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The Bully Pulpit

~ (n): An office or position that provides its occupant with an outstanding opportunity to speak out on any issue.

The Bully Pulpit

Monthly Archives: August 2013

Christopher Hitchens and His Mother

29 Thursday Aug 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

Adolescence, Balliol College, Childhood, Children, Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22, Hitchens, memoir, memory, motherhood, Shakespeare, Writing

Christopher Hitchens

“I mustn’t pretend to remember more than I really do, but I am very aware that it makes a great difference to have had, in early life, a passionate lady in one’s own corner…

I am speaking of the time of my adolescence. As the fact of this development became inescapably evident (in the early fall of 1964, according to my best memory) and as it came time to go back to school again, my mother took me for a memorable drive along Portsmouth Harbor. I think I had an idea of what was coming when I scrambled into the seat alongside her. There had been a few fatuous and bungled attempts at ‘facts of life’ chats from my repressed and awkward schoolmasters (and some hair-raising speculations from some of my more advanced schoolmates: I myself being what was euphemistically called ‘a late developer’), and I somehow knew that my father would very emphatically not want to undertake any gruff moment of manly heart-to-heart with his firstborn—as indeed my mother confirmed by way of explanation for what she was herself about to say. In the next few moments, guiding the Hillman smoothly along the road, she managed with near-magical deftness and lightness to convey the idea that, if you felt strongly enough about somebody and learned to take their desires, too, into account, the resulting mutuality and reciprocity would be much more than merely worthwhile. I don’t know quite how she managed this, and I still marvel at the way that she both recognized and transcended my innocence, but the outcome was a deep peace and satisfaction that I can yet feel (and, on some especially good subsequent occasions, have been able to call clearly to my mind).

She never liked any of my girlfriends, ever, but her criticisms were sometimes quite pointed (‘Honestly darling, she’s madly sweet and everything but she does look a bit like a pit-pony.’) yet she never made me think that she was one of those mothers who can’t surrender their son to another female. She was so little of a Jewish mother, indeed, that she didn’t even allow me to know about her ancestry: something that I do very slightly hold against her. She wasn’t overprotective, she let me roam and hitchhike about the place from quite a young age, she yearned only for me to improve my education (aha!), she had books of finely bound poetry apart from the MacNeice (Rupert Brooke, and Palgrave’s Golden Treasury), which I will die to save even if my house burns down; she drove me all the way to Stratford for the Shakespeare anniversary in 1966 and on the wintry day later that year that I was accepted by Balliol College, Oxford, I absolutely knew that she felt at least some of the sacrifice and tedium and weariness of the years had been worthwhile.”

__________

One of my favorite sections from one of my favorite memoirs, Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens.

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“On Being Asked To Write A Poem Against The War In Vietnam” by Hayden Carruth

29 Thursday Aug 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry, War

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Assad, combat, Hayden Carruth, Military, On Being Asked To Write A Poem Against The War In Vietnam, Plato, Poem, poetry, Syria, Vietnam War, War, Wilfred Owen, Writing

Hayden Carruth

Well I have and in fact
more than one and I’ll
tell you this too

I wrote one against
Algeria that nightmare
and another against

Korea and another
against the one
I was in

and I don’t remember
how many against
the three

when I was a boy
Abyssinia Spain and
Harlan County

and not one
breath was restored
to one

shattered throat
mans womans or childs
not one not

one
but death went on and on
never looking aside

except now and then
with a furtive half-smile
to make sure I was noticing.

__________

“On Being Asked To Write A Poem Against The War In Vietnam” by Hayden Carruth, which you’ll encounter in his Collected Shorter Poems, 1946-1991.

“Mortui solum finem belli viderunt”; Plato, “Only the dead have seen the end of war.” As Wilfred Owen, perhaps the most famous modern war poet remarked (in a phrase now inscribed above ‘Poets’ Corner’ in Westminster Abbey), ”My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.”

I am, of course, bearing in mind the impeding and it seems inevitable U.S. intervention in Syria. I wish I had gone on the record earlier about this — and at least some of my friends will know what my position was — but I was in favor of a U.S. or multilateral strike on Assad’s armaments in May of last year. I have since changed my mind, as I now think the Obama administration is making a grave mistake in focusing on a narrowly tactical rather than broadly strategic, coalition-based course of action. But then again, the real Catch-22 of the matter stems from Assad’s alliances with Russia and to a lesser degree China, which dictate that no matter what the U.S. decides to do, our actions will not have the official sanction of the UN Security Council. So there’s no workable path which would involve a legally constituted, united coalition, as we had in the First Gulf War.

The above picture is of Hayden Carruth.

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Robert Jackson Opens the Nuremberg Trials

28 Wednesday Aug 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, Politics, War

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Antonin Scalia, Chief Justice Robert Jackson, due process, justice, Law, Nazism, Nuremberg Trials, Nuremberg Tribunal, Robert Jackson, the Supreme Court

Der Hauptanklagevertreter

Robert H. Jackson
Chief of Counsel for the United States
Nuremberg, Germany
November 21, 1945

“May it please Your Honors:

The privilege of opening the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world imposes a grave responsibility. The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated. That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason…

In the prisoners’ dock sit twenty-odd broken men. Reproached by the humiliation of those they have led almost as bitterly as by the desolation of those they have attacked, their personal capacity for evil is forever past. It is hard now to perceive in these men as captives the power by which as Nazi leaders they once dominated much of the world and terrified most of it. Merely as individuals their fate is of little consequence to the world.

What makes this inquest significant is that these prisoners represent sinister influences that will lurk in the world long after their bodies have returned to dust. We will show them to be living symbols of racial hatreds, of terrorism and violence, and of the arrogance and cruelty of power. They are symbols of fierce nationalisms and of militarism, of intrigue and war-making which have embroiled Europe generation after generation, crushing its manhood, destroying its homes, and impoverishing its life. They have so identified themselves with the philosophies they conceived and with the forces they directed that any tenderness to them is a victory and an encouragement to all the evils which are attached to their names. Civilization can afford no compromise with the social forces which would gain renewed strength if we deal ambiguously or indecisively with the men in whom those forces now precariously survive.”

__________

An excerpt from Robert H. Jackson, the chief United States prosecutor as he opened the Nuremberg trials on November 21, 1945. This first and particularly visible trial was decribed by British barrister Norman Birkett as, “the greatest trial in history.” Read more about Jackson in Mission at Nuremberg: An American Army Chaplain and the Trial of the Nazis.

Jackson was also United States Attorney General and Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1941-1954, despite never having graduated from law school (he attended Albany Law School for one year before dropping out).

In a recent interview, Justice Antonin Scalia was asked which modern member of the Supreme Court he admired most. His immediate answer was Jackson, whom he said he admired for his ideological originalism (the Constitution is not a “living” document), his staunch defense of due process protections, and his literary technique — his ability to powerfully communicate as a master stylist. And you can see that unyielding force and consummate style above.

“We [the Supreme Court] are not final because we are infallible, but we are infallible only because we are final.”

– Robert Jackson, writing in Brown v. Allen, February 9th, 1953

Robert Jackson

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When and How You Should Break the Law

22 Thursday Aug 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Freedom, History, Interview, Political Philosophy, Politics

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

Boston Tea Party, Christianity, civil rights, conscience, Freedom, justice, Karl Barth, Law, liberty, March on Washington, March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Martin Luther King Jr., racism, Socrates

Martin Luther King Jr. Arrested.

Mr. Wicker: How are we to enforce law when a doctrine is preached that one man’s conscience may tell him that the law is unjust, when other men’s consciences don’t tell them that?

Dr. King: I think you enforce it, and I think you deal with it by not allowing anarchy to develop. I do not believe in defying the law, as many of the segregationists do, I do not believe in evading the law as many of the segregationists do. The fact is that most of the segregationists and racists that I see are not willing to suffer enough for their beliefs in segregation, and they are not willing to go to jail. I think the chief norm for guiding the situation is the willingness to accept the penalty, and I don’t think any society can call an individual irresponsible who breaks a law and willingly accepts the penalty if conscience tells him that that law is unjust.

I think that this is a long tradition in our society, it is a long tradition in Biblical history; Meshach and Abednego broke an unjust law and they did it because they had to be true to a higher moral law. The early Christians practiced civil disobedience in a superb manner. Academic freedom would not be a reality today if it had not been for Socrates and if it had not been for Socrates’ willingness to practice civil disobedience. And I would say that in our own history there is nothing that expresses massive civil disobedience any more than the Boston Tea Party, and yet we give this to our young people and our students as a part of the great tradition of our nation. So I think we are in good company when we break unjust laws, and I think those who are willing to do it and accept the penalty are those who are part of the saving of the nation.

__________

From Martin Luther King, Jr. on NBC’s Meet the Press. The interview took place on March 28th, 1965, a week after King led the five-day March from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. You’ll find extended reflections on this in The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr..

It’s astounding how patronizing the questioners are to King throughout this half hour segment. The entire interview is worth watching, but the quoted portion is copied below.

–

We are coming up on the 50th anniversary of the ‘March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom’ (people always forget the ‘Jobs’ part), so expect to find King’s name coming up not only on this site but throughout the media.

Below: Dr. King and Karl Barth outside the Princeton University chapel. On Sunday, April 29th, 1962, King preached the morning service and Barth taught the evening theology class. Not a bad day’s line-up.Karl Barth and Martin Luther King Jr.

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A World Split Apart: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel Speech

22 Thursday Aug 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Freedom, History, Politics, Speeches

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Cold War, Enlightenment, Fiction, Government, Gulag, history, House of Meetings, humanism, Ivan Denisovich, jail, Janusz Bardach, Martin Amis, morality, novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, politics, prison, prison labor, Renaissance, Russia, secular humanism, Solzhenitsyn, Soviet Union, Stalin, Victoria Lautman, Writes on the Record, Writing, Yevgenia Ginzburg, Yurkas

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

“The current Western view of the world was first born during the Renaissance and found its political expression in the period of the Enlightenment. It became the basis for government and social science and could be defined as rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed and enforced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. It could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the center of everything that exists…

This new way of thinking, which had imposed on us its guidance, did not admit the existence of intrinsic evil in man nor did it see any higher task than the attainment of happiness on earth. It based modern Western civilization on the dangerous trend to worship man and his material needs. Everything beyond physical well-being and accumulation of material goods, all other human requirements and characteristics of a subtler and higher nature, were left outside the area of attention of state and social systems, as if human life did not have any superior sense. That provided access for evil, of which in our days there is a free and constant flow. Merely freedom does not in the least solve all the problems of human life and it even adds a number of new ones…

If humanism were right in declaring that man is born to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature. It cannot be unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It cannot be the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then cheerfully get the most out of them. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one’s life journey may become an experience of moral growth, so that one may leave life a better human being than one started it. It is imperative to review the table of widespread human values. Its present incorrectness is astounding.

It would be retrogression to attach oneself today to the ossified formulas of the Enlightenment. Social dogmatism leaves us completely helpless in front of the trials of our times.

Even if we are spared destruction by war, our lives will have to change if we want to save life from self-destruction. We cannot avoid revising the fundamental definitions of human life and human society. Is it true that man is above everything? Is there no Superior Spirit above him? Is it right that man’s life and society’s activities have to be determined by material expansion in the first place? Is it permissible to promote such expansion to the detriment of our spiritual integrity?

If the world has not come to its end, it has approached a major turn in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will exact from us a spiritual upsurge, we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life where our physical nature will not be cursed as in the Middle Ages, but, even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon as in the Modern era.

This ascension will be similar to climbing onto the next anthropologic stage. No one on earth has any other way left but — upward.”

__________

From Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s speech “The World Spent Apart” delivered at Harvard University on June 8th, 1978.

“A World Split Apart” was given as the commencement address at Harvard’s graduation exercises, and despite it’s several glaring oversimplifications, is a sinewy and deep meditation on the moral fault line of the Cold War. Solzhenitsyn’s less than nuanced characterization of the West (as a society whose freedom has led to moral decay) is excusable, in my opinion, given his personal history and the honest attention he brings to the corrosive effects of Western decadence. It’s a worthwhile — if slightly simplistic — point to make. Furthermore, Solzhenitsyn’s reading of history here — described in the transition from Dark Ages to Renaissance — is shoddy (and surprisingly Marxist), but still necessary to lend brevity and clarity to his moral appraisal of our civilizational course.

We must also spare a little slack for the speech’s specific political context. At this late date in the 1970’s, observing the Carter administration’s impotence on the international stage, one could hardly count the Cold War as a fait accompli.

Still, in a 2007 interview with Victoria Lautman about his Gulag novel House of Meetings, Martin Amis reflected on the uniqueness of Solzhenitsyn’s spiritual resilience:

“It’s often said that memoirs of the Gulag are unrepresentative because they’re all written by intellectuals, and not by criminals or guards.

But they are deeply unrepresentative in another way, too, I feel, in that these people like Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Yevgenia Ginzburg and Janusz Bardach — what enormous souls they had, what incredible spirits they were, what amazing force of life they possessed.

The most popular tattoo in the Gulag, sported mostly by the hereditary criminals, the Urkas, read, “YOU MAY LIVE BUT YOU WON’T LOVE.”

But these Solzhenitsyn’s, they lived and they loved, and their integrity was never challenged. The person they could have been apart from the Gulag was never defiled; Solzhenitsyn said, ‘Prison has wings. You can soar in prison.’

So tales of the Gulag are unrepresentative in that sense. And I think most of the millions who passed through the system – tens of millions who passed through the system – suffered a darker fate: their integrity did not survive. Their character was ruined. They couldn’t love; they lived but they couldn’t love.”

Although I agree with Amis’s general assessment, there’s a minor correction or at least point of clarification to be made about his ‘prison has wings’ anecdote. That phrase appears in Solzhenitsyn’s novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and is uttered by the title character — but not as an affirmation of his vividly imaginative or elevated state within the Gulag. Rather the point being made is the exact opposite.

“Prison” in this context is pedestrian jail; it has wings compared to the spiritually subterranean, emotionally asphyxiating life of a cog in the Siberian forced labor camps administered by the Gulag. Ivan says prison has wings not because he is so spiritually resilient as to transcend captivity; he says it because unlike one of the 14 million Russians who filtered through the Gulag, a regular jailbird, even when confined to a cage, might avoid having his soul defaced, his spiritual wings clipped.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

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Meet John Adams

16 Friday Aug 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in History

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

60 Minutes, Abigail Adams, America, American History, Biography, David Mccullough, founding fathers, friendship, George Washington, Government, history, John Adams, John Hancock, Josiah Quincey, Morley Safer, personality, politics

John Adams

“He was John Adams of Braintree and he loved to talk. He was a known talker. There were some, even among his admirers, who wished he talked less. He himself wished he talked less, and he had particular regard for those, like General Washington, who somehow managed great reserve under almost any circumstance…

As befitting a studious lawyer from Braintree, Adams was a ‘plain dressing’ man. His oft-stated pleasures were his famliy, his farm, his books and writing table, a convivial pipe and cup of coffee (now that tea was no longer acceptable), or preferably a glass of good Madeira…

He was a man who cared deeply for his friends, who, with few exceptions, were to be his friends for life, and in some instances despite severe strains. And to no one was he more devoted than to his wife, Abigail. She was his ‘Dearest Friend,’ as he addressed her in letters — his ‘best, dearest, worthiest, wisest friend in the world’ — while to her he was ‘the tenderest of husbands,’ her ‘good man.’

John Adams was also, as many could attest, a great-hearted, persevering man of uncommon ability and force. He had a brilliant mind. He was honest and everyone knew it. Emphatically independent by nature, hardworking, frugal — all traits in the New England tradition — he was anything but cold or laconic as supposedly New Englanders were. He could be high-spirited and affectionate, vain, cranky, impetuous, self-absorbed, and fiercely stubborn; passionate, quick to anger and all-forgiving; generous and entertaining. He was blessed with great courage and good humor, yet subject to spells of despair, and especially when separated from his family or during periods of prolonged inactivity.

Ambitious to excel — to make himself known — he had nonetheless recognized at an early stage that happiness came not from fame and fortune, ‘and all such things,’ but from ‘an habitual contempt of them,’ as he wrote. He prized the Roman ideal of honor, and in this, as in much else, he and Abigail were in perfect accord. Fame without honor, in her view, would be ‘like a faint meteor gliding through the sky, shedding only transient light.’…

John Adams was not a man of the world. He enjoyed no social standing. He was an awkward dancer and poor at cards. He never learned to flatter. He owned no ships or glass factory as did Colonel Josiah Quincy, Braintree’s leading citizen. There was no money in his background, no Adams fortune or elegant Adams homestead like the Boston mansion of John Hancock.

It was in the courtrooms of Massachusetts and on the printed page, principally in the newspapers of Boston, that Adams had distinguished himself. Years of riding the court circuit and his brilliance before the bar had brought him wide recognition and respect. And of greater consequence in recent years had been his spirited determination and eloquence in the cause of American rights and liberties.”

__________

From the opening chapter of David McCullough’s seminal biography John Adams.

David McCullough

“I feel so sorry for anyone who misses the experience of history, the horizons of history. We think little of those who, given the chance to travel, go nowhere. We deprecate provincialism. But it is possible to be as provincial in time as it is in space. Because you were born into this particular era doesn’t mean it has to be the limit of your experience. Move about in time, go places.

Why restrict your circle of acquaintances to only those who occupy the same stage we call the present? It doesn’t have to be that way… Take the novels of Willa Cather when you go to Nebraska. Bring Faulkner when you’ re going south.

Read. Read all you can. Read history, biography. Read Dumas Malone’s masterful biography of Jefferson and Paul Horgan’s epic history of the Rio Grande, Great River. Read Luigi Barzini’s books on Italy and America. Read the published journals of those who traveled the Oregon Trail. Read the novels of Maya Angelou and Robertson Davies, read Wendell Berry, Wallace Stegner, and the poems of Robert Penn Warren. However little television you watch, watch less.”

David McCullough, speaking recently to a class of college graduates.

Watch McCullough and Morley Safer of 60 Minutes discuss the founders, our current political climate, and McCullough’s writing routine below:

Read some of John Adams’s personal correspondence with his wife, Abigail, below:

John Adams

Whether I Stand High or Low in the Estimation of the World

John Adams

The Great Anniversary Festival

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Steven Pinker on Feminism

13 Tuesday Aug 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Debate, Science

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

biology, cognitive science, discrimination, Elizabeth Spelke, feminism, feminists, gender, gender discrimination, gender relations, human nature, men, Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, women

Steven Pinker

“I am a feminist. I believe that women have been oppressed, discriminated against, and harassed for thousands of years. I believe that the two waves of the feminist movement in the 20th century are among the proudest achievements of our species, and I am proud to have lived through one of them, including the effort to increase the representation of women in the sciences.

But it is crucial to distinguish the moral proposition that people should not be discriminated against on account of their sex — which I take to be the core of feminism — and the empirical claim that males and females are biologically indistinguishable. They are not the same thing. Indeed, distinguishing them is essential to protecting the core of feminism. Anyone who takes an honest interest in science has to be prepared for the facts on a given issue to come out either way. And that makes it essential that we not hold the ideals of feminism hostage to the latest findings from the lab or field. Otherwise, if the findings come out as showing a sex difference, one would either have to say, ‘I guess sex discrimination wasn’t so bad after all,’ or else furiously suppress or distort the findings so as to preserve the ideal. The truth cannot be sexist. Whatever the facts turn out to be, they should not be taken to compromise the core of feminism.
..”

__________

From Steven Pinker, in his debate with Elizabeth Spelke on the topic of Science and Gender. You can find more of Pinker’s thoughts in his superb collection Language, Cognition, and Human Nature: Selected Articles.

Since his breakout book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Pinker has outlined and continually advocated a conception of human nature which I find extremely compelling. It’s foundational claim is that we are not plastic in the way twentieth-century behaviorists would suggest. Human nature is not malleable in any robust sense of the term; but instead it is very rigidly pre-programmed by our biology, which is — perhaps not intuitively — the reason for our complex abilities and variations. The fact that, say, we are wired to acquire a rigid grammatical structure in childhood, and hence speak a language, is what allows us to communicate in such a wealth of information, emotion, and ideas to others. Of course we are plastic in the sense that we learn the language of our childhood environment (I’m not writing this in Japanese, after all), but our ability to internalize grammar emerges from our biological make-up, which we do not choose. (Pinker, who studied in the M.I.T. linguistics department under Chomsky, uses this example among others to emphasize his point.)

Pinker delineates and actively patrols the fine line separating gender distinction from gender discrimination, and for that reason, his debate with Spelke is worth reading or listening to.

More from Pinker, one of our clearest and best communicators of cognitive science:

Steven Pinker

The F Word

Steven Pinker

The Better Angels of Our Nature

Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin

Hitler, Stalin, and the Power of Ideology

Boston Marathon

The Psychology of Terror

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“Every Day” by Tom Clark

12 Monday Aug 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Every Day, Poem, poetry, Tom Clark, Writing

Lamp and Window

Awake the mind’s hopeless so
At a quarter to six I rise
And run 2 or 3 miles in
The pristine air of a dark
And windy winter morning
With a light rain falling
And no sound but the pad
Of my sneakers on the asphalt
And the calls of the owls in
The cypress trees on Mesa Road

And when I get back you’re
Still asleep under the warm covers
Because love is here to stay
It’s another day and we’re both still alive

__________

“Every Day” by Tom Clark. You’ll find it in his collection (that I haven’t read yet) Light and Shade: New and Selected Poems.

I snapped the picture in my study a few hours ago.

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Vices Are Not Crimes

12 Monday Aug 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Political Philosophy

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

crimes, justice, Law, libertarianism, Lysander Spooner, policy, political philosophy, vice, Vices Are Not Crimes, virtue

Lysander Spooner

“If, then, it became so difficult, so nearly impossible, in most cases, to determine what is, and what is not, vice; and especially if it be so difficult, in nearly all cases, to determine where virtue ends, and vice begins; and if these questions, which no one can really and truly determine for anybody but himself, are not to be left free and open for experiment by all, each person is deprived of the highest of all his rights as a human being, to wit: his right to inquire, investigate, reason, try experiments, judge, and ascertain for himself, what is, to him, virtue, and what is, to him, vice; in other words: what, on the whole, conduces to his happiness, and what, on the whole, tends to his unhappiness. If this great right is not to be left free and open to all, then each man’s whole right, as a reasoning human being, to ‘liberty and the pursuit of happiness,’ is denied him.

We all come into the world in ignorance of ourselves, and of everything around us. By a fundamental law of our natures we are all constantly impelled by the desire of happiness, and the fear of pain… No one of us, therefore, can learn this indispensable lesson of happiness and unhappiness, of virtue and vice, for another. Each must learn it for himself.”

__________

From sections V and VI of Lysander Spooner’s 1875 text Vices Are Not Crimes.

Thanks to my good friend C. for sending this text my way. C.’s unyielding libertarianism — or is it anarcho-capitalism? — has been refreshing to return home to, especially as I’ve left the warm centrist cocoon of Washington, D.C. George Orwell said that it is not what a person thinks that’s important, but rather how he thinks; and while I don’t subscribe to the what of C.’s arguments, I’m an unabashed fan of the how. It takes real intellectual will and moral independence to mount the case that the state itself — not just a party or faction — is illegitimate, but C. does this with total energy, seriousness and rigor.

I have different ideas on the matter, and try to play the part of the good sparring partner, but I like the breath of fresh air. The challenge to re-establish first principles is always worthwhile; to enjoy the dialectic of argument is amongst the most rewarding endeavors I know.

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The School of Affliction

12 Monday Aug 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in History

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

Abigail Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Afterlife, American History, Bixby Letter, founding fathers, friendship, John Adams, Kazuo Ishiguro, loss, Mortality, mourning, Noam Chomsky, personal letter, Ravelstein, Saul Bellow, Thomas Jefferson

Thomas JeffersonMonticello, November 13, 1818.

The public papers, my dear friend, announce the fatal event of which your letter of October the 20th had given me ominous foreboding.

Tried myself in the school of affliction, by the loss of every form of connection which can rive the human heart, I know well, and feel what you have lost, what you have suffered, are suffering, and have yet to endure. The same trials have taught me that for ills so immeasurable, time and silence are the only medi­cine. I will not, therefore, by useless condolences, open afresh the sluices of your grief, nor, although mingling sincerely my tears with yours, will I say a word more where words are vain, but that it is of some comfort to us both, that the term is not very distant, at which we are to deposit in the same cerement, our sorrows and suffering bodies, and to ascend in essence to an ecstatic meeting with the friends we have loved and lost, and whom we shall still love and never lose again. God bless you and support you under your heavy affliction.

Th. Jefferson

__________

Thomas Jefferson’s letter to his friend and political rival John Adams, upon hearing that Adams’s wife Abigail had died. You can find it along with more the best letters in American history in The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence.

I finished graduate school at Georgetown a week and a half ago, and have now found myself, for the second time in a year, living in my childhood home, as a graduate, idling away a brief but ambiguous stretch of days before moving on to the “next stage” of life. Twelve months ago, I had just finished four undergraduate years at the University of Virginia, and had lugged home a bag of dirty clothes to wash and suitcase of books to read.

One of those books is Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein, which I inhaled last July and have since picked up off the shelf and re-read in the past week. The novel (Bellow’s final book, published when he was eighty-five) is a roman à clef and thinly disguised paean to his friend and colleague Allan Bloom. Bellow speaks through the narrator, Chick, as he recounts his long friendship and final months with the renowned academic Abe Ravelstein (re: Bloom) as well as the erotic and intellectual conversations they rehearse as the undercurrent of impending mortality slowly submerges their long-developing friendship. Bellow gives voice to these anxieties with a quivering, careful solemnity that I haven’t encountered elsewhere. His text simultaneously affirms Martin Amis’s claim that Ravelstein is a masterpiece without analogue, while flouting Kazuo Ishiguro’s suggestion that no great novels are written by writers who have matured beyond the class of quinquagenarian.

Bellow’s voice is inflected with the ambiguities and uncertainties of one who is aware of his limited earthly future yet wary of traditional immortality narratives. Chick defers to Ravelstein’s afterlife-agnosticism for much of the book, until its final scenes, wherein the two old pals are overwhelmed by a sensation that Ravelstein’s deathbed is not — and perhaps cannot — be their final meeting place. This impulse is rendered and pondered beautifully by Bellow:

“I wonder if anyone believes the grave is all there is… This is the involuntary and normal, the secret, esoteric, confidence of the man of flesh and blood. The flesh would shrink and go, the blood would dry, but no one believes in his mind of minds or heart of hearts that the pictures do stop.”

By the tone of his letter to John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, who was an absolutely determined skeptic for his entire adult life, seems to have embraced some loose version of Bellowian death-survival. The body decays, Jefferson certainly knew that, but as it is eventually cast off, does the spark of consciousness continue to flicker elsewhere? Jefferson may not have really thought that — he may have merely been bowing to the grief of his good friend — or perhaps, like Bellow, he didn’t just want to believe it, he had to.

John Adams

As a side note: Last summer, in the throes of obsession with Ravelstein, I sent the above quotation to Noam Chomsky, to which I attached the question, “So Bellow intuited that life may go on after death — can you sympathize with, or make sense of, such a view?”

Chomsky’s response was typical in its sobering candor: “Bellow is clearly wrong in saying we all believe it.  I can sympathize with a young mother who hopes fervently to see her dying child in heaven, but not with someone like Bellow who chooses the same illusions.”

I didn’t push Chomsky to amend his answer in light of Bellow’s crucial use of the word “involuntary,” though I perhaps should have (or may even in the future). The whole point of the quote — and the related speculation about Jefferson’s view of the afterlife — is to suggest that there is something reflexive, something automatic about the human belief in immortality.

Finally, returning to Jefferson’s letter: does anyone know if his apposition of “loved and lost” in this context inspired Abraham Lincoln’s use of those same two words in his famous Bixby Letter?

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Einstein’s Daily Routine

08 Thursday Aug 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Science

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Albert Einstein, Biography, Daily Rituals, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, Mason Currey, Princeton University, science

Albert Einstein

“Einstein immigrated to the United States in 1933, where he held a professorship at Princeton University until his retirement in 1945. His routine there was simple. Between 9:00 and 10:00 A.M. he ate breakfast and perused the daily papers. At about 10:30 he left for his Princeton office, walking when the weather was nice; otherwise, a station wagon from the university would pick him up. He worked until 1:00, then returned home for a 1:30 lunch, a nap, and a cup of tea. The rest of the afternoon was spent at home, continuing his work, seeing visitors, and dealing with the correspondence that his secretary had sorted earlier in the day. Supper was at 6:30, followed by more work and more letters.

Despite his humble lifestyle, Einstein was a celebrity in Princeton, famous not only for his scientific accomplishments but also for his absentmindedness and disheveled appearance. (Einstein wore his hair long to avoid visits to the barber and eschewed socks and suspenders, which he considered unnecessary.) Walking to and from work, he was often waylaid by locals who wanted to meet the great physicist. A colleague remembered, ‘Einstein would pose with the waylayer’s wife, children, or grandchildren as desired and exchange a few good-humored words.

Then he would go on, shaking his head, saying: ‘Well, the old elephant has gone through his tricks again.’ ”

__________

The section on Albert Einstein in Mason Currey’s book Daily Rituals: How Artists Work.

In unrelated news, my policy project A Small Step to Reducing Gun Violence has made the Georgetown media Hall of Fame for 2013. Watch it below:

GunThe Gun Puzzle

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