Samir Chopra's Blog, page 113

Don’t Tell Me What You Think of Me

Over at the Anxiety blog at The New York Times Tim Kreider gives voice to a common fear, that of finding out what other people really, really think of us:

I’ve often thought that the single most devastating cyberattack a diabolical and anarchic mind could design would not be on the military or financial sector but simply to simultaneously make every e-mail and text ever sent universally public. It would be like suddenly subtracting the strong nuclear force from the universe; the fabric of society would instantly evaporate, every marriage, friendship and business partnership dissolved. Civilization, which is held together by a fragile web of tactful phrasing, polite omissions and white lies, would collapse in an apocalypse of bitter recriminations and weeping, breakups and fistfights, divorces and bankruptcies, scandals and resignations, blood feuds, litigation, wholesale slaughter in the streets and lingering ill will…. Hearing other people’s uncensored opinions of you is an unpleasant reminder that you’re just another person in the world, and everyone else does not always view you in the forgiving light that you hope they do, making all allowances, always on your side. There’s something existentially alarming about finding out how little room we occupy, and how little allegiance we command, in other people’s heads.

Kreider is on the money here, of course. The thought of finding out how others refer to us in our absence, how even those who have most cause to adore us still do not so unreservedly, is enough to fill any reasonable human’s heart with dread. That terror generally finds its grounding both in an overly optimistic assessment of our worth and in an unrealistic desire to not rest content till we have attained a suitably high position in the ranking of the ‘rest.’ As Bertrand Russell noted in opening his chapter on ‘Fear of Public Opinion’ in The Conquest of Happiness:

Very few people can be happy unless on the whole their way of life and their outlook on the world is approved by those with whom they have social relations, and more especially with whom they live.

As a personally memorable instance of a variant of this behavior, after I received a teaching evaluation in which twenty-four out of twenty-five students answered ‘Yes’ to the question ‘Would you recommend this instructor to other students?’ I spent a considerable amount of time during my next lecture tormenting myself wondering about the identity of the exception to the rule. (And like Kreider, I’ve read emails not meant for my eyes in which friends of mine have expressed considerably unflattering opinions of me; some of those people are still my friends.)

I have long tried to insulate myself from the disappointment of the discovery that I’m not universally adored and the crushing horror of universal loathing by ceaseless repetition of the mantra that no one quite likes or dislikes me as much as I might imagine. This reminder of the ‘golden mean‘ of public opinion only has limited effectiveness; like the folks I refer to above, I retreat a little too easily into delusional comforts.

Brawling at Twenty Thousand Feet: The Everest Punchup

The high-altitude slopes of the world’s highest mountain–Mt. Everest–might seem like a strange place to indulge in fisticuffs but that’s precisely what happened on April 27:

It takes a lot to rattle Swiss climber Ueli Steck….on April 27, while attempting to climb Mount Everest, it wasn’t the mountain that nearly killed him but a mob of angry, stone-wielding Sherpas, who descended on Steck and his two climbing partners as they hid in their tent….Steck, Simone Moro, 45, of Italy, and Jon Griffith, 29, of the U.K., had gotten into an argument with the Sherpas earlier in the day while climbing above Camp 2 on the sheer Lhotse face. The Europeans were climbing independently and Alpine-style – fast, light, and unroped – while, 150 yards away, roughly 15 Sherpas were attaching ropes to the face to be used by the commercial guiding companies….Steck and his crew eventually had to step over the Sherpas’ ropes to reach their tent, at which point the lead Sherpa started shouting and hitting the ice with his axe. “Motherfucker!” Moro exclaimed in broken Nepali. “What are you doing?” The Sherpas claimed ice had been dislodged onto them. Griffith thinks it was all about pride. “We believe that we hurt his honor by climbing so fast,” he says.

The fight between the Sherpas and the climbers has now been adequately documented, and ample analysis offered of all the things that have gone wrong on Mt. Everest: the overcrowding, the increasing number of unskilled climbers being led up the slopes by guides from commercial companies, the dangerous waits for fixed ropes, the increased risk-taking to get to the top at any cost.

Much, if not all of this, is old hat, and has been part of the established narrative on Everest for a while, especially since the 1996 disaster that claimed the lives of nine climbers: Everest’s camps and slopes are crowded places, theaters for fatal conflict and confusion. The views and the air are pristine but little else. And neither is discord on a mountain new: read Galen Rowell‘s In the Throne Room of the Mountain Gods for a description of the endless bickering on a 1975 American expedition to K2 in the Karakoram.  

What is new about this latest story is the physical conflict between Sherpas and climbers (Sherpa porters have occasionally gone on strike for better wages; unsurprisingly, this has always been portrayed in Western narratives as blackmail) . Sherpas have been faithful servants, guides and indispensable aides to their clients: they fix ropes, cook food, conduct rescue missions, support climbers in every way possible. A simple way to comprehend their value is to imagine a hot cup of tea thrust through the flaps of a tent early in the morning: waking up for a day’s climbing in sub-zero temperatures suddenly becomes much easier.

In return, they are paid, respected by some climbers and condescended to by a great many others who insist on treating them like children, like the usual grinning natives of exotic adventure tales. To most external observers of the Himalayan mountaineering world, it is clear it is one of the last colonial domains still existent: the dominant vision that emerges is that of the gora saheb, accompanied by his faithful Man Friday, moving up the slope.

This endless condescension, this treatment of the Sherpas as simple-minded illiterates that might do the grunt work, but lack the nous of Western climbers, is visible even in the report above: the European climbers were climbing ‘Alpine’ style, thus possessed of all the skill and dexterity possible, while the Sherpas were merely plodding away, grimly fixing ropes. Classic dichotomy on display: skill vs. brute force. The writer of the article imagines it is only Europeans who can climb Alpine-style; perhaps the Sherpas don’t climb Alpine-style because they are always taking care of someone or something on those slopes?

Then, the cause for the fight: the natives ‘pride’, that old problem whenever you deal with brown or black folk–just like ‘face’, which they seem inordinately worried about losing. Sherpas, sadly, appear incapable of comprehending and appreciating the sophistication of their Western counterparts. (The mentally-challenged Griffith appears to not know the difference between fixing ropes for clients and climbing solo.)

Was ice dislodged on them? We won’t know. The story is never, ever, theirs. It’s always about the non-Sherpas:

“If the Sherpas had been as media savvy as the Euros, the story hitting the news would have been ‘Euro climbers insult, threaten, and endanger Sherpas,’ instead of ‘Sherpas attack climbers,’ ” says IMG co-owner Eric Simonson.

Unsurprisingly, the title of the Men’s Journal story, the one that ironically enough, is the source for the quote that I have excerpted above reads: ‘Attack on Mount Everest: A mob of Sherpas assault three Western climbers…’

Attack, assault, mob. Its pretty clear who is at fault for the Men’s Journal writers.

What is clear to this writer is that Steck, Moro and Griffith needed an ass-whipping and that the Sherpas’ cause would have been considerably helped if more such beat-downs had been administered in the past.

Forget about respecting mountains. Those who climb in the Himalayas need to begin by respecting its peoples.

Kapuściński on Crowds and Revolutions

In his semi-novelistic, semi-journalistic account of the Iranian revolution and the final days of the Shah of Iran, Shah of Shahs, Ryszard Kapuściński, in the closing chapter ‘The Dead Flame’, writes:

Everything that makes up the outward, visible part of a revolution vanishes quickly. A person, an individual being, has a thousand ways of conveying his feelings and thoughts. He is riches without end, he is a world in which we can always discover something new. A crowd, on the other hand, reduces the individuality of the person; a man in a crowd limits himself to a few forms of elementary behavior. The forms through which a crowd can express its yearnings are extraordinarily meager and continually repeat themselves: the demonstration, the strike, the rally, the barricades. That is why you can write a novel about a man, but about a crowd–never. If the crowd disperses, goes home, does not reassemble, we say that the revolution is over.

This is an interesting cluster of remarks that do not necessarily belong in the same paragraph.

The ‘outward, visible part of revolution’–the one most often identified and commemorated and studied–often does have a transitory character; it is upon us quickly and ebbs away just as rapidly. It is why most superficial analyses of revolution insist on its ‘suddenness’ and its ‘dramatic change.’ But revolutions do not occur in days, weeks, or even months; sometimes they take years, decades, centuries. But the revolutionary, radical changes underway are not always visible, not always on the ‘surface’; more often than not, they happen away from the town square, away from the sites of assembly and protest and sloganeering and brickbats, away from where statues are pulled down. They happen in spaces of quieter, but just as intense, political dispute, where blueprints for change are drawn up, haggled over, contested, and drafted. Sometimes they happen in tiny, localized pockets of intimate and personal spaces where the tiniest of individual interactions are up for recontestation and reconfiguration. Sometimes a revolution bubbles up and then back down to find its ultimate resolution in these little pockets. There is a reason a revolution is called ‘radical’ – it’s because it happens at the roots, which more often than not, are deep, and well hidden away from continual inspection.

As for the forms in which a crowd can ‘express’ itself, they are not as ‘extraordinarily meager’ as Kapuściński might imagine. To suggest this is to make the mistake of imagining that the forms of the novel are meager because they always, at least until recently, took the form of paper books. ‘The demonstration, the strike, the rally, the barricade’ are very abstract templates. Within them lurk endlessly diverse possibilities for the display of revolutionary potential: perhaps in their manner of assembly and movement, perhaps in their persistence, perhaps in their effectiveness, perhaps in the forms in which their members finally rise up and resist. A revolutionary crowd is a collective artist of sorts–and here I address Kapuściński’s dismissal of the possibility of a novelistic account of it–one capable  of many reconfigurations of itself. That these basic forms have endured for as long as they have is perhaps the most eloquent testimony in support of the claim that they offer ample opportunity for creative revolutionaries to express themselves.

Finally, ‘if the crowd disperses, goes home, does not reassemble’, the revolution is indeed, often over. But sometimes, and this takes us back to where we began, it’s because the ‘crowd’ knows work remains to be done and not necessarily in the streets. There, the revolution continues.

Kinds of Nostalgia

In reviewing Hadara Lazar’s Out of Palestine: The Making of Modern Israel, (‘Palestine: How Bad, & Good was British Rule, New York Review of Books, 7 February 2013) Avishai Margalit writes

The term “nostalgia” was coined by a Swiss doctor, Johannes Hofer, in a dissertation submitted to Basel University in 1688. It was meant to be used as a medical term to describe a depressed mood caused by intense longing to return home. The disease was noticed among Swiss mercenary soldiers yearning to return from flat Europe to their Alpine mountainous perches….In her book The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym draws a useful distinction between “restorative” nostalgia and “reflective” nostalgia. Restorative nostalgia concentrates on the nostos—returning to the lost home; while reflective nostalgia concentrates on the algos—the longing and the sense of loss. [links added]

I’m an immigrant; nostalgia and homesickness are supposed to be my perennial conditions. That is certainly true though their particular shape and form has morphed over the years; appropriately enough, in response to the corresponding changes in myself and my ‘home’–its people and places. (It is also a feature of this immigrant–and perhaps many others–that I cannot write ‘home’ without enclosing it in quote marks, so confused has my conception of that place become).

The restorative nostalgia that Boym notes is most visibly manifest in my active reaching back to the place I left behind: the planning and preparation, the journey, marked by impatient, eager expectancy, the seeking, on reaching home, of  familiar delights and pleasures and haunts left behind, the inevitable disappointments in the loss of romantic, imaginative conceptions of the past. It used to be a constant feature of my trips back to India that a week or so before my flight, I would experience dreams set there; a week or so before I returned, my dreams would return to American locales. The former evoked a wistful disappointment on waking; the latter, an acute anxiety during their occurrence.

The transition from restorative to reflective nostalgia after these trips was always brutal; I would make it through the return to the airport and the flight back in reasonably good shape, but shortly after my flight had ended–a period ranging from a couple of hours to a whole day–I would be crippled by a wave of debilitating melancholia. I use the word ‘crippled’ advisedly; one some occasions I would be physically incapacitated–unable and willing to bestir myself from my seated or reclining position–by the sense of longing for the people, the sounds, lights and tastes I had left behind.

It is the reflective nostalgia that sustains and animates the restorative variety; it infects and colors many dimly perceived and understood instinctive reactions of mine–like a sudden lump in my throat when viewing a documentary clip or listening to a musical fragment.

It is peculiar to think of oneself as always afflicted, always ‘suffering’, and to rejoice in the relief provided by absorption in quotidian ritual. One of the distinct pleasures of growing up has been to realize that such ‘common unhappiness’ is–in some shape or form, to some degree or other–an ineradicable part of the human condition.

Note: I was first introduced to the meaning–and its history of diagnosis among American Civil War soldiers–of ‘nostalgia’ this past April by my friend David Coady; on hearing it, I realized I should have guessed from the -algia suffix and my own personal experiences that the term denoted a ‘painful medical condition’ of some sort.

On The Lack of Women in Philosophy, Contd.

It’s not just me. It does seem there has been a lot of talk recently about women in philosophy: their absence, why they leave philosophy so early, the sexism and sexual harassment they face, and whether philosophy seems to do worse in this regard than other disciplines in the humanities or even science. (To jump into this debate, you could do worse than chase down some of the links available here through the excellent New APPS blog: discussions on the under-representation of women in edited volumes, conferences, the McGinn affair, for instance.)

I consider myself to have already made a contribution to this debate by my positing the Dickhead Theory as a possible explanation for the lack of women in philosophy. To wit, academic philosophy is overpopulated by male blowhards who seem to conceive of it as a contact sport and engage in public displays of obnoxious behavior at academic fora. Today, I want to embellish that claim just a bit in response to some of the discussion that was sparked by Rebecca Kukla’s suggestion that the adversarial nature of philosophy was something women could and should be able to handle:

I think that the whole idea that women are put off by or unsuited to the aggressive, argumentative style of philosophy is crap.

This has sparked a fairly extensive discussion so I’m definitely coming to this late, and possibly with very little, but let me press on regardless, mainly by way of anecdote. (A far more theoretically informed discussion can be found on the New APPS blog here and here. I broadly agree with Jennifer Saul that whether or not the aggressive style is something that women are comfortable with, its bad for philosophy, and with Eric Schliesser that modes of argumentation can be productive without being aggressive and that even if philosophy was adversarial in the past doesn’t mean it has to be now.)

So: the best and most useful and productive philosophy discussions I have participated in have not taken place at public fora like conferences or colloquia. They have taken place in private settings: a beer in a bar or at someone’s home, a discussion over a coffee somewhere. They have been intense in the best sense of the word: lots of ideas exchanged, arguments traded back and forth, positions questioned and examined extensively.  The contrast with the ‘public’ discussion of philosophy could not be more acute. There, the aforementioned Dickhead Theory finds ample confirmation.

The reasons for this, I think, are quite simple: philosophy as a discipline seems to set great store by performances in its public arenas: the forums, the conferences, the workshops, the colloquia. Here is where, apparently, you ‘make an impression’, where you posture. Its graduate students are highly insecure, worried about jobs and placement. They go to these venues hoping to make a visible impression; they have already received some instruction on how to perform from their ‘heroes’: the tenured (male) bigwigs who will write their letters of recommendation (and who once were graduate students just like them). The peacock effect in these settings then manifests itself in the visible display of coarsely demonstrated philosophical nous.

Take a discipline racked by deep insecurity about its worth compared to science, which finds its most pleasing self-image in imagining itself continuous with the natural sciences and aspires to their ‘hardness’, throw in a largely male population, add a desperate job market, a culture of uncritical hero worship of its luminaries, mix in a sphere of ostensible academic interaction used instead for preening and strutting and the academic equivalent of mating, and you have, I think, the makings of a domain, which will continue to remain hostile to women.

The Asymmetric Panopticon

As I’ve noted before on this blog–in unison with many other commentators–the ‘if you’ve got nothing to hide, then you shouldn’t mind the government spying on you’ argument is among the dumbest to be made in defense of the NSA‘s surveillance program. A related argument is the ‘we don’t have privacy anyway, so quit tilting at windmills.’

A composite assumption of sorts that emerges from these is that the citizenry has no privacy, has no reasonable expectation of any in today’s most notable sphere of personal, political and economic interaction – the Internet, and thus, should be prepared and accepting of essentially unlimited scrutiny of its activities by the government and even private corporations.

These assumptions, along with the wholesale swallowing of governmental and corporate rationales for secrecy in the face of shadowy external threats and proprietary imperatives respectively have led to a rather dangerous panopticon: we are visible at all times, under a steady and constant gaze, to these ever-powerful entities, but they, and their internal machinations are not. (As I noted in my post on Bill Keller last year, it has also led to incompetent journalists asserting that those who demand transparency about the government should disclose details about their personal lives.)

There is nothing remotely symmetric about this arrangement.

On the governmental end, more material than ever before is rated ‘Classified’ or ‘Top Secret’ thus ensuring that those who strive to make it available to the public eye face–as may be seen in the case of Julian Assange, Bradley Manning or Edward Snowden–prosecution and public ridicule. It is worth remembering that the government’s classification of material as ‘Top Secret’, which is the basis for legal prosecution of whistleblowers, is never up for contestation. Thus, one strategy to make transparency harder and whistleblowing more dangerous is to simply classify huge amounts of material thus. It helps too, to mount a furious barrage of accusations of treason and worse against the whistleblower. (A related strategy makes it harder to observe and record the work of law enforcement officers: New York’s S.2402 bill, will, if nothing else, make it much more dangerous to videotape police officers in action.)

On the corporate end, opacity is ensured by a bewildering combination of trade secrets, non-disclosure agreements, proprietary recipes, business methods, and the like; these ensure that those who collect data about us are almost always working in the shadows, away from the public eye, their machinations and strategies and imperatives poorly understood.

So, we find ourselves at this pass: we are told that we have no privacy and should not expect any, but those who want our data and use it to control the contours of our lives, have all the privacy they need and want and then some; we are told that if we have nothing to hide, we have nothing to fear, but those who collect our data surreptitiously are allowed to hide what they do.  (Frank Pasquale‘s forthcoming book The Black Box Society: Technologies of Search, Reputation, and Finance will analyze and highlight this alarming state of affairs. As Pasquale points out, transparency should be a two-way street; data disclosure agreements should require the collectors to make themselves and their methods known and visible.)

The tables have been turned and we are pinned beneath them.  We cower, while our data collectors strut and preen.

The Elusive Art of the Book Review

A dozen or so years ago, my first ‘official’ book reviews were published. Both of them had been commissioned–that sounds so grand!–by the APA Newsletter on Teaching Philosophy: Philosophical Naturalism by David Papineau and What Is This Thing Called Science? by Alan Chalmers. (The always-ahead-of-the-curve APA website’s archive is incomplete and I cannot find copies of these reviews any more. Perhaps it’s just as well.) Back then, I was completing my dissertation and welcomed the opportunity to broaden my readings, develop some analytical writing skills and of course, add a few lines to my CV. My editor was happy with the reviews I sent in and suggested only exceedingly minor edits.

A year later, I wrote another review, this time of Theory and Method in the Neurosciences (Peter K. Machamer, Rick Grush, Peter McLaughlin (eds)), for the journal Metascience. My draft review was rejected by the editor: it supposedly read like a tedious listing and description of the table of contents. The editor had seized on a confusion that I still entertained about how to write a good book review: the step-by-step analysis of arguments or the broad, synoptic take. In the case of my current assignment, this confusion had been made worse by my reviewing a collection of essays rather than a unitary monograph. Suitably chastened, I revised the review to take on–hopefully–a more elevated and magisterial view. It was accepted, and I moved on.

In the intervening years, I’ve only written a few more reviews. Truth be told, I’ve not been approached too often, and I’ve not minded, as I’ve often felt myself lacking in time given my academic commitments and teaching loads at Brooklyn College. Moreover, I find myself not wanting to review philosophy books as much as novels or collections of essays; if I want to diversify my readings now, it’s in a direction away from philosophy, of which I get plenty during my teaching and academic writing. But ‘the literary market’ seems considerably harder to crack, and so I patiently wait for my first commission in this arena, and satisfy myself by writing the odd critical note here on this blog.

Still, my early experiences in writing book reviews and my subsequent reading of review essays and author-reviewer disputes in those hoary fora, the New York and London Reviews of Books, still prompts the question of what the ‘correct’ approach to writing a book review might be: the micro or the macro? (As described above. I’m leaving aside the question of whether the hilariously negative and scathing review–a la Strohminger of McGinn–serves any value whatsoever, other than confirming the popular impression of academics as highly educated squabbling children.)

The best reviews, of course, eschew the excesses of either approach: they disdain the grim plod through the minutiae of the text as well as the lofty ramble or learned filler that only glancingly or perfunctorily considers the book under review.  The former suffers on stylistic grounds and sometimes misses the forest for the trees; the latter on content, especially as it confirms its author as a blowhard.

Unsurprisingly, very few get the balance just right.

Father’s Day is Almost Over, Hurrah

I have never celebrated Father’s Day and to this day have not had occasion to, for this is my first Father’s Day. I moved to the US in 1987 and did not celebrate in it India; my father passed away in 1979. I’ve received a couple of Facebook messages, some in-person congratulations and thankfully, no gifts or cards. I’m happy enough to be a father, but I don’t particularly feel like I need a day dedicated to myself. Or to members of my ‘class.’

This expression of gratitude for the non-observation today of Father’s Day by my family–my wife and my six-month old daughter–stems from my dislike of ‘Hallmark holidays’ (like Valentine’s Day, which is a particularly egregious member of that group). A Hallmark holiday is one that–whatever its origins–is the occasion for an unbridled display of commercialism: the gift buying, the cards, the orgies of spending, and the associated tension and guilt. It serves only to remind me of just how controlled and directed our society and culture are by corporate imperatives.

Father’s Day’s origins are steeped deep in this commercialism, this department-store culture:

Father’s Day was founded in Spokane, Washington at the YMCA in 1910 by Sonora Smart Dodd, who was born in Arkansas….It did not have much success initially. In the 1920s, Dodd stopped promoting the celebration because she was studying in the Art Institute of Chicago, and it faded into relative obscurity, even in Spokane. In the 1930s Dodd returned to Spokane and started promoting the celebration again, raising awareness at a national level. She had the help of those trade groups that would benefit most from the holiday, for example the manufacturers of ties, tobacco pipes, and any traditional present to fathers. Since 1938 she had the help of the Father’s Day Council, founded by the New York Associated Men’s Wear Retailers to consolidate and systematize the commercial promotion. Americans resisted the holiday during a few decades, perceiving it as just an attempt by merchants to replicate the commercial success of Mother’s Day, and newspapers frequently featured cynical and sarcastic attacks and jokes. But the trade groups did not give up: they kept promoting it and even incorporated the jokes into their adverts, and they eventually succeeded. By the mid 1980s the Father’s Council wrote that “(…) [Father's Day] has become a ‘Second Christmas’ for all the men’s gift-oriented industries.” [article citations removed]

As my daughter grows older, I will suggest to her she pay attention to these historical details and not bother herself with commemorating Father’s Day. She will certainly not need to feel any guilt if she doesn’t buy me gifts or forgets to call me. I’ll be happy enough if on the remaining 364–and sometimes 365–days of the year, she internalizes a reasonable fraction of the lessons I will strive to impart to her.

Note: Readers of this blog might have noticed that on Mother’s Day, I wrote a short remembrance of my mother. Why didn’t I write one for my father today? The short answer to that is that I’ve written some already–almost whenever I reference military aviation history for instance–and that one of my central, ongoing writing projects, the history of the Indian Air Force in its two major wars since independence, the 1965 and 1971 wars, is directly and indirectly, influenced by his presence in my life. In this picture, Father’s Day doesn’t stand out.

Boethius’ Philosophy as Therapist

Here is a common way to think about the psychotherapeutic experience: the therapist helps the patient construct an alternative narrative of his or her life. Why is this therapeutic? The patient has offered the therapist a recounting–via a series of archaeological, genealogical forays into his past–of his life’s events, and describes how these have contributed to the crisis currently being experienced. The therapist then offers a reconstruction of these into an account that lends itself to an interpretation different from the one the patient has made central to his assessment of his life’s fortunes. This displacement of the pathology-creating narrative is the therapist’s central function. We live by stories that we tell about ourselves; our therapist–aided by our willing, motivated co-operation–equips us with a new one.

This reconstruction can proceed by pointing out how a patient has, like any author, selectively emphasized and de-emphasized certain events, and more analytically, drawn faulty or mistaken inferences from them. Because such inferences are often based on ignorance, the therapist may also be called on to play the role of educator.

The relevance of the philosopher–and the philosophical attitude–to this task should be apparent.  This is demonstrated quite well in Boethius‘ The Consolation of Philosophy, where Philosophy, in offering her consolations to the miserable prisoner convinced of his misfortunes, offers just such a combination of new narrative, edification and argument analysis.

For instance in Book II of the Consolation, after hearing Boethius’ lament, Philosophy, as part of her description of the true nature of that fickle mistress, Fortune, says in Prose 3, which is subtitled ‘Philosophy reminds the prisoner of his former prosperity and of the precious gifts he still has’:

[You] ought not to consider yourself completely miserable  if you recall your many great joys.

I will not mention that when you lost your father you were adopted by very prominent people and were chosen to become closely associated with the most powerful figures in the city. You soon were more dear to them by love than you had been close before by relationship, and that is the most precious bond….But I want to stress the greatest of your joys.  If any mortal achievement can make a man happy, is it possible that any amount of misfortune can dim the memory of that brilliant occasion when you saw your two sons made Consuls and carried from their house in the company of the Senators and accompanied by the people?….You pledged yourself to Fortune while she pampered you and favored you with her gifts. You got more from her than any private citizen ever received–and now do you think you can bargain with her?

This is the first time she ever frowned on you with her evil eye. If you balance the number and kinds of your joys and misfortunes, you must admit that up to now you have been a happy man.

This is not enough for Boethius, of course, for Prose 4 is subtitled ‘Boethius protests that the worst sorrow is the remembrance of lost joys. Philosophy answers that the only true joy is self-possession in the face of adversity.‘

And so it goes. The outlines of a therapeutic dialectic are clearly visible here and remain so as we read on.

Note: Bertrand Russell‘s The Conquest of Happiness is another classical member of the Philosophy as Therapy canon.

Loss of Faith, the Jewish Atheist, and Working Class Rebellion in ‘Christ in Concrete’

In yesterday’s post on Pietro Di Donato‘s Christ in Concrete, I had noted how Annunziata and Paul’s session with the medium, the Cripple, could perhaps be viewed as an affirmation of the power of the life-sustaining myth. There is a hint of irony in that suggestion, because among the central messages of Di Donato’s impassioned novel is the loss of faith, the failure of Catholicism, the disillusionment of Paul with the myths that are supposed to sustain him; in their place, Donato tells us, what will sustain Paul is the companionship of his fellow workers. The final scenes of the book, which include the crucifix-crushing encounter between Paul and his mother make the loss of faith explosively clear, but the tension, the tautening and ultimate snapping of the ties between the Church, Paul’s faith, and Paul has been building for a while, perhaps ever since his pleas for charitable assistance from the Church were rebuffed.

One of the interesting features of the novel for me–one that I did not see addressed in ‘s introduction to the Signet Classic edition–is the role played by Paul’s friendship with the Russian Jewish boy Louis Molov, the ‘somber boy with the shaved head’ who lives with his family in their neighborhood. When Paul first encounters Molov, he has just ably defended himself against an attack by the local bullies. Fascinated and intrigued, Paul goes to meet him and finds him reading a book, and not just any old one: Thorstein Veblen‘s The Economic Theory of the Leisure Class. (Louis, incidentally, is in the eighth grade! Talk about precocious.) Louis tells Paul about his brother, one who met his death at the hands of the Czar’s soldiers because he tried to ‘organize the peasants against the war’ and ‘made a great speech against the Czar and his war.’

Later, as their friendship blooms, and as they visit the cemetery where Geremio, Paul’s father, is buried, Louis introduces Paul to a shocking idea, one that follows on the heels of his suggestion that Paul’s father’s death and his brother’s had something in common:

“Do you think that your father and these other men buried here will someday rise from their graves and cry revenge?”

“…Revenge…why?”

“Why? Did they want to die?”

“…Want to?”

“My brother Leov did not want to die. They shot the life out of him against his will, but he sprang up from his grave and destroyed the Czar and all his soldiers!”

“He was dead…?”

“They killed him–but his spirit threw the grave aside and paid back the murders of centuries!”

“That was the spirit of God’

“That was the spirit of my brother’s ideals.”

“I don’t understand. Your brother was dead. Only God could have punished his killers.”

Louis’s gray eyes studied Paul.

“What God?”

“Why…God…”

“Whose God?”

“Whose God? There’s only one God.”

“Where?”

“Everywhere.”

“You have seen your father?”

“Yes…”

“And you know your mother?”

“Of course.”

“And you love them?”

“Why, yes.”

“Have you seen God?”

Paul felt something weakening him.

“Louis–haven’t you–don’t you believe in God?”

The gray eyes turned full on him.

“There is no God.”

I hope it is clear why this aspect of the book is interesting: the choice, on the part of the author, to make a precocious  Jewish boy the vehicle for the delivery, from a land and faith far from Paul’s own, of the messages of working class rebellion and atheism. In doing so, Di Donato is explicitly acknowledging what might have been a trope of his time.