The Personal as the Epiphany of the Supererogatory by David Walsh

What is remarkable is the extent to which the instrumental perspective still exercises a hold on us despite its contrary exemplification in science itself.

 Within the logic of survival as the highest goal, the emergence of the mind is often regarded as significant although not a revolutionary event. Reason merely allows a more efficient application of means to guarantee the survival and flourishing of the species.. The notion that the arrival of mind exponentially surpasses biology does not seem to arise. Perhaps only humor can capture the situation in which scientists dutifully calculate the positive and negative effects on survival, while themselves operating within the realm of rationality impervious to all cost-benefit considerations. Their own thinking has left the motivation of survival so far behind that they are scarcely disturbed by the prospect of their own epiphenomenality. So profound is their commitment to the free unfolding of reason that they are even willing to overlook its significance in their dedication to the process of emergence. Truth, they proclaim with every fiber of their being, is their goal, not mere survival. Yet they continue to think only in terms of the logic of survival as the only viable explanatory basis. It is the self-forgetfulness of persons we have already noticed, although now brought to a sublimely glorious extreme. The reason for it, however, is not too hard to discern. It is the dominance of a purely objectivist perspective that lacks any room for the spectator.

 Once it is recognized that science itself is free from the servitude to any purpose beyond it, then it begins to radiate the light of the supererogatory over the whole of reality. Survival, even of the fittest, is only one of the possible goals presented by nature and not by any means the highest. The apprehension of truth, even when it is not instrumentally useful, stands far higher. Having thus loosened the straight-jacket of utility within its own thinking, science can then become the means of recognizing the overflow of purpose that seems to occur on every level of reality .Science is, in other words, not alone in transcending utilitarian calculations. In itself it attests to the degree to which rationality always exceeds any confinement within boundaries defined in advance and thereby alerts us to the extent to which the supererogatory pervades the reality it investigates. It is not just that science cannot comprehend itself. There is also a profound respect in which all that it seeks to grasp eludes it. .  .  .

“Nature loves to hide “ is one of the memorable fragments from Heraclitus. It perfectly captures the outburst of surprise by which the investigator is recurrently seized. The hiddeness of nature is one that wishes to be found, although always in such a way that it overflows the boundaries that thought had set for it. Like the game of hide-and-seek everything builds towards the moment when surprise overwhelms the participants. No matter how rationally they might have anticipated the event there remains something irrepressible about it. Sheer gratuitousness burst upon them. To ask what purpose it serves would be to misunderstand  the transcendence  of the purpose entailed, for surprise exceeds all that could be anticipated within the economy of purpose. New boundaries will then be assigned but we know that they too will be overwhelmed in the surprise that is unanticipated in all discovery.

Routine, the predictable rationality within which we live most of the time, does not endure forever. Periodically it is shattered by what cannot be predicted or anticipated because it lies beyond the purview of the merely useful. Uselessness finally has the last word, as what cannot be superseded because it is the very possibility of all supersession. Strictly speaking, however, that possibility remains confined to the world of persons. They alone can be surprised. But nature too seems to yearn to break free from the routine in which it finds itself. It seems to virtually require the presence of persons in whom that rupture of disclosure, of which nature alone is incapable, can take place. Only persons can be surprised, for they alone can be captured by routine in such a way that they fail to be captured by it. Their mode of being present as not being present is an invitation to the gift of disclosure that nature recurrently furnishes.

This means, of course, that persons are the point at which the sheer immoderate exuberance of nature is displayed. It is through persons that nature discloses more than it can disclose. They are the point at which it is definitively carried beyond itself. Without  persons the surprises hidden within nature would remained locked with expectancy ever ready to overflow expectations. Left to itself, however, nature provides only the barest hints of the expressions within it. We sense it in the profligacy with which nature has dispersed itself throughout an ever expanding cosmos, but we intuit it most directly in the capacity of all living things to leap over the merely expected. The restless inquisitiveness of all animals is the refutation of their mere existence. They are never simply what they are. This is why we can relate to them as if they were persons for they have some of element of the capacity to astonish.

It is not just the obstinacy of living creatures  that they refuse to remain within the laws of behavior assigned to them. There is an inescapable excess of creativity that will probe the limits of the possible. It is in this way that they become individuals, each with their own “personality.” By deviating from the norm they establish an identity that says the unique I is always more than the universal constituents comprising it. They do not of course change their natures in the process, but they proclaim that they are always more than nature imprinted on them. This is why I know my dog better than the vet who sees him once a year for, although the vet has a far deeper grasp of biology, the dog is always more than can be captured within the science. He loves to play. From it he undoubtedly derives many biological benefits but they would hardly be available unless he were prepared to be driven by more than biology. Is there not a metaphor for the whole of nature here, nature that loves to hide? This is not to personify nature as another presence within or behind it. The point is not to read personality into it but to appreciate the extent to which nature can only be read within the horizon of personality. To accept this, however, we must be prepared to acknowledge the provisionality of all scientific explanation. Every account of the state of affairs merely awaits the astonishment that overturns it.

The prospect may seem, at first glance, to turn science into an exercise in futility. But closer inspection suggests that it more deeply confirms the trajectory of science itself, which operates within the paradox of avoiding success. It has long been noted that the one thing that retards the momentum of science is the advent of a grand theoretical settlement of fundamental questions. Even worse would be the acceleration of progress to the point that no further questions remain to be investigated. Nietzsche loved to invoked Lessing’s observation  that scientists are not really interested in the truth, they only care about the pursuit of truth. For all who share this love of science, as opposed to its results, the discovery that science is never able to attain its goal is surely welcome. Accepting the provisionality of all that science has uncovered is no mere concession to the limits of our investigative power. It is rater a blessed release from the burden of completion and an opening into the limitless possibility of wonder from which, in Aristotle’s observation, all knowledge flows. We ought to be heartened by the realization that nothing that science knows is really known  in any definitive sense.

Every explanation adduced is only one step away from the astonishing discovery that upends it and, even when the explanation stands, we are often painfully aware that the investigators too are subject to the same necessities. The reason for this is that scientist is ultimately not outside of the reality he or she investigates. He or she understands it from within, knowing matter as one composed of it and of life as one who lives. We are not outside of the categories of our thought but find ourselves within the very things we investigate. The “explanations” at which we arrive therefore not really explanations in any ultimate sense. They are merely glimpses of the mystery by which we are held.


Science, despite the hubristic cloak in which it is often wrapped, has no more been able to pierce the mystery than philosophy. Every genuine scientist knows that the the more he or she penetrates into the subject matter the more the mystery deepens, rather than dissolves. But that in itself is sufficient reassurance. Nature that loves to hide does not close itself off from us but rather draws us even deeper into the romance of understanding that is the surety of its lasting. In the end it is only because we too are part of nature that we are capable of the adventure of deepening understanding that yet never achieves its goal.  Science is an inescapably personal activity, possible at once because persons are within nature and at the same time beyond it.

Persons alone can contain what cannot be contained, the movement of nature by which it disclose itself as always more than it is. The supererogatory, the miracle of the personal, pervades reality.  .  .

Taming the Donors by Linsey McGoey

Is there any way for civil society organizations to put a halt to the Gates Foundation efforts to increase Coca-Cola and Monsanto’s presence in Africa? The answer is: not really. The foundation is mostly free to spend its endowment however it likes, as long as it’s not breaching domestic laws or regulations in the US or in countries where it operates. Even then, when the foundation underwrites projects which appear to breach domestic laws, as India’s parliament found in the case of the PATH HPV trials, it’s difficult to hold the funding organization to account.

For years, critical observers have proposed different measures for increasing the transparency and public accountability of philanthropic foundations. At the forefront of this struggle are US-based philanthropy experts such as Ray Madoff, Michael Edwards, Mark Dowie, Rob Reich, based at Stanford University, Robert B. Reich, based at the University of California, Berkeley, and Pablo Eisenberg, to name just a few key figures.  There is also no shortage of outspoken voices in developing and middle-income countries most affected by the Gate’s Foundation’s grants in areas of global health and agriculture, including Arundhati Roy and Vandana Shiva, both of whom have criticized the lack of transparency, tax allowances and lack of accountability at large foundations such as the Gates Foundation, calling for radical reform of the philanthropic sector.

In a recent article, Eisenberg, a senior fellow at Georgetown University and a founder of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, offers a list of specific proposals – all of which are worth heeding by policy-makers. US foundations currently have to spend 5 per cent of their endowments each year. Eisenberg has suggested that the figure should be increased to at least 8 percent, and that restrictions  to invest in areas of the greatest need should be implemented forcing foundations to invest in areas of the greatest social need. More investment in family or youth shelters for the homeless, for example, may do more good than funding another named chair at Harvard.

[ Emphasis on polio vaccinations at the expense of other inoculations is not lost on local villagers. Time and time again, they question the emphasis on a disease that places a less burdensome toll on them than other scourges. A number of villagers say “What is polio? We’ve never seen it – why are we worried about it?.. our children are dying of measles. “When you are doing polio, you’re not doing other things such as DPT and measles vaccines” or establishing permanent, general practice clinics in areas where there are none.  Another example is that although the Gates Foundation spend millions on HIV/AIDS prevention, it resisted efforts at treating the disease, despite its prevention effects, because of the challenge such efforts presented to the current system of patent protection by which Gates made his billions in the first place.]

Eisenberg’s second proposal is the reduce the tax incentives for setting up philanthropic foundations, something that would increase the amount of federal money for social programs. His third  suggestion is to limit the size of large foundations, as well as rethink board representation. In his view, there is no reason why some of the largest and most powerful foundations in the world, including the Gates Foundation and the Walton Family Trust, should be composed of a tight nucleus of family members. “At family foundations over a certain size,’ he suggests, ‘at least two-thirds of board members should be non-family representatives of the public.” Dowie has reiterated this point as well: a portion of each ‘foundation’s endowment really belongs to the public, whose state and federal treasuries would hold that portion of any large estate not left to a foundation,’ he notes. ‘It would seem fair, therefore, for 45 per cent of a foundation’s trustees to represent ordinary citizens.”

Reich, now a professor of public policy after serving as labor secretary under Bill Clinton, has pointed out that in 2007 alone, charitable deductions came to a total f $40 billion. “I see why a contribution to, say, the Salvation Army should be eligible for a charity deduction. It helps the poor,’ he writes. ‘But why, exactly, should a contribution to the already extraordinarily wealthy Guggenheim Museum or to Harvard University (which already has an endowment of more than $30 billion)?

Rob Reich, co-director of Stanford’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, suggests that we need to think  more deeply about what the tax incentive is for. ‘If you think that charitable giving should be for redistributive purposes [which is] the usual understanding of the word charity .  .  . then the evidence  . . . is not going to provide you much support for the tax subsidies that now exist because so relatively little charitable money goes to support the disadvantaged or the poor. If you thought that that was the justification for the tax subsidy, you’re going to wind up very disappointed.”

So far there is little evidence that US philanthropy helps much to alleviate the harms caused by inequality. Worse, public policy currently rewards some  philanthropic behavior –in the form of tax concessions – that worsens and causes harm.

Madoff, an expert on trust and estate law based at Boston College Law School, has suggested we need to question whether the current law is doing enough to ensure that charitable dollars reach those organizations that are doing charitable work in a timely fashion.  She is particularly concerned with the failure of the US Congress to address the surge in donor-advised funds, a vehicle where cash or other assets such a stocks are set aside in accounts that are to be dispersed to public charities over time. Contributions to donor-advised funds are given all of the same tax benefits as contributions to a food bank or other operating charity. Yet, there is no time period during which funds must be distributed since donor-advised funds aren’t subject to minimum pay-out requirements imposed on private foundations. Madoff suggests that the growth of donor-advised funds in the US (they now account for about 7 per cent of individual charitable donations) might have actually reduced the amount of funds available to operating charities. While aggregated donations have stayed at about 2 per cent of the GDP since the 1970s, the surge in new organizational vehicles that stash money rather than distributing suggests  that the effect on the rate of overall giving is negative. Donor-advised have become financial holing pens for the assets of people who want to grab a tax deduction but have no immediate plan for any actual charitable giving.

Madoff writes that “in the United States, the tendency is for the public to respond to a large charitable gift by saying: “Oh, that’s great – isn’t that rich person nice for giving to charity.” She stressed that while there’s no doubt charitable gifts can create public value, it’s also  important to recognize public investment that these charitable gifts entail:

When an individual commits $100 million of their business or other appreciated property to charity, the foregone taxes from the government are often far greater than the after-tax cost to the donor. Had the donor not given that $100 million, donor would have had an additional tax liability of up to $66 million just based on the foregone capital gains tax and savings from the income tax charitable deduction. If one adds in estate taxes, the tax savings may be as much as $75 million. Given the size of the tax subsidy, it is important to ask what society is getting in return.

Another concern is that the 1969 Tax Reform Act- the last major overhaul of US charity law – is out of step with the proliferation of new charitable vehicles that work in practice to circumvent the principles that underpinned the Tax Reform Act in the first place. Madoff pointed out that  at the heart of the 1969 Act was an attempt to draw distinctions between grant-making institutions funded by a small number of individuals, called private foundations, and  organizations directly engaged in charitable work called public charities. The Act was established to strengthen public oversight over private foundations, subjecting them to limitations on self-dealing and the introduction of the 5 per cent payout rule.  ‘Our whole edifice is that we are going to treat private foundations differently from public charities.’ Madoff said – yet today the distinction is easily breached. First, though public charities are supposed to represent organizations tat have broad public support, due  the niceties of the tax rules, a single individual can create a public charity simply by funneling the funding through a donor-advised fund. The distinction is also less meaningful because the 5% pay-out rule can be met by administrative expenses (including salaries for the donor and donor’s family) and by making contributions to a donor-advised fund, from which there is no payout requirement! What is the point of having a complex statutory structure tat draws essentially meaningless  distinctions?

Philanthropic donors don’t like to be told how to spend their money, and to some extent they have robust grounds for defensiveness, freedom from political intervention is what makes philanthropy
a check on rather than a handmaiden of political power. But when philanthropy is used as a loot bag for well-financed hedge funders and private equity buccaneers, as is the case of US education, then more restrictions are warranted. If the donors kick up a fuss, one could easily repeat back to them what they often stipulate to their own grantees : a close watch on how dollars are spent is essential to ensuring the creation of ‘social value.’ And if you don’t like the rule, then don’t give the money. Pay the taxes instead.

The proposals above might seem restrictive. And yet,  they pose fewer constraints than the atmosphere in Congress over a century ago, when those across the political spectrum questioned the value of permitting philanthropic foundations at all.

Esienberg is a respected doyen of US philanthropy, something of a folk hero for grassroots non-profit groups. His scrappy admonishments of the concentration of philanthropic resources in the hands of a few elite figures are almost identical to the public concerns that compelled Wilson to establish the Walsh Commission. But today, in the post-Citizens United era of unlimited political campaign financing, suggestions from pro-grassroots activists such as Eisenberg are increasingly non grata in DC power circles.

On the one hand, articulate criticisms of the ‘new’ philanthropy are growing louder, a pushback that, as Benjamin Soskis suggests, ‘can be traced to the nation’s mounting uneasiness with income inequality and to the spread of an economic populism that refuses to regard the concentration of wealth charitably.

On the other hand, legislators don’t seem to have yet taken enough notice. ‘If I was a betting man,’ Aaron Dorfman of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy said to me, ‘I would not be putting money on the idea that there would be any major legislative changes implemented soon.’

Ralph Waldo Emerson spurned the infantilizing effect of charity, the tendency for giving to entrench a relation of inequality between individuals. In a stunning denunciation of Christian morality, Emerson scorned Samaritan notions of one’s duty to strangers, to one’s immediate brethren, to fellow countrymen. “Are they poor?” he when asked, recalling a time when a ‘foolish philanthropist’ insisted that he owes a duty to the less affluent. No, he asserts, they are not: he owes them nothing and they owe him nothing. When people  give, it’s as if they are offering an apology, as if they must expiate themselves for the sin of living. The act of expiation is the true sin, an immoral renunciation of the gift of life, false penance for living and breathing to the fullest. “I do not wish to expiate,” he wrote, “but to live. My life is for itself and not for a spectacle.” And Oscar Wilde seconded that opinion : “Why should the poor be grateful for the crumbs that fall from a rich man’s table? They should be seated at the board, and are beginning to know it.”

While Emerson’s scorn for philanthropy was marked by unnerving elitism, there is something enduringly relevant about his suggestion that a dollar given in charity is a ‘wicked dollar’, one that places its recipients under  a boot rather than recognizing their equal right to foster their own independence, to realize their individuality. Against the egotism of Thiel, Balsillie,or the Gateses, individuals who eponymously stamp their mark on their endowments, the best donations are those that extend as far as possible the courtesy of indifference. By indifference I mean, quite literally, gifts offered with a lack of self-involvement. Because if it is a gift actually to be give- that is, if it’s actually meant to be surrendered by a donor, preventing her or him from further claims on that gift – then a donor has no right to involvement [ nor to profit from it]. Recipients deserve their own independence. They don’t deserve sympathy, which suggests a sort of false rapport with the recipients, which crushes grantees under the taxing weight of a donor’s goodwill. They don’t deserve pity, which demeans as much as it empowers. If the real motivation is to avoid embroiling others in chains of enduring dependency or obligation, then true gifts should offer the respite of autonomy.

Paradise Regained by Gordon Teskey

[ The theme of this poem is the temptation of Christ which is told in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. According to these texts, after being baptized, Jesus fasted for forty days and nights in the Judaean Desert. During this time, Satan appeared to Jesus and tried to tempt him. Jesus having refused each temptation, the devil then departed and Jesus returned to Galilee.]

In Paradise Regained the old adversaries from the battle in Heaven, recorded in book 6 of Paradise Lost, meet again. But in Heaven they were hardly adversaries: The Son’s victory over the armies of Satan is sudden, overwhelming , and total. This time Satan, who is prince of this world (John 12:31), has supernatural powers, and Jesus, the incarnate Son of God, has no powers above human, although he is a perfect human being in every way,. But surely even a perfect human being would not be equal to the powers that Satan now has. Or might he be?

Nor does Jesus have any memory of the war in Heaven, of who he is or what it means to be God’s “Son.” As we have seen, the word Son, obsessively repeated, is the riddle of this poem. Satan wants to find out the meaning of the phrase, “This is my son beloved, in him am pleased” (PR, 1.85), and whether it applies to the prophetic judgment on the serpent uttered by the Son when Adam and Eve were judged: “her Seed shall bruise thy head, thou bruise his heel” (PL, 10.180). Is the meaning of “Seed” the same as the meaning of “Son”? For the climatic episode in Paradise Regained, when Satan tries something harsher and more direct than temptation, he reveals his uncertainty on this question: “Therefore, to know what more  thou art than man/ Worth naming Son of God, by voice from Heav’n,/ Another method I must now begin” (PR, 4.538-40). Satan recalls the Son’s judgment shortly after the action of the poem begins and refers to this wound as “Fatal” and “long threatened” (PR, 1.53 and 59).  What does this wound consist of? Satan conjectures the prophesy means he and the other devils will no longer be left free to range in “this fair empire of earth and air” (PR, 1,.63). They will be driven back to hell, as they are in the Nativity Ode. Is Jesus this “Seed” who will inflict the bruise? That is what Satan wants to find out above all. But whether Jesus is the “Seed” or some other sense of “Son of God”, Satan intends to corrupt him if he can and destroy him if he must – and if he can.

If Jesus can defeat Satan’s efforts to tempt and destroy him, he will have undone Adam’s crime, which persists in the entire human race as original sin, and which Milton understands as the lust of dominion and the lust of possession, but also, especially now, after the collapse of the English Revolution, as cowardice. If Jesus wins, he will have become a perfect instrument for his ministry, which will start after the close of this poem.

Paradise Lost expands upon the Biblical Creation and Fall in the most literal and physical sense. The essential thought of Paradise Lost, about the Bible as well as about human ethics, is direct and uncomplicated. It affirms human freedom, and the exaltedness of human reason, within the horizon of our createdness. We are created beings and owe God thanks and praise for our existence. We also owe God obedience to what was originally a single command: not to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. But after the Fall this original command branched out into many prohibitions, not all of them reasonable and free. The many laws are an effort to plug the leaky holes in the hull of our corrupted nature, while the ship slowly sinks. We are still reasonable and free beings, but overwhelmed by the sins we commit and even more by the sins we inherit from all who have been sinning before us, which inherited sins cumulatively may be termed “history.” History is our great excuse, but it is also our greatest burden. The Son of God comes into the world to remove this weight of sin and restore us to our original state of innocence – although this, as it happens, will take time, and will require, in conventional Christianity, a sacrifice. To remove the weight of sin means for Milton to reverse the direction of history, to turn Paradise lost into Paradise regained – or, rather, to turn the desert of history into a new Paradise that exists only in the barest outlines. The new Paradise, for which the secular version is Utopia, is for Milton in the process of being slowly built. That is the meaning of the phrase in the introduction to Paradise Regained: “An Eden raised in the waste of the wilderness” (PR, 1.7)

Paradise Regained is biblically allusive, conceptually challenging and stylistically spare. It also makes an unexpected advance, intellectually speaking, upon Paradise Lost, which becomes strikingly quietist, with nothing more to recommend than obedience, suffering and meekness, ideas not well coordinated with Milton’s ethically paramount, humanistic concepts of freedom and reason. In books 11 and 12 of Paradise Lost, the synthesis of classical values and Christian faith comes apart and Christian faith overwhelms humanistic values. Transcendental engagement -  that is, engagement with the world, because human beings are inherently noble and deserve better – begins to regress into transcendence pure and simple, because human beings deserve what they get from one another. In these final two books of Paradise Lost Milton almost seems to recommend giving up the world and hoping for Heaven.

Paradise Regained shows renewed intellectual vigor, and the thinking, the dianoia, which is to say, the thought expressed by the characters, is more immediate, disclosing a reawakened engagement with the world. The engagement is dialectical and transcendent because it will have nothing to do with improvement. It begins by rejecting all that the world has to offer and all that the world thinks it needs, in order to begin making a new world out of the old. In a further dialectical subtlety, the thinking in Paradise Regained does not struggle, as we might have expected, to fight its way free from an unalloyed Christian tradition that comes to dominate in the final books of Paradise Lost, nor does it welcome back the classical, humanistic values that make up the anthropology of Paradise Lost. Instead,  Paradise Regained goes straight into the heart of the Christian tradition, in the New Testament Gospels, and includes for good measure a condemnation of the classical tradition. In Paradise Lost, Milton expresses thinking he had already done before beginning the poem, mostly in the prose works written over nearly two decades. In Paradise Regained, we feel the pressure of thinking as it is happening now.

The Jesus of Paradise Regained is like the supremely authoritative Jesus of John’s Gospel, but in a state of becoming. It is almost as if Milton set out to discover where Jesus got his strength of mind from and sought an answer by expanding imaginatively on an episode that is not in John’s Gospel, but that is in the other three. The temptation by Satan is understood ,and so presented by him, as the final and decisive stage in the formation of Jesus’s mind, preparing Jesus for his ministry, and also testing him to see if he is worthy. The portrait we are given of his mind is fascinating, in his private thoughts as well as in his statements to Satan. It is an entirely human mind, without divined knowledge, but it is a mind of a genius and an idealist, one who has read intelligently enough in the Hebrew scriptures to know he is the coming Messiah to which the prophets refer. But exactly what does this mean, and what is to be done? Jesus has come into the desert to think this over, and Satan will have some solutions to offer him.

In the choice of the temptation episode, Milton discovers a thought we see clearly expressed nowhere else in his work: that the Crucifixion, the climatic episode of all four Gospels, is less important than the temptation in the desert, a minor episode at the outset of the synoptic gospels. As Milton sees it, Jesus’s Crucifixion is a victory over the consequences of the original sin of Adam and Eve, the chief consequence being death. But Jesus’s victory in the desert  is a victory over the cause of original sin, the temptation of Adam and Eve. This is the more radical solution.

It is hard to emphasize enough how unorthodox and extreme this idea is, got from a thoughtful and repeated reading of the Greek text of the gospels, with attention and with total disregard for tradition – or for other parts of the Bible, notably the epistles of Paul. As we have come to expect with Milton’s thought, his solution to the problem of what Jesus does to save us [preach against greed, dominion and political cowardice] goes down to the root.

Authentic Hope by Terry Eagleton

Ernst Bloch acknowledges the reality of tragedy, but he is not for the most part a tragic thinker – not because he is a utopian visionary, but because he recognizes only fitfully that a transformed existence can spring only from an encounter with dispossession.

There are times, to be sure, when he takes the full pressure of this truth. Only by a confrontation with the void can new life emerge. He writes in The Principle of Hope of how “the humanity of Marx, which turned towards the humblest of his brothers, proves itself by comprehending the humbleness, the resultant nullity of most of his brothers  in its foundation, in order to prize them from the foundations. The zero point of extremist alienation which the proletariat represents now at last becomes the dialectical point of change: Marx teaches us to find out All precisely in the Nothing of this zero point.” It is an arresting insight into the tragic nature of Marxism – a tragedy which is by no means undercut by its positive political goals, since a loss of being is a condition of achieving them. If these words of Bloch are remarkable, however, it is not least because they cut against much else in his general sensibility. Such a tragic perception is by no means the keynote of his work. The Principle of Hope gives one little sense of immersing itself in the malignant impulses with which hope must contend. We do not hear as much as we should of the arrogance of power, the stubborn persistence of violence and self-interest in every epoch of human history, the chronic recurrence of internecine conflicts, the prevalence of false consciousness, the deep-seated drive to maim, exploit, and humiliate. Any humanism which turns its eyes from such unsavory realities is bound to put its hope on the cheap. Past history for Bloch is for the most part a foretaste of paradise, not, as for Marx, a nightmare that weighs on the brains of the living.

Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope records how Plenty Coups, the last great chief of the American Crow tribe, saw that his people’s way of life was on the brink of a catastrophic collapse, and that “in order to survive – and perhaps flourish again – the Crow had to be willing to give up almost everything they understood about the good  life” with no assurance of a successful outcome. Ravaged by disease, devastated by the rival Sioux and Blackfeet, and almost bereft of their buffalo, the Crow lost nearly two-thirds of their number in the 1890s before they were finally herded onto a reservation. Plenty Coups had received in a dream the divine appeal to accept the ruin of his tribe’s way of life, in the trust that only in this way could his people struggle through to a good end. His hope, in Lear’s words, was that “even with the death of the traditional  forms of Crow subjectivity, the Crow can nevertheless survive and flourish again.” One thinks of Job’s words to Yahweh: “even if you kill me, I will have hope in you.”

In Plenty Coups’ view, to hope was to recognize that there were possibilities that surpassed what could currently be conceived. Faith and hope are most needed when knowledge is hard to come by. When the buffalo went away,” Plenty Coups remarked, “the hearts of my people fell to the ground and they could not lift them up again. After that, nothing happened.” The departure of the buffalo heralded the end of history. As Lear argues, the Crow had lost the concepts with which they might construct a narrative. Since the schema that what counted as an event was shattered, there was nothing more to recount. Yet the death of “Crow subjectivity,” as Lear calls it, might clear the ground for rebirth, so that history might begin to happen once more.

The decisions that the chief confronted were not ones that could be reasoned about in existing moral terms. Only afterward, when a new matrix of understanding had emerged from the cataclysm ,might the significance of his hope become clear to him. A storm is approaching, Plenty Coups dreams, but the devastation that it will wreak will only be understood retrospectively, in the light of concepts that will themselves have been transformed by the impending turmoil. Radical hope, Lear writes, “anticipates a good for which those who have the hope as yet lack the appropriate concepts with which to understand it.”

Revolutionary upheavals transform the very hermeneutical frames within which the occur, so that the attempt to understand them must be deferred. It is an exemplary case of Hegel’s late-flying Owl of Minerva. “If a people genuinely are at the historical limit of their way of life,” Lear observes, “There is precious little they can do to ‘peek over to the other side.’ Precisely because they are about to endure a historical rupture, the detailed texture of life on the other side has to be beyond their ken.” It is in this spirit that Marx begins his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by aiming a satirical shaft at those revolutionaries who draw their symbolic resources from the past, rather than being attuned to what he cryptically calls “the poetry of the future.” If radical transformation is a hard concept to seize, it is because it demands foresight and lucidity, precision and calculation, but all in the name of an end that is necessarily opaque. To project a future is inevitably to draw on the experience of the present; and thus to fail to surpass what we know already; yet how otherwise can a future which exceeds our present understanding be brought to birth?

The struggle for a just society involves an instrumental rationality, but it is not only that. The left would continue to protest against sweated labor and mass unemployment even if it were morally certain that capitalism is here to stay. Bertolt Brecht speaks in his poem “An die Nachsgeborenen” of despairing only where there is injustice and no rebellion; but even if rebellion was to evaporate altogether, the fact that men and women have fought for their freedom so tenaciously over the centuries would still be a source of value. There would, so to speak, be something salvaged on Judgment Day. Though justice might not flourish in the end, a life devoted to the pursuit of it remains a credible one. Not to succeed in the end is not necessarily to have failed, any more than it is true that all’s well that ends well. It is only the lure of teleology that persuades us of this fallacy. Even if history were to fall into utter ruin, it would be a matter for despair only if that catastrophe were predestined; and even then it is possible, like many a tragic protagonist, to pluck value from combating the inevitable. Indeed, unless one combats the inevitable, one will never know how inevitable it was in the first place.  The truth, however, is that catastrophe is not written into the march of history, any more than hope is. However desolate the future may prove, it might always have been different. The contingency that can make for misfortune can also make for success. Besides, a lamentable future would almost certainly be the handiwork of a rapacious ruling minority, not the product of humanity as a whole.

Despite all this, one does not need to view hope in excessively existential terms. Goals are important. One does not have to view hope in too absolute or unconditional terms. Bloch is mistaken to imagine that it a question of all or nothing. According to psychoanalytic theory, we shall never be cured of desire, but this is not to say that we cannot strike a diplomatic pact with it. Though there will be no utopia, in the sense of the world purged of discord and dissatisfaction, it is sober realism to believe that our condition could be mightily improved. It is not that all will be well, but that all might be well enough. One does not need a breed of archangels in order to refrain from genocide or put paid to the trafficking of sex slaves. It is those who deny this good sense who are the fantasists, whatever their vaunted pragmatism. Nothing is more otherworldly than the assumption that the world as we know it is here to stay.

Yet though hope need not in general cut to the foundations, it is just this variety of it that is needed for radical change, given the formidable resistance such a project would confront. In the end, one would need what the theologian Herbert McCabe calls a hope that “goes through defeat and crucifixion to resurrection.” Or as Raymond Williams put it in rather more secular terms: “the fact is that neither the frankly utopian for, nor even the more qualified outlines of practical futures, can begin to flow until we have faced, at the necessary depth, the divisions and contradictions which now inhibit them.”

Tragic hope is hope in the extremis. The concept of progress, Walter Benjamin insists, must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. The optimist cannot despair, but neither can he know genuine hope, since he disavows the conditions that make it essential. Erik Erikson, with the development of a small infant in mind, speaks of hope as “the enduring belief in the attainability of fervent wishes, in spite of the dark urges and rages that mark the beginning of existence.” Only through trust in the love of its parents can the child resist being claimed by those malign  forces.

At the end of Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, perhaps the most magnificent of all literary portraits of evil, the narrator speaks of what he calls “the most frightful lament ever set up on this earth.” It is the symphonic cantata The Lamentation of Dr. Faustus, the final musical composition of the damned Adrian Leverhuhn before his pact with the devil drags him off to hell. It is a work of profound mourning, a “dark tone-poem that permits up to the very end no consolation, appeasement, transfiguration.” Yet is it not conceivable, the narrator asks, “that out of this sheerly irremediable hope might germinate?” He goes on:

It would be but hope beyond hopelessness, the transcendence of despair – not betrayal of it, but the miracle that passes belief. For listen to the end, listen with me: one group of instruments after another retires, and what remains, as the work fades on the air, is the High G of a cello, the last word, the last fainting sound, slowly dying in a pianissimo-fermata. Then nothing more: silence, and night. But that tone which vibrates in the silence, which is no longer there, to which only the spirit hearkens, and which was the voice of mourning, is no more. It changes its meaning; it abides as a light in the night.

It is not that the cantata ends on a tremendously hopeful note. On the contrary, like all pieces of music, it ends in nothing: silence. Yet this particular silence is a peculiarly palpable one, retroactively transforming the final tone of mourning into one of affirmation, and allowing it to make something new of itself in the very act of vanishing. The death of the music generates a ghostly aftermath. It is as if the cantata ends twice: once in reality, as the final note fades, and then again in the mind, the mere specter of a sound, as something mysteriously merges out of nothing. The last note is experienced twice, the first time as living and the second time as dead, but it is in death that it seems most alive. When the note is literally living, it is, like Faustus himself, full of grief at the prospect of its impending demise; but once it has passed into that void, it is repeated with a difference, sounding out again with a transfigured meaning. There is hope, as well as sorrow, in the fact that things pass away. Perhaps there is also hope that some unfathomable source of mercy might extend its favor even to the novel’s demoniac hero, who is caught ,like the final note of his cantata between life and death, yet whose death-driven genius has, after all, given birth to an art in the service of the living.

What is Wealth by Matt Bruenig

In "Capital," Piketty tracks as far back as he can the history of wealth inequality, which is also described as the history of inequality in the ownership of capital. In order to embark upon such a project, one must provide a definition of wealth and capital, which turns out to be a contentious undertaking.

For Piketty, wealth and capital are ultimately socially constructed categories. When he refers to wealth, he is not talking about land or machines or buildings necessarily. He is talking about anything that can be traded as an asset that generates a financial return in a society at a given moment in time. In periods when people could be bought and sold like capital, those people counted as wealth. Right now, monopoly rights over ideas (patents) and media (copyright) count as wealth as well.

So he is not tracking the history of wealth and capital in a physical sense. He is tracking the history of the distribution of asset values. The decision to track wealth this way is clearly the correct one for his project, but it already appears to be driving some confusion in the crush of reviews and reactions.

Wealth Is Socially And Politically Constructed

The source of this confusion is that, within economic discourse especially, we often conceptualize wealth as this almost objective thing: there is a building here and it has a certain market value and that is the amount of wealth it represents. But the "market value" of a given asset is totally dependent upon the way our laws construct our economic institutions.

Consider an apartment building for instance. The market value of that apartment building is supposed to be the net present value of the flow of future rents the building will generate. But the future flow of rents depends upon the laws surrounding the leasing of apartments. In a legal universe with rent control, the market value of the apartment building is lower than a legal universe without rent control. Moving from a non-rent-control universe to a rent-control universe would not change the building at all, but it would destroy a lot of "wealth" (defined here as asset values) because it would reduce the net present value of the flow of future rents the building will generate. Moving in the opposite direction would create a lot of "wealth."

Obviously, changing rent laws does not literally create or destroy wealth in the physical sense of the word. The building is still the building. All it does is change legal relationships such that the market value of the building has gone down, making total wealth in the national accounts decline. Market values, and therefore wealth, do not track objective valuations of things in the abstract; rather, they track the valuation of legally constructed rights and powers with regards to things.

Germany

It is precisely this legally constructed nature of wealth that JW Mason hit on in an excellent post on Piketty at his blog. In the post, he walks through the puzzle that economic powerhouse Germany has the least wealth in Europe. He points out that they don't actually have the least wealth in some physicalist sense of the word. It's just that their legal institutions grant less rights and powers to people with regard to a variety of wealth assets. And that causes wealth to show up much lower in the national accounts.

For instance, Germany's corporate governance structure limits the power of shareholders over firms, delegating a significant chunk of power to workers in the firms instead. This means that the asset value of corporate stock is lower, which means "wealth" in the country is lower. But that wealth valuation does not reflect the physical reality of machines and buildings and tools and so on that firms actually hold. It just reflects, as all market values do, the way German law has constructed economic power and control over firms.

Robert Hale

The pioneer of this legal constructivist account of market valuation was legal realist Robert Hale. Instead of just remarking on how rent control of corporate governance reform can cause asset values to rise or fall, Hale goes all the way to the bone with his analysis. Laws do not just affect valuation of assets. Laws are the very core of asset values.

The net present value of the future flow of income from an asset is entirely structured by legal regimes. A country that has no property law, for instance, would have asset values of $0 even if it was identical to the US in terms of the buildings and machines and so on that was contained within it. If that same country invented some real weak property laws, then asset values would pop into existence because future flows of income would suddenly become a thing you can account for in the present and therefore capitalize into an asset price. I could go further with this, but the point should be clear enough here: since laws create and enforce powers and rights with respect to things and their future use, they are also the primary determinant of "wealth."

Failure to appreciate the legally constructed nature of asset values and therefore "wealth" causes economists and courts alike extreme confusion. They often analyze wealth and economic interactions as if they are these scientific, pre-political things, and in so doing totally miss the institutional forces that are actually determining things like asset prices.

Hale provides an amusing example of this confusion in the form of court cases where judges are trying to figure out what rates to set for public utility prices. The way these courts often handled this question was to determine the market value of the assets of the utility, multiply those assets by a particular rate of return, and then set the utility prices accordingly. This seems reasonable enough except that the "market value of the assets of the utility" is entirely determined by what the utility prices are. Since the utility's assets are valued by the net present value of the future flow of income, and the future flow of income is established by the price the judge selects, the judge is actually determining the value of the utility's assets when they establish the prices even though the judge thinks they are reflecting the value of the utility's assets.

Conclusion

The public utility cases are an especially egregious example of this sort of confusion about what wealth is, and one that seemed to have unhealthily obsessed Hale. But it's emblematic of the broader trend here. Our discourse in this world, even in learned policy circles, still talks about our economy as if it is this quintessentially pre-political, natural thing. Politics in this discussion is described as something that invades, intervenes, and distorts the natural, independent workings of this separate thing called the economy.

Accordingly, deep confusion abounds as people try to scope in hard on what capital or wealth really is as if they are physicists studying a natural phenomena. Wealth assets are always and anywhere political and social constructs. Things exist, but "wealth" is a fiction, the contours of which are fully derivative of how we create our systems of control and power over the material things of the world. This is not some kind of abstract philosophical point either. Just look at asset value data (as in Germany) and you see it, empirically.

http://www.demos.org/blog/4/22/14/pikettys-capital-what-wealth

The Making of Salafism by Henri Lauziere

One point worth stressing is that the last thirty years of the twentieth century saw the appearance of an indigenous literature about the purist notion of Salfism. Until then, the concept was not an object of study per se. Purist Salafis used the term and sometimes gave brief and indirect definitions of it. But prior to the 1970s we can hardly say that systematic attempts were made to explain what purist Salifism meant. By the end of the 1990s, the opposite situation prevailed. Countless books and articles now dealt with the origins and meaning of Salafism, as understood by purist Muslims.

Even more significant is the novel way in which a majority of purists Salafis articulated the concept. Beginning in the 1970s, a process of ideologization took place whereby Muslim scholars recast purist Salafism as a totalizing system reminiscent of the Islamism of Sayyid Qutb (founder of the Muslim Brotherhood). Far from being a theological doctrine and an approach to Islamic law, Salafism became a worldview that encompassed the whole of existence, from knowledge to practice, from morality to etiquette, and even from religion to politics. Salafism was now a total ideology, as defined by sociologist Daniel Bell: ”a total ideology is an all-inclusive system of comprehensive reality , it is a set of beliefs, infused with passion, and seeks to transform the whole way of life.” The Arabic term that best encapsulates this process of ideologization is manhaj, or “method,” an Islamic civilizational world view.

The vast majority of self-proclaimed Salafists worldwide define salafiyya as the most authentic and purist religious orientation within Sunni Islam and have placed themselves at the center of intra-islamic polemics because of their claim to follow the only true  Islam that can lead to salvation. To its many detractors, this form of Salafism is virtually synonymous with Wahhibism – the conservative approach to Islam that prevails in Saudi Arabia and that was first expounded by Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab in the eighteenth century. But purist Salafis have long denied this characterization, both because they abhor such terminology as Wahhabism  and because they reject the idea that Wahhab created a new religious orientation. Salafism, they argue, is nothing other than Islam as it was first revealed, unsullied by innovation, deviation or accretion and uncontaminated by exogenous influences. It is the pure Islam to which the pious ancestors of the first three generations conformed.

Given the difficulty of defining purity in absolute terms, contemporary Salafists often must define it negatively – that is, by elaborating on all things they deem contrary to the pristine Islam of the pious ancestors. In matters of creed, which they view as the highest priority, purist Salafists reject all forms of speculative philosophy, known as kalam in Arabic. According to them, Muslims who seek to explain thorny issues such as God’s names and attributes should never resort to Philosophy, Aristotelian logic, or metaphorical interpretation (tas’wil), all of which distort the meaning of scriptures. The pious ancestors, the argument goes, never used such devious techniques: they merely described God as He described Himself in the revelation. In order to revive this ‘originalist’ approach to theology, purist Salafists insist on the need to avoid nearly every theological doctrine that has emerged since the first fitna, or civil war, which split the Muslim community in the mid-seventh century. They find them all – including the Ash’ari and Maturidi doctrines followed by millions of Muslims today – to be misguided, heretical, or offensive to God in one way or another. In short, they regard these theological doctrines as reprehensible innovations that the pious ancestors either did not encounter or did not tolerate.

This leaves contemporary purist Salafists with only one reliable doctrinal system – Hanbali theology – to which they adhere in its later and more refined iteration, as articulated and defended by Ibn Taymiyya (d. 13428). Yet unlike medieval Muslim scholars, contemporary Salafi usually refrain from claiming  that they are Hanbali in creed because that would imply the blind following of a single man – namely Ahmad ibn Hanbal (d. 855)- who has no inherent authority. To speak Hanbali theology would also imply that ibn Hanbal and his disciples were innovators who constructed a doctrinal system more than two hundred years after the death of the Prophet. To avoid these potential objections, purist Salafis claim to follow the doctrine of the forefathers (madhhab al-salaf), thus enlisting the collective authority of all the pious ancestors in matters of theology. Ibn Taymiyya, the controversial medieval scholar, had made it a point to draw the distinction during one of his trials in Damascus in 1306. When asked to acknowledge that his writings conformed to the Hanbali creed – an admission that might have satisfied his judges and ended the trial – Ibn Taymiyya refused and retorted: “I compiled nothing but the creed of all the pious ancestors, and it is not particular to imam Ahmad. Imam Ahmad only transmitted the knowledge that the Prophet brought forth.”

Contemporary Salafis also search for impurities beyond the realm of theology. In legal matters, they usually deny that the four Sunni schools of Islamic law have any authority apart from the canonical primary sources on which each body of jurisprudence is supposed to be based. In principle, few self-respecting Salafi scholars today would argue to the contrary, even if, in practice, they tend to follow one school in particular. Their rationale is that the schools of law and their institutionalization of disagreement did not exist at the time of the pious ancestors. Therefore, the cumulative legal precedents and methodologies of these schools should not carry more weight than the Qur’an, the hadith, and the consensus of the salaf. Purist Salafis are particularly cautious not to let legal pluralism justify actions that could be construed as shirk ( literally “association”, by which they mean a breach of tawhid, or God’s unicity) because in such cases the distinction between a wrong action and a wrong belief tends to disappear. Allowing Muslims to build structures over tombs and declaring it permissible to seek divine favor through the auspices of a deceased patron are examples of legal pinions that, according to the purist Salafis, endorses idolatry. This is one of the many reasons why they abhor Sufism, which they view a a hotbed for such innovations in deeds and, ultimately, in creed.

The most uncompromising purist Salafis usually leave no stone unturned to locate and eradicate actual or potential impurities from all aspects of religious experience. Not only do they reject what they regard as misguided beliefs and actions, but also attack the epistemologies that enable these beliefs and actions to emerge in the first placed. For this reason, they deny the validity of any intuitive or esoteric knowledge whose content is not accessible to all. Purist Salifis are equally adamant about the primacy of scriptural evidence (naql) over rational proofs (‘aql) as the best means to arrive at the truth. Again, only the Qur’an, the hadith, and the authenticated reports from pious  ancestors who have assimilated infallible prophetic teachings may yield certitude. Reason alone never does, and according to purist Salafi, it would be irrational. They agree that one must appeal to reason, or common sense, to appreciate the superiority of sound transmitted knowledge. But Muslims are not at liberty to interpret textual sources as they please. Nor can they explain away passages that do not serve their views and tastes. Failing to interpret the scriptures as the pious ancestors allegedly did would be an innovation. It would open the door to relativism and could render one liable to accusations of unbelief (kufr). According to some purist Salafi, a Muslim’s deliberate failure to act on this proper understanding of the scriptures, even in matters of etiquette (such as shaving one’s beard) could have similar consequences. In that sense, purist Salafis raise the specter of heresy to a particularly high degree. Even Muslims who personally live up to Salafi standards of orthodoxy or orthopraxy could theoretically stray into heresy if they fail, or hesitate, to anathematize heretics.

In the last twenty years or so, scholars and commentators of various backgrounds have further divided this purist conception of Salafism into several distinct subcategories, the most well known of which are jihadist Salafism and quietist scholarly Salafism. These labels intended to provide better tools for analysis, but it must be remembered that they are often imposed by outsiders. Moreover, the attempt to capture differences on questions pertaining to politics and violence, which, although important, are not at the core of Salafism. By this, I mean, again, that purist Salafists tend to evaluate the soundness of all thoughts and actions – including those pertaining to politics and the use of violence – by standards of religious purity. Ultimately, it is not so much what Salafis do or say about politics that matters as it is  how well they can avoid or defend themselves against charges of epistemological, theological, and legal impurity. As a rule, the stronger the case against them, the weaker their claim to Salifism becomes among their peers.

The Novel, a survival skill by Tim Parks

[ To some degree he sets up a straw dog: ‘what literary criticism does’ that it doesn’t always.]

Conclusion:

If reader reaction to writers are profoundly conditioned by their respective backgrounds, by where one is writing from and the other reading from, then any notion of establishing a definitive “judgment” on a book, or pecking order of writers, is swept away. But it could hardly be otherwise, and despite all the literary prizes and “authoritative” critics, really we already knew this. “He didn’t get it it at all,” “She bought into it at once” are expressions that suggest how readily we accept the idea of affinity or lack of it when we read a book; publishers and newspapers send novels to reviewers who they sense will be well-disposed to a certain style or content; relatives and friends give books they hope will be the right thing for the right person. Often the person receiving the book appreciates at once that a mistake has been made. It’s an experience I’m all to familiar with.

So this is common knowledge.  .  . Here I have proposed a model for narrative creativity that is not common knowledge and that has uncomfortable implications. It is widely believed that literary writing may come out of mental turbulence, disturbance, even pathological states of mind. Yet it is always assumed that the literature produced by these states of mind is beneficent. Why should this be? Is it perhaps that since we enjoy reading narrative it has become important for us to believe that the activity is intrinsically good; we exploit a cod Platonism absorbed since earliest infancy that tells us that if a thing can be described as beautiful it will somehow be morally good as well. A great thinker like Schopenhauer was convinced that novels were detrimental to mental and moral health. People were “deluded into an absolutely false view of life by reading novels.” Nobody takes on this accusation. Schopenhauer is a great thinker, except when inconvenient.

I have tried to give some shape and system to our intuition of the mental discomfort behind much literary creativity. I have not questioned whether Dickens, Hardy, Lawrence, Joyce, etc. write “good” novels or stories. What I wonder is whether the process of fiction writing offers resolution, greater ease, to the writer or the readers, or whether it is a way of rendering an unhappy situation chronic by allowing just sufficient consolation and reward from the expression of unhappiness to prevent us from making big changes. True, I have suggested, in my very title, that writing can be thought of as a survival skill, offering relief from internal conflict, but perhaps in some cases we could add, in lieu of some other more radical and practical course of action: if you are not willing, that is, to undertake the real life changes that might resolve a dilemma, or if such changes have been tried but proved impossible, unworkable, then write!

In this regard I recall a conversation with a German writer, locked into an unhappily complicated relationship with two women and writing rather brilliant books about men locked into unhappily complicated relationships with more than one woman. He was fairly young and over beers complained to me that he found himself doing things (with women) that he had promised himself he would not repeat. However, when I suggested he might want to see an analyst, he responded that he was afraid that if he solved his problem it would effect his writing. Perhaps he needed this messy life to write. Literature, or an income from literature, or the self esteem that accrues from producing literature, were more important than solving his unhappiness, or made unhappiness manageable.

The strategy rubs off on the reader. When we read Colm Toibin’s silvery prose, the fine cadences with which emotional suffering is described, it really does seem that art might somehow make up for, or almost make up for, a lost love, an empty life. Alice Munro is on the same wavelength: successful writing, sophisticated reading, sensibility, irony, deep perception, all invite us to feel at once pleasantly sad, yet complacent about lives described as failures. The reader of Hardy can feel gratified by his or her own rejection of destructive Victorian values, yet at the same time remain convinced of how dangerous it is to go against the social grain. And so on. Perhaps of all writers, Beckett, or at least his narrators in the trilogy, made the most hay with this, at once mocking the consolation to be found from writing- “there is a choice of images,” declares  Malone, having described his alter ego’s disorientation as a “thistledown plucked by the wind” – then finding consolation in this superior awareness that no consolation is to be had.

Let me return to Gregory Bateson’s Naven to frame the one deep question I meant this book to pose. Bateson described a drastically imbalanced society which found in an elaborate and bizarre series of rituals ay of allowing that imbalance to continue without society tearing itself apart. Whether this is precious stability or chronic unease is not an issue for the anthropologist, but it might well be for the individual members of that society. It might be that, becoming conscious of the mechanism, an individual in that society would want to drop the ritual and confront the imbalance. In general, then, is the effect of novels we read essentially a form of Naven, an elaborate mental ritual? Thus the virtual and virtuous intellectual life is sufficiently gratifying, one way or another, to permit us to continue with ugly realities, the satisfaction of feeling ourselves progressive, for example, is enough to go on being conservative. Arguing against arousing compassion in novels, Muriel Spark remarked that the sentiment merely allows the reader to “feel that their moral responsibilities are sufficiently fulfilled by the emotions they have been induced to feel.”

Is this the way our western lifestyle perpetuates itself? With a structural hypocrisy that requires a very special mind set; receiving the Nobel Prize, the winner gives a ferociously anti-capitalist speech to a full-house of international capitalists who all applause warmly. Nothing will change. Such was the case when Jose Saramago took the award. “I can’t understand why the applauded,” remarks The Writer in Bernhard’s play Am Ziel, speaking about his own successful drama: “we are talking about a work that exposes every one of them and in the meanest way admittedly with humor, but nasty humor, if not with malice, true malice. And all of a sudden they applaud!” Art has become structural to our way of life, not a force for change, rather an opportunity to feel complacent about our sensibilities.

Not that I believe that all literature is necessarily of this kind. Of the writers we have looked at Lawrence is definitely of a different nature. Beckett is another writer determined to draw attention to the dangerous consolations of literature, to satirize the power of art to encourage us to imagine our sufferings noble.

But on the whole? Amid all the pieties that art is always worthy and above all worthy of funding, that the world needs stories, regardless of what kind of stories, let us stay focused on the real effect that reading and writing has upon us. Let us understand the malaise it came out of and the malaise we bring to it. Plato banished [poets from his republic. He felt they were noxious. Plato was no fool. I will not suggest we do the same, I love reading novels; but let us beware, or rather be aware. Dickens can be harmful. Hardy can be harmful. Joyce can be harmful. I admire them all. We must defend ourselves.

.   .   .   .   .  .

Example:

The critical reception of Jude, though it proved popular, was the breaking point for Thomas Hardy. Hardy had written openly of sexual problems  that people close to him knew were to do with his own marriage and frustrations. He had spoken explicitly of marriage as a trap. “Why can’t we agree to free each other?” begs Sue of her husband. Yet at the same time he was suggesting that the community’s principles were so internalized in his protagonists’ minds that there was no question of escaping them. “We must conform! . . .says Sue at the bitter climax of the novel. “I am, cowed into submission. I have no more fighting strength left; no more enterprise. I am beaten, beaten!” Victorian principles prevail, albeit as a decaying albatross round the necks of these would-be revolutionaries. And Hardy stayed in his gloomy Dorset home, adding an outside staircase so he could move between study and garden without meeting his wife Emma.

What broke in the end was not his way of life, but Hardy’s will to go on writing novels. If one function of his narrative pessimism had been to keep him in his marriage, despite his unhappiness, this “advantage” was now outweighed by the deeper bitterness the novel created in that marriage – his wife openly announcing her disgust with the book to dinner guests – and again the extreme hostility of a wide area of the press. Hardy, like Jude and Sue, was now cowed into submission, lost any will top go on struggling with his dilemma. Quite probably he accepted the situation with the same relief that Tess accepts her death, especially since the scandal of the book turned it into a considerable commercial success that now made him as independent financially a he was trapped domestically. From now on he would only write poetry, where, he claimed, the same strong opinions could be expressed without negative response, largely because the absence of narrative and the attraction of lyricism prevented the same ferocious engagement on the part of the reader. A disembodied idea is much less dangerous than an embodied one. In a letter in 1888 he remarked:

If there is anyway of getting a melancholy satisfaction out of life in dying, so to speak before one is out of the flesh; by which I mean putting on the manner of ghosts, wandering in their haunts, and taking their view of surrounding things. To think of life as passing away is a sadness, to think of it as past is at least tolerable. Hence even when I enter into a room to pay a simple morning call, I have unconsciously the habit of regarding the scene as if I were a spectre not solid enough to influence my environment.

The relation of such a wish to the fear/courage polarity in alkl of Hatrdy’ novels is evident, as equally there is a parallel between the desire to be beyond engagement and responsibility and Tess’s desire to forget her body in contemplation of the stars, or again Clym’s happiness submerging himself in vegetation and insect life. Hardy yearns for a place beyond fear, desire, and the need to muster courage. He gave up novel-writing, one might hazard, to look for that place and that ghostly place in poetry.

Here’s Afterwards:

When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,

    And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,

Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbors say,

    “He was a man that used to notice such things”?

If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid’s soundless blink,

   The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight

Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, a gazer might think,
  

    “To him this must have been a familiar sight.”

If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm,

    When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn,

One may say, “he strove that such innocent creatures should

    come to no harm,

But he could do little for them, and now he’s gone.”

If, when hearing that I have been stilled at last, they stand at the door,

    Watching the full-starred heavens that winter sees,

Will this thought rise on those who meet my face no more,

    “He was one who had an eye for such mysteries?”

And will any say when my bell of quittance is heard in the gloom,

    And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its outrollings,

Till they rise again, as they were a new bell’s bloom,

  “He hears it not now, but used to notice such things”?

All Hardy’s old anxieties are here, but so quietly  and beautifully expressed we hardly notice. The poet’s has been a “tremulous”, death is already behind him, aestheticized in the tolling bell; his concern about his reputation is presented modestly as he wonders whether people will remember how he observed the natural world that the poem the immerses itself in. A rapacious bird of prey becomes the “dewfall-hawk”; the fact that this bird of prey could be responsible for the death of the “furtive hedgehog” of the next stanza is discretely left unmentioned. Hardy “strove that such innocent creatures should come to no harm. But he could do little for them [or himself]; and now he is gone – so much for the possibility of positive action in the world. In the fourth stanza the starry heavens remain the “mystery” they always were. There is no God,. Finally, the bell of “quittance”  suggests “discharge from debt or obligation.” Hardy is relieved to be gone. All life’s passions have been elided, not just the fatal consummation, Bathsheba’s first kiss with Troy, Tess’s sex with Alec, but the whole damn narrative .The pessimism is so elegantly put that none one could possibly object. Above all there are no women.