"Just think, for instance, of how confidently we make predictions about what will be, and with what remarkable precision we can interpret, explain, and classify what has already happened. Yet we never seem to notice how suspiciously often what happens - in fact - does not conform to what - according to our prognoses - was to have happened. We know with utter certainty what should happen, and when it turns out differently, we also know why it had to be different. The only thing that causes us trouble is knowing what will really happen. To know that assumes knowing how things really are now. But that is precisely where the catch lies: between a detailed prediction of the future and a broad interpretation of the past, there is somehow no room for what is most important of all - a down-to-earth analysis of the present."
I'm struck by how much this quote reminds me of every political talk radio host (right or left) I've ever listened to. They are all (in their own eyes) so right, so precisely on, so prescient, so sure.
The problem with our political theories is that we are unable to see it when "a fact is in conflict with an a priori interpretation of it." We have already pre-judged and our prejudice all to often blinds us to what is right in front of our very eyes, and, even more importantly, to its meaning.
Thursday, March 31, 2016
Wednesday, March 30, 2016
Havel - On Evasive Thinking
It's an election year in the United States, and a particularly bizarre and discouraging one. I'm looking forward to reading Havel again if only to clarify my own muddled thinking about politics. My first encounter with the writings of Havel the dissident fell into my life like a lightning bolt. I'm looking back now across the chasm of a decade and a half and wondering to myself what I found so relevant in the writings of a man fighting totalitarianism. Who was that man who embraced Havel so enthusiastically and what do I still have in common with him?
The speech, On Evasive Thinking, was given in 1965 and published in 1968 during the short lived Prague Spring, when Alexander Dubcek attempted a liberalization of the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia. Think of it as an early attempt at "glasnost."
I find in this speech a certain mistrust of political rhetoric and labels that resonates with my own distrusts. We label a thing - socialist, conservative, reactionary, progressive, we throw it onto a particular spectrum of interpretations and lump it together with a lot of other things with which it may or may not have much in common and we feel we have now somehow "dealt with it." The problem with political rhetoric is it deals with broad generalities and ignores the very specific incidents and situations we confront. In Havel's words-
"The praiseworthy attempt to see things in their broader context becomes so formalized that instead of applying that technique in particular, unique ways, appropriate to a given reality, it becomes a single and widely used model of thinking with a special capacity to dissolve - in the vagueness of all the possible wider contexts - everything particular in that reality. Thus what looks like an attempt to see something in a complex way in fact results in a complex form of blindness. For if we can't see individual specific things, we can't see anything at all. And the more we know only what is apparent about reality, the less we know about reality in fact."
I find myself squirming at the ideology of both left and right in politics. Both are working with a preconceived set of interpretations, a collection of emotionally charged stock phrases and a set of ready made caricatures of their opponents that prevent their holders from actually perceiving concrete problems in their full complexity.
The speech, On Evasive Thinking, was given in 1965 and published in 1968 during the short lived Prague Spring, when Alexander Dubcek attempted a liberalization of the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia. Think of it as an early attempt at "glasnost."
I find in this speech a certain mistrust of political rhetoric and labels that resonates with my own distrusts. We label a thing - socialist, conservative, reactionary, progressive, we throw it onto a particular spectrum of interpretations and lump it together with a lot of other things with which it may or may not have much in common and we feel we have now somehow "dealt with it." The problem with political rhetoric is it deals with broad generalities and ignores the very specific incidents and situations we confront. In Havel's words-
"The praiseworthy attempt to see things in their broader context becomes so formalized that instead of applying that technique in particular, unique ways, appropriate to a given reality, it becomes a single and widely used model of thinking with a special capacity to dissolve - in the vagueness of all the possible wider contexts - everything particular in that reality. Thus what looks like an attempt to see something in a complex way in fact results in a complex form of blindness. For if we can't see individual specific things, we can't see anything at all. And the more we know only what is apparent about reality, the less we know about reality in fact."
I find myself squirming at the ideology of both left and right in politics. Both are working with a preconceived set of interpretations, a collection of emotionally charged stock phrases and a set of ready made caricatures of their opponents that prevent their holders from actually perceiving concrete problems in their full complexity.
Saturday, March 26, 2016
John Keane - Vaclav Havel
I wasn't sure at first I was going to be able to put up with Keane's style. I'm beginning to warm to the fact that he makes no attempt to pretend to objectivity. The freewheeling manner of his narrative voice gives him a chance to editorialize quite frequently. At times, it generates quite a bit of insight. A lengthy diversion on Dubcek's political fortunes made a useful point about what he calls the "politics of retreat."
Dubcek and his opponents have always judged him by the sine qua non of political measurement - did he gain or lose power? Dubcek, however, found himself in a situation little discussed, but that has actually been fairly common in my lifetime. Keane points out that in the "politics of retreat," a politician who has determined to liberalize or even bring an end to a totalitarian system soon finds out that he has "to be ruined for the good of others."
Keane's lengthy list of those who had to learn this "most difficult of all political skills" included Dubcek of Czechoslovakia, Kadar of Hungary, Suarez of Spain, Karamanlis of Greece, Jaruzelski of Poland, Gorbachev of the USSR and to some degree Khrushchev before him. He might have added De Klerk from South Africa. Considering how crucial this activity has been to the history of the 20th century it's interesting that we haven't given it more thought and recognition. I think to some degree we share the career politician's scale of measurement of success - did he gain or lose power? In the politics of retreat, however, the crucial values are
Dubcek and his opponents have always judged him by the sine qua non of political measurement - did he gain or lose power? Dubcek, however, found himself in a situation little discussed, but that has actually been fairly common in my lifetime. Keane points out that in the "politics of retreat," a politician who has determined to liberalize or even bring an end to a totalitarian system soon finds out that he has "to be ruined for the good of others."
Keane's lengthy list of those who had to learn this "most difficult of all political skills" included Dubcek of Czechoslovakia, Kadar of Hungary, Suarez of Spain, Karamanlis of Greece, Jaruzelski of Poland, Gorbachev of the USSR and to some degree Khrushchev before him. He might have added De Klerk from South Africa. Considering how crucial this activity has been to the history of the 20th century it's interesting that we haven't given it more thought and recognition. I think to some degree we share the career politician's scale of measurement of success - did he gain or lose power? In the politics of retreat, however, the crucial values are
- the courage to recognize the need to "withdraw and retreat from unworkable political positions" BEFORE those positions become undeniably disastrous (it's no virtue to flee Saigon before an advancing army).
- an attachment to the rightness of what needs to be done that supersedes what you know you would have to do maintain yourself in power.
Capek - Winter
A beautifully apt description of what happens to a landscape under a really good snow storm:
"Peacefully, endlessly, snow kept falling over the frozen countryside. Like snow, silence too always comes floating down, thought Boura, nestled in his cabin....The land was turning simpler and simpler before his eyes. It coalesced, widened, undulated in white waves untroubled by the disorderly traces of life."
Karel Capek, Footprints
"Peacefully, endlessly, snow kept falling over the frozen countryside. Like snow, silence too always comes floating down, thought Boura, nestled in his cabin....The land was turning simpler and simpler before his eyes. It coalesced, widened, undulated in white waves untroubled by the disorderly traces of life."
Karel Capek, Footprints
Monday, March 21, 2016
Elie Weisel - his mysterious mentor
Just want to record this story for future reference - Paris 1947
"Back in France, and still under the care of the O.S.E., Wiesel for two years fell under the spell, the influence, and finally the educational training of one of the most mysterious and extraordinary men he was ever to meet. He was a Jew, and the name he gave people was simply Shushani, though he had not been named Shushani at birth. He was a diminutive, shabbily dressed little man with a large head and a tiny hat atop it, and dusty glasses. He never said anything about who he was or how he had come to be in France, not to mention where he had been brought up. He had hung around the Shabbat services at the O.S.E. home outside Paris where Wiesel had moved, saying little or nothing, but evidently noticing everything."
"One day, as Wiesel was returning to the home by train from Paris, Shushani was sitting in the same compartment. Has though he had known Wiesel for years, he began to question him about the book he was reading. Wiesel shyly revealed that he was preparing a talk on Job for a forthcoming meeting at the home. Shushani began to talk about Job, and Wiesel began to grasp what a startlingly brilliant and insightful mind he was. Over the next year and a half, Shushani talked frequently with Wiesel and the other Jewish students at the home."
"His appearance, as if from nowhere, and his equally mysterious origins, at first frightened Wiesel a little. But as he came to know him and derive immense insights into the entire world of learning, especially Jewish learning, from him, the encounter appears to have had a profound impact on the young man."
"'I am increasingly convinced,' Wiesel has written in his Memoirs, "that he must be considered one of the great, disturbing figures of our tradition. He saw his role as that of agitator and troublemaker. He upset the believer by demonstrating the fragility of his faith; he shook the heretic by making him feel the torments of the void.' The effect of Shushani's genius and teaching on Wiesel seems to have been incalculable. 'What I know is,' Wiesel writes today, 'that I would not be the man I am, the Jew I am, had not an astonishing, disconcerting vagabond accosted me one day to inform me that I understand nothing.'"
"Shushani was a Talmudic scholar, originally from Lithuania, and he spoke Yiddish with a strong Lithuanian lilt. His name, Wiesel discovered later, was Mordechai Rosenbaum. He appeared to have memorized the entire Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds, knew Sanskrit, the Greek and Latin classics, and innumerable modern languages. To demonstrate his genius to Wiesel, like a juggler showing off new tricks, he once learned Hungarian in two weeks. One evening, he lectured to the orphans at the O.S.E. home at Taverny for four hours straight simply on the very first verse of the book of Isaiah."
"He passed himself off as a rabbi, but no one knew where he had acquired his learning, or even, at the time, where he was from. He never seemed to be reading a book. for some reason, though, he imparted to Wiesel huge chunks of his knowledge and understanding, as though gasping intuitively that Wiesel among few others was capable of absorbing it all. He was absolutely silent about his roots, hi past, even his close relatives, if any of them were alive. Once, when Wiesel was rash enough to ask him a personal question. Shushani angrily closed off any further discussion of it. Only later, piecing together morsels of information from others had bumped into him in different parts of the world, did Wiesel learn his real name or from where he originally came."
"There was something deeply mysterious to Wiesel about Shushani and his sudden appearance. For a moment the youth wondered if there was something of the infernal supernatural about him. He wrote indecipherable manuscripts in an unknown script--some of which Wiesel apparently owns--and in 1965 he died in Montevideo, Uruguay. Why had he gone there? No one seemed to know. Where did he get money to live on? No one was sure about that, though it was rumored that famous professors in France paid huge sums of money to be instructed by him."
Reference in Aikman is to Elie Wiesel, Memoirs: All Rivers Run to the Sea. (New York, Alfred A. Knopf), p. 130.
If you seriously believe in the existence of translated beings (and I do) the question arises within you of what they have done and are doing behind the scenes of history. You have a tendency to look for possible instances of their ministry.
"Back in France, and still under the care of the O.S.E., Wiesel for two years fell under the spell, the influence, and finally the educational training of one of the most mysterious and extraordinary men he was ever to meet. He was a Jew, and the name he gave people was simply Shushani, though he had not been named Shushani at birth. He was a diminutive, shabbily dressed little man with a large head and a tiny hat atop it, and dusty glasses. He never said anything about who he was or how he had come to be in France, not to mention where he had been brought up. He had hung around the Shabbat services at the O.S.E. home outside Paris where Wiesel had moved, saying little or nothing, but evidently noticing everything."
"One day, as Wiesel was returning to the home by train from Paris, Shushani was sitting in the same compartment. Has though he had known Wiesel for years, he began to question him about the book he was reading. Wiesel shyly revealed that he was preparing a talk on Job for a forthcoming meeting at the home. Shushani began to talk about Job, and Wiesel began to grasp what a startlingly brilliant and insightful mind he was. Over the next year and a half, Shushani talked frequently with Wiesel and the other Jewish students at the home."
"His appearance, as if from nowhere, and his equally mysterious origins, at first frightened Wiesel a little. But as he came to know him and derive immense insights into the entire world of learning, especially Jewish learning, from him, the encounter appears to have had a profound impact on the young man."
"'I am increasingly convinced,' Wiesel has written in his Memoirs, "that he must be considered one of the great, disturbing figures of our tradition. He saw his role as that of agitator and troublemaker. He upset the believer by demonstrating the fragility of his faith; he shook the heretic by making him feel the torments of the void.' The effect of Shushani's genius and teaching on Wiesel seems to have been incalculable. 'What I know is,' Wiesel writes today, 'that I would not be the man I am, the Jew I am, had not an astonishing, disconcerting vagabond accosted me one day to inform me that I understand nothing.'"
"Shushani was a Talmudic scholar, originally from Lithuania, and he spoke Yiddish with a strong Lithuanian lilt. His name, Wiesel discovered later, was Mordechai Rosenbaum. He appeared to have memorized the entire Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds, knew Sanskrit, the Greek and Latin classics, and innumerable modern languages. To demonstrate his genius to Wiesel, like a juggler showing off new tricks, he once learned Hungarian in two weeks. One evening, he lectured to the orphans at the O.S.E. home at Taverny for four hours straight simply on the very first verse of the book of Isaiah."
"He passed himself off as a rabbi, but no one knew where he had acquired his learning, or even, at the time, where he was from. He never seemed to be reading a book. for some reason, though, he imparted to Wiesel huge chunks of his knowledge and understanding, as though gasping intuitively that Wiesel among few others was capable of absorbing it all. He was absolutely silent about his roots, hi past, even his close relatives, if any of them were alive. Once, when Wiesel was rash enough to ask him a personal question. Shushani angrily closed off any further discussion of it. Only later, piecing together morsels of information from others had bumped into him in different parts of the world, did Wiesel learn his real name or from where he originally came."
"There was something deeply mysterious to Wiesel about Shushani and his sudden appearance. For a moment the youth wondered if there was something of the infernal supernatural about him. He wrote indecipherable manuscripts in an unknown script--some of which Wiesel apparently owns--and in 1965 he died in Montevideo, Uruguay. Why had he gone there? No one seemed to know. Where did he get money to live on? No one was sure about that, though it was rumored that famous professors in France paid huge sums of money to be instructed by him."
Reference in Aikman is to Elie Wiesel, Memoirs: All Rivers Run to the Sea. (New York, Alfred A. Knopf), p. 130.
If you seriously believe in the existence of translated beings (and I do) the question arises within you of what they have done and are doing behind the scenes of history. You have a tendency to look for possible instances of their ministry.
Monday, March 14, 2016
Karel Capek and the problem with letting the market solve your problems....
I just finished R.U.R., Capek's most famous play, and the work of literature that introduced the word "robot" into the world vocabulary. The second act of the play shows mankind being slowly overwhelmed by the very technology they thought was serving them. The last survivors (ironically those who ran the company that produced the robots that destroyed humanity) are arguing about who was responsible. In a remarkably prescient speech one of the characters (his name is Busman) points out the smoking gun-
"My, you are naïve. No doubt you think that the plant director controls production? Not at all. Demand controls production. The whole world wanted its Robots. My boy, we did nothing but ride the avalanche of demand, and all the while kept blathering on--about technology, about the social question, about progress, about very interesting things. As though this rhetoric of ours could somehow direct the course of the thing. And all the while the whole mess picked up speed under its own weight, faster, faster, still faster--and every beastly, profiteering order added another pebble to the avalanche. And there you have it folks."
Busman puts his finger right on the problem with a society that knowingly allows its prime organizing feature to be the market:
"history is not made by great dreams, but by the petty wants of all respectable, moderately thievish, and selfish people, i.e., of everyone. All our ideas, loves, plans, heroic ideals, all of those lofty things are worthless."
"My, you are naïve. No doubt you think that the plant director controls production? Not at all. Demand controls production. The whole world wanted its Robots. My boy, we did nothing but ride the avalanche of demand, and all the while kept blathering on--about technology, about the social question, about progress, about very interesting things. As though this rhetoric of ours could somehow direct the course of the thing. And all the while the whole mess picked up speed under its own weight, faster, faster, still faster--and every beastly, profiteering order added another pebble to the avalanche. And there you have it folks."
Busman puts his finger right on the problem with a society that knowingly allows its prime organizing feature to be the market:
"history is not made by great dreams, but by the petty wants of all respectable, moderately thievish, and selfish people, i.e., of everyone. All our ideas, loves, plans, heroic ideals, all of those lofty things are worthless."
Thursday, March 10, 2016
Karel Capek - Toward the Radical Center
"Philosophically as well as politically, Capek was a man of the center, but not in the sense used by hostile critics. The center he was aiming for was not a lukewarm middle ground between extremes. It was a radical center, radical in the original sense of the word: at the root of things."
Monday, March 7, 2016
Elie Wiesel - Words
"Be careful of words," Wiesel quotes a learned rabbi as saying. "They're dangerous. Be wary of them. They beget either demons or angels. It's up to you to give life to one or the other."
Pope John Paul II - Swing Wide the Gates
"Be not afraid! Open up, no, swing wide the gates to Christ. Open up to his saving power the confines of the state, open up economic and political systems, the vast empires of culture, civilization and development....Be not afraid!
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