Hildegarde

Lorenzo de Medici as a thug.  I say that because it’s true, but also because it at least implies the obvious–thug he might have been, but he was no Stalin.  If an artist willfully screwed up a commision, he might have had him brought up on charges of fraud–which is somsething you could do in the same situation now, at least if you could prove intent–but he wouldn’t have had him whacked. 

The real reason why art in the Renaissance seems to have consisted of so much agreement between artist and patron is that art in the Renaissance was almost univerally commissioned.  Making a living as an artist in fifteenth century Italy meant making your patrons happy, so that they’d commission more pictures, and so that other patrons would also commission pictures.

No Renaissance artist thought of himself as an Artist with a capital A, in the Romantic sense.   If you commissioned a large project from Michaelangelo, Michaelangelo himself would do the big bits (God holding out his finger to touch Adam’s, say) but a lot of the detail work would be done by apprentices and artisans under Michaelangelo’s direction.  You wouldn’t have considered yourself defrauded, and if you had, everybody would have considered you nuts.

But although  Michaelangelo was not much interested in epater-ing the bourgeoisie–and the Medicis where the first and greatest of the bourgeoisie–he was still infamous for the irregularity of his life. 

And only part of that was his homosexuality.  The Renaissance had both a more and a less tolerant attitude towards homosexuality than we do.  On the one hand, they saw it as a mortal sin that would send you straight to hell if you didn’t confess it.  On the other, they thought sex was such a strong drive, in both men and women, that people would nail anything they could get their hands on when the mood took them.  Homosexuality was “normal” in the Renaissance in a way it hasn’t been since precisely because the Renaissance didn’t distinguish it.  Men, women, sheep–it was all sex, and all sex outside a consecrated marriage was mortal sin. 

I suppose Michaelangelo can legitimately be considered to be a genius, but I want to point out here that I’m not equating “genius” and “Bohemian.”  The only people who do are, I think the Bohemians themselves, because they’ve got something to gain from the linkage.

It’s not genius I think we correlate to Bohemian living, but artists as a class.

And I agree with Cheryl on one point especially–the only difference between “white trash” and “Bohemian” is the rhetoric.  And the rhetoric matters less, in the end, than the Bohemians hope it will.  That’s why reading biographies of writers, painters and composers is often so uncomfortably embarrassing.  Here’s this man, or woman, who seems to have this extraordinary insight into the human condition, or who is able to express that condition at its peak of perfection. You go looking to find the way in which he managed to imbue his own life with the things he understood so well, and find that he didn’t imbue it at all.  He lived a mess and died pathetic.  You know dentists who’ve made more sense of their lives.

But although it’s true that there are artists, and great ones, who have not been Bohemian, the fact is that enough of the percentage of the population that is engaged in the arts has been Bohemian so that the correlation has been a stereotype for millennia.

And that phenomenon requires more explanation than it may seem to, especially since it persists even in periods when artists do not see themselves as outside of or in an adversarial position to their societies.

Yes, of course, there are plenty of people who live like Bohemians without the rhetoric.  We call them a number of things–white trash, no-account, useless–but we also tend to recognize the most salient feature of their existence.

By and large, the people who live like this are bone stupid.  They lack insight, foresight, and self-discipline, and by and large they lack the self discipline because they lack the insight and foresight. 

But Bohemians aren’t stupid people.  That’s why they both need to and find it possible to construct rhetoric to defend the lives they lead.  The question remains as to why they should want to live those lives at all. 

Sherlock Holmes was not a Bohemian, but an eccentric.  He pretended to no quarrel with the social and moral customs of his soceity–in fact, he was proud to embody them.  He was successful, and remains so, because he represented the epitome of the Victorian gentleman scientist.  The cocaine never became an addiction, and his deviations from convention never defined, or justified, his life.  

So we’re back, really, to why Bohemians want to be Bohemians, and why so many people who work in the arts embrace Bohemia. 

Which is a more interesting question, to me, than the one that asks why so many of us consider only Bohemians to be ‘real” artists.

Okay, color me stupid, but this confuses me:

>>>Of course, Jane’s description effectively makes the literary novelists government employees, dependent more on taxpayer money (through a cutout or so) than on sales to the general public. >>>

Where is the “government” coming from?  I said nothing about government funding of literary novelists–in fact, government funding for the arts in this country is a drop in the bucket, and doesn’t usually go to novelists anyway.

This system is essentially private–most of the universities inolved in it are private, the publishing companies are private, the foundations are private. 

For all the yelling and screaming about the NEA–the national endowment, not the teachers’ union–it provides very little in the way of money to people who fully expect to clear over a hundred thousand a year in a bad year.  

Its purpose among the writers of literary fiction is largely symbolic–proof that they have the blessing and honor of their society, or at least the upper-end part of it. 

(And a note–of course Nozick meant literary novelists, since he probably does not identify other writers of long fiction as novelists at all.  Nobody from the college I went to would call me a “novelist.”  I write detective novels, or mystery novels, or something–but that’s not the same thing as being a real novelist. My guess is that you’d get the same reaction if you talked to anybody on the Connecticut Gold Coast–the high-end Wall Street brokers and lawyers, the medical specialists with three advanced degrees, etc.

But before you decide that those people are all snobs, I’m here to tell you that the attitude is prevalent with fans, too, and with people who work in the industry in one capacity or another.  The fans of genre writers have a tendency to the attitude of “we made you, you’d better stay in line” (I get into a lot of trouble on that one), and a woman who said she was a copyeditor on one of the forums I contribute to now and again once said that if she were working on a literary novel, of course she deferred to the writer’s judgment about wording, vocabulary and form, but with a genre writer, well, shs expected those to stick to the standard conventions and assumed that any deviation from them was automatically wrong.  Then she told me I  had no right to complain that my “chaise longue” was changed to “change lounge” since the second was now perfectly accepted common usage.  I pointed out that the common usage was wrong, and let it go.)

But let me go back, for a minute, to Bohemia.  The issue of the madness of artists is one thing, but Bohemia is another. 

By Bohemia I meant a determination to live outside normal social conventions–to refuse to marry in those ages when cohabitation was a scandal (or even a crime), to be a “night person,” to refuse to hold down steady jobs or to establish a normal career arc.

And, if ou can believe the reports of their detractors, to dissent from conventional notions of hygene.

The artist as tortured genius is a trope that goes back only to the eighteenth century.  Leonardo would have considered the idea ridiculous.

The intellectual as Bohemian, though, goes all the way back to the Greeks.  It’s there in Aristophanes’ The Clouds where Socrates is portrayed as a sort of smarter-than-average Maynard G. Krebs. 

From what I’ve read, the portrait in Aristophanes was supposed to be a composite of intellectuals in general and not necessarily of  Socrates in particular, but we’ve got documented evidence–in spades–of the Bohemianism of both the British Romantic poets and the writers of Bloonsbury.

Of course, a lot of what was then considered shockingly irregular would  now be considered perfectly normal.  We don’t get all bent out of shape if somebody calls us by our first names before we’ve known them very long, or expect that a ‘well run” house needs at least one maid, if only to serve at dinner.

But a number of the themes are constant across the centuries–the casual disrespect for the authority and persons of parents; the retreat from customary means of earning a living (or even the pursuit of earning a living at all), the endless indulgence in “alternative” forms of family structure and varieties of promiscuous fornication.

And no, of course it’s not the case that artistic excellence requires any of this, or intellectual work, either.   Lytton  Stachey notwithstanding, there were plenty of Victorians alone who managed to live quite conventional lives while dealing with and advocating the most original ideas, in politics and art as well as bioloy and physics.

Sherlock Holmes was a lot of things, but he was not a Bohemian.

But, really, the more I look at this, the more interesting it gets.  George Steiner has a point–the high art tradition has always worked on a patronage basis.  The ordinary peasant in the streets of Florence may or may not have benefited from Michaelangelo’s art, or Leonardo’s–I tend to think he did, but that’s another post–but Florentine artists of the Renaissance weren’t painting or sculpting for the peasant in the street.

The artists of the Renaissance had an audience, but it was made up of the great patrons, Popes, aristocrats, and the first great captains of capitalism.  These were by and large highly educated men and women whose tastes bore no relation to those of ordinary men and women, and they were backed up by a rising middle class that took it upon itself to form its own tastes to be more aristocratic than not.

Since the opinions of ordinary men and omen did not matter in these societies–the upper classes would have been unlikely to  know what those opinions were–there was no need to “epater” anybody.  There was no conflict between the artists’ judgment of what made good (or great) art and society’s, because both the artist and his audience came from the same intellectual tradition with the same tastes and values.

This was true even in cases–like Michaelangelo’s–where the artist’s socioeconomic history was significantly different from that of his patrons.  If there ever was a brilliant example of class not being primarily about money, Michaelanelo might be it. 

I’m going somewhere with this, I thihk.  I just don’t know where yet.

Every once in a while, things come together sort of serendipitously, and oddly enough, they seem to have today.

Let me start with  John’s question about whether “people who are good at English are also good at math,” or maybe the other way around.   It doesn’t matter.

What does matter is how you’re defining “good at.”   If you’re defining it in an absolute sense, then no–it’s very rate that people are “good at” both  the humanities and the mathematically-dependent hard sciences.

But relatively is another matter.  Ask any of my friends who are good at math–I actually have two who are full time mathematicians, one with something of a reputation–and they’ll tell you that my math abilities are ludicrously weak.

But  I managed to pass–respectably–two semesters of college calculus and a semester of differential equations.  Next to even most of the girls in the private girls’ high school I attended, I was “good at math,” and in honors math courses and the Math Honor Socity {Mu Alpha Theta, no less). 

Relative to the student population of a takes-all-comers public high school, I would have looked very good at math.

Robert, I think, misinterprets what Nozick is saying about intellectuals being “the smartest” people in their high schools–he’s not saying that they actually are smarter than everybody else, but that they spend four years in a system where “smart” is defined as “good at school,” and they’re very good at school. 

The only experience they have of a situation in which “the people” decide who gets status and who loses it is the clique system in their high schools–and that system definitely denigrates the hell out of who they are and what they’re good at. 

But being “good at school” gets you a lot in this society.  First, most of the people Nozick is calling “intellectuals” here would not be government employees of any kind, unless they signed on as White House speechwriters. 

Professional status for academics in the United States is firmly in the hands of private colleges and universities.  Only a very few public universities count as “first class” in job prestige for academics.

And first rate private universities pay their professors a lot of money–lots and lots of it.  A tenured professor at a Harvard or at Amherst will make an easy six figures.  A tenured prfessor with seniority will make a healthy six figures.

As to high-end journalists, etc, the best indication that a kid is going to end up with a national career in the media these days is where he did his undergraduate work.  In other words, yes, these are the people who were “good at school.”

And literary writers in the U.S.  are not getting poor and are not doing something even loosely akin to vanity publishing.  In fact, quite the contrary.   Every major New York house makes a point of publishing at least some literary fiction, and they are considerably more patient with their literary writers than with their popular ones.

There’s also an interlocking systems of awards, committees, writer in residence jobs, magainze and journal publication, and CATs (course adoption texts), that mean these people make significant money and have significant audiences, even if some of those audiences are captive.

In fact, if you want to make a living as a writer, you’d do much better to be “good at school,” go to an  Ivy  League college, get an MFA from the Iowa Writer’s workshop, and then do a year or two at Granta or The Wilson Quarterly.  Most “popular” writers won’t make half the money you do, and they won’t get anywhere near the prestige.

I think Nozick has a point–if you’re “good at school” in a country where being so means you spend four years of your adolescence being denigrated and humiliated by your peers, and where all your rewards come from a top-down centrally planned system of merit, and you then enter the real world to find that your greatest sucess comes when you stay within just such a top-down centrally planned system of merit, you’re going to end up thinking that top-down centrally planned systems of merit are a good thing.  In fact, the only good thing.

But that still doesn’t quite make sense of what’s going on, because it’s been going on longer than the present system has been in place, and it is clear in the lives and works of hugely popular and successful writers and intellectuals as well as dismissed and marginalized ones. 

You can say anything you want about Byron and Shelley–and I think they were worse as poets than we’re usually allowed to admit out loud–but they were not marginal.  They were more like their era’s version of rock stars.  They made tons of money, were more famous than most figures in government, were followed around by what can only be called groupies, and constituted a solid social class of a particular and often highly venerated kind.   At least, venerated by the public, if not by officialdom.

So let me turn this around and ask the question that’s been bugging me for several years now–why is it that intellectual work, and not only the arts, seem to correlate so highly with socially irregular behavior.

I feel like a Victorian mother here–“socially irregular behavior.”  But  I don’t know what else to call it.  Why are artists, writers and musicians expected to be “Bohemian”?

When  I was first thinking about this, it occurred to me that it might be simply a matter of correlation.  If your stock in trade is originality, if you can only do your best work if you do something new, then maybe whatever makes it possible for you to see other ways to write a novel or compose a symphony than the ones you’ve been brought up with might also make it possible for you to see other ways to live.  Whatever compels you to “originality” in one area may compel you to “originality” in another. 

I finally decided that this wouldn’t do, for at least two reasons. The first is that Bohemian originality is not particularly original.   If you’ve grown up upper middle class in New England or California, for instance, you’d do a great deal more to epater les bourgoisie if you moved to  Mississippi, got born again, and settled down to work in a lube shop and have six children than by running way to Paris to sleep with sexually ambiguous African revolutionaries.  

The second is that, in some quarters, the Bohemianism seems to be a settled social role, part of what is expected of certain people in certain walks of life.  For all the rhetoric of “transgression” and revolution, your standard American Bohemian today is an organization man.

That’s the real issue behind literary fiction in the US as we speak–the problem isn’t that it’s divorced from everyday life, or doesn’t speak to a wide audience, or is composed of people who despise their audiences (that last one is true of lots and lots of writers, including some very popular ones who claim to be conservatives).

The problem with literary publishing today is that it’s precisely a system–you enter it the same way you get a job in a Wall Street law firm, by being “good at school” (which means being not too independent in what you say and write, among other things), and then carefully fulfilling the requirements to get degree after degree until you’re finally “officially” a writer.

I mean, for God’s sake.  No wonder all that stuff sounds the same. 

Right now, I’m just going to make a suggestion.  Go see if you can find a collection of essays by Tom Wolfe called Mauve Gloves and Madmen, Clutter and Vine.  In it, there’s an essay–I think it’s the title one, but I’m not sure–that’s a satirical look at the kind of intellectual Nozick was talking about. 

In some ways, it’s more useful than Nozick’s article in outlining the problem–but it’s also very funny.

Wolfe has no patience with this kind of thing, and the last line of the thing is hysterical.

So, John brought up Anarchy, State and Utopia, a book I sometimes suggest to people who know nothing about libertarianism and either can’t or won’t read Ayn Rand, but a book  I always recommend with mental reservations.

I first heard of Robert Nozick in 1983.  I bought the book in London in 1984, going to one of those big academic bookstores they used to have to find it.  I was excited, at the time, for obvious reasons.  The idea of a libertarian–and a radical libertarian–on the faculty of the philosophy department at Harvard was a really neat idea.   It was even neater that he became chairman of that department, just as John Rawls had been before him.  Rawls has got to be the premiere liberal (American sense) philosopher of the last half of the twentieth century.

And Nozick really is a radical libertarian–radical on both fronts of libertarian thought, which is where he gets into trouble, at least for me.

He’s radical in the limitations he would place on government, basically reducing it to the police, the courts, and the military.  Ayn Rand was, of course, there before him, and went farther.

The standard libertarian formula for goverment says that government may properly intervene in cases where one citizen or group of citizens initiates the use of force or fraud against another citizen or group of citizens, and can perform those functions necessary to the continued existence of the society that cannot be successfully performed any other way.

The second half of that formula allows for a certain amount of wiggle room, and most libetarians think it’s okay for governments to run road systems, for instance. 

But Nozick’s problem came in addressing the second issue of libertarianism–what liberty meant for the individual–and in my opinion, he went to the edge of the cliff and just jumped off.

Consider Thomas Jefferson’s reworking of the Lockean formula on rights–not “life, liberty and property” but “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

A lot of people have taken that to mean–and almost all libertarians have taken that to mean–that government has no business interfering in the individual life style choices of citizens.   Most libertarians are pro-choice, but most of them are also in favor of ditching all the drug laws. 

But now let’s take an extreme example–what if you want to own slaves, and know somebody who wants to be a slave.  What right has the government to interfere in your choice?

In a certain sense of “choice,” the answer to the above may be:  none.  Go out on the Internet, and you’ll find entire networks of websites devoted to the “dom and sub” lifestyle, which is all about choosing to be or have slaves in the confines of your own home.   That would seem to indicate that “being a slave” or “having a slave” was a lifestyle choice you are able to make.

But.  Here’s the thing.

A slave isn’t a slave because he voluntarily submits to the will of his master.  He’s a slave because his submission is involuntary.  As long as you can leave any time you want to, you’re not choosing to be a slave,and you aren’t really a slave owner.  You’re playing a game with roles on both sides but no solid basis in reality.

In order for it to be possible for you to choose to be a slave or choose to be a master, your government would be required either to enfoce your choices–to bring your slave back to you when he runs away–or to stay neutral while you did (by, say, hunting down your runaway slave and dragging him back).

This government will do neither of those things, and on the subject of slavery we actually have a Constitutional amendment to cover it.

Now take another example–a real one.  And I warn you, this is gross.

A few years ago, a young man in Germany placed a classified ad saying that he had always wanted to eat a human being, and asking if there was anybody out there who had always wanted to be eaten. 

He got a taker, and the two men hooked up together for a truly remarkable few weeks, during which the first man chopped off bits and pieces of the second, cooked them, and then both ate them hismelf and fed his apparently willing victim.  Finally, the first man killed what was left of the second man, and ate that.

The German government was not amused. Nor were they inclined to be understanding of the lifestyle choices of two consenting adults.

Robert Nozick wasn’t thinking of extreme cases like this when he formed his conviction that in a free society, groups of people should be able to form communities that decided that rules for themselves, no matter how objectionable they might seem to other people.

He was thinking of things like religious communities, not only the  Amish but less strict sects that, for instance, didn’t accept the political equality of women and expected them to e subordinate to their husbands, or groups that wanted polygamay. 

If the pursuit of happiness was to mean anything, Nozick said, then such communities must be able not only to form, but to enforce their rules within their communities.

In a way, he went right back to the Greek understanding of liberty–not as an attribute of individuals, but of societies.  For the Greeks, a society was free if it could make its own rules unimpeded by outside power or authority.  It didn’t matter if those rules were crushingly oppressive to individual action.

Nozick would in fact have been okay with government enforcing–or allowing communities to enforce–slavery.  I don’t know what he would have thought of the second case, but there’s nothing in any of the books I read by him, or any of the articles, that gives me even a hint that he’d be able to oppose it.

The simple fact of the matter is this–in a free society where liberty inheres in the individual, you can pursue happiness, but nobody can guarantee that your fellow  citizens wil like you for it, or respect you for it, or refuse to jude you for it.  Nor are your fellow citizens required to pay for it.  Nor are they required to enfocrce it. 

And that means that we will never be perfectly free.  I’m free to buy a beachside mansion in the Hamptons, but I don’t have the money for it, so my freedom is moot for the moment.  I’m free to decide to dye my entire body neon green and my hair neon pink, but not to walk the streets without getting started at or keep my job as the spokesperson for the Family Values Association.

Some choices are harder to make than others.  They cost more mentally, emotionally, and materially than others.   You are free to make them, but you are required to take the consequences.   If those consequences make you feel constrained in your choices, that’s not lack of liberty but presence of calculation. You are free to jump off a twenty-story building.   You are not free not to go splat when you hit the ground. 

I like a lot of Nozick’s work, and I have a tendency to send people links to my favorite essay of his, “Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism.”  The link is here:

http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/cpr-20n1-1.html

But although individual liberty is ultimately the right to choice of various kinds, that’s not all it is, and reducing your defense of liberty to choice and choice alone is going to get you into a lot of trouble.

The nation Nozick visualized, the one in which individual groups could go off and live with rules of their own making no matter what those rules were would not have been free in any sense of the term, maybe not even in the sense the Greeks gave the word.

In the end, a free country is one in which the government defends the rights of individuals to make free choices, and that ultimately means not only that communities have limited rights of choice in at least some cases, but that individuals themselves may have limited rights of choice in some areas if those choices would decrease or endanger the liberties of the rest of us.

In other words,  Robert Nozick wouldn’t have been able to come up with a defense of the  German government’s prosecution of the cannibal for murder–but  I could do it with my eyes shut.

So, Robert says:

>>With due respect for Locke, he is NOT where rights begin. Try Runnymede, only they weren’t new then.<<<

But  I didn’t say rights started with  Locke–in fact, I’ve said several times on th is blog that rights are not invented by human beings, but inhere in the person whether human beings choose to recognize them or not.  Rights are true statements about a human nature that is fixed, not a social construct in any way.

What I did say was that the formulation of rights as found in the Declaration and elsewhere at the American founding derived from  Locke–and it did.   The formulation “life, liberty and property” was an invention of seventeenth and eighteenth century Enlightenment philosophy–it didn’t invent the fact of rights, but it did invent that particular way of talking about them.

And it’s impossible to spend ten seconds looking into the things Jefferson,  Madison, Adams, Franklin and the rest of them wrote without seeing that they were well acquainted with that philosophy and determined to use it in their design of the new government. 

If I was going to pull for my particular little patch of intellectual ground, I’d be pulling for literature, not philosophy–but literature is secondary to philosophy, as is history.  Neither literature nor history can be written at all without their writers assuming a philosophical position.

I think it makes more sense–Jefferson and Madison thought it made more sense–to assume that philosophical position consciously, rather than by default.

But it occurs to me that the time has come for me to recommend a book.  Usually, I just sort of mention books and talk about them and take the attitude that you can take them or leave them, but I want to take this one and jump up and down on the heads of everybody and say “read this!  read this!”

The book is The Open Society and Its Enemies, by Karl Popper.  I bought my copy of it almost ten years ago, or maybe longer, and at that time it was sold in two volumes.  The first covered Plato to Hegel.  The second started, I think, with Marx and came on down to Popper’s present, which was around the time of World  War  II.

It’s a famous book, so I’m sure it’s still in print somewhere and in some form, but the point here is this:  Popper was a philosopher of considerable influence in his time (and since, in at least some quarters) and his book takes on that part of the philosophical tradition that seem to advocate for an authoritarian, centrally-controlled society under the direction of one form of ruling elite or another. 

Popper saw, before anybody else was willing to, the connections between Fascism and Communism.  He became famous for isolating “falsifiability” as the distinctive attritube of scientific inquiry–note, he didn’t invent falsifiability, he just noticed and codified it. 

But The Open Society and Its Enemies is largely about political philosophy, and specifically that history of political philosophy that begins with Plato and lands us with Marx.  It’s one of the most impressive documents of anti-Communist liberalism, with “liberalism” here used in the American sense, although Popper was a Brit and eventually knighted.

It’s sometimes difficult for us to remember that people like Popper existed, never mind that it was once the norm among liberals to be almost more vigorously anti-Communist than conservatives were.   There’s an entire stretch of the political history of the Anglophone sphere that we’ve just lost, as if it never existed, and yet it explains a good deal about why the FDR consensus lasted as long as it did.

Popper, Sidney  Hook, Arthur  Schlesinger, Jr.  Almost any one of them comes closer to what modern day conservatives say they think they’re doing than the anti-democratic Edmund Burke.  And yet it’s Burke I keep getting hit with whenever I look through conservative web sites. 

It’s a good thing that most Americans aren’t going to be bothered to read through Burke’s dense prose to figure out that what he actually thought not only of the French revolution but of the American one was that not only were revolutions bad things, but so were societies where “the people” were presumed to be able to rule.  They couldn’t really do it, and the result would always be undesirable.

What The Open  Society and Its Enemies at least tries to do is to explain why an authoritarian tradition in Western philosophy ever developed at all, and how that philsophy was composed and how it functions in history–and will continue to function, if it is not faced directly.

It can be very effective, in the short term, to counter the depredations of authoritarianism by pointing to the dire effects it has had when it’s been tried in history.

In the long term, though, by doing that you’re treating the symptom and not the disease, and the disease will be back and in a more virulent form before you have a chance to take a good deep breath. 

First, conratulations to Lee.  I’m so used to thing of Derrida and company as plagues of the English Department that I forget that at least some of them started out as philosophers.

It’s enough to make your head ache.

As to the Founding Fathers of the United States, however, there is simply no way that an examination of what they wrote–both publicly and privately–would support the idea that they constructed this government on the basis of their understanding of history and not of philosophy, or even of history primarily rather than philosophy primarily.

The concept of rights as they exist in the Declaration and in the  Constitution is not historical.  It comes straight out of the work of John Locke, whom the Founders knew and knew well, as they knew Liebnitz and  Rousseau.   They knew both Plato and Aristotle, too, and Cicero and Seneca.

Did history inform the decisions they made about this government?  Of course it did, as it should.  But the design of this government was an exercise in philosophy, and an educated guess that that philosophy of Locke–Locke’s “what should be”–was workable in real life.

The problem here, for me, is this:  rights are a hard sell.  People don’t like them.  In fact, vitually nobody does.  At this moment, neither political party has any inention of honoring rights as they are formulated in this Constitution, and I have my doubts if any government of the US ever managed to honor them fully.

Freedom of speech?  Wonderful idea.  Except it shouldn’t mean that people can say things that are unpatriotic, or that are “hate speech.”  Freedom of the press?  Excellent–but that was never intended to protect child pornographers, or people who want to argue that drugs should be legalized, or people who insult other people’s religions, or people who argue that some races are more intelligent than others. 

And on and on and on.

One of the things I’ve been doing over the last few years is constructing a curriculum that could serve as a full, multi-year course in American civilization, meant for the elementary-through-high-school on the assumption that it might make sense to teach this stuff if only so that succeeding generations could know what they were rejecting.

But yesterday, something came to my attention that seems to me to present the exact sort of problem we need philosophy to solve–that we DESPERATELY need philosophy to solve.

Because it’s only philosophy that can provide the intellectual framework for and foundation of rights.   Rights are creatures of philosophy.  They could not have come into the consciousnesses of human beings in any other way.

Now to the incident, which some of you have already heard of, because I was blithering about it on Facebook yesterday.

What happened, as near as anybody can tell, is this:  Amazon sold a number of books by  George Orwell to their Kindle users.  It was later determined that the third party seller offering these books did not have the right to offer them for sale, and the literary estate of Orwell, or the publisher, or whoever holds the actual copyrights these days, objected.

So Amazon deleted these books from their customers’ Kindles and refunded their money.

Think about that.  You’ve bought a book.   You think you own it.  You get up one morning, try to read it–and find that someone has wiped it clean and you no longer do in fact own it.

If you ever did.

Now do the kind of apocalyptic thinking I’m fond of–imagine a world where Kindles or related devices are the primary way in which books are distributed and read, and then think of a government that decides it doesn’t want its citizens reading X.

Say what you will about “dead tree technology,” as somebody put it yesterday, but once I produce the physical books and put them in your hands, they’re virtually untracable and ineradicable.  That’s why book burnings are always largely symbolic.

It is part of human nature that human beings feel a drive to ontrol their environments–and in the range of human personalities, some will want more control than others.

It is also true that part of our environments consists in the people in them, and that there is no possibility in the real world that we will ever reach a state when we will need to exert no control at all.

The police are a necessary institution–without some such institution, murder and rape and robbery would be routine.  Free markets could not exist unless we were able to provide some protection against fraud, and they don’t work well if we don’t provide some prevention as well as some punishment once the fraud has been committed.

Unfortunately, once we allow any control at all, we put ourselves in danger of being swallowed by too much of it.  Control feeds on itself. 

Rights, as conceived by Locke, are attempts to curb that feeding. They don’t last long unless we understand what they are and how they function, and that means we need to understand at least some philosophy. 

The better course would be to understand a lot of it–but for the purposes of my  primary and secondary curriculum, I could probably get away with starting in the seventeenth century and throwing in those specific ancient philosophers that the Founders also read.  Those were, after all, part of the standard ciriculum for secondary school and  university in this country at the time of the Founding, and for many decades after it. 

There are a lot of issues these days which hinge on our understanding of rights–government health care reform, home schooling, even private clubs that want to admit only Albanian men and allow smoking.  Hell, there’s the issue of smoking in your own home, if you happen to have children living there–and, of course, the rationale for things like the drug war.

Locke presented a concept of rights and a concept of government that had never existed before in history, and we at least tried to put it into practice.  

What’s more, we did this fully conscious of what it was we were doing.  We were, we said, providing novus ordo seclorum–a new order of the ages.

So, my day started-well, it started before it was a day, actually, when the brownout hit around three o’clock.  The full scale power outage made it in at four thirty. 

That last one was the kicker, because of course I  had a couple of freezers full of food, and the power company kept telling me they’d have the power back on by about…oh, maybe quarter after eleven.

It actually worked out all right, because if you have lots of food frozen solid in a freezer and never open the doors, it takes more than half a day for anything to even start thawing out, so we weren’t hit too badly.

But I couldn’t use the computer or otherwise distract myself, so as soon as the day got light enough for me to read, I sat down and devoured a huge hunk of this book I’ve been reading, by Yvor Winters.   It’s actually four short books all collected into a single volume, which I usually don’t like.  But four or five years ago, when I went looking for the one book  I wanted–Maule’s  Curse:  Four Studies in American  Obscurantism–this was the only wa to get it. 

Winters is not only exactly the kind of critic most present-day academics in literature think they’re rebelling against, he was the critic most Fifties New  Critics were rebelling against.  The interesting thing is that he’s still in print at all.

At any rate, me being the person I am, when I finally sat down to read this thing, I  sat down to read it all, all four of the included volumes.   It’s just an odd coincidence that this morning, when I had all this time to read and think, I’d actually just reached the text of Maule’s  Curse itself.   “God will give you blood to drink,” Matthew Maule says to old Judge  Pyncheon at the beginning of The House of the Seven Gables, and in this case both Maule and Hawthorne knew what they were talking about.

I want to go back to a point Robert rased a couple of posts ago and that I have raised several times myself–that the great destructive power of one strand of philosophical thinking in the West (the Plato/Rousseau/Marx strand) is caused by the assumption that you can turn human beings into anything you want them to be–that the power of nuture is absolute over the power of nature.

The intellectual history of the United States begins in  Puritan New England.  Much of the general history of the United States starts there, too, but for whatever reason, the other and contemporary settlements didn’t throw up much in the way of theology, philosophy, poetry or art.  They would, later, but especially in the seventeenth century, they were a little slow to get started.

The thing to remember about Puritanism is that its purity lay not in strict moral adherence to absolute definitions of virtue and sin, but in strict adherence, often to the point of incoherence, to the doctrine of predestination.

The Puritans were, in a way, the ultimate anti-Romantics.  If the Romantics believed that men and women could be changed into anything at all–pacifist vegetarians who would never even consider going to war, for instance–the Puritans believed that men and women could not be changed at all, ever.  God had decided the fate of every human person before the beginning of time.

But here’s the thing.  The Puritans may have believed that, or said they did, but they did not behave as if they believed it.  They established laws and punishments on the assumption that such things would serve as deterrents to prospective criminals.   They constructed school curricula on the assumption that such curricula had an effect on the kind of men and women children would grow into.  

Jonathan Edwards was a very late Puritan–a contemporary of Benjamin Franklin, not the Salem witch trials–but he wrote a book, called Freedom of the Will, proving that human beings have none.   He also preached a very vigorous revival in the First Great  Awakening, and quite obviously thought it was possible for men and women to be converted by being persuaded by sermons.

In other words, it’s not just philosophers who think that men and women can be changed by their environment–it’s everybody. 

I know I’ve tended to use “think they can chane human nature” as a handy way of categorizing the Romantic impulse in morals and politics, but I’ve been less than correct.  

The  Romantics didn’t think they could change human nature, any more than  John Locke did.  They thought human nature was something different than Locke thought it was.  And they were more wrong than Locke was, but let’s put that aside for a moment.

Philosophy is the project of applying reason to the understanding of life on earth–all life, from its material base to its ethical base to its political arrangements and on around again.

Political philosophy is the project of applying reason to the workings of governments.

Rousseau is a philosopher, but so is Locke–they came up with different prescriptions for the governments of men, but they were both engaged in the same activity when they did it.

Their differences are partially ones of assumptions–Locke was much less sanguine about the goodness of mankind than Locke could be–but partially ones of calculation.  And the calculations are crucial.

All philosophers look at the world and see the same things in terms of base data, the same things the rest of us see.  They see that there is a lot of violence and pain, that men and women ruin themselves and each other with stupidity and avarice and spite.   They see that some men live better than others and hold power, and that often these men not only seem to have done nothing to deserve their good fortune, but to exhibit qualities that make such good fortune a slap in the face of justice.

They see that some people work hard all their lives and barely manage to feed themselves and their families, while others work not at all and get anything and everything they want.  In their time, they would have seen–as Plato and Aristotle saw–that some men live in bondage to others, that some are used worse than animals as slaves in mines and quarries. 

They see rape, and murder, and theft, and torture, and–especially from the perspective of nearly 300 years ago–endless wars that on second look seem completely senseless, and that destroy entire peoples, lay waste to the landscape, and make all but a very small group of people on the winning side worse off than when they started. 

They see, as well, wars of religion, and religious persecutions–one human being torturing, murdering, thieving against another in the name of upholding the honor of  God. 

We’ve come a long way since the eighteenth century.  We’ve improved our technlogy to the point where casual starvation is no longer common, where famines are rare.  We’ve improved our understanding of the way men live under governments so that we’ve managed to minimize–but not eliminate–that problems of injustice in inequality of outcome.

But given that this is what all philosophers see, the fact that all philosophers think that human nature is at least in some degree and in some directions malleable is tautological–of course they do.  If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be philosophers.  What would be the point of engaging in political philosophy if you couldn’t improve the lives of human beings from what you see around you?

John Locke and  Ayn Rand want to make radical changes in society just as much as Plato and Rousseau do, they just want to make different changes, and they consider as “problems to be solved” different things.

It makes no sense, to me, for Americans to decide that philosophy is nothing but destructive and worthless trash that should be removed from the “core curriculum,” because while the Puritans and the Romantics wer fighting it out in New England, the Virginians were reading Locke and–yes–Rousseau. 

And on that basis they managed to found a government that was the first ever concceived and constructed on the basis of philosophy–and we’re still here. 

Like it or not, Philosophy  R Us.  You need philosophy to build the gulags, but you also need it to build the Bill of Rights.

Of course, the philosophy that had its brief vogue during and directly after the American Revolution has never been particularly popular–and I would guess a full, whole-hearted acceptance of its principles was close to nonexistent even at the time.

One of the exercise I like to do in some of my classes is to assign a set of readings from the period–Federalist papers, letters, public procolamations, etc–on two subjects:  the right of the people to bear arms, and the separation of church and state.

I’ll absolutely guarantee you I make nobody happy.  The right wing guys are happy about guns–whee! they did mean an individual right to gun ownership–but appalled at how very much support there is for a strict separation of church and state, and even more appalled at how hostile so many of these men were to traditional Christianity.

The left wing people are happy with the separation of church and state until they realize that this meant that individuals and nongovernmental organizations had an absolute right to hire and fire people based on their religion, and they don’t know what to do with the gun rights thing at all.

Then there’s freedom of speech, which absolutely nobody but a few fanatics ever seems to actually believe in.  Most of us believe in “freedom of speech, but…”  “But not if it’s child pornography.”  “But not if it’s unpatriotic.”  “But not if it’s hate speech.”

I’m going to go back to Yvor Winters for a while.

I do want to point out that the first half of thise was written yesterday, and at about the point of that last paragraph about Jonathan Edwards we had a second power outage, this one also lasting five hours, and  I had to stop.

But today looks pretty, so I have my fingers crossed.

There was supposed to be a post yesterday.  I even know what I  wanted to say in it.  I just wanted to write it on a better, and faster, computer than the one I have at home, so I put it off until I could run into school and get some time on the machines there.

Then, the way these things always work, I never got a chance to run in  at all. 

As it turned out, though, it brought me an epiphany, and the only thing that surprises me is that I was at all surprised.

I think that none of you has actually met a Nurse Ratchett. 

I shouldn’t be surprised at this, since in the experience of my own life, Ratchetts have been blessedly rare.   I think I’ve only met two of them face to face, and only one who was in a position to focus on me.

In the nasty situation I am presently in, there are plenty of people whose only concern is to save the institution–but not one of those people is a Ratchett, and the Ratchett involved in this, the one who started it and the one who keeps it going, is not only not working to preserve the insitution, but she’s perfectly willing to see the institution go smash as long as she gets what she wants, which is personal, individual power.

Perrsonal and individual.

What characterizes a Ratchett is not just that she wants power–there are plenty of power hungry jerks in the world–but that the kind of poer she wants.

A Ratchett wants to stand directly in front of her victim, look him in the face, and watch him writhe and squirm and finally capitulate, to accept his pleading assurances that all he wants is to please her, he finds her the one true friend he has ever had, everything she wants is good and true.

A Ratchett would find ordering about a crowd distinctly unsatisfying.   From everything I’ve read about Hitler, he was not a Ratchett in any way. 

I’ve worked in academic instiutions half my life.  I’ve never met an administrator who was a Ratchett.  I  know the kind of enforcers Robert is talking about–but they’re not Ratchetts.   They’re ruthless, and morally stupid.   They’re martinets.  But their object is to maintain the institution at all costs. 

A Ratchett’s object is the writhe and squirm, the breaking of an individual human will, by herself, in her presence, and for itself. 

If you want an Ayn Rand character for reference, it’s not her “second-raters,” but Ivy Starnes from the tramp’s story at the end of Atlas Shrugged.

It’s almost like an odd, fundamentally depraved form of sexual orientation–and, in a way, that makes the Ratchett far more dangerous than martinet administrators or politicians who’ll lie through their teeth to get into office.  

Most of us can’t even imagine wwanting to do to other human beings what the Ratchetts want to do to all the ones they come in contact with.  We really can’t imagine wanting to do it personally, and to watch the break. 

Robert’s administrator-enforcers make damned sure to get other people to cause whatever breaking is necessary, or to do it in letters or e-mails so that they don’t have to face what their actions are causing, if any break is caused.

Because those administrators also don’t actually need anybody to break.  They only need them to obey.  It’s nice if you buy into the program, but they’re happy to take your grudging compliance, and they don’t care a damn if you’re spending your free time thinking they’re idiots as long as you’re doing what they want done.

A Ratchett would never settle for that kind of compliance.  Her purpose is not to get you to obey, but to get you to break–the break is the point, not the obedience.  

Ack, I feel like I’m going around and around here.  Ken Kesey’s book is a good one, so I’ll recommend One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest to anybody out there who wants to read it.   Kesey is an excellent writer who was badly served by his times, but both of his major novels (that one and Sometimes A Great Notion) are worth the time.

And politically, he’s apt to surprise you.  Ratchett is his strongest creation in character, but he was always focussed on them and the harm they do.  In his second book, though, he finds one in…a labor union.

Thinking about the Ratchetts I’ve known and the ones I’ve heard other people report on, it occurs to me that absolutely all of them have been members of the “helping professions,” most usually teachers, nurses and social workers and in every case I’ve heard of people who work with children.

Most people who are charged with running programs of various sorts that have been written on  Ratchett principles–those drug programs, for instance–aren’t Ratchetts themselves, and end up doing it all very badly, and find themselves angry and frustrated that the programs don’t work the way the material says they will.

But that’s our good luck, so I’m not going to bitch about it now.

And eventually, I will get to Yvor Winters.

First, let’s start with Robert’s comment that the Ratchetts of this world are just the hippies’ enforcers.

The Ratchetts are never anybody’s enforcers but their own.  Their interest is in personal, immediate and individual power.  They’ll use the language of hippies if that will get them where they want to go, or the language of Hitler if that will.   They really don’t care about anything but their ability to control everything and everybody around them, with “control” defined as something much deepr than a simple ability to order people about.  They don’t want you to do what they tell you to do.   They want you to believe, to the very core of yourself, that what they tell you to do is the only morally acceptable option, and that you are bad to the core because you resist them.

The hippies have a problem with the Ratchetts because the hippies have such a thoroughly a randically social constructionist view of the world that they have little or no defenses against the Ratchetts.

Even when hippie instincts rebel against Ratchett methods–and they often do–there’s no way most hippies can promote those instincts against any methods at all.   Add to this the fact that Ratchetts are always good at speaking the language of their enablers, and lots of hippies will decide that their qualms are illegitimate, a vestiage of those parts of themselves that remain unenlightened, and you’ve got a prescription for some very bad stuff.

But it’s not only the hippies who react this way to the Ratchetts. Almost everybody does, and Ratchetts arise in every political and social movement, and in absolutely all medical ones.  Ratchetts absolutely love medical movements, because they provide the perfect platform for Ratchett grabs for power–“it’s for your own good” gets to become “the SCIENCE says that X is bad for you, so no rational person could make that choice, so if you’re making that choice, you’re not rational, and if you’re not rational, you can’t really make a choice.”

This is the language of high school anti-drug and alcohol programs far more than of college speech codes, and Ratchett methods will always work best in areas where they can point to something objective (the  SCIENCE says) to back up their bids for power.   In political movements, Ratchetts thrive by turning political questions into  moral ones, unless they really hit the jackpot and find that they can medicalize what is really a non-medical social issue.  \

For that, you have to look at things like the calls in some circles to require home visits of social workers in the first two weeks of every newborn’s life–just to make sure there isn’t any child abuse or neglect going on in the home.  Or, better yet, the people who try to declare that raising a child in a religion is “child abuse” and should be prohibited.

As for the champions of Napoleon in England–we’ve really got to keep intellectual history straighter than this.   They were the “children of Rousseau” in some respects, yes, but they were mostly the children of Goethe. 

The Romantic backlash against the Enlightenment had some hippie-egalitarian elements, such as a reverence for nature and emotion over science and reason, but what it mostly had was a commitment to the Idea of the Genius, the man so much greater, nobler, and finer than the ordinary men around him that he broke every rule and embodied the very spirit of the age.

This is not The Social Contract talking.  This is The Sorrows of Young Werther.  If Hegel represented the apotheosis of history, Goethe proposed the secular Christ, and it was as the secular Christ that the Romantic revered Napoleon (until he lost, therefore proving that he wasn’t really the secular Christ at all), and all the other figures they revered over the years.  Thre were several dozen over the years, and most of them–like Beethoven–were neither military nor poltical.

All this does bring up an interesting question, though–whether or not modern cults of adoration of people like Castro and Che (and even  Stalin, once) are offshoots of this same Romantic quest for the second coming.  That explanation would make a lot more sense than most of the ones I’ve heard. 

But none of this really gets me where I need it to go, which is to some explanation as to why this specific cluster of attitudes–the ones I outlined a couple of posts ago–should go along with the fact of picking up on one real moral necessity or another before and in a greater percentage than those of people with other clusters.

Somebody–Cathy?–suggested that this might be just that these people are “bellwethers,” but I don’t see any “just” about it.  I think that exactly what they are is bellwethers. I’d just like to know why.

But in the meantime I’m reading my first book by Yvor Winters, and maybe I’ll get to that tomorrow.

No, I’m not about to go on a rant about global warming, for or against.  I’ll get to the reason for the title in a minute.

Before then, it seems to me that we’re getting things a little confused, and since I was the one who started the confusion, I’d better be the one to clear it up.

First, I never said that hippies and protohippies are leaders, and I really never said that they were/are morally better than other people.

Nor did I say they were sincere, or authentic.

On the morality front, I actually think they tend to be morally worse than other people on most measures of morality.  At its very best, their moral thinking is fuzzy, insubstantial and largely illogical.  The cluster of positions on that agenda I outlined a few posts ago are not logically connected in any obvious way. 

In some cases, the positions on that agenda are actually contradictory.  To answer John’s question, most of the NETs and the people around them in the abolitionist movement supported the Union side in the Civil War, and didn’t flinch at the ida that war might be necessary to fix the problem.  Hippie pacifism tends to be highly selective even now.

As for the attraction to violent people–some months ago I wrote a post about writers who had ended up getting a thrill out of championing murderers and getting them out of jail.  Those writers included William F. Buckley, who was nobody’s hippie. 

I think the attraction to violent people may have something to do with bookishness and be largely unrelated to left-wing or right-wing, hippie or otherwise, politics.  What’s interesting to me about that particular phenomenon is that I have only ever found one writer who knew what he was doing plain when he got himself into these situations, and that was Truman Capote.  

Whatever else Capote was, he didn’t lie to himself either about the nature of his protoges–he knew Dick and Perry were guilty, and dangerous as hell–or the nature of his attraction to them.  But crime and violence have always attracted the intellectual class. 

As to Mrs. Hiss, I can give you the Cliveden set–who did much the same kind of treasonous work on behalf of the Nazis.   That’s an offshoot of absolute moral certainty, of the conviction that the Good, the Right, and the True lie with X, and therefore anything is justified in bringing about X.

Hippies can certainly fall into that sort of moral mess, but so can people who are not hippies, or anything like them. 

The college speech codes, though, and the rape codes, and all the rest of it, are the work not of hippies but of  Ratchetts, and Ratchetts will attach themselves to any movement where they think they can get enough power to operate as they like.

Te problem with the hippies when they’re confronted by speech codes is that they have no way to resist them, even if they feel–and their morality seems to me to be mostly emotional–that what they’re seeing is wrong.  Heck, even people who are not hippies sometimes have a problem seeing their way through this kind of thing.  I seem to remember having a long and involved arguement with Mique–no hippie, and no leftist, either–who felt that a right to free speech that protected calling somebody a nigger had something wrong with it.

Okay, that was several years ago.  And he changed his mind.  But to people who are not free speech absolutists, the reason for such a protection for such speech is not usually clear, and that resistance to extending protections to “wrong” ideas exists across the political spectrum.   Consider the fuss even ardent opponents of college speech codes–say, Bill  O’Reilly–can make over the NAMBLA website.

If you want to look at a revolutionary war era man who made a principled decision about slavery, you should look not to Washington, but to a man named Robert Carter, who freed his slaves not when he died but immediately and on the spot, knowing it would subject him to penury for the rest of his life and doing it anyway.  There was a god book about him a few years ago that’s worth reading.

But Carter and  Washington, like the contemporaries and near-contemporaries of Rousseau who made him an important figure in the French revolution, where products of the Eighteenth Century Enlightenment.  Hippies are the products of and Romantic backlash. 

And that’s where we get to the title–climate matters.  A world where slavery exists and is largely considered to be inevitable, right and proper is fundamentally different from a world in which slavery exists but is considered to be inexcusably wrong.

Real and necessary social change–and, yes, moral progress–happen not when Leader X arises to point the way, but when the moral and political climate experiences a sea change.  

What the hippies do is to provide mass in bulk for some ideas–bad ones as well as good ones–that attract the less thoughtful and less committed sort of vaguely in their direction, and the existence of that mass, especially when it’s growing, changes the rules of engagement on the ground.

Consider the recent social sea-change about the spanking of children–opposition to which began almost entirely among the hippies.  Most people in the US still support a parent’s right to spank, but that support gets weaker by the day, and it’s already heavily on the defensive.  

Climate matters. And no significant social change ever happens unless the climate changes first.  

The correleation here exists whether we like it or not, and the reason for that correlation is not entirely clear.   That doesn’t make the hippies some sort of moral beacons to the rest of us–as I said about, they seem to me to be largely less morally good the the rest of us–but it does mean that we can’t entirely rule out some reason for that correlation that we haven’t been able to isolate yet.

In the meantime, there is moral progress that does need to be made, and climate matters, and as fas as I can see, these are the people who largely provide the climate.

And that wouldn’t be negligible, even if one of them hadn’t written “Slavery in Massachusetts.”