the truth: it keeps on hurting

Might as well get writing something. It's part of my morning routine. Finish keying notes from research books (this morning: A Study of History, volume 2, by Arnold J. Toynbee, and The Cults of the Roman Empire by Robert Turcan), then, second mug of coffee drawing to its lukewarm close and 7:30 drawing close, I switch to Mozilla Firefox and pop open the Create screen of this blog.

Although blog-post ideas sometimes come to me during the day, I seldom remember them when I set out to write. If they come to me, they usually do so mid-post, and I find my topic morphing into a subject I didn't plan on when I started typing. Ah well--it's a free medium, something more structured and disciplined than my personal journal, but less disciplined than a column published and paid for by someone else.

I suppose it should convey some sense of what it's like to be a writer--or anyway to be this writer. I've mentioned before my appreciation of a comment by the writer-producer-director James L. Brooks, that the writer is always to some extent alienated from the filmmaking process. I think this alienation is more general. The writer, if he or she is any good, is more or less alienated from society altogether, and must be.

The creative writer's real job is to tell it like it is--like it really is. To the extent that a writer is simply repeating socially accepted platitudes, he is adding nothing of value to society (although he may be cashing decent paychecks).

The obstacles to telling it like it really is are many, and start first of all within oneself. Do you have the guts to tell the truth? But before that, do you have the guts to face the truth? And even before that: do you have the guts to look for the truth?

And maybe before any of those: do you have the presence of mind to recognize that truth is something that may in fact be looked for, and perhaps found, by yourself--instead of being something simply received and accepted from someone else? Are you capable of thinking critically about the platitudes exchanged around the barbecue among the assembled, wine-sipping guests?

My own relationship with truth has not been simple or easy. It's been more of a life-adventure, a dominant theme that in some ways I did not see as such until relatively lately. The forces that would suppress truth are extremely strong, even within oneself. This is a point that Daniel Goleman investigates very well in his psychological study entitled Vital Lies, Simple Truths. At a deep level, we shield ourselves from pain by blotting out reality--truth. The narcotic bliss of the heroin addict is a state we rest in naturally, at a lower level. Pleasure numbs our attentiveness to what's actually going on.

I remember reading a paper by the American Buddhist teacher Reginald Ray, in which he observed that our conscious attention tends to follow the "moving hot-point of pain". We're preoccupied with seeking ways to escape the painful or unpleasant aspects of our current situation. The Buddhist meditation practice consists in the first place of resisting the urge to run away from the present moment, whatever it may hold. The mind, which habitually squirms like a restless baby, temporarily gives up its escapist habit.

The truth hurts. I suppose that sums it up. The true writer has a special duty to be in touch with that pain at the personal as well as the societal level, and to give it expression--to put it into the consciousness of the audience.

Such a person cannot really belong to, or be accommodated by, any of the institutions of society, whether in business, academia, or politics. Whatever is institutional has been, by definition, automated, systematized, and therefore, in this view, narcotized to the pleasure of autopilot and unquestioned assumptions.

In the Gospel of John, 8:32, Jesus states,

And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.

This is a profound truth in itself--but even profound truths can be co-opted and perverted. Last night I read in Chalmers Johnson's Nemesis that this very quote is inscribed in the foyer of the CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia. Maybe soon, if it has not been done already, it will be replaced by a more recent quote:

Ignorance is strength.

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.

the same old dream

I've been sitting here for some minutes now, trying to decide what to write.

One of my strongest interests at the moment is the subject-matter of The Sorrows of Empire by Chalmers Johnson, the book that currently attracts me most in my reading-stack, and holds me longest. It is that unusual thing for me: a book that I find hard to put down.

The book's subtitle sketches out its agenda: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic. When I first got the book I flipped it open and found, at the head of chapter 2, "The Roots of American Militarism", the following epigraph:

Overgrown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to Republican liberty.

Do you know who said this? It was George Washington, in his presidential farewell address delivered on 17 September 1796. That epigraph is followed by one from another famous presidential farewell address, given by Dwight D. Eisenhower on 17 January 1961:

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience.... In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted.

I remember seeing a film-clip of Eisenhower's speech, and being shocked that a sitting president of the United States could have such a dark and critical viewpoint of the system in which he functioned--the system which he was supposed, in fact, to be running.

With great authority, and bringing to bear a wealth of telling detail, Chalmers Johnson develops the case that since World War 2 the U.S. has been in transition from a republic to an empire. It's important to understand that he uses the word empire not metaphorically but literally. He means it.

In the U.S. itself the idea has become somewhat mainstream and acceptable since the end of the Cold War in 1991 and especially since the 9/11 attacks in 2001, especially among conservatives and so-called neoconservatives. And on the face of it, if America is a virtuous democracy, what's the harm in letting them run the world? Why not let them take on the Johnny Appleseed role of sowing justice and decency everywhere?

Alas, as Johnson documents, as nations go, the U.S. is not especially virtuous, and, increasingly, is not even really a democracy. In his own words:

In my opinion, the growth of militarism, official secrecy, and a belief that the U.S. is no longer bound, as the Declaration of Independence so famously puts it, by "a decent respect for the opinions of mankind" is probably irreversible.

After a brief flirtation with international law in the 20th century, following the bloodbaths of World Wars 1 and 2, we're back to Thomas Hobbes's "state of nature": survival of the fittest, and may the devil take the hindmost. Or, as the elephant says in the chicken coop: "Every man for himself!"

The elephant in the chicken coop might seem to have the run of the place, but even chickens, when their backs are pressed to the wall, might prove to be a serious nuisance. And what's the elephant going to live on? Large standing armies are hugely expensive (the average U.S. "defense" budget has been just under $400 billion a year since 1950, measured in 2002 dollars), and eventually bankrupt even the richest nations. This is what happened to Spain in the late-16th century, the world's mightiest nation at the time. The urbanologist and economist Jane Jacobs pointed to standing armies as one of the three major "transactions of decline" that lead a society from prosperity to poverty. A large army is too expensive to finance through peacetime operations; they must earn their keep through plunder, or, as in China, being large industrial operations in their own right, with productive assets like factories and farmland.

Where is Spain today? When I visited the country in 1982, few Spaniards traveled because their employment was too low and their currency too depressed. The rest of the world--even next-door France--was too expensive for them. They're doing much better now, but they are still just one country among many, still, as far as I know, net recipients of transfers from the common kitty of the European Union.

The search for power and prestige, the mirage of security through violence--where do these things come from? Another brilliant epigraph from Johnson's book sums it up, this one to chapter 3, from Ian Fleming's 1958 James Bond novel, Doctor No:

It's the same old dream--world domination.

an afternoon's reading

For me, "writing" is mostly research. I spend most of my time learning about what I want to say. How does this process work?

There's a kind of cause-and-effect process; I pursue threads of research. Yesterday, for example, I read from three different books. At teatime I tucked first of all into Home Networking Bible by Sue Plumley--a book I bought last September, having spied it among the stacks of books on the bargain table at Save-On Foods. Its printed Canadian price was $42.99, but Save-On had it marked down to $14.99. As one of the "Bible" series of computer books published by Wiley, it's supposed to be comprehensive about its topic. I had always been rather mystified and intimidated by the concept of computer networking, so I saw an opportunity. I had bought the Windows 98 Bible and been quite happy with that, so I picked this one up as well. I'm reading it now because it's time to get a new computer, and I want to provide Kimmie with a computer as well (probably this one), and to share our broadband Internet account--so home networking it is. I'm gobbling it up quickly, because I want to move on this.

Next: The Golden Ass by Apuleius. I bought the book just this month through Abebooks from a bookseller somewhere in the Southeastern U.S. It's the Wordsworth Classics paperback edition, translated from the original Latin by William Adlington and "revised" by an S. Gaselee. I bought this book as a result of reading Hellenistic Religions, an excellent little book by Luther H. Martin. Martin opens his text with a discussion of The Golden Ass, which was written in the 2nd century AD, because he regards it as a perfect picture of Hellenistic thinking and feeling about the world and about religion.

In it, the first-person narrator, a certain Lucius, is traveling on business to a city in Thessaly, Greece--a place reputed to be the birthplace of magic--and discovers that his hostess, Pamphile, is herself a witch. In his eagerness to learn about the hidden arts of magic, Lucius seduces his host's maid Fotis, and persuades her to take him to where he can watch Pamphile change herself into an owl--a trick she does so she can fly away secretly to her young lover. Lucius, craving such an experience for himself, induces Fotis to get him the magic ointment, but when he puts it on, he is transformed into not an owl, but an ass--Fotis in her nervousness has grabbed the wrong ointment.

As luck would have it, thieves break into the house at this moment, and in the chaos Lucius, now in asinine form, is dragooned into becoming their pack-animal, and finds himself willy-nilly on an adventure as a mute ass. The supposed cure for his condition is simple: he just has to eat some roses--if he can find them. But so far, the thieves have him under tight control (and they're none too kind to their stolen animals).

When I received my copy of the book, I was at first disappointed to discover that the translation was done in 1566; indeed, it seems no one even knows who William Adlington was, since, except for his moniker on the title-page of this book, there is no record of him. The prose style, therefore, is essentially pre-Shakespeare, although it has been modernized (and punctuated) by S. Gaselee, a "fellow and librarian of Magdalene College, Cambridge," in 1922. I regretted not picking up the version translated by Robert Graves, one of my favorite writers. But now that I'm actually in the book, I'm finding it very readable--much more so than I expected. Indeed, to my surprise, the book is something of a page-turner. I read it as I do my nonfiction books, highlighter in hand, picking out cultural tidbits as I go.

Next: The Sorrows of Empire by Chalmers Johnson. I bought this book, along with his earlier work, Blowback, from Amazon.com last month. The paperbacks, published by Owl Books, are part of The American Empire Project, an organization devoted to exposing and documenting the rise of the American empire. I was put on to the books by reading posts on TomDispatch, a blog of dissent by Tom Engelhardt against injustices perpetrated by the U.S. government. Chalmers Johnson, a longtime American academic specializing in Asian economics and politics, is a contributor to Engelhardt's blog.

(Tom Engelhardt I discovered, in turn, via Google News, my homepage. I clicked on an op-ed piece by him that appeared in the South China Morning Post. It was a very well-written, cogent essay, critical of some aspect of U.S. foreign policy, written from a point of view I had not yet seen anywhere in the U.S. press. It led me to check out Engelhardt's blog.)

I had just finished reading Blowback, first published in 2000, and plunged immediately into The Sorrows of Empire, enjoying Johnson's knowledgeable, authoritative prose. (Blowback, by the way, is a jargon term of the CIA, referring to violence perpetrated against Americans by foreigners in retaliation for clandestine operations undertaken by the CIA. An example was the 1988 bombing of Pam Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people--payback for a 1986 Reagan-administration aerial raid on Libya that killed Khadaffi's stepdaughter. Another example is the 9/11 attacks on Manhattan and Washington, which occurred just a year after Johnson's book was published.) The Sorrows of Empire, published in 2004, already has a much different, starker tone than the earlier book, for Johnson says that while Blowback was still a warning about the possibility of America's morphing into a full-on empire, he was now writing about what he regarded as an accomplished fact. Or, as Johnson himself puts it:

In the wake of September 11, 2001, it no longer seems necessary to issue warnings; instead a diagnosis, even an autopsy, may be more appropriate. In my opinion, the growth of militarism, official secrecy, and a belief that the U.S. is no longer bound, as the Declaration of Independence so famously puts it, by "a decent respect for the opinions of mankind" is probably irreversible.

The United States, with its obsequious Congress and its docile press, is at this moment undergoing transition from a republic to an empire (or, in the usual euphemism, a "lone superpower")--a point crossed by ancient Rome just at the time of my own story. In that sense, it is very germane to my own work. But mainly I'm reading it to become a better-informed citizen of the world--a responsibility I take seriously.

So there you have it: an afternoon's reading by the writer.