion, the approach has clearly failed.

Islam in particular does not subscribe to West’s notion of pluralism. Islam stipulates that life, honor, blood, property, belief, race, and mental functioning are to be protected and fostered by the Believing community. In such matters, Islam does not recognize individual rights: the community (ummah) is always paramount.

It follows that pluralism (or multiculturalism) cannot flourish if it is rejected by one of the major beneficiary groups. Thus there is a sad irony in the fact that Muslims were among the victims in the recent British riots.

New word

2011-08-07T09:53:00.000-07:00

This morning I learned a new word: redology. Redology (simplified Chinese: 红学; traditional Chinese: 紅學; pinyin: hóng xué) is the systematic study of the enormous novel. the Dream of the Red Chamber, ascribed to Cao Xueqin.

According to Chinese scholars, there are four major branches of intensive research in redology, focusing on the Seventeen Debates, the Nine Public Cases, the Four Mysteries, and the Three Dead Knots (seemingly insoluble conundrums). Consult the Wikipedia article for further details.

This work, the Dream or the Red Chamber, ranks as one of the Four Great Classical Novels (Chinese: 四大名著; pinyin: sì dà míng zhù) of Chinese literature. Dating from the Ming and Qing dynasties, they are well known to most Chinese readers.

In chronological order, they are:

Water Margin (Chinese: 《水浒传》; pinyin: shuǐ hǔ zhuàn) (14th century);

Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Chinese: 《三国演义》; pinyin: sān guó yǎn yì) (14th century)

Journey to the West (Chinese: 《西游记》; pinyin: xī yóu jì) (16th century)

Dream of the Red Chamber (Chinese: 《红楼梦》; pinyin: hóng lóu mèng) (18th century)

A fifth major work. the Jin Ping Mei, or Plum in the Golden Vase, clearly belongs in this company; however, it has encountered some official disapproval because of its explicit sexual scenes.

My library contains translations of all five. However, I confess that, because of their intricacies, I have only been able to get all the way through Water Margin, which is an outright adventure tale.

Agnosticism

2011-08-05T09:59:00.000-07:00

It is sometimes said that atheism can never become really popular. Well, never say never. And in fact atheism has been popular in some places abroad. Millions of aging Communists in France and Italy were atheists, and so they remain.

In commenting on this subject earlier, I noted that I was an agnostic rather than an atheist. Many cling to the idea that an agnostic is just a closet atheist, someone who is afraid to "come right out" with his/her true beliefs. This is a common misperception. In fact, in its refusal to make any particular affirmation in the God matter, agnosticism finds itself arrayed against both theism and atheism.

My own conviction is that all truth, or just about all, is asymptotic, that is to say a matter of probability. The only exceptions are statements that belong to the realm of purely deductive or a priori assertions, such as 2 plus 2 equaling 4. Even cosmological constants, such as the speed of light, might not be true in a parallel universe.

As regards the god(s) hypothesis, I think it extremely unlikely that there is a God who is a vengeful, arbitrary, dyspeptic old man who holds court somewhere in the sky, surrounded by a gang of enforcers he calls his "angels." But there are other concepts that are less improbable. Some rest on what has been termed the fine-tuned universe, that is, the idea that the conditions that foster life can only occur when certain universal physical constants obtain. These constants lie within a very narrow range, so that if any of them were only slightly different the universe would be not be conducive to the establishment and development of matter, astronomical structures, elemental diversity, or life as it is presently understood.

This imperative is not accepted by all scientists. Some of them point out that in alternative universes other constants might prevail, permitting the emergence of forms of life that we cannot imagine. Even so, though, the concordance of life-fostering elements is uncanny, since even one defection from the ensemble would cause the whole mechanism to collapse.

A few creationists and proponents of the Intelligent Design movement have seized on the concept as offering support for their views. It certainly does not. However, fine-tuning might be consistent with some sort of panentheism, that it, the idea that the universe is pervaded by some sort of stabilizing force. Whether this force, if it exists, should be called "God" or not is obviously a judgment call.

I return to the main theme. On the whole, it would seem that there is not a lot to be said about agnosticism, arguably a selling point since it allows plenty of time to reflect on other matters of more pressing concern. However, I learned from "Agnosticism: A Very Short Introduction" by Robin Le Poidevin (Oxford, 2010) that there is more to be said about it than many think. Professor Poidevin is a "strong agnostic," which means (among other things) that he holds that the attitude of skepticism evident in agnosticism in the narrow sense should be extended across the board. As I indicated, one way of doing this is to seek to assess truth-value in terms of probability. For most people, though, such principled dedication is too austere. They require Answers, so that they can get on with the rest of their lives. For this reason, I fear that agnosticism is destined to remain confined to fairly narrow circles, figuring chiefly as part of the rarefied tool kit of some highly educated individuals, most of them ensconced in academia. By contrast, atheism (as we noted in a previous post) does command a certain popular appeal, as manifested in summer camps, book-club meetings and other social gatherings, parodic rituals, and so forth.

UPDATE. I reproduce portions of some pertinent remarks by the Muslim scholar Reza Aslan, an excerpt from a forthcoming book. Where I part company is in his suggestion that the similarity of certain concepts, such as the Hindu prana, the Chinese ch'i, the Hebrew ruah, and the Christian Holy Spirit, offers cross-cultural confirmation of some objective significance of religion. They may only represent a universal tendency to superstition, as seen in such beliefs as ghosts and the evil eye. As for Paul Tillich's "Ultimate Concern," that has always struck me as a cop out, a kind of fig leaf for unbelief.

Here is Aslan:

"One cold spring day in London, as I crossed the bustling square at Piccadilly Circus, I looked left instead of right (a typical American tourist) and was nearly run down by a careening double-decker bus with a flash of letters emblazoned along its side:

THERE'S PROBABLY NO GOD. NOW STOP WORRYING AND ENJOY YOUR LIFE.

"The slogan is now ubiquitous and not only in London. When I first saw it I laughed, amused that atheists in the UK were miming propaganda techniques perfected by evangelical groups in the US, whose billboards dot the American landscape ("Having truth decay? Brush up on your Bible!"). I likely would have thought no more of it had not a friend informed me that the driving force behind the London bus ads was none other than the dean of the so-called "new atheists"--Darwin's Rottweiler, himself--Richard Dawkins. . . .

"There is, as has often been noted, something peculiarly evangelistic about what has been termed the new atheist movement. The new atheists have their own special interest groups and ad campaigns. They even have their own holiday (International Blasphemy Day). It is no exaggeration to describe the movement popularized by the likes of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens as a new and particularly zealous form of fundamentalism--an atheist fundamentalism. The parallels with religious fundamentalism are obvious and startling: the conviction that they are in sole possession of truth (scientific or otherwise), the troubling lack of tolerance for the views of their critics (Dawkins has compared creationists to Holocaust deniers [and child molesters--WRD]), the insistence on a literalist reading of scripture (more literalist, in fact, than one finds among most religious fundamentalists), the simplistic reductionism of the religious phenomenon, and, perhaps most bizarrely, their overwhelming sense of siege: the belief that they have been oppressed and marginalized by Western societies and are just not going to take it anymore. This is not the philosophical atheism of Feuerbach or Marx, Schopenhauerm or Nietzsche. . . . Neither is it the scientific agnosticism of Thomas Huxley or Herbert Spencer. . . .

"The principal error of the new atheists lies in their inability to understand religion outside of its simplistic, exoteric, and absolutist connotations. Indeed, the most prominent characteristic of the new atheism--and what most differentiates it from traditional atheism--is its utter lack of literacy in the subject (religion) it is so desperate to refute. After all, religion is as much a discipline to be studied as it is an expression of faith. (I do not write books about, say, biology because I am not a biologist.) Religion, however it is defined, is occupied with transcendence--by which I mean that which lies beyond the manifest world and towards which consciousness is oriented--and transcendence necessarily encompasses certain theological connotations with which one ought to be familiar to properly critique belief in a god. One should, for example, be cognizant of how the human experience of transcendence has been expressed in the material world through historically dependent symbols and metaphors. One should be able to recognize the diverse ways in which the universal recognition of human contingency, finitude, and material existence has become formalized through ecclesiastical institutions and dogmatic formulae. One should become acquainted with the unmistakable patterns--call them modalities (Rudolph Otto), paradigmatic gestures (Mircea Eliade), spiritual dimensions (Ninian Smart), or archetypes (Carl Jung)--that recur in the myths and rituals of nearly all religious traditions and throughout all of recorded history. Even if one insists on reducing humanity's enduring religious impulse to causal definitions, dismissing the experience of transcendence as nothing more than an anthropological (e.g. Edward Tylor or Max Mueller), sociological (think Robertson Smith or Emile Durkheim), or even psychological phenomenon (a la Sigmund Freud, who attempted to locate the religious impulse deep within the individual psyche, as though it were a mental disorder that could be cured through proper psychoanalysis), one should at the very least have a sense of what the term "God" means.

"Of course, positing the existence of a transcendent reality that exists beyond our material experiences does not necessarily imply the existence of a Divine Personality, or God. (In some ways, the idea of God is merely the personal affirmation of the transcendent experience.) But what if did? What if one viewed the recurring patterns of religious phenomena that so many diverse cultures and civilizations--separated by immeasurable time and distance--seem to have shared as evidence of an active, engaging, transcendent presence (what Muslims call the Universal Spirit, Hindus call prana, Taoists call chi'i, Jews call ruah, and Christians call the Holy Spirit) that underlies creation, that, in fact, impels creation? Is such a possibility any more hypothetical than say, superstring theory or the notion of the multiverse? Then again, maybe the patterns of religious phenomenon signify nothing. Maybe they indicate little more than a common desire among all peoples to answer similar questions of "Ultimate Concern," to use the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich's famous phrase. The point is that, like any researcher or critic, like any scientist, I'm open to possibilities.

"The new atheists will say that religion is not just wrong but evil, as if religion has a monopoly on radicalism and violence; if one is to blame religion for acts of violence carried out in religion's name then one must also blame nationalism for fascism, socialism for Nazism, communism for Stalinism, even science for eugenics. The new atheists claim that people of faith are not just misguided but stupid--the stock response of any absolutist. Some argue that the religious impulse is merely the result of chemicals in the brain, as though understanding the mechanism by which the body experiences transcendence delegitimizes the experience (every experience is the result of chemical reactions). What the new atheists do not do, and what makes them so much like the religious fundamentalists they abhor, is admit that all metaphysical claims--be they about the possibility of a transcendent presence in the universe or the birth of the incarnate God on earth--are ultimately unknowable and, perhaps, beyond the purview of science. That may not be a slogan easily pasted on the side of a bus. But it is the hallmark of the scientific intellect."

WRD: That conclusion, unknowability, yields agnosticism, not theism.

Zen: Italian style and US style

2011-08-04T19:11:00.000-07:00

On several late nights I have watched (on PBS television) the BBC-originated series "Zen." This has nothing to do with the venerable Sino-Japanese religious philosophy, but focuses on a contemporary Italian detective named Aurelio Zen. Zen is an old Venetian surname, but its Venetian scion Aurelio is posted to the prosecutor’s office in Rome.

With English actor Rufus Sewell in the title role, the television series is based on a series of novels by the late British crime writer Michael Dibdin. Cynical, devious, and shrewd, Aurelio Zen is a kind of Lt. Columbo without the mumbling. The TV series features numerous moody views of Rome at night, evocative of the early Federico Fellini. What the series is best at, though, is in revealing the labyrinth of the Italian bureaucracy, with its many links to crime, big business, and who knows what other centers of power. There are only three 90-minute episodes so far, but more may be coming.

During my years in Rome, some fifty years ago, I was fortunate not to have too many run-ins with the bureaucracy. Friends assured me that conflicts could usually be resolved with a discrete bribe. While I was there, though, I heard an interesting story. In the late 1930s Mussolini’s regime planned for a World’s Fair to take place in Rome in 1942. Of course World War II interrupted this implementation of this scheme, though a new residential quarter, the EUR, arose at the site in the southwestern part of the city.

Reports had it that the Commission to plan the 1942 event continued to meet well into the 1960s, and perhaps beyond. After all, the commissioners reasoned, why should a good thing be abandoned just because its original purpose has lapsed?

Frauds of this kind lie at the heart of Italy’s problems today. For a while the inertia and nepotism hobbling the government could be counterbalanced by the dynamism of the business sector. Public squalor was held in check by private efficiency. But no longer,it seems. Hence the fate of that unhappy country, whose troubles are unlikely to cease with the departure of the buffoonish Berlusconi.

Are we in these states, though, in a position to throw stones? I thought of the 1942 commission when I heard of the tenacious survival of the comically misnamed “Essential Air Service” program, which maintains passenger service at a series of small airports that are completely unnecessary--except of course that they lie within the districts of powerful Congressmembers. On an average Monday at the Bradford Regional Airport in rural northwestern Pennsylvania, six passengers are flying in on each of the three Continental Connection flights. In the airports overall, it is estimated that it requires $3700 in subsidy for each departure.

As part of the current FAA wrangle, the House of Representatives voted to dismantle this absurdity. Yet until recently the Senate refused to go along. Now apparently, Senate majority leader Harry Reid has agreed to the dismantling--provided that the service be immediately restored by Cabinet order. Dracula lives!

The amount of money is small, but when one multiplies such idiocy by a hundred-fold (probably much more) the situation is much more serious. It seems that there is no such thing as a sunset law; these things will go on forever.

This is how empires stumble towards their end.

Catastrophe averted?

2011-08-02T06:44:00.000-07:00

In these pages I rarely offer commentary on current events. It seems to me that our culture is obsessed with present-mindedness. Instead, I try to offer a historical perspective.

Still, as a citizen, and indeed one whose pension arrangements are tied to the economy, I cannot help noticing certain things in the grim present.

It seems that with the incipient passage in the Senate of the bill raising the debt ceiling (and ostensibly including radical measures about the economy) we have dodged the bullet. Only temporarily I fear, for when one looks past the smoke and mirrors, the new legislation simply sets the stage for a continuation of the profligate policies that have brought us to this pass.

How's that again? Doesn't the legislation shred the safety net, destroying the hopes of tens of millions of the aspiring and disadvantaged? Well, I would agree about the shredding of the hopes part, but the bill will do very little to achieve the needed fiscal reform.

Following a long-established form of chicanery, the savings are mostly "backloaded"; they are to occur in the out years. During the first year only $21 billion dollars will be saved, if that; even less in the following year. The remainder of the supposed 917 billion would have to be approved by successive Congresses. Given the mood of the electorate to "throw the bums out," the composition of the next House of Representatives will probably be very different from the present one; it can simply decline to approve the ambitious frugalista agenda.

Increases in revenue are desperately needed. These are fervently opposed by the Tea Partyites and their dupes, but also, more covertly by the left, which believes in the mirage of "growing the economy." Alas, the unemployment rate is not likely to come down soon, maybe ever because so many of the jobs have gone to Asia, gone for good.

If the absurd Bush tax cuts were simply allowed to disappear en bloc next year, a lot would be accomplished. However, Obama has already muddied those waters by saying that only the taxes on the rich should be restored. The thing can only be done if it is all or nothing, and that means a positive utilization of the crippling powers of governmental grid-lock.

Another pie-in-the-sky provision is reduction in military spending. A little later, when we get to that juncture, it will be found that "for pressing reasons" of national security we cannot do that. The real reason of course is that the military-industrial complex is ensconced in too many congressional districts.

In short, very little has changed--or is likely to change. We will continue spending beyond our means, and our economy will continue to fall behind that of other, more dynamic countries.

I will probably get lynched for saying this, but I believe that in some ultimate sense the Tea Party is right. We cannot just keep putting money on the national credit card, promising that we will pay our bills in the "out years." That is what the English call the never-never.

Puzzling realignments

2011-07-29T03:53:00.000-07:00

In June of 1967 I was living in England when the Six Day War broke out between Israel and Egypt. The Israeli forces quickly prevailed.

At that time the BBC took its cameras into an old-fashioned Tory club, one that had a "restricted" membership, meaning that no Jews need apply. As the Israeli victory had become unmistakable, the reporter expected gloom to prevail among the members, but instead they were whooping it up. When asked why, they exclaimed: "We're winning, we're winning!" (What do you mean by "we" I asked myself?) At all events, the reason for the jubilation seemed to be that dislike of the Arabs was intense and, with many old British Forces types present, there was admiration for the military spirit and discipline of the IDF.

As it happened, this shift turned out to be the harbinger of a far-reaching realignment on the international right. In France Marine Le Pen, head of the National Front, professes admiration for the state of Israel, while in Alaska Governor Palin displayed the Israeli flag. This historic shift has gone hand in hand with a growing conservatism in the Israeli citizenship as well.

What I do not understand is the contrasting realignment in the international left, where Muslims have become poster children. This despite such horrors as the subjugation of women and the persecution of homosexuals. Any criticism of Islam on this and other well-founded grounds is immediately denounced as "Islamophobia."

Vagaries of "Christianism"

2011-07-27T05:50:00.000-07:00

At one time, the term “Christianism” was synonymous with “Christianity” and “Christendom.” In recent times it has fallen out of use. After 9/11, however, Christianism was redefined in parallel to “Islamism,” standing over against Islam in the proper sense. The latter term, we are told, serves to differentiate “good,” mainstream Muslims from “bad” fanatical extremists.

Along similar lines, Christianism is supposed to be the dangerous side of Christianity--a distortion really--that ostensibly contrasts with the more authentic version found in the Gospels. It is significant that the journalist Andrew Sullivan, a practicing Catholic, has been one of the main proponents of the distinction between C1 and C2. On June 1, 2003 he wrote: “I have a new term for those on the fringes of the religious right who have used the Gospels to perpetuate their own aspirations for power, control and oppression: Christianists. They are as anathema to true Christians as the Islamists are to true Islam." Subsequently, the term was picked up by several liberal bloggers. Sullivan expanded on his concept in a Time Magazine piece “My Problem with Christianism” (May 7, 2006).

For me, by the way, the adjective “true” always sends up a red flag. Somehow, it is always one’s own party (in Sullivan’s case, liberal Christianity) that is true, that of its opponents false.

At all events, Sullivan’s original definition emphasizes striving for power over others. In practice, however, the label also seems to connote doctrinal rigidity--religious fundamentalism in short.

Be this as it may, the original Sullivanian concept would be better described as “Dominionism.” This is the tendency is the tendency among some politically active conservative Christians to seek influence or control over the civil government through political action, especially in the United States. The trend is also known as subjectionism. The aim is either a nation governed by Christians, or a nation governed by a conservative Christian understanding of biblical law.

In his recent Dish postings, Sullivan has sought to apply the Christianism label to Anders Breivik. This does not seem helpful, as Breivik shows no particular devotion to conservative Christian theology or the behavioral restrictivism associated with it. Instead, the Norwegian killer seems to see Christianity as a bulwark of white nationalism. The overall context is his perception of the clash of civilizations. There is also a certain romantic neo-medievalism in his idealization of the Templar Order.

Speculations about Breivik

2011-07-25T06:03:00.000-07:00

We still know too little about the motivations and associations of Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian mass murderer. Yet this limitation does not prevent speculations from appearing.

Today's NY Times has (on the front page) an article by Scott Shane seeking to implicate US antijihadist websites in the atrocities in Norway. This claim amounts to guilt by association, and is especially dubious when it stems from quarters that keep telling us that the violence of "Muslim extremists" has nothing to do with mainstream Islam.

We must be alert to another form of guilt by association. In all frankness, Breivik's persona has a gay aura. He has resisted dating, and is closely attached to his mother. To be sure he has criticized gay activism, and he may be nonpracticing. Reputedly, however, he was photographed seven years ago dancing at a gay pride parade.

A uniform fetishist, Breivik has a particular attachment to the Knights Templar, which he calls an “international Christian military order,” fighting against “Islamic suppression.” As the Norwegian killer must have known, Philip IV of France accused the Templars of sodomitical practices. Beginning in 1307 he hunted them down, tortured them, and executed them at the stake.

None of these assertions offers any conclusive proof. Yet if there is any truth in the gay angle we may expect it to be exploited in an unpleasant way.

In fact, a somewhat mysterious site aangirfan.blogspot.com/2011/07/breivik-thailand-minnesota-gay.html has already declared "Most Nazis would appear to be macho gay."

This slur has been circulating for some time. Traceable to the Roehm affair in early 1930s Germany (and even earlier in the stereotype of "le vice allemand"), it was given a certain theoretical formulation in a little book by Samuel Igra "Germany's National Vice" (1945). This screed has pretty much vanished from sight; and good riddance.

Yet fifty years later this particular homophobic meme ("the Nazis were gay") resurfaced in the book "The Pink Swastika" by Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams. An enlarged version of this tendentious compilation is available on the Internet. It is rubbish, but some have been taken in by it.

It is to be hoped that efforts to overgeneralize from the Breivik case can be turned back. Time will tell.

PS, See the observations by the gay conservative writer Bruce Bawer (who resides in Norway) in today's Wall Street Journal. He was quoted 22 times in Breivik's vast manuscript. Bawer seems to think that the association will harm the antijihadist cause, which he supports.

Can't-Face-it-book

2011-07-23T13:38:00.000-07:00

I am definitely on the wrong side of the digital divide, as you can easily surmise from the no-frills aspect of these postings. I do not tweet, and for a long time I resisted joining Facebook. But a few months ago I yielded to temptation on that front.

I chose my F-b friends carefully. I like to think that they are among the nicest, most astute, most articulate individuals around. Certainly their collective IQ must be astonishing. Yet what happens when they post on that Book>

Some regale others with such facts as having just had a refreshing shower or being on vacation in Upper Sheboygan Falls or some such exciting place. Others mention some delicious food item they have recently cooked up. They generally do not give the recipe, and in any event one inevitably feels left out. I suppose that one could ask for a dinner invitation, but I can't just drop everything and dash off to Toronto or San Francisco, much as I would like to.

Then there are those who seem to assume that one never opens a newspaper or watches the TV news. In the last few days several have noted the courageous action of Wendi Deng in intervening to help her scoundrel husband Rupert Murdoch. Maybe I should offer to send my own partner to take lessons in the martial arts. But honestly, y'all, I saw Wendi's action IN REAL TIME on MSNBC.

The last sentence brings up something that is not too common with my lot, thank goodness, and that is writing everything either in capitals or lower case.

Well, I needn't go on: most of you are familiar with these shenanigans. Facebook just does not, for the most part, bring out the best in people. For that reason, I only check my account about once a week, and that is too much.

I have to wonder how long this enterprise can last.

Monotheism, its changing fortunes

2011-07-21T05:20:00.000-07:00

For a long time it has been the conventional wisdom that the evolution of world religions clearly shows that monotheism was an advance over earlier polytheistic systems, Naturally, this view has appealed to adherents of the major Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Yet even those without a stake in such particularist approaches could point to the “Dawn of Conscience” in ancient Egypt, culminating in the monotheism of the pharaoh Akhnaten in the fourteenth century BCE.

Often overlooked was the fact that polytheism has not simply disappeared, but remains a defining feature of Hinduism, professed by 950 million people today, or some 13 percent of the world’s population. Such is the pull of the conventional wisdom, however, that some Indologists detect a primordial monotheism in the foundational Vedic documents, a “purity” from which, ostensibly, later Hinduism diverged.

In this larger perspective, then, polytheism was either a primitive, superseded concept. or an atavistic reversion--which amounts to the same thing. The evolutionary superiority of monotheism was thus affirmed, somewhat grudgingly it must be conceded by secularists.

As I have pointed out elsewhere, recent scholarship has detected a disturbing nexus between monotheism, on the one hand, and violence and intolerance, on the other. This is part of what Jan Assmann calls the “Mosaic exception.” Significantly, the conjunction of the three factors did not start with the ancient Israelites, but is already present in the very first model of monotheism, the Aten worship promulgated by Akhnaten.

Now a new charge has been brought against monotheism: that it has led to the widely lamented modern loss of meaning and helped to foster nihilism. Such, it would appear, is the message of a new book by two prestigious philosophers written for a popular audience. The book is “"All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age" by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly. To be sure, the formidable Gary Wills trashed the book in his notorious review in the New York Review of Books. Still, continuing discussion suggests that perhaps it cannot be dismissed so easily.

Here is the book's thesis in a nutshell: "The world used to be in its various forms, a world of sacred, shining things. The shining things now seem far away. This book is intended to bring them close once more. [. . .] Anyone who wants to lure back the shining things, to uncover the wonder we were once capable of experiencing, and to reveal a world that sometimes calls forth such a mood; anyone who is done with indecision and waiting, with expressionlessness and lostness and sadness and angst, and who is ready for whatever it is that comes next; anyone with hope instead of despair, or anyone with despair that they would like to leave behind, can find something worthwhile in the pages ahead. Or at least that is what we intend.”

While the authors particularly admire ancient Greece, they do not delude themselves with the vain hope of bringing back to life such deities as Ares and Aphrodite. They are concerned with something more general, perhaps ineffable--a mood, or attunement that opens one to a sacred dimension that once may have been understood as, and represented by a god or goddess. As some of the more skeptical Greeks themselves suggested, Ares may be understood as shorthand for military or aggressive propensity, and Aphrodite as erotic sensibility.

The authors believe that we have lost the exciting possibilities they detect in Homer's polytheism (and elsewhere in the "shining" realm). As a result people now have a "gut-level sadness," and they are capable only of leading flattened-down and meaningless lives. Our age is one that is threatened by a pervasive nihilism.

The implication is that monotheism is culpable because it has closed off our access to the shining world that our ancestors once experienced. We must find our way back to ecstasy. Still, there is ecstasy and ecstasy. The crowds manipulated by Hitler experienced ecstasy of a sort, but that is clearly not wanted.

Several questions intrude. Is it really clear that the modern world is pervaded by nihilism? Such figures as Martin Luther King and the Dalai Lama do not seem to have been hobbled by this failing. Secondly, can ancient Greece (even supplemented by Dante and, curiously, Melville) really provide redemptive models? As we have noted above, the pagan gods can only be resuscitated in the enervated form of emotional registers and concepts--and not as the deities that were so palpably real to Homer and his successors.

There have been earlier efforts at recovery of the sensibility of paganism. One such was the hermetic syncretism of the Renaissance, best represented by the Florentine philosopher Marsilio Ficino. Then, three hundred years later, there was the “aesthetic paganism” of such German romantics as Friedrich Schiller and Friedrich Hoelderlin.

Such attempts are indeed worthy. But can they be emulated in today’s world of texting, the Internet, and all the other electronic modalities that surround us?

Grayling's folly

2011-07-18T06:15:00.000-07:00

As a teenager I conceived the idea that I was an atheist. This was not much of an accomplishment, as my parents were atheists too. Their atheism was grounded in a far-left political movement, which I came to reject. And so, feeling the need for some independent rationale for my antireligious views, I sent away for a packet of atheist literature (long since lost, I fear). Among the trouvailles that came in the mail was a stirring hymn: “Onward, Atheist Soldiers.” This ditty follows closely the text written by Sabine Baring-Gould in 1865, and the music composed by Sir Arthur Sullivan in 1871.

I laughed out loud.

Like an old-fashioned photographic negative, all too often atheism seemed just a blanket reversal of theism. It was parasitic, without it seemed to me any ability to generate distinctive thought patterns of its own. Then what about, some will say, thinkers of the calibre of Friedrich Nietzsche? Well, Nietzsche was the son of a pastor, and much of what he says about God has this secondary, parasitic character I noted. Besides, Nietzsche clung to remnants of classical paganism, which was scarcely characterized by any uniform rejection of the gods. Atheism should forbid the belief in gods (plural) as well as in God. And Nietzsche strongly identified with Dionysus.

The composer Frederick Delius honored Nietzsche with his “Mass of Life,” a work of some merit. Yet today’s atheist summer camps seem much less elevated in tone. Some of them feature rites of debaptism, as recorded by one visitor to such an event in Westerville, Ohio in 2008. The ceremony began with some words from the Acting President of American Atheists, Frank Zindler: “Do you agree that the magical potency of today’s ceremony is exactly equal to the magical efficacy of ceremonial baptism with dihydrogen monoxide, and do you agree that the power of all magical ceremonies is nonexistent?” Everyone responded with a booming “Amen!” No baptismal pool was need. All that was required was a blow dryer — in this case, the Blow Dryer of Reason. Then the newly dechristened individuals adjourned to a table to partake of atheist communion wafers, some made of peanut butter. Not clear was what one might do to desecrate this host.

Apparently, a good time was had by all. By comparison I fear that I am not a fun person. Elsewhere I have subjected the scriptures of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam to a searching and detailed analysis (abrahamicalia.blogspot.com). Suffice it to say that I have found them wanting. But this experience has not made me an atheist once more. If anything, atheism is sustained, all too often, by a self-righteous sense of certainty that parallels the dogmatism of the Abrahamic religions themselves. For this reason perhaps it should be regarded as the Fourth Abrahamic Faith.

Far better to adopt agnosticism, as indeed I have. Since we do not know for sure whether god(s) exist or not, why not leave it at that? One can then pass on to other subjects, where there is a better chance of achieving some certainty.

I was reminded of these reflections when I chanced in a book store on a weighty tome by the British philosopher and atheist A. C. Grayling: “The Good Book: A Humanist Bible.” In some respects, atheism is a big tent, and some who so describe themselves have lamented the lack of a definitive statement of belief. Grayling seeks to address that concern. More particularly, the question is this: is atheism simply a negation of theism; or is it, rather, a broader philosophy addressing key matters of ethics, the pursuit of happiness, and world view?

Grayling has adopted the latter course. But he has sought to pursue it in a peculiar manner, producing a kind of scissors-and-paste job juxtaposing “gems” from various traditions, rewritten in a ponderous pseudo-Scriptural style. As one reviewer harshly remarks, the result is “a cheesy imitation of the Bible. . . . The passages feel hollow and trite and are every bit as tedious to read as the Bible.” The items are even numbered in the manner of the King James version. There is no footnoting to indicate the sources of Grayling's purloinings.

As regards content, Grayling assimilates to atheism political views that are personal and in no way required by rejection of belief in God. There is nothing incompatible with atheism in being an anarchist or libertarian. But Grayling will have none of this; he is an outright statist. Note these passages from “The Lawgiver,” Chapter 2:

"3. For people cannot act against the authorities without danger to the state, though their feelings and judgement may be at variance therewith.
...
6. For instance, supposing a person shows that a law is repugnant to reason, and should be repealed;
7. If he submits his opinion to the judgement of those who, alone, have the right of making and repealing laws,
8. And meanwhile acts in nowise contrary to that law, he has deserved well of the state, and has behaved as a good citizen should;
9. But if he accuses the authorities of injustice, and stirs up the people against them,
10. Or seditiously strives to abrogate the law without their consent, he is merely an agitator and rebel."

A. C. Grayling is the author of a score of books, many of them, apparently, exhibiting the same self-regarding certainty as his “humanist” writings, of which “The Good Book” is one.

Grayling’s cornerstone principle is something he calls “human flourishing.” On several occasions I had the opportunity of discussing h.f. with my lately deceased friend “Gay Species” (Stephen Heersinck) of San Francisco, who was an advocate. In vain did I point out that “human flourishing” simply repackages Aristotle’s concept of eudaimonia. While he was not a conventional devotee of the Twelve Olympians, there is no doubt that Aristotle was a theist (of the unitarian variety). The very term “eudaimonia” contains within it the noun “daimon,” a supernatural being. Thus the origins of this virtue are not merely the outcome of human reflection, however sustained, but represent a gift bestowed by some external power, one greater than ourselves. It is not a product of unaided reason tout court.

I miss Stephen almost every day. What a pity he is not here to argue with me. Fortunately his website, gayspecies.blogspot.com, is still up and running. There you will find further discussion of the criterion of human flourishing.

PS. Why do I put the term “humanist” in quotation marks? Properly, this designation should be reserved for the learned Italian movement of the Renaissance, where such figures as Ficino and Pompanazzi were not atheists, but clung to a kind of religious syncretism, much influenced by the legendary Hermes Trismegistus.

Genuine atheism did not come along until ca. 1700 with the precursors of Baron d’Holbach in France.

UPDATE (July 24): Courtesy of Andrew Sullivan's Dish site, I reproduce the following astute comments from Joseph T. Lapp:

" Even most religious people will agree that the Bible is not literally true in all its detail. The general atheist position appears to be an assertion about the fundamentalist God. So what? Everyone thinks fundamentalists are off their rocker. It's my experience that most Americans these days believe in more amorphous, less tangible forms [of] God - forms that I find hard to argue with because little is claimed with certainty, or because the fuzzy beliefs are compatible with the world I perceive, even if they wouldn't survive Occam's Razor (which only selects pragmatic theories, not truth).

" In my opinion, many of these modern amorphous, if contradictory, visions of God are potentially compatible with the universe I see. I don't find them useful, but I have no basis for concluding their falsehood, and who knows, one of these visions might possibly have some element of truth in it. It's for this reason that I prefer to call myself an agnostic. I find that most atheist can't allow themselves to acknowledge that any notion that anyone calls "God" could have any chance of harboring truth."

ADDITIONAL NOTE (August 7)

Despite its awkwardness, the following term has gained some (limited) currency. Ignosticism or igtheism [ugh-theism?] posits that every other theological position (including agnosticism) assumes too much about the concept of God and many other theological assertions. The word "ignosticism" was coined by Sherwin Wine, a rabbi and a founding figure of Humanistic Judaism.

Ostensibly, it encompassing two related views about the existence of God:

1. Ideally, a coherent definition of God must be presented before the question of the existence of god can be meaningfully discussed. Yet if that definition is unfalsifiable, the ignostic takes the theological noncognitivist position that the question of the existence of God (per that definition) is meaningless. (This view was anticipated many years ago by the British logical positivist A. J. Ayer.) It may be, according to igtheists, that the concept of God itself is not meaningless, yet the term "God" is considered meaningless.

2. The second view is synonymous with theological noncognitivism, and skips the step of first, asking "What is meant by 'God'?" before proclaiming the original question "Does God exist?" as meaningless.

The fact that these distinctions are somewhat hard to grasp accounts for the relative obscurity of the ignostic trend.

At all events, an ignostic maintains that one cannot even say whether he or she is a theist or an atheist until a sufficient definition of theism is put forth.

Ignosticism is not to be confused with apatheism, a position of indifference toward the existence of God. Apatheists may regard the statement "God exists" as trivial or insignificant; yet they may also see it as meaningful, and perhaps even true.

The Lost Generation--has it been found?

2011-07-16T18:58:00.000-07:00

The French cherish a peculiar expression: le Tout-Paris. By common consent (chez eux), this term does not designate the totality of the inhabitants of the City of Light, but is restricted to a privileged segment of them. Essentially, le Tout-Paris is a collective label for prominent celebrities and persons in the public eye.

These are what we sometimes call the bold-face personalities, as distinct from us ordinary folk.

I thought of this expression the other day when I saw Woody Allen’s new filmic bonbon, “Midnight in Paris.” This is strictly a Tout-Paris for an Anglo-Saxon audience, since Ernest Hemingway, the Fitzgeralds, Cole Porter, Josephine Baker, Man Ray, Gertrude Stein, and Pablo Picasso would not really have made the grade, since they were foreigners.

In the main part of the movie, Gil Pender, a nerdish Hollywood writer played by Owen Wilson, realizes his fantasies in Paris by being transported each night back to the ‘twenties to meet the company just mentioned. In between there are deadly contemporary cameos of a grumpy American businessman (Gil's prospective father-in-law), who hates the French, and a pretentious college professor, who loves them. The pairing implies, sensibly enough, that charting a middle course between the extremes of francophobia and francomania is best. The main part of the film is lots of fun. However, the movie's beginning and ending are alike somewhat embarrassing--a series of picture postcards of famous Parisian sites at the outset, and a further name-dropping trip back to the Belle Epoque of the 1890s at the end.

At any rate, all this brought back memories. Already in high school (1949-52) I had become disillusioned with American hucksterism and shallowness, and longed to move to Paris. That city, and France as a whole, I somehow felt, had preserved their cultural heritage and commitments undefiled. I taught myself to read French, and even today I commonly sequester myself with the classics of that language, absorbing them with pleasure without a dictionary. In addition, my interest meshed with my attachment to the literary avant-garde (I aspired to be a poet). The two fascinations came together, of course, in the cynosure of the Lost Generation of the 1920s.

Somewhere in this period of my life I chanced upon a marvelous book “Paris Was Our Mistress” (1947). The author was Samuel Putnam (1892-1950), best known as a translator of Don Quixote. Putnam went to France about 1927, remaining there with his wife and child, until 1934. He relates his encounters with Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Henry Miller, James Joyce, Luigi Pirandello, and many others. He also wrote about artists, especially Picasso, one of my idols. My sense is that Putnam’s book ranks as the unacknowledged template for Allen’s film.

Later, of course, Hemingway was to write his own first-person account, “A Moveable Feast.” Yet I always felt that Putnam had created the definitive Baedeker for us Paris-worshippers. His book is still in print.

PS. The most amusing line in the movie is uttered by Pender, riffing on T. S. Eliot's complaint about the indignity of measuring out one's life in "coffee spoons." Gil changes it to "coke spoons" (not of course the beverage). Too true. In addition, I commend Woody Allen for his forbearance in not mentioning the cliche of Alice B. Toklas' recipe for marijuana brownies (actually hashish fudge).

Biblical Wisdom?

2011-07-15T05:29:00.000-07:00

Recently a number of perceptive reviews by Adam Kirsch have been appearing in the Jewish journal, Tablet (www.tabletmag.com), not to be confused with a Catholic journal with a similar title. One of the latest (July 5), “By the Book,” concerns the (Hebrew) Bible.

Even the irreligious have a sense, however difficult it is to specify, that these venerable writings provide a deposit of ancient wisdom. In my college classes I attempted to give substance to this intuition through works of art. It is not often realized that down to 1800 a majority of significant works of European art were religious in inspiration--even (especially) those produced by the supposedly secular Renaissance. After retiring from regular teaching five years ago, I sought to specify this sense by sorting the wheat from the chaff. Alas, I found that the torrent of chaff engulfs and overwhelms the few sheaves of wheat. The valuable bits include a few Psalms, Job, Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, and some portions of the Gospels.

To be sure, others, even those who are not religious in the fundamentalist sense, find considerably larger tracts of value in Scripture. Moreover, they believe that overall the Bible contains a message that still offers valuable guidance for modern-day ethics and conduct.

A continuing stream of books seeks to ground this intuition in a more particular examination of the ancient texts. The latest of these, as reported by Mr. Kirsch, is “The Bible Now” by Richard Elliott Friedman and Shawna Dolansky (Oxford University Press).

A respected senior scholar, Friedman serves as the Ann and Jay Davis Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Georgia. He is perhaps best known for his “Who Wrote the Bible?,” concerning the Documentary Hypothesis, where he seeks to chart a middle course between traditionalism and modernism. It is fair to say that, as many would-be peacemakers find, his efforts have failed to settle the conflict, pleasing neither side. Still, he deserves credit for the effort. A newcomer, Shawna Dolansky has lately been addressing the issue of feminine elements in the Hebrew Bible.

In their jointly written volume, Friedman and Dolansky seek to explain “what the Bible has to say about the major issues of our time.” Sensibly enough, they place themselves among the ranks of those “who do not believe that the Bible is divinely revealed, [but] turn to the Bible because they believe it contains wisdom—-wisdom that might help anyone, whatever his or her beliefs, make wise decisions about difficult matters.”

Friedman and Dolansky address five current controversial matters: homosexuality, abortion, women’s status, capital punishment, and the earth.

Of particular interest to me is their approach to the antihomosexual passages in Leviticus 18 and 20. The second (Lev. 20:13) is hideously explicit: “And if a man lie with mankind, as with womankind, both of them have committed abomination: they shall surely be put to death: their blood shall be upon them.” To be sure, the prohibition applies only to male homosexuals and not to lesbians, but to those of us who are its target the words are chilling--as they ought to be for every reasonable person.

Regrettably, the treatment offered by Friedman and Dolansky is tortuous in the extreme. Adam Kirsch has done his best to try to follow their argument. Here is the gist of his summary:

"Turning from Israel to Assyria, Egypt, and Greece, Friedman and Dolansky observe that these other Near Eastern societies generally had nothing against homosexual acts per se. They reserved their odium for the passive partner in anal sex, the man who was penetrated. A “Middle Babylonian divination text” instructs that “If a man copulates with his equal from the rear, he becomes the leader among his peers and brothers”; on the other hand, Plutarch writes, “We class those who enjoy the passive part as belonging to the lowest depths of vice.”

“Never mind that these texts were written more than a thousand years apart, in two very different civilizations, neither of which was Israelite. Friedman and Dolansky use them to establish “the wider cultural context” of Leviticus, from which it follows that “what the authors of Leviticus … may be prohibiting is not homosexuality as we would construe the category today but, rather, an act that they understood to rob another man of his social status by feminizing him.” Why, then, does Leviticus, uniquely among ancient Near Eastern law codes, prescribe death for both partners in homosexual acts? Because, Friedman and Dolansky argue, quoting another biblical scholar, Leviticus “emphasizes the equality of all. It does not have the class distinctions that are in the other cultures’ laws.”

“This is a remarkable performance. Before you know it, a law that unambiguously prescribes death for gay men has been turned into an example of latent egalitarianism. Friedman and Dolansky imply that it was not homosexuality the Bible wanted to condemn, but the humiliation of the passive partner. And since we no longer think of consensual sex acts as humiliating, surely the logic of the Bible itself means that homosexuality is no longer culpable: “The prohibition in the Bible applies only so long as male homosexual acts are perceived to be offensive.”

"But wait: Doesn’t Leviticus also say, in Chapter 18, “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind; it is an abomination”? Here too, Friedman and Dolansky have a reassuring response. “The technical term to’ebah,” they write, is usually employed in the Bible not for absolute moral laws, but for cultic taboos: “an act or object that is not a to’ebah can become one, depending on time and circumstances.” Maybe homosexuality was once to’ebah, but “Why do people assume that things relating to God must be absolute and unchanging? Even for a person who believes in God wholeheartedly, why should that person assume that God is never free to change?””

To make a long story short, the authors start with an enlightened, secular view of male same-sex conduct, and then try to square the Biblical injunctions with it. To use the technical language of Biblical criticism, this is not exegesis (that is, the elucidation of the meaning of the texts based on what they actually say) but eisegesis (the injection of meanings into the text that are not there). In all frankness, the result is ludicrous.

An even more telling point is this. If we can reach valid conclusions regarding ethics by applying natural reason alone, the use of the Bible for this purpose is unnecessary and superfluous. Or, to use a legal analogy, Scripture appears only as a supportive witness--and one that is all too often made to perjure itself.

We come back to a conclusion that has long been evident to skeptics. There is no overall “message” of the Scriptures, at least not one that we can respect. Instead, we are confronted with a vast collage of fallible documents, variously quaint, bizarre, horrifying, and pathetic, which are mainly of use in reconstructing the superstitions and belief systems prevalent in backward regions of the Near East a long time ago. In this mass there are a few nuggets--some Psalms, the book of Job, and so forth--but there is no warrant for assuming that that taken as a whole this salmagundi offers any sustained guidance for human beings in the twenty-first century.

Murdoch and his ilk

2011-07-13T05:55:00.000-07:00

Together with many others, I rejoice at the difficulties that Rupert Murdoch is encountering in Britain. No single individual, whatever his politics, should have so much control over the media. I doubt, though, that the standards of British popular journalism, already abysmal when I lived in London in the 1960s. will improve. The other tabloids will continue on their merry way. And new ones will probably spring up to fill the void.

As I say, I have no love for Rupert Murdoch. Still, I must note what I view as a simplistic approach on the part of our intelligentsia, and that is to personalize the presumed forces of darkness. If only, the refrain goes, we could get rid of Roger Ailes, Glenn Beck, and/or the Koch brothers (the names change over time), all would be well and the country could resume the progressive path that is its natural destiny.

This conviction goes together with the much cherished liberal notion that their view is "reality-based," responding only to facts, while the opponents simply obey the dictates of their ideology, Alas, no single political orientation has a monopoly on reality--elements of it are recognized by almost all political factions,

Why then do so many liberals cling to this dogmatic notion that only their view is indubitably correct? There are two factors: 1) their reluctance to engage in give and take with those holding other views, resulting in a preaching-to-the-converted strategy; and 2) the stubborn belief in the inevitability of progress.

Doubtless I will be accused of being a conservative. I am not. But such accusations are all too typical of the mind-set that I am seeking to describe. Adepts of this view, convinced of the rightness of their own convictions, simply find it difficult to understand the motivations and thought processes of those who do not agree with them.
Were they to do so, they would be in a stronger position.

A difficult issue

2011-07-10T08:54:00.000-07:00

During the 1980s, as I prepared for my two major works, Homosexuality: A Research Guide (1987) and the Encyclopedia of Homosexuality (1990), I felt the need to extend my horizons as far as possible. After all, I was attempting to cover the entire range of same-sex love in all times and places. To be sure, mine was inevitably a tentative effort, but (in all modesty) I do not see that it has been surpassed. (See the side bar with my Profile, for electronic versions of these volumes.)

Enough of blowing my own trumpet. Two areas I addressed were ones in which I felt no personal affinity at all: BDSM and pederasty (aka boy love or BL). As long as it involves consenting adults, Bondage and Domination/Sadomasochism present no problem as such. These behaviors are essentially role playing, and seem to offer psychic rewards for participants. That they provide no such rewards for me does not prevent me from acknowledging that they work for others.

The same degree of acceptance is not generally accorded with regard to the other behavior I noted: boy love. Over the years “intergenerational sex,” as it is sometimes euphemistically known. has become more controversial--indeed very controversial.

Occasionally, some Internet piece claims, without any foundation whatever, that I am a pederast. Well, one can say just about anything on the Internet. (It has also been claimed that I have received a MacArthur “genius” award; that I wouldn’t mind--but it is not so either.) Since I have not engaged in any behavior even remotely close to boy love, I do not worry too much about these fantastic sexual allegations.

What I do take seriously, though, are the concerns of several moderate friends, who believe that boy lovers are being unfairly targeted, and even persecuted. The remarks that follow reflect an effort to respond to one of these friends.

With various sites and blogs, the Internet has given a new lease on life to the BL movement--at least up to a point. In this profusion, two themes are prominent: 1) refining BL advocacy arguments (Bruce Rind’s work being the most sophisticated); and 2) injustice collecting regarding punishments that appear to be draconian.

Currently there are many punishments that seem excessive. Moreover, the popular television program, “To Catch a Predator” hosted by the odious Chris Hansen combines entrapment with voyeurism. Such sensationalizing does not foster serious consideration of the issues.

All things considered, though, these injustices do not serve to validate BL, but only to document the excessive zeal of the opponents. Validation would require a massive, overall study of the behavior of BL persons and their partners, a task that is almost impossible for several reasons. These reasons include the understandable secrecy of most BL practitioners, the possibility of legal retribution, and parti pris on both sides.

As regards persecution, comparison may be useful Compared to BLs, a far greater number of people are languishing in prison for drug offenses. It seems though, that through the ruse of medical marijuana, we are making progress in that realm, at least with regard to pot.

Thirty years ago, the BL situation seemed similarly flexible. But now, in 2011, the boy lovers have completely lost the PR war. Notwithstanding that fact, the BL advocates prefer to dwell in an intellectual ghetto, constantly spinning their theories without regard as to how they might be deployed to persuade the public to take a more rational approach. Preaching to the converted, they only seek to persuade each other--not much of a challenge.

One useful step would be to separate pederasty (relations with teenage boys) from pedophilia in the strict sense--but most advocates do not want to do that. All or nothing they say, an intransigence that serves to foster the upshot that nothing it will be. Then there is hope with what may be termed the “Romeo and Julio cases,” where say a 15-year old youth has a relationship with a 17-year old. But the BLs want nothing of that approach either, because they see no immediate benefit for themselves.

The conclusion is blunt. In terms of public perception, the BLers are simply living on another planet. The chances of redemption are very remote. Their current views and behavior are making that outcome extremely unlikely.

Some say that as long as the younger partner is consenting, there should be no problem. Focusing on consent as the central issue seems simplistic. At the time of the Wolfenden Report in 1957 the concept of consent seemed straightforward, at least for adults. Nowadays the issue seems more complicated, even for adults, as when some employee agrees to sleep with his or her employer to keep the job. Technically, I suppose, climbing onto the casting couch is consensual, but is it really?

Doubtless many of the priestly pedophiles and pederasts think that what they were doing is consensual, but the pressures they have been able to bring to bear on impressionable Catholic boys are simply not analyzable in terms of consent.

We often hear that teenagers want and need sex; that point may be granted. But they can have it with each other. Lots of them do, and there is hope for moving to decriminalizing this activity.

A difficult point for both sides--defenders and opponents alike--to acknowledge is that not all BLs are the same. I would posit three basic types. The first group, about a third, are arguably ethical persons, helping their protege intellectually and financially, and seeking to curb bad habits. Then there is an intermediate group of mixed character. The final third, however, are simply rapists of boys according to the "cock has no conscience" principle. The reluctance of BL advocates to concede the existence of the last category--plenty of horrendous examples are known--vitiates their case. They have lots and lots of bad apples, but to hear them talk there are none at all. They are all, we are assured, benignly enrolled in the first category, performing a useful social service. That idealistic claim is simply untrue empirically.

The most salient problem confronting them, it would appear, is the desperate need to improve their image. Yet locked in the cocoon of their own self-serving theories--always "irrefutable" according to their own lights--they cannot seem to grasp this imperative. Until they can bring themselves to address the image issue, they will be beyond help.

Let me put the issue in a nutshell--with this thought experiment. Supposing some billionaire were to offer unlimited funds to a Madison Avenue firm in order to develop a campaign to improve the image of BLs. What tactics would inform that campaign?

That is truly hard to imagine.

Homosexuality and heterosexuality--are they inventions?

2011-07-05T16:14:00.000-07:00

During my high school years (1949-52) I first experienced a powerful attraction to members of my own sex, specifically to a fellow student, Larry S. I felt that this boy, who seemed so perfect, stood on a plane far higher than mine. I knew that for this reason, and because of the societal prohibition of what I soon learned to term “homosexuality,” I would never be able to consummate this attraction, lending the whole matter a tragic intensity. I never sought to disclose my attachment to Larry (who was in several of my classes), and I doubt that he had any inkling of the depths of my feelings. I recently saw a photograph of him, with regular features but otherwise unremarkable in appearance, and I wondered what the fuss had been about in those remote, confusing days. But that was part of the experience: the sheer enslavement to the being of another.

At about this time in my teen years I chanced to read an article in a popular magazine that purveyed the theories of romantic love espoused by Denis de Rougemont. This Swiss scholar held that romantic love was specifically invented by the Troubadour poets in twelfth-century Europe. To be sure, generic love had existed before, probably from the dawn of human history, but it was not the sort of tragic love that I had experienced. Or so I gathered from the article.

In this way I was confronted with a puzzle. To me my yearning was primal, probably biological in origin. My conviction of the primordiality of the feeling was enhanced by my sense that male same-sex love, seemingly accompanied by intense longing of the sort I had experienced, was a prominent feature of ancient Greece. On what authority I do not know, my stepfather opined (with no reference to me) that the behavior had been known way back in ancient Egypt.

How then could my experience be both timeless and specifically anchored to the twelfth century, the era when it had supposedly arisen ex novo?

Later I learned that Denis de Rougemont’s idea was not original, but rested ultimately on the concept of courtly love (amour courtois) expounded by Gaston Paris in the middle of the nineteenth century. In English the idea had been popularized by C.S. Lewis in his book The Allegory of Love (1936). It was left to Peter Dronke in the 1960s to show that romantic love flourished in many cultures prior to it purported invention in twelfth-century Europe. Thus it could scarcely have been a novelty introduced in medieval Europe.

There is something distinctively French about this notion of the idea of the “invention” of some particular concept or cluster of emotions. A familiar example is Philippe Ariès’ claim that childhood was invented in the early modern period in Europe, having been previously unknown. Needless to say, many have challenged this proposal,

Later (1976) Michel Foucault was to indicate (or seem to indicate) that homosexuality did not exist before 1869, when the word was introduced by the Austro-Hungarian writer K. M. Benkert. This notion of the invention of the (modern) homosexual has been much discussed, so that I trust that I may be excused from entering further into the matter here.

More recently we have been treated to the extraordinary claim that heterosexuality was also something time-bound and invented--a development posterior to the purported invention of homosexuality. I refer to the book of Jonathan Ned Katz of 1995, entitled The Invention of Heterosexuality.

Basing himself on research of Manfred Herzer, Katz begins by pointing out, correctly, that the word “heterosexual” was first employed (as far as we know) in a private letter written by K. M. Kertbeny to another scholar, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs. In this letter, dated May 6, 1868, Kerbeny set forth four terms to designate particular forms of sexual expression: 1) monosexual; 2) homosexual; 3) heterosexual; and 4) heterogenit. (Monosexual seems to haver referred to masturbation, while heterogenit applied to human sexual acts with animals.) In his publication of the following year, however, Kertbeny chose to replace “heterosexual” with “normalsexual.”

Normalsexualität," normal sexuality, was the activity of the majority of human beings. standing over against the minority preference, that is, Homosexualität,. In this way, Kertbeny introduced a judgmental coloration that was absent, or at least less prominent in the earlier coinage.

Since only a few persons could have known about these private speculations, Kertbeny did not truly introduce the term "heterosexual" to the German-speaking public--at least not in any meaningful sense. That task was undertaken by the popularizer Gustav Jaeger in 1880, author of Die Entdeckung der Seele. It was Jaeger, later famous for a line of clothing, who consolidated the contrast between heterosexual and homosexual, subsequently adopted by Krafft-Ebing and many others. (Katz does not mention Jaeger.)

For a long time these discussions were conducted in the German language, and writers in English, French, and Italian on the subject of sexual orientation were necessarily dependent on primary works stemming from Central Europe. Knowledge of German was then regarded as essential if one was to secure a medical degree. Yet Katz, who seems to be monolingual, will have none of this. His narrative of the purported invention of heterosexuality is almost exclusively American. In the terms of the era he is seeking to reconstruct, this is a very provincial view at best.

Katz makes much of an entry in Dorland's Medical Dictionary (1901), published in Philadelphia, which characterized heterosexuality as "abnormal or perverted appetite toward the opposite sex." Few seem to have gone along with this interpretation, and in 1934 the Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary, second edition, authoritatively defined "heterosexuality" as a "manifestation of sexual passion for one of the opposite sex; normal sexuality.”

Evidently, Katz is seeking to show that the definition of heterosexuality was at first ambivalent and unstable, only gradually settling into its current meaning. Yet this claim could only be substantiated by tracing the parallel developments in other languages, which Katz declines to do.

As the author of an online work on the semantics of homosexuality (www2.hu-berlin.de/sexology/BIB/Homolexis/main.htm), I take a great interest in words. Yet anyone working with this material must recognize the danger of linguistic determinism, that is the notion that words proliferate without reference to social conditions and evolving behavioral patterns.

There are other reasons for dismissing the claim of the “invention” of heterosexuality as a twentieth-century innovation. In order to clarify this point one must acknowledge that names and concept are two different things, and a single concept can appear under several different verbal designations. In the Symposium, Plato clearly contrasts opposite-sex love with two different forms, male-male sexuality and female-female sexuality. In early modern France devotés of Cythère (the island of Cythera) correspond to what we would term heterosexuals, standing over against the same-sexers, votaries of Sodom(e). Thus the recognition of these contrasts preceded the 1860s by many centuries.

In short there are no good reasons for believing that heterosexuality and homosexuality appeared at some particular point in recent history; as far as we cam tell, they have been with us for a long, long time--certainly since ancient Greece.

What looks likely to linger is this seductive meme of "invention." A friend harshly terms this scholarly penchant "special creationism." In my judgment, most of the sweeping claims of cultural invention are simply that--inventions. Or to put it more bluntly, just-so stories,

NOTE. In a book I have not seen, the French scholar Louis-Georges Tin seeks to trace the origins of heterosexuality back to that very twelfth century that is supposed to have seen the birth of courtly love (L'invention de la culture hétérosexuelle / The invention of heterosexual culture. Paris, Éditions Autrement, 2008, 205 pp.). Tin is best known for his editing of the The Dictionary of Homophobia: A Global History of Gay & Lesbian Experience, recently translated into English.

The twelfth century rides again! One curious feature about the special creationists is that they cannot agree on their dates. Some think that the "modern homosexual" arose only in 1869; others argue for ca. 1700. Katz thinks that heterosexuality started in the twentieth century; Tin that it began eight centuries earlier. The simplest solution is to assume that these phenomena have been around since time immemorial. But that conclusion, unremarkable as it is, would not justify the writing of a whole book. Perhaps the moon is not made of green cheese after all.

Notes on SSM

2011-07-04T04:26:00.000-07:00

The securing of same-sex marriage in New York State has invited various reflections.

The decision effectively doubles the number of potential beneficiaries. A welcome momentum has been added. In my view, however, it is too optimistic to predict that the other states--now forming a rejectionist bloc in the heartland and the South--will fall quickly into line. The resistance seems irrational, since the states that have SSM are serving as laboratories that have demonstrated that the dire predictions of opponents have not come to pass. But the motives of the resisters are not easily swayed by reason.

A kind of impromptu debate has sprung up between the views of Jonathan Rauch and Dan Savage. As far as I know, the two have not engaged in direct debate, but the contrasts are clear enough. Rauch, who is author of the book "Gay Marriage: Why It is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America," holds that the changes mean that "same-sex relationships will continue to move towards both durability and exclusivity." In other words, gay and lesbian unions will start to observe the undeviating fidelity that is so obviously characteristic of heterosexual unions. Except that it is not. This utopian dream of absolute monogamy clashes with well-established biological realities, especially in the human male. It also contrasts with biblical prototypes, such as Abraham and Solomon, where polygamy was the norm.

Dan Savage is a sex columnist who has emerged recently as a real thinker regarding human relationships. His views are profiled in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine. Reflecting on his own experience with his partner of some years, Savage has concluded that a certain amount of straying has in fact ensured the stability of the relationship. As a general rule that seems accurate, though the details may be troublesome to work out.

Much of the current discussion focuses on male-male relationships. However, statistical evidence from other countries that have had same-sex marriage for some years indicates that, proportionately, lesbians are more likely to take advantage of the option than are gay men. Since woman-woman relationships, often involving children, tend to be more stable anyway, the change is unlikely to affect them very much. Except, that is to say, for this result: the heightened sense of self-esteem and recognition that tying the knot will bring.

Gay pride versus gay shame

2011-07-02T08:45:00.000-07:00

June, the month just completed, is Gay and Lesbian Pride Month.

This observance has prompted me to ask a heretical question: why gay pride? As a rule, we speak of pride in terms of some accomplishment, such as finishing law school or restoring an old house. But we generally do not use the expression to refer to something that simply is. For example, I am not proud of being a man or being a septuagenarian: these are just my attributes. To be sure, some say that they are “proud to be an American,” but such a proclamation seems defensive, as if to acknowledge that there are things (such as wars in Afghanistan and Iraq) that do not make us proud.

Perhaps “gay pride” is a way station on a journey to the point where it would no longer needed. Some say that the goal is to become something like left-handed. If one is left-handed one defends one's status and challenges discrimination, but one does not generally proclaim “I am proud to be left-handed.” One is, or should be, proud of one's whole being, and not just of some aspect thereof.

A seeming exception was this year’s Heritage of Pride march in New York City, which did in fact celebrate an accomplishment: the passage of the law authorizing same-sex marriage in our state. However, that is not what is usually meant by gay pride, which is supposed to be an all-enveloping state of bliss based on one’s sexual orientation.

When the term gay pride first became popular after Stonewall (1969) many of us welcomed the slogan as a departure from the self-laceration that been so characteristic of homosexual self-consciousness in the middle of the century. Even homosexual-rights organizations were subject to this insidious form of depreciation. In the early sixties, I remember attending meetings of the Mattachine Society of New York in which shrinks spoke, lecturing us that we must abandon our “immaturity.” In Los Angeles, one gay-rights leader, Don Slater, even defended the right of a restaurant, Barney's Beanery, to display a hateful sign that said FAGOTS (sic) STAY OUT.

At the end of the decade, all that began to change. As Allan Ginsberg remarked to a reporter at the time of Stonewall in 1969, we had lost “that wounded look.”

Despite the dubious epistemological status of the expression gay pride, I think that it is positive on balance.. However, I am not at all enthusiastic about the antonym, "gay shame." Gay Shame is a movement arising from within the GLBTQ constellation that claims to offer a radical alternative to gay mainstreaming. The trend challenges the now-traditional gay- pride events and activities, which are stigmatized as having become increasingly commercialized. The gay-shame movement has found some acceptance among radicals, counter-culture types, and avant-garde artists and performers.

Adherents are wont to attack "queer assimilation," that is to say, acquiescence in what they perceive as oppressive societal structures—-preeminently same-sex marriage. Reputedly, Gay Shame began in 1998 as an annual event in Brooklyn, New York. Held for a number of years at DUMBA, an artists' run collective center, bands such as Three Dollar Bill and Kiki and Herb and speakers such as Eileen Myles, Mattilda aka Matt Bernstein Sycamore and Penny Arcade appeared at the first event, and the evening was documented by Scott Berry and released as the film Gay Shame 98. Swallow Your Pride was a 'zine published by the people involved in planning Gay Shame in New York. The movement later spread to San Francisco, Toronto, London, and Sweden.

In March 2003 an academic conference on the theme was held at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The event disclosed friction between the activists and the academics, reflecting different strategies. The activists claimed that the academics didn't do enough to acknowledge their own power and class privilege, and to be generous in sharing these with the activists.

There have also been annual themed events titled "Gay Shame and Lesbian Weakness" in London, associated with the club night Duckie run by Amy Lame. Comprising performance art and queer-bash make-overs, the 2004 event was also referred to as “The Annual Festival of Homosexual Misery.”

In pondering this strange phenomenon, it is hard not to detect disturbing elements of willful abjection and internalized homophobia. As such, it seems an atavistic regression to the era of “that wounded look.” There is some evidence that the gay-shame trend is subsiding. That outcome is certainly to be hoped for,

As background, here are some notes about the origins of the concept of gay pride itself. The immediate predecessor was the black pride movement that sprang up in the sixties. In his book "Gay Power" (2006) David Eisenbach asserts that the term "gay pride" was introduced by Robert A. Martin and his friends at Columbia's Student Homophile League in 1968, one year before Stonewall. Martin (later known as Stephen Donaldson) was also riffing off the expression "pride of Lions," referring to campus pride in athletic prowess (the Columbia teams were known as "the Lions," hence the annexation of the collective term "pride). L. Craig Schoonaker, founder of a gay student organization at NY City College in early 1969 (a group that evolved into a small NYC coterie known as Homosexuals Intransigent!), claims to have originated the slogan "gay pride" at the time of Stonewall.

However that may be, the next stage seems to have been as follows. Lesbian activist Brenda Howard was one of the organizers of the first Christopher Street Day March in Manhattan (June 28, 1970). For a time, the expression "Christopher Street" was purloined, even in cities like Los Angeles (they used the expression "Christopher Street West March," quite a long street, it seems). At any rate, Howard recognized that the expression Christopher Street was too limiting, even though it correctly pinpointed the origin of all the events at the Stonewall Inn in 1969. She invented the idea of Pride Day, which quickly morphed into Gay Pride Week.

As far as we can now determine, Robert A. Martin, L. Craig Schoonmaker, and Brenda Howard, all New York City residents, are responsible for this terminology. Other cities, in the US and abroad, fell into step later.

In terms of the gay and lesbian movement, the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion marked the beginning of a major quantitative and qualitative change. This phase was known at the time as Gay Liberation. It is in this setting that the expression “gay pride” began to be used. As noted, it is modeled on "black pride." (Compare also the contemporary slogan “gay power,” which is an adaptation of “black power.”)

Nowadays major universities and many colleges have a club or society for students who identify as LGBT. These groups often change their names, due to the rapid evolution of political correctness, and a wish to appear inclusive. One backronym that is currently in common usage spells out PRIDE as "People Rejoicing In Diversity Everywhere." Apt perhaps, but this is a false etymology.

Sometimes the American expression is taken over as such into other languages, but it is usually translated, as in the Spanish “orgullo gay.”

Quotation of the day

2011-06-29T06:48:00.000-07:00

"The 13th-century philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas taught that material things were good in themselves. It is good that there are cobras and garbage cans around the place. This, to be sure, is a hard doctrine to swallow when you come to the existence of Donald Rumsfeld."

This observation is from Terry Eagleton in the New Statesman for June 22. Raised as a Catholic, Eagleton became a Marxist. Now, in his well balanced remarks about religion, he seems to be "deviating toward sense"(as Jonathan Swift put it in a different context).

Victory for same-sex marriage

2011-06-25T07:08:00.000-07:00

As everyone (just about) now knows, last night same-sex marriage became a fact in New York State, where I live. While I am "in a relationship" I don't think that we will take advantage of the new provision. I rejoice though that those who want it will be able to take this step.

It is important to note that even the new provisions do not provide "full marriage." That is to say, many federal benefits, including those pertaining to immigration and social security, are lacking. What needs to be done now is to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act, and then have the federal government extend the federal benefits in the states that have SSM.

Absent a favorable Supreme Court decision, I fear that full gay marriage in all fifty states will be a long time in coming. In fact the SSM-movement may have an unwanted side effect of reinforcing the red state-blue state dichotomy, as most of the red states will continue their rejectionist stance.

During the 1990s I belonged to a discussion group, including a number of thoughtful writers and "boldface" names, which was generally enthusiastic about gay marriage. In fact it was just about all they talked about, making me weary of the whole issue. Some of these advocates fervently backed what amounted to a "social-engineering" measure: it would curb promiscuity among gay men. Various incentives would serve to herd us into the state of monogamous matrimony. This notion offended against my libertarian instincts. SSM should be a way of widening choice and individual options, and not of narrowing them.

More fundamentally, it seemed to me that gay intellectuals like Gabriel Rotello and Jonathan Rauch were seeking to repeal nature, by eliding a fundamental aspect of human males that has deep ecological roots. That is, sexual pluralism. One can urge that people exercise care and discretion, but to propose monogamy for every man is simply not realistic. I realize, of course, that there are individuals like Gary Wills who have had sex with only one woman, their spouse, throughout their lives. As Kinsey showed, however, these people are not common, and their experience must not be decreed for everyone.

Even for those who believe that they are destined to achieve a pair bond with one person, some experience in cohabitation, possibly with several partners in sequence, is of tremendous help in finding out if one is suitable for monogamy.

So I say: two cheers (but no more) for gay marriage.

Some background is appropriate. The first discussions of the possibility and prospects go back to ONE Magazine in the 1950s. That's right, the 1950s. However, the current movement was sparked by the gay lawyer Evan Wolfson, who has received far too little credit. I was delighted to see Wolfson on Chris Matthews last night.

An early recruit to the cause was Andrew Sullivan, for some years a prolific poster on The Dish (now at The Daily Beast). Here are some excepts from his commentary this morning. --

"The fact that New York State has just become the sixth (plus DC) to grant gay citizens the civil right to marry is a BFD ("Big ** Deal"). I say that having observed and participated in this process for two decades.

"It's a BFD because a Republican-led State Senate passed this law. Yes, the partisanship is massively lop-sided, but the conversion of a few Republicans is what will have made this possible. The credit for that goes to one of the most determined, consistent, professional and impassioned campaigns we have ever fought for marriage equality. Going outside traditional Democratic party lobbies to appeal to those on the other side who are open to our arguments was essential. Yes, Tim Gill, take a bow, wherever you are. Bill Smith, you remain my hero. Governor Cuomo, by all accounts was magnificent at the politics and Mayor Bloomberg and critical Republicans and Democrats and all factions and groups in the gay movement - even HRC! - pulled together. That the most passionate opponent was a Democrat and the most powerful were Republicans helps scramble the attempt by the Christianist right to coopt conservatism for their reactionary theology.

"It's a BFD because it also insists on maximal religious liberty for those who conscientiously oppose marriage equality. [I'm not so sure that this compromise was a good idea.-- WRD) A gay rights movement that seeks to restrict any religious freedom is not worthy of the name. And it makes me glad that we largely avoided anything that looks like that strategy, and that last-minute negotiations were flexible enough to strengthen the protections for religious groups, churches, mosques, synagogues and the like. The gay rights movement is about expanding the boundaries of human freedom - and that must include religious freedom if it is to mean anything. We have come such a long way from the 1980s when religious groups were always seen as enemies, rather than as potential allies.

"It's a BFD because the public leadership of this campaign was heterosexual.

"By all accounts, governor Cuomo has been a magnificently crafty, determined, clear and decisive supporter. Mayor Bloomberg, who just lost his beloved mother, also used his influence with Republicans to move the needle. Cuomo's national reputation and potential career in national politics will be enhanced by this - a sign of how radically the political landscape has changed.

"It's a BFD because it doubles the number of Americans with the right to marry the person they love, even if they are gay. That is one hell of a fact on the ground. It will almost certainly help in California. It will reveal even more profoundly that this does not mean the end of civilization, but is, more prosaically, a modest reform to strengthen the family, integrate the marginalized and enlarge our moral universe. And it cannot now be undone." END OF SULLIVAN QUOTATION.

I certainly agree that it is a "modest reform," not the Messianic transformation that Sullivan and some others had been hailing some years ago.

I understand that Governor Cuomo will lead the Pride Parade tomorrow. As the Australians say, Good On Him!

Prescient quote

2011-06-23T07:57:00.000-07:00

After learning of Al Gore's complaint that Obama has been lagging in efforts to combat global warming, I was moved to exhume the following prescient paragraphs written by Walter Mead Russell in The American Prospect last year.

"For better or worse, the global political system isn’t capable of producing the kind of result the global warming activists want. It’s like asking a jellyfish to climb a flight of stairs; you can poke and prod all you want, you can cajole and you can threaten. But you are asking for something that you just can’t get — and at the end of the day, you won’t get it."

[snip]

"The death of global warming (the movement, not the phenomenon) has some important political and cultural consequences in the United States that I’ll be blogging on down the road. . . . The global warming meltdown confirms all the populist suspicions out there about an arrogantly clueless establishment invoking faked ‘science’ to impose cockamamie social mandates on the long-suffering American people, backed by a mainstream media that is totally in the tank. Don’t think this won’t have consequences; we’ll be exploring them together as the days go by."

Russell doesn't doubt that global warming is occurring. Nor do I. But the likelihood that any real steps will be taken to curb it has drastically declined. This debacle has happened for two reasons: 1) overhyping by the green faction; 2) lack of political will.

So it is time to close that chapter, and take up Bjorn Lomborg's advice that we learn to manage global warming, instead of flailing about with futile schemes based delusional prospects of reversing it.

The Nozick controversy

2011-06-23T06:10:00.000-07:00

Together with a small circle of friends here in New York City, I was electrified by reading the book Anarchy, State and Utopia by the Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick (1938-2002). Illuminated by vivid examples (the Wilt Chamberlain one is famous), the book was a sharp defense of the principles of individual liberty. It stood over against the work of another Harvard thinker, John Rawls, so very tedious and overrated.

A few years after reading the book, I was delighted to meet Robert Nozick at a gay conference in Boston. He was not gay, but had come to the event in order to learn. I will never forget his graciousness in responding to some questions I somewhat brashly raised He died prematurely of stomach cancer in 2002.

Just now Nozick’s work has been attacked in a prolix piece by Stephen Metcalf (“The Liberty Scam”; http://www.slate.com/id/2297019/pagenum/all). I am glad to say that this screed has been refuted by a number of writers. I won’t attempt to summarize the arguments here. Just Google Metcalf + Nozick.

Faux gay?

2011-06-18T06:47:00.000-07:00

When I was in college in the 1950s my best friend C. became my mentor in all things gay. Though I outgrew some of the lessons he taught, I remain grateful to this man for taking me under his wing. At all events, C. had belonged to a coterie of nine young college men, who called themselves "the entourage." Marvin, a straight boy, had attached himself to the group, which gave him fellowship and, he felt, a certain sense of identity. But he was never admitted to full membership in the group. Once, C. told me, they all went out for a night on the town. "Here we are," Marvin happily remarked, "ten gay guys together." Then one of the group unkindly corrected him: "No, Marvin, it's nine gay guys."

This was my first introduction to the gay wannabe phenomenon. It has certain affinities with other types of "aspirational identity," as with those who claim, on very slender evidence, to be American Indians. Reportedly, in a decade or so the Indian population of the US has "doubled."

I though of poor Marvin when I read a fascinating piece by the gay journalist Benoit Denizet-Lewis in today's New York Times Magazine (June 19). The story concerns Michael Glatze, who had worked closely with Denizet-Lewis on a publication for gay youth in San Francisco. Since then Glatze (now 36) has become a kind of poster boy for the "ex-gay" movement.

Michael Glatze was born in Olympia, Washington. His mother was a non-denominational Christian and his father was agnostic. When Glatze was 13 his father died of a heart condition; his mother died when he was 19. Glatze earned a B.A. degree at Dartmouth College.

While working at XY Magazine in San Francisco, Glatze met a young man named Ben. The two would remain a couple for 10 years. They later co-founded their own publication, Young Gay America magazine (YGA Mag).

Gradually, though, doubts began to intrude. In 2005, Glatze was quoted by Time Magazine saying "I don't think the gay movement understands the extent to which the next generation just wants to be normal kids. The people who are getting that are the Christian right."

Glatze turned toward Christianity after a health scare due to heart palpitations.

Glatze has written two pieces about his change which appeared in the online media outlet WorldNetDaily. He has garnered media coverage in other publications and blogs, culminating in today's piece by his friend Denizet-Lewis. Glatze is now studying at a Bible college in Wyoming. He asserts that he is now straight.

According to Denizet-Lewis, during the time they worked together Glatze had steeped himself in Queer Theory, internalizing its message of fluidity of identity. It may be, the journalist suggests, that Glatze never was gay, but had convinced himself that he was--not unlike Marvin before.

This explanation may be correct. Yet it is vulnerable to the accusation that it is--if you will--part of the gay party line, which holds that people who claim to be ex-gays either relapse or never were gays in the first place. Quite a few years ago I had a friend, a gay psychotherapist, who offered $10,000 to any person who had truly changed his or her orientation from homosexual to straight. Privately, my friend confided that he would never have to pay up, because he would always insist that the converted individual never had actually been gay; hence no conversion had taken place.

It is, of course, perfectly true that a number of prominent persons in the ex-gay movement have "slipped" on occasion. Some have resumed a gay lifestyle, suggesting that for them the conversion to heterosexuality was superficial--perhaps even faked in order to gain approval or monetary gain. Some "ex-gays" concede that just as alcoholics always remain alcoholics, they will always be gay; they will just be nonpracticing.

I wonder, though, if it would not be too much for the official wing of the gay movement (assuming that this exists) to acknowledge that a few individuals actually have changed in this way.

Certainly, though, it is hard to follow the tortured reasoning this lost sheep, who now claims to have found himself is advancing. In agreement (perhaps) with President Ahmedinajad, Glatze seems to think that there are no homosexuals. We are all heterosexuals, but some of us (adulterers, patrons of prostitutes, same-sexers, and many other categories) foolishly yield to evil impulses. Now it is true that Kinsey thought that the word homosexual should not be used as a noun, but he held the same view regarding the word heterosexual. We are all (even though Kinsey did not use this expression) human sexuals. But Glatze says there is no such thing, only heterosexuals, some of whom are not strong enough to follow the Christian Gospel and refrain from sexual sins. Where though, reading the Bible in the original languages, does it say that we are all heterosexuals?

In a radio interview given last year to the anti-gay crusader Peter LaBarbara, Glatze sought to explain himself in the following terms: "I’ve said before in recent years that the actual culmination of Queer Theory is that there’s no reason why anybody shouldn’t just leave homosexuality and be a heterosexual – if you actually follow it through with the entirety of your logical thinking. But, our logical thinking is stilted by the enemy, who wants us to not think clearly. The Word of God allows you to think clearly.

[snip]

"Gore Vidal, the famous gay guy, you know, the American writer, once said, “there are no homosexuals; there are only homosexual acts.” And, he is echoing the viewpoint of the Queer Theorists that say, “well, sexuality is fluid. Everybody is open to any possibility.” And, of course that echoes 1 Corinthians 10:13 where God says any temptation is common to man."

One thing seems clear. Even in a remote corner of Wyoming Michael Glatze has an unquenchable hunger for attention. The piece in the Times Mag, which seems to be going viral, should please him.

Glatze has archived some of his interviews at michaelglatze.wordpress.com. In German by the way Glatze means "bald spot"; more than a spot, I would say.

PS Apparently the underlying condition can be combated by a Chinese product against hair loss. Its German marketer recommends it in this way: Fabao 101G gegen Glatze und Haarausfall ! Nie wieder Glatze! ... Well said.

UPDATE (June 20). In retrospect I find that in writing this piece I failed to do justice to the broader issues. Of course, there is the personal tragedy (in my view) of a brilliant, charismatic young man who went so far astray.

However, there is a much broader context. Let me go back to my personal history. In my teens I struggled to understand my homosexuality. At the time I accepted the notion that a psychiatrist would be able to make me "convert," that is change my orientation from homosexual to heterosexual. I felt that if I were to come out I would be pressured into undergoing this treatment. I didn't want it. I had two main problems: I had no confidant or support group; and I kept falling in love with unsuitable persons. But I didn't want to stop being gay.

In the fifties and sixties, psychiatry, especially Freudian psychoanalysis, had achieved a pinnacle of prestige in the US. Sometimes gay groups like Mattachine invited psychiatrists to appear at our meetings: they sternly lectured us on overcoming our "immaturity." After 1969 this all changed. A few years after homosexuality was removed from the DSM, the official diagnostic list of mental conditions. It was not a mental illness, and therefore not treatable as such.

Still one might want to change for practical reasons. Many gay men, as is well known, have close friends who are women. Would it not be appropriate to become het and marry one of these worthy people? Of course such a change is not so easily accomplished.

In the seventies we became increasingly aware of individuals, supposedly firmly heterosexualized (often through lengthy and expensive programs of treatment), who "lapsed," resuming their former gay lifestyle. Others reported that they were able to abstain from same-sex relations, but the desire for them persisted, without a comparable heterosexual desire being affirmed. In short the treatment did not succeed in replacing same-sex desire with opposite-sex desire.

Other assumptions were also common in the seventies and after. Even though most of us were willing to acknowledge that, in various forms, bisexuality existed, we still kept to the notion that there was a basic het-homo dualism. It was either-or; in practical terms tertium non datur.

Largely under religious auspices, efforts to convert young men from homosexuality to heterosexuality seem to have increased in recent years. In some cases the family virtually coerces the hapless young person to undergo such brain washing. Critics of the ex-gay movement are right in protesting against these invasive procedures. A friend terms it "soul murder," and he is not far off the mark.

This being said, I can't help wondering whether there is not a real cohort, fairly small in numbers to be sure, who have made the transition to genital and emotional heterosexuality. Why must one reject this possibility a priori?

Well, one could say, how about asking some people to transition in the other direction--from heterosexuality to homosexuality? Why does that never happen?

In fact it did happen--in a certain way. During my activist days I encountered several "political lesbians." Their interpretation of feminism fostered the belief that sleeping with men was abetting the patriarchy. Conversely, by sleeping with women they could affirm and consolidate their sisterhood. Did this behavior cause role strain? I don't know because I lost touch with the women I once knew in this category.

In conclusion, though, it seems dogmatic to insist that beginning perhaps at the age of five sexual orientation is so firmly fixed that it is impossible to change it. I do not find Michael Glatze's path (fideistic Christianity) inspiring. But we need to consider more carefully the possibility that he and a few others have changed for good.