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PEOPLE LIKE US
for James Wright
There are more like us. All over the world
There are confused people, who can’t remember
The name of their dog when they wake up, and people
Who love God but can’t remember where
He was when they went to sleep. It’s
All right. The world cleanses itself this way.
A wrong number occurs to you in the middle
Of the night, you dial it, it rings just in time
To save the house. And the second-story man
Gets the wrong address, where the insomniac lives,
And he’s lonely, and they talk, and the thief
Goes back to college. Even in graduate school,
You can wander into the wrong classroom,
And hear great poems lovingly spoken
By the wrong professor. And you find your soul,
And greatness has a defender, and even in death you’re safe.
~ Robert Bly
**
Oriana:
Let’s re-read that last stanza:
You can wander into the wrong classroom,
And hear great poems lovingly spoken
By the wrong professor. And you find your soul,
And greatness has a defender, and even in death you’re safe.
Only a great lover of poetry could have written this:
And you find your soul,
And greatness has a defender, and even in death you’re safe.
It's no small matter: finding your soul, becoming a defender of greatness (Harold Bloom was on a crusade for greatness), and finally, as I read it, not being afraid even of death, having lived your life in communion with greatness.
Some may say that that's overreaching. But you can wander into the wrong classroom and happen to hear a statement that can deeply affect your life. You can be passing between two rows of stacks in a library, and a book may suddenly fall at your feet — and what’s more, open itself on the pages that you need to read. Mystical as that sounds, I’m simply describing one of my experiences.
Was Jung right? Are there no accidents? I’m not prepared to go there — and I don’t think there is a clear answer. If we’ve lived long enough, we’ve witnessed and perhaps personally experienced some purely destructive accidents, the sheer perversity of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Jungians might then plead a broader perspective. Theists would posit the Divine Plan. Statisticians could invoke probabilities and “rare events.”
A rule in statistics states that “rare events” do not happen. Your best predictive strategy is to bet on the average. And yet, and yet . . . If we live long enough, we'll discover that rare events do happen. That doesn't contradict the law of cause and effect. It's rather that we can never disentangle all the complexities. Instead, let’s rejoice if something good happens unexpectedly — grace or coincidence, it doesn’t matter.
I say: three cheers for the “positive accidents” that Bly celebrates in “People Like Us,” one of his most popular poems. It’s not quite a classic, but it deserves to be.
Billy Collins would likely try too hard for humor here, possibly asking if you’d rather win a metaphysics debate or receive a nice discount on something you never needed in the first place. But Bly chooses to be completely serious, even if it means straining the reader’s credulity. True, there may be people who wake up and, for a while at least, can’t remember the name of their dog, but the other examples are of huge matters. The probability is low, but not zero. And that’s all that matters. We are delighted to learn about a house saved from fire and the thief who turns away from a life of crime — all due to some trivial mistake or twist of affairs.
the dove orchid, Habenaria radiataLilith:
I love the Robert Bly poem. It brought me back to my days of being an English graduate student, and I certainly may have stumbled into the wrong classroom and heard the wrong professor reciting a poem.
Oriana:
Wrong classroom or the right one . . . Those were in some ways the glory days — we were learning and discovering, roaming through the wonderland of campuses. It’s such a special world of its own, and such special years.
Adam Zagajewski, who’s traveled and lived both in the US and Europe for many years, observed that there is America and then “there are the islands — the universities.” At their best, those are the Isles of Paradise.
Milosz too commented on American vs European universities, calling the European ones stingy and the American ones lavish. There is indeed a certain feeling of luxury about an American campus — it’s like a grand country estate.
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MISREADING HAROLD BLOOM: THE ANXIETY AND INFLUENCE OF A CRITIC
~ “Sometimes all you remember of a teacher is a voice — “a way of happening, a mouth.” I never met Harold Bloom, but like many of his readers, I thought I knew his voice very well. Bloom, who died on Monday, wrote like a teacher; his every utterance projected pedagogically, and I always assumed he wrote much as he talked in class. This quality had great appeal but wasn’t an unmixed blessing on the page. He wrote ceaselessly, torrentially, and as he churned away he easily became vatic, windy, merely reckless where he had once been adventurous. Late Bloom repeated and recirculated his favored obsessions, cross-referencing himself in ecstasies of unearned fulfillment.
He was easy to parody; I praised and derided Bloom at different times, and once succumbed to the mischievous parody itch, as surely generations of his students had, too: “Only Don Quixote can rival the fat knight, Sir John Falstaff, and even Emerson at his strongest— stronger, here, even than his belated rival, Nietzsche — is not quite a match for his ultimate precursor, J’s Yahweh, though I concede that the greatest Jewish genius after Jesus, Sigmund Freud, would not have agreed with my heretical opinion.”
So he wrote too much, and wrote too fast. But the powerful writer is easy to parody because of a certain strangeness and consistency (think of Cormac McCarthy, whom Bloom so championed); in this sense, Bloom was a wonderfully particular stylist. My teasing version is, perhaps, just frustrated admiration. You mistook him for no one else: the late, popular style was a faded fan, but it was still recognizably Bloom’s old peacockery. The leaping links, hieratic cross-referencing, and amusingly camp self-involvement— the sense you got that everything made sense inside Bloom’s head, that everyone connected with everyone else within the huge Oedipal family he had made of literature — had been there from the beginning, somewhat masked by the scholarly density and relative propriety of his early work. There is a way in which Bloom was always speaking his own private language, and gradually publicizing that privacy on his own odd terms. Maybe that’s what strong critics do.
*
There were several Blooms, or perhaps we should think of a pistil and its petals. At the center of these selves was the teacher who gave his celebrated classes at Yale for nearly fifty years. From this core of private reading and public sharing came a flaming variety of performances: the early champion of Romanticism, at a time (the late nineteen-fifties) when English departments, still in thrall to the scrupulous meanness of T. S. Eliot and the New Criticism, were reluctant to take romantically “religious” poets like Shelley and Blake very seriously; the Freudian theorist who speculated powerfully about how writers struggle with their predecessors; the critic who (along with Robert Alter and Frank Kermode) changed the way that literary studies appraised the Bible; and the mainstream popularizer, a well-paid exhorter with some residual insight, who issued books such as “The Western Canon,” “Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages,” and “Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds.”
The early work, including “Poetry and Repression” and “The Anxiety of Influence,” customized a lexicon of somewhat forbidding rhetorical terms—clinamen, askesis, agon—which Bloom then employed with joyously irresponsible confidence, like some English aristocrat who insists on using his mangled French everywhere he goes, and at high volume, too. The technical language fell away as he wrote his more popular books, such as “The Western Canon” and “Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human,” but the structures of thought that underlay that rhetoric did not. I’m reminded of one of his loveliest formulations, his insight that Shakespeare’s great soliloquists change and develop by “overhearing themselves.” Bloom can be faulted for not changing and developing, for not overhearing himself attentively enough. But we, the audience, were lucky enough to get the chance to listen in on his declamations.
Take the Freudian “map of misreading” that Bloom drew and then lovingly embroidered over the decades. Like most good inventions, it is simple, easy to use, and above all, obviously true. This is why everyone still uses the term “anxiety of influence,” and knows what the phrase means, without having to have read a word of Bloom. Writers learn to write by reading and adapting their predecessors; the true originals are very rare, which is why critics talk so much about “traditions” and “influence.” Literary studies, when Bloom was coming of age, tended to advance a rather smoothly linear notion of inheritance and invention: writers took what they needed from their great precursors and discarded the rest. You can detect the traces of the predecessor in the inheritor, even if the inheritor disowns any knowledge of the inheritance. That was about the Freudian limit of the New Criticism.
Bloom went much further: he was interested in precisely those traces. In Bloom’s scheme, literature is like a quarreling family, and the critic becomes the Freudian analyst who can sort out the mutilated patterns of stress and resistance. To come after a great poet, like Arnold coming after Wordsworth and Keats, is a source of anxiety. The younger poet deals with this anxiety by “strongly misreading” the more powerful predecessor, so as to be able to swerve away from his massive and obstructive presence. The weak misreader is the poet who gives in to that anxiety of influence. But all poets, strong or weak, are misreaders of their predecessors, because there is no easy, disinterested way to read one’s ancestors, just as there is no easy, disinterested way to be a child of one’s parents. As many have charged, the theory works best within a patriarchal canon. But you could, for instance, make a perfectly Bloomian case that Virginia Woolf’s refusal to grant any greatness to her precursor, George Eliot, in “A Room of One’s Own” —a book in which Jane Austen and Emily Brontë are the only writers praised as having written as themselves, as entirely free women—represents a massive psychic and literary swerve around the dominating presence of that great Victorian whom Woolf both admired and had to surpass.
And who was Bloom strongly misreading? If we were doing a Bloomian reading of Bloom, we might notice his intense hostility to T. S. Eliot, and we might notice that Eliot, in his essay, from 1919, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” had elaborated a theory about the relation of new writers to their predecessors. Eliot argued that when a new work of art is created, the tradition that preceded it is forced to shift a bit: “something . . . happens simultaneously to all the works of art that preceded it.”
Both Bloom and Eliot see tradition as a kind of family. Eliot sees how we push around our ancestors; Bloom sees how our ancestors push us around. In this sense, Bloom was haunted by the New Criticism within which he grew up, which is why the word “strong” wobbles so much in his work. Bloom uses it Freudianly, to mean a writer’s ability to wrestle with the father figure. But he also seems to use the word to mean something like aesthetic power, where “strong” just means “great”: Shakespeare is a “strong misreader” of Marlowe because . . . he was a greater poet. Indeed, as Bloom got older, and as he wrote more generally for wider audiences, “strong” became a rather lazy description for writers he approved of. At such moments, the old value system of the New Criticism (in which, say, Shakespeare was just deemed a “greater” writer than Milton, or Wordsworth was declared ineffably “finer” than Shelley) could be heard speaking through Bloom’s Freudian terminology.
So was Bloom a weak misreader of Eliot and the New Criticism, or a strong one? What will last of his work? Surely the anxiety of influence really does enrich our sense of how literary inheritance functions. Its permanence seems assured. But Bloom’s Freudian turn can also be seen as part of a larger movement in literary criticism. Despite his assertion that he had nothing to do with deconstruction (the most famous export of Yale’s English department in the seventies and eighties), despite his tiresome denunciations of feminism and theory and “political correctness,” there’s a natural alliance between Bloom’s way of reading and deconstruction, both modes scouring texts for the secrets they cannot successfully repress. And Bloom’s work on religion (his book “The American Religion,” from 1992, is inspired and insane), and on the Hebrew Bible has had a wide and decisive influence.
Even among the popular hasty writing, the manufactured introductions (all those Chelsea House editions), the endless and undemanding arrangements of his beloved “Western canon”— like someone rather obsessively patting and plumping his cushion, to make his fond seat comfier — there are always stray insights and fugitive jewels to be found. Bloom loved Emerson’s (very Freudian) line about how, in the great writers, we recognize our own rejected thoughts—“they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.” That’s true of Bloom, too, at his best—both the inspired analyst and the eloquent returner of those rejected thoughts.” ~
~ James Wood, The New Yorker, October 16, 2019
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EMERSON’S AFFIRMATION OF A “SECOND BEST”
~ “Though Melville and Henry James thought Emerson knew too little of loss, they were mistaken. The three people he loved best died early: his first wife, Ellen; his brother Charles; his little son Waldo. We all know suffering and evil: Emerson had the wisdom not to let himself be darkened prematurely. Stephen Whicher is the best guide:
“His later thought is characteristically an affirmation of a second best. If a perfect freedom was clearly out of reach, man’s fate as he found it still turned out to allow him adequate means to free himself. The two chief second-best means of freedom that Emerson found were “obedience to his genius” and “the habit of the observer” — Vocation and Intellect.” ~ Harold Bloom
Oriana:
Emerson managed to avoid depression. He turned to his work. If only that kind of wisdom had visited me earlier in life, I dare not contemplate how much useless suffering I would have avoided . . . But it would be ungracious to complain rather than celebrate the fact that the wisdom of turning to productivity visited me at all, no matter how late.
As for affection rather than passion, I don’t see affection as “second best.” Together with vocation, it’s a secure foundation for contentment. We need not yearn for happiness. It is a great blessing to have contentment. And I wouldn’t call contentment “second best” either.
No, not a portrait of Emerson, but to me a figure of a solitary walker evokes a special kind of gentle contentment.
*
“Good and evil are a great deal more complex
than a princess and a dragon. Is not the dragon the hero of his own story?” ~ Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus
*
BOOKS THAT TRY TO EXPLAIN WHY OUR WORLD IS IN A BAD SHAPE
Democracy for Realists by Christopher Achens and Larry Bartels
~ "Democracy for Realists is an eye-opening and sober look at the data on democracy and what makes it effective/ineffective. Hint: people are stupid. Or as my favorite Winston Churchill quotes goes: “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”
We romanticize democracy. We like to blame politicians and bureaucrats and argue that if the people were just more engaged, more educated, had more direct say in their government, things would be better. Unfortunately, the data show pretty much all of this to be untrue. People regularly vote against their own interests, are ignorant of the issues, and even when they are well-informed, they are easily swayed by group identities and emotion. Yes, that includes me and you.
The best-functioning democracies are those that have large hierarchies built into them separating power from the popular vote. Unfortunately, due to technology and political pressure, those hierarchies have been slowly dismantled over the last 100 years or so. The book is heavily focused on the United States, but I’m sure most liberal, democratic countries will see themselves in this book. Incredibly well-researched. And more than a few very uncomfortable conclusions.
Notable Quotes:
“Well-informed citizens, too, have come in for their share of criticism, since their well-organized ‘ideological’ thinking often turns out to be just a rather mechanical reflection of what their favorite group and party leaders have instructed them to think.”
“Elections do not force successful candidates to reflect the policy preferences of the median voter.”
“When voters got a chicken in every pot at election time, they usually liked the incumbent party’s ideology just fine, whatever it happened to be. But when incomes eroded and unemployment escalated, they became ripe for defection to anyone who promised to bring home the poultry.”
The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt and Gregory Lukianoff
Haidt and Lukianoff argue with a lot of convincing data that adolescents today are maturing emotionally and psychologically at lower rates and later than ever before. Their main targets are:
The ballooning dysfunction of school bureaucracies, who are now treating kids as customers rather than students.
The trend of “helicopter parenting,” where paranoid parents are coddling their children, protecting them from everything that is uncomfortable and/or potentially threatening.
The heightened expectations for academic achievement — most childhood development happens through playing with other kids. Kids these days play less than ever before, and when they do play, they are often isolated. Instead, they’re busy doing homework and prepping for college applications, sometimes as young as kindergarten.
And, of course, there’s the obligatory “social media is ruining everything” chapter that we all know and love.
Let kids be kids. Teach them independence. Let them get hurt and figure out their problems themselves. Stop with the homework.
Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier
Free information sounds great on paper, but it causes all sorts of deep, systemic problems when implemented at scale. For one, it spawns an extremely aggressive and intrusive advertising model. For two, the economics of data collection create a situation where a small number of servers collect all the data and gain terrifying amounts of power…and then inevitably abuse that power (*cough* Facebook). For three, when software eats the world, it generates greater inequality, not less. For four, when all information becomes free, it becomes valueless and meaningless. People feel entitled to start believing whatever they want, since it’s always unclear what information is more valuable than other information. For five–he can keep going… and does.
“At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 140,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only thirteen people. Where did all those jobs disappear to? And what happened to the wealth that those middle-class jobs created? This book is built to answer questions like these, which will only become more common as digital networking hollows out every industry, from media to medicine to manufacturing.”
The Death of Expertise by Tom Nichols
With our modern obsessions of freedom and equality and happiness, Nichols argues that we’ve taken these rights and applied them to a domain where they don’t belong: truth.
People feel “the right” to have their opinions and beliefs respected, even though they are not qualified, have no credentials or offer no expertise. Pundits on TV claim that their beliefs that climate change doesn’t exist, or that vaccinations are harmful, are just as valid — and should be respected just as much — as their scientific counterparts. Nichols’ blame is scattershot. Everything from the usual internet gripes, to cable television, to the grade inflation happening in school, to school bureaucracies treating students as customers rather than students.
Practice some humility. Trust in science. Trust in people who have decades of experience in a field. In many ways, the issue today, above all others, is trust.
“The bigger problem is that we’re proud of not knowing things. Americans have reached a point where ignorance, especially of anything related to public policy, is an actual virtue. To reject the advice of experts is to assert autonomy, a way for Americans to insulate their increasingly fragile egos from ever being told they’re wrong about anything.”
“We are supposed to “agree to disagree,” a phrase now used indiscriminately as little more than a conversational fire extinguisher. And if we insist that not everything is a matter of opinion, that some things are right and others are wrong … well, then we’re just being jerks, apparently.”
“When feelings matter more than rationality or facts, education is a doomed enterprise.”
Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam
The title refers to the fact that more Americans bowl than in the past. Yet, there are fewer blowing leagues than ever before. Meaning: more and more, people are spending time alone.
It’s not just bowling leagues that are disappearing. Churches, parent-teacher associations, political activists, neighborhood watches, bridge clubs, veterans organizations. You name a community, and it’s likely disappearing.
When the apocalypse comes, it will look like: People dying alone in their homes, without anyone knowing.
“Community has warred incessantly with individualism for preeminence in our political hagiology… The dominant theme is simple: For the first two-thirds of the twentieth century a powerful tide bore Americans into ever deeper engagement in the life of their communities, but a few decades ago— silently, without warning— that tide reversed and we were overtaken by a treacherous rip current. Without at first noticing, we have been pulled apart from one another and from our communities over the last third of the century.”
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/5-books-that-explain-why-it-seems-the-world-is-so-messed-up?utm_source=pocket-newtab
This week's blog discussions led me to think there is something common to several of them, in what amounts to a retreat from the objective and into the subjective. People don't simply say everyone has their own opinion, they feel all opinions are equally justified, and none need to refer to any actual facts, evidence or demonstrable truths. I'm entitled to my own opinion and so are you, and no one can prove any objective validation or rebuttal to either. In fact, just as in the huge campaign now operating to undermine any sense of what is true , casting doubt on all news as "fake news” — there is an insistence on "alternative facts," that is, an alternative reality tailored to the subjective needs and desires of the individual. Any and Every individual.
So, not only do I have my own precious opinion, I have my own facts and my own reality. And so do you. This is a nightmare scenario. It may be an active strategy in the political mess we are suffering through, but it undermines the very foundation of society. Instead of science we have hype, the spin doctors manipulations unchecked by the need to respect objective measurements, scientific truths, or the demands of reason. Here a rose is not a rose, but whatever the moment requires, for whatever result is desired. Lie and lie and lie, and soon lies look more solid, more real, than any truth. Fact finding and the fact finders are discounted as simply another possible story, another personal opinion.
Soon it seems nothing can be trusted, everything may be part of someone's conspiracy to remake the world in their own image...give it the shape of their own ambition, their own fears, hatreds, and desires. It is hard not to be infected with the accompanying paranoia — when a good man dies suddenly, hard not to think murder or assassination. There are no limits to remaking reality, no rules, no laws.
This is more than the work of politicians, dictators and demagogues. As noted, children no longer have childhoods the way they used to. Free play has almost disappeared, replaced by play dates, organized activities for sports or other "enrichment," and early, steady labor at producing the "right" record, and gaining the "best" skills to ensure acceptance into the kind of schools and programs that ensure "success." And if all that fails, hire someone to fake the credentials and secure placement anyway. Knowledge and achievement have themselves been robbed of authenticity, of even the need for authenticity, replaced by hype, scam, all the machinations of the expert con man.
So we have a world where self esteem replaces actual accomplishment...forgetting if everyone wins no one does, because the endeavor itself no longer has any value. We have a world where many prefer gaming to living, spending time and resources in "virtual" worlds as self-created, self-defined "avatars." We have a world where science can be ridiculed and denied because we have a difference of opinion with the facts, and opinions matter more than facts.
Of course this is not all inclusive, but it is pervasive enough to be frightening and threatening, pervasive enough to cause great damage. Damage already seen in the increase in hate crimes and hate speech, in the loss of protective regulations meant to address issues like pollution and climate change, in the abandonment of allies, the cozying up to dictators and enabling of destruction, even genocide of people once our allies.
It can be overwhelming, and I fear it will all get much worse. It reminds me more of a psychosis than anything else, and I wonder how we can heal this terrible madness.
Oriana:
It’s been said many times that Trump is a symptom and not a cause — but I think that to a degree he IS the cause. It’s one thing when the lunatic fringe indulges in conspiracy theories and bizarre beliefs and ideas. It’s much more serious when the head of state blatantly lies and invents his “alternative facts.” When that happens, the whole country is damaged and debased in multiple ways.
It’s the old story of the country collapsing because there is something rotten at the very heart of things — meaning that the king is insane, criminal, or otherwise seriously dysfunctional.
It’s not the first time in history. True, Hitler’s Germany (or Stalin’s Russia) wasn’t the exact image of what’s happening now, but the similarities that exist are quite frightening — for instance, the campaign to discredit the press as creators of fake news and even the enemy of the people — a phrase used especially often in Stalinist Soviet Union. The massive effort to replace reality with some politically expedient untruth is the very essence of authoritarianism, as Hannah Arendt never ceased to warn.
“What is truth?” Pontius Pilate asks during the trial of Jesus — perhaps the most startling question in the entire Bible. Of course there is no absolute answer to that huge question; in our post-Nietzschean, scientific era we recognize that we have only partial truths. But “partial truth” doesn’t mean “no truth.” And ascertainable facts exist: the secret meeting with the Russian ambassador either did or did not take place. Stalin really did sign a non-aggression pact with Hitler, and at first the two were allies. The Civil War really was about slavery — that’s not just an opinion. We must guard real (evidence-based) as opposed to “alternative facts.” It’s not just that our sanity depends on it. So does democracy and the rule of law.
*
~ “Trump's defense strategy: The FBI is lying. The CIA is lying. The NSA is lying. Half a dozen committees of the US Congress are lying. Career diplomats are lying. His former attorney is lying (from jail). His former campaign manager is lying (from jail). His former national security advisor is lying (under threat of jail). CNN is lying. NBC is lying. CBS is lying. ABC is lying. PBS is lying. FOX News has just joined them in lying. Hundreds of newspapers and radio stations are lying. The Internet is lying. The Ukrainians are lying. The Chinese are lying. The Australians are lying. Nancy Pelosi is lying. Adam Schiff is lying. All of the Democrats are lying. More and more Republicans are lying. All of the pollsters are lying.
And Donald Trump is the only person telling the truth.” ~ Robert Clark Young
*
But in spite of all that is wrong with man-made world, there is still the beauty of the natural world: amethyst eyes from Uruguay
*
THE SHIFTING TIDES OF KKK
~ “Ku Klax Klan actually formed after the Civil War, during the Reconstruction period. Then it was entirely contained within the South, mostly in the rural South. It [was] all men. There were violent attacks on people who were engaged, or [wanted] to be engaged, in the Reconstruction state, [including] freed blacks, southern reconstructionists, politicians and northerners who move to the South. That collapses for a variety of reasons in the 1870s.
Then, the Klan is reborn in the teens, but becomes really big in the early 1920s. And that is the second Klan. That is probably the biggest organized outburst of white supremacy in American history, encompassing millions of members or more. ... And that's not in the South, [it's] primarily in the North. It's not marginal. It runs people for office. It has a middle class base. They have an electoral campaign. They are very active in the communities. And they have women's Klans, who are very active and very effective in some of the communities. That dissolves into mostly scandals around the late ‘20s.
Then there's some fascist activity around the wars — pro-German, some Nazi activity in the United States — not sizable, but obviously extremely troubling.
The Klan and white supremacy reemerge in a bigger and more organized way around the desegregation and civil rights movement — again, mostly in the South, and back to that Southern model: vicious, violent, defensive, Jim Crow and white rights in the South.
And then it kind of ebbs. After a while, it kind of comes back again in the late '80s and the early 21st Century as another era. And then there's kind of a network of white supremacism that encompasses the Klan, which is more peripheral by this time. Also Neo-Nazi influence is coming as white power skinheads, racist music, and also neo-Nazi groups. The Klans tend to be super nationalist, but these neo-Nazi groups have a big international agenda.
Then the last wave is where we are now, which is the Internet appears. The movement has been in every other era as movement of people in physical space like in meetings, rallies, protests and demonstrations and so forth. It becomes primarily a virtual world, and as you can see, has its own consequences — many consequences. It's much harder to track. And then there are these blurred lines between all these various groups that get jumbled together as the alt-right and people who come from the more traditional neo-Nazi world. We're in a very different world now.
~ That's a long history. You mentioned that, for a variety of reasons, the Klan in the Reconstruction era collapsed. What are some of the factors that contributed to that?
I would say two things that mostly contributed to that ebb over time.
One is the white supremacist world, writ large, is very prone to very serious infighting. Internal schisms are quite profound in collapsing white supremacists, even as an entire movement, over time.
It's almost always power and money. So, for example, the '20s Klan — I say "Klan" but in every era there were multiple Klans, they all have different names, they all have different leaders — they are trying to extract money from their groups, and they are all fighting about money .... and then over power, and who controls the power, because white supremacy groups don't elect their leaders right away. To be a leader just means to grab power and control. So there's a lot of contention in these groups of control.
It's not ideas. Ideas aren't that central. They have these certain key ideas that they promulgated — race and anti-Semitic ideas — but the fine points of ideological discussion don't really occur that much in white supremacist groups, nor do they get people that agitated. It's not like in other kinds of groups, where people might have various versions of ideas, versions of ideologies. [The Klan] just have kind of core beliefs. But they do tend to fight over ideas for money, power and access to the media.
So that's the fighting. The other thing is, in different waves of history, there are prosecutions, either by the police or civil prosecutions that collapse groups and movements. Sometimes, there's kind of a blind eye to white supremacist organizing, but at other times there is really successful either civil or state prosecutions of these groups that do debilitate them.
Certain groups, like the Klan, tend to rise and fall based on the threats to who is in power. The 1870s Klan [was] based on the Southern racial state formed during slavery being threatened by Reconstruction. In the 1920s, the idea was that political power [was] being threatened by this wave of immigrants. The 1920s Klan [was] very anti-Catholic, as well as racist and anti-Semitic. Part of this anti-Catholicism [was] based on the idea that Catholics were going to start controlling politics as well as the police.
Right now, we have an extremely heterogeneous group that we might call white supremacists. So some of them, probably the smallest group, are nationalistic. And probably the larger group are not particularly nationalistic. This is why it's hard to make generalizations. It's not the case that nationalist fervor just finds itself in the white supremacist movement. The person accused of the shooting in Pittsburgh is an example. If you look at [his] writings, they're not nationalistic, they're in fact anti-nationalistic. And that's pretty common with white supremacy today — some of them have this sense that their mission is this pan-Aryan mission. They're fighting global threats to whites and creating a white international defense. So that's not a nationalist project, that's an internationalist project.
And the other reason is there's this idea among white supremacists in the United States that the national government is ZOG — Zionist Occupation Government — and that's a shorthand way of saying that the national government is secretly controlled by an invisible Jewish cabal. So some of them will be amenable to very local government ... they'll embrace, and work with, and even try to seize control of the government at the county level. But generally, national politics are quite anathema for those two general reasons.
People will say the '20s Klan was not as violent as other Klans. But that's really because its violence took a different form. So there, the threat that the Klan manufactured was the threat of being swapped — all the positions of society being taken by the others — so immigrants, Catholics, Jews and so forth. So the violence was things like, for example, I studied deeply the state of Indiana where the Klan was very strong — pushing Catholics school teachers out of their jobs in public schools and getting them fired, running Jewish merchants out of town, creating boycott campaigns, whispering campaigns about somebody's business that would cause it to collapse. So it's a different kind of violence but it's really targeted as expelling from the communities those who are different than the white, native-born Protestants who were the members of the Klan. So it takes different forms in different times. It's not always the violence that we think about now, like shootings.
Tthe violence that we see today is not that dissimilar from the violence of the Klan in the '50s and '60s, where there was, kind of, the violence of terrorism. So there's two kinds of violence in white supremacy. There's the "go out and beat up people on the street" violence — that's kind of the skinhead violence. And then there's the sort of strategic violence. You know, the violence that's really meant to send a message to a big audience, so that the message is dispersed and the victims are way beyond the people who are actually injured.
You see that in the '50s, '60s in the South, and you see it now.
~ What are the most effective strategies to combat these ideas of white supremacy, or this violence?
I'd say the most effective strategy is to educate people about it, because it really thrives on being hidden and appearing to be something other than it is. I mean, millions of white supremacist groups have often targeted young people, and they do so often in a way that's not clear to the young person that these are white supremacists, they appear to be just your friends and your new social life, like people on the edges who seem exciting. ... And so helping people understand how white supremacists operate in high schools, and the military, and all kinds of sectors of society gives people the resources the understanding to not be pulled into those kinds of worlds.
Twenty years, or even 10 years ago, I would have said it's really effective to sue these groups and bring them down financially, which was what the Southern Poverty Law Center was doing.
[Now,] they don't have property; they operate in a virtual space. So the strategies of combating racial extremism have to change with the changing nature of it.” ~
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2018/12/08/671999530/what-the-ebbs-and-flows-of-the-kkk-can-tell-us-about-white-supremacy-today
KKK, 1922: a new recruit gets initiated*
PERHAPS THE BEST AND MOST REVOLUTIONARY AMERICAN IDEA
Am I naive to still see America as the most revolutionary country in the world? The idea that the many, rather than just the few, can and should enjoy life — that the pursuit of happiness is an un-alienable right — strikes me as particularly American.
Americans take it for granted, as self-evident. It’s not just the rich who have the right to happiness; it’s a universal human right. Believe me, this is NOT self-evident except in the context of the secular (and liberal Protestant) worldview that accepts THIS life as important, that it’s not just a brief and miserable way station before the afterlife, the “true” life.
Coming from a masochistic Catholic background (“Suffering is good for you”; “God sends suffering to those he loves”; “The more you suffer in this life, the shorter the time in Purgatory”), I had great trouble with the notion of the pursuit of happiness. It took me a very long time to learn not to despise it, and finally to accept it for myself.
The most significant modern opponent of this idea is not so much the Catholic church, no longer the dominant cultural force that it once was. It is radical Islam, with its rejection of modernity and this-worldliness. Not surprisingly, the afterlife is very important in radical Islam. The stronger the belief in the afterlife (especially in paradise), the easier it is manipulate people to be willing to die for the faith.
It’s not reason that is the greatest enemy of religion. The greatest enemy of religion is happiness.
Oriana:
“Life should be a joy: not a ledger of sins and failures to live up to impossible standards, but an iridescent beauty like a dragonfly.” — to quote myself because why not; I give myself permission to do it once a year, and anyway I need an excuse for posting an image of a dragonfly (in this case in amber, because I love amber too)
*
FIVE SECONDS THAT CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE
~ "Most of the time when you have stuff that you need to do, you're not going to feel like doing it. And it's a major mistake to sit around and think that you need to be motivated first, and it's an even bigger mistake to think that at some point you will feel like doing it,” Mel Robbins said. She needed a strategy — something that would propel her to take action even when she didn't feel like it.
The Five-Second Rule
So, after stumbling across a television commercial with the image of a rocket launching, Robbins decided she would launch herself out of bed the very next day with the same gusto and determination. When the alarm clock rang, she counted backwards from five just "like NASA when they launch a rocket," she said.
It worked.
So she did it the next day and the day after, and pretty soon, Robbins was counting down on every action she didn't really feel like taking. In just five seconds, she was doing things she hadn't felt like doing before.
It soon became her new rule.
"Life, and business in particular, is about pushing yourself to do the things that are uncomfortable so that you can achieve the results that you want," Robbins said. "The secret is all about not waiting until you feel like it."
The Significance of Five Seconds
It's estimated that Americans make about 35,000 decisions a day. And most of the time, those decisions are made unconsciously.
"We like to think we make decisions based on logic, based on what's best for our businesses," Robbins said. "The fact is that 95 percent of the decisions we make are based on the way we feel in the moment."
What's worse, negative emotions like fear, anger, and uncertainty seem to have strong influence over our decisions.
Research shows there's a roughly five-second window of time between a thought, an idea, or intuition, and the brain's move to support it — or kill it.
"It turns out that inside that five-second window, your entire life and business, everything changes if you wake up and take control of that moment right before you're about to make a decision," Robbins said.
The Science Behind the Hack
So how does a deceptively simple hack create such drastic change?
Here's how: Rather than defaulting to familiar defense mechanisms, counting backward from five (5-4-3-2-1) forces your brain to stop, focus, and occupy itself with something else. Your brain's no longer being hijacked by fear, doubt, anger, or any other powerful emotion that can lead to bad, knee-jerk decisions.
It also stimulates the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that's active when you're changing behavior, when you're learning something new, or when you're directing your thoughts.
"So instead of letting your brain sabotage you, you're using a meta-cognition technique to switch the gears in our mind and make changing easy," Robbins said.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/how-to-change-your-life-in-5-seconds?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Oriana:
Try it. It can be amazing. And that chore you've been thinking about and yet not doing for months on end . . . Blast off, and it's done!
I've noticed that the strategy may fail if the task is in the "no big deal" category. But if it's something that must be done, and you've been procrastinating, try the five-seconds strategy. Soon you too will be saying, "Wow!"
*
ARE FUNDAMENTAL BELIEFS A CHOICE?
“I FEAR, WROTE NIETZSCHE, “THAT WE ARE NOT GETTING RID OF GOD BECAUSE WE STILL BELIEVE IN GRAMMAR.” [“TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS”] The grammar of dream interpretation, whether Freudian or Jungian, is a crust of dead theology. We deaden the outer surfaces of our creative response to dreams in order to protect ourselves from the creative power the dreams bring back to us.” ~ Greg Mogenson, “God Is a Trauma.”
Mogenson is referring to the brain’s power to create our subjective reality — a power too often squandered on brooding over the past or fantasizing about the future — the negative and positive inflation of vicarious living, rather than actively creating our life in the present. To quote Mogenson: “The ‘right’ interpretation is the most daring interpretation. Dream interpretation is the space project of an ever-opening consciousness. Interpretations are trajectories, arrows of longing, satellites in the surrendered heaven of man’s creating will.”
Nietzsche both lamented and celebrated the death of god as a tyrant of the soul, an obstacle to soul-making and metaphor-making. “Indeed, we philosophers and "free spirits" feel, when we hear the news that ‘the old god is dead’, as if a new dawn shone on us; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, premonitions, expectations.”
To Nietzsche religious faith meant “not wanting to know the truth.” Freedom is the opposite of belief. “If there is today still no lack of those who do not know how indecent it is to ‘believe’ — or a sign of decadence, of a broken will to live — well, they will know it tomorrow.”
But our belief in grammar, though weaker now, still holds and will hold as long as we need to communicate (although I’ve graded hundreds of essays which showed no belief in grammar). I think this is in line with “Cognitive scientists are becoming increasingly aware that a metaphysical outlook may be so deeply ingrained in human thought processes that it cannot be expunged. What you actually believe is not a decision you make for yourself. Your fundamental beliefs are decided by much deeper levels of consciousness, and some may well be more or less set in stone.”
True: we have evolved to see patterns even where there are none, to connect the dots. The belief in cosmic justice is our default setting — it takes skeptical thinking to see randomness and coincidences.
I agree that it takes a cognitive effort to see that much depends on mere chance, though we can make the best of it. And we can still reject an immoral, outdated religion, and venture to find and/or create our own journey.
Oriana:
Do we choose our deepest beliefs? “Cognitive scientists are becoming increasingly aware that a metaphysical outlook may be so deeply ingrained in human thought processes that it cannot be expunged. What you actually believe is not a decision you make for yourself. Your fundamental beliefs are decided by much deeper levels of consciousness, and some may well be more or less set in stone.”
Or rather, in neural pathways.
“PLEASANTLY DEMENTED”
~ “It was a geriatric psychologist in New York, Mitchell Slutzky, who told me about the subset of "pleasantly demented." Most doctors I interviewed hadn't heard the term, but when I put out the word, I received a flood of e-mails from friends and bloggers, saying they had relatives who were pleasantly demented. On the Alzheimer's Association Web site, one woman wrote, "Half the clients in adult day care are pleasantly demented." Shelley Hoon of Boston says her mother's personality changed drastically with Alzheimer's. "I used to call her 'The General'," Hoon says. "She was hard-nosed, never laughed, and if she was angry, you'd dive for cover under the couch." Now, Hoon says, her mother is "totally sweet, laughs and finds pleasure in simple things. I don't know what to make of it."
Barbara Ross of Atlanta told me that when her father became demented, "he said he'd had the most wonderful life and was the luckiest guy in the world." He'd forgotten two acrimonious divorces and that his business had gone bankrupt. "So what is wrong with forgetting that garbage and being happy in the moment?" Ross asked.
Dr. Oliver Sacks, who wrote lyrical books about people with neurological disorders, recounted how Ralph Waldo Emerson was cheerful in his 60s when he began sinking into "soft oblivion." When a friend asked how he was, Emerson is reported to have said, "Quite well. I have lost my mental faculties but am perfectly well." He could not remember his own work but continued to give lectures by reading his notes, joking that he was "a lecturer who has no idea what he's lecturing about."
I heard several theories about what might cause pleasant dementia. Sacks suggests it may result from, among other factors, deterioration of the frontal lobes, "particularly those systems associated with self-evaluation, scrupulosity and anxiety." Other doctors suspect damage to the left hemisphere of the brain, which deals with logic and analysis, rather than the right hemisphere, which perceives unity and connection. With the left brain wiped out, people might feel expansive joy.
What intrigues me is the similarity between pleasant dementia and the state that spiritual teachers encourage people to cultivate: acceptance, letting go, being fully present now. Dr. Peter Whitehouse, professor of neurology at Case Western Reserve, says he's a Buddhist practitioner and finds it "fascinating to consider what it means to live in the moment, because in many ways that's what dementia brings." He says memory loss has always been part of human experience. "The Egyptians wrote about it. I'm surprised the world's religions haven't taken this on. They've taken on death. Why haven't they taken on the slow deterioration of one's mental abilities?"
There appears to be no ongoing research into what makes one person with dementia become belligerent and another serene. No one is comparing the brain waves of monks in meditation with the brain waves of people with pleasant dementia.
I don't wish to romanticize the state or suggest that anyone aspire to it, because the pleasantly demented aren't functional. My mother doesn't remember where her clothes are or what day it is. Yet her equanimity and cheer seem preferable to the acute physical suffering I've witnessed in other endgames. Years ago, Sacks said in our interview: "At 75, I sort of wonder what the future has in store. If I am going to lose it, I would prefer to lose it in an Emersonian way."
That way was conveyed in Emerson's poem "Terminus," which he wrote at 63 when he felt his mind slipping from him:
TERMINUS
It is time to be old,
To take in sail:—
The god of bounds,
Who sets to seas a shore,
Came to me in his fatal rounds,
And said: “No more!
No farther shoot
Thy broad ambitious branches, and thy root.
Fancy departs: no more invent;
Contract thy firmament
To compass of a tent.
. . .
A little while
Still plan and smile,
And,—fault of novel germs,—
Mature the unfallen fruit.
Curse, if thou wilt, thy sires,
Bad husbands of their fires,
Who, when they gave thee breath,
Failed to bequeath
The needful sinew stark as once,
The Baresark marrow to thy bones,
But left a legacy of ebbing veins,
Inconstant heat and nerveless reins,—
Amid the Muses, left thee deaf and dumb,
Amid the gladiators, halt and numb.”
As the bird trims her to the gale,
I trim myself to the storm of time,
I man the rudder, reef the sail,
Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime:
“Lowly faithful, banish fear,
Right onward drive unharmed;
The port, well worth the cruise, is near,
And every wave is charmed.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
What a sanguine injunction, I thought, not only for my mother but for those of us who may follow on that ship. May we sail without fear and may the weather be … pleasant.” ~
https://www.newsweek.com/sara-davidson-pleasant-dementia-and-inner-peace-88517
Lilith:
Thanks for posting about pleasant dementia. In my mother’s final years she became very sweet and pleasant all the time. All her anger had finally left her. I posited that she had lost the bad memories.
When my mother was in pleasant dementia she was like I had never known her. I didn’t know she had the capacity to be sweet and nice.
Oriana:
Oh no! To have to wait that long to discover your mother could be this sweet person. We are all several “selves” inside one person; different selves can become dominant in different situations. Children of “pleasantly demented” parent quite often comment on the positive change. Alas, that person is no longer functional.
But in life in general, I’ve seen a kind of temporary “personality change” many times. We are different with a friend we adore than with an annoying salesman. Change the environment, change the way the person is treated, and watch the fascinating changes. That’s a huge other fascinating topic: “I am large. I contain multitudes.”
Castine Harbor; Hugh Fritz Lane, 1851 (one of my favorite paintings at Timken Art Gallery in Balboa Park, San Diego)*
Ending on beauty:
EARLY FALL
The first cold morning,
the first lost tomato
pulled rotting from the vine,
the first grey, rainfilled sky —
sunless as February,
lonely as April
before spring learns
the secret of love.
~ John Guzlowski
