Literature – Page 13 – Into the Woods

Where poets’ lives matter

In the Irish media, the death of poet John Montague was a major event. As far as I can tell, the American media have not mentioned it, though there is an American connection.

Ten of Montague’s books were published by the Wake Forest University Press in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The editors were Dillon Johnston (who founded the WFU press in 1975) and Guinn Batten. Johnston and Batten — old friends of mine — had a very strong interest in Irish poetry and Irish literature, and the WFU press for years was a key publisher of Irish poetry. Johnston wrote Irish Poetry After Joyce (University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), which was the first book I ever helped edit. Guinn Batten now teaches at Washington University and is the author of The Orphaned Imagination: Melancholy and Commodity Culture in English Romanticism (Duke University Press, 2012). I met John Montague many years ago at an event at Wake Forest.

As far as I can tell, Irish culture still very much looks up to its poets. Its billionaires (if any), not so much.

From Montague’sThe Great Cloak (1978):

At the end of a manuscript
I was studying, a secret message.
A star, a honeycomb, a seashell,
The stately glory of a peacock’s tail
Spiralled colour across the page
To end with a space between a lean I
And a warm and open-armed You.

An hour later, you were at the door;
I learned the word that the space was for.

19th Century post-apocalyptic fiction?

As a writer of post-apocalyptic fiction, naturally I’m interested in the classics of the post-apocalyptic genre. Until I read Robert MacFarlane’s wonderful book Landmarks, I was not aware that some post-apocalyptic fiction was written during the 19th Century. MacFarlane devotes much of a chapter to Richard Jefferies, a prolific nature writer who also wrote fiction.

After London was published in 1885, the same year that Mark Twain published Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I can’t say that After London is a particularly exciting novel. It’s packed with unalleviated exposition. The plot is thin. The conversations (such few as there are) are dull. Of the characters, only the protagonist Felix is much developed. However, Jefferies does succeed in painting a vivid and cinematic picture of his post-apocalyptic setting. In his imagined world, some catastrophe that he never describes (because the survivors don’t really know what happened) has wiped out most of the population. London is gone and is mostly flooded. Debris and siltation have blocked the major rivers, and a large lake forms in southeastern England. It’s on and around this lake where the story takes place.

You can read that Jefferies was an influence on J.R.R. Tolkien. I’m not so sure about that, since Tolkien was a great writer and Jefferies a pretty pallid one (his fiction, at least). But Tolkien and Jefferies did have in common a love of terrain and a love of wild nature. I don’t doubt in the least that After London occurred to Jefferies’ imagination because he hated the filth and sprawl of 19th Century London. And so Jefferies imagined London wiped out and its suburbs covered by a lake. Tolkien, too, hated modernity. Tolkien was born in 1892. By 1892, London was much cleaner. When Jefferies was 16, he and a cousin ran off to France. The year was 1864, and London’s sewer system was not completed until 1866. Jefferies probably saw London at the peak of its 19th Century filth and squalor. Though Tolkien’s England probably was nicer in many ways than Jefferies’ England, still Tolkien hated any change and grieved for every fallen tree.

Jefferies died in 1887 at the age of 39, of tuberculosis.

You can get After London in Kindle format. I believe there have been a couple of revival editions, particularly in the United Kingdom. Though some modern scholars have taken an interest in Jefferies (for example, Richard Jefferies and the Ecological Vision (2006), there doesn’t seem to be much likelihood of a Richard Jefferies revival. Judging from my reading of After London, Jefferies’ books won’t hold much interest for today’s general readers. However, readers and writers with a particular interest in nature writing and post-apocalyptic fiction will want to explore Jefferies’ books.

A couple of book reports

The old translation and the new

Plato: The Complete Works. Edited by John M. Cooper, Hackett Publishing, 1997. 1838 pages.

For years, my only volume of Plato was the translation by Benjamin Jowett, first published in 1871. I bought the volume in a used bookstore. It seemed like a good find at the time. From the pencil markings in the front, it appears that I paid $12 for it. Most of my previous reading of Plato was from the Jowett translation. The Phaedrus dialogue, in particular, figures into my Ursa Major novels. One of my two main characters even is named Phaedrus.

Now I know that relying on such an old translation was a huge mistake. An academic friend happened to mention a couple of months ago that the Jowett translation is badly bowdlerized. Instead of Jowett, we now have a new and far superior translation, published in 1997. It’s edited by John Cooper, and it isn’t bowdlerized. It also isn’t cheap. The hardback will cost you over $50.

Benjamin Jowett, by all accounts, was a heck of a scholar. He was at Oxford. But he also was a theologian and a 19th Century evangelical. Do you hear the alarm bells going off? It means that Jowett can’t be trusted not to censor the Greeks. I’ve not spent that much time on side-by-side comparisons of the translations, but it was easy enough to see that where Jowett used the English word “love,” the Cooper translators used the word “sex.” Now that’s a very different thing, isn’t it? And one of the areas in which we most don’t want to misunderstand the Greeks is on the distinction between love and sex. Sex is discussed quite a bit in the Plato dialogues. It’s discussed very casually and without the slightest sign of the squeamishness that is detectable in the Victorian translation. Jowett’s theology prevented him from understanding this. I sometimes wonder how Greek literature even survived the long, dark Christian era. My guess is that it’s only because Christianity required the fetishization of Rome, and along with Rome, Greece. We’re lucky that the squeamish made do with mere bowdlerization, though I have little doubt that some lost texts were lost because it was thought best to copy over something so un-Christian.

There’s another, more subtle, difference in the translations. That is that, in an archaic translation, Plato himself seems archaic. But, in a modern translation, Socrates and his young men seem thoroughly modern. Their wonderful sense of humor seems just the same as ours. Human foibles, it would seem, haven’t changed a bit. And so, reading Plato in a modern translation makes us realize that the distance between (ahem) us smart folk and the Greeks is about a millisecond. They were just like us in a great many ways, and that’s incredibly endearing. There is nothing at all formal about the dialogues. They’re super-casual, just the guys sitting around talking, jesting, and trying their wits against each other. You realize that Socrates was popular not just because he was smart, but also because he was funny, always kind (even to the gym rats with their modest intellects), and fun to be around.

So, as a smart folk and as a reader of this blog, you do keep a volume of Plato by your bed for fill-in reading, don’t you? If you have the Jowett translation, slip a card into it with a warning to the next owner about bowdlerization, sell it to a used bookstore, and get yourself the new Cooper translation.

Don’t fret too much over the The Republic. Utopias as a form of literature are interesting, but their shelf life is terrible. Instead, browse the other dialogues according to your mood.

If you’re new to Plato, I would offer a warning. It’s sometimes difficult to tell when Socrates is being serious. He sometimes elaborates on arguments that he doesn’t believe, at all. This is certainly true in The Phaedrus. If we were sitting at Socrates’ feet, no doubt he’d wink at us from time to time, and he’d sometimes be interrupted by laughter that isn’t mentioned in the dialogues. It’s like listening to Mozart. Frequently Mozart wants you to laugh at his music, just as Socrates wants you to laugh at some arguments. So one needs to be very careful about taking snippets of Plato out of context. It’s possible to get him exactly backwards.

The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction. By Matthew B. Crawford, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016. 320 pages.

This is a strange book, difficult to review. I’d call it philosophy, but Crawford says that it’s more a polemic. The author wants you to take control of your own attention instead of allowing your attention to be dominated by the many forces that have such clever ways of usurping your attention for their own purposes. The author also wants you to be less abstract, less concerned with representations of the world (the most extreme of which would be virtual reality) and more concerned with the world right under your nose.

Crawford’s philosophical position naturally leads him to a great respect for skilled practice, both for the way it requires our attention and the way it requires us to pay attention to the real world, the world outside our heads. He mentions many skills — cooking, gardening, motorcycle riding, pretty much anything that requires the use of tools. He talks about how quickly you can get killed if your attention lapses while racing a motorcycle. He detests “drive by wire” automobile engineering, in which the brake pedal isn’t truly connected to the brakes, or the steering wheel barely connected to the steering. This, by the way, made me appreciate once again how much I like the honest Mercedes engineering of my Smart car, in which the driver is truly connected to the road. It helped me realize how good design — for example the design of my Nikon professional cameras — makes the camera feel like a natural extension of the body and the body’s visual system.

Having made his case in the first part of the book, he devotes his last chapter to the art of organ building, as an illustration of his message. As an organist, I found this fascinating. If Crawford himself is a musician, he didn’t say so. But the work and time that he put into understanding the craft of organ building made me realize that he is almost certainly equally diligent about whatever else commands his attention.

I’m appending a couple of paragraphs about the organ, not because it summarizes the book but because it’s funny, and it’s a great piece of writing.

“Pipe organs are to the Baroque era what the Apollo moon rockets were to the 1960s: enormously complex machines that focused the gaze of a people upward. Pushing the envelope of the engineering arts, a finished organ stood as a monument of knowledge and cooperation. Installed in the spiritual center of a town, a pipe organ mimics the human voice on a more powerful scale, and summons a congregation to join their voices to it. The point is to praise something glorious that transcends man’s making. Yet the congregants can’t help but notice that this music of praise, like the instrument that carries it aloft, is itself glorious.

“A big pipe organ thus expresses both humble piety and vaunting pride at once. It can be shockingly indiscreet in this later role; the organ often dwarfs the ostensible altar. But perhaps these tendencies get blurred together in the life of a congregation. When the choir is at full song, the stained glass is rattling loose, and the whole house seems ready to launch, what then? Then the organist pulls out all the stops. He shifts his weight to the right. His left foot is poised over the leftmost pedal, the low C, and now he stomps it, sending a thousand cubic feet of air per minute through massive pipes to blast heaven’s favorite pigeons out of the rafters. Now the very pews transmit joy to women’s loins, and the strongest man in the congregation feels himself reduced to a blushing bride of Christ. Now one feels it is God’s own organ that fills the sacred chamber, and when this happens, praise comes naturally: hallelujah!”

Signed advance copies of Oratorio in Ursa Major

Oratorio in Ursa Major will be released July 1. Between now and June 15, 2016, I’m offering signed advance copies of Oratorio, hardback only, at a discount, through this blog.

The cost is $25 per copy, which includes shipping by priority mail. The retail price of the hardback will be $29.99, so this is a nice discount, with free shipping. I’m afraid I must restrict this offer to the U.S. only because of the high cost of international shipping. Readers in Europe: Oratorio will be available for sale from Amazon in Europe starting July 1. Bookstores will be able to order Oratorio for you as well.

To order your copies, please email me before June 15 at david@acornabbey.com with this information:

1. How many copies?

2. How would you like to pay? The choices are PayPal and by mailing a check. If you choose PayPal, I’ll send you PayPal information. If you’d like to mail a check, I’ll send you the address.

3. Would you like a particular inscription? If so, please specify.

4. And, of course, please include your mailing address.

Reviews will be appreciated! You’ll be able to review Oratorio in Ursa Major at Amazon and Goodreads starting with the July 1 release date.

Here’s the blurb:

A global catastrophe has returned earth to the Iron Age and killed six billion people. Even the billionaires were tricked and eliminated. An Oxford intelligentsia have taken over the planet. Can such smart people rebuild the world in a better way? With help from the galactic federation, perhaps there is hope. But first, earth’s new elite must retrieve from the past some things that were destroyed long ago — ways of thinking and living that can avoid a fatal reawakening of the delusions bequeathed to us by Rome. Jake Janaway — young, modest, handsome, and scared — is selected for a dangerous mission into the pre-Roman past. Jake has no idea why he was chosen. Jake has a lot to learn. But perhaps no one in the galaxy ever had better teachers, or was more loved.

Ironies in the evolution of tyranny

Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America. By Jack Rakove, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010. 488 pages.

My reading at present is focused on the American colonial era, the revolution, and the development of the American Constitution. I took a lot of notes while reading this book by Jack Rakove. But one passage in particular flashes at me as though it was written in bright red neon. Rakove is talking about James Madison:

“Yet this reactionary fear of the threat to property also converged with his youthful commitment to freedom of conscience to produce one powerful insight about the protection of rights in republican America. These two concerns enabled Madison to perceive a truth that the political theory of the age did not yet properly recognize. In a republic, unlike a monarchy, the problem of rights would not be to guard the people as a whole against the arbitrary power of government, but rather to secure individuals and minorities against the legal authority of popular majorities.”

This brings us to the so-called Tea Party, the contemporary right-wing movement by angry white losers, financed by billionaires. Though the Tea Party has taken a wrecking bar to the American democracy wherever it can gerrymander itself into a stronghold, I am thinking in particular about the state of North Carolina, where the Tea Party legislature actually called a special emergency session, ostensibly to shoot down a local ordinance in Charlotte that was meant to afford transgendered people some dignity in the use of public bathrooms.

But, in truth, the bathroom issue was just a smokescreen in this legislation, called HB2. The transgender part of HB2 was meant to appeal to the fears and hatreds of mouth-breathing voters in rural North Carolina while also distracting the media. The real and even more slimy intent of HB2, as is always the case with the Republican Party, is the billionaire agenda. HB2 prevents local governments from setting a minimum wage that is higher than the minimum wage set by federal or state law. HB2 also prevents local governments from passing ordinances that grant civil rights protections. But the biggest piece of slime is that HB2 prevents workers from suing for workplace discrimination in state courts. This part of HB2 is pretty technical and has sneaked under the radar, but it was a big item on the wish list of the billionaire Republican donor class, and now the billionaires’ servants in the North Carolina legislature have checked it off their list. Here’s an article on that.

And, by the way, HB2 shows that the Republican Party doesn’t give a fig for any principle, if power is involved. HB2 also tramples on the principle of local rule and local government. North Carolina’s cities tend to be liberal and to vote Democratic. But the Republicans in Raleigh never hesitate to use state law to keep counties and municipalities from doing anything remotely liberal. Even property rights are not sacred to these radical Republicans. If your neighbors want to frack for gas but you don’t, then the state will use its power to frack you whether you want it or not. Or, if you’ve got a nice water system, as Asheville does, or a nice airport, as Charlotte does, then the state will just take it from you if it can.

This brings us back to James Madison. Madison foresaw even in the mid-1780s how kings (or even “big government”) were not the only potential tyrant under the new American Constitution. Rather, it was the tyranny of the majority that Madison was concerned about.

Not until 1868 did we get a remedy — the 14th Amendment. The Southern states were trampling on the rights of former slaves during Reconstruction, and the federal government stepped in to try to stop it. Many of the ugliest parts of American history touch on the 14th Amendment. White Southerners fought back with Jim Crow laws and legalized segregation, which stood until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Why it took so long is a political mystery that I may never understand.

Today’s so-called Tea Party derives its methods and inspiration not from the Boston Tea Party of 1773, when colonists protested against a despotic king and a Parliament who gave them no representation in the government. Rather, the so-called Tea Party is shockingly similar in its methods with the Jim Crow racists, who with violence against blacks, the activities of “militias,” gerrymandering, and rigged elections used the government to allow the white majority to hold the black minority down.

The current era is the most shameful period in North Carolina’s history in a hundred years. We will eventually throw the right-wing radicals out of power in Raleigh — hopefully starting with the governor this year. Cleaning up the legislature will take more time. It is highly fitting that the de factor leader of this movement to restore justice in North Carolina is a black man, the Rev. William Barber of the NAACP, who started the Moral Monday movement. I may have some comments on Barber’s new book soon.

Ken’s new book

In a recent comment here, Jo asked whether Ken Ilgunas was involved in the upkeep of the abbey’s orchard. Yes he has been, actually, very much so.

Though the first trees were planted before Ken first came to the abbey, he has slaved in the orchard for many hours — planting new trees and replacements for casualties, feeding the trees, pruning them, straightening them, weeding around them, and mourning for the fatalities that always seem to overtake the figs.

Ken’s second book, Trespassing Across America, will be released April 19, 2016. It’s available for sale (or for pre-order, if you’re reading this before April 19) at Amazon.

Ken’s first book, in 2013, was Walden on Wheels.

Watching the development of Ken’s literary career is like watching his generation finding its way. Ken, however, insisted on blazing his own trail. Student debt? Down with that. Cubicle job? No way. A career-oriented education? Nope — English and history.

I will never forget a critical moment in Ken’s career on the abbey’s side porch. The year was probably 2011. Ken was sitting in one of the rockers in his dirty work clothes, in a quandary, looking off into space, as he often does. He had been offered a desk job at a salary that anyone else his age would have had to jump at. Ken was teetering: What kind of career did he want to have? Should he take the desk job, or did he want to take the risks of making a go of it as a writer?

He asked me what I thought he should do. I evaded the question, because I was pretty sure I knew what he’d do. I believe my words were, “Whatever you decide, I totally trust your judgment.”

Having published two beautiful books by the age of 32, I’d say that Ken made a pretty good career choice.

Update: Oratorio in Ursa Major

During the fall and early winter, the beta readers read the first draft of Oratorio in Ursa Major. I discussed the draft with each of the readers, gave a lot of thought to their ideas, and undertook revisions.

I’m flattered that none of the beta readers suggested any major changes in Oratorio. Rather, from the discussions with the beta readers it seemed to me that what was needed were some new scenes and even a new character. A few days ago, I finished the second draft. The novel grew by about 60 pages. The paperback version now stands at about 515 pages.

During the revision process, I also thought a great deal more about what wants to happen in book 3, because obviously that needs to be anticipated and foreshadowed in Oratorio, which is the second book of a trilogy. Or, who knows. After writing the third novel about Jake’s adventures, I may want to continue with it.

I have moved the release date from April 1 to June 1. This is to give me more time to proofread for typos, to get all three versions ready (paperback, hardback, and Kindle), to get everything on Amazon for pre-ordering well before the release date, to get review copies mailed out, and to work on jacket blurbs and other promotional stuff.

Book review: a biography of Theodore Parker

American Heretic: Theodore Parker and Transcendentalism, by Dean Grodzins. University of North Carolina Press, 2002, 656 pages.

It’s surprising that Theodore Parker isn’t better known than he is. Parker (1810-1860), a transcendentalist, was a friend of Emerson. He inspired Thoreau. He was in the thick of things in the Boston-Concord area during his era. Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. picked up some famous rhetoric from Parker. For example, Parker’s words, talking about slavery, were:

I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.

This inspired Martin Luther King’s famous words:

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

In his Gettysburg address, Lincoln was paraphrasing words that Parker used in a speech in 1850: “A democracy — of all the people, by all the people, for all the people.”

Parker was a Unitarian. The Unitarians had more room for Parker than, say, the Methodists and the Presbyterians, but even some of Parker’s Unitarian friends shunned Parker as Parker became increasingly heretical.

What were some of Parker’s heresies? For one, Parker pretty much threw the entire Old Testament under the bus as primitive and unbelievable (not to mention lousy even as metaphor) and dominated by a cruel and immoral God. The question of miracles, and whether miracles were important or not, apparently was a big theological issue in Parker’s time. Parker came to believe that New Testament miracles were of no importance and probably didn’t really happen, that a revelation stood or fell on its own merit. Parker believed that some of the teachings of Jesus — not to mention the apostles — was wrong and morally flawed. Parker also rocked the boat. He became an outspoken abolitionist. Even Boston churchmen during this era who disapproved of slavery were careful not to preach too vehemently against slavery, because it got people too excited. Abolitionists were expected to be discreet in genteel society.

In many ways, this book is a theological history as much as a biography of Theodore Parker. These guys weren’t just preaching sermons to their congregations. They also were carrying on a theological debate with each other, a debate that also reached into the newspapers and the many church journals that were printed at the time.

I think it would be fair to say that Parker’s heresy boiled down to this: That ultimately, conscience, not scripture, is the only reliable guide. Note that in his statement about justice, it is conscience that allows Parker to divine the arc of the moral universe. I think it also would be fair to say (nor does Dean Grodzins say such a thing in this biography) that Parker left theology behind and became a moral philosopher instead. I think it also would be fair to say the same of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who actually gave up the ministry because it held him back. As for moral philosophy, Parker certainly was influenced by Kant. Parker also read in twenty languages, and he was particularly interested in German philosophy of that era. On a year-long trip to Europe, Parker tried to visit Goethe’s widow, but she was out.

It’s a shame to lose the thoughts of people like Theodore Parker who were so far ahead of their time. It’s amazing, really, how much progress was made in the 19th Century by the intellectual elite, though very little of that filtered down to incurious common folk. The white Protestant churches preach the same old fundamentalist, know-nothing stuff today, as though Emancipation and Civil Rights and all that thought and progress never happened. One of Parker’s complaints about social injustice, actually, was that working people had to work too hard and had little time for reading and study and bettering themselves intellectually. I wonder what Parker would think of television. Congregations at the time — at least Unitarian congregations — actually followed these debates and got intellectually involved. As Parker’s fame grew, people packed large halls in Boston to hear him speak. Who buys tickets to lecture series today? Are there even any lecture series to buy tickets to?

This biography ends around 1846, about 14 years before Parker’s death in 1860. Is Grodzins planning a second volume? Or was it that Grodzins was primarily interested in tracing the development of Parker’s heresy, and that was a done deal by 1846?

The Tristan chord

The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy. By Bryan McGee, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2000.

When I bought this book, I expected only to browse it. I ended up devouring it. As I’ve mentioned in other posts, you never know where research for a novel might lead you. In this case, I was thinking about musical metaphors and interesting ideas for the Socratic dialogues in Oratorio in Ursa Major.

Truth be known, I am not that great a fan of Richard Wagner. I even have been to a performance of “Tristan and Isolde” by the San Francisco Opera, and that did not win me over to the music. I find the music (four hours of it!) difficult to listen to. Still, the legend of Tristan and Isolde is archetypal in Western culture. Jake, my protagonist and hero in Fugue and Oratorio in Ursa Major, often makes drawings of unusual buildings, and he has a bit of a thing for towers covered with vines and thorns (like the tombs of Tristan and Isolde in some tellings of the story).

Nevertheless, I think it’s very important to know just what a landmark Wagner’s “Tristan and Isolde” was in the 19th Century. The music was like nothing ever heard before. Orchestras declared it impossible to play. Singers said that it was impossible to sing. There were more than 70 rehearsals of the opera in Vienna between 1862 and 1864, but the performance was called off and the opera was declared unperformable. Finally Wagner succeeded in staging it, in 1865 — 150 years ago.

After 150 years, the debate still runs hot in some musical circles. Just what is Wagner’s Tristan chord? Is it just a modified minor seventh chord? Or is that G-sharp an appoggiatura to the A, putting the chord in a whole different light? (It’s not necessary to understand the music theory here. The point is that the experts have been arguing and disagreeing for 150 years, and there are several theories about what the chord is.)

Here is what the music looks like:

Here it is played on the Acorn Abbey organ:

Stephen Fry did an excellent documentary on the Tristan chord called “Wagner and Me” back in 2010. (More about this Fry documentary in a moment.) Fry emphasizes the unbearable longing that the chord expresses. Our ears want the chord to resolve, but in four hours of music, it never does — not until the very end of the opera. No wonder some people consider the opera to be torture.

What do we mean by a chord resolving? Even if you can’t read music and don’t know a thing about music theory, your ear knows all the rules. For example, if I sing the first line of this ditty:

Old MacDonald had a farm!

Your ear will give you no rest until you hear that musical phrase resolved:

Eee-aye eee-aye oh!

There. That resolved it. Or think of the last note of pretty much any song:

And crown thy good
With brotherhood
From sea to shining —

Your ear will give you no rest until you hear the last note, in which the dominant chord, as it always must, resolves to the tonic:

Sea!

Believe me, even if you think you know nothing about music, if you love music and listen to music, your ear knows all the rules. I doubt that any metaphysical system will ever be able to explain why music has the emotional effect on us that it has, but part of that musical effect, surely, is creating tension — even longing — in unresolved harmonies and melodies, and then taking us along for a nice ride toward the resolution.

In many ways, John Williams (who wrote the music for “Star Wars”) is the Wagner of our time. Listen to this performance of Leia’s theme and think about how the music creates longing and tension and demands that we listen until we hear these tensions resolved. The final resolution comes quietly at 4:11, with a lonely note from the violin, followed by the remainder of the tonic chord in an arpeggio from the harp. Again, it doesn’t matter what the “tonic” chord is or what an “arpeggio” on the harp is. Your ear knows when it has finally got what it wanted. When the final chord finally comes, the orchestra quietly takes over the chord from the violin and the harp and holds the chord for many beats, to let the resolution sink in and to give our ear the peace it was longing for:

You’re not in a hurry, are you?

Here’s an excerpt from Stephen Fry’s “Wagner and Me” documentary:

Part of what makes Bryan Magee’s book so fascinating is his discussion of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer, both of whom greatly influenced Wagner. Over the years, I have made repeated attempts to read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and each time I have been turned back by the impenetrable density of Kant’s writing. Magee acknowledges that Kant’s writing was unnecessarily turgid and boils Kant down. We are all Kantists now. Magee does the same thing for Schopenhauer. And thus I learned that I am pretty much a Schopenhauerian, though not quite as pessimistic.

Magee is an engaging writer and has written a number of books aimed at making modern philosophy comprehensible to ordinary people.

The just world hypothesis

The Yoda fountain in the Presidio of San Francisco, a place that I used to frequently visit

When you’re writing a novel, you never know what line of research you might get pulled into. Writing Oratorio in Ursa Major required that I think a great deal about justice. I’ve posted previously on this subject in “A little moral reasoning,” about Cecil the lion, and “Should we tolerate the intolerant.” One of the questions that interests me is why we tend to be so bad at moral reasoning and how much harm that does in the world.

Just recently at a meeting of the Walnut Cove town board, I heard a bitter old fundamentalist preacher haranguing the board about its prayer policy, saying that atheists have no moral foundation. How strange, to think that a species that can produce a Mozart or an Einstein is unable to grapple with the principles of moral philosophy without referring to ossified old texts.

Just a couple of weeks ago, there were stories in the media about research (also here) showing that the children of religious families are meaner and less altruistic than the children of non-religious families. This obviously is the opposite of what religionists would have us believe.

But religion certainly is not the only factor that distorts thinking. The just world hypothesis is another big one. It might be better to call it the just world fallacy.

It was the social psychologist Melvin J. Lerner who came up with the term, based on research going back to the 1960s. It boils down to a cognitive bias toward thinking that people deserve what they get and get what they deserve. It is particularly damaging to the social fabric when people believe that some people deserve misfortune because they somehow brought it on themselves.

For example, the Republican Party — and many religious people — believe that poor people are poor because they’re lazy, or there’s something wrong with their culture. The flip side of that is believing that rich people possess some kind of virtue that makes them deserve to be rich.

The writer Barbara Ehrenreich has written some popular books that touch on the just world fallacy — for example, Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America.

In a YouTube video of a reading she gave at the Harvard book store, she talks about how preachers of prosperity doctrine such as Joel Osteen teach their poor followers mantras such as, “I admire rich people, I bless rich people, I love rich people, and I am going to be one, too.” According to this theology, “God wants to prosper you.”

It follows that, if you’re poor, it’s your own fault. You’re crossways with God. And, if you’re rich, you’ve pleased God and God is “prospering” you. Many rich people seem to believe that. Lots of essays and op-eds have been written about rich people strutting as though they’re the masters of the universe, automatically deserving of our deference and respect.

But the just world fallacy is not by any means limited to Republicans and religious charlatans such as Joel Osteen. New Age types buy into it, too. Having lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for years, this type of magical thinking is everywhere: “Do what you love, and the money will come … You control your destiny.” Think of self-help books such as, How to Get the Love You Want in 48 Hours. Everywhere there is the idea that you always get what you attract to yourself, that your thoughts and attitude have some sort of magical power to reshape the universe according to your desire. To be “negative” is to open the door to the devil. We’re told to avoid “negative” people, because their attitude is holding them back, and it’s contagious.

The concept of karma, actually, in Buddhism and Hinduism is a codification of the just world hypothesis. It helps sustain the Indian caste system.

I don’t know about you, but I hate seeing people get what they don’t deserve when so many people don’t get what they do deserve. Just-world doctrine would say that my attitude must be condemned as envy. Lerner’s big concern about the just world hypothesis is that it blinds us to the real sources of inequality and injustice and stands in our way of being motivated to do what we can to achieve greater justice.

It happens that John Rawls, in A Theory of Justice, has a good bit to say about envy. He acknowledges, of course, that envy in many circumstances can be toxic to the social environment. But Rawls describes a type of envy that he calls justifiable envy — envy of goods that some people acquire (and that others are deprived of) because of unjust or unequal social arrangements:

Yet sometimes the circumstances evoking envy are so compelling that given human beings as they are no one can reasonably be asked to overcome his rancorous feelings. A person’s lesser position as measured by the index of objective primary goods may be so great as to wound his self-respect; and given his situation, we may sympathize with his sense of loss. Indeed, we can resent being made envious, for society may permit such large disparities in these goods that under existing social conditions these differences cannot help but cause a loss of self-esteem. For those suffering this hurt, envious feelings are not irrational; the satisfaction of their rancor would make them better off.

Many social movements including the Civil Rights movement have been at least partly driven by justifiable envy for undeserved goods and privileges that some have and others don’t have (and — admit it — can’t get no matter how hard they try). And note Rawls’ references to self-respect and self-esteem. Not only are we blind to ways in which people are deprived of goods and privileges that others take for granted, we also put down the have-nots. We believe in the inferiority of the have-nots and expect them to believe in their own inferiority. They are children of a lesser God, creatures of a separate (and not equal) moral universe. Some will be crushed; it’s just too much for them. Among the stronger, sooner or later, rebellion is guaranteed, even if it’s a lonely rebellion of one.

In the world as it really is, most of us will never be rich. Sometimes what goes around does not come around. Sometimes what comes around is not what is fair and just. This is one reason we love stories — stories are a compensation for an unjust world. Stories (this is especially true of science fiction) are a vehicle for trying out ideas about how things might be otherwise.

In fiction and in stories, the just world hypothesis usually applies. In the end, protagonists get their heart’s desire, but not until they have striven and suffered to get it — not until they deserve it or have defeated the forces that stood in their way. And at the end of the story, bad actors get the punishment they deserve. I realize that there are dissident or experimental forms of fiction in which the just world hypothesis does not apply, but in “classical” form storytelling, the just world hypothesis applies. The justice we find in stories serves as an escape from, and a compensation for, our inability to write the story of our own lives however we please. Yoda was right about the Force, but only because Yoda lives in a story.

There is a substantial body of academic research and literature on justice and the social psychology of justice. Lerner’s books, for reasons I have not been able to figure out, are very expensive. As far as I can tell, though, this material is scattered and is often behind paywalls. Though Barbara Ehrenreich’s books have helped bring the just-world fallacy to our attention, I’m afraid the world is still waiting for a popular book that pulls all this research together and shows how it affects our world.