Reconciling Capitalism and Democracy

Foreign Affairs keeps showing up in my inbox – and I keep ignoring it. But today I paid $2.95  for the article Making Modernity Work, and downloaded it. As I expected, it provided a self-serving history of the Modern world, intended to keep the world of business in power indefinitely. These intellectuals are apologists for that power structure – and I am sure they are well-paid to do so.

I will not attempt to refute their arguments, that would only be a waste of my time and yours. I will only copy this excerpt:

Few “classic” liberals insist that the State should play no role in the economy, and few serious conservatives, at least in England and on the Continent, believe that the Welfare State is “the road to serfdom.” In the Western world, therefore, there is today a rough consensus among intellectuals on political issues: the acceptance of a Welfare State; the desirability of decentralized power;a system of mixed economy and of political pluralism.

The author is carefully ignoring a basic fact – that Americans do not accept this consensus at all – they believe just the opposite. They are not interested in reconciling anything – and reject anything intellectual out-of-hand.

On its home page,  it reviews the book Rule and Ruin about the American Republicans. Europe is aware of America – and doesn’t like it.

However, if you are interested, here is the link to How We Got Here: the Rise of the Modern Order. There is some good stuff here – but if you are like me, you are skeptical about the present system, and see it was a vast failure instead.

2012
02/24
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Business
Economy
History
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A Pain Too Great to Bear

I have been saying, in as many ways as I can think of, that we are in big, big trouble and need to do something about it. But each time I I get the response “Yeh, sure – but what can we do about it?”

Actually, there are a lot of things they can do about it – but they are not interested in any of them, because they no longer exist. They are in deep pain, but not aware of it at all. For them, not being is the ultimate solution – as of course it is.

Here is where poetry can come in – and the poetry of Emily Dickinson in particular. We have turned her into something nice – at the expense of losing her exquisite sensitivity.

Today you get two of her poems on the same subject:

After a great pain, a formal feeling comes -
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs-
The Stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’
And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’?

The Feet, mechanical, go round -
A Wooden way
Of Ground, or air, or Aught -
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone -

This is the Hour of Lead -
Remembered, if outlived,
As freezing persons, recollect the Snow -
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go -

—

From Blank to Blank -
A Threadless Way
I push Mechanic feet -
To stop – or perish – or advance -
Alike indifferent -

If end I gained
It ends beyond
Indefinite disclosed -

I shut my eyes – and groped as well
Twas lighter – to be blind -

—

At this point, we could return to the basis of Christianity – the subject of suffering. Christianity had something new – a suffering God – an idea so shocking no other religion would touch it. Protestantism ignored this, and substituted Optimism for it, and the belief in Progress. This seemed to be a fine solution – especially because it made us rich.

But now we are rich, we find we are no better off. We suffer from the greatest pain of all – a living death (the modern equivalent of Hell).

“But,” people will say, in perfect honesty “I don’t feel any pain!” They can say this because their pain has become unconscious. It is still there – and effecting their minds (in an epidemic of mental illness) and their bodies (in an immense variety of strange illnesses that seem to have no cause). Not to mention the use of pain-killers, such a smoking.

And what amounts to collective suicide, by destroying our world entirely.

We would rather be dead than be bad – which we most certainly have become.

2012
02/24
CATEGORY
Poetry
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Cathedral Sunset – Sedona, AZ

Photobotos

I lived for awhile in Sedona, back when I was living mostly out of the back of my pickup truck. I wasn’t taking in pictures back then, just sleeping out in the beautiful country.

The people there, I have to say, were not so beautiful, and I had to ignore them.

2012
02/24
CATEGORY
Entertainment
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Human Society Has Eliminated the Humans In Its Midst

Humans have the unique ability to be objective observers of their own behavior. Unfortunately, we have let this ability atrophy in our concentration on immediate gains. It’s time we started exercising it again to solve our most immediate problem – our inability to do anything right.

The reason for this was simple – we need human skills to solve our problems but we have eliminated our humans as useless beings who only got in the way of making money. Human concerns obstructed the working of the market – which had to be of primary importance. Moral concerns, we thought, could safely be ignored.

But they cannot. We have to get our priorities straight – we have to come first, not anything else – not even money. If we cornered every cent in the world, and were the most powerful people in the world, but lost our humanity – we would have lost everything, and ended up with nothing.

It is going to be difficult to concentrate once again on us – since we have gotten so used to thinking we are of little value. At the office, which is a gigantic brain-washing operation, we are constantly reminded that money is much more important than we are. We are afraid of being ourselves in this world – afraid of being human.

Religion has also atrophied and it is not interested in us – but is safely in the side-saddle of business.

We have become obsessed with our things, and have become like things ourselves.

We are in pretty bad shape – and it is about time we realized that.

2012
02/24
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Being is Not a Thing

We have become used to thinking in terms of the market – where every thing can be traded.

I remember going to a job fair in Silicon Valley – and marveling why no one else was marveling. There were thousands of highly-paid professionals streaming in from their expensive cars in the huge parking lots – each with resumes in their hand to present to the hundreds companies manning the booths on the inside.

They were for sale on the jobs market – just as slaves once were. Their value was determined by the value of their skills – and they could see nothing wrong with that.

I could. I had made the mistake (beginning in High School) of selling myself on the market, and I had ended up with nothing. Exactly what the Old Testament prophets had warned us of.

In my old age, like many, I suffered from a variety of weird ailments. But I made the right decision: to just get out and live in a low-pressure environment. Actually, I didn’t make this decision, I was not in shape to decide much of anything. But more or less by accident I ended up in a good place, and was able to adapt to it.

This adaption is not something most can do. It means making a life for yourself, something you had not been able to do in all of your previous life.

But if you cannot have your own life, you might as well be dead. You will be even worse than dead, in fact. You will be in great pain – but not consciously aware of it. And your body (and your mind) will suffer because of it.

This will be the subject of another posting – unconscious pain. Look for it soon.

2012
02/23
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Life in Central America
Psychology
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Control of the Mind

I continue to read Harold Bloom’s excellent book on the King James Bible. On page 27 he writes:

Sages and rabbis labored to control our perspective, and the Five Scrolls of Moses represent as successful a usurpation of our consciousness as does the Christian conversion of the Hebrew Bible into the Old Testament.

I immediately got out my highlighter and marked this passage, because he is talking about a very fundamental process – the control of our minds. Something that the majority of the people want to ignore – preferring instead to believe the very best in everyone – and at the same time, offering up their minds on a silver platter for other people to fight over. They like to watch the feeding frenzy that results.

This is what television programming is – a struggle for the minds of the people, which for all practical purposes have only one Mind. Whoever controls that, controls them – all of them.

Ideally, individual people (and groups of people) should create their own identity. Self-possession (which implies the existence of a self) should be vitally important. And people at one time would give up their lives to defend it.

But this is no longer the case. We want the same identity for everyone, and will destroy anyone (or any group) who is different.

Another way of putting this is that man has become mass man – who can have everything, but who can be nothing.

Being is a tricky concept. The best explanation I have heard of it is in The Master and His Emissary, which is about the two hemisphere’s of the brain. The right hemisphere knows all about being, and considers it the most natural thing in the world – it can feel it in operation.

The left hemisphere is not interested in being – and in our technology-obsessed culture it has become the dominant hemisphere – to our immense loss. We have become human things, not human beings.

The mind can think, that is one of its most important functions. But the mass, having no mind of their own, cannot think for themselves – and steadfastly refuse to do so.

These are the most important developments of our time – the rise of mass man and the movement of its Mind into its collective unconsciousness. They should be regarded as part of the same complex.

2012
02/23
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Psychology
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The Yahwist

I am reading The Shadow of a Great Rock: a Literary Appreciation of the Kings James Bible by Harold Bloom.

Right away, I am struck by how much my religious family did not understand the Bible – as contrasted by how much they thought they understood it. Their logic seems to be this – not knowing anything about anything amounts to knowing everything about everything. To their simple-minded way of thinking opposites are equals.

Bloom, by contrast, who can read the Bible in the original Hebrew, goes to great trouble to understand it on many levels. He describes one of these contrasts beginning on page 10:

The Hebrew text of Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers is more a palimpsest than a mosaic; and centuries of scholarly fiction have failed to render a persuasive account as to how it works, since it has worked and goes on performing.

(I had to look up palimpsest myself.) Bloom is writing for a sophisticated audience here, one that is not afraid of working at understanding.

He goes on to explain the various sources of this scripture (Yahwist or J, and Elohim or E, which were combined by a Redactor who added Deuteronomy, and integrated a later Priestly (P) document. This is typical scholarly Biblical criticism, which no other religion has. We should regard this with pride, but instead we are most proud of our total idiocy.

He then writes this, where how he writes is as important as what he writes:

I prefer to simplify by urging the reader to distinguish between two voices, one that tell its story with an irony so large and pervasive the literalists simply fail to hear it. That, ultimately is the voice of the Yahwist: aristocratic, skeptical, humorous, deflationary of masculine pretenses, believing nothing and rejecting nothing, and particularly aware of the reality of personalities, Yahweh’s most of all.

The other voice is pious, fearful, cultic, ornately slow, pretentious, distrustful of women, impatient as to the vagaries of personality.

This is not only excellent writing, but useful as well. It tells you how to appreciate the Bible. And not only that, the Christian attitude in general – which still saturates our culture, whether we like it or not.

He finishes with this:

The Bible matters most because the Yahwist imagined a totally uncanny god, human-all-too-human and exuberant beyond all bindings.

It is now fashionable to regard the Bible with disgust – as part of a distasteful past. I can sympathize with this attitude, since I too suffered from a religious childhood. And religious fundamentalism has returned with all its odious stink.

But the Bible is part of our history, and we should be trying to understand it. Without a past there can no present, or no future. And this unfortunately, is what we seem to be now aiming at.

A world not only without a Bible, but also without any people in it.

2012
02/22
CATEGORY
Literature
Religion
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Man the Stupid

“Know thyself!” was the motto inscribed on the oracle at Delphi, attributed to the poet and law-giver Solon (638-558 BCE).

But we know from history (which the Greeks themselves invented) that they did not understand much of their own behavior. Instead of uniting into a powerful (and intelligent and artistic) force, they fought each other constantly – and were easily conquered and enslaved by the Romans.

The first thing they should have recognized was this simple fact: people are stupid and self-destructive. It would not have taken any great genius to recognize this – the facts were staring them in the face – even gripping them by the throat and choking them.  But they persisted in believing just the opposite – that they were wise.

This illustrates perfectly another one of our traits – our vanity, which we have in unlimited supply. But this would only be a source of occasional amusement, if it was not backed up with all the force we can muster.

We will not see our stupidity – no matter how vast. And we will not see how stubborn this stubbornness is. We will confess to any sin (real or imaginary) but not that.

Is this not strange? How have we gone for millennia without noticing this?

Sages of all kinds have preached that what we need is a more perfect consciousness. No doubt they are right, but this would only be a luxury, easily overlooked in our rush to destroy ourselves.

We can ask ourselves “Why this self-destructiveness?” – But here again, this is not necessary. What we absolutely have to do is recognize that it exists – and is destroying us.

No doubt we will continue to exist, in a greatly reduced state, much as we did in the Dark Ages. But without this fundamental knowledge, we are doomed to ultimate failure.

If were really wise, we would recognize our stupidity – and accept and understand it.

2012
02/21
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Philosophy
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Man Divided Against Himself

I am reading Emerson’s address The American Scholar (1837) his most famous work. I wasn’t expecting much more than a pep talk, and was surprised by its depth, from which I have copied the following:

It is one of the fables, which out of unknown antiquity, convey unlooked-for wisdom, that the gods, in the beginning divided Man into men, that he might be more helpful to himself, just as the hand was divided into fingers, the better to answer its end.

The old fable covers a doctrine ever new and sublime; that there is One Man, – present to all particular men only partially, or through one facility; and that you must take the whole society to find the whole man. Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer but he is all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier. In the divided or social state, these functions are parceled out to  individuals, each of whole aims to do his stint of the joint work, whilst the other performs his. The fable implies that the individual to possess himself, must sometimes return from his own labor to embrace all the other laborers.

But unfortunately, this original unit, this fountain of power, has been distributed to multitudes, has been so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it is spilled into drops, and cannot be gathered. The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut like so many walking monsters – a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.

Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things. The planter, who is Man sent out into the field to gather food, is seldom cheered by any true dignity of his ministry. He sees his bushel and his cart, and nothing beyond, and sinks into the farmer, instead of Man on the farm. The tradesman scarcely ever gives an ideal worth to his craft, but is ridden by the routine of his craft, and the soul is subject to dollars. The priest becomes a form; the attorney, a statute-book, the mechanic, a machine; the sailor, a rope of a ship.

It is hardly necessary for me to add to this eloquence (all too rare in our time).

Except to say that it has been ignored entirely.

2012
02/20
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Philosophy
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The Soul Has Its Bandaged Moments

This is Dickinson’s poem #360, as cataloged in Dickinson by Helen Vendler.

The Soul has bandaged moments -
When too appalled to stir -
She feels some ghastly Fright come up
and stop to look at her -

Salute her, with long fingers -
Caress her freezing hair -
Sip, Goblin, from the very lips
The lover – hovered – o’er -
Unworthy, that a thought so mean
Accost a Theme – so – fair -

The soul has moments of escape -
When bursting all the doors -
She dances like a bomb, abroad,
And swings upon the Hours,

As do the Bee – delirious borne -
Long Dungeoned from his Rose -
Touch Liberty – then know no more -
But Noon, and Paradise -

The Soul’s retaken moments -
When, Felon led along,
With shackles on the Plumèd feet,
And staples, in the song,

The Horror welcomes her, again,
These, are not brayed of Tongue -

This is not a poem to be taken lightly, far from it. Vendler thinks it is about love (a more conventional, if shop-worn, explanation) – but I think it is deeper than that.

Something horrible has happened to all of us. Dickinson is aware of it – but not quite sure what it is. Delicious moments of liberty are all too often turned into slavery again.

In our time sex has become something horrible that cripples, instead of liberating. Being Victorian, Dickinson cannot distinguish between the two.

Vendler’s explanation, based on poetic rhythm and rhyme – is well-worth reading, and re-acquaints us with the basics of poetry.

2012
02/20
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Morality
Poetry
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