‘We Don’t March’: Einstein, Orwell, and Steinbeck on the Evils of Militarism

28 Tuesday Jan 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Freedom, History, Political Philosophy, War

Tags

Albert Einstein, Albert Einstein: His Life and Universe, America and Americans, Bertrand Russell, conflict, democracy, England Your England, Eugene Debs, Fascism, Genus Americanus, George Orwell, Government, John Steinbeck, March, Marching, Military, nonfiction, Pacifism, Patriotism, peace, politics, protest, Rosa Luxemburg, Socialism, Spectacle, Walter Isaacson, War, Why I Write

“When troops would come by, accompanied by fifes and drums, kids would pour into the streets to join the parade and march in lockstep. But not Einstein. Watching such a display once, he began to cry. ‘When I grow up, I don’t want to be one of those poor people,’ he told his parents. As Einstein later explained, ‘When a person can take pleasure in marching in step to a piece of music it is enough to make me despise him. He has been given his big brain only by mistake.'”

Albert Einstein, as described in chapter 2 (“Childhood, 1879-1896”) of Walter Isaacson’s biography Einstein: His Life and Universe.

“One rapid but fairly sure guide to the social atmosphere of a country is the parade-step of its army. A military parade is really a kind of ritual dance, something like a ballet, expressing a certain philosophy of life. The goose-step, for instance, is one of the most horrible sights in the world, far more terrifying than a dive-bomber. It is simply an affirmation of naked power; contained in it, quite consciously and intentionally, is the vision of a boot crashing down on a face. Its ugliness is part of its essence, for what it is saying is ‘Yes, I am ugly, and you daren’t laugh at me’, like the bully who makes faces at his victim.

Why is the goose-step not used in England? In the British army… the march is merely a formalized walk. It belongs to a society which is ruled by the sword, no doubt, but a sword which must never be taken out of the scabbard.”

George Orwell, reflecting in a segment from his essay “England Your England,” which is published in his collection of essays Why I Write.

“It is a strange thing how Americans love to march if they don’t have to. Every holiday draws millions marchers, sweating in the sun, some falling and being carted away to hospitals. In hardship and in some danger they will march… but let the Army take them and force them to march, and they wail like hopeless kelpies on a tidal reef, and it requires patience and enormous strictness to turn them into soldiers.

Once they give in, they make very good soldiers; but they never cease their complaints and their mutinous talk. This, of course, does not describe our relatively small class of professional soldiers: they are like professionals in any army; but national need calls up the citizen soldier, and he is a sight. He kicks like a steer going in, bitches the whole time, fights very well when he is trained and properly armed…”

John Steinbeck, writing in his essay “Genus Americanus,” which can be found in his last published book, America and Americans.

__________

If you have additional references or ideas relating to this topic, please send them my way or post them in the comments section.

During the First World War, prominent public figures in all three of these men’s home countries were jailed for not marching in lock-step into the conflict. Because she opposed the war and had become one of the figureheads of the German socialist movement, Rosa Luxemburg spent most of the war in prison and was eventually murdered by German soldiers in 1919. In England, Bertrand Russell was thrown into Brixton Prison for six months for “passive resistance to military or naval service.” And in the United States, the famous union leader and five-time presidential candidate Eugene Debs was charged with ten counts of sedition for making an anti-draft speech on June 16th, 1918. He was eventually sentenced to ten years in prison and was disenfranchised for life.

If you’d like to read more from Steinbeck, check out another selection from America and Americans, in which he points out a curious paradox at the heart of how Americans appraise their presidents: “The President must be greater than anyone else, but not better than anyone else…”

Or, see more from Isaacson’s biography of A.E., including a page describing Einstein’s obsession with identifying the causality behind the laws of nature. “When I am judging a theory… I ask myself whether, if I were God, I would have arranged the world in such a way?”

Living a Life of Value (But What ‘Value’?)

26 Thursday Sep 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Philosophy

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Bertrand Russell, Cat's Cradle, creation, General Philosophy, Genesis, God, history, Joseph Campbell, Justice for Hedgehogs, Kurt Vonnegut, Michio Kaku, Parallel Worlds, Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Ronald Dworkin, Samuel Beckett, the meaning of life, the purpose of existence, Time, Writing

“People who blame their parents or other people or society at large for their own mistakes, or who cite some form of genetic determinism to absolve themselves of any responsibility for how they have acted, lack dignity because dignity requires owning up to what one has done. ‘The buck stops here’ is an important piece of ethical wisdom. This also requires taking responsibility in a different, more material, way: dignity requires that I not expect others to subsidize my decisions by bearing their financial or other costs.

I do not take responsibility for my own life if I demand that others absorb the cost of my choices: living well means making choices, and that means choosing a life with an eye to the consequences of that life that I should bear myself. Of course there is abundant room in self-respect for accepting, with gratitude, the help of others…

Living a good human life, a life one can look back on with pride, is rarely valuable because that life, abstracted from the process of creating it, has any great value in itself. It is valuable because the process of creating it is valuable. The analogy between art and life has often been drawn and often ridiculed. We should live our lives, the Romantics insisted, as a work of art. We distrust the analogy now because it sounds too Wilde: as if the qualities we value in a painting — fine sensibility or a complex formal organization or a subtle interpretation of art’s own history — were the values we should seek in life: the values of the aesthete. These may be poor values to seek in the way we live, but to condemn the analogy for that reason misses its point, which lies in the relation between the value of what is created and the value of the act of creating it.

We value great art most fundamentally not because the art as product enhances our lives but because it embodies a performance, a rising to artistic challenge. We value human lives as they are lived not for the completed narrative, as if fiction would do as well, but because they too embody a performance: rising to the challenge of having a life to lead…

If we want to make sense of a life having meaning, we must take up the Romantic’s analogy. We find it natural to say that an artist gives meaning to his raw materials and that a pianist fives fresh meaning to what he plays. We can think of living well as giving meaning – ethical meaning, if we want a name – to a life. That is the only kind of meaning in life that can stand up to the fact and fear of death. Does all that strike you as silly? Just sentimental? When you do something smaller well – play a tune or a part or a hand, throw a curve or a compliment, make a chair or a sonnet or love – your satisfaction is complete in itself. Those are achievements within life. Why can’t a life also be an achievement complete in itself, with its own value in the art in living it displays?”

__________

From the chapter “Dignity” in Ronald Dworkin’s philosophical tome Justice for Hedgehogs.

Dworkin’s distinction between the ‘product value’ and ‘performance value’ of a life is one that is overlooked but crucial. It is just too daunting to try to orient and understand your existence in terms of the whole story of the world; attempts to locate oneself in history are as futile as attempts to locate oneself in astronomy. The scale overshadows the unit of measure.

Instead, to consciously evaluate your life by its ‘performance value’ actually puts you, I would think, in a freeing and productive state of mind. Two of the favorite observations I’ve recently read — posted on my quotes page — affirm this idea.

“One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.” – Bertrand Russell

“I don’t believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.” – Joseph Campbell

In the concluding chapter of his book Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos, physicist Michio Kaku echoes in less sophisticated terms this point from Justice for Hedgehogs. However, Dwokin would contend that Kaku’s second commandment — to leave the world a better place than you found it — is a cliché that does not stand up to substantive analysis, given that most lives do not have much ‘product value’ by this standard. Although you’ve definitely heard it before from other mouths, it’s worth being refreshed on Kaku’s take,

“Beyond work and love, I would add two other ingredients that give meaning to life. First, to fulfill whatever talents we are born with. However blessed we are by fate with different abilities and strengths, we should try to develop them to the fullest, rather than allow them to atrophy and decay. We all know individuals who did not fulfill the promise they showed in childhood. Many of them became haunted by the image of what they might have become. Instead of blaming fate, I think we should accept ourselves as we are and try to fulfill whatever dreams are within our capability.

Second, we should try to leave the world a better place than when we entered it. As individuals, we can make a difference, whether it is to probe the secrets of Nature, to clean up the environment and work for peace and social justice, or to nurture the inquisitive, vibrant spirit of the young by being a mentor and a guide.”

In an almost irreverent but deceivingly profound scene from Cat’s Cradle: A Novel, Kurt Vonnegut channels his inner Beckett and infuses the Genesis creation story with a dose of existentialism:

“In the beginning, God created the earth, and he looked upon it in his cosmic loneliness.

And God said, ‘Let Us make living creatures out of mud, so the mud can see what We have done.’ And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak. God leaned close to mud as man sat, looked around, and spoke. ‘What is the purpose of all this?’ he asked politely.

‘Everything must have a purpose?’ asked God.

‘Certainly,’ said man.

‘Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this,’ said God.

And He went away.”

At the close of the novel, there is a similarly farcical scene depicting the end of creation, when man tries unsuccessfully to coax answers from God after an apocalypse. I’ve posted it, and written some about it, here.

“Keeping Things Whole” by Mark Strand

13 Saturday Jul 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Adam Duritz, Bertrand Russell, Counting Crows, General Philosophy, Keeping Things Whole, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Mark Strand, Poem, poetry, Solopism, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Writing

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

__________

“Keeping Things Whole” by Mark Strand, which you can read in his acclaimed book Reasons for Moving: Poems.

Boys and girls, this is what wins you the Pulitzer Prize.

In one effortless stroke, Strand composes a fragile speck of observation and contradiction. At first read, the poem may seem tinged with humility, as Strand asserts his identity by way of absence, by what is missing. Yet he is also the force that fragments his world, and by consequence, he is what keeps the world — its fields, its forests — together. This paradoxical tension is what animates the echo of the poem.

From a technical perspective, Strand establishes the internal logic of what he’s trying to say and then describes things which follow logically yet are still freshly unpredictable. In this way, like many great works of poetry, “Keeping Things Whole” is a sort of mini-work of epistemic philosophy.

The work is also a great kerneled reflection on the philosophy of Solopsism. Ludwig Wittgenstein is the most notable twentieth century thinker who embraced this doctrine. In his Tractatus, Wittgenstein asserts, universalizing the first person, that the world and life are one and that I am the limits of my world.

To get the real thing, here’s what Wittgenstein said:

That the world is my world, shows itself in the fact that the limits of the language (the language which I understand) mean the limits of my world… ‘The language which I understand’ is the language which I have made mine through coming to know how it works, how it manages to represent the world, which is therefore also mine. I become all-embracing, all-possessing… ‘The world and life are one. I am my world.

I don’t claim to comprehend much of this. Like the butt of the old joke about String Theory (‘Anyone who says they understand String Theory… doesn’t understand String Theory’), the guy who tells you he understands the Tractatus is most likely not only a liar, but also an idiot. Bertrand Russell, who was partly responsible for bringing Wittgenstein to the attention of early twentieth century academia, and who himself had the young Austrian as a PhD student at Cambridge, read the Tractatus and was promptly sent a letter by his formidable protégé. This note informed him, simply, that even he, the great don of Oxbridge, would not truly understand the Tractatus. (See Wittgenstein’s famed metaphor of the ladder for more on this. Paraphrasing: “Anyone who discovers my philosophy and works to understand it may use it to climb to new heights, but must immediately kick away the ladder he used to get there.” If anyone can summarize this idea better, post a comment or message me in the sidebar.)

Back to “Keeping Things Whole”. Adam Duritz, frontman of The Counting Crows, wrote a lyric expressing the theme of the poem: “I am covered in skin/No one gets to come in”. And in Strand’s case, it’s reversed. I don’t get to go out.

My favorite works from Strand (in rough ranking):

From the Depths of the Mirror

Ever So Many Hundred Years Hence

The Garden

Black Maps

Bertrand Russell: Why I Lived

15 Saturday Jun 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography, Philosophy

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Bertrand Russell, knowledge, Life, Love, memoir, pity

“Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy — ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness — that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what — at last — I have found.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.”

__________

Bertrand Russell, writing in the prologue to his autobiography.

These Contradictions

05 Monday Nov 2012

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

9-11, Bertrand Russell, Christopher Hitchens, contradictions, Hitch-22, Ian McEwan, Love, Martin Amis

“‘Let’s just go in and enjoy ourselves,’ Yvonne [his mother] had said after a long moment when the Hitchens family had silently reviewed the menu — actually of the prices not the courses — outside a restaurant on our first and only visit to Paris. I knew at once that the odds against enjoyment had shortened (or is it lengthened? I never remember). ‘You should be nicer to him,’ a schoolmate had once said to me of some awfully ill-favored boy. ‘He has no friends.’ This, I realized with a pang of pity that I can still remember, was only true as long as everybody agreed to it. There are more robust versions of the same contradiction: a plug-ugly labor union/Cosa Nostra figure, asked at a Senate hearing if he thought his outfit was too powerful, looked around a couple of times and leaned into the mike before saying: ‘Senator: being powerful’s a bit like being ladylike. If you have to say you are, then you prolly ain’t.’ British diplomats and Anglo-American types in Washington have a near-superstitious prohibition on uttering the words ‘Special Relationship’ to describe relations between Britain and America, lest the specialness itself vanish like a phantom at cock-crow. Never ask while you are doing it if what you are doing is fun. Don’t introduce even your most reliably witty acquaintance as someone who will set the table on a roar. ‘Martin is your best friend, isn’t he?’ a sweet and well-intentioned girl once said when both of us were present: it was the only time I ever felt awkward about this precious idea, which seemed somehow to risk diminishment if it were uttered aloud.

The fragility of love is what is most at stake here — humanity’s most crucial three-word avowal is often uttered only to find itself suddenly embarrassing or orphaned or isolated or ill-timed — but strangely enough it can work better as a literal or reassuring statement than a transcendent or numinous or ecstatic one. Ian McEwan wrote a morally faultless essay just after the atrocities of 11 September 2001, noting that almost all voicemail messages from those on the doomed aircraft had ended with this very common trinity of words, and adding (in an almost but not quite supererogatory fashion) that by this means the murder victims had outdone and outlived their butchers.

But for me this Hays Office problem complicates the ancient question that Bertrand Russell answered (to my immense surprise) in the affirmative. If you were offered the chance to live your own life again, would you seize the opportunity? The only real philosophical answer is automatically self-contradictory: ‘Only if I did not know that I was doing so.’ To go through the entire experience once more would be banal and Sisyphean — even if it did build muscle — whereas to wish to be young again and to have the benefit of one’s learned and acquired existence is not at all to wish for a repeat performance, or a Groundhog Day. And the mind ought to, but cannot, set some limits to wish-thinking. All right, same me but with more money, an even sturdier penis, slightly different parents, a briefer latency period… the thing is absurd. I seriously would like to know what it was to be a woman, but like blind Tiresias would also want the option of re-metamorphosing if I wished. How terrible it is that we have so many more desires than opportunities.”