Paul Vitols's Blog, page 17

how astrology works, part 2

In a recent post I talked about my quest to understand why astrology appears to work. A big step in that direction was my discovery of Carl Jung’s concept of synchronicity, which he called “an acausal connecting principle” that functions in the world as a complement to physical causality. In his view, synchronicity is what connects all events occurring at any one moment, which are arising due to countless chains of cause and effect that otherwise have no relationship with each other. This connection is a connection of meaning: the witnessing consciousness that perceives the events unfolding together experiences—or anyway can experience—a sense of meaning in their simultaneous arising. Because there is no causal connection between these simultaneous events, there is no need for them to be close to each other in order for that meaning to arise. Thus, the arrival of the light from distant planets and stars, which started on its journey here minutes or years or centuries ago, is part of the meaning of the current moment when, say, a birth is taking place nearby. This, in Jung’s view, might account for the meaningfulness of astrology—might be the reason that it works. He even includes a detailed “astrological experiment” as part of his essay on synchronicity.

But while I found Jung’s ideas stimulating and encouraging and plausible, I was not fully satisfied with synchronicity as the whole answer to the apparent efficacy of astrology. So I kept searching, kept asking. As I expanded my library of astrological texts I would look for whatever hints the writers might give about the, what to call it, mechanism of astrology. For a time I studied with Brian Giles, a prominent Vancouver astrologer of the 1970s and 80s. When I asked him about how he thought astrology worked, he said, “Scientists just put one force against another force and see which one’s bigger. They don’t accept that weak forces can have a big effect!”

“So you think there is a physical influence from the stars?” I said.

“Yes!”

I found this interesting. It seemed to mean that the quality of a force was as important, or more important, than its quantity. That would suggest that it is the nature of the energy sent by the stars an planets that accounts for its effectiveness in telling us about events on Earth. Even if the force is minute, it is significant. In this the light of the stars might be like, say, the minute electrical impulses of the human brain, which can give rise to mighty engineering works or great symphonies, despite their seemingly insignificant size.

But I wasn’t satisfied with this either. The whole universe was sending these meaningful energies to this tiny planet Earth on the outskirts of a nondescript galaxy. Those same meaningful energies would of course be radiating in every other direction as well, creating infinite “astrologies” on infinite other planets in the vastness of space. If all these interactions are equally meaningful (and why wouldn’t they be?), then what you have, in effect, is a “physicalized” version of Jung’s synchronicity, where the meaning is now being carried by a physical force, in the form of the electromagnetic radiation of the stars. It’s just too complicated and unworkable. I didn’t buy it and I don’t buy it.

At this point I’d run into what felt like a dead end. I couldn’t accept physical theories to account for the effectiveness of astrology, which, as far as I was concerned, had proven itself. And the most robust “nonphysical” theory, that of synchronicity, left me unsatisfied for reasons that I couldn’t even put my finger on.

For the next 25 years or so I made no progress on this question. Admittedly, for many of those years I almost forgot about astrology as I turned to study other things. But astrology was something that I kept coming back to. From time to time I would read books, cast horoscopes, and interpret them. I got to be not bad at it. But as to why it worked, I did not get any closer to a theory of my own, that is, a theory that I could accept.

In the meantime I was developing myself as a writer. Virtually from infancy I had loved reading and writing, and by the time I got into my teens I had branched out into filmmaking. I was excited by the idea of screenwriting, and also of playwriting. I had plenty of writing talent and natural fluency, but I struggled with how to structure pieces of writing—I struggled with what I would eventually realize was storytelling. To help me out,  our family friend Harvey Burt, an English teacher and a creative writer and dramatist himself, gave me a book one day: The Art of Dramatic Writing by Lajos Egri. I found it exciting, electrifying. My education in storytelling had begun.

I believe I got that book in 1975. I was 16 years old and still scoffed at people who, like my mother, believed in astrology. It would be another 35 years or so before my education in storytelling would lead me to my own theory of why astrology works.

A History of Israelite Religion in the Old Testament Period, volume 1, by Rainer Albertz: the story behind the story of the Bible

A History of Israelite Religion in the Old Testament Period, Volume I: From the Beginnings to the End of the Monarchy by Rainer Albertz

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A deeply researched and well thought-out examination of how Israelite religion evolved in response to social, political, and economic changes.

I bought this volume because I had already read volume 2 and really liked it. I decided to begin with volume 2 because it covers the period closer to that of my own epic in progress, and I thought that volume 2 was so good that I wanted to go back to see what events led to the initial conditions of volume 2 (which takes up the story at the beginning of the Babylonian exile), but also just to enjoy the way the author fits the pieces of the puzzle together.

I was not disappointed. After a chapter in which the author discusses the history of research into “Israelite religion” (a term chosen with care to distinguish it from the religions of the “Hebrews,” the “Canaanites,” and others), he launches into an examination of the religion in the period before the state, that is, until around 1000 BC. According to the author, Israelite religion arose from a collision between two social groups: one, the “Exodus group,” consisted of a relatively small band of refugees from forced labor in the Nile delta led by a charismatic rebel named Moses; the other, much larger group was formed by people who had come to occupy the hill country of Palestine, having decided to abandon life in the cities of Canaan. Both of these groups were actuated by a desire for freedom and social equality, but it was the Exodus group that had an encounter with the god Yahweh, who was seen as their liberator and savior in their escape from Egyptian domination. Yahweh, in throwing off their overlords and leading his people to safety, acted as a warrior-chieftain would have done, and established himself as unique among gods in associating himself with a people and not with a place (the theology of Zion as the abode of God would come much later). The message of Yahweh as liberator and champion of equality found ready ears among the people of the Palestinian hill country, and when the still rudimentary cult of the nomadic Yahweh was augmented with the existing beliefs and practices of Canaanite religion still held by the hill people, Israelite religion was truly born.

Rainer Albertz carries on the story from there, shrewdly reading the Bible in light of the best understanding of which parts were written when, and by whom, and drawing on archeology and historical sources to fill in the gaps as well as possible. He also makes use of other scholars’ theories, weighing these carefully and supporting not necessarily those that are the most current or popular, but those in which he sees the most cogent case being made. In the nature of things he must draw inferences and even speculate here and there, but it is always done in a cautious and reasonable way, seeking the best fit with all the evidence.

In volume 1 we see how Israelite religion was shaped by the egalitarian customs of the tribal society in which it arose, and the shock waves that went through it as a result of the arising of the monarchy–an institution that was always shunned by the tribes, who had broken away from the Canaanite cities in large part because of the injustices imposed by their monarchies. These same injustices, and perhaps worse ones, arise also in Israelite society, in particular its progressive division into rich and poor classes. Under the rigorous provisions of ancient credit laws, more and more family farmers dropped to the condition of landless laborers and even of debt slaves, classes of people unknown in the prestate tribal society. When some observers perceive that Yahweh religion is being used to perpetuate these injustices, the phenomenon of socially critical prophecy is born. Later these social and religious critiques will form the basis of the first moves toward systematic religious reform, which will become a factor in the later monarchy. Volume 1 ends with a look at the attempted reform by Gedaliah, who was installed as governor of Judah after its fall to Babylonia. Working with the prophet Jeremiah, Gedaliah tried to use the upset in the flow of government to implement the earlier Deuteronomic reforms that had been only partly enacted. The project came crashing to a halt when Gedaliah was murdered by a member of the royal house and Jeremiah was forced into exile. God moves in mysterious ways.

Reading this book has greatly enriched my appreciation of the Bible. I have read other books about ancient Israel–books about daily life, about history and archaeology–but with this book, and its companion volume 2, I feel much more that I have got the story behind the story of the Bible. For these volumes focus on Israelite religion, and it is because of religion–not history or politics–that the Bible is still such an important book.

If you want to deepen your understanding of the Old Testament, these two volumes might very well be the best help you can find.

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astrology works—but how?

I’m talking about the Age of Pisces, the 2,200-year astrological age now drawing to a close. In my last post I explained the phenomenon of the precession of the equinoxes, which gives rise to the astrological ages. (I didn’t mention the actual cause of the precession. This is the turning of the Earth’s axis of rotation around another, implicit axis—exactly as a spinning top slowly wobbles around a second implicit axis as it spins.) I promised to explain next why I think astrology is a valid field of inquiry and knowledge, so here goes.

As a boy I was a passionate devotee of science, and indeed until late in my teens I thought that I would go into space science as a career. I ridiculed people who believed in astrology. But by the time I left high school my attitude had started to change. The artist in me was starting to gain the upper hand, and I was becoming conscious of a hunger for knowledge or truth that scientific concepts did not satisfy or even address. Gradually I came to identify it as a spiritual hunger, and my mind, in a kind of desperation, began to open to alternative ways of understanding the world and myself.

I became interested in psychology and symbolism, and I started to give astrology a new look. Reading some of my mother’s astrological books, and acquiring some more of my own, I had to admit that I recognized aspects of myself in the descriptions of certain astrological configurations, and recognized aspects of people I knew in their astrological configurations. It made no scientific sense, but I recognized that it seemed to work.

I was still scientist enough to want to know why. If astrology worked, how did it work? There had to be an explanation.

My first encounter with a serious effort at explaining the effectiveness of astrology was in the works of the psychologist Carl Jung. Fascinated with symbolism and the unconscious, I had become a fan of Jung and had spent some of my first earnings as a hospital janitor on hardcover volumes of his collected works, which in those days (around 1980) were regularly stocked on the shelves of Duthie Books in downtown Vancouver. Jung himself was convinced that astrology worked, and even did some statistical tests to validate this mathematically; the results of these were published in his collected works. As for an explanatory theory, he thought that astrology was among the phenomena that could be accounted for by a new principle that he was proposing: the principle of synchronicity.

We don’t hear too much about synchronicity nowadays, but in the late 20th century it was a prominent concept in popular culture (and even the title of an album by The Police). Jung proposed that, in addition to the principle of physical causality, which links events by a flow of energy and contact through time, there exists another principle, which he called synchronicity, that links events not by physical cause but by meaning. While causality is a physical relationship that operates in the flow of time (boy kicks soccer ball, ball smashes window, parent yells at boy), synchronicity is an immaterial relationship that connects things happening at the same time, and causes an experience of meaning to arise in a witnessing consciousness. One of the examples that Jung gives from his own life is of a time when he was talking with a patient in Zurich, about a dream that the patient had had about being given a golden scarab beetle. And while she was telling this dream, they heard a tapping at the window, and when Jung opened the window in flew a beetle—the “nearest analogy to a golden scarab that one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), which contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt an urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment.”

This is how synchronicity manifests: as meaningful coincidence. It’s coincidence because the events are not causally connected—there is no conceivable way that Jung’s patient’s dream, their meeting, and the flight of that beetle could have had a common physical cause. And it’s meaningful because the consciousness that witnesses it experiences it as such. To be speaking of a scarab beetle, and then to have one as it were walk on stage to illustrate itself, is a striking event which seems to imply that nature is cooperating with or validating one’s current action in some way.

But how does the world, life, create meaningful coincidences? What is the mechanism of it? For Jung it all rests on the foundation of the collective unconscious—a term he invented to denote the psychic features that we all hold in common, as distinct from our conscious personalities on the one hand, and the contents of our individual unconscious on the other. The name of a grade 2 classmate that I can’t bring to mind is a content of my personal unconscious, and not of yours. But, according to Jung, the common experience of, say, having a mother has deep roots in our respective minds that are not matters of our personal life histories. This deep common experience forms the nucleus of what Jung termed an archetype, a kind of energy-center in the unconscious that manifests its presence by causing certain kinds of images, ideas, and feelings to arise in conscious experience. In his view these archetypes are the reason for the striking similarities that can exist between the creations and behaviors of people who are widely separated in time, space, and culture.

By definition, the contents of the unconscious cannot be known. The very existence of the unconscious is something that can only be inferred; Jung himself, as I recall, said that its existence is and must remain a “postulate” of psychology. Because it cannot be known directly, there is no way to know its full extent. It is the mysterious ocean on which our conscious experience floats: dark, unknown, and filled with living things that are far out of sight. As I understand it, Jung thought that the collective unconscious extended far enough into the world, so to speak, that it could engineer the phenomena of synchronicity, the meaningful coincidences in our lives.

But this might in itself be too “causal” a way of looking at it. For synchronicity would seem to be a separate way of cognizing reality altogether. Jung himself used the image of lines of longitude and latitude in the system of geodesic coordinates: the lines of longitude, emerging from a single point at one pole, flow outward as connected series of points, and in this they are like the chains of cause and effect. The lines of latitude, on the other hand, connect all of these lines of longitude together at each point, and thus are like the meaningful connections of synchronicity. Each event has its own causal chain that led to it, even as it is simultaneously connected in meaning with every other causal chain at that moment.

I think Jung wanted his concept of synchronicity to be a scientific concept, or at least as much of one as causality is (and he did collaborate on this idea with the prominent nuclear physicist Wolfgang Pauli). But I suspect that’s impossible, because there doesn’t seem to be any scientific way of testing the “meaning” of an event. Meaning is a subjective experience, in the eye of the beholder. It must remain a philosophical idea rather than a scientific one. Indeed, in his essay on synchronicity Jung notes that his thinking has antecedents in Arthur Schopenhauer’s essay, “On the Apparent Design in the Fate of the Individual.” (And, to be sure, causality itself is a philosophical idea that is simply accepted and used by scientists.)

Does synchronicity, then, explain the apparent accuracy of astrology? In one sense it does, in that it provides a framework whereby the arrangement of distant stars and planets at certain moment reflect the quality of that moment, just as much as anything else does that is more nearby. The power of their significance has nothing to do with their physical influence, which is small. But some part of me was and is dissatisfied with synchronicity as a complete explanation of astrology. In part this may be because it would seem to place an equal value or emphasis on everything that is happening at the same moment. What makes the configuration of the stars at this moment any more meaningful than the configuration of the leaves on the maple-tree outside, or of the books on my desk? They all presumably partake equally of whatever meaning exists at this moment. Shouldn’t I be able, in theory, to cast a birth chart based on them?

Another issue for me might be the referring of all this meaning to the “unconscious,” which, because it is intrinsically unknowable, seems like a handy dumping-ground for everything we can’t explain. God and the Devil are in the unconscious, and everything between them. It can be used to explain everything, and something that explains everything, in a sense, explains nothing.

So while, as a student of Jung’s ideas, I accepted synchronicity and found that the idea enriched my life, I did not regard the question of the explanation of astrology as settled. I would keep on reading, asking, and thinking until I found an answer that worked for me.

But more of that in the future.

The Age of Pisces 101: precession of the equinoxes

I’ve promised to write more about my work in progress, The Age of Pisces. But where to begin? What to say about such a large project?

I can start with the title. The Age of Pisces is a reference to the astrological age that is still current (for despite the song from Hair and other references from pop culture, the Age of Aquarius is still some way off). But what exactly is an astrological age, and how do we know we’re in one, and how do we know when it begins and ends? Oh: and what does it mean anyway—why should we care?

The mainstream understanding is that the “precession of the equinoxes” was discovered by the Greek astronomer Hipparchus between about 147 and 130 BC, although I’m convinced that the discovery was much, much earlier than this. The equinoxes are the 2 points on the celestial sphere where the celestial equator intersects the ecliptic. The celestial equator is simply the imaginary circle formed on the sky by projecting the Earth’s equator onto it: imagining the plane of the equator intersecting the spherical shell of the sky. The celestial equator is what’s known as a great circle, which is a circle drawn on the surface of a sphere that has its center at the center of the sphere. So a great circle is always a circumference of the sphere—the largest circle that can be drawn on a sphere. The ecliptic is another great circle, but this one is formed by the intersection of the plane of Earth’s orbit on the celestial sphere. The celestial equator and the ecliptic are different circles because the axis of the Earth is tilted with respect to its plane of orbit. If the axis were not tilted, then the celestial equator and the ecliptic would be one and the same circle, and there would be no intersection of circles and therefore no equinoxes.

Earth’s orbital plane is defined by its path around the Sun. This means that the Sun is  always, by definition, on the ecliptic. As Earth goes around the Sun, the apparent position of the Sun in the sky (that is, against the background of fixed stars) changes. In the course of a year it moves all the way around the sky, returning to the place where it started (that is, to the place where we started observing it a year ago). And because Earth’s orbital period is about 365 days, which is close to the number of degrees in a circle (360), the Sun travels, on average, about 1 degree each day along the ecliptic.

Now because the ecliptic and the celestial equator are both great circles, when they intersect they cut each other exactly in half. And since the equator is the circle that conventionally divides the Earth into northern and southern halves, this means that half of the ecliptic is above the celestial equator—that is, north of it—and half of it is below—that is, south of it. This in turn means that the Sun, traveling along the ecliptic, spends half the year north of the celestial equator and half the year south of it. In the northern hemisphere where these observations were originally made, the time of the Sun’s passage north of the celestial equator corresponds to the seasons of spring and summer, when the days are longer than the nights, and its passage south corresponds to autumn and winter, when the nights are longer than the days.

But in this annual cycle of growing and shrinking days there are 2 days when the lengths of day and night are the same. These are the days when the Sun, following the ecliptic, crosses the celestial equator, once on its way north at the beginning of spring, and once on its way south at the beginning of autumn. Loosely we call those days the equinoxes (a word   that derives from the Latin words for “equal” and “night”), but more strictly the term applies to the points on the celestial sphere where the ecliptic and the celestial equator intersect, and the Sun crosses these points not over the course of a day, but really at a specific moment in that day (if you choose one point to represent the Sun, such as its center). This is what allows astronomers to declare that spring or autumn begins at an exact time of day each year, and more generally it allows more precise measurements to be made of the Sun’s motion altogether.

When we track the motion of the Sun through the sky over a year we say that it returns to the same place, but what is it that makes a place in the sky the “same”? There is only one way of locating anything in the sky, and that is with respect to the background of fixed stars. In the ancient world it was observed that while the stars moved through the sky each night, as did the Sun during the day, they moved en masse and did not change their positions with respect to each other. This made them different from the Sun, Moon, and other classical planets, which did change their positions with respect to each other and with respect to the stars around them. Indeed our word planet derives from the Greek planes, which means “wanderer,” a reference to exactly this property. So the fixed stars act as an unmoving grid against which the motions of the planets, which in ancient times included the Sun and Moon, can be tracked. And this is what astronomers have done since remote antiquity.

If we’re measuring the progress of the Sun through a year, and we decide to make our starting-point the spring or vernal equinox in March, then we will know that the Sun has returned to its starting-point when it returns to the same position among the background of fixed stars as when it started. This in turn implies that the vernal equinox itself is a fixed point in the sky, exactly like a star, sitting permanently at a fixed distance from other nearby stars.

What Hipparchus is credited with having discovered, though, is that the vernal equinox (and therefore also its counterpart across the sky, the autumnal equinox) is not fixed after all. Very slowly, it moves. That is, over the course of years, decades, and centuries, the vernal equinox shifts against the background of fixed stars, gradually changing the stars in its immediate neighborhood. In doing this it is said to precess, and this continuous, slow motion is called the precession of the equinoxes. In the fullness of time the equinoxes precess all the way around the sky, returning, eventually, like the Sun in its annual course, to the same point in the sky, that is, to the same spot among the fixed stars. But while the Sun does this in one year, the equinoxes take about 26,000 years to do it. It is thought that because this motion is so slow, it takes more than one lifetime of good astronomical record-keeping to be able to see it, and that is why it was not until the time of Hipparchus, who had access to such good records, that it was discovered.

Right, on to the astrological ages. In ancient times observers saw that the planets, while moving around with respect to each other and with respect to the background stars, always  kept to a narrow belt in the sky, around the circle called the ecliptic. Now certain constellations of stars are found on the ecliptic, and by the time the ancient Greek astronomers were at work these had resolved down to the 12 constellations known as the zodiac (a word derived ultimately from the Greek zoe, “life”). So when the Sun or another planet traveled along the ecliptic, its location could be roughly indicated by which of these constellations it was currently passing through. If the Sun was currently passing by the stars of the constellation Aries, then the Sun could be said to be “in Aries.”

And the same could be said for an equinox. This imaginary point in the sky moves, like a planet, along the ecliptic through the constellations of the zodiac, spending about 2,200 years in each one. Each of these 2,200-year transits of the vernal equinox through a zodiacal constellation is termed an astrological age, and takes its name from the constellation of the transit. Using certain special ideas and techniques, some ancient astronomers declared that in 7 BC the vernal equinox entered the constellation Pisces, and thus inaugurated the Age of Pisces. If they were right, then the vernal equinox is still there, making its way backward through the constellation. It’s almost over the border to Aquarius, but not quite. By this reckoning, it won’t get there until about AD 2170.

So maybe we can see the dawn of the Age of Aquarius, but we still live in the Age of Pisces. It’s late in the age, but Pisces it still is. And what does that mean? If you’re a modern astronomer, chances are it means nothing; the ideas and nomenclature of astrology are relics of a superstitious time. It’s mere inertia that causes the modern astronomer to still refer to the vernal equinox as “the first point of Aries” and to symbolize it with the astrological glyph for Aries.

But I disagree with that view. I say that it does have meaning. Astrology is a valid field of definite knowledge that can enrich the life of anyone who takes the time to study it. I’ve studied it myself over the last 35 years or so, and there is not the least doubt in my mind as to its validity. Furthermore, I have my own idea of why it works, but that will be for next time.

The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion: a man seeks an efficient path to matrimony

The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Because intelligent people need light reading too.

This book came into my hands by serendipity. I saw it lying on my wife’s side of the bed one afternoon, and idly picked it up to read the first page or two. I was drawn in right away by its opener:

I may have found a solution to the Wife Problem. As with so many scientific breakthroughs, the answer was obvious in retrospect. But had it not been for a series of unscheduled events, it is unlikely I would have discovered it.

Good, I thought. I enjoyed the serious, Spock-like tone, and its comic application to the as yet unspecified but already capitalized Wife Problem. Where could this thing be going?

I experienced some dissonance, because the book’s cover had struck me as being chick lit: the tall skinny lettering, the whimsical cartoon bicycle. What didn’t fit was the apparent maleness of the author, Graeme Simsion. But there might be male writers of chick lit–how would I know? However, as I read the next page or two or three, I saw that the book does not conform in any way to my notions of chick lit. For one thing, the protagonist and narrator is a man–Don Tillman, associate professor of genetics at a university in Melbourne–and for another he addresses his readers as though they were his intellectual equals, that is, as though they too were people with high IQs. Nice!

So, being between novels (having just finished the U.S.A. trilogy by John Dos Passos), I decided to take Rosie for a spin. I was drawn in quickly by the fast-paced storytelling. Don Tillman, who, we have strong reason to suspect, is what my nurse sister would call somewhere “on the spectrum” of Asperger’s-autism, at age 39 has decided that he wants to find a wife. He doesn’t expect it to be easy, for, despite the fact that he possesses many or all of the characteristics that a woman might desire in a husband–he is tall, fit, good-looking, holds a prestigious and well-compensated job, keeps an immaculate apartment, and cooks delicious dinners–he lacks the most basic social skills that would enable him to find a mate, or even to make friends, of which he has only two, a husband-wife pair of fellow profs. They tolerate his rigid, intellectualized, and highly scheduled way of being, while trying to coach him in fitting in with society better.

Don doesn’t “get” emotions. He recognizes that they exist, and that they play a big part in people’s lives, and he even experiences some himself. But he finds that they invariably lead to inefficiency, errors, and wasted time. So he does his best to expunge them and neutralize their effect. The result is a robotic persona that, ever since Don was a child, has made him a figure of fun for others. In order to cope, he has learned to tolerate embarrassment and accept social disasters with good grace. If he had a sense of humor he would try to laugh at himself, but he doesn’t, not really, not yet.

One of my slight quibbles with the book is that I’m not clear at first exactly why Don wants to get married. He would like to have a sex life for a change, and maybe that’s reason enough. At age 39 a man’s thoughts might start turning that way. Anyway, Don comes up with a strategy to avert dating disasters such as he’s had in the past: he devises a detailed questionnaire for prospective women, to whittle prospects down to those with whom he might be compatible–nonsmokers and nonvegetarians, for example. With some coaching from his one male friend, the philandering psychology prof Gene, Don embarks on the Wife Project.

Perhaps predictably, Don’s strategy does not save him from disaster. One of the women he encounters early in the project is a certain Rosie, a 29-year-old bartender, who despite her good looks is an obvious reject: smoker and vegetarian. But Rosie has as problem that catches Don’s interest: her mother having died when she was little, she would like to find her birth father. And Don, a genetics prof, for reasons he can’t quite explain to himself, offers to help her.

And away we go on a wild but fun genetic chase for Rosie’s true father, with Rosie and Don by turns tolerating, enjoying, and detesting each other’s company. The story is engaging, well designed, and funny, and moves so fast that at times I wanted it to slow down; certain episodes that I thought were big and dramatic were narrated a bit hastily for me.

But Don Tillman is a captivating and complex character. Seemingly a robot in a human body, he discovers that he can change–and that he wants to, once he discovers a reason to do so. And his story is a refreshing change: a romance told from the man’s point of view. For men want love too–they just don’t know it. Certainly Don doesn’t. But if he can figure it out, there might be hope for us all.

I was tempted to give this book 5 stars. Certainly, every day I looked forward to reading it, and I laughed aloud at several points, and also cringed in vicarious humiliation. I found myself getting confused toward the end as the paternity mystery was untangled, but I think I understood it all by the last page. In all, a really good, enjoyable effort. If all books were this good I would be one happy reader.

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The Capitalist Manifesto by Louis O. Kelso and Mortimer J. Adler: turning the 1% into the 100%

The Capitalist Manifesto by Louis O. Kelso

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This mature, rational examination of what kind of economy a modern democracy needs to have is even more relevant today than it was in 1958.

I bought this book in 2010, a well-worn hardback that had belonged formerly to the University of Keele (“withdrawn from stock” is stamped faintly over the bookplate). I guess not enough people in Keele were borrowing it. But they should have been: for this is a work of cogent economic and philosophical analysis of the growing predicament of the United States, and, by extension, all other developed industrial economies. That predicament, as the authors see it, is that the form of capitalism that has evolved there is fundamentally inconsistent with a free and democratic society, and if things are simply allowed to progress along the same path, this inconsistency must eventually produce a society that is entirely unfree and undemocratic. That is, it will produce a totalitarian socialist state—a state in which all political and economic power is concentrated in the hands of the ruling elite, as was the case in the USSR at the time when these men were writing, and as is the case today in countries such as Cuba and North Korea.

The United States becoming like the USSR—or North Korea? Alarmist hogwash! Adolescent hyperbole! That’s what I would think if I were simply presented with the propositions I’ve stated above. But these authors, Louis O. Kelso and Mortimer J. Adler, are the opposite of writers who might engage in such rhetorical tactics; these are serious, deep thinkers, steeped in the ideas of the Great Books. Despite what might appear to be the impishness of their title, which is clearly riffing on that of the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels, Kelso and Adler are no firebrands; rather, they are philosophers, seeking to move their audience not with passion and rhetorical figures (“you have nothing to lose but your chains!”), but with the depth of their learning and the sure-footedness of their reasoning. Although they make no reference to Ludwig von Mises, whose Human Action: A Treatise on Economics appeared 9 years earlier, I’m sure they would concur with Mises that economic arguments can only be settled, finally, by ratiocination. Economic questions will be settled by the Mr. Spocks of the world, not by the Dr. McCoys.

And here we have not just an economic treatise, but a manifesto, written by a pair of Spocks. The book contains not just an analysis of the situation, but practical suggestions as to how the country might change course and avert economic and political disaster. For although they are not alarmists, they are alarmed, and believe that action is urgently needed.

The basic problem, as they see it, is that the modern version of capitalism, the so-called mixed economy that has arisen in response to some of the injustices of the early, laissez-faire capitalism of the Industrial Revolution, has itself become an engine of injustice. But the injustice is no longer against—or no longer directly against—the industrial workers whose plight so aroused the indignation of Marx; now the injustice is against the capitalist. And the injustice is specifically that the rewards of the industrial system, the wealth that it produces, are being distributed, increasingly, to the wrong people—that is, to those who have not earned them. For the authors observe that the contribution of labor to the production of wealth has steadily declined since the Industrial Revolution, while the contribution of capital has steadily increased, such that, by the time of their writing, the respective contributions were 10% and 90%, while the respective shares of the proceeds were more like 70% and 30%. And the authors assert that anyone who is generating 90% of the result, but receiving only 30% of the benefit, is enduring an injustice. It’s hard to argue with that. Certainly, any of us who was in that position personally would be quick to point it out and bring things into balance.

Does this mean that Bill Gates has not got his full due? Should we care? According to the authors we should care, if we care about justice. And we do care about justice, as soon as we feel that we or people we care about are suffering from its lack. And as soon as justice becomes selective, it ceases to be justice.

The problem with the mixed economy, according to the authors, is that it has abandoned justice in favor of a different value: charity. The enthronement of this value is announced most vividly in the Communist Manifesto: “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” People are to receive a share of the wealth not on the basis of what they have contributed, on the basis of their need. And this is the guiding principle of the welfare state, the mixed economy.

But it’s not just the recipients of actual state welfare who are wards of the wealth-redistributing state; all those who earn their living through employment are similar wards, in that they are beneficiaries of ongoing government efforts to create “full employment”: suppressed interest rates to juice business, deficit spending, make-work projects, steeply progressive income-tax rates, and the ever-swelling payroll of government itself, to name only a few. All of these measures are conceived of as necessary in order not just to ensure that citizens have a living, but to enable the mass consumption that is thought key to an industrial economy. “Take from the rich and give to the poor so that the poor can spend money and keep each other employed.”

This course, while it may have seemed expedient for a time, is not sustainable, according to the authors. For not only is this system unjust in itself, it is sowing the seeds of its own destruction. For by diverting an ever greater share of wealth into workers’ hands, it is crimping the formation and deployment of capital—that which actually creates the wealth. And it has this further unintended consequence: it concentrates capital in the hands of an elite—the now notorious “one percent.”

So what is the answer? The answer is the Capitalist Revolution: the transformation of the United States (or any industrial economy) from a socialistic mixed economy to a truly Capitalist (and the authors capitalize Capitalism when they refer to its true, final form) economy. And in a truly Capitalist economy, everyone is a capitalist. The answer is not to take more and more from the capitalists and share it out among the workers; the answer is for workers themselves to become owners of the means of production—to become shareholders, to become capitalists. The aim is for every household to have a viable income from capital alone.

And this is possible precisely because capital is so productive. The advance of technology has made human labor less and less a factor in the production of wealth; and the nature of technology is such that this process can continue without limit. The authors, writing in 1958, were looking at nuclear power as a technology that would provide enormous gains in productive power, and therefore in wealth. While that hasn’t proceeded in the straight line they may have imagined, there have been tremendous advances in computing and robotics that have made possible huge advances in industrial productivity.

This is significant, for our word robot comes from the Czech word for “slave,” and the authors of this book point back to the liberal societies of the ancient world, in which men of leisure could engage in liberal pursuits because the toil of subsistence was performed by slaves. But while slavery is unjust, the use of robots is not; so while the liberal life of leisure that was enjoyed by Aristotle and his contemporaries was sustainable only because of the injustice of slavery, a modern life of such leisure can be sustained by the “slaves” of today—robots—with no such injustice. Because of the wealth created by technology, a truly free and democratic life is possible for us today.

Possible, but not actual—not yet. Its possibility lies on the far side of the Capitalist Revolution. And this was the specific connection that brought Mortimer J. Adler to join with Louis O. Kelso in authoring this book. For while Kelso was the expert on capitalism (he would later release a large book on it), Adler had arrived in his own political thinking at the conclusion that, in his own words:

Democracy requires an economic system which supports the political ideals of liberty and equality for all. Men cannot exercise freedom in the political sphere when they are deprived of it in the economic sphere.

And, he became convinced, freedom in the economic sphere cannot be attained as long as one must toil for one’s living. This was Aristotle’s view, and the reason that he denied that working men and tradesmen, even if free, could be citizens: their time was eaten up with subsistence labor, and they were beholden to their employers or their customers, and thus did not enjoy the freedom of action and of conscience of a man of property.

The idea of America as a nation of free, propertied citizens was the vision of Thomas Jefferson and other Founding Fathers of the United States. They assumed that this meant a nation of freehold farmers, and efforts were made over the years, such as the Homestead Act of 1862, to realize this vision. According to Kelso and Adler, this vision can still be realized, but it will not take the form of a nation of farmers; rather, it will be a nation of stockholders, who, living on a stream of income from the wealth produced by machines, can realize their human potential by engaging in the liberal work that is the privilege, the duty, and the joy of the man of leisure.

I left off reading this book sometime in 2011. What brought me back to it recently was a rash of journal articles about the tremendous recent advances in machine or artificial intelligence—AI. In just a few years, computers and machines will be able to perform the majority of human labor, at a higher level of quality and quantity than what humans can achieve. Thoughtful people are wondering how we can prepare for such a society. What can we do if the majority of us are displaced from our jobs?

Kelso and Adler foresaw this day, and the answer is in their book. Its proposals will not be easy to implement, and many of their suggestions are tentative, intended only to get the ball of discussion rolling. And, large as the obstacles are to the practical implementation of the Capitalist Revolution, they are as nothing compared with the deeper problem of educating people to be full citizens. We live in a culture that either celebrates toil for its own sake (the Protestant work ethic) or, on the other hand, imagines freedom from it as an endless playtime, filled with shopping, vacations, games, and entertainment.

But it was not for any of these things that we were born. Human happiness, according to these authors, is attainable only by developing and fulfilling our specifically human characteristics, such as our capacity for thought, language, spirituality, and creativity. When we are doing these things we are not toiling for our subsistence, but performing the work of civilization. Such work is both harder and more rewarding that toil. Not monetarily rewarding—that is not its aim. The work of civilization is intrinsically rewarding; as human beings we are rewarded in the mere doing of it.

In the ancient world this was made possible by slaves; in the modern world it is made possible by technology. But even with the enabling technology, it can’t happen unless similarly enabling political, economic, and educational factors are in place. The United States and other advanced industrial economies have at least the makings of a genuinely democratic society, which is the political requirement; this book sketches a path to the creation of the economic requirement. The educational requirement is a separate and possibly even more radical topic of discussion.

But according to these authors, these are discussions that we need to have. The questions were already urgent in 1958; now, after 57 years of pushing ahead with the mixed economy, we have advanced even further in the direction of a society of impoverished wage-slaves and wards of the state. For, in the words of Kelso and Adler:

Unless the ultimate resolution of the class war is found in Capitalism through justice for all and with freedom for all, it will be found in socialism and the totalitarian state—that caricature of the classless society in which all men are equally enslaved, for none has the political freedom of a citizen or the economic freedom of a capitalist.

Lacking the emotion, sarcasm, and calls to armed revolt of the Communist Manifesto, The Capitalist Manifesto will not set hearts on fire. It makes its appeals to that most human part of us: our reason. And it is not advocating violence, but discussion—the means to change chosen by free, reasonable people. Whether we are collectively up to such a challenge is an open question, but as talk about the wholesale displacement of human labor by robot labor in our society gains urgency, I humbly suggest that this book be added to the list of core texts to enlighten the debate.

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on the proper livelihood of the literary artist

In my last post I talked about how the e-book revolution, despite the high level of automation that it is bringing to the publishing process, has multiplied the labor of authors by giving them more tasks to do. Since this is the opposite of the division of labor, which, according to Adam Smith, is responsible for all the wealth ever created by humans, we have to expect that, all other things being equal, it is a wealth-sapping process for the author. For whenever we change tasks, there is a loss of productivity.

But all of this concerns the writer as a producer—as an industrial or commercial phenomenon. All of the author-help sites and tools out there assume that the author’s primary goal is to make money, and so all of the advice is geared in that direction. But this is to ignore that historically, writing and publishing have not been primarily about business. Yes, it does cost money to write, publish, and distribute a book, even an e-book, but there remains the fact that writing and publishing are cultural activities: they are, I would say, still the primary means for the dissemination of ideas, and, in the case of poetic works, they constitute a form of fine art (literature, after all, was one of the seven classical fine arts). This means that writing and publishing do not and should not fall entirely under the laws and norms of commerce. Their value is not merely a commercial value.

The literary artist or scholar falls outside the bounds of conventional economic calculation. Ludwig von Mises, in his Human Action, says:

A painter is a businessman if he is intent upon making paintings which could be sold at the highest price. A painter who does not compromise with the taste of the buying public and, disdaining all unpleasant consequences, lets himself be guided solely by his own ideals is an artist, a creative genius.

And what goes for painters goes for authors of literary works. This is why the “profession” of artist has always been known as impecunious. And indeed the same might be said of scholars—those other authors who produce works for reasons not connected with revenue. I recall reading in Don Quixote that “scholar” and “pauper” were virtual synonyms. The observation goes back much further than that; consider these lines from Ecclesiastes:

Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the men of skill; but time and chance happen to them all.

We all need a livelihood, but the more that an artist is focused on gaining a livelihood from his art, the less of an artist he is. And hence the proverbial poverty of the starving artist.

What’s an artist—including a literary artist—to do? I have no answer. My own feeling is that the proper and best means of living for an artist is via patronage: to receive a living from one or more patrons who believe in one’s work. Harriet Shaw Weaver acted as a patron to James Joyce when he wrote Finnegans Wake, a work that surely could never have seen the light of day if purely commercial considerations had prevailed. Such a relationship can still be precarious, for patrons can themselves be vulgar and fickle. But the relationship is still an honest and voluntary one, which means that it is fitting for free people.

When I was growing up, and maybe even to some extent still, governments acted as patrons or financiers of the arts. But this is a much less satisfactory situation, I think, not only because favoritism and corruption enter so easily into political decisions, but because supporting artistsor buying art—is not the proper business of any government. At bottom it’s not right for a government to use its coercive power to extract the earnings of some people, and hand these to other people, such as artists, whom the tax-paying citizen might never want to support.

Whatever we might think of the taste of a patron, the money is his own to give away if he chooses, and that makes his transactions with the artist pure and blameless.

Am I soliciting patronage? Not directly (although if you’re interested in helping to fund a literary artist, let’s talk). Currently I’m supplementing begging and borrowing with earning. All of which takes time. Which in turn brings me back to the multiplication of labor. I do so many things now besides writing that I wonder whether my lifespan will be enough to produce some actual work. Luckily, many people are living a long time now; I just have to hope that I’m one of them.

on the multiplication of labor

Golly, it’s been almost 2 months since my last post. What can I possibly offer as an excuse?

The standard one would be “I didn’t have time”—but I don’t believe in that excuse. For we all have the same amount of time: 24 hours in a day. What differs are our priorities. That implies that I have assigned a lower priority to posting to this blog than I have to other things. And this despite the fact that I recognize that keeping up with one’s blog is a core activity for the modern writer. What’s wrong with me?

There are a couple of things that are wrong with me, but I suspect that they might actually resolve down to just one thing. One of these things is the need to scare up some revenue—a livelihood. For, like most writers, and especially like most fiction writers and other artists of language, I don’t make my living by writing. I have done so in the past, off and on during my career. I’ve even done quite well at it, working in television and in the corporate world as a technical writer. But in the long (long, long) process of getting The Age of Pisces written and published, I have run down my resources and have been obliged to look for ways to keep body and soul together. And this has taken time.

Another thing wrong with me is the fact that being a modern, self-published writer, I have many other duties to attend to besides just writing my books and keeping up with my blog. Ever since the beginning of the e-book revolution a few years ago, the cognoscenti have been insisting that now the writer must wear many more hats than formerly. As publisher as well as writer, the author must now see to the editing, production, and publication of his book, plus all of its marketing. And thankfully there are many intelligent and low-cost ways of doing these things—but they take time. For each task there is a learning curve and an investment of time to get it accomplished. And many of them are ongoing—not unlike the blog itself.

But there’s even more wrong with me, for the dispersion of my attention occurs not only across the various tasks that make up the preparation of my book series; it occurs also across activities that do not directly relate to that project. I continue to study the art of writing itself, and I continue to work on my own liberal education. I continue to read about subjects that do not directly relate to my work in progress, just because I’m interested, or because I want to be informed about the world I live in. Right now, for example, I’ve resumed reading a book I put down in 2013 called The Capitalist Manifesto by Louis O. Kelso and Mortimer J. Adler. I was spurred to do this by reading an article (on a nifty little app called Flipboard) about how machine intelligence is progressing so fast that in just a few years’ time 80% of all jobs in the developed world will be performable by computers or robots. An important topic for a world citizen to pay attention to, surely—but not related to my fictional world of the Eastern Mediterranean of the 1st century B.C. I even try to pick up the guitar once in a while. And all these things take time.

A couple of thoughts. One is that all this has made a slow writer (guess who) even slower. For the piling-up of new job functions on the book author is working directly against the flow of economic history as first observed by Adam Smith in his The Wealth of Nations. Smith’s work launches from the observation that the increase of human material wealth springs from a single cause: the division of labor. Book One begins with his discussion of the industry of pin-making. He notes that a workman not educated to the business, working alone, could probably turn out scarcely a single pin in a day, and certainly not 20 of them. But he saw an indifferently stocked and staffed factory of 10 men making pins, and they were turning out 48,000 a day. Such is the wealth-multiplying power of the division of labor, and it applies to every field of human endeavor.

The forward march of electronic technology, though, has caused the modern writer to do an about-face and march backward in economic development, away from the division of labor to what I suppose would have to be called the multiplication of labor. And just as the process of specialization, which is the purpose and point of the division of labor, leads its practitioners to higher levels of expertise and productivity, so the process of generalization to an expanding array of job functions, which is the effect if not the purpose of the multiplication of labor, leads its practitioners in the opposite direction: to lower levels of expertise and productivity. Certainly, I can confirm this from my own experience. I’m doing more things—or trying to do them—and getting less done.

I think that there was much that was irrational and wrong about the publishing industry on the eve of the e-book revolution. But it at least had this going for it: a division of labor. In that one respect, at least, it was rational. And for this reason I expect to see a return of the division of labor to the e-publishing world; no doubt it is already happening. But in the meantime, those of us toiling on the margins, far from the mainstream, have a newly extensive set of hats that we have to keep changing, and this hat-switching must perforce slow us down, no matter how clever the technology is that we might use to perform our new job functions.

So there you have it: a slightly expanded excuse for why I haven’t been doing my blog posts. But there’s more to be said about this. For in talking about the division of labor I’ve only really been talking about the writer as an industrial concern—as a business. And that, to me, is the least interesting part of writing. For the writer who is also an artist, a whole other set of considerations comes into play.

But more on that next time.

The Wizard of Oz: birth of a Girl Adventurer

How many times have you seen The Wizard of Oz? I’m going to guess that I’ve seen it a dozen times. Kimmie, my wife, reckons that she’s seen it at least 20 times. I haven’t the slightest doubt that there are people who have seen it more than 100 times. Unless someone can come up with a more plausible alternative, I have to believe that The Wizard of Oz is the most-watched movie ever made; certainly, according to Wikipedia, it was named by the U.S. Library of Congress as the most viewed movie in syndicated-television history.

Dorothy and her nonhuman crew

On this, my (let’s call it) 12th viewing, as movie #4 in Paul’s Creme de la Creme Festival, I felt the magnetic power of this enchanting story. It takes hold early and does not let go. Beneath the charming and delightful fairy-tale elements run deep currents of myth and archetype, which may operate all the more strongly because it does not seem that anyone involved in creating this work, from the original novelist L. Frank Baum onward, had any clear idea of these depths. Indeed, The Wizard of Oz presents a classic example of that strange phenomenon of filmmaking: a crowd of people, working briefly, fitfully, often at cross purposes or in unknowing collaboration. When I had a TV show of my own—one that had no small connection with The Wizard of Oz—I came to see the process less as a collaboration and more as a pack of dogs pulling at a carcass.

Something like this was most evident in the writing of Oz. The finished film gives screenplay credits to Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, and Edgar Allan Woolf, in addition to acknowledging Baum’s 1900 novel. But many more hands were involved—probably too many to track. These included, again according to Wikipedia, Herman J. Mankiewicz, Ogden Nash, Irving Brecher, Herbert Fields, and each of the 4 directors who worked on the movie: Richard Thorpe, George Cukor, Victor Fleming, and King Vidor. And this is just a sampler, for the Wikipedia article names several more, and there will be others who are unnamed. How can such a goulash of creative effort result in one of the best movies ever made? It’s a mystery—another fact to strengthen my belief in the Muse that guides artistic effort from places unseen.

To refresh your memory of the story—for surely you know it—Kansas farm girl Dorothy (Judy Garland), an orphan who lives with her Aunt Em, Uncle Henry, three affable farmhands, and her little dog Toto, feels driven to run away from home when a nasty neighbor, Miss Gulch (Margaret Hamilton), arrives with authorization from the local sheriff to seize Toto for allegedly biting her. When she runs down the road with Toto, Dorothy meets a kindly traveling showman named Professor Marvel (Frank Morgan) who uses his crystal ball to persuade her that she will be missed and she should return home. But when she gets back to the farm a tornado is brewing in the sky, and since the other occupants have gone to the storm cellar, she enters an empty house. The wind wrenches a window from its hinges and it conks Dorothy on the head, knocking her out, apparently briefly, and then the house is ripped from its foundation and whirled through the sky to crash down in a strange land that neither Dorothy nor we have ever seen before—the land of Oz.

The house has landed right on the wicked Witch of the East, killing her and freeing the diminutive munchkins of Munchkinland from her oppressive rule. Helped by Glinda, the good Witch of the North, Dorothy is sent toward the great wizard who lives in the Emerald City of Oz for help in returning home to Kansas. Along the way she collects friends in the form of the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Cowardly Lion, and is followed by the Witch of the East’s vengeful sister, the wicked Witch of the West (who happens to be a dead ringer for Miss Gulch). Magic adventures ensue.

I mentioned myth and archetype above, and I am not the only one who sees this story in those terms. Caroline Myss, in her book Sacred Contracts: Awakening Your Divine Potential, discusses the story in detail as an allegory of “our need to transform the abandoned, wounded, or dependent aspect of our Child archetype to one that is healthy and self-sufficient.” As Myss interprets it, the story depicts a journey to psychological wholeness. Dorothy’s house, representing her whole self, is lifted spinning into the air and crashes in Oz, her own personal realm of adventure. She is accompanied by Toto, whose name is Latin for “everything” (or “whole”), a sign that all the qualities and powers that she will need are already with her. The little Munchkins represent fragments of Dorothy, just as her new friends the Scarecrow, Tin Woodman, and Cowardly Lion represent aspects of herself—intelligence, compassion, courage—that she is unconsciously seeking to realize. (Myss notes that both the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman are inert until Dorothy comes along to bring them to life.)

Her first encounter with the Wizard is terrifying, and, like a spiritual master, he sets her a daunting task: to fetch the broom of the Witch of the West. When she fulfills the task, the Wizard is tamed and becomes friendly. In the climax, when the Wizard is about to try to carry Dorothy back to Kansas in the air balloon in which he himself arrived in Oz, Toto breaks free, and Dorothy, trying to rescue him (as she first did at the beginning of the story), leaps out. The good witch Glinda appears to advise Dorothy that she has had the power to return home all along: it resides in the ruby slippers that were magically transferred to her feet from the feet of the dead Witch of the East. And with the famous line, “there’s no place like home,” Dorothy awakes to consciousness in her own bed. Having faced her adventure with courage (Cowardly Lion), she now knows (Scarecrow) how much she loves (Tin Woodman) her adoptive family. Her hero’s journey is complete.

In Sacred Contracts, Myss introduces her idea of the “8th chakra”—a chakra beyond the traditional 7 of Indian yoga, this one located about an arm’s length above one’s head. Myss suggests that this is the locus of the archetypes that we each embody at different times and in different ways. She provides a list of several dozen of these archetypes, adding that the list is not complete. Her list includes such figures as the Gambler, the Mentor, the Messiah, and she identifies Dorothy with the Orphan Child—one of 6 different manifestations of the important Child archetype. Myss says that “precisely because orphans are not allowed into the family circle, they have to develop independence early in life.” And certainly Dorothy does this.

But I’d like to offer another suggestion: that Dorothy embodies another archetype as well, one that does not occur in Myss’s list. I call it the Girl Adventurer, a young female counterpart of the archetypal Hero. Baum based his own story partly on Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and Alice is another example of the Girl Adventurer. Further examples might include Nancy Drew and Belle in Beauty and the Beast.

Wikipedia describes Judy Garland’s Dorothy as a damsel in distress, but I don’t see her that way. That is, she is a damsel, and she is in distress, but she does not passively wait for someone to rescue her—she takes action. This is what makes her an adventurer. But the kind of action she takes is different from what her male counterpart might take. For while the male Hero achieves his aims through acts of daring and prowess, fighting or tricking his way past opposing forces, the Girl Adventurer proceeds more softly: she asks questions, makes friends, and, when needs must, reproaches wrongdoers. Dorothy, who is always pleasant and caring, is roused to anger when the Cowardly Lion bullies her new friends Scarecrow and Tin Woodman: she stands up to him and shames him. She calls his bluff and it works; he backs down, blubbering.

I believe that all stories are about archetypes; that every character has an archetype for a skeleton; and that the better the character, the more strongly he embodies the archetype. In this sense I think that Dorothy is a really good character. Seemingly vulnerable and sweet, she proves to have reserves of courage and determination. Her heart is touched by the plight of each of her new friends, and she is ready to invite them to join her. She is not merely their friend, she is their leader—but she leads by caring. The Hero dares; the Girl Adventurer cares.

These are just a few thoughts; there is much, much more that could be said about this story and about this movie. The story is simple, powerful, and imaginative; the production is luscious and striking; the songs are moving and charming. I confirmed my rating of 10 out of 10 for it, and if I were to rate it out of 100, I would probably give it a 98. That’s how good I think it is. And that’s why you and I have seen it so many times.

Dodsworth: midlife crisis among the bourgeoisie

Paul’s Crème de la Crème Festival rolls on.  Last night Kimmie and I screened the third entry in my chronological festival of the best films, the 1936 production of Dodsworth, directed by William Wyler and starring Walter Huston and Ruth Chatterton. The screenplay by Sidney Howard was adapted from his 1934 play, which in turn was an adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’s 1929 novel. The story is about an automotive industrialist who, having retired wealthy at a relatively young age, decides to rediscover himself and his marriage by taking his wife on a grand tour of Europe–only to find that his wife is bored, restless, and embarrassed by his provincialism. And upon this second viewing I have to confess that the movie was not as good as I remembered.

Dodsworth entered my Crème de la Crème Festival by a circuitous route. For when we originally watched it in 2009, I rated it 8/10 on IMDb—too low to make it into the Crème de la Crème. But later, thinking about the movie and about my admiration for William Wyler as a director, I had a change of heart and upgraded it to a 9. Now, having watched it again, I’ve moved it back down to an 8; and if I were to rate it out of 100, I would give it a 77.

Wikipedia, in its article about the original work by Sinclair Lewis, describes the novel as a satire on the differences in ideas and morals between Americans and Europeans. I have not read the novel, but the film adaptation is no satire; it’s a family drama—a story of marital strain and dissolution resulting when one of the partners, in this case the wife, enters midlife crisis. For Fran Dodsworth (Chatterton), when she discovers that European men can still find her attractive, wants nothing more to do with the Midwestern town where she has lived in such comfort and luxury. Her husband Sam (Huston), modest and plainspoken, more than once refers to themselves as “hicks,” and this now stands for everything that she can’t bear to be associated with. It all hits home when Sam reminds her that their daughter is about to have a baby—that Fran is about to become a grandmother.

I think the reason I originally upgraded the movie from an 8 to a 9 was because of its adult tone. As I mentioned in my review of Counsellor at Law, William Wyler excels at the sensitive portrayal of mature content. In this film too there are nicely observed scenes that stand out from the adolescent level that most movies rest at. The Dodsworths’ marriage is in trouble, but they handle it, for the most part, like mature adults.

The Europeans come off less well. Fran has at least three suitors in the course of the story, and they all come off as effete and parasitic—caricatures of snobbish aristocrats. Maybe this was the “satirical” part of the story, but if it was, it came off as clunky and ordinary.

My attention wandered while watching this movie. The marital strain being depicted has become familiar ground in many novels, movies, and TV shows since that time. This one may have seemed new and special at the time, but now it has been surpassed. Accordingly, I’ve removed it from the Crème de la Crème Festival, and the total number of films in it has dropped from 91 to 90.

Next!