Screed

I made the following post a few days ago on FB:

I don't hear this commented on too often. The real reason Trump is so popular isn't because he's racist or sexist, let alone a "job creator," it's because he pisses off the left. I am continually seeing his supporters say, "he must be doing something right, look how hysterical the left is."
At least this is what they tell themselves, because it is still uncomfortable for all but the worst of his supporters to admit that if you like a guy like this then you are to varying degrees racist and sexist.
EDIT--I want to emphasize I'm not calling everyone who voted for Trump racist and sexist, especially those who hate him but like hid policies. I am referring to those who love the guy and everything about him.

I want to retract this now. I am not comfortable with it for two reasons. First, because I don't feel there is any intellectual or moral integrity to casting broad judgements across a large group of people. Second, because while I believe there is a place for loud and confrontational debate (sometimes a shout or cry is the only rational response), that has never been my default style. I prefer to treat another person as, to use Martin Buber's famous phrase, another "Thou" to confront rather than an "it" to label. This is how I've read William Blake's line, "The greatest act is to put another before you." Blake does not mean to put another's needs ahead of our own, rather, to place a person in front of you, confronting them face to face in an I/Thou relationship.

That said, I would like to say something about what angers me most about the current president and the Republican party, why I think they are so harmful, and what my own position is (surprise, surprise it is not the Democrats).

1. DT's rhetoric and communication style. He regularly uses incendiary language, language that invites aggression, division, partisanship, and suspicion. He feeds on and amplifies the fears of the populace.

2. But DT, it seems likely, only intended to use the presidential race as a publicity stunt. His rhetoric may very well be hollow, an opportune ploy to get attention in the hopes of revitalizing his brand. To put all of our anger on his shallow (albeit extremely reckless) rhetoric is to miss the real harm being done (harm that would most likely been more efficiently carried out under a seemingly more normal candidate) by the Republican party.

3. This harm includes:
a. accelerating inequality by reducing funding for public support programs, suppressing political activism, and providing tax cuts to the rich.
b. deregulating businesses and so harming our natural habitats and resources as well as local cultures and populations.
c. continuing to place vastly disproportionate attention on the needs and wants of corporations. Alongside this is the American corporations tendency to focus only on short term (quarterly) goals. There are too few long term plans, plans that not only look to the next 5-10 years, but generations in advance. We do not have anything like China's Belt and Road Project.
d. ignoring the suffering of the most vulnerable by maintaining a culture of silence. This includes sexual harassment, racial profiling, and the systems of power that prevent victims of these crimes from receiving justice.

I realize all of these points need considerable fleshing out, just think of these points of departure for a longer essay down the road.

Regarding my hope for the future. I think there are several things we need to do to not only preserve what vitality America still has, but to preserve the vitality of our planet, which is rapidly becoming unsuitable for life for many living beings.

1. Develop long term plans for providing food, energy, and materials.
2. Develop unifying purposes that provide not only jobs, but also a common bond amongst disparate peoples. My personal favorite is develop a Mars Colonization mission. Such a mission would require countless projects (countless jobs), enough jobs for several large countries (including our own).
3. In order to achieve these goals, we must invest heavily in education, innovation, and technology.
4. There also needs to be continued investment in literature and culture to ensure that the population is able to think deeply and humanely over the very important questions we will be faced with in the future.
5. In order for this to be worth doing we have to preserve our democracy. We can do this by strengthening the political activism of the populace. Government programs will free up the time and resources of more individuals so they are able to participate in the polls. There should also be a complete overhaul on how money plays a role in politics. We need ideas to take center stage. Perhaps have information sessions on diverse opinions and then have randomized selections of voters (like a jury) make their decision.

All these ideas are in the easiest stages, although all point to bidding interests of mine. Perhaps I should close with a short vision of what a future utopia might look like, a utopia I find very hopeful and possible:

The one scenario not conceived of as remotely likely by any faction of futurians—the reverse really of all their competing auguries—is the possibility, and then the final achievement, of a generous and benevolent One World government, solving humankind’s problems and adjudicating its disputes through the consent of the governed. The end of capitalism and its plutocrats and bought politicians. An antique among futures, that one, and impossible to envision on any grounds: political, economic, sociological, or simply the ground of basic human nature.
So that will be it. The future will consist of a new kind of universal anarcho-totalitarian system which is, on the whole, pretty successful at fostering human happiness and diversity as well as ensuring social justice and welfare. From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs: Karl Marx’s formulation has always applied very well to individual families—it’s how the best-run families function—but in the future it will define the Family of Man. Immanuel Kant’s distinction between public and private, which is exactly opposite to the one in common use today, will then be universal: the private is the particular ethnic, religious, political, clan, or company loyalties we own; when we are public we engage the world and one another with the tools of a plain reasoning that belongs to us all and commands the assent of all.
A command economy, of course: that idea failed in the past because of lack of timely information and a disregard of personal desires, but the Internet 4.0, born out of the primitive workings of Google and Amazon, will fix that, and what you want—within reason—you can get. It seems impossible to us that, absent the Invisible Hand, entrepreneurial innovation can flourish, wants be met, and well-being increase—so it’s clear that’s what is to come.
Often the prudent, far from making their destinies, succumb to them; it is destiny which makes them prudent.
—Voltaire, 1764

This may sound like the commonest hopes (and doubts) we have had for technology, particularly information technology, for a century and more. But such hopes and doubts always foresee plenty as a consequence of the right worldwide deployment of powerful means, rapidity and noise as a function of interconnectedness, manipulation of fickle desires and dreads by Hidden Persuaders. No. The future will show simplicity, asceticism (possibly as a result of scarcity: there may be enough for all, but not a lot more) and taking care, maybe too much care. Use it up, wear it out, make it do, do without. Certainly a democracy with as many parties as there are citizens, a parliament of all persons governing through a sort of fractal consensus which I cannot specify in detail, will spend a lot of time pondering. In fact it will be amazing (only to us imagining it now) how quiet a world it will be. A woman awakes in her house in Sitka, Alaska, to make tea, wake her family, and walk the beach (it runs differently from where it runs today). After meditation she enters into communication with the other syndics of a worldwide revolving presidium, awake early or up late in city communes or new desert oases. Nightlong the avatars have clustered, the informations have been threshed: the continuous town meeting of the global village. There is much to do. 

from John Crowley's essay, "Totalitopia."

Year in Books 2015; "Emerson and The Central Man"

I know that I have been posting on this blog very sporadically (to the point of posting barely at all, the road to hell being paved with what it is) nonetheless, I set out now once again to write regularly and share my thoughts--we'll see how long that lasts. I love coming up with reading lists. Last year I set myself the goal of rereading John Crowley's Aegypt quartet along with reading Samuel Delany's Neveryon quartet. I considered writing on them but felt my reactions still too unformed, perhaps in a few years when I reread them I will have something more definitive to say. This past year I read quite a bit of American literature--beginning with David McCullough's biography of John Adams, then Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, Emerson's Journals, David S. Reynold's biography of Whitman, McCarthy's Blood Meridian, Faulkner's Light in August, Conrad's Nostromo (I read Conrad because he seems part of a line of influence from Melville to McCarthy that I was interested in tracing backwards) and Melville's Moby Dick, and finishing the year with David McCullough's biography of Truman. I read and skimmed through quite a few histories and reread quite a bit of David Bromwich. I hope to post again before the year is out giving a full summary of my reading. For now I'd like to share these reflections on Emerson.

Division and Unity

I have spent the year thinking about America’s literary heritage, which for me means I’ve been thinking about Emerson. At the heart of my reading were the journals (in the abridged Library of America edition). Emerson prophesied a figure he called “the central man.” It is easy to reduce this to merely one more iteration of the great man theory. Carlyle, at his worst, succumbs to this, but Emerson is more elusive. One example of Emerson’s elusiveness can be seen in his consideration of Amos Bronson Alcott. After several pages of general praise Emerson concludes:

Alcott sees the law of man truer & farther than any one ever did. Unhappily, his conversation never loses sight of his own personality. He never quotes; he never refers; his only illustration is his own biography. His topic yesterday is Alcott on the 17 October; today, Alcott on the 18 October; tomorrow, on the 19th. So will it be always. The poet rapt into future times or into deeps of nature admired for themselves, lost in their law, cheers us with a lively charm; but this noble genius discredits genius to me. I do not want any more such persons to exist. Part of this egotism in him is a certain comparing eye which seems to sour his view of persons prosperously placed, & to make his conversation often accusing & minatory. He is not selfsufficing & serene.

It is little fault on Alcott if he falls short, no individual met Emerson’s strict criteria. And yet, as Steven Whicher observed in Freedom and Fate, Emerson is not very clear either on the specific qualities that constitute this figure. He often speaks of “the erect position,” but what precisely is that? 

Emerson is suggestive in his negative response to Shelley. Is it merely Emerson’s native New England Puritanism that rebels against Shelley’s atheism and sexual liberty? I rather suspect it is the Lucretian and Epicurean element in Shelley that bothered him. Ralph Richardson’s biography of Emerson recounts his anxiety over the theodicy problem he encountered in Hume and Epicurus—that if there is a God he cannot be both all powerful and good otherwise how can we account for evil. Emerson famously expressed this anxiety in his remark, “A believer in Unity, a seer of Unity, I yet behold two.” 

Writing in his journals on November 27, 1839, Emerson considers the sense of division in himself which leads him, in turn, to his attack on Shelley:

Shelley is never a poet. His mind is uniformly imitative; all his poems composite. A fine English scholar he is, with taste, ear, and memory; but imagination, the original authentic fire of the bard, he has not. He is clearly modern, and shares with Wordsworth and Coleridge, Byron, and Hemans the feeling of the Infinite, which so labors for expression in their different genius. But all his lines are arbitrary, not necessary,' and therefore, though evidently a devout and brave man, I can never read his verses.

Emerson will mention Shelley a few more times in the journals, but his opinion never changed. He is always circumspect in his praise and ultimately dismissive. This is puzzling for me considering Emerson’s unabashed early enthusiasm for Whitman, himself deeply influenced by Shelley. It is possible that Whitman’s Lucretianism did not block Emerson’s admiration because it was mediated by Whitman’s strong personality. Shelley’s poetry is indeed wracked with division. Whitman accepts everything, multitudes, contradictions, and finds unity in his acceptance.

Utopia

Historians of Utopia usually begin first with Plato before turning to Thomas More as the origin proper. The same historians are usually free to admit the porous nature of their subject, confessing that the idea of a better world has existed since the dawn of history. Auden phrased these conceptions of an ideal world as Edens and Jerusalems. Edens are pastoral paradises whereas Jerusalems are urban perfect societies and so are utopias proper. 

Emerson was interested in utopian thought, particularly Fourier, but seemed uninterested in its real world manifestations, like Brook Farm. Instead, he sought a kind of utopian figure, a person who could hold all things together. Often this interest presented itself as a concern for the unification of the arts and sciences. Many figures were exemplary for Emerson but principle amongst them were Goethe and Swedenborg. Emerson ultimately turned from both. For Goethe: 

I dare not say that Goethe ascended to the highest grounds from which genius has spoken. He has not worshipped the highest unity; he is incapable of a self-surrender to the moral sentiment…He is fragmentary; a writer of occasional poems and of an encyclopaedia of sentences. When he sits down to write a drama or a tale, he collects and sorts his observations from a hundred sides, and combines them into the body as fitly as he can. A great deal refuses to incorporate: this he adds loosely as letters of the parties, leaves from their journals, or the like. A great deal still is left that will not find any place. This the bookbinder alone can give any cohesion to; and hence, notwithstanding the looseness of many of his works, we have volumes of detached paragraphs, aphorisms, Xenien,*(33) etc.

One might take issue with Emerson’s assessment of Goethe. The Renaissance scholar, Michael Martin, in his book on Sophiology titled The Submerged Reality, sees Rudolph Steiner as both the fulfillment of Goethe’s promise and the answer to Romanticisms failed quest for unity. Steiner was both a poet, a theologian, and a practical innovator in many spheres of life. 

Regarding Emerson’s ultimate verdict on Swedenborg, Sam McGuire Worely writes in Emerson, Thoreau, and the Role of the Cultural Critic, “In placing a fixed moral identity in the external world Swedenborg betrays the centrality of human will that Emerson had at first hoped to find there. Instead of being a matter of human will and understanding, Swedenborg’s moral universe becomes closed and determinate (40).”

Plato comes closer. Plato is both the scientist and the poet. He is able to focus on particulars as well as view the whole. In his essay on Plato in “Representative Men” Emerson says, “Each student adheres, by temperament and by habit, to the first or to the second of these gods of the mind. By religion, he tends to unity; by intellect, or by the senses, to the many. A too rapid unification, and an excessive appliance to parts and particulars, are the twin dangers of speculation.” There is a passage in Shelley's Defense of Poetry that comes to mind, “The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world, has, for want of the poetical faculty, proportionally circumscribed those of the internal world; and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave.” The ideal figure, then, should command a mastery over both these faculties of the intellect.

It is likely that Emerson’s focus on the individual over society has excluded him from classification among great utopian thinkers. John Crowley, himself an exceptional author of utopian novels, wrote in an essay titled “The Labyrinth of the World, the Paradise of the Heart” that all utopias are ultimately centered around this dual concern of the individual and society. Crowley concludes his essay with the argument that the value of utopias is not as practical instruction manuals but rather as rich visions of possible worlds. Few would argue this point, the history of applied utopian thought and its utility for totalitarian regimes is all too well known. If Emerson’s utopianism receives a fuller consideration it may prove his evasiveness to be a boon. 

My book list for 2016:

Winter
Dream of the Red Chamber Vol. 1 and 2
Buddhism Naturalized
The Magic Mountain
Tintin

Spring
Dream of the Red Chamber Vol. 3
Everything Flows
I Am China
Three Body Problem
Rome and China

Summer
Dream of the Red Chamber Vol. 4
Tale of the Genji
Japan and the Shackles of the Past
Nagarjuna and the Middle Way
Sound of Two Hands Clapping
Hunger Mountain

Fall
Dream of the Red Chamber Vol. 5
The Sea, the Sea
Wuthering Heights

Imaginary Authors?

I've been thinking about the emergence of "the author" in the 18C and wondering what might have been alternative developments to this course. A favorite author of mine, John Crowley, has been developing similar notions (in a very casual way) of a kind of shared consciousness between individuals. (Link here--Imaginary Individuals and here-- Teeming Temes and the Future of Totalitarianism.) Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash also deals with identities diffused through society. He thinks of religion and culture as memes, for him a kind of computer program, complete with viruses, that has been hardwired into humanity. An overly stable and isolated sense of self is certainly a fiction but a completely integrated consciousness, too, strikes me as rather incongruous with human experience.