Interesting slide show at the NY Times of the latest exhibit by German artist Anselm Kiefer, a holocaust-themed extravaganza of ash gray titled "Next Year in Jerusalem." Above, "Merkaba."
Friday, November 19, 2010
Anselm Kiefer
Interesting slide show at the NY Times of the latest exhibit by German artist Anselm Kiefer, a holocaust-themed extravaganza of ash gray titled "Next Year in Jerusalem." Above, "Merkaba."
Mortimer's Hole
Not to give away the climax of my book, but:These images of the caves are interesting, too.Archaeologists in Nottingham say they have uncovered the true site of one of the country's most infamous caves. Mortimer's Hole is reputed to be the route by which Edward III's troops entered the city's castle to capture Roger de Mortimer, in 1330. . . .
The official entrance of Mortimer's Hole is next to Brewhouse Yard but archaeologists now believe the real tunnel originates in a garden in the Park Estate.
The discovery was made during the Nottingham Caves Survey, a two-year project in which a laser scanner is being used to produce a three-dimensional record of Nottingham's sandstone caves. University of Nottingham archaeologist Dr David Walker said: "It's almost certainly the real Mortimer's Hole."
"Early documents talk of a secret passage which the modern one certainly wasn't because it was used for carting stuff up from the River Leen to the castle," he said. "The documents all fit with this tiny sliver of a blocked cave which runs into a man's garden."
Roger de Mortimer was sent to the Tower and then hanged on 29 November 1330.
The archaeologist believes the real Mortimer's Hole is a tunnel currently known as the North-Western Passage.
From the house on Castle Grove in the Park Estate, the passage stretches for 30-40 metres and is partly filled with rubble.
Dr Walker said, once you get past the debris, the full height of the tunnel is exposed and there are rock cut steps at the bottom and an arch at the top.
An American Indian in Iceland
Intriguing:
The first Native American to arrive in Europe may have been a woman brought to Iceland by the Vikings more than 1,000 years ago, a study by Spanish and Icelandic researchers suggests. . . .Spain's CSIC scientific research institute said genetic analysis of around 80 people from a total of four families in Iceland showed they possess a type of DNA normally only found in Native Americans or East Asians.
"It was thought at first that (the DNA) came from recently established Asian families in Iceland," CSIC researcher Carles Lalueza-Fox was quoted as saying in a statement by the institute.
"But when family genealogy was studied, it was discovered that the four families were descended from ancestors who lived between 1710 and 1740 from the same region of southern Iceland."
The lineage found, named C1e, is mitochondrial, which means that the genes were introduced into Iceland by a woman.
"As the island was virtually isolated from the 10th century, the most likely hypothesis is that these genes corresponded to an Amerindian woman who was brought from America by the Vikings around the year 1000," said Lalueza-Fox.
Thursday, November 18, 2010
The Secret Agent
I just finished listening to Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent (1907). I was disappointed. Lord Jim and some of his stories show that Conrad could write with tense power about men facing crises, and I expected something like that in a book called The Secret Agent. But this book is not at all tense, and I did not find it powerful. It consists of half a dozen essentially independent character sketches, each showing how one man or woman reacts to a terrorist act. Some of the sketches struck me as perceptive, especially those of two quite different policemen, but none of them really gripped me. The terrorist act seems largely inconsequential, and I just didn't care much about any of the people involved.
The effect of The Secret Agent is to show that what we think of as an "event" is the intersection of the lives of many people, each acting on his or her own motives based on a life history of which the event is only a part, often a small part. Which is intellectually interesting, and I'm sure is a more accurate assessment of the average terrorist act than the sort of hyperbole one gets in contemporary thrillers or Hollywood movies. But it wasn't much fun to read.
The effect of The Secret Agent is to show that what we think of as an "event" is the intersection of the lives of many people, each acting on his or her own motives based on a life history of which the event is only a part, often a small part. Which is intellectually interesting, and I'm sure is a more accurate assessment of the average terrorist act than the sort of hyperbole one gets in contemporary thrillers or Hollywood movies. But it wasn't much fun to read.
All Hail the Mayor of London
London's Conservative mayor, Boris Johnson, advises George Bush not to bring his book tour to Britain, because “some embarrassed member of the Welsh constabulary” might have to arrest him for war crimes:
“Waterboarding” is a disgusting practice by which the victim is deliberately made to think that he is drowning. It is not some cunning new psych-ops technique conceived by the CIA. It has been used in the dungeons of dictators for centuries. It is not compatible either with the US constitution or the UN convention against torture. It is deemed to be torture in this country, and above all there is no evidence whatever that it has ever succeeded in doing what Mr Bush claimed. It does not work.
How could America complain to the Burmese generals about the house arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi, when a president authorised torture? How can we talk about human rights in Beijing, when our number one ally and friend seems to be defending this kind of behaviour? I can’t think of any other American president, in my lifetime, who would have spoken in this way. Mr Bush should have remembered the words of the great Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, who said in 1863 that “military necessity does not admit of cruelty”. Damn right.
The Snake Boy
Thomas with a young garter snake he found on the way home yesterday. He said, "It's a good thing there aren't many deadly poisonous snakes around here, because I can't see one without picking it up."
The Dream of Europe
As central bankers huddle in Dublin, trying to "stave off an Irish debt crisis," as the Times put it yesterday, I ponder the ongoing project of European integration. I find it very interesting that across the political spectrum only a few cranks and bond speculators are advocating what many economists think is the obvious solution for Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain: withdrawal from the Eurozone. The experiment in having one currency controlled by one central bank across sixteen countries with quite different economies and political systems is not going smoothly. As long as the European economy was growing, the problems were masked, but the financial crisis and the recession have shown how potentially destructive it is for a cumbersome debating club of governments to try to run an economy. Over the next decade Europeans are likely to pay a stiff price for political integration, paid in foregone economic growth and higher taxes.
So far as I can tell, most Europeans are ok with this. The citizens of Greece and Ireland seem to place more blame for the situation on their own national governments than on the EU or its German bankers. There have been demonstrations against fiscal policy from Greece to Liverpool, but I have not noted any signs advocating withdrawal from the EU or demanding a looser monetary policy in Frankfurt.
This tells me that most Europeans believe in a European future. They may be suspicious of bureaucrats in Brussels, but only in the way that Americans are suspicious of bureaucrats in Washington. People are committed to increasing union as the way of the future, and they really don't want to go back to changing currency all the time. The bankers and finance ministers working on the crisis don't talk about interest rates or growth rates or bank failures, they say things like "the union is fighting for survival." And they seem to mean it; the don't consider that breaking up the Eurozone is an option, because that would mean the failure of the political project to which they have devoted their whole careers. There is, so far as I can see, no competing vision for the European future, or the Dutch or German or Greek future. People support the EU because they don't know what else they would do. Whatever the economic cost, people will stay with the vision they have rather than live without one.
So far as I can tell, most Europeans are ok with this. The citizens of Greece and Ireland seem to place more blame for the situation on their own national governments than on the EU or its German bankers. There have been demonstrations against fiscal policy from Greece to Liverpool, but I have not noted any signs advocating withdrawal from the EU or demanding a looser monetary policy in Frankfurt.
This tells me that most Europeans believe in a European future. They may be suspicious of bureaucrats in Brussels, but only in the way that Americans are suspicious of bureaucrats in Washington. People are committed to increasing union as the way of the future, and they really don't want to go back to changing currency all the time. The bankers and finance ministers working on the crisis don't talk about interest rates or growth rates or bank failures, they say things like "the union is fighting for survival." And they seem to mean it; the don't consider that breaking up the Eurozone is an option, because that would mean the failure of the political project to which they have devoted their whole careers. There is, so far as I can see, no competing vision for the European future, or the Dutch or German or Greek future. People support the EU because they don't know what else they would do. Whatever the economic cost, people will stay with the vision they have rather than live without one.
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Humanities Enrollments Are Not Declining
Michael Bérubé makes a very interesting point about enrollments in college humanities programs in this essay.Responding to an MSNBC reporter who said,
Students are now making the jump to more specialized fields like business and economics, and it’s getting worse. Just look at this: in 2007, just 8 percent of bachelors degrees were given to disciplines in the humanities.Bérubé writes,
So things are getting worse? Really? No, not really, not even according to the graphic MSNBC put up at the :13 mark. . . . Compared to 17.4 percent in 1967, yow! We are totally in trouble! . . . except that the decline was entirely a phenomenon of the 1970s and 1980s, when the percentage dropped to about 7 percent. And it’s been 8-9 percent for the past 20 years now. . . .It amazes me sometimes how often people repeat things that are simply not true.
The real story should be this: amazingly, remarkably, counterintuitively and bizarrely, humanities majors in the United States, as a percentage of all bachelor’s degrees, have held steady since about 1990.
The Insanity Virus
A small band of scientists thinks that both multiple sclerosis (MS) and schizophrenia are caused by viral DNA that we all carry in all our cells. About 40% of our DNA seems to have been put there by viruses long ago. Our cells keep that foreign DNA inactive by smothering it with protein, but sometimes the countermeasures fail and the viral DNA becomes active. An old viral gene called HERV-W is now known to be active in many people with MS, and there is some evidence that it is active in schizophrenics as well. Douglas Fox has a review article on this at Discover:
The idea is that some infection, possibly early in childhood, somehow interferes with the body's control of the old viral DNA and allows it to express itself. This might explain why schizophrenia is more common in people born in early spring, and why it is often associated with inflammation:The facts of schizophrenia are so peculiar, in fact, that they have led [Dr. Fuller] Torrey and a growing number of other scientists to abandon the traditional explanations of the disease and embrace a startling alternative. Schizophrenia, they say, does not begin as a psychological disease. Schizophrenia begins with an infection.
The idea has sparked skepticism, but after decades of hunting, Torrey and his colleagues think they have finally found the infectious agent. You might call it an insanity virus. If Torrey is right, the culprit that triggers a lifetime of hallucinations—that tore apart the lives of writer Jack Kerouac, mathematician John Nash, and millions of others—is a virus that all of us carry in our bodies. “Some people laugh about the infection hypothesis,” says Urs Meyer, a neuroimmunologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. “But the impact that it has on researchers is much, much, much more than it was five years ago. And my prediction would be that it will gain even more impact in the future.”
Very interesting. I think it will turn out that many of our most mysterious health problems are caused by various kinds of infections, and our bodies' responses to them.Through this research, a rough account is emerging of how HERV-W could trigger diseases like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and MS. Although the body works hard to keep its ERVs [viral DNA strands] under tight control, infections around the time of birth destabilize this tense standoff. Scribbled onto the marker board in Yolken’s office is a list of infections that are now known to awaken HERV-W—including herpes, toxoplasma, cytomegalovirus, and a dozen others. The HERV-W viruses that pour into the newborn’s blood and brain fluid during these infections contain proteins that may enrage the infant immune system. White blood cells vomit forth inflammatory molecules called cytokines, attracting more immune cells like riot police to a prison break. The scene turns toxic.
In one experiment, Perron isolated HERV-W virus from people with MS and injected it into mice. The mice became clumsy, then paralyzed, then died of brain hemorrhages. But if Perron depleted the mice of immune cells known as T cells, the animals survived their encounter with HERV-W. It was an extreme experiment, but to Perron it made an important point. Whether people develop MS or schizophrenia may depend on how their immune system responds to HERV-W, he says. In MS the immune system directly attacks and kills brain cells, causing paralysis. In schizophrenia it may be that inflammation damages neurons indirectly by overstimulating them. “The neuron is discharging neurotransmitters, being excited by these inflammatory signals,” Perron says. “This is when you develop hallucinations, delusions, paranoia, and hyper-suicidal tendencies.”
The Zuniga Map, 1608
The Zuniga Map is the most important map of the early years of the Jamestown colony. It was found in the Spanish archives, in the files of the Spanish spy network. It is probably a tracing of a map drawn by John Smith. Above, the whole map; below close-up views of Jamestown and Powhatan's capital of Werowomoco. You can explore the map in detail here.
Daydreaming and Happiness
Some Harvard psychologists somehow got 2,200 people to put an ap on their iPhones that querries them at random intervals about what they are doing, what they are thinking about, and how happy they are. The least surprising finding is that the happiest people, by far, were the ones having sex; apparently not even being interrupted by your iPhone can ruin that experience. Other activities that make people happy include exercising, conversation, listening to music, taking a walk, and eating. Activities that make people unhappy include commuting and working.
The more interesting thing about the study has to do with what people are thinking about. What the research shows is that people who are focused on what they are doing are happier than those whose minds are somewhere else; this was a stronger effect than the difference between activities. Of course, these numbers are not independent, because people doing the best activities were more likely to be thinking about what they were doing (only 10% of people having sex admitted to thinking about something else, compared to 65% of those engaged in personal grooming). And for people who were thinking unhappy thoughts, it didn't matter where they were or what they were doing; they were unhappy.
Setting aside the problem of basing conclusions about human nature on the self-reported mental states of 2,200 iPhone owners, I think this study pretty much confirms what everyone knows about daydreaming and happiness. Letting your mind wander is risky; it may take you to happy places, or it may wallow in despair. If something is really bothering you, then your thoughts are likely to stray back to it whenever you let them. The best way to escape from bad thoughts is to throw yourself into something that engages your mind. One of the basic problems with life is that it involves lots of activities that don't really engage our brains, leaving us unable to escape from sadness when we need to. These findings seem to support the Buddhist notion of Mindfulness, that is, that careful attention to whatever task we are doing is the best way to organize our minds, and also the program of cognitive psychology: if what you are thinking about determines your mood, then learning to control what you think about would be the simplest way to become happier.
The more interesting thing about the study has to do with what people are thinking about. What the research shows is that people who are focused on what they are doing are happier than those whose minds are somewhere else; this was a stronger effect than the difference between activities. Of course, these numbers are not independent, because people doing the best activities were more likely to be thinking about what they were doing (only 10% of people having sex admitted to thinking about something else, compared to 65% of those engaged in personal grooming). And for people who were thinking unhappy thoughts, it didn't matter where they were or what they were doing; they were unhappy.
Setting aside the problem of basing conclusions about human nature on the self-reported mental states of 2,200 iPhone owners, I think this study pretty much confirms what everyone knows about daydreaming and happiness. Letting your mind wander is risky; it may take you to happy places, or it may wallow in despair. If something is really bothering you, then your thoughts are likely to stray back to it whenever you let them. The best way to escape from bad thoughts is to throw yourself into something that engages your mind. One of the basic problems with life is that it involves lots of activities that don't really engage our brains, leaving us unable to escape from sadness when we need to. These findings seem to support the Buddhist notion of Mindfulness, that is, that careful attention to whatever task we are doing is the best way to organize our minds, and also the program of cognitive psychology: if what you are thinking about determines your mood, then learning to control what you think about would be the simplest way to become happier.
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Language
Certain words now in our knowledge we will not use again, and we will never forget them. We need them. Like the back of the picture. Like our marrow, and the color in our veins. We shine the lantern of our sleep on them, to make sure, and there they are, trembling already for the day of witness. They will be buried with us, and rise with the rest.
--W.S. Merwin
--W.S. Merwin
Poetry
I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond
all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
--Marianne Moore
all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
--Marianne Moore
Education vs. Money
Non-Tea Party Americans may marvel that any group can think of itself as egalitarian when its main political goals are to cut off government assistance to the poorest and reduce taxes for the richest. But American populism has almost always concentrated its anger against the educated rather than the wealthy. So much so that you might describe contemporary American politics as a class struggle between those with more education than money against those with more money than education: Jon Stewart’s America versus Bill O’Reilly’s, Barack Obama versus Sarah Palin.
--David Frum
--David Frum
Inessential
The latest education report from the British government, which is making huge cuts to its education spending and trying to figure out how to spend what is left, declares that history is now an "inessential" subject. Antony Beevor calls this "a grave and myopic mistake":
I think that some knowledge of the past is essential to understanding the present. At least, the present makes no sense to me except as the result of lots of things that have happened, some of them a long time ago. A culture without a history is like one of those amnesiacs who cannot form memories and therefore lives in the perpetual present, trying to assess each situation without knowing what came before and, inevitably, misunderstanding everything. George H.W. Bush's memoir includes a fascinating description of a debate he had with Colin Powell on the eve of the war in Kuwait, in which Bush sees this as World War II all over again and Powell is very worried that it is Vietnam all over again. You might say, see, history added nothing to this debate or possibly even confused the issue with false parallels. But without their knowledge of history, how would Bush and Powell have thought about the coming war at all? How would they have discussed the issues it raised, and how we might respond to them? How is it even possible to conceptualize events except as part of human history?
People think historically about themselves and their lives, even if they know nothing about what historians do. They have vague notions of the good old days, or the bad old days, or the 60s or the 50s or the 80s, and they understand themselves by reference to that knowledge. The history taught in schools may not seem very relevant to many people, but it is at least something. Without that knowledge, people will be even more subject to political manipulation than they already are. Without that knowledge, debates about things like foreign and economic policy take place in a complete vacuum. Without a past, we have no sense of what might happen in the future. That, it seems to me, would be a very bad way to be.
My first thought is, "essential for what?" Obviously it is possible to get through life with no real knowledge of what happened before we were born, but this applies equally to all math beyond arithmetic -- what percentage of adults do you suppose ever used trigonometry on the job? -- and almost all of science, subjects which the British government deems "essential."At a purely practical level, history is important because it provides the basic skills needed for students to go further in sociology, politics, international relations and economics. History is also an ideal discipline for almost all careers in the law, the civil service and the private sector. This is because the history essay teaches students to research and assess material, to marshal facts and develop arguments, and to arrive at logical conclusions. . . .
History is also necessary because it helps to explain current events. How did western culture and western capitalism come to dominate the world? How do cultures rise and how do they fall? We need to know – because otherwise we will not understand the consequences of the rise of China, India and Brazil, the weakening of the United States, the political and economic decline of Europe. History will not give us the answers, but it will certainly help to focus our questions and our understanding of the forces at work in the world today.
Of course history is easily manipulated – though that makes it even more important for us to know what actually happened. We need a knowledge of history to spot the delusions of leaders making false parallels, such as President Bush comparing 9/11 to Pearl Harbor, or Tony Blair talking of Saddam Hussein as another Hitler.
I think that some knowledge of the past is essential to understanding the present. At least, the present makes no sense to me except as the result of lots of things that have happened, some of them a long time ago. A culture without a history is like one of those amnesiacs who cannot form memories and therefore lives in the perpetual present, trying to assess each situation without knowing what came before and, inevitably, misunderstanding everything. George H.W. Bush's memoir includes a fascinating description of a debate he had with Colin Powell on the eve of the war in Kuwait, in which Bush sees this as World War II all over again and Powell is very worried that it is Vietnam all over again. You might say, see, history added nothing to this debate or possibly even confused the issue with false parallels. But without their knowledge of history, how would Bush and Powell have thought about the coming war at all? How would they have discussed the issues it raised, and how we might respond to them? How is it even possible to conceptualize events except as part of human history?
People think historically about themselves and their lives, even if they know nothing about what historians do. They have vague notions of the good old days, or the bad old days, or the 60s or the 50s or the 80s, and they understand themselves by reference to that knowledge. The history taught in schools may not seem very relevant to many people, but it is at least something. Without that knowledge, people will be even more subject to political manipulation than they already are. Without that knowledge, debates about things like foreign and economic policy take place in a complete vacuum. Without a past, we have no sense of what might happen in the future. That, it seems to me, would be a very bad way to be.
Getting Ready for Secession
Jeffrey Gettleman has a piece in today's New York Times about preparations in South Sudan for the upcoming vote on whether to secede. He thinks the outcome is clear:
Western diplomats and political analysts say the writing is on the wall — in indelible ink. South Sudan will soon be a separate country, they expect, whether the referendum is on time, or is peaceful or not.It is the "peaceful or not" question that hangs in the air. Since the border between the north and the south has not yet been agreed, and the disputed regions include oil fields, I think some level of violence is almost inevitable. There is also the issue that while the dominant ethnic group in the south, the Dinka, is strong for independence, there are other, smaller groups who fear life in a Dinka-controlled state. Some of those groups may fight for autonomy within the south, or to stay part of Sudan. I fear a long civil war, but I hope that things go relatively smoothly. My gut tells me that all the parties are too tired of fighting to embark on a major conflict, but I am far from certain that is right.
Starting a College from Scratch
While reading a stack of books about the "crisis" in higher education, Stanley Fish meets a man with a plan:
Wouldn't it be fun to design a college of one's own? Not to actually be responsible for getting it off the ground, which sounds like a nightmare, but just to plan? Blackwood's scheme intrigues me. I have long toyed with the notion of a school, either a college or a high school, at which students would learn both academic and practical things. The academic side would be a rigorous liberal arts program, and students would learn practical skills by being responsible for all the maintenance on school buildings and grounds, from painting trim to overhauling the engine in the van. Sometimes the fantasy involves a farm. I suppose I enjoy this notion partly because I graduated from college not knowing how to do anything beyond changing a light bulb, and I wish I were much more familiar with the material side of our civilization.While I was trying, and failing, to make sense of all this, the second thing of the week happened. I received a visit from Stephen Blackwood, a young man fresh from receiving his doctoral degree , who told me — can you believe it? — that he is starting from scratch a new liberal arts college, Ralston College, to be located in Savannah, GA. Either blissfully unaware of the obstacles rehearsed in the woe-is-us books or wrapped in the armor of faith and innocence like a modern St. George, Blackwood, without very much experience or money, has so far managed to secure a promise of buildings to house his new enterprise, gained the moral and honorific support of Harold Bloom, Hilary Putnam and Salman Rushdie, and applied for a tax status that will allow him to recruit and admit students, all of whom will receive full tuition scholarships paid for by the funds he plans to raise in the near future.
When they get to Savannah, the students of Ralston College will find that the school year is the entire year, 12 months, that they are expected to dine together and wear academic gowns, that they will all be reading the same texts organized around a yearly theme (in successive years, the Self, God, Nature, Community and the Beautiful), that the texts will be “supremely difficult” and begin with Greek and Roman authors, many of whom will be revisited the next year under the aegis of a new theme, and that they will also be receiving instruction in the visual arts, mathematics, the sciences and foreign languages (at least two). . . . No on-line instruction, no departmental structure, no professorial ranks, no athletic programs, no teacher evaluations (student-centered education but not on the customer model) and no tenure. Back to the future! Plato and students under the plane tree in Savannah.
Monday, November 15, 2010
Carderock, Maryland
I spent part of today along the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal just west of Washington. It was a cloudy day, but it is such a beautiful place that it was still wonderful. Above, pictures taken through the morning mist, and below, among the glorious beech trees.
Another Soccer Season Ends
Ben standing in front of his team before their last game of the year, Saturday.
In Which I Agree with Tom Friedman
Tom Friedman has finally figured out that the main planks in his agenda, especially massive investments in clean energy and education, are not failing because of "partisanship," but because Republicans oppose them. I also like the way he frames the debate over what to do about carbon emissions:
So here’s the math: 98 climate scientists out of 100 will tell you that man’s continued carbon emissions pose the risk of disruptive climate change this century. Two out of 100 will tell you it doesn’t. And “conservatives” today tell you to bet on the two. If the climate-deniers are right — but we combat climate change anyway — we’ll have slightly higher energy prices but cleaner air, more renewable energy, a stronger dollar, more innovative industries and enemies with less money. If the deniers are wrong and we do nothing, your kids will meet the sudden stop at the end.This is what I think; there are so many other reasons to move away from a fossil-fuel based economy that even if the climate models are all wrong it would still be a good idea, and if the models are right, we would be averting catastrophe.
A Medieval Ghost Town
Craco, in southern Italy. Built mainly in the 12th and 13th centuries, abandoned between 1880 and 1930. From this page of "world ghost towns."
Sunday, November 14, 2010
The Grand Experiment
I have been inspired by reading and writing about Byron, Shelley, and the other Romantic revolutionaries to imagine the position of a conservative in the year 1810 or so. He says:
It seems to me that we are doing just fine without aristocracy; representative democracy has many flaws, but it is certainly a workable system. The notion that political authority needs the automatic respect that aristocracy encourages in the lower orders has turned out to be false.
The abolition of private property, as practiced by Bolsheviks and Maoists, has been disastrous everywhere it has been tried. On the other hand the limitation of property rights by regulation and high taxes, as practiced in our mixed economies, is perfectly compatible with both economic growth and political order, and it has helped us make the poor much better off. As Lord Acton remarked, "All that has been done to improve the condition of the working man has been done since the rights of property were discovered not to be unlimited."
Raising the living standard of the poor has led to a few spotty labor shortages, as with migrant farm laborers, but on the whole it turns out that people who are well paid and decently treated are much more productive than abused peons.
Crime rates have fallen dramatically across the world as our punishment of offenders has grown more lenient.
Our experiment with ending patriarchy and improving the status of women is, it seems to me, working quite well. There are still problems with how this is going to work out, but on the whole we have raised the status of women without harming the status of men. Certainly feminism has not led to a wholesale collapse of respect for authority, as Mary Wollstonecraft's critics predicted. It may be that this has not made women as much happier as feminists hoped, but it does not seem to have made them much less happy either.
On marriage, the record is mixed. Legalizing divorce has led to a lot of divorce -- no surprise there -- and divorce creates problems for children. Marriage may have been especially critical for family stability among the poor, and the dramatic decline in marriage among the poor of both Europe and America may be contributing to serious social pathologies. On the other hand, we have freed millions of people from awful marriages, and that has to count for something. Middle class people do fine with the freedom to marry, divorce and remarry as they see fit.
The experiment under way in Europe now, in running a society without religion, is too new to say if it will really work, but the evidence so far is positive. European atheists have lower rates of crime and divorce than believing Americans, as do Japanese, who don't have much religion, either.
So taken item by item, only a few of the claims made by conservatives of the early 1800s have turned out to be true. The stability of society has proved to be a much more robust thing than they feared, and the middle class suburbs of both America and Europe have achieved a degree of order and prosperity far beyond anything imagined in the ancien regime.
It has to be said, though, that the history of the modern era has been marked by disasters on a scale never before seen. Instead of bringing us peace, as Shelley and his friends hoped, the overthrow of aristocracy gave us World War I, World War II, and the Cold War with all of its attendant proxy wars. Revolutionary governments from Lenin's to Pol Pot's have unleashed the worst slaughters humanity has ever known. I agree with Roberto Calasso that one of the causes of Stalinism, Maoism, Nazism, and world war was the abolition of the old order, which left us very much adrift and prey to all sorts of crazy dictators with crazy ideas. It may be that much of the destruction was wreaked by modern technological and economic change rather than political reform, but I think that political reform has to bear a share of the blame.
Let's hope that the disasters were just a produce of the transition from the old world to the new, and that our future will be more like the past fifty years than the fifty before that.
Preserving the old social order in its every detail is the only way to maintain civilization; as we saw in France, any change leads to either anarchy or tyranny. We must:Over the past 200 years of constant social and political experiment people have tried to live without all of these pillars of the old order. How have the experiments worked out?
1) maintain the aristocracy in their wealth and privilege at the top of society, allowing only a few families to join in each generation;
2) protect property rights;
3) keep the poor poor, because only dire poverty motivates those slackers to do the work necessary to keep society going;
4) make a severe and public example of criminals;
5) keep men dominant in political society and within the family;
6) promote marriage and enforce its obligations;
7) use the church to preserve morality, encourage obedience, and assist with social cohesion.
It seems to me that we are doing just fine without aristocracy; representative democracy has many flaws, but it is certainly a workable system. The notion that political authority needs the automatic respect that aristocracy encourages in the lower orders has turned out to be false.
The abolition of private property, as practiced by Bolsheviks and Maoists, has been disastrous everywhere it has been tried. On the other hand the limitation of property rights by regulation and high taxes, as practiced in our mixed economies, is perfectly compatible with both economic growth and political order, and it has helped us make the poor much better off. As Lord Acton remarked, "All that has been done to improve the condition of the working man has been done since the rights of property were discovered not to be unlimited."
Raising the living standard of the poor has led to a few spotty labor shortages, as with migrant farm laborers, but on the whole it turns out that people who are well paid and decently treated are much more productive than abused peons.
Crime rates have fallen dramatically across the world as our punishment of offenders has grown more lenient.
Our experiment with ending patriarchy and improving the status of women is, it seems to me, working quite well. There are still problems with how this is going to work out, but on the whole we have raised the status of women without harming the status of men. Certainly feminism has not led to a wholesale collapse of respect for authority, as Mary Wollstonecraft's critics predicted. It may be that this has not made women as much happier as feminists hoped, but it does not seem to have made them much less happy either.
On marriage, the record is mixed. Legalizing divorce has led to a lot of divorce -- no surprise there -- and divorce creates problems for children. Marriage may have been especially critical for family stability among the poor, and the dramatic decline in marriage among the poor of both Europe and America may be contributing to serious social pathologies. On the other hand, we have freed millions of people from awful marriages, and that has to count for something. Middle class people do fine with the freedom to marry, divorce and remarry as they see fit.
The experiment under way in Europe now, in running a society without religion, is too new to say if it will really work, but the evidence so far is positive. European atheists have lower rates of crime and divorce than believing Americans, as do Japanese, who don't have much religion, either.
So taken item by item, only a few of the claims made by conservatives of the early 1800s have turned out to be true. The stability of society has proved to be a much more robust thing than they feared, and the middle class suburbs of both America and Europe have achieved a degree of order and prosperity far beyond anything imagined in the ancien regime.
It has to be said, though, that the history of the modern era has been marked by disasters on a scale never before seen. Instead of bringing us peace, as Shelley and his friends hoped, the overthrow of aristocracy gave us World War I, World War II, and the Cold War with all of its attendant proxy wars. Revolutionary governments from Lenin's to Pol Pot's have unleashed the worst slaughters humanity has ever known. I agree with Roberto Calasso that one of the causes of Stalinism, Maoism, Nazism, and world war was the abolition of the old order, which left us very much adrift and prey to all sorts of crazy dictators with crazy ideas. It may be that much of the destruction was wreaked by modern technological and economic change rather than political reform, but I think that political reform has to bear a share of the blame.
Let's hope that the disasters were just a produce of the transition from the old world to the new, and that our future will be more like the past fifty years than the fifty before that.
Ozymandias
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
--Shelley, 1818
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
--Shelley, 1818
Free Love
Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1792-1832, was for a century or so very famous as a poet, but in his own lifetime was better known for his political agitation, publicly avowed atheism, and unconventional household arrangements. It seems to me that, based on recent movies, he is once again more famous for outrageous behavior and atheism than for anything he wrote. Most of his verse now seems stilted and artificial to our tastes, stuff like:
I am also struck by how every experiment in the opposite direction ends up confirming the conventional wisdom about marriage. Whatever the problems with monogamous marriage, it still works better, on the whole, than any other arrangement we have managed to come up with.
Earth, Ocean, Air, beloved brotherhood!Like many revolutionaries of the Romantic era, Shelley was an advocate of "free love." Monogamous marriage, to these wits, was mostly about property arrangements and the control or suppression of True Human Feeling. He left his first wife -- to be fair to him, they married in haste at the ages of 19 and 16 -- and joined a group of freethinkers that hovered around the London bookshop owned by William Godwin and his wife Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women. (Wollstonecraft thought that marriage as practiced in her time was mainly about keeping women under the control of men.) Shelley eventually ran off to Switzerland with Mary Wollstonecraft's daughter, who was also named Mary Wollstonecraft, and her stepsister Claire Clairmont. They formed a self-conscious circle of freethinkers, devoted to revolutionary politics, art, and free love. Claire was for a while Lord Byron's lover, which brought him into the circle for a brief but famous time. These experiments in unconventional social arrangements left a trail of broken hearts and broken lives: Mary's half-sister committed suicide in 1816, followed a few months later by Shelley's first wife. A memoir by Claire Clairmont has recently come to light in which she offers her perspective on these events, fulminating against free love:
If our great Mother has imbued my soul
With aught of natural piety to feel
Your love, and recompense the boon with mine;
If dewy morn, and odorous noon, and even,
With sunset and its gorgeous ministers,
And solemn midnight's tingling silentness . . .
If no bright bird, insect, or gentle beast
I consciously have injured, but still loved
And cherished these my kindred; then forgive
This boast, beloved brethren, and withdraw
No portion of your wonted favour now!
how it abused affection that should be the solace and balm of life, into a destroying scourge . . . how the worshippers of free love not only preyed upon one another, but preyed equally upon their own individual selves turning their existence into a perfect hell. . . . Under the influence of the doctrine and belief of free love I saw the two first poets of England become monsters of lying, meanness, cruelty and treachery -- under the influence of free love Lord B became a human tyger slaking his thirst for inflicting pain upon defenceless women who under the influence of free love . . . loved him.As Oliver Herford pointed out in the TLS (Sept. 24 2010), this is not quite right about Byron, who never articulated any theory of free love and acted as a rake without bothering over justification; besides, Claire pursued him rather than the other way around. Reading about this I am struck, first, by how young these people were. Claire Clairmont was only 17 when she began her affair with Byron, and Harriet Westbrook Shelley only 21 when she drowned herself. They threw themselves into life with great passion but they completely lacked wisdom.
I am also struck by how every experiment in the opposite direction ends up confirming the conventional wisdom about marriage. Whatever the problems with monogamous marriage, it still works better, on the whole, than any other arrangement we have managed to come up with.
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