aging (dis)gracefully

Speaking for myself, these are uncertain times. As one gets older, it seems reasonable to suppose that one should get wiser, more mature, and generally acquire a better outlook on life.

But this isn't necessarily so. I think about the saying that some people "forget nothing and learn nothing". But I worry that there could be another saying, that some people "study everything and learn nothing". Or simply that in one's older age, the chickens of one's youthful folly and hubris come home to roost.

Yesterday I continued to make my way through James Carroll's House of War, his history of the Pentagon. The book is not exactly what I expected it to be, but I am enjoying it very much--maybe more than if it had been what I expected. I was expecting a kind of institutional history of the Pentagon. Instead, the book is a thoughtful examination of the ideas and policies of the U.S. military since the Pentagon was created in World War II, particularly as these ideas were held and pursued by various significant individuals. Distressed by the current and growing militarism of his country, Carroll is asking, "what went wrong?"

One of the most significant players in this history was Robert S. McNamara, Secretary of Defense under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. McNamara, a young statistician attached to the Air Force in World War II, went on to become CEO of Ford, and made a name as a brilliant and highly capable and successful executive. From there he was recruited to join Kennedy's cabinet in 1961.

The Pentagon, the largest office building in the world, had been built to its full Army-specified size in 1941, in direct defiance of President Roosevelt's order that it be cut to half its planned size. From the word go it was a cockpit of interservice rivalry. With the advent of nuclear weapons, its budget ballooned in the fear and paranoia of the Cold War.

Kennedy was elected after engaging in the most powerful scaremongering ever used by any presidential candidate. People were terrified of the "missile gap" (which did exist--but hugely in the United States' favor), and the citizens were urged to build bomb shelters for what was increasingly looking like an inevitable and imminent nuclear war. The terror came to a head with the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, and twitchy fingers hovered on the hair-trigger of nuclear attack.

Kennedy was able to defuse that crisis, but he had a change of heart about talking tough to the Soviets. He came to see it as his mission to lead the world away from nuclear Armageddon. (Looking at it now, I suspect this was the real reason he was whacked in 1963.)

Robert McNamara, for his part, saw it as his mission to bring the Pentagon under civilian control--his control--and to move the "nuclear trigger" out of the hands of paranoid hawks such as Curtis LeMay, head of Strategic Air Command, who believed ardently in the preemptive and massive first-strike use of atomic weapons. In Vietnam, McNamara sought to rationalize the use of bombing as a tool, not to destroy everything and everyone in sight, as was done eventually in World War II, but to push the Viet Cong toward a political, negotiated solution.

This idea proved to be a complete failure. Even by 1967 more ordnance had been dropped on Vietnam than on Europe in all of World War II, and the Viet Cong showed no sign whatever of giving up. Meanwhile, McNamara was becoming a nervous wreck. He was weeping at his desk in the Pentagon. Lyndon Johnson was afraid that McNamara was going the way of the first Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal, who, in 1949, had degenerated into acute paranoia and wound up committing suicide while under psychiatric care. When McNamara, at a key meeting, yelled and pleaded that the bombing in Vietnam had been a total waste and had to stop, Johnson had him removed from his post. McNamara was 100% right, of course--but the bombing went on.

Robert McNamara is 91 now. It seems that the Vietnam War proved to be a humbling and shattering experience for him: a time when his intelligence and self-confidence met their Waterloo. Or, switching to a metaphor used by James Carroll, he was Ahab meeting his Moby-Dick in the Pentagon, the great beast that he sought to subdue but which dragged him under. The brilliance of his youthful achievements led on to pain and no doubt remorse in his older years.

So age is not any kind of safe haven. Not unless, perhaps, you've lived prudently and wisely in your youth. And how many of us have done that?

House of War, House of Death

Two days ago I finished reading the Iliad, as translated by Robert Fagles. Over all it was very good, and much more accessible than I was expecting.

Now I'm keying notes from the book's introduction by Bernard Knox and from its end-notes.

One thing that's striking about the Iliad is its unapologetic and graphic violence. Picking one example at random (there are many to choose from) from Book 17, "Menelaus' Finest Hour", the warrior Hippothous is trying to drag the corpse of Patroclus away from the battle-front:

Hippothous out for fame...Pelasgian Lethus' son,
lashing a shield-strap round the ankle tendons,
was hauling Patroclus footfirst through the melee,
hoping to please Prince Hector and all the Trojans,
Hippothous rushing on but death came just as fast.
No Trojans could save him now, strain as they might--
Ajax son of Telamon charging quickly into the carnage
speared him at close range through the bronze-cheeked helmet,
the horsehair crest cracked wide open around the point,
smashed by the massive spear and hand that drove it.
His brains burst from the wound in sprays of blood,
soaking the weapon's socket--
his strength dissolved on the spot, his grip loosed
and he dropped the foot of brave Patroclus' corpse.
There on the ground it lay--he rushed to join it,
pitching over the dead man's body face-to-face,
a world away from Larissa's dark rich soil...
Never would he repay his loving parents now
for the gift of rearing--his life cut short so soon,
brought down by the spear of lionhearted Ajax.

The poem contains much mayhem of this sort. I would not say that it particularly glorifies violence so much as looks it unflinchingly in the face. In Homer the warriors are mostly brave, but subject to fear and even terror. They fight and kill, but they don't want to die, and when they do they claw at the dirt and clutch their entrails, whimpering their last as the darkness swirls down over their eyes (a common image in the Iliad) and they descend unwillingly to the hated House of Death.

The killing in the Iliad is up close and personal: the result of arduous hand-to-hand combat. I think about another book I'm reading, House of War by James Carroll, a history of the Pentagon. The book's subtitle suggests Carroll's viewpoint: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power. The 20th century saw great "advances" in the technology of killing. Weapons became more mechanized even as the institutions using them became more impersonal and bureaucratized, with the soldier becoming subsumed in the growing fungus of The Organization Man as described in William H. Whyte's 1956 classic. The result in World War II was the deliberate slaughter, especially of civilians, by aircraft flying far overhead, launched not so much by individuals as by committees and teams of bureaucrats.

The darkness swirling over the eyes of all those women and children, though, was just as real. When Dresden was fire-bombed people leaped into the rivers to escape the gigantic walls of flames, only to be boiled alive there. They descended reluctantly to the hated House of Death.

People who claimed the mystique of the warrior had in fact become functionaries of the slaughterhouse, not different from the illegal immigrants who work at meatpacking plants, killing animals in an efficient, high-volume process worked out by industrial engineers. What do you do with all that blood? All those intestines and brains? It's all been worked out. The math has been done, the drawings rendered on drafting-tables.

Yes, we live in a sniper's world: a place of killing the defenseless from positions of impregnable safety.

In Homer's world, violence was still dangerous to the perpetrators. But the mystery remains of its mystique, its fascination, the whirlpool-like attraction of it for us primates (for chimpanzees commit murder too). It's a somber puzzle.

looking at evil

I've sat here for several minutes now, staring at the screen, wondering what to write.

It's not that there's nothing to write about. It's that there seems to be too much to write about. Any topic I might begin with feels like the beginning of a whole journey, a commitment. Everything is interconnected, and to raise one topic feels like it must be related to everything else in order to make sense, or to seem other than merely an isolated, irrelevant interest of mine.

Yesterday I received a new book in the mail--a favorite event for me. This was a small paperback entitled Monarchy, Aristocracy and the State in Europe 1300-1800 by Hillay Zmora. Why this? you might ask.

I was led to it by a particular stream of thought. Following the stream backwards, or, I suppose, upstream: I had arrived at an interest in the idea of aristocracy or a ruling class. The notion of a ruling class seemed to have arisen from the distinction between warriors and producers or farmers. This in turn seemed to have arisen from the emergence of distinct ways of life on two different kinds of landscape: the fertile ground of riverbanks for farmers, and the arid land of the steppes for warriors, who were nomadic pastoralists. Farming and pastoralism in turn seemed to be the evolved extensions of plant-gathering on the one hand and hunting on the other. These different economic activities were respectively engaged in by women and by men, and arose in their turn from more primitive foraging and scavenging. Our early and pre-human ancestors made their living by finding plants and meat to eat where they could.

Why was I interested in all this in the first place? I was investigating the question of evil: what is it, where did it come from? Is its origin in the brutality and hard-heartedness of pastoralism, in which herdsmen round up animals and slaughter them? Exploiting the weak and dumb in order to survive--and then transferring that attitude to one's fellow creatures, and developing an ethos of superiority based on physical prowess and violence? The ruling class.

Cats prey on mice, and mice don't like it. Does that make cats evil? Do they not deserve to live too? Nature seems not to have taken an opinion on good and evil. Does that mean they don't exist?

I'm concerned about the evils of our own time, and of the past century. The rise of mechanized weapons and mechanized bureaucracy seems to have created fertile fields for evil inflicted on a mass scale. Was this inevitable? If so, why? If not, why did it happen? Why is it still happening?

Hillay Zmora, in his book, starts out by saying that the modern European state, founded on human rights and the rule of law, was born from the violence of relentless warfare that had to be financed. Raising money for war was the basis of the modern state.

Yes, I'm curious about these things--they trouble me, and I'm going to keep looking.

the new racist

Yesterday I talked about reading Sven Lindqvist's book "Exterminate All the Brutes", which I continue to enjoy very much.

After writing my post, during the day, I came to a realization. Something in Lindqvist's book has caused me to look at things in a new way. The specific event was this: I discovered my own definition of the word racist: "someone who believes in the existence of races".

This was a further step in a series that was launched during my investigation into the thematic ideas of my story--specifically the idea of identity.

Before I started that research, I took it for granted that races were real--that something called race actually exists in nature. What could be more obvious? There are groups of dark-skinned people, and groups of light-skinned people, and groups of people sharing similarly formed eyes and hair-texture. They're strikingly different from each other.

Three things budged me off my conviction (which I held quite strongly) that races exist:

1. Reading about the discovery that all human beings currently on Earth are descended from a single woman--a literal Eve


2. Reading in Scientific American and other places that no clear genetic basis for race has been found--nor is it likely to be


3. Reading the book Us and Them by David Berreby, in which Berreby shows that race is a mental category created, like any mental category, to fulfill a purpose. And in the case of race, that purpose has always been to rationalize unjust treatment of others

Plus there are the obvious holes caused by the simple fact that people of different "races" can have children together--who then belong to which race? They have to choose one, like Barack Obama!

Those things pushed me away from the belief that there is such a thing in reality as race. I still assumed that the idea of race was a useful tag for certain purposes, and certainly it's a widespread notion.

Yesterday that notion too dropped away for me. Lindqvist in his book documents the long debate that existed in the European scientific community of the 19th century in which anthropologists wrestled with the question of why contact with Europeans led to the extermination of native populations everywhere: Australia, Africa, the Americas. The consensus came to be that it was "natural selection": that the strong "races" were killing off the weak--a natural and inevitable process.

Lindqvist's key point is that genocide, blame for which is now customarily laid at the feet of the Germans under Hitler because of the Holocaust, was actually already a firmly established process, if not policy, of colonialism, starting, he maintains, with Spain's colonization of the Canary Islands in 1478. The indigenous people were wiped out, every last one of them, in what was to be the type case for colonization.

In short, Hitler did not by any means "invent" genocide. Rather, he was jumping belatedly on a bandwagon that had already been rolling for hundreds of years. What made it shocking to Europeans was that it was carried out right in Europe, and not far out of sight and out of mind in the remote wilderness of other continents. The Jewish "race" could be identified, isolated, branded "inferior", and selected for extermination. The "Slavs" were also an inferior race--and likewise slated for destruction, so that their farmland could be taken over for the benefit of the master race.

Berreby shows in his book that our "tribal mind"--the part of us that divides the world into them and us--is very deep-seated, and not really liable to simple reprogramming by conscious decision. It seems to be more automatic, more visceral. But nonetheless, it's not supported by either facts or logic, and still less by the idea of justice. We put people into races when we want to control them or exploit them.

In Bernard Knox's excellent introduction to the Iliad, he refers to the writer Simone Weil's characterization of the Iliad as the poem par excellence about force as the center of human history. And Weil defined force thus: "force is what makes the person subjected to it into a thing."

The concept of race helps turn people into things. And things we can push around, move, destroy, and dispose of as we choose.

So I intend to stick to my new realization: there is no such thing as race, and anyone who believes that there is, is, by my definition, a racist.

"exterminate all the brutes"

Part of my problem in starting a fresh blog-post is not that I'm running out of ideas for posts, but that there are too many ideas--too many things to talk about. I find it intimidating that here, with my chance to talk about anything I want, I come up against the limits of what I can express--how much time and space I have to say whatever I may want to say. How well do I use the resources I've been given?

One very provocative line of reading and thinking lies with the book "Exterminate All the Brutes" by Sven Lindqvist which I'm making my way through.

The quotation marks are part of the title; it's a literary reference. Do you recognize it? It's from Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, first published in 1899. The line is due to the colonial despot Kurtz, summing up his attitude to the locals over whom he has absolute power, and giving voice as well, as Lindqvist shows, to the de facto agenda of European colonialism from its start.

With a book like this, there is always the danger that it will turn out to be politically correct preaching and finger-wagging about Eurocentrism and racism. This book is not the least bit like that. It is indeed about colonial cruelty and racism, things that Lindqvist clearly deplores, but his approach is that of a curious, puzzled, and highly motivated investigator. And his method, so personal and individual, has as much poetry in it as scholarship.

His "method", if it can even be called that, was to journey to North Africa, to the Sahara, with a computer and a mass of data discs containing relevant research texts. There, while making his way from desert city to desert city by bus and taxi, he studied, thought, and read--all the while taking in the strange and frightening colors of his surroundings. In a series of short chapterlets, almost always less than a page, he shows the connections he makes between the historical and literary material, interspersing his thoughts with descriptions of his journey, his dreams, and a few striking memories of his childhood in Sweden. It's a truly unique literary stew--and a marvelous one.

Taking Heart of Darkness as a watershed, a powerful literary indictment of colonialism as it was (and is) actually practiced, Lindqvist uncovers many of the specific sources and inspirations that Conrad drew on to create his story. (Conrad of course had also skippered a riverboat on the Congo for awhile.) One fascinating insight is that H. G. Wells's novel The War of the Worlds, published in 1898, was itself a work in this same stream: the cruel, pitiless, technologically superior Martians were simply the British or the French, and we hapless humans the "natives" of Earth, targeted for destruction so that our new overlords could harvest the coveted resources of our planet. Wells, like Conrad, was a critic of colonialism.

Lindqvist shows that Wells's vision was no exaggeration. One of his disc sources included Winston Churchill's account of the 1898 battle of Omdurman in the Sudan, in which 11,000 Sudanese were killed and 16,000 "wounded" (no one knows whether any of these actually did survive), while the British took only 48 casualties. As Lindqvist puts it, "the entire Sudanese army was annihilated without once having got their enemy within gunshot." In the words of Churchill, who was there:

It was a terrible sight, for as yet they had not hurt us at all, and it seemed an unfair advantage to strike thus cruelly when they could not reply.

The British soldiers' rifles grew so hot from continual firing that they had to exchange them for reserve rifles, rotating them in and out of action. Brass shell casings formed into hills beside the shooters. The climactic colonial "battle" for dominance of North Africa was a turkey-shoot.

Covering as much ground as it does, Lindqvist's book is brief: a total of 172 tersely written pages. And that's another thing: his prose, even in translation, is a model of vividness, clarity, and power. Picking a passage more or less at random:

Clusters of animals and people are incessantly on their way across the dried-out riverbed that is Tam's equivalent of Hyde Park. Weary camels lower their heads and blow at the dust to see if conceals anything edible, and patient goats graze pieces of paper. Women come with their burdens, not on their hips as in In Salah, but on their heads. Groups of boys drift around, every step tearing up a cloud.

But Tam has a specialty. It has a road--indeed, a motorway--on which if necessary you would be able to make your way across the river bed with polished shoes. It is reserved for the army.

An officer comes across this bridge on his way to the post office, four men with him in white lace-up boots and white helmets, the chinstraps under their noses. Outside the post office they march on the spot while he walks past the queue, demands a stamp, and sticks it on. Then six steps forward and another spell in neutral as he mails the letter--at which they all march on with the same solemn expression of satisfaction.

Not bad at all.

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.

credit history

In my inventory yesterday of the research books I read the previous day, I left out one: A History of Interest Rates by Sidney Homer.

I think I forgot it because I have been reading (and typing) it down here at the PC, instead of in the living-room as part of my daily reading period. I got my hardback copy of Homer's classic last February through Abebooks; it is marked (discreetly) with the stamps of a former owner, the Ambassador College Library in Pasadena, California.

I first learned about this book in 1994, when it was referenced by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg in their hefty jeremiad The Great Reckoning, a bold set of forecasts based on their theory of history. This theory was centered around the concept they called megapolitics: that the ultimate driver of historical change is and always has been the technology of weapons. In the last analysis, those who make things happen have always been those who held the greatest ability to project violence. In the view of these authors, the history of civilization has been essentially the story of how governments have controlled the freelance violence of individuals and small groups by being able to overpower them. But a continuing trend, from the beginning of history, has been the "democratization" of violence: the development of ever more powerful weapons that placed ever more violent power in the hands of individuals. We have gone from spears to muskets to handguns to machine guns to high-yield explosives to "tactical" nuclear weapons. In the long run, in their view, the question is whether governments, including legitimate, accountable ones, can hold the balance of power against violent individuals and splinter-groups.

The authors acknowledge that these thoughts are not cheerful. However, when you boil away all the ideology and talk, you arrive, basically, at Hobbes's "state of nature": what we now call the law of the jungle, or, in more sanitized Darwinian terms, survival of the fittest. Hobbes saw the rule of law as what separates us from that miserable condition in which men's lives are "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". But Davidson and Rees-Mogg are saying that the rule of law itself is only as good as the weapons that back it up. If the police are less well armed than the miscreants they are trying to control, then the state is lost just as surely as if its army is outmanned and outgunned by an invading force. The final backstop of the rule of law is violence.

I found their book fascinating, and in fact have read it twice. It even formed a key inspiration for another TV project that Warren and I created in the 1990s, a drama about a degenerated society in the near future (a project which has not got off the pad). For the record, I'm a nonviolent person myself, and believe firmly in the principle of negotiation rather than violence in achieving results. No matter how long it takes, agreement is a much more powerful force, as well as more humane, than simply imposing your will through violence. At the same time, we all know what happens when we operate by an "honor system" that has no one policing it. Even in a monastery, frictions and grievances arise.

The authors of The Great Reckoning were investors and investment advisers, and the book was addressed mainly to fellow capitalists. How do you make a buck in Hobbes's state of nature? One of their favorite authorities was Sidney Homer, and his monograph on the history of interest rates. When I first saw the title, A History of Interest Rates, I laughed. It sounds like a satire of dullness--a text that might be carried around by an ultra-nerdy sitcom character. Because I have long been interested in finance and capitalism, I actually felt some nerdish attraction for the book--although not enough to actually seek it out and buy it.

However, now that my own story of the ancient world is developing more of a financial component, I felt I had to get it. I've still read only the first 60 pages or so, but I find that it is even more interesting than I'd hoped. As Homer, a bond trader and partner of Salomon Brothers in New York, observes, interest rates are like a fever chart of society: peace, calm, and stability are reflected in low interest rates; and disorder, uncertainty, and fear are reflected in high interest rates.

Homer also observes that every major legal code, at least of the ancient world, from that of Hammurabi on, was brought in largely to regulate credit. From ancient times, Jews (and other compact societies) were forbidden to lend to each other at interest; loans were expected to be interest-free. Only loans to strangers or outsiders could bear interest. Eventually such rules created large financial and social problems, which were addressed in various ways.

The very word credit is related to words like credo and credible, relating to belief. To extend credit is to have faith. Faith in someone, faith in the future. Faith is the basis of religion.

My intuition tells me that this is an important theme, both for my story and for all of us.

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.

cheered up for the epic

After my "fake it till you make it" self-advice in yesterday's post, I did have a good (for me) writing day, pushing a few pages ahead in the morning, then coming back in the afternoon to start setting up notes for my next chapter. This is pretty much my fantasy of productivity: writing prose in the morning, then, in the afternoon when I'm feeling less creative, tinkering with administration and notes for the coming chapters. Yesterday was an instance of that, and I felt good. I actually cheered myself up!

Partly as a result of that, I think, I slept better last night. I dreamed that I was stuck in a massive traffic-jam on a convoluted freeway system, but that I found a way through, to skip past the worst of the jam to get where I was going. I couldn't believe my good fortune.

We'll see how today goes, but yesterday I felt a distinct shift in my attitude.

Meanwhile, in my afternoon reading, I was very pleased to come across, in Toynbee's A Study of History, a brief reference to the development of the epic genre. Here is an extract:

The Saga and the Epic arise in response to a new mental need, a new awareness of strong individual personalities and of momentous public events. "That lay is praised of men the most which ringeth newest in their ears," Homer declares. Yet there is one thing in an epic lay more highly prized than its novelty, and that is the intrinsic human interest of the story. The interest in the present predominates just so long as the storm and stress of the Heroic Age continues; but the social paroxysm is transitory; as the storm abates, the lovers of Epic and Saga come to feel that life in their time has grown relatively tame. They cease to prefer new lays to old, and the latter-day minstrel, responding to his hearers' change of mood, repeats and embellishes the tales of the older generation. In this later age the art of Epic and Saga attained its literary zenith. "Drama...develops in the home country, Epic among migrating peoples."

I regard my own work as an epic, but I want to find out more--all I can--about what exactly an epic is. I need to know my genre.

Here is an extract from N. G. L. Hammond's A History of Greece to 322 BC:

The comparative study of heroic ages has shed light also upon the genesis and development of epic poetry. It appears to originate under the troubled conditions of a heroic age as oral poetry, composed and transmitted by minstrels, even though the art of writing survived from an earlier civilization. The earlier epic lays are usually short and deal with the exploits of one or more heroes. The later lays develop in length and in technique, are recited as court poetry, and deal with leaders of the princely class both male and female. In this later stage the interest of the poet tends to shift from the exploits of the heroes to the study of heroic character, and nonheroic themes such as religion or manticism or matters of general rather than personal scope may begin to intrude.

As I see it, epic is the genre par excellence of heroes. While every fictional work has a hero or heroine, epic is the genre that deals with the hero as such. It is therefore the antithesis of modern works dealing with antiheroes. (I recall hearing the movie star Gregory Peck more than once deploring the rise of the antihero in Hollywood moviemaking, which he felt made for insipid and uninspiring movies. Peck himself of course was the perfect Hollywood heroic actor, by nature unsuited to antiheroic roles.)

And what is a hero? Nowadays that question has been best addressed by Joseph Campbell. The hero is he or she who, taking courage, journeys to the seed-source of universal creation--a place within--to find the new forms that will energize and give new life to his or her society. Societies age and die, as ours is aging and perhaps dying. New life is found only by those few who have the courage, vision, and independence to make the hazardous journey to find it. These are the heroes.

Those, anyway, are some of my thoughts on it. It's not that epic is a larger type of story, it's that other types of stories are little pieces of epic.

the darkening age

Jeepers, still coming up dry as I sit down here to write a post. Maybe it is time to go back to jotting down ideas for blog-posts as they come to me during the day; for they do come to me. Sometime after I publish each post I usually have the thought, "Oh yeah, that's what I've been wanting to write about!"

Well, today I'm quite underslept (late to bed, early wakeup) and I don't feel up to much in terms of anything to say. I've dutifully typed some notes into the PC, from Arnold J. Toynbee's A Study of History (volume 1 of the abridged version) and from The Golden Bough (also an abridged version--where did people ever find the time to read 12-volume works?).

I'm finding Toynbee's writing a bit pompous, but also powerful, bold, and provocative--in other words, very good. I love his field of inquiry: how civilizations arise, flourish, and decline. He's plowing ground similar to that covered by Oswald Spengler in his The Decline of the West, the book that so inspired the young Joseph Campbell. I got that out of the library a couple of years ago, but found it quite heavy going. I would need to get my own copy that I could highlight at will (I'm a destroyer of books--ruining them for others while making them more useful and valuable for myself).

Toynbee has identified 21 civilizations (or "civilizing societies") that have existed since humanity first took up agriculture. The one in which I'm sitting and writing right now he dubbed Western Christendom. By his reckoning, every civilization evolves along the same broad lines, prospering for awhile under the impetus of an initial creative and spiritual energy, gradually settling into a universal state run by a dominant minority. Along with the dominant minority grows a church, a religion within the universal state, and a proletariat of people excluded from the dominant minority. Eventually, as the state ossifies into a more or less oppressive structure, it cracks and is overthrown by forces within and without. In general, the church that grew within the shelter of the universal state becomes the spiritual germ of another civilization, as the Christian Church became the germ of Western (and also Eastern) Christendom after the demise of the Roman Empire. In the meantime there is an interregnum or "heroic age" in which barbarians contend for the scraps of empire--what in our history we refer to as the Dark Ages.

Fascinating. I can't help but wonder: what is the "church" of our society now? The notion of "Christendom" has become weak and anachronistic, even though there are still many Christians in our society. But in Canada, as in Europe, the churches are filled--well, partly filled--mainly with old people; their congregations are dying off. The U.S. is more aggressively "Christian", but the society itself is violent and uncivil, with "Christianity" apparently doing little but attempting to put the brakes on certain aspects of science, such as evolutionary biology and biotechnology.

Western society is certainly aging. Who would deny that we're moving closer to senescence in our aggressive, materialistic culture, in which fewer and fewer people vote, and which is gradually coming to be steered by unpopular people who, as Toynbee puts it, rule rather than lead. There is disaffection within and also resentment without--ingredients leading toward the dissolution of the society and the lapse into a new "heroic age" of barbarism and warlords. Right now, it's not easy to pick which spiritual tradition or idea might form the nucleus of a new society, something creative to arise from the corpse of our own.

the dead hand

Coming down a bit early today to do my post. Rain drips down from a drenched cotton-batting sky. Kimmie's office is having a barbecue at a coworker's house. I'll be heading up in due course, so I wanted to take care of this, and also get some afternoon reading in before attending the gathering.

I've been meaning to do a post based on the powerful and chilling term dead hand. Here is my faithful Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 10th edition:

dead hand 2: the oppressive influence of the past

The term swam up into my mind when I was writing something a few weeks ago. When I looked it up I was surprised at its strength. The oppressive influence of the past is a vast topic, and, phrased that way, also chilling.

It feels very relevant to the writer of historical fiction. One question I sometimes ask myself is, Why write (or read) historical fiction? Robert McKee's answer (in his storytelling text Story):

Many contemporary antagonisms are so distressing or loaded with controversy that it's difficult to dramatize them in a present-day setting without alienating the audience. Such dilemmas are often best viewed at a safe distance in time.

He of course is talking about screenwriting, and how to justify the tremendous added production expense of setting a story in a past period, but I believe the argument translates to fiction-writing as well.

While I'm sure there's something to that, I don't believe McKee's explanation gets to the heart of the matter. I'm thinking that historical stories have, for one thing, a quality of "once upon a time"--they evoke the mythical realm of the fairytale. Closely related to that is that they show people of remote times to be the same as we are now, merely with different fashions, social codes, language, and technology (which in turn reveals all these things to be incidental to the human condition). The problem of life, of how to live, was ever the same. The human condition has an eternal quality, which points to questions of meaning, of the spiritual.

At the same time, those very differences call attention to the corresponding aspects of life in our own time: we are thereby made aware of our own existence by seeing it through the eyes of another time, so to speak. We may notice afresh, and appreciate--or question--the social structures and things in our world that we usually take for granted.

And now: the dead hand of the past. In Ulysses Stephen Dedalus says, "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." I'm sure many neurons have fired in the effort to unpack his meaning. Mircea Eliade, in his The Myth of the Eternal Return, says that for archaic man,

neither the objects of the external world nor human acts...have any autonomous intrinsic value. Objects or acts acquire a value, and in so doing become real, because they participate, after one fashion or another, in a reality that transcends them.... [H]uman acts...are repeated because they were consecrated in the beginning...by gods, ancestors, or heroes.

Later on he says:

[I]nterest in the "irreversible" and the "new" in history is a recent discovery in the life of humanity. On the contrary, archaic humanity...defended itself, to the utmost of its powers, against all the novelty and irreversibility which history entails.

For archaic man--who, after all, is us under our Calvin Klein briefs--historical acts, that is, acts that were not performed originally by a god or hero or ancestor, are necessarily imperfect and in fact sinful. It is the accumulation of these sinful, profane acts that is wiped out each year with the ancient New Year festival--a rite we still practice with our saturnalian New Year's party and list of resolutions. In the ancient world, much more than now, life started afresh after the New Year. History was erased like an Etch-a-Sketch and everyone was reborn.

What I seem to be creeping toward, here, is the idea that the dead hand is the accumulated dead weight of profane history--the irreversible events that have piled one on another since the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden, or since the Big Bang, depending on your view. The dead hand makes its way into spiritual thinking as the doctrine of original sin, or as karma: what was done in the past, by people we no longer identify with as ourselves, catches up with us.

The dead hand says that past and present are connected, not only in obvious ways, but in a deep mysterious way that affects each of us like a powerful current we usually don't even know we're swimming in--or drowning in.

I'm not quite sure, but I think I'm suggesting that historical fiction, historical drama, brings us closer to this reality by showing us the relativity of time. The past is now if we know how to look.