The Mazeppist

"Technically a Form of Christianity"

2012-01-17T00:20:00.000-05:00

Julian Baldick's 1993 book Imaginary Muslims treats of the Uwaysi movement in Islam--a fascinating chapter in the history of Muslim pietism. My present interest, however, does not concern the book or the movement it studies but, rather, an interesting series of short observations that Baldick makes on page 3 of his introduction:

"Now Islam recognizes Jesus as the Christ, the Messiah, and thus is technically a form of Christianity."

I think this simple observation is both true and profound. Baldick rightly qualifies the foregoing statement with a few more that are equally true and profound:

"However, it sees him [Jesus] as a man and a prophet, not as God incarnate or God's Son. It has no church or priesthood. Instead, there are jurists (in effect rabbis) and Sufi 'elders' (very like the startsy of Russian Orthodox monasticism), who provide advice to the faithful and answer their queries."

In four sentences, Baldick describes the Islamic tradition as a whole through insightful comparisons to Christianity and Judaism, revealing deep kinship and differences.

For Muslims, the Jewish Messiah has come and, no doubt to the disappointment of Jews, identify this individual as Rabbi Jesus. Since one of the primary means of distinguishing Christianity from Judaism is this same identification, Baldick sees no reason to mince words: Islam is "technically" a form of Christianity--no doubt to the consternation of many Christians today. But why should this fact trouble Christians rather than delight them? That is a question that Christians need to answer for themselves.

Of course, part of the reason is that, as a matter of dogma, Christians conflate Jesus' role as Jewish Messiah with his Christian deification and, as is clear from Baldick's follow-up qualification, Muslims reject the latter (as do all good "Jewish" unitarian monotheists) while accepting the former. Christians have become so accustomed to thinking of Messiah-ship and deification as two aspects of a single role that they cannot help but be disturbed when confronted with the fact that 1.5 billion of their "co-religionists" (as it were) dogmatically distinguish the two.

That Muslims manage to get along without "church" or "priesthood" is another source of annoyance to Christians--most of whom have convinced themselves that religion without some form of either is simply inconceivable. 15 centuries of Muslims "doing without," however, would seem to indicate that it is not only conceivable but quite doable.

The comparison of Muslim jurists to Rabbis is not only descriptively accurate but, as much scholarship has demonstrated over the past half century, historically apt: for Islamic and Jewish jurisprudence appear to have "grown up together" during the medieval period.

The comparison of Sufi shaykhs to Russian Orthodox elders is also quite apt--and the cross pollination among such religious personnel is itself a matter of study--although, at this point, remains under-investigated.

Another Mythical Image of Mazeppism

2012-01-06T19:49:00.003-05:00

In the Greek lore concerning Herakles, we are told that the hero encounters the fearsome figure of Antaeus in Libya. The Mazeppist has fond feelings for Herakles due to his appropriation by the ancient Cynics as a symbol of the struggle to maintain one's integrity in a world of pretense and self-deceit. But Antaeus also occupies a place of honor in the Mazeppist imaginary for, as Herakles discovered the hard way, the source of Antaeus's super-human strength was the earth. Therefore, the only way to defeat the Libyan hero was to lift him off the ground. So also with the heroes of Mazeppist humanism.

(Image at left is Blake's Antaeus from Dante's Commedia)

Edward Estlin Cummings

2011-12-25T10:26:00.000-05:00

"His style reflects his thinking, which was fiercely independent and vastly amused. His poetic eccentricities remained unchanged over the years. They marked him as a happy, unashamed, one-man romantic movement."

--John [Clellon] Holmes, "E. E. Cummings" in the World Book Encyclopedia.

The Romantic Humanism of Wallace Stevens

2011-12-23T07:48:00.000-05:00

No less than Lucretius before him, "Stevens saw beneath the illusory surface of our world to the whirling vortex of the atom. He knew that life is motion and that structure is illusion. Like most of us moderns he felt from time to time the discomforts of motion sickness, and like most of us he felt a 'blessed rage for order' in the face of the uncertainties of whirl and flux. He knew, or came to know, that to give form and beauty to what is essentially without form or beauty is to falsify, that to fix 'reality' even momentarily is to create a fiction. But he came to know, too, that the final belief must be in a fiction and that the courageous man knows that it must be so and chooses carefully and well."

--Richard Allen Blessing, Wallace Stevens' "Whole Harmonium", Syracuse University Press (1970), 6-7.

Further Notes On Mazeppism

2011-12-18T23:00:00.001-05:00

Mazeppism is a variety of Romantic humanism--a phrase as redundant, in my view, as "liberation theology." But what does such a phrase mean?

As terms and as movements or trends or tendencies or attitudes--rhetorical postures all--both "Romanticism" and "Humanism" have complex histories, and both are quite malleable when it comes to defining them. Each is a congeries of values--some overlapping, some competing, some downright contradictory.

What I mean by the phrase is open to interpretation. If one reads this blog, and its sibloglings, one might arrive, perhaps, at a definition. But what would be the point of that? Definitions provide us only with a false sense of security.

When, as an undergraduate, I read Lucretius, I wanted only to understand his argument, his point of view. I never suspected then how deeply his thought penetrated my own. Now I feel as though I cannot escape him.

The nature of things are as he sang them. What, then, are definitions but illusions?

Mazeppism is a Romantic Humanism. What is that?

This.

A Hopeful Form of Humanism: Mazeppism Re-Visited

2011-12-16T18:08:00.003-05:00

The image of Mazeppa strapped naked to a wild steed and sent hurtling through a dark wood--chased by wolves (no less)--is, like all great religious images, symbolic of human truths.

A similar image, found in Homer's Odyssey, depicts Odysseus "strapped to the mast/Back to the mast/Begging to be untied" while the Sirens attempt to seduce him and his oarsmen into running their ship aground.

I have long associated these images with one another and each of them also with a third: that of Christ on the cross. Whenever I see a crucifix, I never see Rabbi Jesus hung on a gibbet, but all of humanity stretched out upon the planks of injustice: the scaffolding of a civilization founded upon violence and inequality and maintained by force of law and brute coercion.

Nevertheless, I tend to be somewhat selective when it comes to crucifixes. Most seem to appeal to a Mel Gibson-like aesthetic which revels in sado-masochistic depictions of the Christ figure: those which emphasize a beaten "savior." Since I find the notion that God demands human blood sacrifice in exchange for forgiveness unworthy of a just Deity, I reject the doctrine of sacrificial atonement. That makes the image of a crucifix problematic for me. Occasionally, however, one finds a crucifix (like the one above left) in which Christ appears almost unconnected to the cross--it is as if crucifixion and resurrection are, in some mysterious sense, one and the same event. Some sects of Gnostic Christians and the Qur'an endorse similar views of the Christ victorious over those who would railroad him to his death by torture. That is a Christology of which I approve.

At the end of his long and painful ride, Mazeppa lives to struggle on behalf of the oppressed. Odysseus escapes the enchantments of the Sirens to be re-united with his family. And, despite all odds, humanity overcomes its civilizational self-crucixion.

Mazeppism is, in fact, a hopeful form of humanism.

The Great Humanistic Revanchement

2011-12-04T13:10:00.002-05:00

The Mazeppist, whose patron saint is Jude Thaddeus, also known as the patron saint of desperate or lost causes, has dedicated the coming year of 2012 to the "Great Humanistic Revanchement" (YGHR). To that end, he urges every reasonably educated American to read three (count 'em, only 3) books in the coming 12 months:

1) Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions;

2) Edward Said, Orientalism;

3) Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis.

Why these three? All published in the latter half of the 20th century, each book contains an antidote to three of the four horsemen of the 21st century apocalypse.

Reading Kuhn's SSR as an undergraduate enabled me to recognize the constructed nature of all knowledge--especially scientific knowledge. Such insight helps to bring one back from the lost highway of naive realism. Never again would I take the claims of so-called "experts" at face-value. My undergraduate course in statistics didn't hurt, either. Naive realism underwrites the Siamese twins of scientism and religious fundamentalism who somehow manage to sit astride the gray horse of the 21st century apocalypse.

Reading Said's Orientalism in the mid-1990's alerted me to the constructed nature of my "knowledge" of Asia and, in particular, of Islam. It also alerted me to the political uses and implications of such "knowledge," not to mention the irony that such "knowledge" is, in fact, ignorance. As the years have passed, I have become fairly critical of Said's own biases and blindnesses; nevertheless, Orientalism is a book that must first be read before it can be properly critiqued--and, once read, the deep truths it contains concerning the hypocrisy that infects all "Western" narratives of moral superiority will never allow one's conscience to rest. Such narratives underwrite the nationalistic jingoism, liberal condescension, and sublimated white supremacy that ride the black horse of the 21st century apocalypse.

Toulmin's Cosmopolis, a book I read before Orientalism, helped me to appreciate the catastrophic significance of the Thirty Years War for all of the subsequent history of Europe and its North American progeny. The catastrophe was not limited to the unprecedented slaughter that took place during the conflict itself, but to the manner in which Europeans chose to respond to the tragedy.

History is the record of unintended consequences and Toulmin, a student of Wittgenstein's, argues that the post-war Cartesian turn to dogmatic metaphysics and scientific certainty amounted to a counter-revolution against the humanism of Montaigne and Shakespeare. This counter-revolution continues to this day and underwrites jingoistic nationalism, scientism, and religious fundamentalism: all effects of that 17th century civil war. The Cartesian counter-revolution is the pale horse of the 21st century apocalypse that gallops behind the others and urges them forward.

As for the fourth horse of the 21st century apocalypse--the bloody red one--read these three books and you will see it coming with your own eyes.

The Most Important Fact In The World

2011-12-02T19:08:00.000-05:00

The Mazeppist cannot improve upon Walter Pater's description of the two "large" classes of minds who, together, comprise the endangered species known as religious humanists:

Robert Elsmere was a type of a large class of minds which cannot be sure that the sacred story is true. It is philosophical, doubtless, and a duty to the intellect to recognize our doubts, to locate them, perhaps to give them practical effect. It may be also a moral duty to do this. But then there is also a large class of minds which cannot be sure it is false—minds of very various degrees of conscientiousness and intellectual power, up to the highest. They will think those who are quite sure it is false unphilosophical through lack of doubt. For their part, they make allowance in their scheme of life for a great possibility, and with some of them that bare concession of possibility (the subject of it being what it is) becomes the most important fact in the world.

—Walter Pater, Review of Mrs. Ward’s Robert Elsmere
Essays from "The Guardian" (London: Macmillan, 1910), 67-68.

I suspect that, although Pater wrote as if he were describing the thoughts of other people, he was really describing his own two-mindedness about religious belief. I would be surprised to learn that he did not, throughout his life, repeatedly cross the invisible line that divides one "class" from another.

His intellectual honesty is so rare in these days of desperate religious certainty. Had he the courage to write about his own hopes and doubts in the first person, he would have achieved the admirable candor of Montaigne.

Correspondence from Jack London to the editor of the "Bulletin" (9.17.1898)

2011-11-23T11:22:00.000-05:00

"I have sailed and traveled quite extensively in other parts of the world and have learned to seize upon that which is interesting, to grasp the true romance of things, and to understand the people I may be thrown amongst."

One World At A Time

2011-11-14T15:21:00.000-05:00

More Thoreauvian humanism:

… No more satisfying deathbed utterance can be imagined for Thoreau than his reply to a question put gently to him by Parker Pillsbury a few days before his death … [Pillsbury, a former minister who had left the church over slavery, said] “You seem so near the brink of the dark river … that I almost wonder how the opposite shore may appear to you.” Thoreau’s answer summed up his life. “One world at a time,” he said. [Citation to: F. B. Sanborn, The Personality of Thoreau (Boston, 1901), pp. 68-69].

Robert D. Richardson, Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, Berkeley: University of California Press (1986), 389.

Desultory Notes On Religious Humanism

2011-11-11T13:23:00.000-05:00

I find that I cannot eat the bread of religion (whether the unleavened bread of orthopraxy or the leavened bread of ecstatic piety) without the salt of humanism.

My particular "sect" of humanism is that of the sober Romantics (e.g., Wallace Stevens, who found the term "humanism" itself mildly offensive); but I cheerfully recognize all the great humanists the world over: "religious" (Muslim, Christian, Confucian, Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, Jewish), atheist, and agnostic.

As a humanist, I recognize that the aforementioned categories are not necessarily antithetical to one another. Indeed, there is much overlap between and among them--depending upon what aspect of which category one considers.

Whenever the great religious traditions produce humanistic sub-traditions, they save themselves from themselves.

Rather than offer a definition of religious humanism, I will cite two examples.

1. There is an anecdote about Henry David Thoreau that captures wonderfully the attitude that underlies religious humanism. It is said that, as Thoreau lay dying, he received a visit from an aunt who asked him if he had made his peace with God. Unflappable as always, Thoreau is said to have replied, "Why, aunt, I did not know that we had ever quarreled."

Religion for the humanist is not built upon the presumption that human beings require reconciliation with the divine--which makes it, I think, particularly difficult (but, thankfully, not impossible) for Christians to be humanists. Indeed, some of history's great religious humanists have been Christians who were able to overcome the dogmatic presumption that human beings are born into this world alienated from God.

2. My Rabbi, one of the great humanists of Jewish history, is said to have uttered these words: "The son of man is lord even of the Sabbath." Perhaps one of the most succinct assertions of religious humanism ever formulated.

Todd Lawson in London - Frye & the Koran

2011-11-04T19:22:00.000-05:00

The Legacy of Henry Corbin: Todd Lawson in London - Frye & the Koran: On Wednesday 9 November Prof. Todd Lawson of the University of Toronto will give a lecture on the late Prof. Northrop Frye, under the title ...

Montaigne

2011-10-26T22:24:00.000-05:00

"My lawgivers are Erasmus and Montaigne, not Moses and St Paul."--E. M. Forster, from the essay, "What I Believe" (1938).

Jack Kerouac

2011-10-23T23:06:00.001-05:00

I've read a lot about old J.K. over the years, but no one, to my mind, has ever summarized his life story with such insight and concision as John Clellon Holmes:

"The tragedy--I shouldn't even call it that--but the irony is that he worked so hard to project, to put on paper and project in the world a vision, his own particular vision ... He'd worked really very selflessly out of his genius to get it down, and then when it came back to him, when it was accepted, from his point of view, for the wrong reasons, he didn't know how to handle it ... Jack had tremendous areas of--I'm loath to call it ignorance, but they were. But that's what made him good. If he'd known how the world worked he never would have broken his heart over it." --Jack's Book, 318.

Man Against Mass Society

2011-10-11T01:23:00.000-05:00

At roughly the mid-point of the last century, Gabriel Marcel published Man Against Mass Society, a "neo-Socratic" (Marcel rejected the label "Existentialist") social critique.

For Marcel, the indifference of the masses to the present state of endless war--recall that, in 1951, the endless war du jour was the Cold War--is made possible by what he termed a "spirit of abstraction." This spirit has been sent abroad in the land by the propaganda machines of the ruling class (the fourth estate, public education) which effectively de-humanize the enemy through rhetorical demonization and minimize the public's exposure to any accurate information that might make the consequences of its government's military actions concrete.

This same spirit of abstraction reflects the public's lack of connection to any sort of effective politics: the ballot box offers a simulacrum of democracy, not actual democracy; elected officials work to maintain the status quo, not disrupt it. The resulting sense of impotence undermines any individual sense of self-worth or collective sense of community.

Aimless, alienated, and bored, people become subject to fanaticism for they are lost in the spirit of abstraction and lack "ground."

Clearly, nothing has changed in sixty years.

It remains to be seen if the present "Occupy X" fad will effect any real change whatsoever. So far, it appears to be little more than a kind of "acting out" of genuine frustration. But no one has come forward with any concrete solutions designed to effect the radical change that is needed. It is difficult to understand how people who have been systematically indoctrinated to believe that the simulacrum of democracy is actual democracy could be capable of taking concrete steps towards the dissipation of the ruling spirit of abstraction. How could they know where to begin?

The Hearty, Forgiving Laughter of the Paterian Humanist

2011-10-07T12:00:00.000-05:00

No one is born a humanist, but if you work at it long enough, you may become one of the Terrentian variety. For it was the Roman poet Terrence who said "I am a man, therefore I consider nothing human to be foreign to me." Then, if you keep working at it, you may pass from the sort of open curiosity that characterizes Terrentian humanism to the appreciation that characterizes Paterian humanism. You may be on your way to Walter Pater's Diaphaneite.

Terrentian curiosity brings the humanist face to face with difficulty: the difficulty of finding ways to digest the depths of human depravity along with the heights. The mental acrobatics this requires sharpens the intellect and broadens one's sensibilities. Paterian appreciation, on the other hand, shifts the focus from the head to the heart. It is interesting to recall, in this regard, that the work Pater left unfinished at his death was a study of Pascal.

One never really understands a figure such as al-Ghazali, Pascal, Heidegger, Ibn Hazm. Oh, for a while, one thinks she does; but that is probably best put down as just another instance of hubris. If one is lucky, one lives long enough to forgive these thinkers, i.e., to accept them for who they were, when and where they were, and know that, there but for the grace of God go I. It is really no different than with anyone else with whom we must learn to live.

That does not mean that they will no longer disappoint us; they shall and they must. Indeed, if they fail to disappoint, to offend, they fail us as human beings.

In Pensees 4 Pascal wrote: "To make light of philosophy is to be a true philosopher."

Let it be the hearty, forgiving laughter of the Paterian humanist.

Why I Write

2011-09-10T21:49:00.000-05:00

An essay by George Orwell.

Are English Departments Killing the Humanities? -

2011-09-08T22:16:00.000-05:00

Dissent Magazine - Arguing The World - Are English Departments Killing the Humanities? -

Paideia

2011-09-07T19:47:00.000-05:00

The intellectual principle of the Greeks is not individualism but “humanism,” to use the word in its original and classical sense. It comes from humanitas: which, since the time of Varro and Cicero at least, possessed a nobler and severer sense in addition to its earlier vulgar sense of humane behavior, here irrelevant. It meant the process of educating man into his true form, the real and genuine human nature. That is the true Greek paideia, adopted by the Roman statesman as a model. It starts from the ideal, not from the individual. Above man as a member of the horde, and man as a supposedly independent personality, stands man as an ideal; and that ideal was the pattern towards which Greek educators as well as Greek poets, artists, and philosophers always looked. But what is the ideal man? It is the universally valid model of humanity which all individuals are bound to imitate. We have pointed out that the essence of education is to make each individual in the image of the community; the Greeks started by shaping human character on that communal model, became more and more conscious of the meaning of the process, and finally, entering more deeply into the problem of education, grasped its basic principles with a surer, more philosophical comprehension … The ideal of human character which they wished to educate each individual to attain was not an empty abstract pattern, existing outside time and space. It was the living ideal which had grown up in the very soil of Greece … This was not recognized by the classicists and humanists of earlier generations … they left history out of account and construed the “humanity,” the “culture,” or the “mind” of Greece or of classical antiquity as the expression of an absolute and timeless ideal. (Werner Jaeger, Paideia, vol. 1, pp. xxiii-xxiv).

Hayden White's Historicist "Party of Hope" Humanism

2011-09-04T13:47:00.001-05:00

In October 1959, Hayden White published a review article in the journal Comparative Studies in Society and History on Franz Rosenthal's translation of Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah. White used the occasion to articulate his own historicist humanism. He opens his essay with a key observation:

"It is a distinguishing feature of modern Western historical thought that it has striven self-consciously to free itself as an autonomous, self-explanatory and self-justifying form of thought. Croce believed this movement to be a late phase of humanism and identified it as the main ingredient in the Western intellectual tradition. In his view, the history of historiography in the West has been one long struggle to expel the category of transcendence from historical analysis, that is, a struggle of history against philosophy of history" (White, "Ibn Khaldun", p. 110).

I would respectfully amend White's final sentence to read, "... that is, a struggle of an immanentist philosophy of history against a transcendentalist one."

Secularity, so-called, is really nothing more than a preference for immanence over transcendence. Such a preference, by the way, has roots in ancient Semitic literatures (the Bible, no less), and so any facile distinction made between sacred and secular is just that--facile, all too facile.

One can read White's subsequent analysis (and critique) of Ibn Khaldun's masterpiece as an exercise in Euro-centric triumphalism--a reading, I fear, that someone like Edward Said would have been only too prone to produce. I choose to avoid such a reading while, at the same time, reserving the right to take exception to statements that reflect a youthful enthusiasm on White's part that would probably make him blush today (e.g., "Unlike modern historical thought with its value free orientation..."). Exception taken, noted, let us move on...

White's essay tends to celebrate the accomplishments of the ancient Greek historians (Herodotus, Thucydides) in a manner that credits their efforts with a kind of modernity that owes more to wishful thinking than critical analysis, and his brief precis of "Asharite theology" ironically de-historicizes the Muslim thinker's metaphysics in such a way as to miss the fact (later recognized by White's friend and colleague Norman O. Brown) that al-Ashari's "imperious" and "secluded" Deity may lead one to a version of secularity both radically immanentist and nominalist.

Nevertheless, his overall critique of Ibn Khaldun is sound:

"In Ibn Khaldun's philosophy of history there is no progress that is not temporary, no enlightenment that is not revelation, no human accomplishment which does not have at its base mechanical chance; there is only the enervating Lucretian rise and fall out of the void and back again, only brute habit making for what seems to be historical continuity" (ibid., p. 123).

In my view, what remains most admirable about White's article is the articulation of the wonderfully historicist humanistic morals that he drew from his study of the Muqaddimah:

1. "... when the historian has no genuine respect for men, he will look everywhere but to men for the cause of historical change, and, failing to center upon man as the agent responsible for human triumph and disaster, he will find it impossible to share, through his history, in the achievement of the former and the avoidance of the latter" (pp. 124-125).

2. "... the distinction between 'inner meaning' and external appearance of historical events is not in itself vicious; it only becomes so when it is used to justify escape from the burden of human freedom and its responsibilities" (p. 125).

With these lines, Hayden White announced his membership in the Party of Hope: the party of all who dare to embrace a humanism capable of sustaining the practice of democratic criticism so woefully absent from public discourse in the United States today.

Of Pseudo-Antinomies and False Dichotomies

2011-09-03T13:43:00.000-05:00

If it weren't for the discourse of pseudo-antinomies and false dichotomies, most academics would have nothing to say at all...

"The idea of the Orient, very much like the idea of the West that is its polar opposite, has functioned as an inhibition on what I have been calling secular criticism. Orientalism is the discourse derived from and dependent on 'the Orient.' To say of such grand ideas and their discourse that they have something in common with religious discourse is to say that each serves as an agent of closure, shutting off human investigation, criticism, and effort in deference to the authority of the more-than-human, the supernatural, the other-worldly. Like culture, religion therefore furnishes us with systems of authority and with canons of order whose regular effect is either to compel subservience or to gain adherents. This in turn gives rise to organized collective passions whose social and intellectual results are often disastrous. The persistence of these and other religious-cultural effects testifies amply to what seem to be necessary features of human life, the need for certainty, group solidarity, and a sense of communal belonging. Sometimes of course these things are beneficial. Still it is also true that what a secular attitude enables--a sense of history [disentangled from theology] and of human production, along with a healthy skepticism about the various official idols venerated by culture and by system--is diminished, if not eliminated, by appeals to what cannot be thought through and explained, except by consensus and appeals to authority" --Edward Said, The World, The Text, and the Critic, p. 290.

Edward Said was very good at identifying some pseudo-antinomies and false dichotomies (the "Orient" and the "West") while relying uncritically on others (the "secular" and the "religious"). Nevertheless, I approve of his identification of the "secular attitude": his phrase "a sense of history and of human production" is an allusion to the New Science of history founded by Giambattista Vico on the principle that "what human beings can know is only what they have made, that is, the historical, the social, and [Said adds redundantly] secular" (ibid., p. 291).In the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, Spinoza had introduced to humanistic reading a form of mental askesis by means of which Europeans could grant themselves permission to consider history without invoking the God-hypothesis. After Spinoza, explanations of the form "And then a miracle occurred..." need no longer be considered adequate. Indeed, they need no longer be considered explanations at all.Vico strengthened Spinoza's gift to humanistic reading by grounding this de-theologized hermeneutic in an anthropocentric epistemology: "human beings can know only what they have made." To follow Said and call Vico's position "secular" is to pretend that "secular" and "religious" are discrete and antithetical categories inscribed in the nature of things instead of human constructions--at best, heuristic devices--that have no meaning apart from one another.

The Prescription: Philology

2011-09-01T11:30:00.001-05:00

It was not without a certain level of anxiety, even embarrassment, that Edward Said offered philology as the most effective way to re-tool American humanism for the 21st century. He admits as much in the opening sentence of his lecture, "The Return to Philology," and then offers the reader the consoling reminder that "the most radical and intellectually audacious of all Western thinkers during the past 150 years, Nietzsche, was and always considered himself first and foremost a philologist" (p. 57).From this invocation of Nietzsche, Said moves seamlessly to the fact that in Islamic traditions, "knowledge is premised upon a philological attention to language" which found its beginnings in tafsir (Qur'an interpretation) and developed, with ever greater elaboration (if not sophistication), from grammatical studies (not to mention--and Said does not--close readings of pre-Islamic Arab poetry) through "jurisprudential hermeneutics and interpretation" and culminating, for Said at least, in fiqh al-lugha or "the hermeneutics of language." He then reminds the reader that in the previous lecture he had briefly adverted to the fact that there was "a consolidation of the interpretive sciences that underlie the system of humanistic education, which was itself established by the twelfth century in the Arab universities of southern Europe and North Africa, well before its counterpart in the Christian West." Indeed, it is not until Vico in the middle of the 18th century that Europe actually made a substantial contribution to the development of humanistic knowledge to which "the science of reading," i.e., philology, "is paramount" (p. 58).It is a potted history, true enough in its general outlines, but somewhat slighting of the known development of humanism in Western Europe. That said, I think it is well established that Muslims (predominantly Arab in the beginning but less so as time passed and conversion to Islam increased) led the way to humanism in the history of Central and Western Asia, Eastern and Western Europe.What Said has to say about "philological reading" is perhaps more interesting. A "true" philological reading, he says, is "active; it involves getting inside the process of language already going on in words and making it disclose what may be hidden or incomplete or masked or distorted in any text we may have before us. In this view of language, then, words are not passive markers or signifiers standing in unassumingly for a higher reality; they are, instead, an integral formative part of reality itself" (p. 59). Though Said appears to rely upon Vico, Emerson, and Richard Poirier as his authorities for such a view, it is difficult to read it and fail to be reminded of Herder (and Herder's somewhat agonistic relation to Kant) as well.The kind of active reading that Said has in mind is foreshadowed by the phrase "making it disclose what may be hidden or incomplete or masked or distorted in any text we may have before us." And here we are introduced to philology as "secular apocalypse." The move Said wishes to make is from textual practices to "statements about vast structures of power" (p. 61). Such a move involves, however, an ambitious (and far too often reckless) leap of the critic from text to world (or vice versa) and he does what he can to minimize the likelihood that the reader will "move immediately ... from a quick, superficial reading" to such statements--though readers of Said's Orientalism and other works have reason to complain that this is a frailty to which Said himself was too often heir.The remedy for such recklessness is the philological patience that Said asserts is the "abiding basis for all humanistic practice ... a detailed, patient scrutiny of and a lifelong attentiveness to the words and rhetorics by which language is used by human beings who exist in history: hence the word 'secular,' as I use it, as well as the word 'worldliness'" (p. 61). Said continues:

"... reading involves the contemporary humanist in two very crucial motions that I shall call reception and resistance. Reception is submitting oneself knowledgeably to texts and treating them provisionally at first as discrete objects (since this is how they are initially encountered); moving then, by dint of expanding and elucidating the often obscure or invisible frameworks in which they exist, to their historical situations and the way in which certain structures of attitude, feeling, and rhetoric get entangled with some currents, some historical and social formulations of their context ... Thus a close reading of a literary text ... in effect will gradually locate the text in its time as part of a whole network of relationships whose outlines and influence play an informing role in the text" (pp. 61-62).

Consequently, it is not a rash leap from literature to politics that Said contemplates for the humanist, but a gradual one that would appear to grow organically and by means of the practice of humanistic reading itself.

Humanism and Democratic Criticism: The Changing Bases of Humanistic Study and Practice

2011-08-31T10:33:00.001-05:00

Said's second lecture on a new American humanism takes aim at "humanism as protective or even defensive nationalism" (p. 37). He rehearses the ways in which humanists and humanism have been used as tools (sometimes knowingly and willingly, sometimes not) of nationalistic agendas (sometimes government-sponsored, sometimes not). In this respect, the uses and abuses of the humanities in the North American context have not been unique:

"All cultures have this as a latent tendency, which is one reason why I have connected the humanities directly with the critical sense of inquiry, rather than with what Julien Benda calls the mobilization of collective passions" (p. 37).

Said emphasizes the centrality of critical inquiry to his conception of humanistic study and practice:

"... it is the mark of humanistic scholarship, reading, and interpretation to be able to disentangle the usual from the unusual and the ordinary from the extraordinary in aesthetic works as well as in the statements made by philosophers, intellectuals, and public figures. Humanism is, to some extent, a resistance to idees recues, and it offers opposition to every kind of cliche and unthinking language" (pp. 42-43).

How does this work out in practice?

"More than ever before, it is true to say that the new generation of humanist scholars is more attuned than any before it to the non-European, genderized, decolonized, and decentered energies and currents of our time. But, one is entitled to ask, what does that in fact really mean? Principally it means situating critique at the very heart of humanism, critique as a form of democratic freedom and as a continuous practice of questioning and of accumulating knowledge that is open to, rather than in denial of, the constituent historical realities of the post-Cold War world, its early colonial formation, and the frighteningly global reach of the last remaining superpower of today" (p. 47).

Again, speaking of the "proper role of the American humanist today," Said wrote:

"... I cannot stress strongly enough, [it] is not to consolidate and affirm one tradition over all the others. It is rather to open them all, or as many as possible, to each other, to question each of them for what it has done with the others, to show how in this polyglot country in particular many traditions have interacted and--more importantly--can continue to interact in peaceful ways, ways never easy to find but nonetheless discoverable also in other multicultural societies like the former Yugoslavia or Ireland or the Indian subcontinent or the Middle East. In other words, American humanism, by virtue of what is available to it in the normal course of its own context and historical reality, is already in a state of civic coexistence, and, to the prevailing worldview disseminated by U.S. officialdom--especially in its dealings with the world outside America--humanism provides little short of stubborn, and secular, intellectual resistance" (p. 49).

These words stir me like passages in Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address: for they carry within them the ambition of "achieving our country"--something that Richard Rorty, towards the end of his life, hoped to do through (mistakenly) identifying Liberalism with Leftism and both with the Democratic Party. Rorty was, without realizing it, signaling his membership in the Party of Memory. Said, on the other hand, here signaled his membership in the Party of Hope.

This is not to say that memory has no role in the humanistic enterprise--far from it! But humanistic practice is not, as Said puts it so beautifully, "an ornament or an exercise in nostalgic retrospection" (p. 53). Instead, Said proposes what he calls "radical humanistic critique" which begins, for the American humanist, in a self-critique of humanism: "For one thing," Said writes,

"... too much is known about other traditions to believe that even humanism itself is exclusively a Western practice. As a particularly telling example, take two important studies by Professor George Makdisi on the rise of humanism and the Islamic contribution to it. His studies demonstrate amply and with enormous erudition that the practices of humanism, celebrated as originating in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy by authorities such as Jakob Burkhardt, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and nearly every academic historian after them, in fact began in the Muslim madaris, colleges, and universities of Sicily, Tunis, Baghdad, and Seville at least two hundred years earlier ... We now know so much about [the contributions of non-Westerners to the so-called "Western miracle"] as in effect to explode any simple, formulaic accounts of humanism ... It is little short of scandalous, for instance, that nearly every medieval studies program in our universities routinely overlooks one of the high points of medieval culture, namely, Muslim Andalusia before 1492, and that, as Martin Bernal has shown for ancient Greece, the complex intermingling of European, African, and Semitic cultures has been laundered clean of that heterogeneity so troublesome to current humanism" (pp. 53-54).

This state of affairs prompts Said to ask,

"When will we stop allowing ourselves to think of humanism as a form of smugness and not as an unsettling adventure in difference, in alternative traditions, in texts that need a new deciphering within a much wider context than has hitherto been given them?" (p. 55).

When, indeed?

Humanism and Democratic Criticism: Humanism's Sphere

2011-08-30T18:53:00.000-05:00

In posts on Northrop Frye at this blog's "American Athenaeum" siblogling, I have mentioned both my deep admiration for the work and legacy of Edward Said and also my frustration with his lamentable penchant for ad hominem attacks upon scholars with whose work he often appeared to have had only a passing acquaintance. Consequently, I do not feel the need to repeat those remarks here.

Instead, I would like to celebrate Edward's contribution towards a contemporary articulation of American humanism as found in lectures that he gave towards the end of his life and collected in the small volume which bears the title Humanism and Democratic Criticism.

1. "Change is human history, and human history as made by human action and understood accordingly is the very ground of the humanities" (p. 10).

2. "... it is possible to be critical of humanism in the name of humanism and ... schooled in its abuses by the experience of Eurocentrism and empire, [I believe that] one could fashion a different kind of humanism that was cosmopolitan and text-and-language-bound in ways that absorbed the great lessons of the past from, say, Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer and more recently from Richard Poirier, and still remain attuned to the emergent voices and currents of the present, many of them exilic, extraterritorial, and unhoused, as well as uniquely American" (pp. 10-11).

Let me say parenthetically that readers of this blog (yes, both of you) should be able to recognize that the foregoing statement bears a distinct ideological consanguinity with what is often referred to here as "Mazeppism."

3. "For my purposes ... the core of humanism is the secular notion that the historical world is made by men and women, and not by God, and that it can be understood rationally according to the principle formulated by Vico in New Science, that we can really know only what we make or, to put it differently, we can know things according to the way they were made ... Hence Vico's notion also of sapienza poetica, historical knowledge based on the human being's capacity to make knowledge, as opposed to absorbing it passively, reactively, and dully" (p. 11).

4. "So there is always something radically incomplete, insufficient, provisional, disputable, and arguable about humanistic knowledge that Vico never loses sight of and that, as I said, gives the whole idea of humanism a tragic flaw that is constitutive to it and cannot be removed. This flaw can be remedied and mitigated by the disciplines of philological learning and philosophic understanding ... but it can never be superceded. Another way of putting this is to say that the subjective element in humanistic knowledge and practice has to be recognized and in some way reckoned with since there is no use in trying to make a neutral, mathematical science out of it. One of the main reasons that Vico wrote his book was to contest the Cartesian thesis that there could be clear and distinct ideas and that those were free not only of the actual mind that has them, but of history as well. That kind of idea, Vico contends, is simply impossible where history and the individual humanist are concerned ... But it is worth insisting, in this as well as other cases, that attacking the abuses of something is not the same thing as dismissing or entirely destroying that thing" (pp. 12-13).

5. "... the late-twentieth-century American university has been corporatized and to a certain degree annexed by defense, medical, biotechnical, and corporate interests ... the humanities ... have fallen into irrelevance and quasi-medieval fussiness, ironically enough because of the fashionability of newly relevant fields like postcolonialism, ethnic studies, cultural studies, and the like. This has effectively detoured the humanities from its rightful concern with the critical investigation of values, history, and freedom, turning it, it would seem, into a whole factory of word-spinning and insouciant specialities, many of them identity-based, that in their jargon and special pleading address only like-minded people, acolytes, and other academics" (p. 14).

6. "Humanism is the achievement of form by human will and agency; it is neither system nor impersonal force like the market or the unconscious, however much one may believe in the workings of both" (p. 15).

7. "America's is an immigrant society composed now less of Northern Europeans than of Latinos, Africans, and Asians; why should this fact not be reflected in 'our' traditional values and heritage?" (p. 20).

8. "... to understand humanism at all, for us as citizens of this particular republic, is to understand it as democratic, open to all classes and backgrounds, and as a process of unending disclosure, discovery, self-criticism, and liberation. I would go so far as to say that humanism is critique, critique that is directed at the state of affairs in, as well as out of, the university ... and that gathers its force and relevance by its democratic, secular, and open character" (pp. 21-22).

9. " ... the whole concept of national identity has to be revised ..." (p. 24).

10. "The invention of tradition has become far too thriving a business" (p. 25).

11. "... every reading and interpretation of a canonical work reanimates it in the present, furnishes an occasion for rereading, allows the modern and the new to be situated together in a broad historical field whose usefulness is that it shows us history as an agonistic process still being made, rather than finished and settled once and for all" (p. 25).

12. "Not to see that the essence of humanism is to understand human history as a continuous process of self-understanding and self-realization, not just for us, as white, male, European, and American, but for everyone, is to see nothing at all" (p. 26).

13. "... there can be no true humanism whose scope is limited to extolling patriotically the virtues of our culture, our language, our monuments. Humanism is the exertion of one's faculties in language in order to understand, reinterpret, and grapple with the products of language in history, other languages and other histories. In my understanding of its relevance today, humanism is not a way of consolidating and affirming what 'we' have always known and felt, but rather a means of questioning, upsetting, and reformulating so much of what is presented to us as commodified, packaged, uncontroversial, and uncritically codified certainties, including those contained in the masterpieces herded under the rubric of 'the classics'" (p. 28).

14. " ... language is where we start from as humanists ... and language ... supplies humanism with its basic material as well as, in literature, its richest occasion" (pp. 28-29).

Mazeppism is a humanism.

Humanism Defined

2011-08-29T20:46:00.004-05:00

“For the essence of humanism is [the] belief … that nothing which has ever interested living men and women can wholly lose its vitality--no language they have spoken, nor oracle by which they have hushed their voices, no dream which has once been entertained by actual human minds, nothing about which they have ever been passionate or expended time and zeal.” — Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, p. 28.

It always strikes me as odd that some human beings ask other human beings to defend the notion of humanism or the study of the humanities, so-called.

Pater here echoes the Roman poet Terrence's declaration that Homo sum--"I am a man" (i.e., a human being)--and what follows from that fact is that "I consider nothing human alien to me" (nihil humanum alienum a me puto).

For human beings to take interest in themselves, their own thoughts and feelings, their own perceptions and experiences, is really a no-brainer. Narcissistic, perhaps, but otherwise non-controversial.

And yet, increasingly in our world, the teaching of the humanities is under attack by human beings who, apparently, have lost interest in humanity.

If anyone should feel the need to defend their position, it should not be those who teach or advocate the teaching of the humanities, but those who oppose them.

But that is not the world we inhabit in the opening decades of the 21st century.

That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection by Gerard Manley Hopkins : The Poetry Foundation

2011-08-27T21:53:00.000-05:00

That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection by Gerard Manley Hopkins : The Poetry Foundation

As I've Said Many Times Before: Mazeppism Is A Humanism

2011-08-22T10:19:00.002-05:00

My tariqa, al-Insaniyya, is world-wide and trans-sectarian. We are a beleaguered lot, nonetheless—especially my own branch of Romantic religious humanists, the Paterian. The Diaphaneite ideal is difficult to understand, much less to instantiate. But then, what ideal is not?

Tony Davies’s tongue-in-cheek definitions of “Humanism” and “Humanist” capture the difficulties involved in identifying as a Humanist quite nicely:

“Humanism: An undefinable term, possibly obsolete.
Humanist: A teacher and writer of books. A superman. A deluded wretch, deserving pity and contempt. None of the above. All of the above.”

(Tony Davies, Humanism, 2nd edition, London: Routledge, 2008, p. 150).

Add the qualifiers "Romantic," "religious," and "Paterian," and you find yourself a sect of one.

So be it.

Weber's "Gesamtpersonlichkeit" and Pater's "Diaphaneite," PART THREE.

2011-08-19T13:42:00.000-05:00

Matthew Beaumont's "Introduction" to the Oxford World Classics edition of Pater's Studies in the History of the Renaissance is first rate scholarship and, at times, almost moving in the degree to which it communicates the personal struggles of this most unusual of Oxford dons. Through the close and careful attention that he pays to Pater's writings, Beaumont is able to discern the impress of his subject's otherwise repressed emotional life. In the early essay "Diaphaneite," Beaumont discovers a Paterian manifesto that will haunt all of the don's subsequent academic work:

"'Diaphaneite' posits nothing less than the proto-type of a utopian society: 'the type must be one discontented with society as it is,' Pater declares; and the mass proliferation of this man of the future, he adds, 'would be the regeneration of the world'"(Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, OUP, p. xii).

This Paterian "man of the future," like Weber's Berufsmensch or Gesamtpersonlichkeit is also a man of the past. The past of Weber's ideal type is early modern Europe and Protestant; the past of Pater's ideal type is also early modern Europe, but the Europe that juxtaposed the pagan sensibilities of a revived Hellenism to the severe Hebraisms of a Luther or Calvin. In my view, the difference in these sensibilities leads Beaumont to take a small misstep in his reading of "Diaphaneite," for he argues that Pater's "revolutionist" (Pater's term) is "no activist ... not even of an ascetic, transcendental kind" (ibid).

My own response to such a statement is an Abelardian yes and no; for it seems to me that Pater, at this particular point in his intellectual development, is of two minds about the way in which his coming man will make an impact upon the world. He signals his ambivalence in the very term he chooses to name this figure. The verbal form "diaphaneite" can be rendered both as "you will cause something to appear" and "you will allow something to shine through" and, hence, expresses activity or passivity, depending upon how one chooses to render the verb in English. As Ulrike Stamm has observed, this means that "the transparency [of the 'diaphanous character'] works in two directions. It refers on the one hand to a greater ability of reception, of taking in perceptions and ideas, and on the other hand to an ability to express the inner self to the outside world and to form one's self as a clear outline in accordance with one's own system of inner law" (see Stamm, "Walter Pater's essay 'Diaphaneite' as a bridge between romanticism and modernism," in Nineteenth-Century Prose, September 22, 1997, emphasis added).

It may well be that Stamm finds Kant in Pater before Pater found Kant, but I do not think so. For, in "Diaphaneite," Pater refers to this specific type of character as one that exemplifies "all the higher forms of inward life" by its "subtle blending and interpenetration of intellectual, moral and spiritual elements." One salient effect of this "subtle blend" is that it manages to elevate "taste" from a "mental attitude or manner" to a new level: "Its beautiful way of handling everything that appeals to the senses and the intellect is really directed by the laws of the higher intellectual life" (Pater, Renaissance, p. 137).

Pater does not make explicit to what "laws" he may be referring, but Stamm's Kantian phrase, "one's own system of inner law," does not strike me as far from the mark. As with Weber, Kant's voice seems to be a latent strand within the Paterian complex but one that becomes more pronounced as Pater's thinking matured. He will not speak of "the charm of ascesis" until he writes the Preface to his history of the Renaissance, but I would suggest that the "passivity" Beaumont detects in the character of the Paterian "Diaphaneite" is perhaps better understood as the reticence of one who knows his own mind too well to allow himself to be caught up in what Pater called "the play of circumstances" (Pater, p. 138). Such reticence is an instinctive mode of ascesis, one that expresses "the direct sense of personal worth ... that of pride of life" that Pater's ideal type possesses in spades and that makes him a different kind of "revolutionist" than those who act out of "self-pity, or indignation for the sake of others, or a sympathetic perception of the dominant undercurrent of progress in things"--but a revolutionist nonetheless (ibid). Pater writes:

"It is not the guise of Luther or Spinoza; rather it is that of Raphael, who in the midst of the Reformation and the Renaissance, himself lighted up by them, yielded himself to neither, but stood still to live upon himself, even in outward form a youth, almost an infant, yet surprising all the world ... Over and over again the world has been surprised by the heroism, the insight, the passion, of this clear crystal nature" (ibid., 139).

In "Diaphaneite," Pater offers us an ideal type that presents an alternative to that of Weber, and yet one that shares much in common with the Weberian ideal. Ascesis, it seems, produces more than one kind of character and, with it, varieties of charisma. Unlike Weber, however, Pater does not appear to have imagined that his "basement type" of character could serve as the foundation for a new social order. His "utopianism" is not expectant, it does not even appear to be particularly hopeful:

"Here there is a moral sexlessness, a kind of impotence, an ineffectual wholeness of nature, yet with a divine beauty and significance of its own" (ibid).

A rather sobering conclusion if one is looking for relief from yet another round of Weberian capitalist-Protestants.

Weber's "Gesamtpersonlichkeit" and Pater's "Diaphaneite," PART TWO.

2011-08-18T12:18:00.003-05:00

As J. Hillis Miller has shown, Pater's theory of recurrence is tied up with his theory of form. And, for Pater, "form is everything, matter nothing" (Miller, "Walter Pater: A Partial Portrait" in Bloom's Modern Critical Views, Walter Pater, p. 86).

Therefore, when considering a particular historical personage, we must take notice of that particular person's presentation in time as a congeries of elements. Miller likes to use Plato as an example:

"No element in Plato is new, not one speculative atom. What is new is the way of putting these elements together. In Pater's doctrine of recurrence, repetition is always with a difference. The difference lies in the way old forces are brought together once more in a slightly changed way and under new conditions. Pater's term for this novel way of assembling new materials is 'form.' Plato's originality lies in his brilliant novelty of form..." (ibid).

As to how such recurrent configurations come about, Pater does not venture much in the way of explanation. In his early essay "Diaphaneite," he seems content to utter phrases such as "a happy gift of nature," and "coming as it were in the order of grace, not of nature"--neither of which is particularly "diaphanous" as a description and hardly suffice as explanations (see Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, OUP, p. 137)!

If we require explanations of such phenomena, we must look elsewhere than Pater. Finding a certain congeniality between Pater's thought and Max Weber's (as mediated by Kant), I have chosen to look there.

What I find in Weber is a similar sensitivity to "form," whereby the form of the individual personality is determined, in part, by "larger," i.e., "social" formations.

At this point I must confess a degree of skepticism about sociology in general. I can never quite escape the nagging suspicion that the analysis of social formations offers no better (or worse) an explanation of a given phenomenon than such phrases as "a happy gift of nature" and "coming as it were in the order of grace, not of nature." What do we accomplish by offering a sociological explanation? Without a doubt, we have added a layer of complexity to our descriptions of phenomena--we have "thickened" them as Geertz would say--and that, at any rate, is something. But is that our ultimate objective? I think not. Our ultimate objective is to penetrate further into the mystery of how things happen and, if possible, to thereby gain some sort of leverage over the course of our lives. In other words, in the so-called human sciences, we have not advanced beyond the stage of magical manipulation of the universe. We are still "primitives" in our efforts and our desires. I often wonder if we would not be better off simply accepting the rudimentary nature of our grasp of things and, instead of striving to achieve something more "advantageous" (whatever that means), apply ourselves towards living more comfortably within our manifest limitations. With this caveat in mind, let us return to Weber's sociological explanation of personality types--leaving aside the question as to whether what Weber provides us is truly an example of explanatory power or just another adroit deferral of facing up to human impotence and mortality.

Weber shares Pater's interest in accounting for differences in human personality. He is convinced that the form of community in which one finds oneself has a determinate bearing upon the shape which that personality takes. In other words, community acts upon human personality in a manner analogous to the way a mold acts upon jell-o. Weber pays close attention to the various forms that communities take in particular historical contexts. He often compares and contrasts the attributes of distinguishable social formations. One pair of social formations that Weber distinguishes is "church" versus "sect." His motivation for making this distinction (which appears to introduce a sort of circularity to his arguments) is to account for the appearance and persistence of certain personality types. The particular Weberian type that is most relevant to the present inquiry is that of the Berufsmensch or "person of vocation" which I take to be a sub-type of the integrated modern personality that Weber favors: the Gesamtpersonlichkeit. If I am mistaken about Weber's taxonomy of types, I don't think it will be fatal to the comparison I wish to make with Pater and such a mistake (if there is one) could be corrected with a shift in nomenclature.

The distinction that Weber makes between church and sect is this: a "church" is the kind of community that "routinizes" charisma (and therefore manages to "homogenize"--sectarians would say "neutralize"--its individual manifestations among its members because all are deemed, by virtue of their membership in the community, to participate in charisma in some fashion); a "sect" (on the other hand) is the kind of community that cultivates the individual personalities of its members in such a way as to insure periodic "outbreaks" of charisma among them. It achieves this goal in a variety of ways. One is by limiting membership to those who have demonstrated charismatic authority prior to joining the organization. As a practical matter, this means that a sect cannot rely upon heredity to sustain or grow its membership in the way that a church can--for the obvious reason that charisma is not a predictable trait among families. For example, some of the Kennedys have had it, but most have not.

As Kim points out, Weber associates the "church" form of community with the Anstalt or institution and he associates the "sect" form of community with Gemeinschaft or organic community--a Romantic concept that would also inform Gramsci. On the basis of this distinction he compares and contrasts the Catholic church with Puritan sectarianism:

"Weber alleges, for instance, that the Catholic Church is not particularly interested in the ethical qualities of its lay population, because it is vested with a power to redeem their sin periodically. Thus the church members include periodic sinners as well as religiously sincere personalities. This is why ... Weber calls it a 'salvation-dispensing foundation' ... an institution based on leveling universalism. By contrast, Puritan sects tend toward a religious elitism or spiritual aristocracy. For Puritans, as their name indicates, only the pure can be admitted to the Lord's Supper, and 'it is a sin not to purge the sacramental communion of nonbelievers.'As opposed to Anstalt or institution, a Puritan sect is not a universal organization that embraces everybody and anybody. It is in a sense an elite group of those who have passed the strict test of admission, usually decided by a ballot of members. Those belonging to sects are the new elites and aristocrats by virtue of proven quality, or in short, charisma: 'The possession of such faculties is a "charisma," which to be sure, might be awakened in some but not in all'" (Kim, Max Weber's Politics of Civil Society, p. 77).

There is much here to mull over. If Weber is correct about the real-world effects of his church-sect distinction, he has provided us with a valuable analytical tool that can assist us in forming our expectations of certain types of social formations. And insofar as our expectations of social formations relate to our political hopes and agendas, he has contributed to those as well.

Pater's favored personality type, the Diaphaneite, is a charismatic mode with political potential but, as we shall see in PART THREE of this post, he was not particularly optimistic that this type could fulfill his utopian hopes.

Weber's "Gesamtpersonlichkeit" and Pater's "Diaphaneite," PART ONE.

2011-08-17T12:58:00.000-05:00

Perhaps the place to begin with these two "personality types" is to recognize them as just that--"types." Ideal types in both instances and, therefore, useful as heuristic devices rather than descriptive history.

After acknowledging the typological nature of these devices, one should consider the different emphases of their inventors and try to decide whether or not such differences have a decisive impact upon the way in which such types are best understood.

A superficial comparison of these two types will seize upon the fact that Weber was a founding figure of sociology and Pater a literary man and then summarily conclude that the latter's typology suffers from a failure to attend to the role of social or environmental factors.

I hope to avoid this kind of superficiality in my analysis. That said, to ignore the potential relevance of such an obvious difference would be irresponsible.

Let us begin with Pater--or, rather, with the expositor of Pater who, in my view, does the best job of "distilling" from his body of work the "configuration that underlies all his criticism," J. Hillis Miller (see, e.g., Miller's article "Walter Pater" in the 2nd edition of The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Criticism, pp. 720-722).

Miller rightly outlines the manner in which Pater embraced the notion that all of human experience reflects the Heraclitean flux. This notion saturates Pater's approach to literature and to life itself. Moreover, it lends a distinctly solipsistic flavor to Pater's world-view, for once Heraclitus has cut from beneath our feet all solid ground, each individual is left with nothing to hold on to but a rushing stream of impressions and her or his own interpretations of the same.

It is those who travel this far with Pater, and this far only, who are in the greatest danger of producing a superficial reading of his project.

For Pater does not see each individual consciousness as a self-enclosed monad bobbing about in the Heraclitean flux; instead, he posits deep commonalities among consciousnesses and, indeed, among the very elements of the flux itself: "It turns out that for Pater, the moment, though unique, is not single. Each 'impression' is 'infinitely divisible'"--for it is in the very nature of the flux to be so (Miller, 721). Each impression snatched from the primeval soup of experience is "self-divided" or, in Pater's terms, "Anders-Streben" (Other-Striving). As Miller explains, "The moment is in battle against itself in a way that recalls the Heraclitean flux, the Parmenidean or Empedoclean battle of opposites" (ibid).

It is via this appreciation of the complexity of the moment or momentary impression that Pater introduces the dimensions of diachronicity and conflict into his "system":

"The uniqueness of the momentary impression is a result not of its singleness but of its special combination of antagonistic forces flowing into it from the past and destined to divide again, each to go its separate way into the future. This means that the moment, at first seemingly so isolated, is connected by multiple strands to past and future" (ibid).

Here one observes Pater's often remarked debt to early Greek and Hegelian philosophies; but it is with respect to his rarely remarked debt to Kant that we discover his affinity to Weber. Pater's Kantian side argued that the ethically appropriate response of the individual to the Heraclitean flux was not to "go with the flow" merely, but rather, to "purge away by an effort of refinement or askesis all impurities in the moment, all irrelevant associations" in order to arrive at "the unique 'virtue' of each moment, meaning by 'virtue' the power or energy specific to the elements concentrated in that moment" (ibid). Pater spoke of this power or energy in terms of its ability to induce "pleasure" in the person savoring the moment, but it would seem that pleasure is but one possible response to this activity and, in the interests of thick description, one might wish to invoke Longinus (a la the Paterian Harold Bloom).

In any event, for Pater's Victorian contemporaries, the scandalous aspect of his "system" was that, lurking beneath his ethics, there lay an unapologetic aesthetics (cp. Ludwig Wittgenstein, "Ethics and aesthetics are one" remark 6.421 of the T L-P).

In addition to diachronicity and conflict, Pater's "system" contains an "implicit theory of repetition, so Viconian or Nietzschean in its resonances" (ibid, 722). For Pater, what distinguishes history from a record of "one damn thing after another" is the manner in which existing elements re-combine and, therefore, recur.

"The 'virtue' of a given moment does not die with that moment. It divides again into the various elemental forces that have entered into it. Those forces are always potentially able to combine again in a repetition of the earlier flame, a reincarnation that will be no less unique and no less 'wholly concrete' for being a recurrence" (ibid).

As an example, Miller suggests that "A great figure such as Plato is unique, in Pater's view, only in being a special combination of ideas and images already present long before his time" (ibid). Pace Hegel, Pater did not endow history with any specific linearity or teleological direction. The task of the historian and critic is, therefore, the "scrupulous discrimination of the particular elements that are configured in a painting, a poem, a work of philosophy, a personality" (ibid). Pater was less concerned with producing "predictions" than "explanations" and he was less concerned with producing "explanations" than "appreciations."

Weber was likewise indebted to Kant insofar as his ideal type of early modern personhood employed an ethical discipline or askesis as a means of managing his own participation in the unruly world of experience. The specifically sociological contribution of Weber was his insistence that human beings are capable of directing the flow of experience (the flow of the flux, as it were) by means of the social forms that they impose upon the found world. These social forms are, in part, the product of individual exercises of askesis cooperatively performed and, once established, they provide an artificial environment conducive to the recurrence of such acts and, therefore, their (potentially) perpetual institution (see, e.g., Kim, Weber's Politics of Civil Society, p. 74).

Reading Weber together with Pater allows one to recognize the latent aesthetics of Weber's sociology as well as the sociological possibilities of Pater's criticism. We shall return to these matters in PART TWO of this post.

Max Weber and "The Last of our Heroisms"

2011-08-16T11:46:00.000-05:00

"The historical constitution of a certain type of self and the empowerment of its agency through a complex interplay with political, social, and economic conditions always remain close to the heart of Weber's research agenda. Throughout his vast unorganized opus, Weber appears to be occupied with a distinctive ontology and genealogy of the modern self, which he calls the 'Occidental self' in the essays on world religions, the 'charismatic individual' in the studies of economy and society, personality (Personlichkeit) in the methodological essays as in his later writings on politics and science, and the 'person of vocation' (Berufsmensch) in The Protestant Ethic. These ideal-typical individuals share such characteristics as asceticism, methodical self-discipline, a regimented way of life, and an instrumental stance toward this world (and even toward one's own self)--all culminating in a fanatic zeal for secular activism ... Weber contends with Thomas Carlyle that it is these types of individuals, 'raised in the hard school of life, simultaneously calculating and daring but above all dispassionate, steady, shrewd, devoted fully to their cause,' who have made it possible to generate 'the last of our heroisms'" (Kim, pp. 27-28).

Given Weber's later criticisms of the "iron cage" which, in his view, characterizes late modern rationality, one might suspect that he harbored deep anxieties about such a "dispassionate" type. Most liberals do. But Weber, to his credit, was not "most liberals"--in his case, anxiety proved an effective spur to constructive thought and action. Kim detects Weber's ambivalence about the role of "dispassionate rationality" even in his early work and argues that Weber, as an alternative, posited a sort of "middle way" type of character "that can bring subjective value and objective rationality together to form a systematic total personality (Gesamtpersonlichkeit) under the supremacy of will" (Kim, p. 30).

Readers of Walter Pater may recognize here a resemblance to the Paterian appropriation in "The School of Giorgione" of Matthew Arnold's "imaginative reason." In "Pagan and Medieval Religious Sentiment," Arnold declared that

"The poetry of later paganism lived by the senses and understanding; the poetry of medieval Christianity lived by the heart and imagination. But the main element of the modern spirit's life is neither the senses and understanding, nor the heart and imagination; it is the imaginative reason" (see Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, OUP, new edition 2010, pp. 122, 179).

Kim argues that

"This willful combination of value and rationality ... enables the modern self to gain a moral, political, and economic agency in the form of worldly activism that is to revolutionize the subsequent course of modern history. In his Protestant ethic thesis, evidently, Weber wanted to isolate this paradoxical compound, a theme that kept on informing his critical evaluation of his contemporary politics and society as a degeneration of this early modern ideal" (Kim, p. 30).

It will be instructive to compare Weber's Gesamtpersonlichkeit with Pater's "Diaphaneite."

Max Weber, Anarchist.

2011-08-15T22:03:00.001-05:00

Sung Ho Kim, a scholar who studied the works of Max Weber at the University of Chicago, seems to me to have his finger on the pulse of our (post?) modern political predicament. His revised doctoral thesis Max Weber's Politics of Civil Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) attempts to demonstrate that Weber was more than just a diagnostician of the political malaise that has diseased our Evening-Lands in these dark days of their accelerating decline (the notorious "iron cage" metaphor). Weber also holds relevance as a physician with a prescription for what ails us.

When I entered my Ph.D. program in 2001, the mantra of "those in the know" as to how to repair our dysfunctional politics was "civil society." As a Chomskian Left Libertarian, I was encouraged by the prospect of liberals embracing the notion that the procedural state may not be the ne plus ultra of human social organization. Unfortunately, liberals tend to invoke magical formulae (the "audacity of hope" syndrome) in lieu of direct political action and, as anyone who was paying attention understood, the mere repetition of the mantra proved empty.

With this magical chanting ringing in my ears, I read Richard Rorty's Achieving Our Country and allowed him to persuade me (for the last time) to give liberals another chance to repair the mess they had made of the country when they abandoned progressive politics after the debacle of McGovern's ill-fated campaign for the Presidency in 1972. Kim, on the other hand, was immersing himself in the body of work bequeathed us by Max Weber and asking the right questions. At the center of his inquiry are these two beauties: (1) Can a liberal democratic regime sustain itself in a robust form while remaining neutral to the moral dispositions and civic virtues of its citizens? and (2) What is the role of civil society with regard to the continuing viability of a liberal democratic regime (statecraft) and the self-constitution of its citizens (soulcraft)? (Kim, p.5). In response to these questions, Kim offers a Weber who had concluded that

"The cultivation of a certain type of moral agent ... called 'the person of vocation' (Berufsmensch) is critical for the continuing vitality of the modern liberal democratic regime; that its virtues, dispositions, and characters can be fostered only in a peculiar context of civil society ... called 'sectlike society' (Sektengesellschaft); and that the decline of civil society and the concomitant degeneration of the liberal self must be restored as one of the central agendas for late modern politics. Statecraft and soulcraft are not separated in Weber's politics of civil society, nor can they or should they be separated" (Kim, pp. 6-7).

Weber contended that "not all forms of civil society are conducive to a robust liberal democratic regime; some are in fact detrimental to it. Through a genealogical reconstruction ... he [sought] to resuscitate a peculiar mode of civil society as the site where his liberal politics of voluntary associational life and the unique ontology of modern self intersect and interact" (Kim, p. 7).

The "peculiar mode of civil society" that Kim claims Weber hoped to "resuscitate" is the "sectlike associations" of early modern Europe (and, I would add, medieval Muslim societies). As Kim reads Weber, the "iron cage" is a late modern phenomenon and not characteristic of the modern period (or project) as a whole. Kim argues that,

"...in the Protestant ethic thesis Weber aimed to isolate an ontology of the self in which subjective value and objective rationality are willfully brought together to form a systematic whole, thereby enabling modern individuals to act in accordance with the principled sense of moral duty--a view that is distinguishable from both Enlightenment naturalistic anthropology and Victorian liberal characterology and rather resembles the Kantian ideal of the self-legislating self. Although this type of modern self, which Weber called Berufsmensch, is constituted in inward, subjective isolation ... it does not usher in an atomized social realm of individual rights in Weber's social imagination. On the contrary, Weber held that a novel mode of sociability results from the modern empowerment of the individual agency, which is institutionalized as a sectlike society. Weber saw that the Berufsmensch can be maintained only in a rigorous social mechanism of ethical discipline, which demands a small-scale, pluralized, and voluntary associational life in opposition to state intervention. The result is a permeation of small voluntary associations into modern political society ... The nature and mechanism of sectlike society [is to be found in] Weber's essays on Puritan sects ... [and, based upon his findings in those studies,] Weber wanted to revive a secularized form of Protestant individualism and associational pluralism..." Kim, pp. 25-26.

The advocacy of "small-scale, pluralized, and voluntary associational life in opposition to state intervention" is a fundamental tenet of Left Libertarianism. Moreover, as every history of Anarchism acknowledges, the Protestant Reformation and the English Revolution were periods rife with Anarchistic experimentation.

We shall continue to explore Kim's remarkable reading of Weber in subsequent posts.

The Madness of Marcel Proust

2011-08-11T12:16:00.005-05:00

At the age of 19, Proust began to take notes for the work which would make him famous. At age 34, after the death of his mother, he is said to have "retired from the world" in order to devote himself to recording what his experience had been. He knew by then what it means to live; what was left to him was the creation of literature. At age 42, or thereabouts, he published Swann's Way. He was dead at 51 and the final volume of his work was published 5 years later.

The madness of Proust (like the madness of Kierkegaard, and many others) was a literary one. The power of the written word is immense; it can become tyrannical and all-consuming.

When we are told that the Word becomes flesh and dwells among us, should we be comforted by this news, or terrified?

How ought we to compose ourselves? That is the question...

It is no accident that, in the Islamic tradition, adab means both personal conduct and literature.

Swinburne on Whitman and Blake

2011-08-04T15:28:00.000-05:00

From the 2nd edition of Swinburne's essay on Blake (1868), pp. 300-301:

The points of contact and sides of likeness between William Blake and Walt Whitman are so many and so grave, as to afford some ground of reason to those who preach the transition of souls or transfusion of spirits. The great American is not a more passionate preacher of sexual or political freedom than the English artist. To each the imperishable form of a possible and universal Republic is equally requisite and adorable as the temporal and spiritual queen of ages and of men. To each all sides and shapes of life are alike acceptable or endurable. From the fresh free ground of either workman nothing is excluded that is not exclusive. The words of either strike deep and run wide and soar high. They are both full of faith and passion, competent to love and to loathe, capable of contempt and of worship. Both are spiritual, and both democratic; both by their works recall, even to so untaught and tentative a student as I am, the fragments vouchsafed to us of the Pantheistic poetry of the East.

True Religion: A Brief Homily

2011-08-02T19:47:00.001-05:00

All religions are true. All religions are false. The criterion of true religion is a simple one: if, when faced with the choice to love, to hate, or to be indifferent to another human being, something in the religious tradition that you profess to adhere to persuades you to choose love over the alternatives, your religion, in that moment, is true. In the next moment, should you decide to choose otherwise, your religion, in that next moment, is now false.

The truth or falsity of any religion is the responsibility of its adherents.

If you consider yourself religious, choose wisely. Choose to love.

All the rest: the dogma, the ritual, the poetry, the architecture, the painting, the statuary, the institutions, the bureaucracies--are so much opera and its staging. You are more than welcome to love the opera; but love your neighbor better, and love your neighbor first.

De Profundis

2011-08-02T17:42:00.000-05:00

"While in reading the Gospels--particularly that of St. John himself, or whatever early Gnostic took his name and mantle--I see the continual assertion of the imagination as the basis of all spiritual and material life, I see also that to Christ imagination was simply a form of love, and that to him love was lord in the fullest meaning of that phrase."

-- Oscar Wilde

Our Sadean Modernity

2011-07-19T14:08:00.003-05:00

There are probably as many ways to read the Marquis de Sade as there are readers who are willing to do so; but read him we must, it seems to me. As Camille Paglia observed in her once controversial book Sexual Personae:

The Marquis de Sade is a great writer and philosopher whose absence from university curricula illustrates the timidity and hypocrisy of the liberal humanities. No education in the western tradition is complete without Sade. He must be confronted, in all his ugliness.

Timidity and hypocrisy indeed. We in Europe and North America cannot face the Marquis because we are unwilling to hear the music that confronts us when we do. If we were able to muster the moral courage to face the Marquis's peculiar "music," then, perhaps, we could come to an honest appraisal of our present role in the world, and instead of averting our eyes and remaining silent about that role--the twisted way we are managing to "Abu Ghraibize" it (not just the Middle East, among other atrocities, the U.S. government maintains secret torture chambers throughout the world and financially underwrites foreign governments that do the same)--we might actually find our way out of that role into a new one. But I'm not holding my breath.

In the course of what will be but brief remarks, I do not wish to create the impression that I see Sade as a villain. I do not. I see him, in part, as a victim. He found himself living in revolutionary times--a revolution that threatened everything he had been raised to take for granted as prerogatives of his privileged birth. And he seems to have embraced this revolution, despite his own interests. Then the revolutionaries turned on him. His life story is truly an amazing one and his personal strength of character, his imagination, his critical acumen and, above all, his unflinching candor, are what made him more than a victim. In my view, he was a hero.

And yet, one cannot help but be intensely ambivalent about his literary heroics. For he is like Milton's Satan or Milton's precursors among those Sufi sages who saw Iblis (the Satan character in the Qur'an) as the true monotheist, the one figure among the angels to understand the implications of Allah's order to bow down to Adam (consequently, Iblis refused).

Intensely ambivalent because the freedom of which Sade may be thought an "apostle" carries with it untold burdens of responsibility. For all the lip-service we give to freedom in this country, we lack the guts to lay hold of it. Sade is a painful reminder of our cowardice.

In one of his revolutionary pamphlets, written before he fell out of favor with the new French Republic, Sade proclaimed sovereignty to be "...one, indivisible, inalienable." When you share it or confer it on others, he says, you destroy it. So he proposed radical methods of democratic self-governance that the revolution was incapable of institutionalizing. Or we must assume it was incapable of institutionalizing Sade's reforms, for I am not aware that any effort was made to put them into effect.

Of course, there are those who would say, "On the contrary! You yourself have admitted that we are Abu Ghraibizing the world. Does that not make us Sadeans to the core?"

I answer: yes and no.

Here we must distinguish between Sade the literary artist and Sade's own characters. We have become Sadean fictions to the core: indiscriminately cruel and in love with our own barbaric natures. But the Marquis himself, the aristocrat who embraced radical democracy and personal liberty and maintained this stance throughout a lifetime of successive imprisonments at the hands of "democrats" and "liberals," that Sade eludes us. We don't know him. We don't recognize him. We do not aspire to be him.

Instead, we emulate his literary revenge upon our own craven politics and religion. And we do so without a touch of ironic self-recognition. We see ourselves in Sade's mirror and we do not blush. Worse, we gush. We applaud the sickening visage he shows us of ourselves as if it were a thing of beauty.

Our Sadean modernity is nothing if not labyrinthine. A deep reading of Sade holds the potential of revealing its ins and outs, swerves and curves, its dark recesses and trompe l'oeils. But in the deepening shade of the Eveninglands we now inhabit, who has sufficient light to begin to read his texts anew?

A Brief Message from the Invisible Whitmanian Republic

2011-07-18T12:29:00.000-05:00

The old, weird America that almost was...

Until the Revolution Comes...

2011-07-09T17:49:00.000-05:00

Pyrrhic victories are the only victories that the Corporatocracy will permit the American people...And even then...

Sidney Blumenthal's Unintentional Prophecy From 2008

2011-07-09T10:12:00.001-05:00

The GOP on the verge of imploding

The key (i.e., prophetic) sentence: "Just as the Republican collapse under Bush has given the Democrats an unprecedented opening, the Democrats may still find a way to reinvent the Republicans."

I doubt that, when Sidney Blumenthal uttered this prophecy, he imagined that the Democrats would "reinvent the Republicans" by BECOMING THE REPUBLICANS.

As I like to tell my students, if you want to be an historian, you must develop a keen sense of irony. Otherwise, the joke will be on you.

The Mazeppist Tries His Hand At "Prophecy"

2011-07-08T12:00:00.000-05:00

I put the word "prophecy" in scare quotes because what follows is about as prophetic as saying to someone with a heroin addiction, "You know, if you don't kick that, you will probably come to an untimely end."

The "Prophecy":

In order to continue to live the self-serving lie that the American public and its corporate Over-Lords are living in these opening decades of the 21st century--i.e., the lie that we are a free people Divinely ordained to preserve our freedom and to spread it to others by force of violence--we have had to dehumanize entire populations. We are even now attempting to de-legitimize a world religion (Islam).
Our end is fore-shadowed in this our beginning:

We are dehumanizing ourselves and de-legitimizing the Christian faith.

Once again: our end is in our beginning.

Another Mazeppist Credo

2011-07-05T17:32:00.000-05:00

"...the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one."

--John Ruskin

A Mazeppist Credo

2011-06-28T21:00:00.000-05:00

"The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong man has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his."

--Hugh of St. Victor

More Reflections on Turkey

2011-06-23T11:29:00.000-05:00

Istanbul continually celebrates Europe and Asia, past and present, sacred and secular...

It is hard to imagine that such a place can exist, here in the Land of Burger-Death and Endless Imperialist War, of what Tolstoy rightly called "stupefication." To spend a month in a place that honors traditional modes of conviviality while embracing modern conveniences and inconveniences is to see a future beyond anything that the self-anesthetized in the U.S. can ever imagine.

We have already been surpassed by our cultural superiors. It is only a matter of time before we arrive at the station to see the caboose of the train that passed us by fading into the distance. The little glorious run of the Evening Lands (the last 500 years) is all but finished. Bankrupt. Exhausted. Only the fire-works remain...

Difficult As It Is for Hard-Core Jesus-Landers to Accept...

2011-06-21T18:47:00.000-05:00

there really are people in this world, the humble Mazeppist among them, who love Jesus too much to ever accept being mistaken for a Christian.

When my dental-hygienist here in Jesus-Land wants to tell me about the many, subtle ways that God has blessed her in her life, I am thankful that her fingers are in my mouth so that all I can do is grunt and nod.

Not that I doubt for one moment that God has indeed blessed her in many subtle ways; I do not question such an assertion. What I question is why she feels compelled to share such things with me while she is scraping the plaque from my teeth.

No doubt she feels that "God" has moved her to "witness" to me. But I just think that such behavior reflects a lack of cultural sensitivity at best (and, my God, we share the same culture, at least in theory); at worst, it is an exhibition of her ego-driven desire to tell me that she has something that I need. She "has" Jesus in a way that I don't "have" Jesus.

I truly doubt that she could ever appreciate the fact that I not only "lack" Jesus in the way that she "has" him, but I thank God that I lack Jesus in such a way.

I have no desire to make Jesus my personal savior, my private deity. I have too much love and respect for the man I meet in the Gospels (canonical and otherwise) and in the Qur'an to ever wish to appropriate his memory in such a fashion.

It was through my love for Rabbi Jesus that I was able to find my way out of Christianity and the Christ-idolatry it tragically entails. May I never so dishonor my Rabbi as to worship him as a god.

Reflections on My Recent Month-Long Sojourn in Turkey

2011-06-20T16:09:00.000-05:00

Kipling's axiom that "east is east and west is west and never the twain shall meet" is conclusively refuted.

Istanbul is a city of 20 million people out of a country of 70 million. I have never been to any urban metropole where the people were more friendly or more kind. One should take children there, if you have them; Turks love children and will dote on yours, even if they do not know them.

Coming from a country of uncouth barbarism as I do, the general level of hospitality and conviviality is a little disconcerting at first; you have trouble believing it is genuine. I was in Turkey for a month. It is genuine.

Constantinople was the capital of a Europe united as a Christian empire. The Turks take pride in their entire heritage and the historical remains scattered throughout the city of Istanbul are reason enough to spend 2 weeks there--in the vain hope of scratching the surface.

The brilliant humanist and Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan designed the most amazing mosques...No photograph can do them justice...In addition, every human being should visit the Agha Sofia and stand at the world navel. Then look straight up.

Pictures of Turkish artists and poets adorn park benches and bus stops. Like ordinary Arabs and Iranians, Turks will often quote a line of poetry when attempting to explain something.

Thanks be to Allah that the EU could not get past its prejudices and admit Turkey when Turkey was interested in membership. The Turks, being Turks, found another way and now the EU needs them more than they need the EU. There really is justice in this world.

The Future of the U.S. is Written in Blake

2011-06-11T04:58:00.000-05:00

As a culture ages, its wars become an increasingly explicit symbol of its growing death impulse and reversion to nature.

--Northrop Frye, FS, p. 223.

Northrop Frye on Revolution

2011-06-09T13:52:00.000-05:00

Revolution is the sign of apocalyptic yearnings, of an impulse to burst loose from this world altogether and get into a better one, a convulsive lunge forward of the imagination. There is thus a connection far deeper than a resemblance of sound between revolution and revelation.

Fearful Symmetry, pp. 201-202.

Mazeppism is a Blakean Apocalyptic Humanism

2011-05-15T10:06:00.001-05:00

Saree Makdisi, William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790's (University of Chicago Press, 2003).

The vicissitudes of scholarly fashion require Job-like patience, a felicitous genetic inheritance, and just enough luck to deliver a life adequately long to see intellectuals arrive at the obvious. When they do arrive, woefully tardy and rarely apologetic, they are often burdened with glorious gifts.

Blake scholarship is no exception.

One must wade through reams of fallen trees blotted with toxic ink stains, risking life, health, and sanity, until one bright, sunny morning, roaming the library stacks in heart-sick desperation, a title catches the eye. Sometimes, as with Makdisi's book on Blake, the title is too long and inadequately informative. But if the sunlight manages to penetrate the gloom of the aisle that holds the PR 4100's, and do so at just the right angle, the spine of the book for which one has waited decades (without knowing it) whispers urgently from the shelf: "Pick me!" At that moment, freedom of choice is exposed for the self-congratulatory conceit that it is. The book is plucked from the shelf and, after several moments of intense scrutiny, one is reconciled to all of the scribblers who have made the life of the mind ultimately so rewarding.

Makdisi gets it.

At that momentous historical turning point, toward the end of the eighteenth century, in which almost every attempt to represent otherness seemed to slip into the exoticizing political aesthetic that would enable and justify imperial conquest, it was a matter of some urgency to be able to think of the foreign without resorting to (or sliding into) the language and figures of exoticism...Blake drew on and reformulated for the exigencies of his own time a heterogeneous underground tradition that stressed the continuity of European and Afro-Asiatic cultures, rather than the sharp differentiation between Europe and its others which would prove essential to modern imperialism...Blake's interest in certain mystical currents which had plunged deep underground long before his own time offered him a way to articulate a logic of cultural heterogeneity that refused the discourse of exoticism. Indeed, his simultaneously political and aesthetic stance on otherness must be seen to enable a carefully articulated position on the cultural politics of imperialism, as well as a discourse of freedom contesting the internal imperialism of the state. Or, rather, Blake's elaboration of a form of religious and political freedom that would defy what he called 'state religion' was also an elaboration of a form of political and cultural freedom from the discourse and practice of imperialism...What I want to propose is that through this investigation of Blake's anti-imperialism we will discover how he found a way to produce a critique for his own time, rather than as a quasi-reactionary attempt to return to some lost original fullness, both of the ancien regime and of the bourgeois radicalism that attacked it--a way to refuse the logic of the state and of the discourse of sovereign power itself in the name of what he would call 'Immortal Joy.' Makdisi, pp. 204-205.

Mazeppism, as I practice it, is, and has always been, a variety of Blakean apocalyptic humanism.

William Blake: A radical visionary

2011-04-29T16:31:00.000-05:00

William Blake: A radical visionary

An article from 2000 on the (largely forgotten) radical politics of William Blake.

Blakean Humanism: Romantic Messianism Democratized

2011-04-21T18:43:00.000-05:00

When writing a particular life (Genet's, Flaubert's, even his own), Jean-Paul Sartre sifted his data for what he called, borrowing a term from Merleau-Ponty, the "differential": that which placed his subject out of step with the prevailing spirit or presumptions of his time and, as a consequence, permitted him to undertake a life-project that reflected the peculiar stamp of his individual consciousness. For Sartre, every life is filled with opportunities to step away from the drowse of "bad faith" that encumbers it and embark upon a career of existential authenticity.

In his difficult and challenging Theses on the Philosophy of History, Walter Benjamin theorized a Marxist historiography; whereas Sartre focused his biographies on specific individuals, Benjamin attempted to take in the sweep of history itself. And yet he, too, was in search of the "differential" that impregnated historical moments with "chips of Messianic time" (Addendum A): those historical junctures which presented historical actors with opportunities for revolutionary action. In Thesis XV, Benjamin wrote:

The awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode is characteristic of the revolutionary classes at the moment of their action.

Likewise, the recognition of such moments in the course of sifting one's historical data presents the critical historian with the opportunity to salvage them from the ash-heap of the victor's narration about the past and, thereby, transform her scholarship into a mode of revolutionary praxis.

Hubert Babinski was correct to point out the "mystical messianism" or hero worship that, for better or worse (and usually worse), has afflicted Romantic sensibilities since they first came into their own as such in the late 18th-early 19th centuries C.E. This is, without question, one of the frailties to which the Romantic movement has always been heir. For some, the Mazeppa legend represents yet another iteration of this unfortunate tendency.

But not for the latter-day Mazeppist.

For the latter-day Mazeppist is, after the recent example of Northrop Frye, a Blakean humanist. That is to say, an individual who sees his/her own reflection in Harold Bloom's description of William Hazlitt, whose religious background, "like that of all the English Romantic poets ... was in the tradition of Protestant dissent, the kind of nonconformist vision that descended from the Left Wing of England's Puritan movement" (Bloom, The Visionary Company, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press (1971): xvii).

Bloom continued:

There is no more important point to be made about English Romantic poetry than this one, or indeed about English poetry in general, particularly since it has been deliberately obscured by most modern criticism. Though it is a displaced Protestantism, or a Protestantism astonishingly transformed by different kinds of humanism or naturalism, the poetry of the English Romantics is a kind of religious poetry, and the religion is in the Protestant line, though Calvin or Luther would have been horrified to contemplate it. Indeed, the entire continuity of English poetry that T. S. Eliot and his followers attacked is a radical Protestant or displaced Protestant tradition (ibid).

Like Benjamin, like Blake, the latter-day Mazeppist performs a variety of displaced Protestantism and, in the process, democratizes Romantic Messianism.

The "differential," the productive combination of longing and loss that the figure of Mazeppa represents, is not the franchise of an aristocratic few, but the birthright of the long-suffering many. For the Blakean humanist, the Mazeppa/Christ figure is a metonym for the proposition that every human soul carries within itself the capacity to emerge from the most unpromising of fates to take its seat within the "visionary company" of "seers"; those who have been gifted by their trials upon this earth with new eyes to recognize a given moment as a chip of Messianic time and with the revolutionary will to act upon it appropriately.

And so it was I entered the broken world
To trace the visionary company of love, its voice
An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)
But not for long to hold each desperate choice.

Hart Crane (of course).

The Romantic Imagination

2011-04-18T12:31:00.000-05:00

From Hubert F. Babinski, The Mazeppa Legend in European Romanticism (NY: Columbia University Press, 1972):

Mazeppa's use in European Romanticism is at once the story of a minor figure who captured the imagination of many important artists and of an unbroken chain of artistic influence and inspiration. As a result, one can see the Romantics' minds at play with a subject that had wide and deep cultural appeal throughout Europe in the Romantic period (p. 148).

By understanding how one figure was utilized by Romantic artists in different ways, one can, perhaps, see a little more clearly some of the qualities considered characteristic of the Romantic mind: gothicism, new uses and meanings of history, the transformation of subject from one art form to another, the preoccupation with the artist in society and with the creative process, the emphasis on individual suffering (which moves from Ichschmerz toward the spiritual or mystical), and the relation of politics to art. Although these characteristics existed to varying degrees in artists of different countries at slightly different times, there is a general sense that Romanticism as a movement underwent an evolution in Europe between 1789, to use a convenient though imprecise date, and 1840. It seems to me that, for better or worse, the end point of that evolution, reflected in the matured Romantic imagination, is messianic mysticism (p. 149).

The Romantics were extremely interested in liberators who could deliver nations from political oppression, an interest prompted no doubt by their contemporary history and political idealism. Such liberators, the Romantics felt, had to be tried and refined by suffering in order to be purified for their messianic task. Often the Romantics looked to myth and history for their examples, or, like Blake, they created new myths. The suffering of the liberators, or heroes, was usually beyond the range of human experience; or, perhaps more aptly, what the Romantics thought and felt was usually beyond the range of human experience. Such suffering gave these heroes a special spiritual character in the minds of the Romantics, and often, as a result, they so appeared in Romantic art. That special quality can be called, in a broad sense, mystical. Since many Romantics shied away from institutional religions, the quality of the mysticism in their works often seems areligious. It is a mysticism that acknowledged a spiritual dimension in man that can work either good or evil, though the Romantics generally tended to avoid such orthodox classifications of the spirit. Very few were able to accept the total goodness of the human spirit, though such total acceptance seemed to be the point of a good deal of Romantic art and philosophy. Notable exceptions are Blake, the late Slowacki, and Krasinski. The mysticism that most often appears in Romantic art, then, resembles the implicit Christianity of Job, Ecclesiastes, and the Sermon on the Mount with variations of gnosticism. The work of Blake, the late Wordsworth, and the late Shelley was mystical in this way. Slowacki and Mickiewicz carried the mystical in their work to a maturity equalling if not surpassing Blake's (pp. 149-150).

"On the Road" to the "Postmodern"

2011-04-06T10:57:00.002-05:00

In a perceptive and well-balanced article from the mid-1990's, Robert Holton examined Kerouac's appropriation of the Spenglerian notion of the "fellaheen" and concluded that

While a sense of racial alterity had long been a central topic of white American literature--examples from Freneau to Faulkner come to mind--one can argue that in Kerouac and the Beats a quite different manifestation of this American preoccupation appears. In Kerouac's Beat classic On the Road there is, on one hand, the expression of a radical desire to challenge the existing social order through a fore-grounding of the conventions and limitations of racial identity; and, on the other hand, there is a misrecognition of those conventions and limitations so profound as to justify the claim that ultimately On the Road legitimates as much as it challenges the master narratives that post-modernism seeks to undo.

[Robert Holton, "Kerouac Among the Fellahin: On The Road to the Postmodern" in Modern Fiction Studies 41:2 (1995: Summer), pp. 265-283].

I like to say that there are two kinds of white Americans (though one need not be white to fall into one or the other of these categories): racists and recovering racists. Kerouac seems to have been among the former at several points in his life and among the latter at other times. In this regard, his personal story is not all that exceptional. As Northrop Frye continually reminded us, artists are often unexceptional in many ways; Kerouac was an artist. We have no warrant to be surprised.

Rather, we should bear witness to his struggles with race and class and ideology as they found articulation in his life and his art and turn them to our own advantage: as opportunities to reflect upon our own struggles with race, class, and ideology.

By his stripes we may be healed.

Kerouac Among the Moroccan "Fellaheen"

2011-04-04T21:46:00.003-05:00

His best time in Morocco was a solitary hike to a Berber village in the mountains. These were the original fellaheen (the very word is Arabic) who had impressed him in the pages of Spengler with their endurance. Here in real life he was even more respectful of their simplicity and humility. In his notebook he made pencil drawings of their huts, imagining himself retired there to paint for the rest of his life. One of the peasants gave him a machete with a gold-braided handle, which he treasured ever after. Characteristically, Jack's response to Islam was based not on any intellectual apprehension but on his love for these villagers. The glory of their religion, embodied in their stolid faces, moved him to observe the fast of Ramadan. A few months later he would tell Malcolm Cowley that Islam and Buddhism were the only two religions capable of lasting another fifty years. --Gerald Nicosia, Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac, London: Penguin Books (1986), p. 546.

Chasing Our Faustian Tails

2011-04-03T18:07:00.003-05:00

In the decade following the Allied victory, church attendance and religious affiliation grew at an unprecedented rate, and critical debate over the significance of the increase reached a fevered pitch in intellectual circles as well as popular culture. During an era that witnessed the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the Nuremberg trials, a neo-orthodox revival, the beginning of the cold war, and the Korean conflict as well as congressional investigations into un-American activities, the postwar "turn to religion" took place within a heightened atmosphere of crisis, conspiracy, and conformity. John Lardas, The Bob Apocalypse, p. 38.

It is instructive to re-visit the era which saw the rise of the Beats and, as John Lardas rightly did, place that social and literary phenomenon within its cultural context. Then, to step back (as Lardas neglected to do), and--drawing from the Spenglerian inheritance that the Beats themselves cherished--bear witness to the sorry repetitions of the American religious imagination.

The Beats were, as Lardas acknowledged, Spenglerian Transcendentalists. Their strong American literary precursors were Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. Collectively and individually, the Beats attempted to renew the promise of the American experiment that Emerson articulated in Nature. Unlike Emerson, however, the Beats did not draw their inspiration from a romanticized view of the natural world but from a Spenglerian (romantic) view of a cultural type: the fellaheen.

Echoing Tolstoy's peasants (themselves an echo of Rousseau's "noble savage" figure), the Beats attempted (like the mysterious W.D. Fard of the Nation of Islam before them) a transvaluation of racialist stereotypes. In the process, they performed what Northrop Frye named as the goal of ethical criticism: "... to look at contemporary social values with the detachment of one who is able to compare them in some degree with the infinite vision of possibilities presented by culture. One who possesses such a standard of transvaluation," Frye argued, "is in a state of intellectual freedom. One who does not possess it is a creature of whatever social values get to him first: he has only the compulsions of habit, indoctrination, and prejudice" (Anatomy of Criticism, p. 348).

It is difficult for one who regards the religious imagination as a source of cultural fecundity to observe the present American scene with equanimity. The bizarre revisionist history (participated in and approved by no less a figure than the current occupant of the Oval Office) that seeks to valorize the Reagan era as a time of peace and prosperity represents a kind of moral effrontery that leaves one not only speechless but gasping for air.

Those who lived during the Reagan years and witnessed that Administration's irresponsible saber-rattling-as-foreign policy combined with its war on organized labor and the middle class recognize the Obama betrayal for what it is: an unabashed continuation of rule by the militarized corporatocracy. The Christian Right's blessing of this travesty of democracy exposes the moral bankruptcy of early 21st century Protestantism. At the same time, American embrace of Catholic social teaching seems to be a quaint relic of the first half of the 20th century. The Mazeppist advocates the renewal of post-Spenglerian cultural criticism of the kind practiced by such unlikely bedfellows as Kerouac and Frye (On The Road and Anatomy of Criticism both appeared, if I'm not mistaken, in 1957).

Frye's strong precursors in the historical reflection upon culture were Vico and Spengler. Hayden White was right to celebrate Frye as a thinker who, like Sartre, "was nothing if not a philosopher of human freedom, of artistic creativity, and beyond that of a generally human power of species self-creation" (White, The Fiction of Narrative, p. 266). His eclipse in the field of literary criticism is but one more symptom of the tragic onset of Faustian winter.

Hayden White on Frye (on Spengler)

2011-04-01T07:29:00.002-05:00

In a 1994 essay (collected in White, The Fiction of Narrative, pub. by John Hopkins in 2010), Hayden White reiterated his previously stated belief that Northrop Frye was "the greatest natural cultural historian of our time." He then mentioned that

Frye remarks somewhere that "the great synthesis of Marx and Spengler has yet to be written..."

and hints that the theory of history which underlies Frye's incomparable Anatomy of Criticism is, in fact, just the sort of synthesis that Frye was looking for.

White goes on to point out that Vico's distinction between human history and natural history is foundational in Frye's thought--a distinction one finds echoed in Frye's review of The Decline of the West.

For Frye, as for Spengler, the way in which human beings can come to know nature and the way in which human beings can come to know culture is qualitatively different.

Once this Vichian distinction is admitted, Spengler's methodological innovations in historical investigation demand serious consideration.

Spenglerian Methodology

2011-03-31T09:12:00.002-05:00

From Northrop Frye's review of The Decline of the West (Daedalus 103, no. 1, Winter 1974, pp. 1-13).

1. Analogical Reasoning:

The philosophical framework of Spengler's argument is a Romantic one, derived ultimately from Fichte's adaptation of Kant. The objective world, the world that we know and perceive, the phenomenal world, is essentially a spatial world: it is the domain of Nature explored by science and mathematics, and so far as it is so explored, it is a mechanical world, for when living things are seen objectively they are seen as mechanisms. Over against this is the world of time, organism, life and history. The essential reality of this world eludes the reasoner and experimenter: it is to be attained rather by feeling, intuition, imaginative insight, and, above all, by symbolism. The time in which this reality exists is a quite different time from the mechanical or clock time of science, which is really a dimension of space. It follows that methods adequate for the study of nature are not adequate for the study of history. The true method of studying living forms, Spengler says, is by analogy, and his whole procedure is explicitly and avowedly analogical. The problem is to determine what analogies in history are purely accidental, and which ones point to the real shape of history itself. Thanks to such works as Bernard Lonergan's Insight (1957), we know rather more about the positve role of analogy in constructive thought than was generally known in 1918, and it is no longer possible to dismiss Spengler contemptuously as "mystical" or "irrational" merely because his method is analogical.

2. Morphology:

Everything that is alive shows an organic rhythm, moving through stages of birth, growth, maturity, decline and eventual death. If this happens to all individual men without exception, there is surely no inherent improbability in supposing that the same organic rhythm extends to larger human units of life.

This morphological view of history, which sees history as a plurality of cultural developments, is, Spengler claims, an immense improvement on the ordinary "linear" one which divides history into ancient, medieval, and modern periods. Here Spengler seems to me to be on very solid ground, at least to the extent that linear history is really, at bottom, a vulgar and complacent assumption that we represent the inner purpose of all human history...Hegel has been often and most unfairly ridiculed for advocating a view of history which made the Prussian state of his day its supreme achievement. But whenever we adopt this linear view, especially in its progressive form, which asserts that the later we come in time the better we are, we do far worse than Hegel. The linear view of history is intellectually dead, and Spengler has had a by no means ignoble role in assisting at its demise.

3. The Decline of the West and the practice of history:

Spengler's book is not a work of history; it is a work of historical popularization. It outlines one of the mythical shapes in which history reaches everybody except professional historians...What Spengler has produced is a vision of history which is very close to being a work of literature--close enough, at least, for me to feel some appropriateness in examining it as a literary critic. If The Decline of the West were nothing else, it would still be one of the world's great Romantic poems.

4. Spengler and his critics:

I have elsewhere tried to show that it is intellectually dishonest to call a man's work reactionary, whatever his personal attitudes may have been, because it is the use made of it by others that will determine whether it will be reactionary or not. The pseudocritic is constantly looking for some feature of a writer's attitude, inside or outside his books, that will enable him to plaster some ready-made label on his author. Genuine criticism is a much more difficult and delicate operation, especially in literature, where a man may be a great poet and still be little better than an idiot in many of his personal attitudes...

In a large number, at least, of important writers we find an imagination which makes them important, and something else, call it an ego, which represents the personality trying to say something, to assert and argue and impress. A great deal of criticism revolves around the problem of trying to separate these two elements.We have Eliot the poet and Eliot the snob; Pound the poet and Pound the crank; Yeats the poet and Yeats the poseur; Lawrence the poet and Lawrence the hysteric. Further back, Milton, Pope, Blake, Shelley, Whitman, all present aspects of personality so distasteful to some critics that they cannot really deal critically with their poetry at all. For somebody on the periphery of literature, like Spengler, the task of separation is still more difficult, and requires even more patience...In my opinion Spengler has a permanent place in twentieth-century thought, but so far as his reputation is concerned, he was often his own worst enemy, and a stupid and confused Spengler is continually getting in the way of the genuine prophet and visionary.

5. The enduring value of Spengler:

After all this has been said, and a great deal more that could be said taken for granted, it is still true that very few books, in my experience, have anything like Spengler's power to expand and exhilarate the mind. The boldness of his leaping imagination, the kaleidoscopic patterns that facts make when he throws them together, the sense of the whole of human thought and culture spread out in front of one, the feeling that the blinkers of time and space have been removed from one's inward eyes when Greek sculptors are treated as the "contemporaries" of Western composers, all make up an experience not easily duplicated...

The Spenglerian Moment

2011-03-30T10:38:00.002-05:00

From John Lardas's The Bop Apocalypse (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001, pp. 48-49):

The cold war began quietly with George Kennan's 1946 "long telegram" from Moscow about the ominous and inevitable expansion of the Soviet Union into Eastern Europe. Policy recommendations of containment turned quickly into warnings of American vulnerability, warnings often bordering on paranoia. In 1947, two years before he became secretary of state, U.S. State Department official Dean Acheson warned Americans that they "must be on permanent alert" against the Russians. That same year, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was established, in part to protect America against the machinations of communists.

The tendency to demonize the Soviet Union and its state ideology quickly gained rhetorical momentum. As confidence games in the geopolitical sphere intensified, ordinary Americans participated in this peculiar national pastime of self-posturing and self-invention. Many Americans gained self-assurance through a form of identity inflation at the expense of the "other." From the most zealous of anticommunists to apolitical, suburban newlyweds, they were constructing identities for both self and country--often over and against an imagined foe, whether communists, homosexuals, juvenile delinquents, or even invaders from outer space. The American social body, it seemed, was under attack by contaminating forces. In order to alleviate the threat of corruption, Americans used the religious language of myth and symbol to forge personal religious worlds at a time when the stability and safety that such worlds promised were in high demand. As cold war anxieties became palpable and the stakes were raised, both foreign policies and domestic theodicies were on the table.

In our new Spenglerian moment, we must come to grips with the fact that 21st century Americans--bred and raised in a hyper-capitalistic (Spengler would say "Faustian") social experiment called "consumerism"--suffer from a peculiar form of collective amnesia: there is little or no cultural memory resident in the population at large. The consequences of this lack are enormous. With yesterday forgotten, the challenges of the present appear to be unprecedented. In the face of these "unprecedented" challenges, the American public looks away from its own inner resources and develops a dependence upon "experts" to show it the way to safety if not success.

But who are these experts and what exactly are they "expert" in?

The airwaves and the internet are filled with experts who are not-so-astonishingly like George Kennan in 1946: lacking historical depth, they are confused by difference, frightened by what confuses, and afraid that they may fail to sound the alarm should something alarming actually be afoot.

Kennan would later recognize that his "long telegram" over-stated the potential threat that the Soviets posed the U.S. and Eastern Europe.

But later was too late. He had given the Mandarins of Fear-Mongering precisely what they needed to construct a post-war industry fueled with wartime adrenalin. The Cold War--the War To End All End To Wars--had begun.

Notice that the victims of Cold War paranoia (political dissidents, homosexuals, the poor and uneducated) are the usual suspects of witch hunts throughout European and American history.

Notice, too, that the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Gay rights movement have helped to narrow the target populations of the Paranoiac Class.

As the new millennium dawned, there must have been panic among those whose livelihoods depend upon cultivating fear in the American population.

The criminals of 9/11 either played beautifully into the hands of the fear-mongers or they were recruited for the purpose.

With no real investigation of the crime ever conducted and the crime-scene evidence immediately destroyed or buried in classified files in the interests of "national security," it is not likely that the American public will ever know which of those two alternatives is the more credible.

But whatever the truth of the fateful events of that day, we know for certain that the Reichstag Fire effect has propelled this country forward through a decade of unchecked corporatism, militarism, and diminished democracy.

Indeed, and most ironically, the United States appears to be following the Turkish model whereby democratic processes are permitted within limits that do not transgress the sensitivities of the military and its domination of the Treasury.

The Spenglerian moment in cultural criticism has returned.

The Decline of the West

2011-03-29T19:39:00.003-05:00

"If The Decline of the West were nothing else, it would still be one of the world's great Romantic poems." --Northrop Frye

Throughout much of the 1980's and into the early 1990's, I read the Beats (especially the Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg triumvirate) and, with the Beats, I read Spengler. It did not take long for me to recognize that little could be made of the latter's grand metahistorical claims, but, as a resource for a vivid vocabulary of cultural criticism, The Decline was, and remains, a gold-mine.

Be that as it may, Spengler is so often smeared with the brush of fascism that, for the last couple of decades, I have felt it best to let that sleeping dog lie. Not that I neglected to read him--I did not. And for many years his portrait glared down upon me at my writing desk--reminding me, always, of the seriousness of my intellectual tasks. Indeed, his oracular pronouncement that "All genuine historical work is philosophy, unless it is mere ant-industry" (DOTW, v. 1, p. 41), served me well as my methodological motto during the years I worked on my doctoral dissertation.

Like so many Germans of his generation, Spengler, as Heidegger, had a Nazi problem. But Spengler's Nazi problem is, to be fair, less than Heidegger's--even less than Ezra Pound's--for Spengler seems to have found Hitler something of an embarrassment from the beginning, if not a figure worthy of contempt. Even so, the Nazi problem persists in Spengler's case: for the obvious reason that his magnum opus makes readers who have been raised on the triumphalist narratives of the "rise of the West" uncomfortable.

But the time for Western discomfort is now; Spenglerian cultural criticism is needed now more than ever.

The Myths of American Exceptionalism and Western Triumphalism must be subjected to a withering "de-construction" that is both historical and satirical.

The Beats understood this as early as the 1950's. Sixty years on we must learn to raise their standard again with pride.

Events have left us no choice.

It is our Spenglerian destiny.

Toward a Counter-Imperial Faith

2011-03-20T10:08:00.002-05:00

Toward a Counter-Imperial Faith

I am sorry to say that, for most people on the planet, religion is not about love, or justice, or leading a righteous or balanced life. No, for most people on the planet, religion is really about winning. Being on the winning side: being among the chosen, the saved, or having the last word. In this way, religion inculcates infantilism and only exacerbates the problems of the world. But occasionally, some religious people achieve maturity in their faith. When that happens, religion can become part of the solution to the problems of the world.

What I like about the linked article from Tikkun is that it is an expression of what I would consider to be "grown-up" religiosity; what Dietrich Bonhoeffer might have called an instance of "man come of age."

Christianity, in my view, as a salvation religion, has an unfortunate tendency to promote infantilism in its adherents. Moreso than other faith traditions? That is difficult to say--and probably impossible to determine empirically. But insofar as Christianity promotes a sort of "life-boat" mentality among its adherents, it is problematic in my view. And though I do not subscribe to the notion that origins are necessarily determinative of outcomes, I don't think that it is irrelevant to observe that Christianity began its history as an apocalyptic movement. Lifeboats are an intrinsic aspect of apocalyptic faiths and the monkey of apocalypticism is forever on Christianity's back. How Christians choose to deal with this monkey is what can make all the difference for the future of humankind. I heartily approve of the way in which the author of the above-linked article has chosen to deal with the monkey of his Christian faith.

Back in the last century, the Catholic social activist Dorothy Day likewise exhibited a healthy way of managing the monkey. According to her biographer Paul Elie, Day felt that it was during wartime that "the claim of Christianity to be a religion of love" was most severely tested. And she felt that it was during wartime that one witnessed most professing Christians betray their faith. She wrote: "Love is not the starving of whole populations. Love is not the bombardment of open cities. Love is not killing, it is the laying down of one's life for one's friend" (quoted in Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own, NY: FSG (2003), p. 140.

More recently, New Testament scholar John Dominic Crossan published God & Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then And Now, NY: HarperOne (2007) with an epilogue in which he asks several pointed questions of his co-religionists (Crossan, p. 237):

1. How is it possible to be a faithful Christian in the American Empire?

Then, "beneath" that question, Crossan unearths a second one:

2. How is it possible to be a nonviolent Christian within a violent Christianity based on a violent Christian Bible?

That's right, my dear reader: a violent Christianity based on a violent Christian Bible.

These two questions merge for Crossan into a third, more direct question:

3. How is it possible to be a faithful Christian in an American Empire facilitated by a violent Christian Bible?

Since we are living in an epoch of Christian triumphalism--predominantly Protestant Christian triumphalism--the time has come (indeed it is long overdue) for Christian soul-searching on these matters.

Conveniently, according to the Christian calendar, we are deep in the Lenten season.

From how many pulpits across this broad land do you suppose such Lenten reflection is being advocated?

I would be surprised if one needed the fingers of both hands on which to count them.

Lessons from Anonymous on cyberwar - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

2011-03-16T23:02:00.000-05:00

Lessons from Anonymous on cyberwar - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

Another front in the war against the militarized corporatocracy.

The Mazeppist Salutes Great American Heroes

2011-03-15T19:38:00.001-05:00

Daniel Ellsberg and Joe Hill.

Rising anti-Muslim rhetoric? - Riz Khan - Al Jazeera English

2011-03-10T19:22:00.000-05:00

Rising anti-Muslim rhetoric? - Riz Khan - Al Jazeera English

The New Medievalism

2011-03-09T22:56:00.002-05:00

It is my firm belief that the Empire of the Eveninglands--these Orwellian States of Amnesia--is collapsing under its own weight and our modernity, which never really took hold of the imaginations of the masses, has lost its bid to do so.

So-called “post-modernity” is but a transitional phase. We are on the cusp of the new Dark Ages.

In the immortal words of Bob Dylan: “Power and greed and corruptible seed seem to be all that there is.”

It is no wonder that books on Stoicism and Gnosticism are selling like hot-cakes: for such are the tools of survival as the lights go out.

In times like these, we must form subterranean networks among individuals of good will. Hold prayer vigils. Designate safe houses for heretics.

The neo-fascists in the Republican and Tea parties are attempting to roll back the clock on worker's rights and women's rights.

It is open season on the middle class, on Muslims, on people of color.

Old age pensions, health care: these "perks" are destined only for the wealthiest 5% of the American population.

We are headed into the black hole of feudalism, where corporate CEOs are the land-lords and the rest of us are serfs.

It is a sad, indeed, a pathetic end to the American experiment.

Not with a bang, but a whimper.

The New Humanism

2011-03-08T18:32:00.003-05:00

I tend to find David Brooks both smarmy and shallow. But this Op-Ed piece isn't so bad. Maybe there's hope for us all.

Islam and Anarchism

2011-03-07T22:18:00.001-05:00

No god but God.

Democracy Incorporated

2011-03-06T10:21:00.002-05:00

Sheldon Wolin's Democracy Incorporated is, perhaps, the definitive analysis of the present state of the nation.

Read it and rise up!

Practicing the Three "R's"

2011-03-04T18:21:00.003-05:00

Practicing the three "R's" (to resist, refuse, renounce the prevailing wisdom of one's culture) in addition to doing one's daily activities (working, eating, exercising, sleeping, being the member of a family, of a local community, etc.) is, like taking the red pill in The Matrix, asking for trouble.

When I was in my late teens and early twenties, I was ready to take the red pill. My elders, people I respected, divined my intentions and took me aside. Sagely, confidentially, they advised me with the wisdom of age. I was repeatedly subjected to the following sermon: "Life is tough enough as it is; don't think you can save the world. Look out for 'number one.' If you don't do it, nobody will."

Initially, I resented this advice. For one thing, I had no illusions that I could save the world. That was a misstatement of my desires. Secondly, the notion of "looking out for number one" ran counter to what I had decided were worthy ideals. Mutuality, reciprocity, a sense that human beings share the world and must learn to look out for one another and for the earth herself, just seemed to me to be common sense.

But these ideals were uncommon sense and the weight of my culture, it seems, is dead-set against them.

When Ted Kennedy failed to replace Jimmy Carter as the Democratic Party's nominee in 1980 and Ronald Reagan was subsequently elected, ushering in the "greed is good" decade, I confess I gave in to despair.

Who was I, after all, to piss against the wind?

I began to look out for number one and to rationalize my change in perspective with a clever reading of the Golden Rule: doing unto others as you would have others do unto you is not a call to put others before self; rather, it is only to see that others are treated as well as you would have them treat you. This presupposes that one treats oneself well; and, by all means, when the opportunity arises, do unto others as you would have others do unto you...

By means of this interpretation, I was able to invert an other-centered admonition into a self-centered credo. I now had it on the authority of Christ himself that my ego was to be given free reign. It was not long before "others" were largely pushed out of the equation. By my mid-twenties I was living for myself alone.

And having a ball, I must admit.

No, I'm no St. Augustine and this is no Augustinian confession of remorse. I found it a great relief to be sucked into the cultural vortex and simply go with the flow. The 1980's were, for me, a decade of self-indulgence. My elders were right: you have to look out for number one. If you don't, no one else will.

By the early 1990's, however, I discovered the price that living for self alone entails: one achieves precisely what one is living for--self alone.

Personally, I found that result to be empty. I had dug myself a pit and was living in the bottom of it. I should have been happy, but I was not.

To climb out of the pit of my self, I began to reach out to others. Slowly.

Old habits die hard. But I was determined.

I discovered an early poem of Allen Ginsberg's (entitled "Song") that contradicted the wisdom of my elders: "The weight of the world," Ginsberg wrote, "is love." In other words, the burden of life in this world is to overcome the temptation to live for self alone and to learn to put others, the needs of others, ahead of one's own needs.

I don't pretend to have mastered the discipline that loving others requires--not by a long shot. Nor do I always know what I am doing when I set out to put the principle of loving others before self into action. I cannot guarantee that my motives are purely altruistic--indeed, I would be surprised to learn that altruism is even in my personal repertoire. What I can say for certain is that I have repudiated the advice that informed my actions in the 1980's.

Resist. Refuse. Renounce. "Number one" is not the self but the neighbor. This is the principle. The discipline is love.

Countering Bigotry

2011-02-27T03:28:00.002-05:00

Op-Ed by Nick Kristof.

A revolution against neoliberalism? - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

2011-02-25T09:06:00.000-05:00

A revolution against neoliberalism? - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

Brilliant.

Mazeppism is an Expression of Native Radicalism

2011-02-25T00:11:00.002-05:00

As the Mazeppist has noted from time to time, this country has produced a native strain of Leftism with luminaries like H. D. Thoreau, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, W.E.B. DuBois, C. Wright Mills, Joe Hill, Emma Goldman, Norman O. Brown, etc. With the recent death of Howard Zinn, we lost a great scholar-activist. Noam Chomsky, God bless him, seems determined not to go gentle into that good night. But, on the whole, the large pool of native Leftists that the 1960's counter-culture promised us--the cohort preternaturally destined to realize the Invisible Whitmanian Republic right under the bulbous noses of the Nixonian Right--has proved, to say the least, disappointing. Anymore, Boomers give me an acute case of dyspepsia.

In the Spring 2011 issue of Tikkun magazine, Michael Lerner interviews Professor Chomsky ("Overcoming Despair as the Republicans Take Over"). There is some light there but, I have to say, not as much as I'd hoped to find. Fortunately, the same issue contains Richard Wolff's "Prospects for the U.S. Left: Not Bad At All." It's late here in Dar al-Hijra and I've had a long day--my usual Mazeppist skeptical irony may need recharging; be that as it may, I found Wolff's positive assessments reassuring. Wolff writes:

"Millions of people have been impacted by high unemployment and home foreclosures, by decreased job benefits and job security, and by the realization that none of these afflictions will end soon. A sense of betrayal is settling into the popular consciousness" (p. 21)

.

Sadly, if this is true, it is good news for the beleaguered American Left.

What Wolff terms the "hegemonic alliance of big business, the richest 5 percent of citizens, and the state" is, he asserts, "becoming more visible to the American public" and, as the visibility of the plutocratic corporatocracy increases, "public discourse in the United States has rediscovered and opened up" to "those voices on the U.S. left" who are reviving "debates over capitalism itself." The time is ripe, he says, for a "left resurgence ... in the consciousness of masses of American citizens" (p. 22).

Perhaps even more astonishing is Wolff's claim that the "U.S. Left is constructing analyses and programs that have large and growing audiences and constituencies in the country." These analyses and programs "increasingly include transformation of enterprises such that workers collectively, cooperatively, and democratically owning and operating enterprises would become a growing business sector." In addition, "the U.S. Left is working its way to a comprehensive alternative program to exit the [current economic] crisis, one taxing the corporations and the richest 5 percent--those who contributed most to the crisis, who are most able to pay for resolving it, and who have received the most state aid so far and therefore 'recovered' the most" (p. 44).

Wolff seems to find hope in the rise of the Tea Party; he finds it symptomatic of popular American discontent with the status quo and a blind groping towards radical solutions. He is confident that the Tea Party will only disappoint those who are presently looking towards it for solutions and, when the day of disillusionment arrives, he seems to feel that the Left will be poised to reap the harvest of the inevitable Tea Party fall-out.

From Richard Wolff's word-processor to God's ear, I say.

But I'm not holding my breath. Instead, I plan to sleep on this, get up again in the morning, and don the threadbare mantle of my Mazeppism.

Nobody said overthrowing Leviathan through non-violent persuasion was going to be easy.

Let's see what tomorrow brings.

The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet

2011-02-21T17:21:00.002-05:00

i.e., as a figure of capable imagination. This is Mazeppa, the mythical figure.

"To define poetry as an unofficial view of being places it in contrast with philosophy and at the same time establishes the relationship between the two. In philosophy we attempt to approach truth through the reason. Obviously this is a statement of convenience. If we say that in poetry we attempt to approach truth through the imagination, this, too, is a statement of convenience. We must conceive of poetry as at least the equal of philosophy. If truth is the object of both and if any considerable number of people feel very sceptical of all philosophers, then, to be brief about it, a still more considerable number of people must feel very sceptical of all poets..." Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel, New York: Vintage Books (1951), pp. 41-42.

Even so,

"... what concerns us in poetry, as in everything else, is the belief of credible people in credible things. It follows that poetic truth is the truth of credible things, not so much that it is actually so, as that it must be so. It is toward that alone that it is possible for the intelligence to move." Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel, New York: Vintage Books (1951), p. 53.

Ivan Mazepa, the historical figure, is a matter of interest to those who wish to know something about the history of the Ukraine.

Mazeppa, the mythical figure, is a matter of interest to those who wish to know something about themselves as figures of capable imagination: as human beings whose suffering is not a matter of indifference, but of epic struggle against seemingly insurmountable odds.

Mazeppa's "wild ride" may not have been an event in the life of Ivan Mazepa, as such; it is, however, an event in the life of every human being who loves and finds herself torn from her love despite all of her struggles to hang on.

When R. W. Emerson notes in his journal at the death of his little son Waldo: "I am Defeated all the time; yet to Victory I am born," he is Mazeppa, regaining consciousness in a Cossack's hut, battered and beaten but still alive and, against all odds, on the mend.

"...poetic truth is the truth of credible things, not so much that it is actually so, as that it must be so. It is toward that alone that it is possible for the intelligence to move."

Ivan Mazepa

2011-02-21T17:18:00.001-05:00

The historical figure.

A Hero of Mazeppism (Old and New)

2011-02-20T10:36:00.002-05:00

The "old" Mazeppism was the movement for Ukrainian independence (late 19th century-early 20th century).

The Ukrainian-born Russian writer N. V. Gogol became identified with that movement due to his deep sympathies for his homeland.

But there is much about Gogol, as a writer and a literary personality, that resonates with "new" Mazeppism.

Anyone who identifies with republican independence from empire is a Mazeppist fellow traveler whether they know it or not...

Thousands protest in Morocco - Africa - Al Jazeera English

2011-02-20T09:45:00.000-05:00

Thousands protest in Morocco - Africa - Al Jazeera English

Rise up young lions of the Maghreb!

Mazeppism is an Existentialism...

2011-02-19T10:44:00.002-05:00

and Existentialism, as Sartre taught us, is a humanism. As a "Romantic Orientalism" purged of imperialistic tendencies by the refining fire of historical reflection, Mazeppism is post-Romantic. But every post-Romanticism remains Romantic in the same way that every post-Enlightenment is a child of the Enlightenment: Romanticism is post-Romanticism's sine qua non. And Romanticism is a post-Enlightenment mode.

In sum: Mazeppism is an Existentialism, which is a humanism. It is an Orientalist mode of Romantic humanism but post-Romantic and post-Enlightenment.

Let us be candid: we stand on the shoulders of giants with clay-feet, but giants nonetheless.

The Mazeppist

2011-02-18T12:39:00.002-05:00

Hosni Mubarak resigns as president - Middle East - Al Jazeera English

2011-02-11T11:32:00.000-05:00

Hosni Mubarak resigns as president - Middle East - Al Jazeera English

MABROUK TO THE EGYPTIAN PEOPLE!!!!!!!!!!

From Lord Byron's Mazeppa

2011-02-11T00:42:00.002-05:00

They found me senseless on the plain.
They bore me to the nearest hut,
They brought me into life again
Me - one day o'er their realm to reign!
Thus the vain fool who strove to glut
His rage, refining on my pain,
Sent me forth to the wilderness,
Bound, naked, bleeding, and alone,
To pass the desert to a throne, -
What mortal his own doom may guess?
Let none despond, let none despair!

Abou Ben Adhem by James Henry Leigh Hunt

2011-02-10T01:17:00.000-05:00

Abou Ben Adhem by James Henry Leigh Hunt

In elementary school, this poem was parsed for me by my teachers from about 1st to 3rd grade (as I recall). What I also recall was that the Islamic elements of the poem were repressed, making it difficult for me to understand. Not that I knew anything about Islam in elementary school, but I knew that I did not understand the poem's peculiar cultural flavor, much less its unusual religious perspective. And it seemed to me that my teachers avoided discussing these most intriguing and yet foreign elements of the poem. They wanted me to focus on the poem's message--probably because they themselves did not understand its religious perspective and cultural flavor. So I recall resenting the poem because it occasioned frustration in me. I think it was in third grade that I finally gave in and simply focused on the message: at which time the poem seemed like a revelation to me. Then I regretted not appreciating the poem sooner. It could have been taught better; but it is probably a wonder that it was taught at all.

Speaking of Dostoevsky

2011-01-21T16:06:00.003-05:00

"The practical conclusion derived from this faith turns into an accusation of the age in which I live and into a command to be human in this most inhuman of ages, to guard the image of man, for it is the image of God."

--Nikolai Berdyaev

The Brothers Karamzov

2010-12-30T13:54:00.002-05:00

I first read TBK in my late twenties (1980's) and must confess that I found it a bewildering jumble of stuff. I re-read it in my early thirties when Pevear and Volkhonsky published their translation (around 1990). I got more out of it the second time through but still found it a puzzle. I watched the old film adaptation of the novel from 1958 with Yul Brenner and Lee J. Cobb only to conclude that, as is most often the case, literary genius does not translate well to film.

At present, I am reading the novel for the third time and, this time, the pieces seem to fit better. In fact, they fit together only too well. Page after page, I cannot escape the feeling that (1) I am fifty years old, (2) this is only the third time I have read this novel and, consequently, (3) I have squandered much of my life.

Faulkner claimed to have re-read Don Quixote once a year. If Cervantes's masterpiece merits devotional reading (which, undoubtedly, it does), TBK merits it even more. The unfathomable depths of Dostoevsky's characterizations...All of us, every one, we are all mysteries to ourselves, and Dostoevsky's characters are mysteries dwelling in mysteries. There are books as true to the human condition as TBK, but there are none truer...

Holiday Advice

2010-12-27T15:15:00.001-05:00

Drop what you are doing and pick up the following four books: (1) Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear (10th Anniversary edition, Basic Books 2009); (2) Garry Wills, Bomb Power (Penguin 2010); (3) Chris Hedges, Death of the Liberal Class (Nation Books, 2010); (4) F. M. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (Pevear and Volkhonsky trans., Vintage Classics, 1991).

A word of explanation:

The books are to be read in the above order as a set.

The first three volumes detail how (and why), over the course of the last century, successive generations of Americans delivered their birthright of freedom into the custodianship of a militarized corporatocracy. The 4th book will disabuse the reader of any illusions s/he may still harbor that things could have turned out any other way.

At which point you will be ready for Sartre...

Mazeppist Musings

2010-12-19T19:03:00.002-05:00

1. In the late 1980's, when the Soviet union collapsed and the Chinese government traded Mao's Marxian vision for State Capitalism, the National Security State that had emerged from the United States's Cold War corporativism found itself freed from any rivals to keep it in check. Now nothing stands in the way of American greed and hubris--nothing but the people of the planet to oppose the spreading shadow of McWorld. All that's left of the "Left" is one hundred thousand little "jihads" (see Benjamin Barber's Jihad vs. McWorld, 1995!). Is it enough?

2. Trahison des Clercs: Also in the '80's: when intellectuals in Europe and North America traded Camus and Sartre for Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida, they signaled their capitulation to the U. S. National Security State and the war machine. They were now fully complicit.

Heidegger, for all of his radical gestures vis a vis the traditions of "Western" philosophical discourse, was deeply conservative when it came to politics and culture. Foucault and Derrida were never able to muster consistent political commitment.

Deconstruction is as disruptive to Leftism as it is to the Right. It is best understood as a tool--a Cynical gesture in the classical sense: think Diogenes' motto, "Deface the currency!" It is not an end in itself.

3. The pyrotechnics of 9/11, whether the work of Bin Laden or Dick Cheney, have had but a singular effect upon the American consciousness: to ennervate the national character by re-invigorating the Culture of Fear (see Barry Glassner's brilliant study of that title). No matter who the true perpetrators [perpe-traitors?] of 9/11 turn out to be, the enduring result has been the Reichstag Fire Effect. The Bush Administration took full advantage of this effect and Obama, the Right's Manchurian Candidate, has dutifully followed suit.

4. But such is not the revolution. The revolution will not be televised. Pfc. Bradley Manning, whether or not he is Wikileaks's "mole," has been assigned the tragic role of the revolution's first martyr.

Julian Assange's courage, like Manning's conscience, is considerable. And his service to the non-violent people's revolution against American Empire, as a foreign national, is most conspicuous. But the real contours of the revolution did not begin to manifest themselves clearly until the "Hacktivists" came forward in defense of Assange and, after his arrest, flexed their IT muscle by effectively shutting down significant elements of the Machine. In so doing, they demonstrated that, at will, they could throw a wrench into the gears. They appear to be the vanguard for which we've been waiting.

Proceeding slowly, cautiously, but with supreme confidence, they have exposed McWorld's Achilles' heel. McWorld will fall to one hundred thousand little "jihads"--aided and abetted, of course, by its own blind arrogance, greed, paranoia, and bureaucratic stupidity.

5. The moral? Resist. Refuse. Renounce.

The Way Forward

2010-10-12T12:12:00.002-05:00

"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results." --Rita Mae Brown, Sudden Death, p. 68.

By Rita Mae Brown's measure, the political process in the United States is--and has been for a long time now--insane.

We are stuck: wedded to a dogma that has proved itself over time to be false. The dogma is that representative government is the be-all and end-all of liberty.

It is not.

Representative government is a stage, a way-station, on the road to greater democracy. The latter is achieved through collective self-governance.

Raoul Vaneigem's A Declaration of the Rights of Human Beings, like his 1967 manifesto, The Revolution of Everyday Life, is light-years beyond any thinking about governance that has currency in the present catastrophe we call American politics.

Vaneigem is an authentic visionary. The American body politic, on the other hand, is swept up in government and media induced orgies of fear and greed. Tea-Partiers arrogate to themselves the position of "enlightened ones," but their Constitutional fundamentalism, no less than their religious fundamentalism, cannot distinguish the forest for the trees.

The Tea-Party offers no true cure; it is but a symptom of the disease.

The painful truth is that the storied framers of the Constitution were not omniscient. They were fallible, flesh-and-blood men. As the history of the so-called "commerce clause" cases decided by the U.S. Supreme Court clearly shows, the document they produced was inadequate to the needs of the nation as it began to evolve in the post-civil war period. The Judiciary stepped in and, in effect, undermined the power and authority of both the Congress and the Executive branch for the inescapably obvious reason that the framers possessed no crystal ball.

Sorry, Virginia, there is no Santa Claus.

In recent years, conservative justices on the Supreme Court have held open the door for the Imperial Presidency since Congress appears to lack any notion that the Constitution puts it in the driver's seat. This is precisely the opposite of the Tea Party's diagnosis of a runaway Congress and runaway Judiciary. Tea Partiers mean well, but they are out of touch with reality. Like all fundamentalists, they embrace a romanticized past and have no time for the tedious details of the historical record. But the devil is in the details. And God, too.

We can fault the individuals who hold and have held offices in all branches of government--there is plenty of blame to go around--but the penultimate fault lies with the 18th century inadequacies of the Constitution itself.

The ultimate error rests with the American people who have transferred their indefeasible rights of self-governance to elected representatives and for practicing a civil religion whereby the U.S. Constitution is transfigured from a basic legal charter into omnicompetent Holy Writ.

The Constitutional fundamentalists in the Tea Party are true believers in this false dogma and all of their assertions about restoring the Constitution to its rightful place in governance, if actually enacted as policy, would cause the complete collapse of a broken system.

Which might not be such a bad thing.

I have said it before and I will say it again: what this country needs is a non-violent people's revolution that would result in the calling of a Constitutional Convention to replace the dysfunctional 18th century document with a 21st century one. In this task, our revolutionary re-founding mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, should look to the great social democracies of Europe and Scandinavia for models and guidance. In this task, as in all tasks, the new revolutionaries must not confuse the American context with that of other parts of the world. And whatever they do, they should keep Murray Bookchin's notion of the "third American dream" before them.

Bookchin's third American dream differed from two others (i.e., the dream of rugged individualism and the immigrant dream of endless opportunity) by stressing "community, decentralisation, self-sufficiency, mutual aid and face-to-face democracy" (Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism, 1974).

In the process of such a revolution, we will discover of what we Americans are truly made.

Frankly, I have high hopes but few illusions.

It is very possible that we will only discover, to our infinite sorrow, the degree to which this country is fragmented and polarized along racial, class, ethnic, and religious lines.

We may discover that we lack the heart for mutual aid across such lines and that we lack the imagination and courage that face-to-face democracy requires. Many of us probably do prefer the spectacle of flat-screen talking heads shouting slogans at one another and engaging in ad hominem attacks. For many Americans this is what passes for "democracy"--a variety of "infotainment."

We may also discover the degree to which the National Security State has bankrupted the treasury and undermined whatever chance we might have had to realize the third American dream.

Such risks may well be worth it, in my view. For by taking them, we may be forced to admit to ourselves our true political condition.

Everything then will depend upon our response. Will we panic and uproot whatever is decent in our culture and political traditions or will we find the strength within ourselves to do something unprecedented?

I would hope that we would recognize that the only way out of the corner into which we have painted ourselves is to dismantle the National Security State and the military corporatocracy that runs it, surrender the Empire, and learn to become good neighbors to one another and proper citizens of the world.

Before Bernard Lewis Lost His Mind

2010-10-01T14:40:00.003-05:00

Before Bernard Lewis lost his mind and became the darling of Neo-Con Neo-Imperialists--indeed, before he became one himself--he was quite a creditable scholar. One can read Lewis's writings from the late 1950's to the early 1970's and even occasional pieces into the 1980's with great profit and pleasure. But then something happened.

A friend of mine (since deceased), a professor of rhetoric and communications at a state university in Pennsylvania, once did a study of Lewis's writings and concluded that the change in his thinking began to occur in the aftermath of the 1967 war. His theory was that Lewis, like many Jews living in Europe and the United States at the time, had dismissed the state of Israel as the pipe-dream of left-wing idealists and was certain that it had no real chance of survival--not because of Arab opposition necessarily, but because Utopian experiments always fail. The '67 war turned the heads of many Jewish doubters, and Lewis may have been one whose head was turned. For in the wake of the '67 war, Israel appeared to be, in reality, not a Utopian experiment at all, but a Western-financed base of military muscle in an oil-rich region. Geo-politically speaking, Israel made a lot of sense.

Whether or not this was or is Lewis's reasoning is really known only to Lewis himself. It is truly baffling however to read his 1958 essay "On Writing the Modern History of the Middle East" and then compare it to his productions on what-went-wrong-with-Islam of the last decade or so. The former is a measured and scholarly study; the latter reads as if the scholar enlisted Paul Wolfowitz as his ghost writer.

As the late Edward Said asked in his review of Lewis's What Went Wrong With Islam?: What went wrong with Bernard Lewis?

We may never know for sure.

Artificial Populations at "Ground Zero"

2010-09-16T10:58:00.004-05:00

The centre that he sought was a state of mind,
Nothing more, like weather after it has cleared--
Well, more than that, like weather when it has cleared
And the two poles continue to maintain it

And the Orient and the Occident embrace
To form that weather's appropriate people,
The rosy men and the women of the rose,
Astute in being what they are made to be.

This artificial population is like
A healing-point in the sickness of the mind:
Like angels resting on a rustic steeple
Or a confect of leafy faces in a tree--

A health--and the faces in a summer night.
So, too, of the races of appropriate people
Of the wind, of the wind as it deepens, and late sleep,
And music that lasts long and lives the more.

In this late poem by Wallace Stevens, the Mazeppist finds his or her true calling: to be born at last from the embrace of Orient and Occident. To rise up the rosy men and women of the rose astute in being what they are made to be: a healing-point in the sickness of the mind that has divided east from west (and, as Stevens would have it, divided imagination from reality). For such is the nature of the everyday psycho-pathology that afflicts every citizen of the emergent American Empire, growing more rotten every moment with the insidious ideology of American Exceptionalism.

Not Exceptionalism, but Appropriateness, says Stevens. To be the appropriate people of the weather that prevails when east and west, imagination and reality, are brought into balance and harmony. When dialogue, conversation, and deliberation banish violence from the repertoire of human relations.

Here is the Mazeppist's Wallace Stevens dream:

Real American genius finally wakes up and recognizes how the American nation was driven mad by grief and horror and fear stoked to a frenzy by the cynical and criminal opportunism of the ruling class in the aftermath of 9/11; recognizes how the American nation lashed out at innocents at home and abroad, engaging in wars of choice, suppression of freedom (in the name of freedom), rape, looting, torture...All the misguided expressions of an organism in pain.

And then, miraculously, real American genius, awakened from its decade-long nightmare, remembers itself. It remembers itself and resolves to create a sacred space at "Ground Zero" that would NOT be a monument to jingoism and bigotry, flag-waving paranoia and hate. Real American genius--Oh, if such a thing had survived the 20th century!--would create a space at "Ground Zero" that would be inviting to people of all faiths and no faith to gather and to contemplate what happened there and how the American nation completely lost its bearings as a consequence.

And in a moment of heretofore unfathomable generosity of spirit, real American genius would declare that, "Today, we will build a new 'mosque,' a new space for prayer, remembrance, and contemplation, here, at 'Ground Zero.' We will call a cease-fire around the world and withdraw our troops. We will re-appropriate the billions of dollars we are spending on revenging our hurt on people who never hurt us and re-direct those billions of dollars to the betterment of the American people and of all peoples everywhere."

And then the American nation would go to work on this new task, this new creation, this new Jerusalem, and all the world would look on in awe.

The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

2010-08-20T15:36:00.002-05:00

The opening lines of this 1852 essay by Karl Marx return to me often: "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."

The high water-mark of American political idealism was the 1972 Presidential bid of George McGovern. McGovern's landslide loss to Richard Nixon, aided and abetted by the Democratic Party establishment itself, was truly a tragedy, not only for this country but for the rest of the world--as the Empire's subsequent acts bear out daily.

All of us who pitched in for Obama's "hope" and "change" movement participated in the second act of this great world-historic fact. Every day, a new farce.

Obama steps up on behalf of the First Amendment in the "Ground Zero Mosque" controversy, and then quickly distances himself in subsequent remarks. So Clintonesque.

And, like the Clintons, the Obamas can be expected to be well-rewarded for "public" services rendered.

Like they say, it takes a village to raise a child and marry her off to an investment banker.

On the one hand, our cherished ideals; on the other, Goldman Sachs.

"Money doesn't talk, it swears," sang Dylan back in 1965. On the road to the high water mark of American political idealism, that line meant something. Now all is celebrity and toxic consumerist commodification.

How can you tell when a politician is lying? His lips are moving. It is truly disgusting when even words like "hope" and "change" are reduced to hollow slogans, coins of the present realm.

Marx saw it coming. And we must live it through. Is there a third act? Marx didn't say. Unless it is the revolution of the proletariat.

Good luck with that.

Good Old American Decency and Common Sense in Every Word

2010-08-19T17:31:00.001-05:00

Today, Keith Olbermann rocks!

A Global De-Militarized Zone

2010-08-18T11:34:00.003-05:00

The goal to which all sane individuals left on the planet should commit themselves to, beginning today, is to convert the earth, every square inch of it, into a de-militarized zone.

The advent of the 21st century has witnessed war-mongering, war-profiteering, and rapacious capitalism shift into high gear. At the center of the maelstrom is the United States of America and its lackey-allies.

Many of our fellow citizens do not feel right about the direction in which we are headed, but they shrug and ask, "What can I do?"

What is to be done? Tolstoy posed this question at the close of the 19th century. His prescient inquiries and warnings were ignored and we are now in far deeper and more perilous waters than ever before.

This country has produced a slim tradition of native radicalism--slim but resilient. It is on the ropes today and in danger of going down for the count. Emerson is no longer remembered for his abolitionist stand or Thoreau for his pacifism. The scholars who study their works seem too often to be unmoved by them. At least, politically.

The good news is that the American tradition of native radicalism is not the property of professors, and certainly not the property of those professors who fawn after power. It is the common inheritance of the American people.

"There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious,
makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part,and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop."

– Mario Savio, Sproul Hall Steps, 2 December 1964, UC Berkeley

It has happened before; it can happen again.

Indeed, it must. We owe it to the world that is still aborning.

Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd

2010-07-05T14:51:00.005-05:00

Last night I lay in bed and listened to the thunder roll incessantly overhead. This morning, I woke up feeling oddly anxious and sad. The air was now cool, the sky a cloudless blue. I could not make sense of my mood.

Admittedly, however, for the past two weeks, I had been worried. My dear friend, mentor, and colleague Nasr Abu Zayd had fallen suddenly ill in Indonesia and returned to Cairo for treatment. Indeed, he had been reported dead. In disbelief at the initial reports, I had tried to contact Nasr without success, and then contacted several people who were able to provide me with reliable information: Nasr had fallen ill with a rare infection, but he was being treated and was expected to recover. That was the news one week ago today.

An email reached me this morning that he had passed away at 9:00 A.M. Cairo time.

Inna lillahi wa inna alayhi raji'un.

Good-bye dear friend. I will always remember your advice, your companionship, your support, and, no less than the others, our laughter.

The Task Ahead

2010-07-01T12:45:00.000-05:00

The debacle of the failed American republic presents us with a formidable task: nothing less than the redemption of the American spirit.

That spirit has been corrupted by the turn it has taken through the cancerous side of what Harold Bloom has termed the American Religion.

For Bloom, the American Religion is Janus-faced; and he traces both faces back to Emerson's vision.

For we find in Emerson both the prophet who admonished us that "things are in the saddle and ride mankind" as well as the build-a-better-mousetrap-and-hitch-your-wagon-to-a-star promoter of American can-doism and exceptionalism.

The ideology of American exceptionalism is, without question, the most lethal and pernicious ideology abroad on the planet today. "Just because other Empires proved toxic for the peoples they conquered, doesn't mean ours will..."

The cock-eyed optimism of the Emersonian vein has permitted well-meaning individuals caught up in the sway of the militarized corporatocracy that runs this country to commit violence and fraud on a scale never before witnessed in the history of the world.

The task before us, then, is this: to revivify the atrophied portion of the Emersonian vision--the Emerson who admonished us all for our acquisitiveness, our compulsive reduction of all things to commodity.

The question we must ask ourselves before attempting to undertake such a task, however, is this: how late is the present hour? Is there sufficient time allotted us for so Herculean a task, or ought we to abandon this ship of fools and seek shelter and solace in a world apart?

And if we answer "the latter," where is that world?

Honest. Thoughtful. Spot on.

2010-04-24T17:41:00.002-05:00

A Twinge Of Conscience « Peter Ustinov | This I Believe

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Socratic Irony

2010-03-22T13:34:00.000-05:00

"Socratic irony is the only involuntary and yet completely deliberate dissimulation. It is equally impossible to feign it or divulge it. To a person who hasn't got it, it will remain a riddle even after it is openly confessed." -- F. Schlegel

Annals of Pantagruelism

2010-03-17T15:21:00.003-05:00

Perhaps the original Pantagruelist avant la lettre was none other than Socrates...

1855

2009-12-29T14:59:00.002-05:00

The year 1855 was an auspicious one in the modern history of human spirituality. In that year, Walt Whitman published the first edition of his "new American Bible"--Leaves of Grass. And, in March of that year, Leo Tolstoy confided to his diary that

"Yesterday a conversation about Divinity and Faith suggested to me a great, a stupendous, idea to the realization of which I feel capable of devoting my life. That idea is the founding of a new religion corresponding to the present development of mankind; the religion of Christ but purged of dogmas and mysticism--a practical religion, not promising future bliss but giving bliss on earth."

1855 was a landmark year in the revival of Pantagruelism.

Shaykh Tolstoy (Again)

2009-12-15T18:55:00.002-05:00

When last I mentioned Shaykh Tolstoy in this blog, it was to include him in the august, international body of Pantagruelists--for Tolstoy was a Pantagruelist and every Pantagruelist is, in turn, a Tolstoyan...

I have just re-read, for the third time, George Steiner's magisterial study, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism (published in 1959). Back then, Steiner had to admit that the way of Dostoevsky (who was distrustful of any programmatic attempt to better the lot of human beings) seemed to be remarkably prescient, given the then-prevailing post-Stalinist view of the Soviet Union. By comparison, Tolstoy's religious humanism appeared to be naive at best, rigidly dogmatic at worst.

And yet, half a century on, Dostoevsky's mystery-mongering loses its luster in the light of the religious Right's persistent obscurantism and militarism. It would be grand if Steiner, still vital at 80, would re-visit this fateful pair of 19th century Russian geniuses and essay, again, their meaning for our time.

The Pledge of Allegiance

2009-11-22T17:06:00.002-05:00

I pledge allegiance to the flag
Of the Orwellian States of Amnesia,
And to the republic
Walt Whitman sang--
Before plutocrat
Imperialists
Stole liberty and justice
From all.

--Wobbly Joe

Bob Dylan in Denver

2009-10-22T13:46:00.001-05:00

I grew up in the 1960's listening to Bob Dylan's music, but I first saw him perform live in the old Stanley Theater in Pittsburgh Pa. It must have been '79 or '80--'81 at the latest. It was the "Slow Train" tour and Dylan was on fire for the Lord (or a Lord), inspired, defiant, and brilliant. I've seen him repeatedly since then, in various parts of North America, and through thick and thin. During the 1980's, there was a lot of thin. But towards the end of that decade, there were faint glimmers of light--a song here, an album there. And in the early '90's, Dylan decided he had either to quit or go down swinging. Thankfully, he chose the latter and, ever since, he has been honing his sound and (with the stable anchorage of bassist Tony Garnier) perfecting his live performance. Last night's set in Denver was ferocious with songs like “Cold Irons Bound” and “Ballad of a Thin Man” among the big guns booming. The amazing guitar work of Austin's Charlie Sexton (recently returned to the line-up) was an added treat. If you haven't seen Dylan live in the last decade or so, or if you’ve never seen him live, you must go see him now. He is a force of nature. Go and hear the old lion roar.

From the back cover of Isaac Gewirtz's I Am With You: Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass: 1855-2005

2009-09-23T17:15:00.003-05:00

"...the golden thread of Whitman’s intention: that a new American man and woman might join him on a 'perpetual journey' of self-realization, discovering along the way that 'All truths wait in all things.'"

This "golden thread" is the deep charter of the Invisible Whitmanian Republic--not what Mr. Springsteen has termed the "Badlands" (i.e., the country we live in), but what he has termed the "Promised land" (i.e., the "America we hold in our hearts"). The country we must continually struggle to "achieve," as Richard Rorty so sagely expressed it (alluding to James Baldwin).

The perpetual journey of self-realization is the soul-craft that will continually re-invent the American experiment. The two journeys are, as a practical matter, intimately inter-related. And as we continue to limp along with an out-dated 18th century Federal Constitution and a self-defeating two-party system that is securely in the hands of the Plutocratic War Party, determined (as it is) to "naturalize" the permanent war economy, we must heed N. O. Brown's call to abandon politics (as usual) in favor of "metapolitics"--the Whitmanian road to soul-craft, and soul-craft to nationhood.

With each passing year I become more and more convinced that Leaves of Grass is the reason for America (USA). I am teaching myself how to live Whitman. How to cultivate a large sense of life. How to reach out to others--to be expansive as it were. To achieve "love's body" hoping for the day when that body becomes the body-politic.

And whoever has been blind in this life, will be blind in the next (Q 17:72). Whoever is incapable of finding their way clear of the culture of fear induced by the governmental and corporate purveyors of "soft" terror shall wander endlessly in the wilderness and be barred from entering the longed-for Canaan-land.