Cons Who Rule A Ruined World

An interview with Harold Bloom.

The Harvest Of Western Civilization's Amnesia

In the concluding chapter of his magisterial book Early Greece (2nd edition 1993), Oswyn Murray noted that "myth and reality" combined in the aftermath of the Persian Wars of the 5th century BCE. "Politically," he noted, the Greek victory "created a new race of heroes, who had surpassed the achievements of their ancestors before Troy." The positive reality is that the Greeks gained both political independence and a new sense of cultural self-confidence. This would seem to be all to the good--were it not for the fact that, as Murray also noted, "Greek culture had been created from the fruitful interchange between east and west" and "that debt was now forgotten." He continues:

An iron curtain had descended: east against west, despotism against liberty--the dichotomies created in the Persian Wars echo through world history, and seem ever more likely to continue, as man revives old ways and discovers new ones for tormenting his soul. (page 301).

Such dichotomies, reified in ethnocentric histories and passed down from generation to generation, form a political mythology that is harnessed repeatedly by demagogues posing as historians or political scientists (witness the writings of the late Samuel P. Huntington).

What result? Now, Murray wrote in 1993, "like the Greeks, it is we the victors who are the new persecutors of a once proud empire; and, like the Greeks, we shall in due course reap our reward." (ibid.)

A quarter of a century later, nothing has changed. In fact, matters have only worsened. Refusing to learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it.

(And, yes, the above map ought to put apocalyptic thoughts in the reader's mind).

The Ka'ba

Break it down:



Mecca.



Iron filings attracted to a magnet.



Cubic crystal of pyrite.

There is something elemental about the ka'ba.

Eid Kareem!

Wittgenstein: A Wonderful Life (1989)

"Tell Them I've Had A Wonderful Life."

Wittgenstein on his death-bed.

The Human Condition

In such great slavery, such weariness,
and with false concepts and a soul in danger,
to be where I am, carving things divine.

~ Michelangelo, Poems and Letters, tr. A. Mortimer, p. 61.

Hiking The Phrygian Way

Khwaja Shamsuddin Hafez

The Songs.

Muhasibah

Cut out the dead wood.

Discipline the self through introspection and subsequent action.

See the angel in the marble.

Set him free.

Primitive Christianity

Primitive Christianity was Jewish and did not survive the Apostle Paul's well-intended Gentilization of the faith. The closest approximation to primitive Christianity to survive into the 21st century is tasawwuf.

Whereas Jesus was the Great Reformer of Israelite religion, Muhammad was the Great Revivalist of Jesus' Galilean reforms.

Christianity, then, is a vast archive of Gentile misunderstandings of a Jewish reform movement and Islam is the Perso-Arabic reception and continuation of the Muhammadan revival of that movement.

The Protestant Reformers of the 16th century came too late in the game to be able to effect a movement like tasawwuf. Not only that, but they were the European heirs of a long history of Christian antisemitism. Consequently, they were incapable of embracing anything close to the Jewish halakha that was undoubtedly the underlying habitus of the primitive church.

History, we must never forget, is the record of unintended consequences.

Malraux

Not Irish, part Dervish, Liberal Ironist, Latent Existentialist, Radical Hermeneut.

The Golden Age Of French Intellectualism

Andre Malraux And The Crisis Of Western Civilization

Malraux's life and writing were "characterized by a restless, questioning, quasi-apocalyptic intensity that is fully understandable only in terms of the crisis with which Western thought was confronted in the first half of the twentieth century: at grips with a fast-accumulating mass of new knowledge, Western civilization was seeking to adjust to the violent changes that had disrupted its former social, intellectual, and spiritual framework of values."

Moreover, he was "vitally concerned with the problems of the life and death of civilizations; the specificity, irreducibility, and relativity of all cultures; their determining action in shaping the mental structures of individuals; and the bearing on his own cultural world of the observations and conclusions of historians and anthropologists such as Oswald Spengler and Leo Frobenius."

~ Germaine, Bree, The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vols. 5-6, pp. 144-145.

Hidden

This film from 2005 remains one of my favorite French films. It features Daniel Auteuil, one of the finest actors of his generation. The subject is the October 17, 1961 Paris massacre of Algerian protesters--or that is the surface subject of the film. The depth subject (what lies "hidden") is the human condition.

The 1961 Paris Massacre

The Righteous Yearning

As for the aims and ideals of Marxism, there is one feature of them that is now rightly suspect. The taking-over by the state of the means of production and the dictatorship in the interests of the proletariat can by themselves never guarantee the happiness of anybody but the dictators themselves. Marx and Engels, coming out of authoritarian Germany, tended to imagine socialism in authoritarian terms; and Lenin and Trotsky after them, forced as they were to make a beginning among a people who had known nothing but autocracy, also emphasized this side of socialism and founded a dictatorship which perpetuated itself as an autocracy.



When all this is said, however, something more important remains that is common to all the great Marxists: the desire to get rid of class privilege based on birth and on difference of income; the will to establish a society in which the superior development of some is not paid for by the exploitation, that is, by the deliberate degradation of others--a society which will be homogeneous and cooperative as our commercial society is not, and directed, to the best of their ability, by the conscious creative minds of its members. But this again is a goal to be worked for in the light of one's own imagination and with the help of one's own common sense. The formulas of the various Marxist creeds, including the one that is common to them all, the dogma of the Dialectic, no more deserve the status of holy writ than the formulas of other creeds. To accomplish such a task will require of us an unsleeping adaptive exercise of reason and instinct combined.

~ Edmund Wilson, To The Finland Station, 483-484.



The yearning to bring justice, equality, and peace to our dealings with one another in this present life is a righteous yearning--nothing to be ashamed of. The Prophetic tradition (from which Marx and his followers emerged) not only encourages such desires but frankly demands them. Likewise, it demands that actions be taken to make such utopian hopes a reality.



Eyes on the prize.

Cheever

We rise from sleep all natural men, boisterous, loving, and hopeful, but the dark-faced stranger is waiting at the door, the viper is coiled in the garden, the old man whispers lewdly to the boy, and the woman sits at her table crying.

~ John Cheever, Journals, 1962.

The Leftist Mr. Wilson

A review.

The Holy Fool

The Turkish Political Imagination

"However, for many people [in Turkey] who are of a vaguely leftist bent, communism is an attractive concept because it is so antithetical to the government they despise. Some of my friends are signed-up members of the Communist Party; they have no particular belief in communism as a concept, and certainly not as a practicable political system, but they want to formalize their dissatisfaction with what they call the 'fascist' mentality of the Turkish government. In Europe, communism is a bit of a joke. In Turkey, it is feared and loved because it actually has some relevance to the strength of people's convictions."

~ Alev Scott, Turkish Awakening, pp. 233-234.



Mazeppism: Anti-Fascist, Anti-Imperialist.