Class war? Yes, always.

NYT comment 2020-01-17 on “The Bernie Sanders Fallacy”, by David Brooks, in which he argued that there is no class war.

There has always been a class war. Rulers and ruled do have common interests, nicely summarised in the Canadian triplet of "peace, order, and good government." But they also have different interests, and these sooner or later lead to more or less open conflict.

Nevertheless, I think Brooks is correct: Values matter more than economics. Economics is a means, not and end. We want a strong economy not because a strong economy is good in itself but because it enables us to achieve our non-economic goals.

It seems to me that two of the central values of all human societies  are fairness and justice. Capitalism as it is practiced these days is unfair and unjust. The irony is that Trump's promise to "drain the swamp", to  punish China for stealing jobs, to restore good old American manufacturing and mining jobs etc, all these promises appealed to these values. That's why so many centrists and independents voted for him. That's why the Democratic hopefuls have to emphasise fairness and justice. E.g., the present tax system is unfair to the 99%. Dumping pollutants into the air, earth, and water is a form of freeloading, which is unjust. And so on.

The Dems' campaign is at bottom about fairness and justice. The leftist term "class war" is a distraction, especially so in a country where a sizeable minority freaks out at any hint of "socialism."

Cicero and Public Debt: A fake quote, but it gives one to think. (Repost)

 

 A statement allegedly (1) by Marcus Tullius Cicero (January 106 – 7 December 43 BC):

The Budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, the public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed, lest Rome will become bankrupt. People must again learn to work instead of living on public assistance.

Cicero lived in an empire, which was rich enough to pay the costs of military occupation and administration of the (ever longer) supply chains that sustained Rome. Whoever put these words in his mouth thought as if Cicero lived in a subsistence economy, one that's barely able to meet the needs of its citizens. They were wrong. (2)

We live in an economy capable of even greater over-production than Rome. We make too much, but we still think about our economy as if we can't make enough (3). That causes a lot of stupid decisions, whose effects are now becoming clear: Too many people (4), too much production and consumption, too much exploitation of natural resources (5), etc, all of which are the causes of the climate crisis, the ecological crisis, and the many sociopolitical crises around the world. The only question left is which crisis will destroy our way of life first, and just how bad it will be. If we don't learn to think differently, we won't adapt fast enough to survive with anything remotely like our present way of life (6).

Having made such gloomy pronouncements, I still wish you a good day. :-)

Footnotes:
1. From https://checkyourfact.com/2019/08/19/fact-check-cicero-quote-budgeting-treasury-public-debt/
“The quote does not appear in any of Cicero’s surviving works. It actually comes from best-selling author Taylor Caldwell’s novel about ancient Rome.” Note the phrase "assistance to foreign lands": Rome never did this. And the phrase "public assistance" is American, not Roman.

2. Any empire capable of maintaining itself for any length of time clearly was capable of producing far more than its citizens needed. Rome had about three times as many “statutory holidays” as we have, thus a much shorter working year. Even slaves got some time off on those holidays.

3. The USA spends over a trillion dollars per year on its armed forces and the wars they fight.

4. In my lifetime, the Earth’s human population has grown more than fourfold. 1940: about 2 billion.  2021: over 8 billion.

5. It’s likely that there won’t be enough food to feed all human beings sometime between 2025 and 2050, not because we don't produce enough, but because we insist on using "the market" to for its production and distribution.

6. Just how different will it be? Best case: Something like a medieval life-style for the survivors, with small farms producing enough food to sustain the necessary artisans and traders. Worst case: Back to the stone age, with perhaps some of the survivors being able to scavenge useful materials like iron from the ruins. That is, if humans don't go extinct.

I was lucky...

I was lucky, I guess. I learned not only habits of mind, but substance of value. Both have informed my life.

The habit of analysing a text to discover the interplay of surface and depth, to uncover its connections to the culture in which it's embedded, to think thoughts I couldn't otherwise think, all these have enriched my life. Most of all, they've helped me get some inkling of what it's like to be someone else.

As for substance: The works I read for my degree have common themes. They are all riffs on the central insight of our religions and philosophies: that connection with other human beings is the only thing that makes life worth living.

My faith tradition supplies one version of this insight: "Love God, and love your neighbour." To love God means to love his creation. To love your neighbour means to see each other as precious beings. To do both means to be overwhelmed by awe at the gift of being alive.

It was the study of secular texts that brought me to see the sacred texts as primary. They are historically the first ones to teach those habits of mind and those matters of substance. That's why they endure. And that's why study of the humanities remains essential. Without the discipline of deep reading, a text will feed the darkest impulses of the human heart.

 

Three Haiku

1.
Frog in sunlit pond
Heron stalking with prim steps
Bubbles on water

2.
Planes glide through blue air
Silver fish in white water
Death waits for his time

3.
Tulips stand bravely
By dark cedar hedge, spilling
Colours like water

 2022.05.24

Airplane travel

We don’t travel on airplanes, we are shipped from one location to another like parcels of fish.

Sure, there are windows from which we can observe the clouds, if any, and the topography, which looks so little like the maps we’ve filed in our memories that we can barely recognise our location. That’s why some like to watch the display of the flight path over a vaguely aerial view of the ground. The alternative is to watch a movie, which seems a more honest admission that we can’t experience flight as travel.

Travel requires not only movement, but the sensation, the awareness, the feeling of movement. There is none such when we fly in a modern aircraft. The plane may as well be standing still somewhere in space with the surroundings flowing past. A car isn’t much different: we sit still in the car, and the road, the landscape, the air move past us. Does this mean the car is moving? Hard to say, until something interrupts the motion of the car, and we move inside the car and possibly out of it. The absence of the sensation of movement explains why driving and flight simulators work so well.                                

Travel requires agency. We move ourselves, by moving our limbs. We move across and through our surroundings. In a plane, in a car, in a train, we are carried by the machine. The only machine that enables us to travel is the bicycle, which we cause to move by moving our limbs, just as we cause our body to move by moving our limbs.

“Travel by airplane” misrepresents what’s actually happening. The plane transports us, just as it transports our bags.  Just like a parcel of fish.

Last two by Marsh, for now

Ngaio Marsh. Overture to Death (1939) The Vale of Pen Cuckoo: an inoffensive old house inhabited by a squire, his son, and his cousin. A plain old church and adjacent vicarage inhabited by the vicar and his daughter. A doctor with an invalid wife, attracted to a newcomer who is too smart by half. Two women of a certain age infatuated with the vicar, hating each other, and vying for the right to play the overture to the play. The play is put on to raise funds to replace the piano in the village hall. Someone rigs that  piano with a gun aimed at the player. The gun goes off when the victim treads on the loud pedal.
     Alleyn untangles the clues, manages to construct an accurate timetable, and finds that everything hinges on a box used to elevate a watcher to window level. The charm of the book is its character drawing. Marsh had a sharp eye for foolishness, and for the evil done by people who consider themselves respectable. She also has some sympathy for people who suffer from a stunted emotional life. Well done. ***

Ngaio Marsh. Death and the Dancing Footman (1942) Another case that’s solved by constructing a precise timetable, this time made possible a by a footman who dances to Boomps-A-Daisy, a popular tune he hears on the radio. The characters aren’t as interesting as usual. The setting is a weekend party that the host has deliberately arranged to bring antagonistic people together. We know from the beginning that this will result in murder. The puzzle is first, who will be the victim; and second, how it was done. A handy snow storm forces the unwelcome conclusion that the murderer is one of the guests.
     Alleyn sorts it all, of course. The solution is suitably satisfying in terms of poetic justice, and a romance blossoms. Marsh has a soft spot for lovers. She also tries her hand at natural disaster: her description of a car journey through a snow-covered wilderness is a kind of set piece.  ***

Two more by Marsh

Ngaio Marsh. Death In A White Tie (1938) It’s The Season. Lord Robert “Bunchy” Gospell, a friend of Alleyn and many other people, is found dead in a taxi after a specially successful coming out party. He has been keeping eyes and ears open to discover what he can of a blackmail racket. That was the motive for killing him. The murderer has ben very, very clever, but his eye and taste for elegant Renaissance objets do him in. That, and very careful tracing of the times different people were able to overhear Bunchy’s call to Alleyn.
     Bunchy at one point reflects on the cruelty of dragging young women through the debutante season, of placing them so blatantly on show for the marriage market. He’s a kind man, and  always dances with some of the wallflowers. Troy was at the ball, so Alleyn can plead his suit. Marsh is very good on the social and psychological effects of the Season. She flubs Alleyn’s love story. She’s trying for some kind of noble renunciation in case Troy rejects Alleyn, I think, and it doesn’t work. The glimpses in the later books of the Alleyns as a married couple and parents are more convincing.
     There’s some casual and silly racism here, too. Definitely of the times, and a reminder that current attempts to present a less offensive version of the past don’t work well. Marsh usually expresses irritation and more at racist attitudes, so its presence here jars.
     Nevertheless, a good puzzle, and a pretty good portrait of the upper classes behaving and misbehaving. ***

Ngaio Marsh. Death at the Bar (1939) Three friends arrive for their annual holiday in Ottercombe, an isolated fishing village with a cosy pub. One of them, a vain barrister, prods a recently a established local man. Later, the barrister dies of cyanide poisoning. The several other people with reason to dislike him create the maze that Alleyn and Fox must traverse. All’s well that ends well, including the obligatory romance. A nicely done puzzle, as usual, and nicely done semi-satiric portraits of te common vices of vanity, lechery, jealousy, envy, and so on. I’m still on a Marsh binge, and enjoyed rereading this novel. ***