Paul Vitols's Blog, page 31

unfit for liberty

A people may prefer a free government, but if, from indolence, or carelessness, or cowardice, or want of public spirit, they are unequal to the exertions necessary for preserving it; if they will not fight for it when it is directly attacked; if they can be deluded by the artifices used to cheat them out of it; if by momentary discouragement, or temporary panic, or a fit of enthusiasm for an individual, they can be induced to lay their liberties at the feet even of a great man, or trust him with powers which enable him to subvert their institutions; in all these cases they are more or less unfit for liberty: and though it may be for their good to have had it even for a short time, they are unlikely long to enjoy it.

I typed these words this morning as part of my daily program of transforming the highlights of books I've read into Word documents, in turn part of my own program of amassing a personal computer-based reference library. The words were written by John Stuart Mill, and they were quoted in the introduction to the chapter on Courage in volume 2 of the Britannica Great Books of the Western World. And as I typed them I got a strange feeling—not a good feeling.

For I think that Mill's words, written, I think, sometime in the mid-19th century, are a pretty apt description of my own society today. When I glance at my Google News page, the top headline reads, "Barack Obama hits Iran's central bank with tough new sanctions"—essentially an act of war, one of a series. These were measures used against Iraq in the run-up to its invasion.

My own country, Canada, has also become more bellicose, assisting in the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Libya, among other places (not Syria though—no oil there). We're imperial stooges, I'm sad to say, and have been for some time. Although Canada did not directly participate in the Vietnam War, the special trade deal known as Auto Pact was a bone thrown to Canada by Lyndon Johnson in exchange for our support of America's invasion of that remote place. We provide window-dressing for the imperial project.

I'm concerned that this imperial project is possible only because the people in whose name the money is being borrowed to prosecute these wars have become, in Mill's words, unfit for liberty. What happens to such people?

I believe we're going to find out—are in the process of finding out.

I can't help but think of another quote that I captured some time ago in another context:

The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.

Hermann Goering was a lot of things, but he wasn't wrong about how the politics of imperialism work. The "leaders" have interests that are different from those of the people whose money and blood they are spilling to achieve their aims.

But people who are fit for liberty wouldn't let that happen to them.

a tentative definition of wealth

This morning I posted to Twitter and to Facebook this link about the Facebook IPO, written by Dan Denning of Daily Reckoning Australia. In his post Mr. Denning makes this point:

Time is your most valuable asset. And it's the one asset we all have equal amounts of. How we use it is what distinguishes us from one another.

This thought coincides with my own thinking over the past year or so. I thought of the common excuse we all make, "I don't have the time", and wondered what it really means. For we all have the same amount of time: 24 hours in a day. How we spend that time expresses our personal values. So when I say, "I don't have time for that," what I mean is, "I don't value that activity highly enough to make time for it. My time is filled with other things that I value more."

Of course, often we have already pledged our time away: made time commitments that don't leave any spare room. But to the extent that we're not slaves, those commitments too are a choice, and an expression of our values.

Again, in reference to Mr. Denning's words, my specific thought in the past year has been this: that time is not just our most valuable asset; it is ultimately our only asset. We all have an unknown but finite quantity allotted to us at birth, and we continuously spend it. This is the powerful ancient image of the hourglass: the sand is our life draining away. What are we doing with it?

The other things we call wealth are really just transformations of time. Money, for instance, represents time in the sense of how long it takes us to earn a certain amount of it, and in the sense of how it can help us make use of our nonearning time. The same applies to specific assets or experiences we might buy. In this way we exchange and reshuffle the time in our lives, but our total stock of time remains finite, and is continuously slipping away.

Lately I was trying to come up with my own definition of wealth. Bearing in mind these other thoughts, one of my early stabs at it was this:

possession of the quantity of resources that allows one to maximize one's leisure time

A new word comes in: leisure. For not all time is equally valuable to us. The premium time, the true temporal wealth, is leisure. This implies that many people usually considered wealthy are not wealthy at all. The lawyer who puts in 60-hour weeks to earn $500,000 a year has very little leisure, even as he drives a more expensive car, lives in a more expensive house, wears more expensive clothes, and goes on more expensive vacations than most of us.

The lawyer might object: what use is leisure to me if I don't have the money to enjoy it? Fair enough. But this raises further questions. What constitutes enjoyment? And how much does it need to cost?

In the ancient world, as I've mentioned before, leisure was the prerogative and indeed the defining mark of the free man—the citizen. And there were only 2 proper uses for his leisure:

improving himself
improving his society

If you weren't doing one or both of those things, then you were in the deepest sense wasting your time. At least, this was the ideal.

Leaving aside for a moment the question of improving society, what does it mean to improve oneself? Speaking generally, the ancients again might answer: "cultivating virtue." For my part, I think they were right. But it might be argued that this idea is too limiting in our freedom-loving world. People should be able to do what they want, no?

So I resorted to Abraham Maslow's theory of motivation. Based on his studies of animals and humans, he found that the psychological motives of behavior could be grouped into a few broad categories, which could be arranged in a hierarchy. The hierarchy just meant that the lower-order motives or needs were the ones that animals, including human animals, attend to first, leaving other needs unmet until these ones have been taken care of, at least partly. At the bottom level are the physiological needs, such as food, water, and air. Moving up from there, we come to the safety needs, belonging needs, esteem needs. These complete the needs that Maslow characterized as "deficiency needs"—those things we need for our normal healthy development and living, and which, once they are met, do not need to be over-met. Some of us eat, for example, more than we need; but that is not healthy.

At the top of the hierarchy, above all those deficiency or D-needs, are what Maslow called the "being" or B-needs: the need for human beings to actualize themselves, to fulfill their potentials. According to Maslow, once we have fulfilled our D-needs, we naturally turn toward our B-needs and actualize ourselves, for this is how we experience fulfillment in life. And, unlike the D-needs which can be satisfied with a finite amount fulfillment, the B-needs are open-ended: we never get "full" of them. If you find fulfillment in playing the piano, there is no natural endpoint; the piano and its music can fill up the life of someone who has passion for it, with plenty left undone when they die. Or you may find that your zeal for self-actualization moves on from piano to, say, gardening. Again, there is no limit to the fulfillment you can get from gardening as long as you have a passion for it. You can keep going with it: learning more, doing more, appreciating more.

All right, so where does this take me? I offer this as a tentative definition of wealth:

having resources such that one is not impeded by a lack of resources in pursuing either one's deficiency needs or one's being needs

I had reasons for putting it in this negative way, with the phrase "not impeded." For this preserves the freedom aspect. No one is forcing us to look after our deficiency needs and our being needs; Maslow just observed that, left to our own devices, that's what we do.

And how did I start wandering down this path? I was actually reflecting on the question of economic growth. But I'll have to leave that for another time.

Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice: ridiculous & lovable

Last night's entry in Paul's History of Cinema Festival was the 1969 social comedy Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, written by Paul Mazursky and Larry Tucker, and directed by Mazursky. It's a movie I first saw about 8 years ago when I was studying romantic comedies in preparation for starting to write one of my own.

(Curious? Mine was called Monogamy, with this log-line: "A happily married but square biologist, called as an expert witness in a sensational divorce suit involving alleged abuse of a "fidelity hormone", is dismayed to find he's fallen in love with the plaintiff's attorney, who is unconventional, ultramodern—and married." The idea came to me while reading an intriguing nonfiction book called The Myth of Monogamy by the husband-wife team of David P. Barash and Judith Eve Lipton.)

Back then I watched it one night while Kimmie was out, sprawled solo on the love-seat, and I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it. But I thought that might have something to do with the scotch I was drinking while also watching a 30-year-old Natalie Wood in a bikini. I wasn't sure what to expect on a reviewing, but I found that I enjoyed the movie possibly even more this time while watching it with Kimmie. I'll try to say why.

(Danger: spoiler alert. I'll be talking about the story's structure, including its ending, so read on only if you've seen the movie or otherwise don't mind spoilers.)

One interesting thing is that the movie's IMDb rating is a relatively limp 6.5/10 (with a lowish sample base of 2,371 viewers). Furthermore, all categories of viewers rate it about the same at 6.5, with the interesting exception of viewers under 18 years old, who give it, on average, 8.0. (Not to keep you in suspense, I rated it 8/10.) I'm not sure what to make of this, but Kimmie, when I told her, dismissed the IMDb viewers as "prudes."

Who knows, she may be right. With this movie we arrived at the first in our festival that deals with sex in a direct, frank way, even as its touch is very light. The movie opens with a hip California couple, Bob and Carol (Robert Culp and Natalie Wood), driving to a mountain retreat. Here, guided by a few avant-garde psychologists, a heterogeneous but trippy collection of men and mainly bare-breasted women are doing tai chi, engaging in primal screams, and blissing out in hot tubs. Bob, a documentary filmmaker, is here to do background research for a film project, and Carol is just tagging along. They enter a continuous 24-hour encounter group, bottled in a room with about 10 other men and women and a facilitator to confront each other with their feelings. People challenge each other, break down, cry, engage in group hugs, and Bob and Carol emerge changed: they want to live a life of emotional and verbal honesty from now on.

Back home at their luxurious hacienda in what might be Beverly Hills (not bad for a documentary producer!), they seek to spread the gospel of this new honesty to their best friends, Ted and Alice (Elliott Gould and Dyan Cannon), who are sympathetic but skeptical.

In the normal course of things, the zeal from such a weekend would wear off before long, but before that can happen, Bob decides he's all in, and will walk the walk, come what may: when he returns from a trip to San Francisco he confesses to Carol that he slept with a production assistant there. In this big scene, which is the turning-point from act 1 to act 2, the "honesty" trip is put to the test, and the development is surprising. For Carol does not do the expected. Encounter-group trained, she examines her feelings in real time: "I don't feel hostile," she says, "I don't feel jealous. I feel . . . strange." Intriguingly, it is Bob who turns hostile, accusing Carol of suppressing her jealousy. But as the smoke clears, they arrive at a new place in their marriage: an honest rendering of the affair shows that it was only about sex, not love, and so cannot touch their loving marriage. Their commitment to the new honesty is now solidified.

They redouble their efforts to turn their friends Ted and Alice on to this new emotionally honest way of being. For it turns out that Ted and Alice have some sexual hangups, and Ted, spurred by Bob's blandishments, decides to have a one-night stand of his own, contrary to his hitherto strict faithfulness. Meanwhile Alice, in a telling and excellent scene with her psychiatrist, reveals, via a Freudian slip, her secret attraction to Bob.

Act 3 takes place when the two couples take a trip together to Las Vegas. (Incidentally, this is exactly in keeping with the telling of a well-told, classically structured story: act 3 generally moves the action to a new location not previously seen—the arena of the story climax. The act structure of this story is soft but definitely present. The "inciting incident" of act 1 was the emotionally charged climax of the encounter group.) While the two couples chill in their hotel room, waiting to catch Tony Bennett's act, Ted blurts out, in his new conversion to emotional honesty, that he's had a one-night stand, and triggers the release of pent-up tensions between the characters.

Alice, now the only character who has not given in to this new "honesty" (Carol in the meantime has had a fling with her tennis pro Horst, played delightfully by Horst Ebersberg), snaps. Shrugging off her already very revealing outfit, she says something like, "Well, if that's how things are, then we might as well just have an orgy." The ensuing action has all four characters heading for the king-size bed, but I won't say more about that, except to report a line of dialogue that made me guffaw (a rare response for me). Alice says: "First, we'll have an orgy. Then we'll go see Tony Bennett."

Indeed, what could be better? I laugh now as I type it.

Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice is an underrated movie. My first exposure to it at age 10 was via Mad magazine's satire of it, and in general I think it was viewed as kind of scandalous but also a glimpse of what you would more or less expect from Californians with their laughable narcissism. And indeed the movie is talking about narcissistic Californians in the throes of turning on and tuning in, if not quite dropping out. My impression is that the material is that of a scathing satire, but executed by a gentle, loving heart, which will be that of Paul Mazursky. The result for me is a kind of delicious piquant cocktail composed of these contrary qualities—for I believe that all interest is created by the juxtaposition of opposites or contraries. These people are ridiculous, but they're lovable—and that about sums it up for all of us, doesn't it?

Aeschylus | Sophocles | Euripides | Aristophanes

Aeschylus | Sophocles | Euripides | Aristophanes by Aeschylus

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Here we have a striking instance of the weakness of the star-rating system—a system that I ordinarily have no problems with. For I believe it is entirely possible and reasonable to respond to the question "How much did you enjoy this book" with a star rating. But with this book, more than any other so far, I felt flummoxed.

Did I enjoy reading the book? Yes I did. But that enjoyment was not of a simple or continuous kind—not that I demand simple, continuous enjoyment from things, least of all from books. Reading this book took effort of more than one type. For one thing, as is my policy with both poetry and drama, I read all the plays out loud, even though only the works of Aeschylus and Aristophanes are translated as verse, while those of Sophocles and Euripides are in prose. And gradually, as I overcame my inhibitions (I did my reading at home!) and started to work harder at acting the parts, I came to appreciate the plays much more. By the time I was reading Aristophanes, I was experiencing strong feelings of delight at the material; comedy hasn't changed in 2,000 years—who knew? No doubt he was a lot funnier to the people of his own culture, whose people and institutions he was satirizing, but we get the gist of it and easily recognize the social problems and human failings he holds up to ridicule.

As I try to parse the components of my enjoyment, here's what I'm coming up with:

First, for me, was the fact that this was volume 5 of the Britannica Great Books series and therefore part of my program of reading the whole set, which I own. This in turn is part of my effort to become liberally educated, and so I feel a sense of accomplishment and enrichment with every page I read. Without this program I would never have picked up this book, and now I'm so glad that I did. Occasionally in my other readings people allude to the works of the Greek dramatists, and now I've read them—all of them, in their entirety, beginning to end. I no longer have vague feelings of awe and mystery about these plays, and no longer will feel at a disadvantage to those who have read them and can quote them. I've read them too—and because I've got the book, I can quote them. And there is a great deal in there that is worth quoting.

Second, the dramas themselves are, in the main, very good. It's not for nothing that these works have been preserved for thousands of years. As a writer of drama myself, I observed closely what stories these authors chose to tell and how they developed their conflicts. The tragedy writers (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides) were all excellent at finding the root conflict in situations and depicting this in dialogue (relatively little staged action is mentioned in the surviving texts). (Aristophanes as a comedian is a special case, but he too found provocative comic ideas and developed them cleverly.)

Third, I got to read some very famous plays, scenes, and lines—all in context. One such is Sophocles' Antigone, in which occurs, among other things, this famous line: "Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man. . . ." Now I've read that line in the context of its scene, its play, as well as in the body of its author's work and as part of Greek drama as a whole. Wow!

Fourth, I came to grips with great, important ideas. This volume is part of the Britannica series because these playwrights contributed to what the Britannica editors call the Great Conversation: the dialogue of ideas that has run through the major literary works of Western civilization. For example, in the very first play in the book, the Suppliant Maidens of Aeschylus, the action features a group of Egyptian women of Greek descent arriving at the shore of Argos, fleeing the Egyptian men who want to marry them. They appeal to their Greek kinsmen to protect them, even if it means war with the Egyptians. In this situation Aeschylus creates difficult conflicts of duty and responsibility. And I realized with some awe while reading it that he is probably the first author in the Western tradition to raise seriously and without prejudice the issue of women's rights. And he does all this in 14 pages—and that's just one play. Many of these plays, the majority of them, deal with ideas that are still among the deepest and most difficult that we face as human beings. To enjoy these plays fully, you need to be willing, and preferably eager, to think about serious things.

Fifth, I took positive pleasure in the verse translations of Aeschylus and especially of Aristophanes. I'm not an experienced reader of poetry, but I felt I was getting a great dose of worthwhile verse here. I recognize that poetry cannot be translated, only reinvented, and I don't know the standing of these translators (G. M. Cookson for Aeschylus and Benjamin Bickley Rogers for Aristophanes) in the world of ancient Greek drama, but this reader feels that they did a great job at a task that must have been extraordinarily difficult. When humorous verse works, it really works, and there were many passages in Aristophanes where I thought that, against all odds, the translator came up with the goods.

And sixth, all of the plays were collected together in one volume, with no translators' introductions or explanatory notes beyond a 1-page biography for each playwright. I've long been used to reading such introductions and notes for important literary works, feeling that to be a kind of studently duty. But the editors of the Great Books believe strongly in exposing the reader as directly as possible to the words and thoughts of these writers, encouraging you to go commando with these greatest and most challenging works of literature. I felt timid at first with no Virgil to hold my hand as I entered the strange world of ancient Greek drama, and in fact tried to rely for a little while on a separate guidebook that gave brief synopses of the plays, explaining the situations leading up to their openings, and so on. But soon I dropped that as I realized that the plays really are complete in themselves, and that there is a distinct and enriching pleasure in just diving in to the text—kind of like diving into the open sea without any lifeguard or flotation device. If you can swim you can dive into the sea; and if you can read you can dive into these plays.

In sum: three stars for the difficulties and longueurs that I experienced in reading these plays; four stars for my general feeling of enjoyment and appreciation as I read; and five stars for my sense of accomplishment and my conviction that my afternoon reading period over these past months has probably never been better spent.

View all my reviews

sketchbook: Sunday 1 January 2012

SUN 1 JAN 2012 11:45 am MY HEARTH

Every fire has its own biography. This one was almost stillborn, but now, after repeated rearrangements and relightings, it is born: its throaty breath sounds over the growing hiss of steam escaping from moist wood. The flames are orange and shiver hurriedly upward like some storm-shaken bush growing behind and through a rail fence. The young fire grows brighter, feasting on wood that is still recognizable. As the fire matures, the little fireplace will become a hot furnace of embers, quickly exploding new lengths of fuel into holocausts of flame. Eventually, starved, the fire will die, continuing to throw off heat from its black rubble until it has expired and become again just a part of the room.

It's a Wonderful Life—still

In a recent post I mentioned that Kimmie and I watched the movie It's a Wonderful Life on Christmas Eve, and I started talking about my impressions of it. In that post I mainly talked about what happens in the movie; now I'd like to explore the meaning of the story a bit more. Again I make a spoiler alert: I'll be talking about what happens in the story, including the ending, and indeed may be providing even bigger spoilers than that.

When I talk about the meaning of a story, I refer to what Robert McKee calls the controlling idea, which he defines thus:

A CONTROLLING IDEA may be expressed in a single sentence describing how and why life undergoes change from one condition of existence at the beginning to another at the end.

Sometimes this idea has been called the theme of the story, sometimes its premise, or even its moral, but the essential idea is to summarize the point of the story in one sentence. Why one sentence? Because a single sentence makes a single assertion, and until you have boiled down the meaning to a single assertion, then you have not got to the end of the line in thinking through the meaning of that story.

Another way of saying this is that the singleness of the sentence reflects the underlying unity of the story. A single story is one thing, made up of many parts, to be sure, but nonetheless possessing an overarching unity. If it did not have this unity then it would not feel like one story, but two or more—or simply a mass of incoherent pieces. I contend that the better the story, the more readily its meaning can be expressed as a single coherent sentence. When I say readily, by the way, I don't mean that discovering this meaning is easy; rather, I mean that this meaning, once found, is capable of brief, forceful expression. Finding the meaning, the controlling idea, of a story is a difficult task of reflection and consciousness even for those who are experienced at it. If you've never tried it before, I think you'll be surprised at just how difficult it is, even for a simple story.

(Incidentally, Edward P. J. Corbett, in his excellent text Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, which I am now reading, says that this ability to summarize any discourse in one sentence is an essential skill of the serious reader, and of course of the writer, but that this skill is the hardest of all reading skills and is generally the last skill learned by the reader.)

All right, so how to find the controlling idea of a story? Where do you look?

The first place to look is at the story's ending. In a well-constructed story the values at stake come to the surface at the end, and one value prevails over the others that have been contending for supremacy in the course of the narrative. The meaning of the story is essentially an assertion of that value.

But that's not all it is. As McKee describes it, the controlling idea of a story is not just an assertion of what value triumphs, but also how it triumphs. What caused this value to prevail? In a story about cops catching a criminal, the value at stake might be justice—but how has it been realized by the protagonist? Did he catch the crook through his keen deductive powers? Or was it more through dogged determination against odds? Or was physical or moral courage a more important element? Each of these leads to a different meaning; each is making a different assertion about how justice is realized.

As a writer and storyteller, I regard the study of controlling ideas as part of my ongoing training. In March 2010, having watched It's a Wonderful Life for probably the 5th time in December 2009, I sat down to analyze its story to discover its controlling idea. I'll share some of what I came up with. Here's the entry I made when I created my document:

SATURDAY 20 MARCH 2010

This story seems clearly to be about coming to appreciate your own life as it is. The ending of the story has George returning to his own world from the world-without-him (a variant on what happens to Scrooge in A Christmas Carol) and feeling relief and euphoria. The value of his own personal life to those around him has been made vividly manifest, and he is delighted to discover this.

Having seemingly lost everything—his own life, and with it all that was familiar and good in the people around him—he has it restored to him. (His hearing loss is perhaps his lifelong "deafness" to the messages coming to him about the value of his life. When his hearing is restored by Clarence in the alternative world, it means that now George will have "ears to hear with.") He is giddy with gratitude and delight.

Back home he finds his family, and now all his friends, the whole town, shows up to offer support in his hour of need. They make it tangible with cash—the life-blood of his savings-and-loan. George hits the jackpot in every way.

George finally comes to see himself through others' eyes, and in so doing he comes to see them more clearly too. In thinking himself alone and friendless, George was underestimating his friends. He had been kind and helpful to them all his life, but as a bearer of responsibility and lone knight defending the town against the depredations of Mr. Potter, he had imagined that others viewed him with the same harsh, critical, doubting eyes with which he viewed himself. Now, in his hour of need, his friends pay him back his kindness and support—with interest.

The community really is a place of mutual relationships—not just the one-way, I-help-you relationships that George has thought himself to be participating in. George discovers that he's not an island, and this discovery is one of intense joy that puts away his lifetime of wistfulness and frustration. No Alaskan glacier or tramp steamer or Arabian desert can offer him this.

Mr. Potter is selfish and grasping. George has contempt for him, but Potter is his own shadow. They are both frustrated—and both "warped." Potter is frustrated because there is an asset he cannot acquire—the savings-and-loan. George is frustrated because he cannot fly away to the life he craves, a life of freedom and adventure. He is shackled by duty to the town and to his father's S&L.

At the end there is an outpouring of love, appreciation, and giving—all aimed at George. To him it's all gravy, since he was simply delighted to be back in his life, and was eagerly looking forward to going to jail, because jail was part of that life. That's how much he loves his life. It was lost, but now it's found, and he really treasures it. Being showered with love, appreciation, and cash is just a giant bonus.

It's as though the preexisting fact is love, and the instrumental benefits that come from that are purely secondary and derivative. Potter's worldly success seduces George into thinking that you have to be worldly and tough and maybe heartless to succeed, to be wealthy.

All of George's "wealth" at the end was present all along—but he was blind to it. Not entirely, for he did love his wife and family and friends. But he saw these things as compensations, he took them for granted and focused only on the goals and wishes he could not fulfill. His frustration caused him to denigrate what was excellent about his life. Clarence, by providing a tour of a different kind of "unattained world," shows him the value of his own world. George wakes up and smells the coffee.

George comes to see himself as a recipient of love and help as well as a giver. He's taking his turn at receiving others' generosity, and discovering the ecstasy of true belonging.

George has always dwelt in a glorious future, never in the here and now.

He's always known that people liked him, but he didn't realize their power to love and help him when he really needed it. As the Responsible One, George has fantasized about an irresponsible life as an adventuring free agent. And he has been responsible, and responsibility is important—but it's not the whole story. We're responsible for a reason. In exactly the same way that people save at the S&L so that their neighbors can have houses too, we live with discipline—responsibility—so that our neighbors can benefit, and so that we can benefit too. Their prosperity is my prosperity—just at a different moment. We take turns.

Potter doesn't take turns. His prosperity is his alone—and it comes at others' expense. From his point of view, it's always his turn, and never yours. For him, life is a zero-sum game, and his sum is not going to be zero—yours is.

George saw his life as a sacrifice—one that he resented. Life was a zero-sum game for him too! But he was getting the zero. It was thrust upon him unasked, and out of duty he sacrificed his own wishes and dreams. Like Abraham offering up Isaac, only this time God does not reprieve Isaac, he takes him! In this way George and Potter do think alike.

Thus is born bitterness, resentment. "I didn't ask for this—but got it anyway!" Others have their dreams fulfilled, their desires met. George is a martyr; their dreams and desires are fulfilled at his expense.

But you can enjoy the game even when it's not your turn. . . .

That was the end of my first entry, and I felt I'd made good progress. I picked it up again the next day, exploring further the idea of "taking turns" as an important notion for this story. Some extracts:

SUNDAY 21 MARCH 2010

Thought: dwelling in the glorious future means that "your turn" lies in the future—not in the present.

The sum of community is greater than its parts. Life is a positive sum for all, if you're willing to take turns.

To share means to take on different roles at different times. Today I'm the giver and you're the receiver; tomorrow it's vice versa. When we willingly assent to this, we form a true community. We take turns and thereby we all prosper better than we would alone.

It's like the trust game: you fall backward, and someone catches you. George was doing all the catching, and could not do any of the falling himself. He thought he couldn't afford to fall—there was no one to catch him. But there was—everyone, acting together, catches him! Individually they could not, but together they can—and do. Together they can undo the forces of Potter and the law. Just when George needs the full focused power of his community, it's there for him. If this isn't divine intervention, it's indistinguishable from it.

The issue of taking turns feels central. It's like that image of hell and heaven: hell is the banquet table with long spoons that people can't use to reach their own mouths, while heaven is the same hall, but the diners are feeding each other. Two elements have to be present to turn the hall into heaven:

the focus on serving others, not oneself
taking turns

For no matter how many other diners you feed, you still need food yourself. And in this heaven, only they can feed you. If you don't let them, you'll starve. You may also feel resentful—and you're robbing them of the joy and good karma of generosity.

It's not enough just to give. You have to open up and receive, too. This means relinquishing your sense of specialness or exceptionalness.

None of us is special by nature. We feel special when it's our turn.

The community is a parabolic mirror, and each of us takes turns being at its focal point, receiving the full intense rays of the Sun. The community has to be structured, organized, functioning, in order for the rays to be focused. When you try only to be the mirror and not be at the focus, you're actually disrupting the whole thing.

This story points to the mystery of individuality and the group. The mystery of membership.

Taking turns brings in the element of time, and the element of a game: something done for fun. Life is a game. And the game is fun even when it's not your turn, if you play it with the proper attitude.

A game has an object and a purpose and rules, but it's entered into only for fun. Enjoying a game means taking it seriously, but not too seriously. You're playing it properly if you're having fun—that's how you know.

In the game of life, Mr. Potter is obsessed with winning (playing too seriously), and George is obsessed with making sure it's always someone else's turn. Or maybe better: he's "letting" others win. Both he and Potter are missing the fun of the game.

The climax of the movie is playful, fun. People are singing "Hark! the Herald Angels Sing," suggesting that Heaven wants life to be fun. They're making jokes and throwing money into the pot. There's a rush of gladness that's more important and deeper than any of the physical or social issues at hand. . . .

And that was it for my second entry. Again, making good progress—but I wasn't there yet. You can see that I'm assembling ideas, looking for what the values in the story are.

But this post is plenty long enough. I'll pick this up again later.

Happy New Year.

sketchbook: Thursday 29 December 2011

THU 29 DEC 2011 ca. 2:10 pm X-RAY LAB ON 16th ST.

Women's voices, the faint sound of a pop song on the sound system behind. The waiting-room is a sandy-tobacco color, consistent with the wriggle of greenish-beige in the indoor/outdoor carpet. There are 14 chairs packed closely in the space; 8 are occupied and one woman stands: an aboriginal, flinging her long dark silky hair, adjusting it before she sits.

Almost everyone is in black; only I wear a blue windbreaker.

"Okay. Thank you so much." A customer leaves.

"Mrs. Forsyte. Yesterday there was Barb, then there was Irene. . . ."

A middle-aged woman talks to her elderly neighbor, whose voice is faint and trembly. They are doing a crossword puzzle together.

". . . Practically in one space . . ."

It's a Wonderful Life: when defeat can be victory

On Christmas Eve Kimmie and I watched It's a Wonderful Life, the 1946 Frank Capra film that has now become a Christmas classic, for maybe the 7th time. As with all the best films, I found that I enjoyed it even more this time than the previous times. I'd like to take a look at why I find it so enjoyable.

(Spoiler alert: This post contains spoilers galore, including the movie's ending. Read on only if you have seen it.)

As with some other movies that I place in the highest category of quality, It's a Wonderful Life had a lot of writers contributing to the screenplay. According to the Internet Movie Database, the screenplay credit went to Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, and Frank Capra, with "additional scenes" by Jo Swerling, from a story by Philip Van Doren Stern, and with further uncredited work by Michael Wilson. According to Wikipedia, Dorothy Parker was also one of the writers brought in.

The underlying property was a short story by Van Doren Stern called "The Greatest Gift", which, when he was unable to publish it in 1939, he turned into a set of 200 Christmas cards which he mailed out. One of these came to the attention of a producer at RKO Pictures, and RKO bought the rights in order to develop the story into a vehicle for Cary Grant. Three scripts later, RKO didn't like what they were seeing and unloaded the project with the three scripts to Frank Capra's company Liberty Films for the original purchase price of $10,000. This was when Capra brought in his own crew of writers and, as far as I know, none of the original RKO writers has a credit on the show.

Despite the group effort that resulted in the screenplay, this movie has a strong, definite vision and shows clarity and unity of purpose at every step.

Using the idea of fictional modes laid out by Northrop Frye in his Anatomy of Criticism, the story belongs partly to the mode he calls romance, meaning that it features characters (in this case angels) with powers and qualities beyond those of ordinary human beings, and partly to the high mimetic mode, meaning that its hero embodies qualities that are superior to our own. For George Bailey (James Stewart), the frustrated would-be globetrotter and adventurer whose efforts to escape the small town of Bedford Falls are repeatedly thwarted, is, unlike most of us, a man with the courage, vision, and integrity to prevent the last independent business in town, his father's Bailey Savings & Loan, from falling into the clutches of the avaricious Mr. Potter (Lionel Barrymore). It is a task that George does not seek and is reluctant to accept, but a sense of duty and responsibility keep him fighting against seemingly impossible odds.

Worse, it's a fight that he does not win. On Christmas Eve 1945 he's let down by his absent-minded Uncle Billy (Thomas Mitchell), who manages to mislay $8,000 of the S&L's cash while depositing it at the bank—cash which the sharp-eyed Mr. Potter grabs, not because he needs it or even wishes to steal it, but because he knows that its disappearance will be the ruin of the S&L and of his young enemy George Bailey. George goes on a desperate hunt for the cash, even humiliating himself before Mr. Potter to beg for an emergency loan to get the S&L through the crisis. When all that he can provide as collateral for the loan is a life-insurance policy with $500 of equity in it, Mr. Potter dismisses him with the remark, "You're worth more dead than alive, George."

This leads George to the conclusion that Potter is right: the world would be better off without him. George heads to a local bridge to jump off (I suppose forgetting that his life-insurance policy won't pay out for suicide), and is there thwarted once again—this time by his guardian angel Clarence (Henry Travers), who beats George to the punch by jumping off the bridge first and then screaming for help. Spurred by the same instinct to help that had him also save his younger brother Harry from drowning when they were kids, George dives in to rescue Clarence, and thus ushers in the unique and powerful third act of the movie, in which Clarence, like the spirits in Dickens's A Christmas Carol, conducts George on a tour of what Bedford Falls would look like if George had never been born.

George comes to see that he has made a huge difference to the people around him, some of whom, like his brother, would not even be alive had he not intervened to help them. He realizes that his agon with Potter is a triviality, and that the outcome of his cash crisis a matter of no importance in the big scheme. Without George Bailey, Bedford Falls would have fallen victim to complete ownership and domination by Mr. Potter—indeed, this alternative town is now called Pottersville—with the result that all its residents, including George's current lovable friends and neighbors, are more callous and selfish. Horrified by this spectacle, culminating in a vision of the neurotic spinsterhood of his beloved wife Mary (Donna Reed), George pleads with Clarence to return his life as it was.

Clarence duly grants his wish, and in a mad rush of elation George sprints back into town, delighted to embrace the very same situation that a couple of hours earlier had brought him to the brink of suicide. As he runs by Potter's office he calls out, intoxicated with joy, "I'm goin' to jail! Isn't it marvelous?"

But George, it turns out, is not going to jail. When he returns to Mary he finds out that word of his predicament has spread to his friends, who are much more numerous and benevolent than he had supposed, for they all arrive to bring what money they can to help bail out George Bailey—and it is only just now, as I type these words, that I see that his name, Bailey, is also bailee, "the person to whom personal property is bailed", or "delivered in trust for a special purpose". It can also mean, of course, simply one who is bailed out, as George is bailed out here and as he has bailed out others again and again in his life. The name George is that of St. George, who tamed the dragon that terrorized the community, in this case Mr. Potter.

The communal joy that overtakes the group is so strong that the officials who have come to arrest George tear up their warrant and join in singing "Hark! the Herald Angels Sing". We know that Clarence has earned his wings, and are left in no possible doubt that it is, indeed, "a wonderful life".

The symbolism of George's name is a clue to the dimensions of meaning within the story, and they are many. But I'll take up that topic in a future post. For now I'll just say that I've given this move an "A", which, up to 1968, I've only bestowed on 11 movies; and that I've rated it as 10 out of 10 on IMDb. In my opinion, movies don't get better than this.

The Growths of Civilizations by Arnold J. Toynbee

A Study of History 3: The Growths of Civilizations by Arnold J. Toynbee

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Once a static, primitive society has responded to a certain intensity of challenge, it shatters the "cake of custom" and begins to change—to differentiate and develop. If the conditions are right, it begins to grow. But what are those conditions, and what exactly does it mean for a society or civilization to "grow"? In this third volume of his mighty Study of History, first published in 1934, Arnold J. Toynbee sets out to answer those questions.

According to Toynbee, the phenomenon he calls Challenge-and-Response continues to operate. The challenges to societies come from two main sources: the physical environment and the "human environment"—other surrounding societies. A challenge that is successfully met produces a change in society that can be called growth. For example, in our own Western civilization, which Toynbee calls Western Christendom, an early challenge to the scattered and disorganized society that existed after the collapse of the Roman Empire was the pressure of barbarians to the north and east of Western Europe, and the response that was created was the set of social, political, and military institutions that we call feudalism. The feudal system remained in place until further challenges provoked further innovations by Western Christendom, which in turn constituted further growth.

Do you find it strange and anachronistic that Toynbee uses the label "Western Christendom" for our society—the one we usually simply call "Western"? Our Western society is so secular, and indeed a cornerstone of our constitutions is the separation of church and state. Indeed, Toynbee himself says that the two driving forces of our society, which give it its distinctive character, are Democracy and Industrialism. What do these have to do with Jesus Christ?

The answer lies in the original germ of a society. According to Toynbee, this germ is always spiritual. As I understand it, he's saying that the enthusiasm and energy that cause people to want to work together to build a society can come only from a spiritual source. In the case of Western Christendom, this source was Christianity, which began its life in the Roman Empire as one sect among many that met the needs of the empire's "internal proletariat" (to use another term of Toynbee's). The charisma of Jesus Christ and his teachings attracted the oppressed and marginalized members of that antecedent civilization, spurring them to build a religion that eventually was magnetic enough to supplant the preceding state religion of paganism. When the Roman Empire dissolved, the Christian Church had the necessary spiritual, ideological, and administrative structures in place to become the kernel of a new civilization—Western Christendom. Christianity became the DNA of Western civilization (and also of Eastern Orthodox Christendom—a distinct society of its own, according to Toynbee). With civilization, the spirit leads and the physical structures follow.

As for what growth specifically consists of, Toynbee opts for a term of French philosopher Henri Bergson: etherialization. This is the tendency of human things to become more refined and spiritual and intangible as they develop. For example, in commercial life the tendency has been a shift in emphasis from commerce in heavy industry and manufacturing toward the service and then the "information" economy. Growth is in the direction of the less physical and the more abstract.

Along the way, Toynbee explicitly refutes a couple of common notions of what constitutes growth: the conquest of territory and the development of technology. To me, these points were especially interesting because it seems almost universal and unquestioned nowadays to equate growth with one or both of these things. But Toynbee asserts that such utilitarian thinking is nothing more than the habitual tendency of historians in any period to look at all historical events through the lens of the preoccupations of their own age. Our own age is technological and violent, so those are the values we instinctively apply. It's possible to resist this temptation, though, and that is what Toynbee strives to do.

As a writer Toynbee is excellent. Yes, he is donnish and unfolds his arguments in a sometimes schoolmasterly way, but he is deep, detached, urbane, humble, and very reluctant to criticize other thinkers. The range and depth of his reading and knowledge are almost unbelievable. He makes free use of examples from mythology and literature to make his points, and summarizes and illustrates his points with telling quotations from the Bible and the classics. For example, in one of his infrequent mentions of his own life-experience, he describes how, during the First World War (still the "General War of 1914–18″ to Toynbee), when he was walking by the Board of Education offices in London, he saw that they had been converted to a new war office devoted to the study of trench warfare; and this caused him to recall a passage from the Gospel of Matthew:

When ye therefore shall see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the Prophet, stand in the holy place, (whoso readeth, let him understand), then shall be great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the World to this time. And, except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved."

Toynbee's work as a whole invites us to consider the sweep of history, the enterprise of humanity in its entirety, not from any single narrow perspective, such as technology, economics, or politics, but in its full depth and range. He has addressed the question with the whole of his spirit, and hence he ranges beyond bland academic and scientific formalisms, even as he is a great student and a great thinker. And he's inviting us to do the same.

It's a great invitation, and well worth accepting.

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On Rhetoric by Aristotle

On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse by Aristotle

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Not Aristotle's clearest or best organized work, but still part of the core curriculum of a liberal education.

Why read Aristotle today? Because he is one of the greatest minds in Western history, and such a person's well-considered thoughts are inherently worth reading, if anything is.

In addition, this book was deliberately aimed at those seeking to play an active role in a democratic society, to help them fulfill their function as citizens of a free society. We in the West imagine ourselves (mostly) to be members of a free society, and in fact take this for granted. But we tend not to participate in the political functioning of our society, and in general are not encouraged to do so. Most particularly, we are not educated to do so.

In the ancient world the idea of the liberal education was formed: an education fitting for a free man, that is, one who was a participating citizen of a democratic state. In ancient Greece the citizens themselves formed the government of their city-states, and every citizen might expect to hold a government post at one or more times in his life. What knowledge did such a man need to fulfill his role in the best way? Which faculties should he cultivate and which suppress?

Liberal education came to be envisaged as training in the seven "liberal arts": logic, grammar, rhetoric, mathematics, geometry, music, and astronomy. By medieval times these were split into two groups: a higher trivium consisting of the first 3, and a lower quadrivium consisting of the latter 4. As Sister Miriam Joseph explains in her excellent book The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric, these arts remain as relevant today as they ever were. For the art called logic is simply the art of how to think accurately about reality; the art of grammar is the art of expressing one's thoughts accurately in symbolic form, such as words; and the art of rhetoric is the art of persuading others of the validity of one's thoughts. Aristotle's book is probably still the most important text on this third art of the trivium.

In broad strokes, Aristotle analyzes rhetoric and finds that it has 3 main applications, namely judicial, or talking about past events; deliberative, or talking about future courses of action; and so-called epideictic, or talking about the present, which Aristotle says is mostly connected with formally praising and blaming people. Facing one of these three tasks, the speaker or rhetor has 3 basic strategies of persuasion: logical argument, or persuasion via facts and logic; emotional argument, or finding language to arouse certain feelings in the audience; and the so-called moral argument, which consists in winning the audience's trust and good will through one's own character and demeanor. Interestingly, Aristotle regards this last "argument" as the most persuasive element in a speech. In terms of persuasion, how we say things is more important than what we say.

There are further detailed breakdowns of how to achieve these various aims, illustrated in many cases with examples.

The translator, George A. Kennedy, provides a summary of the main points of each chapter, along with interesting historical material and some notes about how Aristotle fits in with the flow of ancient teaching on rhetoric generally (for it was a subject keenly studied in both Greece and Rome). For my taste there is perhaps more attention drawn than necessary to academic issues like the question of whether certain sections were later additions and other minutiae of translation. In many cases he puts the original Greek term in brackets by the English word, which again is aimed at an academic reader. In general though I found the translator's comments useful and illuminating.

Like all of Aristotle's surviving works, this is a technical manual (all of his publications for the general reader have been lost), and so you need some determination to get through it. But our society is becoming ever less free, and it's not going to become more free unless each of us takes responsibility for training ourselves to be free. It won't happen by itself; and our society—governments, schools, institutions—isn't doing it.

A free society settles its differences through dialogue, not violence or fraud. This book is still a major text on how to do that. As such, it's well worth our time and attention all these centuries after it was first written.

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