darkness ahead

Where have I been, you ask?

Well, Kimmie and I have been working our way through a headcold, caught we know not where. I got it first, and probably passed it on to her. I'm very much better, but Kimmie is going through the middle of hers. Indeed, she's decided to take today off work.

I've been chipping away at my mighty work, and at the ideas surrounding and supporting it. This is a huge task, and one that I don't think I can really discuss in this blog, since I don't want to go too deeply into my own views of the meanings of my still unfinished work.

Then I'm feeling a certain blog-fatigue, as I did a couple of years ago. This blog, begun as a kind of lark or experiment back in 2005, has become a kind of commitment. I've often told myself that even if not many people read it, it can still serve as a personal record--a kind of diary of my own thoughts, if not of my life exactly, during this time of creation.

Then there's the world falling about our ears: a worldwide financial meltdown and the wintry prospects beyond. It feels almost irresponsible not to address these grave and urgent matters--but what do I know about them? I suspect that even those in the know don't really know much about what's going on. As I write these words, the U.S. House of Representatives is still grappling with the $700- (or is it $800-) billion bailout bill for Wall Street. This is almost certainly a further waste of money--a mere playing for time in order to keep things from collapsing before the federal election. The legislation, at least as it exists till now, includes these words in its Section 8:

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

Is it constitutional to put decisions and individuals beyond the reach of law? That I don't know, but the fact that the framers of the bill are trying it tells me that we've got something that looks much like what happened at times of crisis in ancient Rome. It was the Romans who invented the office of the dictator: a person who could be invested with supreme command over the state and the army and who could rule by decree for a fixed period of exactly six months.

In Rome the dictatorship was a perfectly constitutional office that had its own defined limits. One could be appointed in times of grave stress or threat to the Republic, and he would lapse back to ordinary citizenship again when he had done his task and restored normalcy to the polity.

The U.S. of course has no such provision in its constitution. The ever-increasing tendency to place persons in authority beyond the reach of law or oversight is a sign of creeping tyranny, and the prospect of an unconstitutional dictatorship draws ever closer. Section 8 of this bill gives certain people great power while removing any accountability from them. It's a very bad sign when a preoccupation of the regime is how to escape prosecution for its actions.

Arnold J. Toynbee, in his A Study of History, describes how every society goes through the transition from being guided by leaders--people who inspire others to follow them on the basis of their vision and personal qualities--to being dominated by rulers--those who have inherited the levers of power, but who lack the charisma of actual leaders. In the U.S., we've had the transition from leaders such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, who stirred and inspired their fellow citizens, to rulers such as George W. Bush and Richard Cheney, who have been preoccupied with world domination and shaping their own country into something closer to a police state.

As I've mentioned before, Toynbee also discusses the threefold progress of a typical Greek tragedy as it applies to the catastrophic undoing of such a ruling regime. Those three stages are koros, hubris, and ate. He translates these as "surfeit", "outrageous behavior", and "disaster". I believe we've seen plenty of the first two of these; now the third is looming into view.

The U.S. has the largest military in the world. They may feel they need it if large segments of its population, thrown out of their houses and their jobs, their retirements savings wiped out, become agitated. Voila: full-on military dictatorship.

Preposterous? Maybe. But maybe that's what they thought in Burma too. And I expect that real estate is still very affordable there.

musings on a dark, rainy fall morning

Back to the task. Kimmie returns to work today. The mornings are dark a long time now after 5:30, when our alarm goes off. I hear the distant jingling of our front-door chimes buffeted in the predawn autumn wind.

My project, my story, is morphing out from under me. As I learn more, throw open more doors to the vaults of the deep past, my world enlarges and changes the journey of my heroes. Not fundamentally--I'm in far too deep to make a radical story-change now. But it's more like discovering things that were already here: connections, meanings, possibilities. I feel I have the opportunity to replace certain arbitrary elements, which I'm never very happy about, with elements that reflect the growing meaning of my story. In this way a controlling idea very gradually emerges, like a shipwreck being floated gingerly from the bottom of the ocean.

My reading about the cults of the Roman Empire--the exotic religions brought into it by its foreign traders and captives--is throwing tremendous new light on the way I see that world. I sometimes wonder (and worry) about the fact that I'm coming across this information so late in my journey, but in general I trust the timing of the arrival of information. This trust seems to be borne out time and again by the coincidental arrival of complementary information from different sources. I read about the Egyptian religion of Isis, which became widespread in the Roman world, in a book devoted to her cult, only to open a chapter of Toynbee's A Study of History to find him discussing Isis and Osiris (he conjectures that this brother-sister, husband-wife, mother-son duo represents a transformation of the more ancient cult of Ishtar and Tammuz in Sumer). These simultaneous linkages between widely different sources happen a lot for me, and tend to confirm the path I'm on, and the way I'm traveling it. It's like just-in-time delivery of manufacturing parts, except the parts here are ideas or pieces of knowledge.

If my "building blocks" are arriving just in time, that must mean I'm assembling things at the right pace--painfully slow though that seems to me. (I find it embarrassing to be asked about the progress of my work, since its progress is almost imperceptible, even to me. Pluto seems to orbit the Sun faster.)

Even in Chalmers Johnson's latest book, Nemesis, about the disintegration of the American republic, I have a very good short summary of the rise and fall of the Roman Republic, which also dovetails with my other research, even though I'm reading it to learn more about current events and not for my project. The parallels between Rome and the U.S. are striking, and give me a feeling of relevance in what I'm doing.

Supposedly Harry Truman said that the only news is the history you don't know. I'm sure that's true. History is made generally by the ignorant and purblind, those who believe they're acting in an original way but who are in fact merely duplicating the actions of others taken long before, most often with disastrous results. It's a truism to say that history repeats itself, and it never actually does, quite. But the hallmark of intelligence is the ability to see a pattern where the less intelligent see only chaos.

Mind you, that's also the hallmark of paranoia.

One of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, I think it was Live and Let Die, had as an epigraph this little saying:

Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.

According to Toynbee, since the beginning of civilization societies have evolved according to one overarching pattern: growth; stagnation into a "time of troubles"; the rise of a pacifying "universal state"; and a final rupture and disintegration due to the combined agitation of a disenfranchised "internal proletariat" and a hostile and opportunistic "external proletariat" of barbarians beyond the civilization's frontier. Although I have not yet finished reading his Study of History, Toynbee so far reckons that our own civilization (which he calls Western Christendom) entered its "time of troubles" in the 16th century with the bitter and fratricidal European Wars of Religion. Since the 20th century was even more disastrous and bloodthirsty, it seems safe to say we're not out of the time of troubles yet. Indeed, they have to get so bad, in Toynbee's view, that people are generally relieved to acquiesce in living under the aegis of a universal state, like Rome under the Empire.

We don't seem to be there yet, which means that things are set to get continually worse. The U.S. administrations since World War 2 have set their sights on becoming the next universal state. But their chances of success are, in my opinion, poor. I expect this century to be worse than the 20th century in terms of human suffering, and that much of it will be linked to catastrophic environmental change. If Toynbee's historical cycle is still functioning after we go through that wringer, it's anyone's guess who might be strong and coherent enough to provide a peaceful universal state for the survivors to recuperate in.

Whew, this morning's even darker than I thought.

sick souls

I've recently been reading again from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James, a book developed from a series of talks he gave at the Gifford lectures on natural religion in Edinburgh in 1901-02.

The first three lectures lead in with a general discussion of his topic--looking at religion primarily from a psychological point of view. Lectures 4 and 5 are together called "The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness", and deal with optimistic religious experiences, using as his main example the "mind-cure" school of religion that seemed to be all the rage at the time he was speaking. This held that one can quite abruptly change one's life for the better by having faith in the guidance and help of a higher power, visualizing health and happiness, and refusing to dwell on or even acknowledge pain, illness, or depression in one's life. As James demonstrates, this approach had proved itself to be widely effective and powerful--indeed could not have become so popular if it had not.

But in lectures 6 and 7 he moves on to "The Sick Soul"--the opposite outlook, which does not deny pain and sin, but looks these right in the face, acknowledging them to be a permanent feature of the human and even cosmic landscape. I'm still working my way through lecture 6, but already have been exposed to some powerful remarks that remind me very much of some of my Buddhist studies, which likewise emphasize the futility and impossibility of finding lasting happiness in life, so long as one relies on clinging to impermanent things.

As James says,

Take the happiest man, the one most envied by the world: in nine cases out of ten his inmost consciousness is one of failure.

In illustration of this, he quotes Goethe in 1824:

I will say nothing against the course of my existence. But at bottom it has been nothing but pain and burden, and I can affirm that during the whole of my 75 years, I have not had four weeks of genuine well-being. It is but the perpetual rolling of a rock that must be raised up again forever.

Whew. Or this, from Robert Louis Stevenson:

There is indeed one element in human destiny, that not blindness itself can controvert. Whatever else we are intended to do, we are not intended to succeed; failure is the fate allotted.

Sobering words. They seem to suit my mood at the moment. Reading as much history right now as I am, especially sweeping views of the whole of human history (I've just finished Michael Cook's A Brief History of the Human Race), it's hard not to see it as a march of folly, the gradual acquisition of more powerful means to achieving the same dismal ends.

The British historian Arnold J. Toynbee, writing in the 1930s, saw militarism as one of the main features of a decadent and moribund society, a kind of social disease that would prevent the arising of a decent human civilization for as long as it persists. Well, we live in a world that is vastly more militarized than it ever has been, with more killing power distributed into more hands.

Being the biggest and best-armed is no help. Toynbee points to the legend of David and Goliath as the example of how supreme power breeds complacency, and brings about its own destruction through means it feels no motivation to foresee. Even when a heavily armed power toils to stay up to date, upgrading its military systems, as the ancient empire of Assyria did, it eventually reaps the whirlwind of militarism.

Assyria dominated the Middle East from about 1000 to 650 BC, but its oppressive strength bred tremendous resentment in its neighbors, and eventually all the conquered rose against it and destroyed it. When the Greek general Xenophon led his 10,000 mercenaries back from Persia toward the Black Sea in the 5th century BC, he passed Nineveh, the ancient fortified capital of Assyria. He and his men were amazed to find such a vast and heavily built city utterly vacant. Xenophon was unable to discover the truth about who had built the city, or when. The very name of Assyria had been forgotten.

the science of fiction

I've been meaning to talk about an intriguing passage I read in Toynbee's A Study of History (volume 1). Here it is:

There are three different methods of viewing and presenting the objects of our thought, and, among them, the phenomena of human life. The first is the ascertainment and recording of "facts"; the second is the elucidation, through a comparative study of the facts ascertained, of general "laws"; the third is the artistic re-creation of the facts in the form of "fiction."

I'm finding that Toynbee is full of startling assertions, but I found this one perhaps the most startling so far (I'm about 160 pages into volume 1). Toynbee is placing history, science, and fiction on a continuum--they're all, in some sense, the same thing! (Actually, Toynbee goes on to say that this categorization is originally due to Aristotle--almost more startling!) He goes on:

History, like the drama and the novel, grew out of mythology, a primitive form of apprehension and expression in which the line between fact and fiction is left undrawn. All histories resemble the Iliad to this extent, that they cannot entirely dispense with the fictional element. The mere selection, arrangement and presentation of facts is a technique belonging to the field of fiction; no historian can be "great" if he is not also a great artist. It is hardly possible to write two consecutive lines of historical narrative without introducing such fictitious personifications as "England," "France," "the Conservative Party," "the Church," "the Press," or "public opinion."

Fascinating. I seem to recall my late brother-in-law Freddie dismissing history because of its inescapable bias or "point of view"--but here Toynbee is asserting that this "bias" is of its essence, not something that negates its worth but something that makes it worthy.

Let's take another bite:

So science and fiction by no means confine themselves to what are supposed to be their own techniques. All sciences pass through a stage in which the ascertainment and recording of facts is the only activity open to them. Lastly, the drama and the novel do not present fictions, complete fictions, and nothing but fictions regarding personal relationships. If they did, the product would consist of nonsensical and intolerable fantasies. When we call a piece of literature a work of fiction we mean that the characters could not be identified with any persons who have lived in the flesh, nor the incidents with any particular events that have actually taken place. In fact, we mean that the work has a fictitious personal foreground; the background is composed of authentic social facts. The highest praise we can give to a good work of fiction is to say that it is "true to life."

Toynbee is saying that every novelist is a historian and a social scientist recording authentic observations about the world, but peopling his document with invented characters. The "inventedness" of the characters makes the document both possible and effective. I'm assuming that he is implying that the better the novelist is, the better a historian and social scientist he is. I would add to that the better a psychologist, since, although the characters are fictitious, in order for them to ring true at the level of individual motivation and behavior, they must obey the "laws" of the inner life--as opposed to the social life--of all people.

As a psychologist the novelist must be subtle and genuine, a good observer. Interestingly, real psychologists are not necessarily good observers or understanders of people. I recall when I lived with Brad and Keith in our upstairs duplex on 12th Avenue back in 1980: as young intellectuals we had lots of books. Keith in particular was omnivorous, even indiscriminate in his buying of used books on impulse. Some of these were real lemons. After a while, we came to store the worst of these on top of the toilet-tank in the bathroom, with a sign on the wall that said "emergency wipe". Here went things like poetry by Rod McKuen and philosophical tracts by Ayn Rand.

One of the books that wound up on the "emergency wipe" pile was Walden Two, a Utopian novel by B. F. Skinner, the famous behaviorist. I only ever read the first few pages, but they were pretty dire. The writing was at the level of a low-grade science-fiction novel of the 1940s or 50s, but instead of having the redeeming interest of imaginative views of future technology and alien life-forms, it was offering a portrait of an "ideal" society as conceived by a behaviorist--a pretty poor substitute. I just remember descriptions of characters in the opening pages: the confident, assertive demeanor of the university grad, and the nervous deference of the guy who had not graduated from university. The rats running in Skinner's mazes had more complex motivations than these guys. Having such caricatures walking around in something so pretentiously titled as this book earned it a spot on our "emergency wipe" pile.

Anyway, all that by way of saying that "real" psychologists (I actually don't regard behaviorists as true psychologists at all) are not as good at psychology, in a certain sense, as a decent novelist. I'm a scientist, after all!

I think back to another memory: my friend and classmate Don in grade 5 told me his way of keeping the meanings of fiction and nonfiction straight: "bull" and "non-bull". Well, I'm happy that Toynbee has shown that the distinction is not so clear-cut. The two are mixed, no matter what hat we're wearing.