Banksy (not title needed)*
NIETZSCHE: POSTCARDS FROM SWISS ALPS
I love the great despisers,
for they are great worshippers,
arrows of longing for the other shore.
Dearest Mother: Yesterday I walked
into a cloud of newly hatched
ladybugs, the air insane with red,
hundreds of tiny bodies, tick-tick,
colliding with my straw hat.
I dine at The Alpine Rose,
make compresses for my eyes
with glacier water from the lake.
As for my sleep medicine,
don’t worry, I don’t go above
50 grams of chloroform.
Please send me some sausages.
dear Friend, This morning I noticed
my landlady’s powdered face,
her sweetish odor of valerian drops.
The geraniums on her balcony
trail after me, interrupting my thoughts.
What if I asked her point-blank,
“Madam, but suppose God
is an invention of the devil?”
Philosophers are such sadists.
We who think should present ourselves
for immediate execution.
Dear Fräulein,
thank you for the kind gift
of your Memoirs of an Idealist.
Please stop complaining
that women are slaves.
That’s what makes civilization possible.
Dear Cosima, Dear Lou,
Dear Stranger on the Train:
love was the screaming of the nightingales.
Solitude is a dawn.
In the red silence I write bitter,
I mean better —
Yet if only at the mouth of the question,
outlined with a thread of light,
stood Ariadne —
Respected Colleagues and Illustrious Dead:
I want back
the coin under your tongue.
I climbed as high as I could.
On the ledge of heaven I saw
a swift’s nest, festooned with droppings.
Dear Sister: are we not
the fools of a dead god?
Through the snowy
labyrinths of sleep,
through the granite
swirls of birth I shout:
No truth only perspectives
the sacred word perhaps
if you stare into the abyss
it is going to stare back
My soul too
is the song of a lover
Dearest Sister:
are we not happy
~ Oriana
Oriana:
I can instantly think of two men who I wish had given me that warning. The first of these men, a sado-narcissist (Jeremy Sherman’s term), said that the suffering he caused made me a poet.
Tatry, Poland; my first experience of the (literal) abyss *
WAS ALBERT CAMUS KILLED BY THE KGB?
~ “Sixty years after the French Nobel laureate Albert Camus died in a car crash at the age of 46, a new book is arguing that he was assassinated by KGB spies in retaliation for his anti-Soviet rhetoric.
Italian author Giovanni Catelli first aired his theory in 2011, writing in the newspaper Corriere della Sera that he had discovered remarks in the diary of the celebrated Czech poet and translator Jan Zábrana that suggested Camus’s death had not been an accident. Now Catelli has expanded on his research in a book titled The Death of Camus.
Camus died on 4 January 1960 when his publisher Michel Gallimard lost control of his car and it crashed into a tree. The author was killed instantly, with Gallimard dying a few days later. Three years earlier, the author of L’Étranger (The Outsider) and La Peste (The Plague) had won the Nobel prize for “illuminat[ing] the problems of the human conscience in our times”.
“The accident seemed to have been caused by a blowout or a broken axle; experts were puzzled by its happening on a long stretch of straight road, a road 30 feet wide, and with little traffic at the time,” Herbert Lottman wrote in his 1978 biography of the author.
Catelli believes a passage in Zábrana’s diaries explains why: the poet wrote in the late summer of 1980 that “a knowledgeable and well-connected man” had told him the KGB was to blame. “They rigged the tyre with a tool that eventually pierced it when the car was traveling at high speed.”
The order, he said, had been issued by Dmitri Shepilov, the Soviet Union’s minister of internal affairs, in retaliation for an article by Camus in the French newspaper Franc-Tireur published in March 1957.
“It seems it took the intelligence three years to carry out the order,” Zábrana’s diary reports. “They managed eventually and in such a way that, until today, everyone thought Camus had died because of an ordinary car crash. The man refused to tell me his source but he claimed it was completely reliable.”
Camus had sided publicly with the Hungarian uprising since autumn 1956, and was highly critical of Soviet actions. He also publicly praised and supported the Russian author Boris Pasternak, who was seen as anti-Soviet.
Catelli has spent years researching the validity of Zábrana’s account. In his book, he interviews Zábrana’s widow Marie, investigates the KGB’s infiltration of France, and includes secondhand testimony from the controversial French lawyer Jacques Vergès. Catelli was contacted by Giuliano Spazzali, an Italian barrister, after the book’s publication in Italy. Spazzali recounted a conversation he’d had with the late Vergès about Camus’ death.
“Vergès said the accident had been staged. It is my opinion that Vergès had more evidence than he cared to share with me. I refrained from asking,” Spazzali told Catelli. “Discretion is the best attitude when a hot topic rises unexpectedly. I didn’t investigate any further, and yet I remember how Vergès was certain that the staged accident was schemed by a KGB section with the endorsement of the French intelligence.”
Catelli argues that Camus’ outspokenness was interfering with French-Soviet relations, and “Camus’ prominent character … stood out in the eyes of the French people as a reminder of the USSR’s cruel imperialism. Both the French and the Soviet governments would have benefited greatly from silencing this unpleasant reminder … No proper investigation was carried out.”
“A horrible conclusion, but after digesting the evidence Catelli has given us, it becomes difficult not to agree with him. Thus ‘car accident’ should now be filed in another drawer as ‘political assassination’ – and thus Albert Camus was silenced when he was 46 years old,” writes Auster in a foreword [to Catelli’s book].
“I hope that the academics will not follow the old opinion that it was a simple accident,” said Catelli, who is talking to British publishers about an English translation. “I think we owe it to the memory of Albert Camus.”
The Death of Camus draws to a close with Catelli expressing the hope that it will bring forth more evidence, “before the waves of time come to lay waste to the sandy, frail traces of what happened”.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/dec/05/albert-camus-murdered-by-the-kgb-giovanni-catelli?CMP=share_btn_fb&fbclid=IwAR1qRmsKuP9vRz6yjJ1Anh8QZg-RVNJcNvxNPAzkMc4Pz6blAIiZu7xFZ1I
Oriana:
M. Iossel writes: "These rumors have been circulating for decades. Likely with good reason, too. The KGB hated him with a vengeance, and Soviet ideological chieftains viewed him as their bitter enemy.”
If this is true, and it wouldn't surprise me, then we need to add the name of Camus to those of other writers and journalists murdered by the monstrous regime.
As I understand it, Sartre continued his support of various Communist regimes in spite of writing so much about freedom.
Georges Redon (1869-1943). A view atop the Notre Dame, Paris*
HIKING WITH NIETZSCHE
~ “John Kaag notes the preponderance of philosopher-walkers besides Nietzsche: the Buddha, Socrates, Kant, Rousseau, Thoreau. "The history of philosophy is largely the history of thought in transit," he writes. His book takes us on a hike through Nietzsche's manically prolific output, which occasionally feels like a forced march but more often feels like an invigorating excursion. Scrambling up treacherous rocky inclines in worn sneakers, Kaag reflects on the peaks and valleys of Nietzsche's life and philosophy. He considers the tug between Apollonian and Dionysian impulses addressed in Nietzsche's first book, The Birth of Tragedy; Nietzsche's challenge in Thus Spoke Zarathustra "to imagine ourselves...above the societal conventions and self-imposed constraints that quietly govern modern life"; and his concept of the origin of moral values in Beyond Good and Evil, a book which Kaag's Kantian wife, Carol Hay, pronounces misogynist, hypothetical, and stupid.
His alpine scrambles, which are both physical and mental, are fascinating, if something of an uphill battle for him. Kaag's wise takeaway: "Even slipping can be instructive. Something happens not at the top, but along the way."
Like Alain de Botton, Kaag believes that philosophy can offer applicable relevance to personal dilemmas — a sort of elevated form of self-help. In American Philosophy Kaag wrote, "At its best, philosophy tries to explain why our lives, so fragile and ephemeral, might have lasting significance." In his new book, he quotes Nietzsche — "I profit from a philosopher only insofar as he can be an example" — and notes that, as a teenager, Nietzsche was drawn to Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Promethean individualism" and "experiential turn in philosophy." So, too, is Kaag.
Along the way, two vivid portraits emerge: the first, of the brilliant albeit often histrionic and "wrong-headed" German's descent into madness; and, the second, of Kaag, an intense insomniac who, not yet 40, has emerged as an engaging popularizer of philosophy. Readers may be surprised by some of Kaag's personal revelations, including the severe anorexia that nearly killed him: "This type of self-deprivation was my first addiction — and after all these years I still remember it fondly," he writes. He also draws parallels between Nietzsche's early loss of his father to his own, noting, “My father, like Nietzsche's, went crazy when I was four. Nietzsche's died. Mine abandoned his family.” Nietzsche sought an alternate father figure in composer Richard Wagner, a terrible choice which ended in serious disillusionment. Kaag sought salvation in philosophy.
Kaag refracts other personal issues through Nietzsche's writings, including the challenges of adulthood and parenting, noting the tedium, restrictions, and battles of will with a contrary toddler whom he amusingly likens to Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener. He recalls his mixed feelings over his father's pronouncements that he'd never wanted children "but that I was not always the burden he'd anticipated," and comments, "Most of my adult life has been premised on not becoming my own absent dad." Yet after a miserable excursion with his wife and daughter in a frozen, cramped gondola, he fumes with startling honesty: "Coming here with the family had been a bad idea. Before meeting Carol, I never wanted kids. Not even a little. Some days I still don’t."
Kaag extracts plenty of relevant ideas from Nietzsche and his followers in this stimulating book about combating despair and complacency with searching reflection. But, interestingly, it's while watching his daughter blissfully gather woodland wildflowers or a shepherd contentedly eating a hunk of cheese while checking his flock that he experiences the most resonant moments of grace and insight.” ~
https://www.npr.org/2018/09/26/651083219/in-hiking-with-nietzsche-challenges-are-seen-through-the-philosophers-teachings
~ “As narrator of his own story, Mr. Kaag is not as likable in “Hiking With Nietzsche” as he was in “American Philosophy.” He is frequently angry, self-absorbed, compulsive and perfectionist. But his honesty is bracing, and he ends his story by describing a festival of masks and drumming in Basel that reveals something Dionysian about its people. They are not the sheep that he and Nietzsche might have taken them for. They struggle, like all of us, with responsibility and the adventure of living our lives.” ~
https://www.wsj.com/articles/hiking-with-nietzsche-review-highest-education-11544745367
Waldhaus Hotel, Sils-MariaOriana:
I love the idea of hiking the Alpine trails where Nietzsche used to hike, thinking his furious thoughts. If I could live my life over again, that would be on my list. The best I can do in this one and only reality is to get Kaag’s book. Nietzsche as self-help! Well, why not.
I can't hike on Nietzsche's trails, but just reading about them gives me joy. I’ve done a lot of hiking, and understand both the ecstasy of the heights and the bone-deep tiredness. “Even slipping can be instructive.”
I also love the idea of comparing a toddler to Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener. Yes, the negativity. And I appreciate a father’s honesty about how stressful it is to live with a small child — though there are also the beautiful moments. This applies to so many things — does the joy exceed the stress of putting up with the discomforts? Of course there will be days of wishing to have remained “child-free.” And we can be virtually certain that for Kaag there won’t be a second child. But he'll be a great dad to his little girl.
I haven’t thought of Nietzsche from the point of view of “how to combat despair.” Yet so much writing (and art in general) is, in some manner, about that. Mortality and loss are ever with us, but we realize that unless we decide to commit suicide to get it over with, we have to find ways to be useful, to contribute, to be valued and make others be valued.
It’s interesting that during the trip that comprises Hiking with Nietzsche, the philosophy professor has to deal with a petulant toddler. One thing that Nietzsche would not tolerate is anyone throwing tantrums like a four-year-old any time that life won’t give us the toy we want. But there is a wonder and mystery to a child — to any human being — and it can be difficult to decide whether less stress is always preferable to more stress, but also an enlargement of one’s understanding and experience of life. (But what am I saying, “decide.” Life decides for us, as does our unconscious.)
Above all, Nietzsche tells us to say “Yes to life.” He is a strange guide, but in the end he is one of my masters — someone who’d frown on depression and falling apart — a giant figure on the Alpine peaks who always advocated practicing being strong. I realize the controversy around Nietzsche’s idea of strength, which can be twisted into a loathsome Nazi attitude — but my position is that we must be selective. Let’s choose from Nietzsche only that which helps us live without despair.
Sils-Maria, Switzerland: one of the regions where Nietzsche stayed and hiked *
TEN BOOKS THAT HAVE STAYED WITH ME
1. Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevsky
2. The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky
3. As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
4. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
5. Survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levi
6. Anna Karenina, Lev Tolstoy
7. Leaves of Grass, Whitman
8. The Doll, Boleslaw Prus
9. New Poems, Volumes I and II, Rilke
10. Valis, P.K. Dick
and quite a few others to a smaller extent, e.g. King Lear, Hamlet, The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale; Walden by Thoreau, Solaris by Stanislaw Lem, The Odyssey, Robinson Crusoe by Defoe, Dracula (the book, an extraordinary epistolary novel, not the movie), Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Gone with the Wind, The Magic Mountain, Little Dorrit, David Copperfield, Notes from the Underground, Duino Elegies, Sonnets to Orpheus, and more — many more, but I was trying to write quickly, “off the top of my head.”
Little Dorrit and the unforgettable debtor's prisonAs for immortal characters, Dorothy (The Wizard of Oz) and her “colleagues,” e.g. the Cowardly Lion or the Tin Man, have reached that immortality — maybe thanks to the movie and Judy Garland more so than the book, but it still counts.
Sherlock Holmes counts. But Winnie the Pooh counts too.
As does Alice in Wonderland, the Red Queen, the Mad Hatter — that whole gang.
And Peter Pan, Wendy, and Tinkerbell; and Captain Hook.
I've already mentioned Robinson Crusoe, but where would Crusoe be without Friday?
Or Catherine without Heathcliff?
Jack London's Wolf Larsen also comes to mind. Interesting, so much ocean in great fiction.
Sometimes it’s not the protagonists. Naphta and Settembrini from The Magic Mountain count more, for me, than Hans Castorp or his love interest, Mme Chauchat. Lady Macbeth is arguably more interesting than Macbeth himself.
Oliver Twist may not be greatest of the novels by Dickens, but the characters are unforgettable. And Gone with the Wind has drawn much criticism, but who can forget Scarlett O’Hara? (by the way, her married names are irrelevant — she eclipses all the other characters as Scarlett O’Hara)
And, much as we may love Tiny Tim, the same goes for the much more powerful figure of Ebenezer Scrooge. And Captain Ahab is more powerful yet. Captain Ahab, meet Scarlett O’Hara.
Humbert Humbert and Lolita? Controversial, certainly, but not forgettable. And being unforgettable is perhaps the main strength of a fictional character.
But the greatest wonder of all is how deeply fictional characters can affect us. “The people we encounter in writing pierce us, their inner lives give us more life,” wrote one of Harold Bloom’s students, who also said that thanks to Bloom, Falstaff became a lifelong friend. I mostly despise Falstaff, but that’s another side of literary characters — mostly we love them, but when we loathe them, that can go deep too.
Mostly we love them. I was amazed that I didn’t dislike Macbeth. I guess when you see a character suffer so vividly, compassion takes over.
Lady Macbeth by Samuel Hord *
Mary: THEIR STORIES BECOME PART OF OUR STORIES
I think these unforgettable characters, from Jane Eyre to Ahab to Raskolnikov, become for us like figures in a personal mythology. We not only respond to them as real people, heroes, villains, friends, we use them to sort, order and refine our own experiences. Their stories become part of our stories, part of the way we apprehend the world and actively create our own narratives of who and what we are. The truly great characters become a kind of lens for seeing the world through, and a way of understanding beyond our limited experience. They also give us, with a strong sense of immediacy, the opportunity to see life lived in times and places completely unfamiliar. They enlarge our vision and enrich our understanding. They are friends you can't lose, who will never turn away.
Oriana:
Absolutely. And it’s interesting that they don’t have to be sympathetic characters. Knowing Captain Ahab enriches us — we seek to understand him. What makes a person vengeful? Then if we meet someone obsessed with revenge, we are at least somewhat prepared. And Jane Eyre’s insistence on her dignity, her refusal to degrade herself and become Rochester’s mistress — it helps women readers toward achieving similar moral clarity. At the same time, the hidden rage a woman may feel at being treated as an inferior is not ignored either, but portrayed in its destructive aspect in the mad wife in the attic. We need to recognize both the idealized self and what Jung would call the shadow — great fiction doesn’t let our vision become one-sided.
Lilith: THEY HAVE BECOME PART OF ME
Thanks for listing the 10 books that have stayed with you. I might include many of these on my list, but others that have become part of me are The Sun Also Rises, Great Expectations, Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, Brave New World, 1984, The Grapes of Wrath, 100 Years of Solitude, and I wouldn’t forget Don Quixote, Madame Bovary, and even Middlemarch, which I read in graduate school. Also Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Also Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—these will never leave me!
Oriana:
Yes! to all your choices.
I wish people would actually read Bram Stoker’s Dracula — what a fabulous epistolary novel. It was a revelation to me.
A privilege to be familiar with those great books.
* “Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.” ~ Arthur Mille
Oriana:
I wonder here about the several women I’ve met who said they wish they hadn’t had children. That’s a huge thing to regret. And I do know what it’s like to live with a huge regret, since for quite a while I thought I made a life-destroying mistake coming to the US. Eventually I realized that there is no way to predict an alternate life with any accuracy, and when you make a large change (be it countries or spouses), you are changing problems. Virtually nothing is all good or all bad, and every curse has a blessing in it, and every blessing a curse . . . so . . . the point is to stop wishing for another life, and make the best of each day.
Egret at dawn; photo: Rob Travis. This morning the visitor I had at dawn was not an egret, but Walter Cronkite — in a dream, of course. He and I hugged, and it felt so good to be around that man — the innocence and trust and decency of another era.*
THE DECLINING DIVORCE RATE
~ “Since 2008, the percentage of American marriages that end in divorce has fallen, and in this paper, the University of Maryland sociologist Philip Cohen has quantified the drop-off: Between 2008 and 2016, the divorce rate declined by 18 percent overall.
After accounting for the rising average age of married Americans and other demographic shifts during that time, Cohen found “a less steep decline—8 percent—but the pattern is the same.” That is, the divorce rate in 2016 was still lower than one would have predicted if the demographics of married people were the same then as in 2008.
When I asked Andrew Cherlin, a sociology professor at Johns Hopkins University, how to make sense of this trend, he opened his explanation with something of a koan: “In order to get divorced,” he said, “you have to get married first.”
The point he was making was that people with college degrees are now more likely to get married than those who have no more than a high-school education. And the key to understanding the declining divorce rate, Cherlin says, is that it is “going down some for everybody,” but “the decline has been steepest for the college graduates.”
The reason that’s the case is that college graduates tend to wait longer to get married as they focus on their career. And they tend to have the financial independence to postpone marriage until they’re more confident it will work. This has translated to lower rates of divorce: “If you’re older, you’re more mature … you probably have a better job, and those things make it less likely that you’ll get into arguments with your spouse,” Cherlin says.
Divorce rates had been increasing since the mid-1800s, in part because of what Cherlin described as “a gradual growth in the sense that it was okay to end a marriage if you’re unhappy.” Divorces spiked after World War II, peaking in 1980.
Cherlin says that in the late 1970s, when he received his Ph.D., it was widely expected among researchers that the divorce rate would continue to rise. But it hasn’t, and what’s behind this unforeseen development is the decline of marriage—and the corresponding rise of cohabitation—among Americans with less education. As the sociologist Victor Chen wrote for The Atlantic, those without college degrees were a few decades ago significantly likelier to be married by age 30 than were those with college degrees. In 2018, Chen notes, “just over half of women in their early 40s with a high-school degree or less education are married, compared to three-quarters of women with a bachelor’s degree.”
Chen connects this trend to the decline of well-paying jobs for those without college degrees, which, he argues, makes it harder to form more stable relationships. Indeed, Cohen writes in his paper that marriage is “an increasingly central component of the structure of social inequality.” The state of it today is both a reflection of the opportunities unlocked by a college degree and a force that, by allowing couples to pool their incomes, itself widens economic gaps.
So, looking at married couples alone doesn’t capture the true nature of American partnerships today. “If you were to include cohabiting relationships [in addition to marriages], the breakup rates for young adults have probably not been going down,” Cherlin says. In other words: Yes, divorce rates are declining. But that’s more a reflection of who’s getting married than of the stability of any given American couple.” ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-not-so-great-reason-divorce-rates-are-declining?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Oriana:
It's really a picture of a frightening divide: the educated class providing their children with the advantage of two parents and greater affluence vs the struggling single working-class mothers. It's not as black-and-white as that, but it's a disturbing trend.
*
THE GOLDEN AGE OF CAPITALISM: DEMAND-SIDE ECONOMICS OF JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES
~ “In the mid-twentieth century, advertising, popular press, and television bombarded Americans with the message that national prosperity depended on their personal spending. As LIFE proclaimed in 1947, “Family Status Must Improve: It Should Buy More For Itself to Better the Living of Others.” Bride likewise told its readers that when they bought new appliances, “you are helping to build greater security for the industries of this country.”
This messaging was not simply an invention of clever marketers; it had behind it the full force of the best-regarded economic theory of the time, the one elaborated in John Maynard Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936). The key to full employment and economic growth, many at the time believed, was high levels of aggregate demand. But high demand required mass consumption, which in turn required an equitable distribution of purchasing power. By ensuring sufficient income for less well-off consumers, the government could continually expand the markets for businesses and boost profits as well as wages. Conversely, Keynes’s theory implied, growing income inequality would lead to lower demand and slower economic growth.
The basic Keynesian logic of demand-driven growth came to be accepted across U.S. society in large part due to significant postwar efforts to explain, communicate, and popularize it. Proponents of Keynesian thinking worked hard to educate the public about the new economic theory and the possibilities of abundance that it foretold. A particularly compelling example is the book Tomorrow Without Fear (1946). Written by Chester Bowles, a former advertising executive turned wartime price czar, it turns Keynes’s dry economic theories into accessible and evocative prose. Drawing on the shared experiences of the Depression and World War II, it made the public case for the possibility and the necessity of mass affluence in postwar America.
Similar efforts—other prominent voices included John Kenneth Galbraith and Leon Keyserling—ensured that workers, the popular press, business executives, academic economists, and politicians on both sides of the aisle were largely on the same page: mass consumption among a broad swath of the populace was necessary to a thriving economy. This consensus propelled the fastest sustained rise in output and living standards the United States has ever seen, while also motivating government action to expand social insurance and protect living standards.
Today, as we enter the second decade of recovery from the Great Recession, a growing debate has emerged around new economic ideas, and it remains as important as ever to pay attention to how exactly economic theories win broad public support. By examining the economic beliefs of a more prosperous time—including the popularizing efforts that led to their widespread adoption—we can more fully appreciate how to build new forms of consensus today.
What motivated public intellectuals, policymakers, and government officials such as Bowles to spend their nights and weekends translating economic theory for the general public? Part of the answer lies in the fact that the experiences of World War II and the Depression forged a unity and clarity of purpose among Americans that can be hard to fathom today. The experiences not only brought existential dread to the country, but also took it from one economic extreme to another.
During the 1920s, the government cut taxes and maintained a strict balanced budget in the hopes of sustaining high business confidence and investment. The guiding economic theory held that the primary limit on economic growth was supply (the total amount of labor and capital available). Some economists even thought that an increase in supply would inevitably generate a corresponding growth in demand, a kind of economic equivalent of “if you build it, they will come.” But instead of sustained growth, this focus on investment created a bubble that culminated in the biggest bust in history.
Surveying the wreckage, Keynes realized that supply-side thinking got things backward. One glance at the 1930s economy made that clear: everywhere you looked there were recently shuttered factories, along with unemployment rates above 20 percent. Clearly the slump was not due to a lack of capacity to make things, but rather a lack of markets in which to sell them. This is the core Keynesian insight: economic catastrophe can be caused by inadequate demand, which will feed upon itself in a downward spiral. Demand shortfalls often originate with a tightening of investment, as businesses start to worry about having overcommitted. Once that happens, unless the government steps in with fiscal or monetary stimulus, unemployment will follow.
World War II put these ideas to the test, and they passed with flying colors. When the government stepped in and started buying things, U.S. businesses leapt to meet the challenge. Real GDP grew by 75 percent from 1940 to 1945. Industry had the ability to produce far more than most people had ever imagined; all it needed was a customer with the means to pay.
As the war ended, government officials and policymakers had to figure out what to do with this new industrial capacity. Should the country simply close down the new factories and return to the level of output and unemployment that it had in 1940? Or should it convert the capacity to peacetime use, and come up with new sources of demand to replace government arms spending? This question marked a subtle shift from Keynesianism as a method of moderating business cycles to Keynesianism as a strategy for economic growth, with a whole cohort of postwar policymakers embracing the Keynesian idea that the key to avoiding mass unemployment was to ensure sufficient aggregate demand. As Robert Nathan, chair of the War Production Board’s Planning Committee, put it, “If increased buying power can be gotten into the hands of consumers who will spend it for goods and services, American industry need not worry about finding markets for all it can produce, and produce profitably.”
Imbued with the patriotism and solidarity of the era, many officials felt it was their responsibility to reflect on these lessons and share them with their fellow Americans. Indeed, Bowles was not the only one explaining this vision for a new economic future. Nathan wrote his own book, Mobilizing for Abundance (1944), to explain how Keynesian economics could bring widespread prosperity after the war, as did journalist and future senator Blair Moody in Boom or Bust (1941) and Vice President Henry Wallace in Sixty Million Jobs (1945). Indeed, so invested were everyday Americans in restoring and contributing to the overall economy that when the Pabst Brewing Company sponsored a contest to come up with plans for postwar employment, it received nearly 36,000 entries.
Americans understood the stakes of the transition to peacetime. The connection between economic turmoil and political conflict was clear to those who had watched the rise of fascism in the 1920s and ’30s. The development of atomic weapons meant that a third world war would almost certainly end civilization while, at the same time, the experience of war production offered the prospect of boundless opportunities and prosperity. This stark trade-off—civilizational annihilation on one hand, endless prosperity on the other—made it extremely important to get the transition right. And it was clear that doing so was only possible if the American people were brought fully on board.
In Tomorrow Without Fear, Bowles pitched his explanations of Keynesian theory to resonate with Americans’ intuitive, shared experience. Contrasting the booming wartime economy with the trepidation in 1940, for example, he asked: “Did we feel insecure in 1940 because we thought we couldn’t produce all the goods and services we needed?” The answer, of course, is no, and Bowles goes on to identify this as “the baffling paradox of the times, the inability of people on every hand to find markets for the goods that people on every hand so badly needed!”
Despite their patriotism and optimism, however, Bowles and his contemporary prophets of abundance were under no illusions about the challenges that widespread prosperity, even if it were secured, would bring. In 1930 Keynes had anticipated the possibility of an end to scarcity in his essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” speculating about the enormous cultural adjustment it would require. If the “economic problem” of subsistence—“hitherto the primary, most pressing problem of the human race”—was solved, then, Keynes wrote, “I think with dread of the readjustment of the habits and instincts of the ordinary man, bred into him for countless generations, which he may be asked to discard within a few decades. . . must we not expect a general ‘nervous breakdown’?”
Ever the ad man, Bowles in Tomorrow Without Fear translated this ‘economic problem’ into the difficulty of ‘learning to live better.’ We know we can produce, he wrote. But what we don’t yet know is if we can learn to “use our productive capacity to raise our standards of living, to lighten the burden of toil for all of our people.” This learning curve would require a maturation of sorts, and “if we can’t grow up with it . . . the very achievements of our science and technology will be our undoing. And what could be more ridiculous!”
Learning to live better was of such concern because a direct implication of Keynesian economic theory is that inequality is in itself harmful for growth. The key point is that businesses will only produce when there is demand for their products, otherwise they will shutter their facilities and lay off their workers. Because high-income people spend a smaller share of their earnings than low-income people do, high levels of income inequality result in lower levels of aggregate demand, the forerunner to recession and unemployment. Bowles demonstrated this logic by taking it to its extreme:
~ Let us suppose that one percent of the population were to receive 95 percent of our entire national income, with the remaining 5 percent spread among the rest of us. Could our system—could any system—work on that basis? One percent of the people couldn’t possibly consume 95 percent of all the goods and services which the rest of us could produce. ~
The long-lasting prosperity of the 1940s and ’50s thus owed, in large part, to the fact that the general public broadly understood and agreed upon the economic principle that fast-paced growth and high employment could be achieved on the back of consumer demand, but only if purchasing power was distributed widely enough.
Once armed with this information, the general public went about enforcing it. As Lizabeth Cohen documents in A Consumer’s Republic (2003), labor unions cited the importance of maintaining high demand through widely distributed purchasing power to justify their calls for higher wages. As George Meany, secretary-treasurer of the AFL, put it in 1944, “we have the machinery to build all of the automobiles, all of the radios, washing machines and such things; we have the workers to build all of the houses that we could possibly use. But we will not make those things unless there is purchasing power available to buy them.”
Henry Ford used the same logic when he decided to pay his workers enough to buy the cars they made. Keeping wages low is penny wise, pound foolish.
Demand-side growth also had bipartisan support. President Harry Truman, a Democrat, made it a cornerstone of his economic policy and appointed pro-growth economist Leon Keyserling to lead the newly created Council of Economic Advisers. Ten years later, President Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, supported the expansion of benefits for seniors as a means of boosting demand and getting the country out of the 1958 recession.
This era is commonly remembered as the Golden Age of Capitalism, and for good reason: the results of this consensus on demand-driven growth are hard to dispute. Productive capacity and living standards grew in lockstep for twenty-five years, at rates never yet equaled. This equitably distributed growth meant that children who lived through this era had a greater than 80 percent chance of outearning their parents as adults. Among today’s young adults, the rate is just 50 percent.
What happened? Keynesian economics fell out of favor for a variety of reasons, from reluctant business executives who didn’t want to lose leverage over their employees to classical laissez-faire economists in the 1970s who used the stagflation crisis to reassert the Victorian belief that government should not intervene in markets. This was the state of mainstream economics in 2007 when the Great Recession hit. That crisis brought about a “Return of Keynes” just in time to keep the economy from fully collapsing, and in 2008, even Robert Lucas—the developer of the rational expectations hypothesis that did much to undo Keynesianism—admitted that “everyone is a Keynesian in a foxhole.”
While Keynesian thinking is beginning to resurface in the academy, it still has a long way to go in terms of shaping popular and policy discourse. This is true even though Keynesian analysis seems singularly well suited to current troubles. Today we have almost unprecedented levels of income inequality combined with sustained low growth. We are still digging our way out from a massive economic slump whose root and proximate causes have remarkable parallels with those that animated Keynes. All of the ingredients that went into The General Theory and that showed the shortcomings of classical economics are present today as well.
This will be even more true going forward. Consider the case of automation, which many people fear will cause unemployment; Andrew Yang is running a whole presidential campaign on it. But as many have noted, it is not the robots themselves that we have to fear, but the continued decline of worker bargaining power. If incomes can be made to rise alongside automation—whether through higher wages, a shorter work week, or a universal basic income— we don’t have anything to fear from robots. In fact, this is the world that Keynes dreamed of in “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” The reason we have come up short is not our technology but our political economy.
Keynesian economics offers the opportunity to connect the two largest economic problems of our time—slow growth and extreme inequality—with a compelling theory that the latter causes the former. After all, large numbers of businesses today are struggling because their core consumers no longer have the money to buy their products. Even wealthy investors are struggling with what the business press calls “capital superabundance.” There is far more money to invest than there are promising investment opportunities, which keeps returns down. At its most fundamental level, this problem is a shortfall of demand: just as in the 1930s, the capital exists to produce far more than we currently do, if only the people who need things had the money to buy them.
To a Keynesian, the way to revive and stabilize economic growth is to increase the purchasing power of low- and middle-income consumers. A Keynesian growth program would thus allow room for some traditionally conservative constituencies to get on board with progressive policies such as child allowances, a job guarantee, and a fifteen dollar minimum wage. Far from being a drain on the economy, these policies are our tickets out of secular stagnation.
Keynesian economics also carries a positive moral message. Unlike the “Greed is good” mantra of the 1980s, Keynesian analysis argues that selfishness leads to ruin and that you should help your neighbor. Bowles makes this point well in Tomorrow Without Fear:
~ In our modern world, for the first time in history, what makes good morals makes good economics, too. As we organize our economy to provide more and better food for the hungry, the corner grocer and the farmer find their incomes increased... Greater equity in sharing our economic pie costs no one anything. Instead it means a bigger pie for all of us to share and, hence, more pie for every one of us. ~
While it is dramatic in its ambitions, the Keynesian approach is far from a risk: no other strategy has been tested so thoroughly and with such great success. As Bowles understood, the key is to communicate it.
https://bostonreview.net/class-inequality/robert-manduca-selling-keynesianism?utm
Breadline during the Depression
Mary:
The increasing need for greater and greater demand in a society where wealth has become unavailable to the majority, increasingly concentrated in a small percentage at the top, has led to some strange developments. Two significant examples are health care and prisons. Both of these are now named “industries” — the Health Care Industry and The Prison Industry, names that ring, for me at least, with cognitive dissonance. What both industries must produce, their reasons for being and the source of their profits, is “customers”— prisoners and patients.
What health care providers are more interested in, and unashamedly so, is not delivering care, but "growing their practice." They want to gain an ever growing list of customers who can pay for what they offer… establishing method of payment is the first step in accessing any care beyond the emergency room. That is why so many have no access to care at all.
Another, to my mind almost desperately ridiculous strategy, is to grow the list of treatable diseases. So now you can "suffer" from inadequate eyelashes...an illness requiring treatment with a prescription medication prescribed by a doctor. Another recent discovery is the 'excessive underarm sweating" that can also be conveniently 'treated' with a new medication . The discovery of many new sufferers of various psychological illnesses has been increasing the customer pool for mental health providers and the psychopharmacopeia for some time.
Like deodorants and toothpaste, there is a wild proliferation of treatments...dozens of new diabetes drugs, anti-anxiety and mood stabilizers, statins, and so on. Redefine health, create a need, then join the crazy, profitable rush to treatment. Everywhere is the message that one, or two or twenty products are never enough...we all have such unique and personal needs that there must be many many choices of solution. (The one area where this may actually be authentic is immunotherapy, still in its infancy.)
With the truly disturbing establishment of private for-profit prisons and the Prison Industry, the "customers" are the prisoners, and industry growth demands more and more of them. So we have to have a legal system, a law enforcement system, and a social system that can guarantee production of lots of criminals …customers… users…to fill all these big and growing prisons.
I can't help but think these crazy developments result at least in part because we are so terrified, or righteously enraged, by the idea of unearned, unworked for “free stuff.” Politically and ideologically repugnant to the Right, the kind of challenge such an economy of abundance gives to our Puritan origins and the righteous Evangelicals can even cause the liberal to hesitate. Free time and free stuff — it just can't be right, it still tastes like sin.
Oriana:
You are so right about the religious origins of so much in our culture. The rich are the Elect, their wealth a sign of divine favor. How interesting that the Calvinists managed to read the bible so selectively they never noticed the part about how it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle and so on . . . It totally amazes me that Christianity, so compatible with socialism, is not so different from other religions in conveniently ignoring the radical teachings of one who actually called himself the Son of Man, and prophesied that “the last shall be the first.” We can’t have this commie stuff!
Of course we can’t have free stuff for the poor, i.e. the sinners. I’ll never forget the conversation I once had on Facebook, where a conservative Christian claimed that poverty of is a result of “intergenerational sin” (you can’t make up this stuff) . . . Now, free stuff for the rich, well, they deserve it since, statistics be damned, they’ve worked so hard to gain their wealth! Or at least their ancestors did — or, OK, they didn’t actually start by working down in the coal mines, but they were investors divinely guided about “timing” and how to marry an heiress — and we must respect the dead by not tolerating any inheritance taxes to speak of. Let generation after generation spend their days on golf courses while some poor fools work two full-time jobs just to pay the rent.
And then comes Keynes and says no, no, you’ve got to pay workers more so they can buy things … But unlimited growth of demand has its problems too, so we’re back to all kinds of crises. We need to rethink what kind of world we want, and maybe bring back some of the older ideas — instead of “greed is good,” perhaps some concern for the common good.
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THE WORLD IS RUNNING OUT OF SAND
~ “Trivial though it may seem, sand is a critical ingredient of our lives. It is the primary raw material that modern cities are made from. The concrete used to construct shopping malls, offices, and apartment blocks, along with the asphalt we use to build roads connecting them, are largely just sand and gravel glued together. The glass in every window, windshield, and smart phone screen is made of melted-down sand. And even the silicon chips inside our phones and computers – along with virtually every other piece of electronic equipment in your home – are made from sand.
But believe it or not, the world is facing a shortage of sand. How can we possibly be running low on a substance found in virtually every country on earth and that seems essentially limitless?
Sand is the most-consumed natural resource on the planet besides water. People use some 50 billion tons of “aggregate” – the industry term for sand and gravel, which tend to be found together – every year. That’s more than enough to blanket the entire United Kingdom.
The problem lies in the type of sand we are using. Desert sand is largely useless to us. The overwhelming bulk of the sand we harvest goes to make concrete, and for that purpose, desert sand grains are the wrong shape. Eroded by wind rather than water, they are too smooth and rounded to lock together to form stable concrete.
The sand we need is the more angular stuff found in the beds, banks, and floodplains of rivers, as well as in lakes and on the seashore. The demand for that material is so intense that around the world, riverbeds and beaches are being stripped bare, and farmlands and forests torn up to get at the precious grains. And in a growing number of countries, criminal gangs have moved in to the trade, spawning an often lethal black market in sand.
“The issue of sand comes as a surprise to many, but it shouldn’t,” says Pascal Peduzzi, a researcher with the United Nations Environment Program. “We cannot extract 50 billion tons per year of any material without leading to massive impacts on the planet and thus on people’s lives.”
The main driver of this crisis is breakneck urbanization. Every year there are more and more people on the planet, with an ever growing number of them moving from the rural countryside into cities, especially in the developing world. Across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, cities are expanding at a pace and on a scale far greater than any time in human history.
The number of people living in urban areas has more than quadrupled since 1950 to some 4.2 billion today, and the United Nations predicts another 2.5 billion will join them in the next three decades. That’s the equivalent of adding eight cities the size of New York every single year.
Creating buildings to house all those people, along with the roads to knit them together, requires prodigious quantities of sand. In India, the amount of construction sand used annually has more than tripled since 2000, and is still rising fast. China alone has likely used more sand this decade than the United States did in the entire 20th Century. There is so much demand for certain types of construction sand that Dubai, which sits on the edge of an enormous desert, imports sand from Australia. That’s right: exporters in Australia are literally selling sand to Arabs.
But sand isn’t only used for buildings and infrastructure – increasingly, it is also used to manufacture the very land beneath their feet. From California to Hong Kong, ever-larger and more powerful dredging ships vacuum up millions of tons of sand from the sea floor each year, piling it up in coastal areas to create land where there was none before. Dubai’s palm-tree shaped islands are perhaps the most famous artificial land masses that have been built from scratch in recent years, but they have plenty of company.
Lagos, the largest city in Nigeria, is adding a 2,400-acre (9.7 sq km) urban extension to its Atlantic shoreline. China, the fourth-largest nation on Earth in terms of naturally occurring land, has added hundreds of miles to its coast, and built entire islands to host luxury resorts.
This new real estate is valuable, but it often incurs steep costs. Ocean dredging has damaged coral reefs in Kenya, the Persian Gulf and Florida. It tears up marine habitat and muddies waters with sand plumes that can affect aquatic life far from the original site. Fishermen in Malaysia and Cambodia have seen their livelihoods decimated by dredging. In China, land reclamation has wiped out coastal wetlands, annihilated habitats for fish and shorebirds, and increased water pollution.
And then there’s Singapore, a world leader in land reclamation. To create more space for its nearly six million residents, the jam-packed city-state has built out its territory with an additional 50 sq miles (130 sq km) of land over the past 40 years, almost all of it with sand imported from other countries. The collateral environmental damage has been so extreme that neighbouring Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Cambodia have all restricted exports of sand to Singapore.
All told, according to a Dutch research group, human beings since 1985 have added 5,237 sq miles (13,563 sq km) of artificial land to the world’s coasts – an area about as big as the nation of Jamaica. Most of it built with gargantuan amounts of sand.
Mining sand to use in concrete and other industrial purposes is, if anything, even more destructive. Sand for construction is most often mined from rivers. It’s easy to pull the grains up with suction pumps or even buckets, and easy to transport once you’ve got a full boatload. But dredging a riverbed can destroy the habitat occupied by bottom-dwelling organisms. The churned-up sediment can cloud the water, suffocating fish and blocking the sunlight that sustains underwater vegetation.
River sand mining is also contributing to the slow-motion disappearance of Vietnam’s Mekong Delta. The area is home to 20 million people and source of half of all the country’s food and much of the rice that feeds the rest of South East Asia. Climate-change-induced sea level rise is one reason the delta is losing the equivalent of one and a half football fields of land every day. But another, researchers believe, is that people are robbing the delta of its sand.
For centuries, the delta has been replenished by sediment carried down from the mountains of Central Asia by the Mekong River. But in recent years, in each of the several countries along its course, miners have begun pulling huge quantities of sand from the riverbed.
According to a 2013 study by three French researchers, some 50 million tonnes of sand were extracted in 2011 alone – enough to cover the city of Denver two inches deep. Meanwhile, five major dams have been built in recent years on the Mekong and another 12 are slated for construction in China, Laos, and Cambodia. The dams further diminish the flow of sediment to the delta.
In other words, while natural erosion of the delta continues, its natural replenishment does not. Researchers with the Greater Mekong Program at the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) believe that at this rate, nearly half the delta will be wiped out by the end of this century.
To make matters worse, dredging the Mekong and other waterways in Cambodia and Laos is causing river banks to collapse, dragging down crop fields and even houses. Farmers in Myanmar say the same thing is happening along the Ayeyarwady River.
Sand extraction from rivers has also caused untold millions of dollars in damage to infrastructure around the world. The stirred-up sediment clogs water supply equipment. And removing all that material from river banks leaves the foundations of bridges exposed and unsupported. In Ghana, sand miners have dug up so much ground that they have dangerously exposed the foundations of hillside buildings, which are at risk of collapse.
That’s not just a theoretical risk. Sand mining caused a bridge to collapse in Taiwan in 2000, and another the following year in Portugal just as a bus was passing over it, killing 70 people.
Demand for high-purity silica sands, which are used to make glass as well as high-tech products like solar panels and computer chips, is also soaring. America’s surging fracking industry also needs the extra-durable high-purity grains. The result: acres of farmlands and forests in rural Wisconsin, which happens to have a lot of those precious sands, are being torn up.
The competition for sand has grown so intense that in many places criminal gangs have gotten into the trade, digging grains up by the megaton to sell on the black market. In parts of Latin America and Africa, according to human rights groups, children are forced to work as virtual slaves in sand mines. The gangs get away with all this the same way organized crime does everywhere – by paying off corrupt police and government officials to leave them alone. And, when they deem it necessary, by assaulting and even killing those who get in their way.
Awareness of the damage caused by our addiction to sand is growing. A number of scientists are working on ways to replace sand in concrete with other materials, including fly ash, the material left over by coal-fired power stations; shredded plastic; and even crushed oil palm shells and rice husks. Others are developing concrete that requires less sand, while researchers are also looking at more effective ways to grind down and recycle concrete.
In many Western countries, river sand mining has already been largely phased out. Getting the rest of the world to follow suit will be tough, though. “Preventing or reducing likely damage to rivers will require the construction industry to be weaned off river sourced aggregate,” says a recent report on the global sand industry by WWF. “This type of societal shift is similar to that required to address climate change, and will necessitate changes in the way that sand and river are perceived, and cities are designed and constructed.”
Mette Bendixen, a coastal geographer at the University of Colorado, is one of a growing number of academics calling for the United Nations and the World Trade Organization, to do more to limit the damage caused by sand mining. “We should have a monitoring program,” says Bendixen. “More management is needed because right now it’s not being managed at all.”
At present, no one even knows exactly how much sand is being pulled out of the earth, nor where, nor under what conditions. Much of it is undocumented. “We just know,” says Bendixen, “that the more people there are, the more sand we need.”
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191108-why-the-world-is-running-out-of-sand?utm_source=pocket-newtab
*
*
A single line in Matthew—“Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s”—largely accounts for why the West isn’t still hostage to theocracy. The Koran contains a few lines that could be equally potent—for instance, “There is no compulsion in religion” (2:256)—but these sparks of tolerance are easily snuffed out. Transforming Islam into a truly benign faith will require a miracle of re-interpretation. And a few intrepid reformers, such as Maajid Nawaz, are doing their best to accomplish it.”
http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/sleepwalking-toward-armageddon
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MILOSZ ON SWEDENBORG: CHRIST IS THE ONLY GOD; GOD IS A MAN
“God is a man. That is why the Bible has that passionate tone not found in other religions dominated by metaphysics. God does not practice metaphysics.” ~ Oscar Milosz, quoted by Czeslaw Milosz in “The Land of Ulro”
“For the theologian Swedenborg, the prophecy contained in the Apocalypse had come to pass in his own time. Of the Christian Church all that was left was “the abomination of desolation.” The decline of religion — the mouthing of words in which the hearts no longer believed — was, in his opinion, facilitated by two doctrines.
The first, the doctrine of the Trinity, adopted by the Council of Nicaea in 325 as a weapon against the heresy of Arius, constituted an enigma resolved only by the mind’s imposition of three gods instead of one. Christianity in effect became polytheistic, the consequences of which would not be apparent until centuries later.
Though a rationalist, Swedenborg refused to concede the Arian argument that Christ was a man only. On the contrary, there was no other God but the God-man, Creator of heaven and earth, who was born of a virgin, died, and was resurrected. Christ was not “consubstantialis” with the Father but was himself the Father; hence that “Divine Human” signifying the Creator of the Universe. This was the great secret revealed to Swedenborg: our heavenly Father is a man. Heaven has a human shape.
The second fatal doctrine was the act of Redemption by which Christ obtained God’s forgiveness for the sins of mankind. From Mary, Christ received a human, that is, sinful nature, and His life was a succession of temptations overcome, thanks to which human nature became divinized.
Here Swedenborg was challenging the Catholics, for whom Christ’s human nature was without sin, and the Lutherans, who professed that man was saved by faith alone, that salvation was made possible through Christ’s bloody atonement.
The fallacy of both doctrines lay in the way in which they interfered with a decidedly anthropomorphic vision of Godmanhood (the God-man and human nature divinized).
. . . No one is condemned by God to Hell. Each dwells in the company and setting of his choice, according to his will’s intention. The damned, when surrounded by the saved, suffer revulsion and anguish.
Swedenborg posited the year 1757 as the year of the Last Judgment, assigning a strictly allegorical meaning to the Apocalypse. The Judgment took place in the other world; neither Earth nor mankind would come to an end, because the higher world could exist without mankind as little as mankind could exist without the higher world. The Second Advent had also come to pass, not literally but as the truth incarnated in Swedenborg’s writings.
Swedenborg thus transposed the biblical story of Creation and “the final things” to a purely spiritual plane. His theology admits neither to the resurrection of the bodies, with the exception of Christ, nor to the other extreme, that of [reincarnation].
Moreover, if the Last Judgment meant that in the “spirit world” there was to be a strict distinction — hitherto increasingly effaced — between salvation and damnation, then we should have no quarrel with the year 1757. For it coincides with the rise of the Industrial Revolution, along with its concomitant, that of spiritual disinheritance.
A God responsible for an evil world was either not good or not omnipotent. The Gnostics chose the good God, who was now transformed into the Other God, the Unknown God, while the Jehovah of the old Testament received the title of the lower demiurge. Swedenborg’s Christ is God the Father-Man incarnate.
A Swedenborgian concept that had great appeal to the Romantics was the arcanum of marriage, which referred as well to the marriage of spirits since, in Swedenborg’s heaven, angels were of both sexes. [If a couple truly loved each other, they would remain married in the spirit world; otherwise, each would be given a new suitable partner.]”~ Milosz, The Land of Ulro, p.137 on
~ “Although Swedenborg, the son of a Swedish clergyman (to whom he owed the name Emanuel, meaning “God is with us”), was equally critical of both Lutheran and Catholic theology, he was sufficiently Protestant to omit Purgatory. His three realms are Heaven, Hell, and midway between the two the “spirit world,” the place to which we all go after death, and where gradually, themselves unaware, their will’s true “intention” (their love) is revealed, whereby a person either ascends to Heaven or descends to Hell.” (138)
“Those caves; those miasmic barrens; those slums where the damned assail each other with knives in the streets; those subterranean concentration camps where the condemned slave day in and day out for their niggardly portion; those celestial houses with their luscious gardens, summer cottages, and arbors nestled among trees . . . A man’s internal condition assumes a form corresponding to his sensuous experiences on earth; an afterlife, in the objective sense, does not exist, only the good and evil in man. “You are what you see”: if nature is composed of signs, those signs now become liberated to form an alphabet of joy or anguish. Swedenborg’s space is internal.” (144)
“A Swedenborgian concept that had great appeal for the Romantics was the arcanum of marriage, which referred as well to the marriage of spirits since, in Swedenborg’s Heaven, angels were of both sexes. The literature of Romanticism has accustomed us to interpreting his “bonding of souls” in an asexual way, even though Swedenborg advocated rather a purified sexuality. For Swedenborg, earthly marriage was a “correspondence” central to Christianity, corresponding to the celestial marriage between love (Amor) and wisdom (Sapientia). Hence, too, the importance attached by him to a monogamous union, which, when it yields a harmony of the spiritual-carnal, is heaven on earth.” (154)
from Wikipedia:
~ According to Swedenborg, angels in heaven do not have an ethereal or ephemeral existence but enjoy an active life of service to others. They sleep and wake, love, breathe, eat, talk, read, work, play, and worship. They live a genuine life in a real spiritual body and world.
An angel’s whole environment — clothes, houses, towns, plants, etc. — are what Swedenborg terms correspondences. In other words, their environment spiritually reflects, and thus "corresponds" to, the mental state of the angel and changes as the angel's state changes.
Swedenborg states that every angel or devil began life as an inhabitant of the human race.
Children who die go directly to heaven, where they are raised by angel mothers.
Angels are men and women in every detail just as they were here on earth, only they are spiritual and thus more perfect.
Swedenborg also says that Christian marriage love of one man and one woman is the highest of all loves, the source of the greatest bliss. “For in themselves Christian marriages are so holy that there is nothing more holy. They are the seminaries of the human race, and the human race is the seminary of the heavens.”
The ancients believed in a fountain of perpetual youth. In heaven their dream is realized, for those who leave this world old, decrepit, diseased in body or deformed, renew their youth, and maintain their lives in the full vigor of early manhood and womanhood.
So who sends people to Heaven or Hell? Nobody but themselves. There is no inquiry as to their faith or former church affiliations, or whether they were baptized, or even what kind of life they lived on Earth. They migrate toward a heavenly or hellish state because they are drawn to its way of life, and for no other reason. ~
Oriana:
A friend has chided me for devoting time and energy to “all this unreal stuff.” I see his point. At the same time, I am willing to admit that when I first discovered the ideas of Swedenborg (I came across his Heaven and Hell in a used bookstore), I felt a rush of excitement that wasn’t purely intellectual. My heart was touched too. I don’t believe that we “go” anywhere after we die, but if we did, I’d choose Swedenborg’s system of ending up with kindred minds, in a place that corresponds to your main mode of perceiving the world. Thus, a kind, trusting person would end up surrounded by kind, trusting spirits; the lovers of beauty would be enjoying beautiful houses and gardens — and of course there would be a lot of overlap here, since lovers of beauty are usually also those who prefer kindness and trust. Isn’t kindness actually a form of beauty?
And I love Swedenborg’s first mystical experience, which happened while he was eating supper. He heard a voice telling him, “Don’t eat too much!”
So, of what use can Swedenborg be to those who don’t believe in the afterlife? I think that his depictions of heaven and hell apply to earthly life. By now it’s a commonplace to say that heaven and hell are states of mind, but we need to be constantly reminded of that. To the extent that we have a certain limited degree of freedom, we can consciously try to slow down, to be more serene — and of course more kind to our fellow human beings. When tipping a waitress, we can try to apply the Golden Rule: if we happened to be that waitress on her swollen feet, would we like to be tipped in a miserly fashion, or generously? If we have room for a new fruit tree, which kind of fruit would be best to offer to friends and neighbors?
Awareness that heaven and hell are right here on earth, and that our thoughts and actions do have an effect after all — that kind of awareness is a game changer. Swedenborg is certainly not a modern thinker, but I see him as being “on the side of the angels” — people who extend the realm of kindness and beauty.
ending on beauty:
WINTER TREES
All the complicated details
of the attiring and
the disattiring are completed!
A liquid moon
moves gently among
the long branches.
Thus having prepared their buds
against a sure winter
the wise trees
stand sleeping in the cold.
~ William Carlos Williams
A liquid moon
moves gently among
the long branches.
As we used to say in poetry workshops, this is the poem. The rest is explaining.
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