Thursday, November 27, 2014

Athe-ist as Athe-does

Simon Critchley didn’t exactly change my life, but he did solidify a lot of things in my mind that I had been thinking about for a while and hadn’t yet decided upon. I had been reading Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins for a while--and so I certainly didn’t need convincing--but it wasn’t until I read the introduction to Simon Chritchley’s The Book of Dead Philosophers that I fully embraced the idea of atheism. It was a wonderfully liberating moment in my life. After participating in organized Christianity all through high school, and then new age religion for a dozen years or so beginning in my mid-thirties, it was a huge relief to jettison all of the trappings of the supernatural afterlife and embrace the reality of the universe: that there is no god. And there never was. All of those beliefs that Christians so arrogantly call myths are absolutely no different than the stories in their bible and their belief in an imaginary spiritual being. The Greek and Roman gods, the Egyptian gods, the Hindu gods, you name it, the Judeo-Christian god is absolutely no different, just another in a long line of myths to give comfort for those incapable of thinking for themselves.

Of course there’s the facile argument that in choosing to define oneself by saying that something doesn’t exist presupposes its existence, but that argument carries with it the obvious fact that it is not really an argument at all. As author and film critic David Denby once wrote in an entirely different context, “I understand the point of that critique; I admire its wit and its rug-pulling aggressiveness. But I think such remarks are no more than half-truths . . . And anyone who refuses to see this may be refusing to take responsibility for his own intellectual efforts.” My stance on the existence of god is in no way a defining statement of myself any more than people who say they are a dentist or a lawyer are making a statement about the totality of their lives. But there are people for whom their belief in an imaginary deity is a defining statement about their lives. And that, to me, bespeaks a monumental lack of imagination as well as a refusal to take responsibility for their lives. What’s worse is that they want to impose their own belief system upon others in the misguided notion that their fantasy is somehow the only valid reality. What Simon Critchley did for me, in a wonderfully clear and succinct way, was to articulate exactly why they do that.

Critchley begins his introduction by launching right into the reason why so many people have glommed on to the most recent mythologies for the last two millennia, and that’s the fear of death. Actually, he calls it “the overwhelming terror of annihilation.” Though immediately after that he sort of undermines the importance of that phrase by talking about the fear of pain associated with dying or the fear of what’s on the other side. But those seem to be minor points in comparison to the loss of self, the complete “annihilation” of one’s unique consciousness. I remember a story I heard by Wayne Dyer--from back in my New Age days--where he was participating in a guided meditation and everyone was asked to imagine themselves floating above the room, then outside above the building, then above the clouds, and finally looking down at the Earth from space. That’s when the guide drops the bomb and suddenly asks them to imagine the Earth without them on it. It’s a fascinating exercise because it points out the fact that people don’t like to contemplate the end of their own existence.

Critchley then addresses how most people deal with the impending end of their existence in this way: “What we seem to seek is either the transitory consolation of momentary oblivion or a miraculous redemption in the afterlife.” This momentary oblivion can take many forms, from drugs and alcohol to consumerism and sports, or any kind of popular entertainment like TV, movies, or social media, while the belief in redemption in the afterlife is the fairy tale of religion. Critchley quotes Cicero and Montaigne in the alternative to these to methods of avoidance and comes to “an astonishing conclusion: the premeditation of death is nothing less than the forethinking of freedom. Seeking to escape death, then, is to remain unfree and run away from ourselves.” And he ends this idea by stating that, “The denial of death is self-hatred.” Christopher Hitchens used to talk about something similar when discussing the Islamic jihad mentality and associating that denigration of life with the same ideas present in Christianity. In all such thinking, that a better life awaits after death, human life is devalued and can thus be used to rationalize and condone murder in examples like the Crusades, the Inquisition, and others too numerous to list.

Philosophy, then, offers a way out of this desperate deception. By embracing the very nature of our finite selves, we give ourselves the freedom to live and work and think as we choose. Life, physical human existence, becomes our raison d'être, and the cherishing of that life in all its forms becomes a moral imperative that exceeds all of the platitudes of religious hypocrisy ever uttered. Critchley then goes on to examine Socrates in some detail in what is really a second introduction. The death of Socrates in many ways highlights this reaction against free thinking, but the political overtones of the case as well as the man’s eccentricities tend to disguise the more elemental nature of the event, namely that freedom of thought equals freedom of life. All of this leads to the greatest line I have ever heard by a philosopher in the way that it demonstrates the actual thinking of the man. “When a man told him, ‘The Thirty Tyrants have condemned you to death,’ he replied, ‘And nature them.’” It’s a beautiful sentiment that so accurately captures the essence of what it really means to be alive. To live in fear of death, by comparison, is a prison, and the self-denial and diminishment of life that comes from the self-delusion of religion is absolutely tragic.

This leads, quite naturally, to the idea of philosophy as something quite distinct from the acquisition of knowledge. Philosophy does not pretend to know. That, quite ironically, is the domain of those who profess to have faith. Philosophy is the acquisition of wisdom, and to be wise one must not “know” because that is the point at which learning stops--which, again, says a lot about the defenders of faith. “Philosophy begins,” says Critchley, “with the questioning of certainties in the realm of knowledge and the cultivation of a love of wisdom.” What is clear about those who pursue religion as a path to certainty is that they have become so afraid of death that are willing to trade their current lives for that certainty, though it is anything but. And the self-absorption and hypocrisy that necessarily must accompany such a belief is as destructive a force against humanity as any that has ever existed. What I am most thankful for is that this delusion is obvious to those who will open their minds and see the real truth. No more do I have to fear death, and in the process I have embraced actual life in a way I never knew possible before. Atheism: if there is a god, it’s what he’d want us to believe.

Tuesday, November 25, 2014

Edward, Edward

For the first poem in Lionel Trilling’s anthology The Experience of Literature he chose this disturbing Old English ballad, “Edward, Edward,” but it’s easy to see what drew him to include it. The poem has the same kind of startling effect as his first dramatic selection, Oedipus, or the anecdotal story “Appointment in Samara” that he references in his analysis of the play. The poem tells the story of Edward, who goes to his mother with blood on his sword. When he tells her that it is the blood of his hawk, she is immediately suspicious, saying that the hawk’s blood is not that red. So this time Edward changes his story and claims that it is his horse that he’s killed. But mother is not buying this either, as his horse is old and his anguish doesn’t make sense considering that he can get a new horse. Finally, he comes out with the shocking revelation:

          O, I have killed my father dear,
          Mother, mother:
          O, I have killed my father dear,
          Alas! and woe is me, O!

But rather than reacting to her husband’s death, the role of the mother in the poem is more one of his conscience. She begins a series of questions that become ever more disturbing, almost more so than the deed itself.

          And what penance will ye suffer for that?
          My dear son, now tell me, O.
          I’ll set my feet in yonder boat,
          And I’ll fare over the sea, O.

So far, so good, but his choice of exile seems a bit lenient for such a crime. Still, she continues the questioning asking what will happen to his inheritance that he leaves behind, and he says they will have to age into ruins. A more important question inquires as to the fate of his wife and children, but nothing can prepare the reader for the shock of reading that “The world is large, let them beg through life.” Finally, she wants to know what will happen to her and he seems to rightly assess that, “Mother, mother: The curse of hell from me shall you bear.” What this seems to say is that she will be forever associated with the act of her son.

Trilling’s analysis of the poem begins with the two shocking statements, the first being the death of his father, which he accurately assumes that we have been prepared for by “his two prevaricating answers.” The relationship of the noble to his hawk, and then his horse, are increasingly strong and therefore the expectation of something more horrible is realized in the death of his father by his own hand. But as if attempting to replicate the shock in the poem, Trilling goes on to state, “we are wholly unprepared for the second revelation, that he has killed his father at the behest of his mother.” What? From my reading of the poem, nothing of the sort seemed to present itself. But then I realized what I had missed. Though I hadn’t pondered it long, the last line of the poem had made no sense to me. But in re-reading in this light the meaning is suddenly clear.

          The curse of hell from me shall you bear,
          Such counsels you gave to me, O.

Trilling makes a wonderful observation at this point, that the ballad form of the poem, rigid and objective, marches forward despite the horrific revelations within and offers no commentary on the action within. The audience is shocked, but the poem itself never flinches. The characters, however, are not so detached. Edward is clearly sad about his mortal deed, and his mother senses this, inquiring about “Some other evil ye fear.” Once his confession is out, however, the further questions seem to build his hatred to the point where “at last the curse is torn from him” and “it is that much the more terrible because it has been so long held back.” But Trilling also rightly points out that the poem does not tell the “whole story.” The audience doesn’t know what might have motivated the son’s deed or the mother’s suggestion he carry it out. This disparity, he claims, “is strangely pleasurable.” Returning to the idea of form again, Trilling posits that this satisfaction is a result of the “return of the past, which the poem had seemed determined to exclude from its purview.”

The rest of his analysis deals with the ballad form itself. The distinctive aspects in “Edward, Edward” are the repetition of certain phrases, suggestive of the song form of its original recitations, and the question and answer format of the dialogue. Interestingly, he speaks of a trans-Atlantic migration of the song to America and the toning down of the tragedy in the process. The son kills his brother instead of the father, and the mother is not complicit in the murder, sending him away to escape rather than to exile. Again, Trilling is masterful in his understanding of literature and the moral implications of the content, and delivers another tremendous analysis.

Sunday, November 16, 2014

My Kinsman, Major Molineaux

I’ve only read a few stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and none of his novels. “My Kinsman, Major Molineaux” is the first story in Lionel Trilling’s anthology The Experience of Literature and it’s quite fascinating. The key to my interpretation of the story comes right from the title itself. While written in third person it is from a limited point of view, and the way Hawthorne frames his narrative gives it the feel of a first person story. This is perfectly reflected in the title, which also has the effect of putting the reader in the place of identifying with the protagonist, a young country boy named Robin. The boy is eighteen and has come from the country in his father’s old clothes. The story is set during the colonial period in America, well before the Revolution, and yet the independent mindedness of the colonists is already firmly in place. Hawthorne writes a prologue to this effect, that the governors of Massachusetts were an unfortunate lot, disrespected by the people of the colony for their royal affiliation, and disdain of the British government for being weak with their subjects. They were stuck between two ways of thinking and neither was going to give in.

The plot itself is nothing, a simple story of a young man looking for a relative in a small New England village. It’s to Hawthorne’s credit that the prologue doesn’t give away the ending. At least to me it didn’t. I don’t envy those people who are so clever that they always figure out what’s going to happen next, completely destroying their suspension of disbelief. I’ve always been fortunate enough to allow the writer to manipulate me in any way he sees fit, and it makes for a wonderful reading experience. What the story lacks in plot, however, it makes up for in atmosphere, and it’s here that I think Hawthorne is at his best. His descriptions, especially of the night in an era without electric lights, are exhilarating. There is something haunting about characters who seem to be swimming out of the void. “. . . torches were close at hand; but the unsteady brightness of the latter formed a veil which he could not penetrate. The rattling of wheels over the stones sometimes found its way to his ear, and confused traces of a human form appeared at intervals, and then melted into the vivid light.” He also does this with inanimate forms as well, bringing them to eerie life. “Next he endeavored to define the forms of distant objects, starting away with almost ghostly indistinctness, just as his eye appeared to grasp them.”

Trilling views this humble tale as something of a hero’s journey, but to my way of thinking over exaggerates this when he says it “suggests those trials or tests that regularly form part of the initiation rites by which primitive peoples induct the youths of the community into the status of manhood.” That’s a little bit much. The association of this idea with Robin’s immaturity, however, is definitely made clear in the story where he overestimates his own importance. In one instance, having been rebuffed when inquiring about his relative, he thinks, “This is some country representative who has never seen the inside of my kinsman’s door, and lacks the breeding to answer a stranger civilly.” He also dismisses out of hand the idea that some of the lesser homes might be the abode of his rich relative. “. . . he paused, and looked up and down the narrow street, scrutinizing the small and mean wooden buildings, that were scattered on either side. ‘This low hovel cannot be my kinsman’s dwelling,’ thought he, ‘nor yonder old house . . . and truly I see none hereabouts that might be worthy of him.’” What’s interesting is that this leads Trilling to an analytical ambiguity about Hawthorne’s intention in terms of the boy’s transformation, especially about what the audience is supposed to feel when, his innocence lost, Robin decides to return home.

This ambiguity is reflective of a far more important one for the reader, namely, what feeling is supposed to accompany the climax of the story where Robin discovers that Major Molineaux has been tarred and feathered. American readers, Trilling rightly points out, are likely to be on the side of the insurrectionists. At the same time, those meeting out the punishment are not portrayed in a flattering light. “In this train, were wild figures in the Indian dress, and many fantastic shapes without a model, giving the whole march a visionary air, as if a dream had broken forth from some feverish brain . . .” And when meeting the man in charge of the insurrection, he is described as the devil. “One side of the face blazed of an intense red, while the other was black as midnight . . . as if two individual devils, a fiend of fire and a fiend of darkness, had united themselves to form this infernal visage.” All of this calls into question how Hawthorne intended his audience to feel about the treatment of this royal appointee. Trilling says we can never know, but that really seems to be the point. With the author not taking a side it allows readers to form their own opinion.

What is strange is that Trilling says Hawthorne turns Robin against his kinsman by, “being warmly associated with the Major’s tormenters, eventually joining in the hideous laughter of the mob at its victim’s plight.” But nothing of the kind ever happens. Watching the throng as it passes by, with the Major in the wagon, a man from across the street in a window laughs loudly and it becomes infectious as the crowd picks it up and it finally takes hold of Robin himself with his voice becoming the loudest. In the context of the story, however, it is decidedly not the Major that he is laughing at, but at himself and the realization of his own innocence. This is made perfectly clear after the mob moves on and Hawthorne describes him thusly: “Robin started, and withdrew his arm from the stone post, to which he had instinctively clung, while the living stream rolled by him. His cheek was somewhat pale, and his eye not quite so lively as in the earlier part of the evening.” Robin’s horror at witnessing the scene is clear. It’s only when his companion makes a joke after he asks the way back to the ferry that Robin says, “Thanks to you, and to my other friends, I have at last met my kinsman.” And lest there be any mistake as to the sarcasm of that statement, Hawthorne says that he made this statement “rather dryly.” As a result of this misinterpretation, Trilling oversteps again in connecting this behavior with ancient blood rituals.

This mistake also leads Trilling to ask if Robin has gone over to the side of the devil. And this is absolutely not the intent of the story. Nevertheless, it does put Trilling back on the right track when he begins looking at the description of the “devil” that Robin gives to his companion, and his inquiry about the many voices he hears coming down the street. “May not one man have several voices,” his companion inquires, “as well as two complexions?” But this does not speak to any duplicity in Robin as much as it does the duplicitous nature of the act of the mob itself, which I pointed out earlier, seems to be Hawthorne’s purpose. Trilling notes that the leader of the mob “is clad in military dress and bears a drawn sword” and interestingly juxtaposes that with the Major who was also a soldier and “derives his dignity from his military character” but then goes nowhere with it. Instead he moves on to Robin’s companion, suggesting at first that he might be evil as well. Fortunately, he dismisses this and more cogently interprets his suggestion that Robin stay in the village by saying that “he is the better for no longer depending on his [kinsman’s] help.” And yet Trilling can’t help devolving back into his mistaken interpretation that “Robin’s cruel deed of turning upon his kinsman in ridicule was a necessary step in his coming of age.” No, it was Robin’s revelation about his own innocence that accomplished this.

The thing is, this notion doesn’t even make sense to Trilling himself as he remarks offhandedly, “It is a strange idea to contemplate.” Nevertheless, this is an interpretation that he is unable to let go of. So he invokes Freud and heads down a well-trodden path to look at Robin’s laughter as something of an Oedipal act, repudiating his family’s teaching and training in seeing the world for himself, as it really is. But where Trilling sees Robin’s description of leaving home in the first place as turning his back on his upbringing even before he sets out on his trip, that’s not the impression I had. When Hawthorne writes of Robin, “Then he saw them go in at the door; and when Robin would have entered also, the latch tinkled into its place, and he was excluded from his home.” To me this at first seemed like an expulsion, and Trilling takes the Freudian view of Robin’s laughter at the Major as being done to his father in surrogacy. But by the end of the story I became convinced that this was just the opposite. Trilling labels Robin’s leaving as a “virtual expulsion from the family.” After reading the reminiscence again carefully, the reactions of the individual family members take on an entirely different meaning in view of the ending. Robin’s immediate request to return to the ferry at the end of the story implies a return home rather than a rootless exodus into the wilderness and that, once presented with the facts, they would naturally allowed him to remain “home in the bosom of the family.”

Finally Trilling’s reading of the story leads, quite expectedly, to a series of unanswerable questions and an equally unsatisfying conclusion that they “cannot be answered with any assurance that we are responding with precise understanding to what the author means.” To my mind this means that Trilling should undertake a different interpretation so as to be able to answer those questions. I would look at another Hawthorne story, “Young Goodman Brown,” to shore up my analysis. In that story the title character also experiences a loss of innocence when he realizes his Puritan religion is all a lie, and that people can’t be perfect. At this moment of revelation he also experiences a similar laughter at his own naïveté. “Maddened with despair, so that he laughed loud and long, did Goodman Brown grasp his staff and set forth again . . . ‘Ha! ha! ha!’ roared Goodman Brown when the wind laughed at him . . . Think not to frighten me with your devilry . . . Here comes Goodman Brown. You may as well fear him as he fear you.’” And to Trilling’s question as to whether Robin becomes evil himself, that is answered in this story as well. One his innocence is lost, Goodman Brown no longer lives in fear of sin and has become, not a figure of evil, but a man whose eyes are now open to the truth. Hawthorne describes him this way: “In truth, all through the haunted forest there could be nothing more frightful than the figure of Goodman Brown.” Thus, by using another Hawthorne story, it seems that we really can understand Hawthorne’s intent in “Major Molineaux.”

Robin’s journey is one of self-discovery, a loss of innocence, of going from childhood to manhood. In his immature state he imagines himself to be something much grander than he really is. The visit of his father’s cousin, the impressive Major Molinaeux, with his “generous intentions, especially as [Robin] had seemed to be rather the favorite,” imbued the young man with a stature far beyond what he actually possessed. The association in his own mind with his father’s cousin, a man who had “inherited riches, and acquired civil and military rank,” once shattered, has now prepared Robin for the real world, his own manhood, and the task of rising “in the world without the help of your kinsman, Major Molineaux.” Thus the “two complexions,” the “several voices” that a person has are those that experience brings out over time, reflecting the Emersonian imperative to “Speak what you think today in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today.” Is one of those bad and one of them good? Absolutely not, and this is reflected in the apparent ambivalence of Hawthorne himself toward the insurrection, the absolutely neutral prologue contrasted with the shock of seeing Molineaux tarred and feathered. When looked at in this way it all fits together and makes Hawthorne’s intentions very clear.

Saturday, November 15, 2014

Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky

Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media is one of the best documentaries ever produced. Directors Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick made a crucial decision to stand out of the way and allow Chomsky, through a multitude of interviews and documentary footage, to speak for himself. The film’s title comes from Chomsky’s book of the same name, first published in 1988, a critical look at the corporate underpinnings of the media in American and the link between the media and politics in controlling U.S. cultural thought through propaganda. The film begins with Chomsky’s background as a professor of linguistics at M.I.T. and his subsequent philosophical writings about the nature of a free society. His view is that the more advanced a society becomes the more they need freedom from political and economic ties of the state and the ability to create on their own without coercion from a dominant governmental force, even if it is a democratic one. His study of human language and cognition has led him to advocate for an anarchic, socialistic society that seeks out authority and challenges the assumptions made by that authority, especially in respect to the subliminal control it exerts over society.

One of the most egregious areas of coercion in Chomsky’s view is private control over resources, but today that could be extended to include health care and insurance as well. Chomsky takes this idea in the direction of the media, where the Constitution defines the need for a free media that can act as a control on government and help voters make informed decisions. But the Constitution was written by men who believed that the masses were not capable of governing themselves and created a representative democracy that would remove them from the actual process of the law, placing the power in the hands of the elite. In order for the elite to control the masses, it then becomes necessary to indoctrinate them with propaganda, hence the need for control over the illusion of a free media. The key to Chomsky’s model of control hinges on the importance that there be a perception of liberal bias in the media. In this way the consumers of the news believe that there is an adversarial relationship between the media and the government and rest easy in the false confidence that their interests are being protected by media watchdogs. But the reality is that all of the major media in this country is owned by, and are subsidiaries of, major corporations that depend on advertising dollars from other major corporations to survive and therefor have no interest in subverting the dominant economic culture in this country by telling citizens the truth.

What the film does well is to present the alternative to Chomsky’s view. In yet another interview with Bill Moyers, he talks to writer Tom Wolfe who condescendingly dismisses Chomsky and academia as the new clergy, who need something to be wrong so that they can be the keepers of knowledge and understanding. The close up on Moyers as he grins almost lecherously at the idea, is chilling. But at the time of the film there were still 23 corporations who owned over fifty percent of news media in the country. Today there are far fewer as a result of consolidation, and a mere six corporations own ninety percent, while Tom Wolfe has become irrelevant in the literary world. From there the film goes back to biography, with Chomsky risking his career to get involved in the movement against the war in Vietnam, and unconsciously updates this message. Today the media’s “liberal bias” can be seen as total absorption with the idea of embarrassing the government, and that shift has had extremely negative consequences because it only seems to apply to Democratic leadership. While the right-wing hammers away at Democratic leaders in Washington, the mainstream media seem powerless to resist and join in by reporting their sensationalist lies as truth. But when anyone criticizes republican leadership, the right-wing reacts violently with spurious accusations of anti-Americanism which, again, the mainstream media seems compelled to report as actual news.

One of the best examples of the way this works in today’s media comes at the end of the film. Chomsky had signed a petition in support of a French Holocaust denier, not because he supported the man’s views but for the simple fact that the French state was trying to put the man in jail for his views. Chomsky didn’t believe they should be able to do this, no matter how inflammatory and false his claims were. When the Frenchmen’s supporters asked Chomsky to write something for them on free speech, he did so, and it wound up being used as a forward to a book. Because of the lack of intellect in Western society, very few people were able to separate the two ideas, that the only thing Chomsky was supporting was the man’s right to say something, and that his support of that in no way was an endorsement of the man’s ideas. As Chomsky says in the film, either someone believes in free speech or they don’t. And if they do, they must defend the rights of those who wish to say things that they disagree with. But because so many people viewed Chomsky’s stance as tantamount to yelling fire in a crowded theater, it didn’t matter, and the controversy only served to diminish him, the same way the media diminishes anyone on the left who attempts to make this country better or point out the flaws in the current system. Once slapped with slanderous lies, it’s nearly impossible for a person to reason their way out of them because the days of reason, it would seem, are at an end. And these days, the slander of choice is anti-Americanism.

Anti-American accusations are closely linked with anti-war accusations. In the film, the first Iraq war had just concluded, and Chomsky makes mention of Bush Sr.’s illegal activities in the C.I.A. that are fleshed out in the documentary Dark Legacy, which even connects him to the JFK assassination. Clearly Bush Jr.’s illegal war in Iraq, in which he and his administration lied to Congress and lied to the world to achieve, fits right in with the media’s lack of criticism and utter lack of presenting alternative views to war, almost since the beginning of the Republic. The bulk of the middle section of the film is taken over by the example of the genocide in East Timor and the U.S. support of the Indonesian invasion that was completely suppressed in the media compared to the genocide in Cambodia that was reported widely in the U.S. New York Times editor Karl Meyer is interviewed refuting Chomsky’s claims, but it’s clear he doesn’t even realize how he is part of the system. A similar situation happened later with Rwanda. After failed U.S. military intervention in Somalia, the U.S. simply turned its back on Rwanda and the lack of anything like outrage in the U.S. media simply allowed it to continue. In both of these examples it’s not that one side of the story was completely eliminated--though in Timor that was nearly the case--but there has to be an appearance of the equality of debate and that both sides are represented, which is not the case, as one side is uniformly framed in a way that makes it much less convincing, usually by omission. And this is wonderfully symbolized by a faux debate that Chomsky participated in in Holland.

As to why Chomsky stays in the U.S. despite his criticism, there’s no real conflict. It is, in fact, the freest society in the world. What Chomsky tries to point out is how rigidly controlled that society is. And this is not a paradox. The U.S. is one of the richest countries in the world in terms of resources, lack of enemies, and societal freedoms, and the citizens of this country should be enjoying a standard of living second to none. Instead, the corporate oligarchy that controls this country has always been more concerned with concentrating that wealth in the hands of a few rather than allowing all its citizens to share in these happy advantages. And in that respect Chomsky calls this country’s behavior a scandal. At the same time it is the very freedoms we enjoy within the society that allows our government to commit despicable acts on our behalf, and the media to ameliorate our revulsion by framing them in a very specific way that makes us look justified in doing so.

Chomsky’s role in U.S. cultural life is, as he sees it, to provide people with “courses of intellectual self-defense.” When asked about this phrase he immediately said, “I don’t mean school, because you aren’t going to get it there.” In fact, he sees education in this country, even higher education, as “a system of imposed ignorance.” What he means is that people need to develop independent minds, which he says is “extremely hard to do alone. The beauty of our system is that it isolates everyone. Each person is sitting alone in front of the tube. It’s very hard to have ideas or thoughts under those circumstances; you can’t fight the world alone . . . Courses of intellectual self-defense will have to be in the context of political and other organization.” But while our isolation has only increased over the last twenty years, it has done so in the guise of “connectivity,” the illusion that we are actually more engaged with each other. Cell phones, the internet, and cable TV all serve as isolating influences in the way that they either increase a person’s self containment through text messages and social media, or distract them from reality through entertainment media that now includes the news. “The point is, you have to work. That’s why the propaganda system is so successful. Very few people are going to have the time or the energy or the commitment to carry out the kind of battle that’s required to get outside of [the mainstream media].”

Our civilization has developed within a context of convenient myths, says Chomsky. The most insidious is that of individual material gain. This ultimately selfish outlook on life is, of course, supported and reflected by the government that runs it. In a way it’s endearing that people want to believe that their government is good, a righteous experiment devoted to the welfare of all its citizens. But that’s not what it is. The United States is an oligarchy, with the corporation at the head and in control. And in that sense it’s not much different than the film The Matrix. People are continuously fed lies and myths that support the things they want to believe, continually given diversions like technology and sports, and immersed in a consumer society in which news media is just one part, no different in their minds than the reality TV and Facebook feeds they numb themselves with. “The question is whether democracy and freedom are values to be preserved or threats to be avoided. In this, possibly terminal, phase of human existence democracy and freedom are more than values to be treasured, they may well be essential to survival.” But in the twenty years since the film was released, things have become much worse. Why, oh, why then, is everyone in American society so willing to take the blue pill? I, for one, am going to do my part to change that. Hopefully, there are others who feel likewise.

Friday, November 14, 2014

Oedipus for the Rest of Us

Though I have done a lot of reading in my life, there are gaps to be sure. My recent introduction to Lionel Trilling led me to an anthology that he assembled called The Experience of Literature in which he wrote short essays about a number of the works in the book. It’s fascinating to get his perspective on these canonical works of literature and feels somewhat like a college seminar with Trilling as the professor. The book begins with a section on drama, and starts off with the Robert Fitzgerald translation of the Greek play Oedipus Rex by Sophocles, something I hadn’t read since college. But in reading with a new eye, and keeping in mind Trilling’s moral stance on literature, this new way of thinking about it gave me a real sense of purpose in reading it. Trilling calls the plot “the most ingenious and the most terrible that has ever been conceived.” But it’s the way in which the plot unfolds that accounts for this. He also calls it a detective story, and in that regard Oedipus thundering about to disclose the murderer of the previous king, Laïos (Laius), is harrowing as his investigation brings him closer and closer to the fact that he himself is the murderer and that this criminal act, in Trilling’s words, “is immeasurably worse than at first it had seemed.”

Next he goes on to talk about the controversy over whether or not to call the play a tragedy, and the argument that by doing so removes the element of free will from the character and thereby diminishes the story. For me, however, that debate seems to be Sophocles’ purpose. In his essay on education, “On the Uses of a Liberal Education,” English professor Mark Edmundson quotes Walter Jackson Bate who said on the same subject, “we need not be the passive victims of what we deterministically call ‘circumstances’ (social, cultural, or reductively psychological-personal), but that by linking ourselves through what Keats calls an ‘immortal free-masonry’ with the great we can become freer--freer to be ourselves, to be what we most want and value.” Therefore it is not the circumstances of our lives, fate if you will, but how we govern ourselves in the face of them that really determine the outcome of ours lives. Given this, what we should take from Sophocles’ play is that Oedipus’s primary flaw, “his choleric pride, amounting to arrogance that prevents him from heeding any word of caution when he is pursuing his search for the killer of Laïos,” according to Trilling, is really responsible for his tragic downfall. Trilling dismisses this idea, however, saying that Oedipus’s pride is simply the catalyst and that fate had already laid the explosives that his arrogance touched off.

For Trilling, the ignorance about Oedipus’s true lineage is what causes the tragic revelation and therefore by the time the play begins the die has already been cast. Sophocles then is making the form of the play fit with its function as a tragedy. The audience, along with Oedipus, can do nothing to change the outcome. The only other option is for Oedipus to live in ignorance the rest of his life, but that is utterly inconsistent with his powerful character. I hesitate to call him fearless because it is his fear that drives him from Corinth to Thebes. And this is really what supports the free-will analysis, for had he faced his fear in Corinth and stayed, Oedipus would have avoided all of what transpired. In either reading, however, Sophocles’ plot remains at the center of what makes the play great. This same idea, that frisson of knowledge that the audience shares but the character does not possess, is reminiscent of Somerset Maugham’s retelling of the short tale “Appointment at Samarra,” which Trilling abbreviates but is given here in full.

                    Years ago in Bagdad, a merchant sent his servant to buy supplies. The servant returned, shaking
          and out of breath. The merchant asked, “What’s wrong?”
                    “Master, I was in the market and I was jostled by a woman in the crowd. When she turned around,
          it was Death who had bumped me. She looked me in the eye and made a threatening gesture.” The
          servant begged, “Master, lend me your horse and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I’ll
          go to Samarra and there Death won’t find me.”
                    The Master concurred and the servant rode away in a cloud of dust. Later that day, the Master
          went to the market and encountered Death. “Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant
          when you saw him this morning?”
                    Death spoke, “It wasn’t a threatening gesture but a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him
          in Baghdad, for I have an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.”

The ultimate irony of a man fleeing his fate and running into the arms of it as a result is splendid. Trilling attempts to distinguish between the two characters, however, saying that the servant who is a mere pawn of fate is far different from the nobility of Oedipus who turns the merely ironic into tragedy. But I would argue somewhat with the idea of Oedipus being all that noble.

While the emphasis in most analyses tends to be on the character of Oedipus, what struck me the most was the reaction of his uncle, Kreon (Creon), to Oedipus’s taunts in the middle of the play. Certain that the blind seer Tieresias (Tiresias) --whom Kreon sent to Oedipus--is acting on Kreon’s behalf when he accuses him of the murder of the previous king, Laïos, he threatens to have Kreon killed. The typical response that we would expect is indeed Kreon’s first reaction. “I am told that heavy accusations have been brought against me by King Oedipus. I am not the kind of man to bear this tamely.” But Kreon is a noble man and believes that if he is indeed guilty of a crime that he will gladly face his punishment. “If in these present difficulties he holds me accountable for any harm to him through anything I have said or done--why, then, I do not value life in this dishonor.” Upon hearing the charges, however, he knows them to be false, and yet he can barely get in a word because of Oedipus’s anger. “Do you think I do not know that you plotted to kill me, plotted to steal my throne? Tell me, in God’s name: am I a coward, a fool, that you should dream you could accomplish this?” After ranting along these lines for a while, Kreon is finally able to speak. “Now listen to me. You have talked; let me talk, too. You can not judge unless you know the facts.” But Oedipus is not interested in facts, and his righteous indignation overpowers all of his senses.

What’s remarkable is that Kreon doesn’t react with anger, but instead tries to reason with the King and when he gets his chance he makes a good case for himself. Knowing full well he is innocent of the charges, he offers his life to Oedipus. “If I am found guilty of treason with Teiresias, then sentence me to death. You have my word it is a sentence I should cast my vote for--but not without evidence!” Even the chorus chimes in at the end of the argument. To Oedipus they say, “A friend so sworn should not be baited so, in blind malice, and without final proof.” Oedipus then tells the gathering why his argument has been so heated. If Tieresias is not lying, it means he did kill the king. “You are aware, I hope, that what you say means death for me, or exile at the least.” Then Oedipus lets Kreon go, but curses him all the same. Kreon has the last word on the matter, and it’s a good one. “Ugly in yielding, as you were ugly in rage! Natures like yours chiefly torment themselves.” The resolution demonstrates once again Kreon’s nobility. At the end of the play, after Oedipus knows he is the murderer, and Kreon is brought before him as the new king of Thebes, he says, “Alas, how can I speak to him? What right have I to beg his courtesy whom I have deeply wronged?” And, in keeping with his nobility, Kreon answers, “I have not come to mock you, Oedipus, or to reproach you either.”

What we have here is an example of the kind of morality that Lionel Trilling believed was possible to learn through the act of reading literature. And though he primarily dealt with the literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, his precept can certainly apply to all eras, including the Greek. “For our time the most effective agent of the moral imagination has been the novel of the last two hundred years. It was never, either aesthetically or morally, a perfect form and its faults and failures can quickly be enumerated. But its greatness and its practical usefulness lay in its unremitting work of involving the reader himself in the moral life, inviting him to put his own motives under examination.” In this context it’s easy to see that Kreon’s behavior is a model for us all. Trilling, however, continues to focus his interpretation on Oedipus, stating that it is actually his very inability to escape his destiny that earns him nobility as well. “Oedipus, who is unable to save himself by intelligence and right intention and who is subject to an order of things which does not proceed by human rules and is not susceptible to human understanding, is enhanced in stature by his doom.” It is this idea that Trilling’s teacher, John Erskine, mentions in passing as the only real virtue in accepting one’s circumstances: “If you want to get out of prison, what you need is the key to the lock. If you cannot get that, have courage and steadfastness.”

On both instances, then, Oedipus’s “courage and steadfastness” in the face of the horrible crimes that he unwittingly committed, or the nobility of Kreon’s refusal to engage Oedipus emotionally when the argument was clearly one that demanded intellect, we are presented with moral examples in literature that we can use to measure ourselves by and put our “own motives under examination.” When looked at in this way it should be obvious that the great works of the past still have much to teach us in the present and that the human experience, though altered radically in its outward guise throughout history, is still very much the same as it always has been. It’s a completely new way of looking at literature for me, and one that I’m eager to continue, a master class taught by a master of literary analysis, the great Lionel Trilling.

Thursday, November 13, 2014

The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent

Having only recently been introduced to the writings of Lionel Trilling through his book of essays entitled The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent, this led me inexorably to the original essay of this title by John Erskine. An English professor at Columbia University in New York, Erskine was highly influential for creating a course on The Great Books in which students were given the task of grappling with the great minds of the past without the aid of any secondary materials. Like many of his students, Trilling was enthralled with Erskine’s emphasis on the acquisition of intelligence and it was a profound influence on his own intellect. What is less well known is Erskine’s sideline as a composer, writing music and librettos for several operas, and as a novelist, penning over a hundred books, some of them made into films. But it was as an educator that he made his mark on U.S. intellectual history, and his most famous essay, “The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent,” is one of the reasons why. Incredibly simple and easily digested, it argues for Americans to put away their reverence for the British and the church and embrace the life of the mind, for the betterment of all mankind.

One of the more fascinating aspects of the essay is the mere contemplation of the title. Morality, in this context, is understood to be quite distinct from one’s personal integrity in distinguishing between right and wrong. Here morality carries with it the impact that it has on others rather than just ourselves. Take alcohol, for instance. In the privacy of one’s home, getting drunk is no one else’s business and people should be free to follow the dictates of their own personal beliefs when making that decision. Once a drunk person gets behind the wheel of a car, however, they have suddenly involved others and have a moral obligation to their fellow drivers not to be on the road. What, then, are the moral implications of being ignorant? Clearly it has to do with the impact of ignorance on the rest of society, especially in a democratic society. Thomas Jefferson’s oft cited quote, “whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government” is usually left incomplete. His conclusion states, “that, whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them right.” Without intelligence, the people lack the ability to correct the wrongs in government and are thus unable to fix them, and the implication for others is clear. The moral obligation is in being well-informed and attracted by the wrongs that one sees. To neglect that obligation is to neglect other members of society, a moral wrong in the eyes of Erskine.

He begins his essay by posing the question of what a wise man would make of American cultural values, circa 1914, and if among them the wise man would list intelligence as being one. From there he begins a literary explanation of how intelligence in Anglo-Saxon history became something to be denigrated. What he leaves out is the impetus for this springing from the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages who were the keepers of knowledge and clearly intended to keep it that way. He tackles the subject through the Bible, in the book of Job, and through Milton’s Paradise Lost, in which the Devil is the intellectual and God is an angry and jealous overlord. “Milton makes his Satan so thoughtful, so persistent, so liberty-loving, so magnanimous, and God so illogical, so heartless and repressive, that many perfectly moral readers fear lest Milton, like the modern novelists, may have known good and evil, but could not tell them apart.” It’s a valid point. What is the difference between good and evil? American author Nathaniel Hawthorne in his short story “Young Goodman Brown,” recognized this when the title character of his story has nearly completed his allegorical journey through the forest of knowledge and discovers his own impurity, crying out, “There is no good on earth; and sin is but a name. Come, devil; for to thee is this world given.”

Knowledge, then, from the time of Adam and Eve, has been seen as the dominion of the wicked. And lest we think that we have outgrown our Anglo-Saxon prejudice against intellect, I offer a more recent example. In an interview with Bill Moyers, the great Noam Chomsky was asked if he believed in common sense. “Absolutely,” he replied. “I believe in Cartesian common sense. I think people have the capacity to see through the deceit in which they’re ensnared.” But then Moyers goes on to say how incongruous it is to hear a man from the ivory tower talking about common people with appreciation. The meaning is clear. Because Chomsky is an intellectual man, a scholar and a linguist, he couldn’t possibly have any relationship to the common man. Chomsky then makes an argument that Erskine would have appreciated. “I think that scholarship has the opposite consequences. My own studies in language and human cognition demonstrate what remarkable creativity ordinary people have.” In Erskine’s essay he substantiates his view through the use of characters in English literature back to the time of Shakespeare. The heroes are inevitably plain and simple, while the villains are clever, scheming, and highly intelligent. The French, at least, have enough sense to pity the innate goodness of heroes who are trapped by their own lack of intelligence.

Though Erskine fears we may balk at his portrayal of English literature as anti-intellectual, he states that it is the function of the reader to be aware of these tendencies. And if we are unable to do that, then “our admiration is not discriminating; and if we neither have discrimination nor are disturbed by our lack of it, then perhaps that wise man could not list intelligence among our virtues.” The real meat of the essay comes when he asks how we judge actions as good or bad, and that simply believing that a good man does good and a bad man does bad without examining the act itself is anti-intellectual. He supports this idea by the way we venerate the nobility of death, especially in wartime, without bothering to look at who gave the orders and the stupidity involved in many of those decision that ended in noble deaths. At the same time, his overt dig at the church is prescient for our day in reflecting the anti-intellectualism of the religious right. Speaking of the men graduation college he says they are easily divisible “into those who wish to be intelligent men, and those who prefer not to be intelligent, but to do the will of God.” He follows this line of reasoning with a seemingly unrelated analogy, but one that is really a criticism of religion in disguise.

The English belief in character above all, in moral courage and steadfastness, is not enough when faced with the modern problems of the day. He compares this to a man being in prison. What he needs most to escape is a key to open the lock. That key is what Erskine compares to intelligence. The only way courage and steadfastness benefit a man in prison is if he doesn’t have the key and must remain inside. Though he forges ahead in the essay, the implication is clear. Those who remain in a state of misery and suffering as proof of their religious faith are clearly stupid. It is only through questioning and scholarship that man raises himself from the problems of the day and escapes his prison, not by attempting to pray it away. Today we are lapsing into the same behaviors as the people of Erskine’s day, and making the same mistakes, “mak[ing] a moral issue of an economic or social issue, because it seems ignoble to admit it is simply a question of intelligence.” The religious right would rather not think about the consequences of their actions, for if they did they would see the moral perversion of their insistence that everyone abide by their ethical choices, and that using the state to coerce the ethics of other citizens is in itself a sin.

For Erskine, intelligence is its own moral virtue. “We really seek intelligence not for the answers it may suggest to the problems of life, but because we believe it is life,—not for aid in making the will of God prevail, but because we believe it is the will of God.” And while he asks Americans to move beyond the denigration of intellect in British culture, what he is really asking is to move beyond the simplistic idea of faith over intellect espoused by the church, that in reality “sin and misery are the fruit of ignorance, and that to know is to achieve virtue.” Then, as today, Americans are inclined toward an instinctive, gut reaction, to social issues, but as Erskine once again points out, “filial love, hunger, and fear are still motives to conduct, but intelligence has directed them to other ends,” and that “its outward effect was to rob the altar of its sacrifice and the priest of his mysteries.” Finally, he makes the same contention as Chomsky, namely that intelligence is what really brings mankind together rather than being a dividing point. “Our affections divide us. We strike roots in immediate time and space, and fall in love with our locality, the customs and the language in which we were brought up. Intelligence unites us with mankind, by leading us in sympathy to other times, other places, other customs; but first the prejudiced roots of affection must be pulled up.” And reflecting on Plato, he makes the same assessment as Young Goodman Brown, “that sin is but ignorance, and knowledge and virtue are one.”

Like so many other writers from the early twentieth century that I’ve been reading, John Erskine feels as if he’s speaking to us today. Morality is not just an individual pursuit. The purpose of morality is to enable people to live together in a way that respects the humanity of all. To have a moral obligation to be intelligent is to recognize that stupidity doesn’t just affect the individual, but affects everyone in a free society. In a recent television interview, intellectual writer Leon Wieseltier put it this way: “A democratic society, an open society, places an extraordinary intellectual responsibility on ordinary men and women . . . because the quality of the formation of our opinions determines the character of our society . . . A thoughtless citizen of a democracy is a delinquent citizen of a democracy.” Unfortunately our society today has far too many thoughtless citizens, while the ability to rectify that thoughtlessness is higher than ever. There is no excuse for the kind of mindless citizenship that takes at face value the distortions and sensationalism of the media and politicians and refuses to do the critical thinking necessary to make wised decisions that are going to affect all of us. John Erskine knew that, and it’s time the rest of us know it too.

Wednesday, November 12, 2014

Yellow Journalism Wins!

It’s official; the news media in this country is completely worthless. After taking over the country from a president who had ravaged our rights and protections, gutted Wall Street regulations, and lied to the world to start a war, President Obama and the Democrats in congress managed to get the economy growing at 3.5 percent, gasoline prices to drop below three dollars, the stock market up to record levels, deficits cut in half, ten million more Americans with health care, and unemployment below six percent for the first time since Obama took office from the moron-in-chief. But that’s not what the news media has been reporting for the past six years. Instead the media been engaged in one long war of attrition against the left by insisting on sensationalizing everything in order to get ratings. Taking their cues from right-wing entertainment organizations posing as news services, most of the mainstream media has become little more than an echo chamber for conservative talking points because of their willingness to shamelessly distort and lie about what is really happening in Washington.

The Ebola non-outbreak is just one example of this kind of completely unethical journalism, and it’s not even political. One person who flew into Texas from Liberia had Ebola and died on October 8th. Two nurses who had worked with the man contracted the virus but were treated early and recovered. Since then, a doctor who flew into New York City from Guinea and tested positive is being treated and is also recovering. That’s it. That’s all there is. There is no outbreak, no epidemic, there was simply a failure in Texas to understand what the first man’s true condition was and since then there has been nothing but successful identification and treatment of the virus. Everything has worked exactly as it should. But in looking at the media one would think that a new Black Plague had been unleashed upon the United States and is ready to plunge us all into a new Dark Age. That is yellow journalism by definition, distorting and lying about events in order to sell newspapers or attract viewership. It is the most insidious problem facing this country today, and yet the American public, lemming-like, seems perfectly willing to follow these Pied Pipers of doom right off the cliff to their own destruction. And that destruction is coming in the form of the complete collapse of our political system.

The great American philosopher Bertrand Russell once wrote that, “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.” That was the problem, initially, but things have changed drastically in the last twenty years. Fools and fanatics are now being guided by people who know they are lying and have become so brazen about it over the last six years that they don’t care who knows it. The entire political agenda from the right has become a game. They are utter obstructionist liars who refuse to represent the people who have elected them. Instead they are playing a childish game of who-has-the-power, wresting away control of government from the people and giving it over to their corporate masters in order to line their own pockets. The right has become the party of hatred. They hate immigrants, the poor, the sick, the middle class, the educated, the left, the other in all its forms. They pander to fools and fanatics so that guns and illegal drugs can proliferate, destroying the government’s ability to protect its citizens, all the while spouting their own hypocritical adherence to family values and moral virtue. And the news media is willing to report on it as if it had any meaning at all, and thereby giving it meaning in the possess.

This last election cycle, as meaningless as it actually is, has been elevated to the status of a gladiatorial duel in which the Democrats have been named the slaughtered victims of a vengeful public who refuses to follow them down a path of political destruction. History, it is readily apparent, is not without a sense of irony. From the moment President Obama was elected in 2008, the right has been claiming that they wanted him to fail, that they wanted him to destroy the country just to prove they were right. But, of course, that didn’t happen. And when the opposite happened they took up the task of destroying the country themselves in order to blame the left for it. And apparently it has worked. The republican party wants only one thing: money. And they will harm or destroy anyone who stands in their way. That would be bad enough, but with the media clearly in their camp it now appears that Americans are not intelligent enough to see through their disingenuous maneuvers and are buying into their own destruction at the very hands of their perceived liberators.

But this should come as no surprise to anyone. The media, corporate entities themselves, benefit from the sensationalized reporting of politics and government. This is something that Noam Chomsky and others have been talking about for decades. The media has no obligation to be objective, and yet because of the way reporting has evolved Americans still have that naïve expectation. It’s time to wake up finally to the complete and total corporate control of the media and its product as little more than the reality-TV entertainment that it is. Newspapers are no better, with imbedded advertising masquerading as legitimate news the same way that PR pieces have been doing on televised news for decades. The right, along with its corporate media partners, have won a few seats in the Congress and now have a majority. Whether or not they have any actual control remains to be seen. But one thing is clear, the only thing that we’ll be hearing from the media for the next two years is how Democrats are attempting to block important legislation and continuing to destroy the country. It’s the pot calling the kettle black in its purest and most despicable form. Get used to it, however, because as long as you keep watching you can expect little else.

Tuesday, November 11, 2014

Requiem for the 20th Century

Last Sunday I attended a performance by the Seattle Symphony Orchestra. The two selections were both elegies. The first, by Richard Strauss, was written in 1945 as the Nazi Reich was collapsing and his beloved concert halls were all being destroyed by Allied bombs. The most devastating to him was the Munich Court Theater, which he called, “the greatest catastrophe of my life.” His composition began under the title Sorrow for Munich, but soon changed into something else, a work for string orchestra that was aptly named Metamorphosen. He was eighty-years old at the time and wrote of the burning of the theater, “there is no possible consolation, and at my age no hope.” At the opposite end of the spectrum was the second piece in the program, the comet flame at the end of Mozart’s life, his Requiem Mass, left incomplete at the time of his own untimely death at the age of thirty-four. Though he had only finished five of the movements, they are stunning, some of the most inventive and evocative choral music I’ve ever heard. The rest of the piece was fleshed out at the insistence of his widow, Constanze, by one of his students, Franz Xaver Süssmayr, in order to collect the commission from Count Franz von Walsegg.

It turns out, however, that Walsegg had a habit of anonymously commissioning works by composers and then passing them off as his own. Constanze Mozart wisely held a recital of the work before tuning it over and thus forestalling any controversy over authorship. While there has been debate through the centuries about the merits of Süssmayr’s additions and wholly composed sections, it is not an inconsiderable attempt at mimicking Mozart’s style and no less an expert than Beethoven said of it, “If Mozart did not write this music, then the man who wrote it was a Mozart.” That’s good enough for me. The act of attempted plagiarism by Walsegg is not unique in history, unfortunately, but it put me in a reflective frame of mind as I considered the utterly derivative and artistically devoid product that passes for music today. In looking over the concert hall it also occurred to me how few young people were in attendance, and that had me wondering what would become of concert music in this century. At the same time, however, I also realized that the lack of support for classical music that is already beginning is just a part of a bigger picture in that intellectual thinking, philosophical argument, and high-minded artistic sensibilities in our culture seem to have fallen off a precipice. And it’s doubtful, at least to my mind, they will ever return.

Part of this personal lament has emerged from a variety of readings I have come across recently. One is a 1997 piece from Harper’s Magazine by Mark Edmundson, professor of English at the University of Virginia, called “On the Uses of a Liberal Education: As Lite Entertainment for Bored College Students.” In this personal essay Edmundson attempts to explain why the students in his classes are unable to comprehend the material they were assigned and therefore had nothing to say about it. He chides the consumer culture that kids have grown up in, without blaming the kids themselves, and places the blame squarely on the colleges and universities for buckling under pressure from students and parents to get easy grades. The problem, however, begins long before students enter college. Walk into any high school English class and you will see ill-prepared teachers--some of whom could be the very students Edmundson saw floundering in his classes--doing nothing to teach critical thinking or analysis of literature, for the simple reason that they don’t possess that ability themselves. The protective cocoon kids grow up in, which includes everything from participation trophies to public school mandates that teachers not damage children’s fragile self-esteem, has created a generation of young people who can’t bear to be told they’re wrong. So universities, ever vigilant to keep their lecture halls full, have eliminated challenging courses and give out easy grades in response. At least Edmundson’s essay has a glimmer of hope, from a distance of seventeen years in the past. Not so with a newer essay.

Former professor of English at Northwestern University, Joseph Epstein, throws in the towel in his essay “Who Killed the Liberal Arts? And Why We Should Care.” from the Weekly Standard in 2012. Epstein does a better job than Edmundson of defining just what the liberal arts are, and their importance in a free society. His essay, however, is more of a personal take on a book review of Andrew Delbanco’s College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be. He takes a more analytical approach in looking at the devaluation of a liberal arts degree in the workplace as well as the ability of science and technology departments to maintain higher standards because of the greater competition for available spots and more guarantee of prospects coming out of college--something Edmundson mentions as well. But where Edmundson looks at the situation from his spot at the front of the room, Epstein juxtaposes what is going on now with what happened when he was a student in a lengthy, but interesting, digression. What his college experience gave him was “the confidence that I could read serious books, and with it the assurance that I needed to return to them, in some cases over and over, to claim anything like a genuine understanding of them.” Students today, however, have little time for doing anything but the minimum to get by. They certainly never cultivate anything like the intellectual excitement that Epstein felt during his undergraduate years. The implication for the future is that the elimination of that kind of education in the vast majority of colleges and universities is the reason for much of our society’s ignorance and corruption, a trend with seemingly no way of reversing itself.

This sense of despair was made all the worse for me because of other readings I have been doing. The first came about from seeing Leon Wieseltier on television promoting a book of articles from The New Republic called Insurrections of the Mind. That book is astounding. The minds that wrote for the publication over the last century were brilliant as well as prescient. Herbert Croly’s 1920 article "The Eclipse of Progressivism" could have been written today in its delineation of a mono-political culture that colludes with big business at the cost of the populace they are ultimately dependent upon. This book, in turn, led me to the introduction of a book by Lionel Trilling that was written by Wieseltier, The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent. His concise and insightful summation of Trilling’s importance and beliefs were eye opening, and Trilling’s work led me to his own introduction of a book on Matthew Arnold. The result of all of these revelations for me was the ability to really understand the intellectual depth of thinking in the country during the last century. And the juxtaposition of that kind of thinking with the almost non-existent mode of argument in today’s society is chilling.

Where are the new intellectuals going to come from if schools are not going to teach? As a country we have already reached the point at which today’s teachers and professors are the lackluster product of a broken education system themselves, one that seems incapable of instilling any kind of passion for genius or excitement about learning to students. Kids--as well as adults--immersed as they are in a meaningless virtual world of their own creation, have no conception of genius, the virtue of intelligence, or the moral responsibility to others to be able to think for themselves and participate in meaningful societal discourse. Instead we have incredibly imbecilic people like George W. Bush, the moron-in-chief, running the country into the ground because of his inability to think and, even worse, his toadies spending the next six years blaming the current president for the Republican debacle that was the Bush years. Fortunately, we still have a few intellectuals left but, like the gray haired and bald heads in the audience at the symphony, they are not going to be around for long and are already being replaced by people who have no business, much less brains, passing themselves off as having anything like a critical mind. If only there were someone like Mozart to write a requiem for the death of intelligence in our country. But, alas, there’s no one left with the intelligence to do so.

Monday, November 10, 2014

Seth Rogen: Anti-Culture Hero

One of the more interesting responses to the tragic murders in Isla Vista, California last spring came from film critic Ann Hornaday in her editorial in The Washington Post. In it she posited the idea that much of Elliot Rodger’s frustration could be traced to Hollywood itself and its obsession with sex. In addition to the presumption of mental illness in explaining his actions, she also states that it is “just as clear that his delusions were inflated, if not created, by the entertainment industry he grew up in.” That's a bold statement. While psychiatrists and sociologists have for decades pulled back from declaring the association between violence and television programming, video games, films and music as anything more than a correlation, Hornaday’s clarity of vision is a startling jolt of reality that, while completely unscientific, is more than supported by the anecdotal evidence. What’s most interesting to me is that the backlash from the piece had nothing to do with her suppositions which, apparently, everyone understands at some level to be true. Her mistake was evidently in using specific examples to support her assertions.

In her editorial she states, “How many students watch outsized frat-boy fantasies like ‘Neighbors’ and feel, as Rodger did, unjustly shut out of college life that should be full of ‘sex and fun and pleasure’? How many men, raised on a steady diet of Judd Apatow comedies in which the shlubby arrested adolescent always gets the girl, find that those happy endings constantly elude them and conclude, ‘It’s not fair’?” Of course Seth Rogen, producer and star of “Neighbors,” responded with indignation to the allegation: “I find your article horribly insulting and misinformed,” Rogen wrote in a tweet directed at Hornaday. “How dare you imply that me getting girls in movies caused a lunatic to go on a rampage.” If that had been the actual allegation, he might have had a point, but there were many other references as well, from Christian Bale’s performance in “American Psycho” and James Toback’s “The Pick-Up Artist” to every James Bond film ever made. She was making a point about the kind of films that are responsible for giving kids a distorted view of what life should be like. Was “Neighbors” responsible for Rodger’s killing spree? Of course not. Was the film culpable in terms of its perpetuation of utterly unrealistic expectations and behaviors? Almost certainly.

The fact that Rogen wants to abdicate responsibility for his participation in and creation of these types of films says more about him than his remarks do about Hornaday. I’m sure that Rogen feels he is just creating a product that people want, no different than say, a manufacturer of cigarettes or guns. But there is a much more insidious practice at work here. Film critic David Denby, in discussing popular films in his book Do the Movies Have a Future, makes the culpability of filmmakers abundantly clear: “The studios are not merely servicing the tastes of the young audience; they are continuously creating the audience that they want to sell to . . . constantly created new audiences, arising from infancy with all their faculties intact but their expectations already defined.” The argument that filmmakers like Rogen (as well as tobacco and firearms manufacturers) fall back on is that “Their needs are being satisfied. If they didn’t like these movies, they wouldn’t go.” But that’s not true. As Denby states, “Who knows if their needs are being satisfied? The audience goes because the movies are there, not because it necessarily loves them.”

Author Joseph E. Green, in his book Dissenting Views, calls the product of this deliberate manufacturing “anti-culture,” and writes about it in terms of its export overseas. “If we speak solely of the cinema, music, and television—-the pop cultural milieu that forms one of the last remaining exports of the United States—-we cannot help but notice the overwhelming juggernaut that is most obviously expressed in the worldwide interest in film and music stars.” This statement, however, presupposes the indoctrination of Americans themselves as they glibly sell what he calls a “mellifluous nothing,” the peril of which mainifests itself in the fact that “universal ties between human beings are formed along the lines of reality television stars rather than anything of consequence in the real world.” Taking this idea to its logical conclusion, he quotes French author Jacques Ellul to express what so many of us already know: “Mass production requires mass consumption, but there cannot be consumption without widespread identical views as to what the necessities of life are.” And who creates those views? It’s obvious, the producers themselves, in the form of advertising. Or in the case of cinema, the self-fulfilling images of the films themselves that contribute to creating the very audience it continues to sell to.

But how can young people be that disconnected from the “real world?” After all, they are the most tech-savvy generation in history, connected twenty-four hours a day to the Internet via their cell phones, tablets and computers. Author Mark Bauerlein in his book The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes our Future gives lie to the myth that today’s youth are travelling anywhere near the real world on their daily commute along the information superhighway. As long ago as 2006 when a journalist asked a sixteen-year-old panelist at an online news convention whether her reliance solely on self-selected news feeds “made her miss the ‘broader picture,’ she snapped, ‘I’m not trying to get the broader picture. I’m trying to get what I want.’” As a result, today’s generation is even more disconnected from real life role models. “Maturity comes, in part, through vertical modeling, relations with older people such as teacher, employers, ministers, aunts and uncles, and older siblings, along with parents, who impart adult outlooks and interests . . . The Web (along with cell phones, teen sitcoms, and pop music), though, encourages more horizontal modeling, more raillery and mimicry of people the same age.” Thus, in the absence of real world models, young people relying more and more on media images when casting about for ways to define their own sense of self.

The only thing “horribly disgusting” in this whole tragic episode, are the films that Rogen and his cohorts continue to foist upon the public in the misguided notion that they are providing even an approximation of entertainment. And the expectations they produce are not negligible. As Hornaday makes clear, “Part of what makes cinema so potent is the way even its most outlandish characters and narratives burrow into and fuse with our own stories and identities . . . what may start out as harmless escapist fantasies can, through repetition and amplification, become distortions and dangerous lies.” But television is just as big a culprit in manufacturing these unrealistic expectations. In a Slate magazine article about the spate of sit-coms featuring fat men with beautiful wives, author Matt Feeney articulates the obvious feminist argument. “They perpetuate the view that women shouldn't expect autonomy or fulfillment in romance and marriage. They do, after all, play to a certain male fantasy: living the gluttonous, irresponsible, self-absorbed life of an infant and basking in the unconditional love of a good-looking woman.”

David Denby reinforces this idea when he writes about what cinema used to be: adult entertainment. “Movies, for the first eighty years of their existence, were essentially made for adults . . . For the most part, ten-year-olds and teens were dragged by their parents to what the parents wanted to see . . . and that process . . . laid the soil for their own enjoyment of grown-up movies years later. They were not expected to remain in a state of goofy euphoria until they were thirty-five.” The films themselves perpetuate an idea of what life should be like. Those of us who are secure enough in our own image of ourselves, can see these films for what they are, pandering to the lowest common denominator. But should kids be expected to make that distinction? Are they even capable of making that distinction? Like it or not, the images that young people are immersed in, seemingly from the time they are born, are more likely to influence them than admonishments by adults to the contrary. Hornaday concludes her editorial by making the obvious connection between the product and the results it produces. “If our cinematic grammar is one of violence, sexual conquest and macho swagger—-thanks to male studio executives who green-light projects according to their own pathetic predilections—-no one should be surprised when those impulses take luridly literal form in the culture at large.”

Clichés become so because of the elements of truth they contain. And the old adage that if you’re not part of the solution means you’re part of the problem never held truer than it does here. Seth Rogen may believe that he’s an innocent bystander in all of this, but his very words show him to be part of the problem. Fortunately, film critics like Ann Hornaday and David Denby are able to shine a light on the shameful practices of Hollywood and make the clear connections between the way people in our society behave and the messages they have been absorbing for decades in theaters. Rogen’s ignorance of what educated people have known for the past fifty years shows that he is as much a victim of this kind of inculcation as he is a perpetrator. The German philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once wrote that, “There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.” Seth Rogen’s comments to Ann Hornaday simply display for all to see the frightening degree to which his ignorance in action has contributed to a national tragedy.

Sunday, November 9, 2014

The Fall of the American Empire

This is not a new topic. All throughout history powerful empires have bemoaned the destruction of their greatness from within. But I’m not sure how else to put it. I don’t like what I see happening in the country on an intellectual level. Everything seems to be bolting downhill to anti-intellectual, emotional, knee-jerk governance in a way that makes me despair for the future. From my point of view education--or the lack thereof--seems to be the culprit. After decades of substandard teaching in this country it’s no wonder that people don’t have the ability to think coherently. The result is a country that seems poised on the precipice of impotence, unable to govern itself let alone have any meaningful impact on the world stage. It’s a sad state of affairs and one that has become increasingly evident to me. My only goal here is to allow myself space to make observations and express an intellectual opinion about what I see. I don’t have the answers, but hopefully by illuminating the problems it might be possible to begin to turn the ship of state in a different direction. If not, the iceberg of anti-intellectualism is waiting to sink the Titanic once again.