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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.

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Tag Archives: Work

F. Scott Fitzgerald on Succeeding Early in Life

08 Sunday Apr 2018

Posted by jrbenjamin in Literature

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E. Phillips Oppenheim, Early Success, F. Scott Fitzgerald, My Lost City, My Lost City: Personal Essays, Success, Work

“The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young. When the primary objects of love and money could be taken for granted and a shaky eminence had lost its fascination, I had fair years to waste, years that I can’t honestly regret, in seeking the eternal Carnival by the Sea.

Once in the mid-1920s I was driving along the High Corniche Road through the twilight with the whole French Riviera twinkling on the sea below. As far ahead as I could see was Monte Carlo, and though it was out of season and there were no Grand Dukes left to gamble and E. Phillips Oppenheim was a fat industrious man in my hotel, who lived in a bath-robe — the very name was so incorrigibly enchanting that I could only stop the car and like the Chinese whisper: ‘Ah me! Ah me!’ It was not Monte Carlo I was looking at. It was back into the mind of the young man with cardboard soles who had walked the streets of New York. I was him again — for an instant I had the good fortune to share his dreams, I who had no more dreams of my own. And there are still times when I creep up on him, surprise him on an autumn morning in New York or a spring night in Carolina when it is so quiet that you can hear a dog barking in the next county. But never again as during that all too short period when he and I were one person, when the fulfilled future and the wistful past were mingled in a single gorgeous moment — when life was literally a dream.”

__________

From the ending of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1937 essay “Early Success”, which you’ll find a lot of places but was first collected in My Lost City: Personal Essays, 1920-1940.

There’s more:

  • Hemingway’s first letter to Fitzgerald
  • The best cover letter of all time
  • Hooman Majd talks human nature in style

Image courtesy: Lit Hub

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The Value of Leisure

10 Thursday Sep 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Philosophy, Religion

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3, Catholicism, Christian, Christianity, Effort, ethics, forgiveness, Greek philosophy, Industrialism, Josef Pieper, laziness, Leisure, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, Love, Restlessness, Sloth, Thomas Aquinas, Work

Josef Pieper

“Work is necessary, and it’s good in its place: as a means to an end, the end being to provide the necessities of life. From the time of the Greeks to the rise of industrialism that was the idea — work was a means to an end. But when work was over was the time of true human life: time for family, friends, community, for the life of the mind and the life of the spirit.

At the zenith of the Middle Ages… it was held that sloth and restlessness, ‘leisurelessness’, the incapacity to enjoy leisure, were all closely connected; sloth was held to be the source of restlessness, and the ultimate cause of ‘work for work’s sake’. It may well seem paradoxical to maintain that the restlessness at the bottom of a fanatical and suicidal activity should come from the lack of will to action…

Our culture feels in its bones that ‘hard work is good.’ Aquinas, the great medieval philosopher, propounded a contrary opinion: `The essence of virtue consists in the good rather than in the difficult. Not everything that is more difficult is necessarily more virtuous; it must be more difficult in such a way that it achieves a higher good as well as being more difficult.’

The tendency to overvalue hard work and the effort of doing something difficult is so deep-rooted that it even infects our notion of love. Why should it be that the average Christian regards loving one’s enemy as the most exalted form of love? Principally because it offers an example of a natural bent heroically curbed; the exceptional difficulty, the impossibility… of loving one’s enemy constitutes the greatness of the love. And what does Aquinas say? ‘It is not the difficulty of loving one’s enemy that matters when the essence of the merit of doing so is concerned, excepting in so far as the perfection of love wipes out the difficulty…’

The inmost significance of the exaggerated value which is set upon work appears to be this: man seems to mistrust everything that is effortless… he refuses to have anything as a gift. We have only to think for a moment how much the Christian understanding of life depends upon the existence of ‘Grace’; let us recall that the Holy Spirit of God is Himself called a ‘gift’ in a special sense; that the great teachers of Christianity say that the premise of God’s justice is his love; that everything gained and everything claimed follows upon something given, and comes after something gratuitous and unearned; that in the beginning there is always a gift—we have only to think of all this for a moment in order to see what a chasm separates the tradition of the Christian West and that other view [of classical Greece].”

__________

Pulled from Josef Pieper’s Leisure: The Basis of Culture.

A couple days late for Labor Day. I would’ve posted it earlier, but, well, work got in the way.

Read on:

  • Ronald Dworkin goes deep into the issue of valuing a human life
  • Noam Chomsky’s take on the true value of work
  • A poem about working late: Louis Simpson’s “The Light in My Father’s Study”

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Flow

12 Monday Jan 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Interview, Writing

≈ Comments Off on Flow

Tags

Flow, Guardian, Ian Katz, Ian McEwan, Work, writers, Writing

BOOKS IAN MCEWAN

“When I’m working, there are those moments when something goes well in the morning for half an hour or an hour. I try to describe this experience, and I think everyone’s had it. We don’t have a good word for it, but it’s a form of happiness — one psychologist called it ‘flow’, which isn’t quite enough — that consists of total absorption in trying to do something. It could be playing a game of tennis or gardening or cooking a meal, or writing a novel. But it’s that wonderful suspension from time and from the narrative of your existence, when you are simply, absolutely lost in the thing you are doing. And you don’t even remember who you are. And you don’t even feel any pleasure at the time.

And those moments — which I think are rare for all of us — are only realized in retrospect. It’s when the doorbell rings and you pop out of it that you realize you have been supremely happy. But not the happiness of laughter or exhilaration. And it’s those episodes that I really treasure — those moments when there’s only the writing, only the page or the screen, only the thing itself. They’re very hard to sustain, but every now and then — maybe only once or twice a week — there are those moments of pure absorption.”

__________

From Ian McEwan, during a conversation with Ian Katz at the Guardian’s Open Weekend festival last year.

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Johnny Cash on Work Ethic, Preachers, and Singing Gospel Music with Elvis

24 Tuesday Jun 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Interview

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Barney Hoskins, Elvis Presley, Folsom Prison Blues, God, Gospel Music, I Walk the Line, interview, Johnny Cash, Music, Pain, preaching, Resilience, Ring of Fire, Rock's Backpages, Singing, Song, Songs, Sunday Morning Coming Down, Work, Work Ethic

Johnny Cash

Barney Hoskins: Do you really need to tour so much? Do you need to work so hard and drive yourself so hard?

Johnny Cash: For my soul I do. Yeah, for my soul. It’s a gift. My mother always told me that any talent is a gift of God, and I always believed that. If I quit, I would just live in front of the television and get fat and die pretty soon. So I don’t want to do that. You know I just hope and pray I can die with my boots on. I’ve been in hospital beds and I don’t want to end it up there…

I went through a period that I didn’t want to sing those old songs again. I finally decided that I was really cheating them and myself. And I started singing all the old ones with gusto and lust. Like I loved them. Those songs, “I Walk the Line” and “Folsom,” “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” “Ring of Fire”. They’re part of me. They’re an extension of me when I get in front of that microphone. There’s a part of me going through that mic, you know, to that audience. They feel it and they know it if I feel it, you know. They’ll turn it right back to me, the appreciation. That’s what it’s all about. That’s what performing is all about, is sharing and communicating.

Barney Hoskins: Could you have ever been a preacher? Were you ever tempted to–?

Johnny Cash: No. I think in my world of religion, you’re called to preach or you don’t preach. Called by God to preach. I never been ordained by God to preach the gospel. I have a calling, it’s called to perform and sing. That’s it. I think gospel song is a ministry in a way. Gospel music is so ingrained into my bones, you know. I can’t do a concert without singing a gospel song. It’s what I was raised on.

It was the thing that inspired me as a child growing up on a cotton farm, where work was drudgery and it was so hard that when I was in the field I sang all the time. Usually gospel songs because they lifted me up above that black dirt.

johnny cash

Barney Hoskins: I was going to ask you how the pain is in your jaw these days.

Johnny Cash: It’s pretty severe.

Barney Hoskins: Really? All the time? Constant?

Johnny Cash: Almost all the time, yeah.

Barney Hoskins: How do you–

Johnny Cash: Except when I’m on stage.

Barney Hoskins: Really?

Johnny Cash: Yeah.

Barney Hoskins: That’s miraculous that it just leaves you. Power of music I guess.

Johnny Cash: Yeah, I pray for that and it works. It doesn’t alter or hinder my performance.

Barney Hoskins: It must be a struggle to have to take pain killers at the same time, to be able to regulate them–

Johnny Cash: I don’t take them. I can’t take them. It’s like an alcoholic: he can’t drink. I can’t take pain pills.

Johnny Cash

Barney Hoskins: You must be very brave to–

Johnny Cash: No. I’m not very brave because for five years I didn’t try to take the pain. I fought it. I had a total of 34 surgical procedures on my left jaw. Every doctor I’ve been to knows what to do next, too. To relieve me of pain, I don’t believe any of them. I’m handling it. It’s my pain. I’m not being brave either. I’m not brave at all after what I’ve been through, I just know how to handle it.

Barney Hoskins: When you look at yourself in the mirror do you feel like an American icon when you look at yourself in the mirror?

Johnny Cash: God, what a question. Shit. I see the pimples on my nose and I see the fat jaw from the pain where it’s swollen… Icon? No. I don’t see him. He’s not in my mirror. Thanks anyway.

Barney Hoskins: I was interested to know whether you ever talked about gospel music with Elvis?

Johnny Cash: Oh yeah. That’s all we talked about. Well that wasn’t all, we talked about girls too. Yeah, Elvis and I, a lot of shows we would sing together in the dressing room and invariably we’d go to black gospel. We knew the same songs. We grew up on the same songs.

__________

Johnny Cash, speaking in an interview with Barney Hoskins on October 14th, 1996.


More American icons:

  • Mark Twain’s daily routine
  • Paul Newman’s collected wisdom
  • Jack Kerouac’s ending to On the Road

Johnny Cash

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Jefferson’s Ten Rules

14 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Philosophy

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Advice, American History, Counsel, Epictetus, grandfather, grandson, happiness, Jefferson's Ten Rules, John Spear Smith, Julian Boyd, letter, Monticello, Patience, Philosophy, Ten Commandments, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson Smith, Thrift, Wisdom, Work

Thomas Jefferson

To Thomas Jefferson Smith.
Monticello, February 21, 1825.

This letter will, to you, be as one from the dead. The writer will be in the grave before you can weigh its counsels. Your affectionate and excellent father has requested that I would address to you something which might possibly have a favorable influence on the course of life you have to run, and I too, as a namesake, feel an interest in that course. Few words will be necessary, with good dispositions on your part. Adore God. Reverence and cherish your parents. Love your neighbor as yourself, and your country more than yourself. Be just. Be true. Murmur not at the ways of Providence. So shall the life into which you have entered, be the portal to one of eternal and ineffable bliss. And if to the dead it is permitted to care for the things of this world, every action of your life will be under my regard. Farewell. […]

A Decalogue of Canons for observation in practical life.

1. Never put off till to-morrow what you can do to-day.

2. Never trouble another for what you can do yourself.

3. Never spend your money before you have it.

4. Never buy what you do not want, because it is cheap; it will be dear to you.

5. Pride costs us more than hunger, thirst and cold.

6. We never repent of having eaten too little.

7. Nothing is troublesome that we do willingly.

8. How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened.

9. Take things always by their smooth handle.

10. When angry, count ten, before you speak; if very angry, an hundred.

__________

A Letter written by Thomas Jefferson to his friend John Spear Smith, on behalf of Smith’s son and namesake, Thomas Jefferson Smith. Jefferson, who was born 271 years ago yesterday, was 81 when he wrote this letter.

The Monticello website has an extended discussion of the meaning of rule #9, about which there has been considerable speculation. It ties into last week’s post concerning the Ayaan Hirsi Ali-Brandeis affair:

Jefferson’s intended meaning is the subject of some debate. Julian Boyd wrote an article on this in 1957, “The Smooth Handle: A Challenge to the Organization Man.” Boyd believed that this statement embodied how Jefferson thought citizens of a republic should behave, and was descended from a similar saying by Epictetus, “Everything has two handles, one by which it can be borne; another by which it cannot.” While debate was essential to a healthy republic, Boyd argued, Jefferson believed strongly that the exchange of ideas must always be civil, and he expressed this belief in his advice to “take things always by their smooth handle.”

This is only one interpretation, however, and without an explicit explanation from Jefferson himself, each reader is free to interpret it as they will.

More Jefferson:

  • Meet Thomas Jefferson
  • Meet Thomas Jefferson’s father
  • David Brooks and Jon Meacham have an entertaining discussion about Jefferson and his brilliant political rival Alexander Hamilton

Jefferson's Ten Rules

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Talent Is a Question of Quantity

18 Tuesday Feb 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Literature

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Effort, Journal, Journals, Jules Renard, novel, Persistence, Skill, Talent, Wisdom, Work, Writing

Jules Renard

“Talent is a question of quantity. Talent does not write one page: it writes three hundred. No novel exists which an ordinary intelligence could not conceive; there is no sentence, no matter how lovely, that a beginner could not construct. What remains is to pick up the pen, to rule the paper, patiently to fill it up. The strong do not hesitate. They settle down, they sweat, they go on to the end. They exhaust the ink, they use up the paper. This is the only difference between men of talent and cowards who will never make a start. In literature, there are only oxen. The biggest ones are the geniuses—the ones who toll eighteen hours a day without tiring. Fame is a constant effort.”

__________

From Jules Renard’s journal, in an entry from 1887. Renard would have been 23 years old at the time of this writing.

In one of his more cryptic jottings, which appears eight years later in these same journals, Renard wrote: “There are good writers and great ones. Let us be the good ones.”

You can find that epigram, along with other highlights from the first half of Renard’s journals, at the link below. Later this month, I’ll publish selections from the second and arguably more remarkable half of his largely overlooked masterwork.

Jules RenardThe Brilliant, Unread Journals of Jules Renard

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A Mother’s Work

26 Tuesday Nov 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in History

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

C.S. Lewis, Clive Staples Lewis, home, letters, motherhood, mothers, parenthood, Sisyphus, The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Work

C.S. Lewis by Arthur Strong

“I think I can understand that feeling about a mother’s work being like that of Sisyphus (who was the stone rolling gentleman). But it is surely in reality the most important work in the world. What do ships, railways, miners, cars, government etc. exist for except that people may be fed, warmed, and safe in their own homes? As Dr. Johnson said, ‘To be happy at home is the end of all human endeavor’. (1st to be happy to prepare for being happy in our own real home hereafter: 2nd in the meantime to be happy in our houses.) We wage war in order to have peace, we work in order to have leisure, we produce food in order to eat it. So the job of motherhood is the one for which all others exist…”

__________

C.S. Lewis, writing in a letter to a “Mrs. Johnson” on March 16th, 1955. This correspondence can be found in The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume lll: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy 1950-1963.

As I was busy posting about the anniversary of Jack Kennedy’s assassination, I forgot to note two other events which November 22nd, 1963 also marks — the death of Clive Staples Lewis and the eleventh birthday of my mother, a reader of this blog.

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W.S. Merwin: Poems from the Outside

13 Thursday Jun 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry

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Tags

city, country, gardening, labor, Noam Chomsky, Poem, poetry, W. S. Merwin, Work

W.S. Merwin

Coming into the high room again after years
after oceans and shadows of hills and the sounds
after losses and feet on stairs

after looking and mistakes and forgetting
turning there thinking to find
no one except those I knew
finally I saw you
sitting in white
already waiting

you of whom I had heard
with my own ears since the beginning
for whom more than once
I have opened the door
believing you were not far

__________

“Late Spring” by W. S. Merwin, which you can keep on your shelf along with other greats from Merwin in his Collected Poems 1952-1993.

Watch a short video of Merwin below, which is taken from a recent profile of him in PBS’ Bill Moyers Journal. In addition to introducing and reading “Late Spring,” Merwin also describes his love of living in the countryside and working on the land.

When he was 54 years old, Merwin — who had lived previously in Majorca, London, Mexico, and the continental U.S. — moved with his wife Paula to the island of Maui. There he designed and largely built a home surrounded by acres of once-lush terrain which had turned toxic by decades of logging, poisonous agribusiness and erosion. Merwin then began the painstaking task of restoring the soil and surrounding land; and today, 31 years hence, it is considered one of the densest palm forests in the world.

Now 85, Merwin continues to live, garden, and write in Hawaii.

Yet while cloistered away from the American literary establishment, Merwin continues to garner his share of acclaim and awards. In 2010 he was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States, an occasion which the New York Times marked by writing, “The humans in Mr. Merwin’s poems take their bearings from the natural world, one that is often embattled… Mr. Merwin is a laureate for our times, and we look forward to his tenure.” Bill Moyers observed that Merwin seems to scorn leaving his life in paradise… except for those occasions when he has to return to North America to accept Pulitzer Prizes.

But Merwin takes a more humble approach. He says:

“I love the city, but I also love the country. And I realize that when I’m in the city I miss the country all the time, and when I’m in the country I miss the city some of the time. So what I do now is live in the country and go to the city some of the time…

Writing poetry has to me always had something to do with how you want to live. I guess I’ve done something that many of my contemporaries didn’t do. Many of them went into universities and had academic careers, and I have nothing against that. But I didn’t think I was made for it. I begin, after about a week in university, I begin to feel the oxygen’s going out of the air very fast and I have to go somewhere else.”

This love of the land and physical labor strikes a chord with me, not because I feel it too (I get anxious when more than five miles from a museum or concert hall), but because some of my family shares in Merwin’s obsession to an almost psychotic degree. At my family ranch in Texas, for example, my mom will often while away the afternoon hours by picking acres of weeds and incinerating them in controlled burns — an activity I am yet to find as entertaining as sitting by the lake.

Yet at 85, Merwin’s vitality and zest are attributes that all of us can aspire to, and they recall those of another, younger — although only by a year — thinker, Noam Chomsky, who mused about physical labor by saying:

“For me there was always too much that I wanted to do. I’m not sure how widespread this is – take, say, a craftsman, I happen to be no good with tools, but take someone who can build things, fix things, they really want to do it. They love doing it: ‘if there’s a problem I can solve it’. Or just plain physical labor – that’s also gratifying. If you work on command then of course it’s just drudgery but if you do the very same thing out of your own will or interest it’s exciting and interesting and appealing. I mean that’s why people look for work – gardening for example. So you’ve had a hard week, you have the weekend off, the kids are running around, you could just lie down to sleep but it’s much more fun to be gardening or building something or doing something else.”

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Is There a Universal Human Nature?

22 Friday Feb 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Interview, Philosophy, Psychology

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Axel Schiøtz, Bach, Charlie Chaplin, cognition, evolution, free time, human nature, Noam Chomsky, Pablo Casals, psychology, Work

Noam ChomskyYou have argued that any stance one takes on political, economic, social or even personal issues is ultimately based on some conception of human nature. Why is this?

Any stance we take is based on some conception of what is good for people. This conception will tacitly presuppose a certain belief as to the constitution of human nature — human needs and human potential. You might as well bring them out as clearly as possible so that they can be discussed.

According to your view of human nature, all human beings possess certain biological functions endowing them with common mental capacities. How do you defend this position against postmodernist critics who argue that there is no such thing as human nature, and that all attempts to define it are guilty of reading other cultures in the light of Western perceptions and values?

Not even the most extreme postmodernist can seriously argue that there is no such thing as human nature. They may argue that the exact properties of human nature are difficult to substantiate — this is certainly correct. However, it is impossible to coherently argue that an intrinsic, universal human nature does not exist. This amounts to the belief that the next human zygote conceived might just as well develop into a worm or a crab as a human being. Postmodernists might limit their assertion to denying any effect of human nature on our mental make-up — our values, our knowledge, our wants, etc. This also makes no sense.

The postmodernist will argue that a child growing up in New York will develop a certain way of thinking, and if that child had grown up amongst Amazon tribes people she would have developed a completely different way of thinking. This is true. But we must then ask how a child could develop these different consciousnesses. In whatever environment it finds itself, the child will mentally construct a rich and complex culture on the basis of the extremely scattered and limited phenomena it is exposed to. That consideration tells us (in advance of any detailed knowledge) that there must be an extraordinary directive and organizational component to the mind that is internal. We can begin to see human nature in terms of certain capacities to develop certain mental traits. I think we can go further than this and begin to discover universal aspects of these mental traits which are determined by human nature. I think we can find this in the area of morality.

For example, not long ago I talked to people in Amazon tribes and I took it for granted that they have the same conception of vice and virtue as I do. It is only through sharing these values that we were able to interact — talking about real problems such as being forced out of the jungle by the state authorities. I believe I was correct to assume this: we had no problem communicating although we were as remote as is possible culturally.

Are you suggesting everyone agrees about the nature of vice and virtue?

In fact I think they probably have a very high measure of agreement. One strong bit of evidence for this is that everyone — Genghis Khan, Himmler, Bill Gates — creates stories of themselves where they interpret their actions as working for the benefit of human beings. Even at the extreme levels of depravity, the Nazis did not boast that they wanted to kill Jews, but gave crazed justifications — even that they were acting in ‘self-defense’. It is very rare for people to justify their actions by saying ‘I’m doing this to maximize my own benefit and I don’t care what happens to anybody else’. That would be pathological.

But I think you would agree that not all cultures are equally viable from the standpoint of promoting human fulfillment and well-being? Are you wanting to argue that your understanding of human nature can give us a kind of objective understanding of the conditions of human flourishing?

Now we’re taking an essentialist position which the relativist would contradict. I’m not willing to go that far. We can develop a stronger conception of human nature through drawing on Enlightenment thinking on the issue.

This has support from some of the sciences, but is mainly founded on a philosophical investigation into our hopes, intuition and experience, and an examination of history and cultural variety. There are needs for conditions which allow the flourishing of human capacities. Insights from the Enlightenment show us that people need to exist in free association with others — not in isolation, and not in relations of domination. There is a need to replace social fetters with social bonds. Therefore any social structure that involves relations of domination — whether it’s the family, a transnational corporation, gender relations — has a very heavy burden of proof to bear. It must demonstrate that the benefits it provides outweigh the restrictions it imposes on human capacities. If it can’t demonstrate its legitimacy, it should be dismantled.

Do you think that different social and economic circumstances either block or reinforce certain dispositions — that, for example, whatever there might be in the way of a natural tendency towards selfish and aggressive behavior is reinforced by the capitalist market society?

There’s no doubt about it. Let’s take Germany, for example. In the early 20th century Germany was the most advanced area of Western culture — in music, the arts, science. In the passage of a few years, it entered the absolute depths of human history. Small changes in German society allowed people like Joseph Mengele to flourish rather than people like Einstein and Freud.

Granted the truth of what you say about our distinctively human capacities for freedom and co-operative action, how come we are so open to that kind of manipulation and deceit? How come we remain both globally and locally so caught up in oppression?

It’s a serious question. Why are we born free and end up enslaved?

Is there a case here for viewing social factors as more determinant than biological factors?

You can’t say which factor is more decisive. They interact. Take the example of puberty: small changes in nutrition can modify the onset of puberty by a factor of two, or even terminate it altogether. Or the visual system: in a kitten you can destroy the neural basis for vision simply by not presenting pattern stimulation in the first couple of weeks of its life. However, does this mean that the environment is the decisive force? No. Puberty is a process which human beings undergo at a particular stage of maturation because that’s the way they’ve been designed. You don’t undergo puberty because of peer pressure. Likewise, human limbs will not develop into wings rather than arms or legs. The genetic component determines strict limits within which variation is possible. I believe the same is true of our social and mental development.

How do you see the relationship between work and free time in a more liberated society?

Polls in the US, Germany and elsewhere have shown that people value free time over material goods. Therefore, there are major propaganda efforts to reverse this. One reason over a trillion dollars a year is spent on marketing in the USA is to try to undermine our natural tendency to want free, liberated time.

What are you currently reading?

I’ve just finished a few important books. One is Ha-Joon Chang’s Bad Samaritans, a penetrating and expert study showing how and why standard doctrines concerning economic development are dramatically refuted by the historical record and have caused severe harm when applied. Another is Peter Hallward’s Damming the Flood. The “flood” is Lavalas, the popular movement in Haiti that won the first democratic election in this tragic country, a victim of French and US torture, and the savagery of a small elite, since it became the first free country of free men in the hemisphere. Hallward’s deeply informed account of what he sees as “neo-imperial sabotage” by the traditional torturers explores the background of the coup of 2004 and the persistence of “the flood” in a country that is a microcosm of imperial savagery and heroic resistance, however one interprets recent events.

What are you currently watching?

My wife and I used to be movie addicts, but I’m now pretty much reduced to what the grandchildren want to see. All-time favorite? The one movie I sat through twice was Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights, so maybe that qualifies.

What are you currently listening to?

If some ancient equipment could be rehabilitated, I’d take out some wonderful old records of Axel Schiøtz singing Schubert Lieder and Pablo Casals playing Bach solo cello suites, reviving memories of more light-hearted days when my wife and I backpacked through Europe to the Prades festival, 60 years ago.

__________

From two interviews with Noam Chomsky — one from his website, the other from the Christian Science Monitor.

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Chomsky on Education, Children, and the Value of Work

02 Wednesday Jan 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Interview, Philosophy

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Children, education, Freedom, Frithjof Bergmann, No Child Left Behind, Noam Chomsky, play, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Work, ZNet

Noam Chomsky

The philosopher Frithjof Bergmann says that most people don’t know what kind of activities they really want to do. He calls that ‘the poverty of desire.’ I find this to be true when I talk to a lot of my friends. Did you always know what you wanted to do?

That’s a problem I never had – for me there was always too much that I wanted to do. I’m not sure how widespread this is – take, say, a craftsman, I happen to be no good with tools, but take someone who can build things, fix things, they really want to do it. They love doing it: ‘if there’s a problem I can solve it’. Or just plain physical labor – that’s also gratifying. If you work on command then of course it’s just drudgery but if you do the very same thing out of your own will or interest it’s exciting and interesting and appealing. I mean that’s why people look for work – gardening for example. So you’ve had a hard week, you have the weekend off, the kids are running around, you could just lie down to sleep but it’s much more fun to be gardening or building something or doing something else.

It’s an old insight, not mine. Wilhelm von Humboldt, who did some of the most interesting work on this, once pointed out that if an artisan produces a beautiful object on command we may admire what he did but we despise what he is – he’s a tool in the hands of others. If on the other hand he creates that same beautiful object out of his own will we admire it and him and he’s fulfilling himself. It’s kind of like study at school – I think we all know from our experience that if you study on command because you have to pass a test you can do fine on the test but two weeks later you’ve forgotten everything. On the other hand if you do it because you want to find out, and you explore and you make mistakes and you look in the wrong place and so on, then ultimately you remember.

So you think that basically a person knows what it is that he or she wants to do?

Under the right circumstances that would be true. Children for example are naturally curious – they want to know about everything, they want to explore everything but that generally gets knocked out of their heads. They’re put into disciplined structures, things are organized for them to act in certain ways so it tends to get beaten out of you. That’s why school’s boring. School can be exciting. It happens that I went to a Deweyite school until I was about 12. It was an exciting experience, you wanted to be there, you wanted to go. There was no ranking, there were no grades. Things were guided so it wasn’t just do anything you feel like. There was a structure but you were basically encouraged to pursue your own interests and concerns and to work together with others. I basically didn’t know I was a good student until I got to high school. I went to an academic high school in which everybody was ranked and you had to get to college so you had to pass tests. In elementary school I had actually skipped a year but nobody paid much attention to it. The only thing I saw was that I was the smallest kid in the class. But it wasn’t a big thing that anybody paid attention to. High school was totally different – you’ve gotta be first in the class, not second. And that’s a very destructive environment – it drives people into the situation where you really don’t know what you want to do. It happened to me in fact – in high school I kinda lost all interest. When I looked at the college catalogue it was really exciting – lots of courses, great things. But it turned out that the college was like an overgrown high school. After about a year I was going to just drop out and it was just by accident that I stayed in. I happened to meet up with a faculty member who suggested to me I start taking his graduate courses and then I started taking other graduate courses. But I have no professional training. That’s why I’m teaching at MIT – I don’t have the credentials to teach at an academic university.

But that’s what education ought to be like. Otherwise it can be extremely alienating – I see it with my grandchildren or the circles in which they live. There are kids who just don’t know what they want to do so they smoke pot, or they drink, they skip school, or they get into all kinds of other anti-social behavior. Because they have energy and excitement and nothing to do with it. That’s true here, I don’t know how it is in Europe, but here even the concept of play has changed. I can see it even in the place where I live. My wife and I moved out to this area because it was very good for children – there wasn’t a lot of traffic, there were woods out the back and the kids could play in the street. The kids were out playing all the time, riding their bikes whatever. Now there are children around but they’re not outside, they’re either inside looking at video games or something or else they’re involved in organized activities: adult-organized sports activities or something. But just the concept of spontaneous play seems to have diminished considerably. There are some studies about this, I’ve seen them for the United States and England, I don’t know if it’s true elsewhere but spontaneous play has just declined under social changes. And I think it’s a very bad thing because that’s where your creative instincts flourish. If you have to make up a game in the streets, if you play baseball with a broom handle you found somewhere that’s different from going to an organized league where you have to wear a uniform.

Sometimes it’s just surreal – I remember when my grandson was about ten and he was very interested in sports, he was always playing for teams for the town. Once we were over at his mother’s house and he came back pretty disconsolate because there was supposed to be a baseball game but the other team that they were playing only had eight players. I don’t know if you know how baseball works but everybody’s sitting all the time, there’s about three people actually doing anything, everybody else is just sitting around. But his team simply couldn’t give the other team an extra player so that the kids could have fun, because you have to keep by the league rules. I mean that’s carrying it to real absurdity, but that’s the kind of thing that’s happening.

It’s true in school too – the great educational innovation of Bush and Obama was ‘No Child Left Behind’. I can see the effects in schools from talking to teachers, parents and students. It’s training to pass tests and the teachers are evaluated on how well the students do in the test – I’ve talked to teachers who’ve told me that a kid will be interested in something that comes up in class and want to pursue it and the teacher has to tell them – ‘you can’t do that because you have to pass this test next week’. That’s the opposite of education.

What is your personal work routine? How do manage to work so much?

Well my wife died a couple of years ago and since then I’ve done nothing but work. I see my children once in a while but almost nothing else. Before that I worked pretty hard but had a personal life outside. But that’s unique.

How many hours of sleep do you get?

I try to get about six or seven hours of sleep if I can. It’s a pretty crazy life – tremendous number of talks and meetings so I don’t have anywhere near as much time as I’d like to just plain work because other things crowd in. But I nearly never have any free time – I never go to the movies or out to dinner. But that’s not a model of any sane kind of existence.

__________

Excerpts from Noam Chomsky’s recent interview on Work, Learning, and Freedom with Michael Kasenbacher of ZMagazine.

It’s tough to know where to begin with Chomsky. I try to read every word he writes, and listen to most of his interviews, but it’s a daunting task given just how much he produces and how wide a range of topics fall within the scope of his knowledge. If the first paragraph of his Wikipedia page is any indication —

Noam Avram Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, logician, historian, political critic, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. In addition to his work in linguistics, he has written on war, politics, and mass media, and is the author of over 100 books. According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index in 1992, Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any other living scholar from 1980 to 1992, and was the eighth most cited source overall. 

— you can see just how much breadth and depth there is to his work. I’ve also exchanged about 500 emails with him since I was 15, and these have provided a sort of intellectual sounding board for my deepest political, philosophical, and personal questions about the world. I plan on posting some of those emails on here soon.

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