Apologia Pro Literati Vita

Friday, April 15, 2011

Well-Temperament with Trevor John Stephenson

Another wonderful and enlightening discussion of temperament with Trevor John Stephenson.

Part I | Part II

Tom Shippey on Tolkien

Medievalist and scholar of modern fantasy and science fiction Tom Shippey on J. R. R. Tolkien and "filling the gaps" of medieval English literature.

Part I | Part II

It is curious the following pair of articles came across my desk in the same week, Terry Eagleton's encomium for Marx in The Chronicle of Higher Education and Wendy McElroy's reflection on values and economics at Mises Daily. I would certainly wager the authors are not in communication. While Eagleton's essay, a condensed version of his book sans the scholarship, I would assume, embraces more issues, both articles add an uncommon spin to the topic of economics: culture. Now your humble bloggers have discussed leisure and culture as well as economics but I thought this was a novel take. This pair of articles in particular yields a fruitful comparison.

In Praise of Marx, by Terry Eagleton
The Case for Frugality, by Wendy McElroy

First and foremost they both examine the concept of leisure in the light of economics, albeit from opposing economic camps. Both authors embrace the idea that leisure time is of value and both realize that some excess production is necessary to achieve excess time. Both authors even admit the excess production can be spent on anything at the discretion of the individual: perhaps what pleases you is expensive and you must work more to afford it or perhaps you work less because you would rather have leisure time or what goods please you are inexpensive.

Yet Eagleton's position demands, since inequality is unacceptable, that the excess production be split to achieve equal leisure. While both embrace the value of leisure Eagleton in essence declares it a right. There being no legitimate and acceptable reasons for inequality, either of resources or ability, and because this condition of leisure does not naturally exist since people have to support themselves via work to create food, shelter, and so forth, some people have to provide it for others. He also seizes the moral authority to act and balance the inequality, adding, "We would no longer tolerate a situation in which the minority had leisure because the majority had labor."

Thus it becomes the case that an individual is not free to value and trade his labor, i.e. his finite time and life, since he must support others, others who define what the "minimum standard" of "leisure" is and distribute the resources to achieve it. He may have to work more than he wants to (and achieve less leisure, either of time or goods) because someone else cannot.

Eagleton clearly wants to present the spiritual, "enlightened," side of Marxism, i.e. Marxism as un-economic and essentially unconcerned with material goods. Yet lack of such considerations merely neglects the economic and moral effects of planned economies, it does not eliminate them. He says that people would be free how to spend their leisure without acknowledging the processes used to determine how much leisure he is allowed to keep in the first place (as well as the moral implications and economic ramifications.) His romantic view ignores the fundamental fact that central planning destroys the ability of an individual to ascertain the cost and result of a given activity. That individuals are free to act and act unpredictably further confounds any attempt at centralization. The gross and repeated failures of planned economies to react to change are usually glossed over as failures of implementation rather than of essence. Too critics often attempt to distinguish between planned economies and taxation, the latter being acceptable because merely redistributes and does not interfere with the economy, a false assertion.

Like Christopher Hitchens' "libertarian" argument for "free" health care, [1](that it makes you more free) the fatal flaw of this very similar article is its lack of attention to the fundamental paradoxes of socialism. As a pair the articles show that anyone can value culture and a leisurely, philosophical life. Too they demonstrate that such leisure comes at a price. The question is "who pays it?" You or someone else? Eagleton's article has value insofar as it spurs the non-socialist to review an author often caricatured and scoffed at rather than studied. Such a love letter, though, however romantic and sincere, does not vindicate the ideology.

N.B. No doubt Eagleton's reference to Ludwig von Mises makes his apparently persuasive article, expertly tailored to appeal to a wide audience, more so by imbuing in it a semblance of equanimity and scholarly rigor. Readers should follow with Mises' "Socialism."

[1] http://www.aplvblog.com/2009/09/libertarian-case-for-free-health-care.html

Saturday, April 9, 2011

Baroque Music of the Synagoguge

Salomon Rossi was an Italian Jewish composer of the late Renaissance and Baroque. The above is a setting of the Kaddish (sometimes known as the Mourner's Prayer); the text is in Aramaic, not Hebrew as many non-Jews believe.

Helmut Walcha

Friday, April 8, 2011

A Telling Comment

Speaking at the National Archives in downtown Washington, D.C., esteemed documentary filmmaker Ken Burns commented today on the recent popular criticism of public funded broadcasting. Patrick Gavin reporting for Politico carries parts of the talk which I think would perk the ears of any libertarian, not so much because of any particular policy suggestions from the director but rather because of his choice of words. Let's take a quick look:

People can make arguments about the marketplace, but if your house is on fire at 3 a.m., you don't call the marketplace. When your road needs plowing, you don't call the marketplace. The marketplace doesn't have boots on the ground in Afghanistan. [1]

Any libertarian or advocate of a free market, I think, would be immediately taken aback by how Burns talks about a "marketplace" and what his choice of words seems to indicate. Unusually, he describes it as if it is a monolithic institution, that is, he conceives of it in essentially statist terms. He seems to be thinking, "I can call the government for help because it is a finite entity, but in contrast I cannot call 'the marketplace' because it is not." This suggests a fundamental view of his: that the basic unit of utility or agency in society is the individual but as some larger institution, most particularly the government. This may seem an extraordinary extrapolation but a lack of understanding of what a market is, the free association of people, leaves only a collectivist mindset. His reasoning forgets that all institutions are made of people. Regarding economics, they are people with particular skills: if they didn't work where they did they would work somewhere else with those same skills. Likewise, if there is a demand, someone with the skills to meet it will do so. And if there is no one with the skill, there is nothing the government can do about it. Only individuals can make the choice to invest in a particular skill.

Perhaps, you might say, the government organizes people, meaning it collects the money and pays the plow drivers because citizens, if left to their own choice, would not pay for them. Thus the government in this line of thinking "creates the demand." Well if there was no demand the people didn't really want it now did they? And if there is demand, well then you don't need the government now do you? You're not suggesting people be forced to pay for things they don't want, are you? Of course not.

So what is Burns really suggesting here? Does he think that the government, that central planning, is really the only way people can organize? Is he saying if the government didn't organize fire brigades and plows that we would all sit and freeze or flambé to death? That you can't learn a skill and offer it to people in exchange for something?

Burns' choice of words strongly suggests that to him a "marketplace" is not a market place of people offering their skills to others who need it and who will in turn trade what they have or do in return, but
a vague notion describing how people produce only inessential items. In fact he seems to mock "the marketplace" for not being a specific institution he can call on for help, as if the world isn't filled with people offering their skills to each other without government "guidance." A "free market" in this view is just a sort of foggy, fundamentalist, fantasy.

Referring to both the government and marketplace as institutions that produce things themselves instead of contrasting methods of organization of people, the actual agents and producers of society, suggests a mindset not centered on the individual. No doubt Mr. Burns thinks that "the marketplace" can accomplish certain things, but the way he talks about it, as a failed or faux institution, reflects a fundamentally state-oriented view. At the very least his choice of words reflects someone who has not seriously thought about the economic implications of liberty.

[1] http://www.politico.com/click/stories/1104/ken_burns_blasts_pbs_critics.html

Sunday, April 3, 2011

250 Posts!

Philosophy and the Solace of Self

Nowhere is there a more idyllic spot, a vacation home more private and peaceful, than in one's own mind, especially when it is furnished in such a way that the merest inward glance induces ease. . .

–Marcus Aurelius, Meditations. IV.3

To what might one owe peace of mind? To a hard day's work or the satisfaction of a job well done? To feats and victories, heroism and valor? To the forbearance of suffering and endurance throughout the languish of pain? To piety and devotion? As the Epicureans said, might it simply be the avoidance of all such pains and extremes?

Though Aristotle's advice might seem the most obvious it is in fact the most difficult: to do the right thing, in the right measure, at the right time, always. And that one's happiness is ever the balance of pleasure derived from one's present task, received from past deeds, and expected from future ones. Surely anyone who has read what Aristotle expected from a man might see such a task as positively Herculean. To do so one would have to be responsible for ever moment of his life, to have lived each moment at least as best as he was able. Or at least to have redeemed one moment's failure with another's success.

One must of course possess a relentlessly introspective nature. It is not enough merely to do, but one must assess. Worse still, one must do and assess in moderation, not ever yielding to passive torpidity or unguided exuberance.

This virtue of moderation so praised by long gone cultures, cultures who praised the man both musician and astronomer, who tilled the earth and tweaked poetry, is not so much valued today as specialization. Yet how would the main whose intellectual facilities are developed at great disproportion to his mastery of his self react to the temptations of the body, the rights of the condemned, or the uncertainties of philosophy? One need not look far to find brilliant scientists with eggshell philosophy, or lofty, ivory-tower intellectuals who could not arbitrate the case of a lost dog without caucus and a dissertation on metaphysics.

It follows then that one must have a moral code against which to judge one's actions but this guarantees little peace of mind. No one is born with a fully formed moral system and whose does not change, at least a little, over time? Thus at the end of one's life one is bound to see some misdeeds, yet those same misdeeds may have spurred the creation of the new moral view. There is no escaping the function of time on happiness.

At many points in his life a man will find himself at a crossroads considering the man he has become and the man he hopes himself one day to be. At those points he will have much to consider. First and foremost he will be limited by his intellectual ability and desire for self-criticism. Perhaps most integrally of all, should he lack either of these I scarcely imagine he would realize it. Such a man, philosophy's exile, deserves the pity of all other men. Who is deaf to Plato's timeless call to, "γνῶθι σεαυτόν" and the endless questions and conundrums unleashed by Plato's prompt holds never the world in a grain of sand but ever is held within the limits of his myopia.

What might the balance of these innumerable variables look like? Aristotle and Marcus point the way, though not nearly so precisely as we would hope. What is expected of man is nothing less than the reconciliation of past, present, and future. To relish in the contradiction of man's inescapable indignity and his supernal potential. To form in the self the eclectic communion of the dignitaries of humanity and the peerless spark of the individual. To make the man neither rationalistic automaton nor gross id. To relish every grasp of the flesh and every glimpse of the divine. To say to oneself, "far have I come, far must I go, but gladly." To relish the journey, the destination, and the contradiction. To look back on every grace as undeserved and service as unrequired. To be steward, supplicant, and king; brother, friend, son, father, and foe. To be creature of Prometheus and child of God.

Yet finding solace in the self is not simply an act of moderation between the extremes of opposing philosophical schools. Rather it is the act of moderation between self and other. What is most obviously the great challenge of political life, the balance of individuality and community, is less often seen in the context of developing a character, a character neither ex nihilo nor pastiche, neither alien to other men nor subsumed into group-think. To have knowledge not encyclopedic for the sake of knowing, but catholic for the sake of understanding and living. To make of one's mind not a computer calculating conditionals but a retreat fashioned with the furniture of a lifetime of learning–furniture new and old, sometimes shuffled around, maybe re-finished, and maybe built yourself if you're lucky. To be eclectic not as affectation but as the expression of a curious and uncommon character. What's in your room? Does it clamor with the croaking frogs of Aristophanes and the eternal laughter of Mozart?

Yet happiness is not just being able to close your eyes and watch Achilles fight the Scamander or sit with Bertram Wooster in the garden, but to be content with one's deeds. Not just with heroic feats and discoveries, but in what you have shared with others, with family, coworkers, friends, and acquaintances. Retreat to a room quirky and quiet, but not empty. Retreat, but only to live. Retreat to a mind, as Marcus says, neither "lavish nor crude," neither preoccupied with the machinations of thought nor swept up in the urgencies of whim.

Craft this self not obsessively or relentlessly but with prudence and patience. Craft a self that knows self and other, that is in time and timeless. It's beginning will be its end, so from one philosopher and time to another, know thyself. Remember the rose garden. Through time time conquer, and betwixt past and future, dance. This mind, this presencing self, this world weaving through worlds and time. . .