May 2022 – Into the Woods

The long, long culture war

Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity. Darrin M. McMahon. Oxford University Press, 2001. 262 pages.

Merely reading about the violent history of France is enough to get a case of PTSD. France, already damaged by the Protestant Reformation of the 16th Century, lurched from monarchy to revolution and then back again to monarchy. Though most of us are at least somewhat familiar with that history, what most of is did not know is that it was one long culture war, the very same culture war that we are still fighting today.

This culture war was between the Enlightenment — which then was new — and the mortal enemies of the Enlightenment, people on the right who have been with us since the Enlightenment’s beginnings. On the left was a new humanist philosophy that made no claim to being a divine revelation. Its roots were in reason. It was a European project, but this book limits itself to France, where the chief luminaries of the Enlightenment were men such as Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau.

Who were these mortal enemies of the Enlightenment? That can be answered accurately with a few words: the church and the authoritarian elite, but mostly the church. Most of the anti-philosophes, as this book calls them, were abbots and theologians. They saw Enlightenment philosophy as an evil conspiracy out to put an end to royalty and religion. In their minds, royalty and religion were the only forces capable of holding a society together. In France, their anti-Enlightenment evidence for this was the Reign of Terror after the 1789 revolution. These anti-philosophes were organized, and they produced a blizzard of books, tracts, and pamphlets to try to counteract the writings of the Enlightenment philosophes.

This old culture war, which raged white-hot from before the Revolution until the beginning of the Third Republic in 1870, was remarkably similar to the culture war through which we are living today. We could call it MFGA — Make France Great Again:

“…[T]he effort [was] to cleanse France of all trace of the Enlightenment and of the Revolution and to invest its inhabitants with a spiritual piety more intense than the eighteenth century had ever known. On the surface, this was a journey to the mythic past. But in truth the world that the men and women of the far Right aimed to create was not that of the ancien regime, the former regime. The world to which they hoped to return existed only in their minds.”

This book is above all a history of France, and McMahon has little to say about parallels with the present, which are obvious. He has little to say about the rest of Europe. I would venture to say that Britain handled the Enlightenment far better than France for two reasons: Henry VIII had conveniently gotten rid of the Catholic Church centuries before; and England’s royalty was more humane than France’s. McMahon does write, though, in describing how the enemies of the Enlightenment demonized their enemies: “Bequeathing an image of its enemy that long outlived it, the French Counter-Enlightenment, too, passed on a structure of opposition and a set of recurrent themes that would resurface in right-wing thought even to the present day.”

In America, the Enlightenment provided the basis for a new government and a new Constitution. But there were those in high places who hated the Enlightenment. McMahon mentions the Reverend Timothy Dwight, president of Yale from 1795 to 1817, who preached a sermon “in which he denounced the orchestrated plot, hatched by Voltaire, Frederick II, the Encyclopedists, and the Society of the Illuminati to destroy the Christian religion and the French monarchy.” That’s a conspiracy theory — from the president of Yale! According to Wikipedia, “Dwight was the leader of the evangelical New Divinity faction of Congregationalism — a group closely identified with Connecticut’s emerging commercial elite.”

Is there a traceable paper trail from then to now? I would say no. Rather, it’s that authoritarians and religionists never change. Their thought was just as ossified in the 18th Century as it is today. McMahon does mention, in his notes, a book from 1991 that I will read next: The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy, which deals with how conservative forces have tried to prevent progress. McMahon also mentions the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), whom I first encountered during my student days and who is now back on my reading list.

McMahon quotes Whitehead: “The major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur.” Why that is so is easy enough to see. Those who abhor the ideas of reason, equality, and democracy will fight like hell against progress. They are baffled by how anyone could possibly want a world ruled by anyone other than preachers and kings.

The theater of intimidation

The U.S.S. Nimitz under the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco Fleet Week, 2006. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

We all want to be as aware as possible of the political environment that we are immersed in. An important element to watch for is: Who is trying to intimidate us? How? Why? Are they trying to intimidate us with real power? Or are they bluffing? Intimidation is a key part of the right-wing playbook.

Consider what Madison Cawthorn wrote in an Instagram Post after he was defeated in a primary election on May 17: “The time for gentile [sic] politics as usual has come to an end. It’s time for the rise of the new right, it’s time for Dark MAGA to truly take command. We have an enemy to defeat, but we will never be able to defeat them until we defeat the cowardly and weak members of our own party. Their days are numbered.”

Cawthorn is a clueless amateur. His threats will appeal to other clueless amateurs, but Cawthorn has no power to make good on his threats. But intimidation may also come from real power, from those who are pros at the theater of intimidation.

Fleet Week is an annual event in San Francisco. Once I actually joined the crowd on the Golden Gate Bridge to watch an aircraft carrier loom up out of the fog over the Pacific and pass under the bridge, with its crew in dress whites standing at attention and lining the decks. The display of power was stunning and, I admit, even beautiful. I quickly recognized that it was theater. Part of the job of the U.S. Navy, during peacetime, is to display American naval power to the world. American naval power is certainly true power, but there is still an element of bluffing, as American military adventures in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan show. Vladimir Putin has true power. But he also got caught bluffing when his army encountered the power of Ukraine.

The news this week was dominated by yet another school shooting. This one was in Texas, in the little town of Uvalde. The Uvalde police, it seems, at first tried to fudge the truth about their response. It turns out that they never went into the building to confront the shooter because they were afraid they might get shot. Instead, those cowboy Texans waited for federal help, from the U.S. Border Patrol. Two years ago, the Uvalde police department had boasted about its S.W.A.T. team, with a photo of the team in full costume. The boast included a warning to people not to be alarmed at the scary sight of the S.W.A.T. team. After the photo of the S.W.A.T. went viral, more than one person pointed out in social media that the real purpose was not to make Uvalde’s Latin community feel safer, but, rather, to intimidate them.

Whether it’s the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017, the MAGA attack on the U.S. Capitol, militia rallies, Trump rallies, the practice of Trumpian politics, or just a dude with a gun on his hip, there is always an element of the theater of intimidation. Even the red MAGA caps are part of the costume in the theater of intimidation. It works. There are many people who still believe that Trump and his co-conspirators will never be brought to justice. I attribute that to the demoralization and intimidation that is such an important element of Trumpian politics. They want us to believe that we’ve already lost. But it’s theater.

In the present political environment, few pundits are willing to acknowledge that Trump and MAGA are in free fall toward the trash heap of history. One of the smartest pieces I’ve seen lately was in the Washington Post, “Why Trump’s 2024 chances are even worse than Georgia suggests.” The author, Jason Willick, quotes Richard Hofstadler: ” … [T]hird parties are like bees: once they have stung, they die.” Trump, having stung, is going down. And, as he goes down, the bluffing will be exposed.

I’m not saying that right-wingers don’t do real harm with every ounce of real power that they can get. But they also use bluffing to augment their power and to do damage that, except for the theater of intimidation, they would not have been able to do. They’re scary. But they’re not as scary as they want to be, and they’re not as scary as they think they are.

Source: Facebook

Update:

Obi-Wan Kenobi

I had been eagerly awaiting this new Disney+ series. But after watching the first episode, I was disappointed. Ewan McGregor does his best, but he couldn’t make up for a ho-hum story and a ho-hum script.

Disney, I suspect, needs to try to please kids. That may not work very well for oldies like me who were already older than Luke Skywalker when we saw the first Star Wars film back in 1977. There is a young Princess Leia character in Obi-Wan Kenobi, age around seven, who is extremely annoying — miscast and cockily unaware of how bad her lines are. Maybe that will work for kids. Remember Jar Jar Binks, and the young Anakin and his pod race? The Star Wars franchise has always been weakest when it tried to be kid-friendly.

What we have, I’m afraid, is a first-string cast (Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen), but second-string writing and directing. Still, I’ll keep watching. The visuals on the planet Tattooine are superb. The music (some of which was written by John Williams) is excellent. And it is always fun to return to the Star Wars world, which, after 45 years, has become a kind of parallel universe.

Cooler summer cooking, outside

Even if cooking on the deck didn’t keep the heat out of the kitchen, cooking on the deck would still be worth doing. Cooking outdoors is as much fun as eating outdoors.

I have long used my gas grill for cooking on the deck. But not everything wants to be cooked on a grill. Today I tried out an iron Dutch oven on an induction hot plate. It worked great. The Dutch oven serves perfectly as both an oven or a frying pan, depending upon whether the cover is on it.

I bought the induction hot plate a couple of years ago as an audition for an induction range. I ended up liking it far less than I expected and easily made the decision that an induction range is not for me. Part of the decision was related to the kind of cookware I use. I have several well-loved copper pots, as well as glass cookware. Only steel and iron, of course, will work on induction stoves. So the induction hot plate ended up abandoned, at the bottom of the pantry. As for the Dutch oven, that’s an essential kitchen item. I have a both a glazed and an unglazed Dutch oven, both made by Lodge.

In the photo above, the chicken nuggets are Impossible’s vegan chicken nuggets. You can get them at Trader Joe’s, and they are very good, probably the best of the new fake meats that I’ve tried. Potatoes like nothing better than hot cast iron. The broccoli likes it, too, as long as you give the broccoli some steam during part of its cooking time.

I could have done a better job of regulating the heat. The Dutch oven got much hotter than I expected, even with the induction plate set for 400 degrees or lower. But that’s OK. The slightly burned bits gave everything that mysterious campsite flavor, which I suspect can only be achieved outdoors.

Remember old library books?

When I was writing the post about Edna St. Vincent Millay a few days ago, I thought about the 1964 Rowse edition of the Shakespeare sonnets that I used to own. That book was destroyed in a house fire in 1974. Having recently gotten a new shelf to occupy the last remaining shelf space in the little room that I now call the library, I’m buying books a bit recklessly, with a thought to timeless reference books. Of course I have a book of Shakespeare’s complete works, but the Rowse edition of the sonnets is a book that every library should have.

This book cost $10.84 from a bookseller on Amazon — a bargain. The book originally came from a high school library. Apparently it was checked out six times before the library got rid of it. How sad is that?

Note, by the way, how the rhyme-scheme of Shakespeare’s sonnets differs from the rhyme-scheme of the Millay sonnet that I previously posted. Shakespeare’s rhyme-scheme is ABBA, CDCD, EFEF, GG — three quatrains and a couplet.

Because I’m going through a phase in which I’d rescue and collect old typewriters if I had the space for them, I’m fascinating with artifacts from the typewriter era. A few days ago I watched the movie Operation Mincemeat, which was a pretty good movie. There were many scenes with typewriters, as there were with Julia. The renewal of interest in typewriters, I’m guessing, has encouraged screenwriters to include typewriter scenes in period pieces. I’m all for it.

Operation Mincemeat

Turning our political radar north

The countries of the Baltic Sea. Source: Global International Waters Assessment via Wikimedia Commons.

Today, Sweden and Finland formally applied for membership in NATO. (Washington Post story here.) This is a very big deal. Remember when the Neocon war hawks of the Bush-Cheney administration tried to teach us that diplomacy no longer matters and strove to establish an American empire armed to the teeth, fueled by oil, and aligned with authoritarian oil countries? And then, eight years after the Bush-Cheney administration, Putin’s friend Donald Trump wanted to destroy NATO with a U.S. withdrawal, and, like Bush-Cheney, sucked up to the oil countries (that includes Russia) rather than looking north. That kind of foolishness might have been weakly arguable then. But now, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the exposure of Russia’s weakness and Putin’s misjudgments, and a rapid realignment of the Western democracies, the Republican madness — oil and authoritarianism — is obvious.

It may seem surprising that this realignment happened so quickly — in a matter of weeks, really. Partly, of course, that was the product of diplomacy. (One of the miracles of the Biden administration is how quickly Biden re-professionalized the State Department after Trump turned it over to hacks with conflicts of interest.) But in fact the situation was changing before Russia invaded Ukraine. This short report from the RAND Corporation, dated September 15, 2021, is about how three key Nordic countries — Norway, Sweden, and Finland — had in recent years become increasingly concerned about deteriorating relations with Russia:

“Overall, Norway, Sweden, and Finland have dramatically shifted their plans and actions in response to Russian threats in the European Arctic. For the United States, this change could represent an opportunity to further strengthen cooperation with its key allies and partners, helping to enhance security in the region and better counter Russian challenges in the northernmost reaches of Europe.”

If Republicans had remained in control, the consequences for the West would have been disastrous as the strategic and economic opportunities were lost and as the U.S. acted in favor of the Russia kleptocracy rather than our allies, the European democracies.

Norway has been a member of NATO since its beginning, in 1949. The admission of Sweden and Finland probably would be almost automatic, but Turkey has thrown some sand into the gears. Turkey’s reservations (mentioned in the Washington Post story above) seem rather silly, but it’s easy to suspect that Turkey’s underlying gripe (other than blowing a kiss at Putin) is that, as the Arctic becomes more and more important in a warming climate and as the world turns away from oil, Mediterranean countries such as Turkey become less and less important. One of the great advances from making oil obsolete will be making the oil countries obsolete. The Baltic Sea will become the new Mediterranean.

It was a book about the economic future of Scotland that first got me thinking about how important the Arctic will become as the climate warms, as ice melts, and as a navigable sea route to Asia opens up through the Baltic Sea. Russia and the Baltic countries are already preparing for the economic changes this will bring. Sweden and Finland joining NATO, I would think, will have economic consequences for the West far beyond its consequences for mutual security and defense.

The old kleptocratic order based on oil created billionaires literally by the thousands. Many of those billionaires are oligarchs like Putin who also have countries to rule and interests to protect. They won’t go down easily, no matter how many yachts we confiscate. This is what is behind much of the geopolitical drama through which we are living at present. Trump, a puppet of that old order, did everything he could to swing the United States away from a new order and toward the old. But four years under Trump wasn’t enough to convert the institutions of democracy into the tools of an autocrat (drain the swamp!) and turn the United States into Russia. If Republicans gain full control of the government again, it’s hard to imagine any result other than geopolitical disaster. If there is a next time, they’ll move faster and more ruthlessly.

I don’t mean to sound pessimistic. As long as the Republican Party — the clueless tool of the .1 percent — can be kept out of power, and as long as the .1 percent who own their own countries don’t start using their nukes (big if’s unfortunately), then the immense military and economic power of the U.S. can help lead the progress toward a new order — more democratic, more sustainable, more fair, and with a prosperity more equally shared. The alternative is a United States fleeced of its wealth by kleptocrats and beaten down by a white Christian police state.

Centrist misdirection

After an 18-year-old with an AR-15 killed 10 people in a Buffalo supermarket, The Atlantic was quick out of the gate with a piece typical of its radical centrism. The article was “America’s Gun Plague,” by David Frum.

Was the shooter a left-wing extremist? asks Frum in the first paragraph. A vegan animal-rights zealot? But of course it was neither. It was yet another right-wing crazy cracked up on right-wing propaganda.

In the fourth paragraph, Frum writes: “The crucial variable in mass shootings is not ideas but weapons. We cannot control ideas or speech and should not attempt to do so even if we could.”

Sorry, Mr. Frum, but you can’t change the subject to guns. We’re not talking here about “ideas.” We’re talking about noxious, dangerous, right-wing lies, knowingly weaponized by the Republican Party as political propaganda and retailed virtually everywhere — from the halls of Congress to the most noxious internet hidey-holes of right-wing radicals.

The Atlantic, for the most part, is thoughtful and even wise. But The Atlantic also frequently publishes addled-headed pieces by radical centrists claiming to be enlightened defenders of free speech who are horrified by what they see to their left but blind to what is on their right. They crank out breathless article after breathless article about campus leftists (as with the piece in the cover story above).

Centrists, you see, are not capable of doubt about whether they hold the moral high ground. They are absolutely certain that they do. Centrists used to throw around the term “moral leveling” as an insult aimed at the left. Their point was that “ideas have consequences” and that standards and principles exist against which we can claim that some ideas are better than other ideas. Good. But in their blindness, centrists cannot see that they are the greatest moral levelers of all. If the center is the high ground, then it is necessary for centrists to see equally serious wrongness both to the left and to the right. Thus centrists are mired in one of the most dangerous fallacies of our times — false equivalence.

The New York Times, this morning, bless its heart, does not fall into any centrist fallacies. The Times, with little to say about guns, puts this piece in the second most prominent position on its web site: “A Fringe Conspiracy Theory, Fostered Online, Is Refashioned by the G.O.P.” Yes. That’s the problem.

Centrists like Frum do often write about the dangers of Trumpism. But it also seems that, for every piece (or paragaph, or book chapter) critical of the right, they feel it’s necessary to come up with some kind of piece or paragraph or book chapter equally critical of the left. If they didn’t, then how would they display their centrism and their moral superiority?

My view is that, when the history of post-Reagan America up through the Trump era is written, the unintentional blindness of centrists will have done as much damage to the republic as right-wing radicals. Though centrist blindness is dim-witted and unintentional (sadly, they’re not as smart as they think they are), their misdirection is entirely intentional and calculated.

One of the reasons the right wing in this country has become so dangerous is that they have figured out how to weaponize the Constitution. The Second Amendment is cover for right-wingers and their militias armed to the teeth for the purpose of intimidation and the creation of fear even when they’re not shooting anyone. (“When do we get to use the guns?” they ask their politicians.) And the First Amendment is cover for the alternate reality blended with rage that is created by right-wing propaganda. Centrists like Frum call it “ideas.” A centrist will tell you that the remedy for twisted speech is more speech and better speech, not attempts to control speech. Does it follow that the remedy for guns is more guns and better guns rather than attempts to control guns? That seems to be the slippery slope we’re on, thanks to the right-wing weaponization of our Constitution.

I don’t claim to have an answer for the booby-traps in the American Constitution that right-wing radicals are exploiting. But one thing is clear to me: Radical centrists don’t have any answers either.

Note: The cover story for The Atlantic cover above (September 2015) was “The Coddling of the American Mind,” by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. Is what college students want to hear and don’t want to hear really a problem? It may well be, for all I know. Maybe I’ll even worry about it a little in my spare time. But in 2022 centrists are still cranking out breathless warnings about speech on campus — in their articles as well as their books — even as the right actively works to crush the American democracy and its institutions, to ban books, to make laws restricting speech, to whitewash and dictate what students can be taught, and to punish corporations for disagreeing with Republicans, all the while loudly retailing their false alternate reality to keep susceptible minds confused and enraged. If centrists would come to their senses they could be very helpful. But I have never been able to get through to a centrist, any more than I’ve ever been able to get through to a right-winger.

Young Russians

Yesterday John Twelve Hawks posted on Facebook a link to this YouTube recording. A screen shot of his posting is below. John Twelve Hawks is reminding us that it’s not just Ukrainians who are dying in this war. Young Russians are dying by the thousands.

The recording is from 2019, so clearly the composer, Kirill Richter, wasn’t composing an In Memoriam for the war on Ukraine. Maybe he’s a bit prescient. Can we imagine how different the world might be if, instead of war, we had generous culture exchange between the West and the people of Russia and Eastern Europe? If it weren’t for social media, I for one would know nothing about the artists and musicians of Russia and Eastern Europe.

John Twelve Hawks is my favorite living science fiction writer. Unfortunately he hasn’t published anything new since 2014.

Kirill Richter, a young Russian. Source: Spotify.

Heartstopper

This series is British, but it comes along just when it’s needed in the United States: that is, as Republican states such as Florida and Texas try to invent ugly new laws designed to make the lives of young people miserable and to intimidate and punish anyone who dares to try to make the world safer for them.

So here you have it: Heartstopper dramatizes exactly what Republicans are afraid of — young people who will never, ever vote for a Republican. It also shows that, no matter what kind of meanness Republican cruelty can cook up to try to bring back the 16th Century, young people are not going back. I don’t think Heartstopper is intended as a pun, but in the U.S. it may stop the hard and feeble hearts of some old Republicans.

I’m a bit too old for this series. It’s made for young people. But from it I’m learning a lot about what young people are thinking these days and in what direction they will take the world. I even like some of their music. The charm is irresistible. I downloaded the first episode just to have a look because the reviews have been so good. Then I downloaded all of the first season.

Heartstopper can be streamed from Netflix.

Millay’s diaries (and sonnets)

Rapture and Melancholy: The Diaries of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Edited by Daniel Mark Epstein, Yale University Press. 390 pages.

I’m not going to review this book. I couldn’t possibly top the New Yorker’s review: How Fame Fed on Edna St. Vincent Millay. One of the reasons the New Yorker review caught my interest is that it mentions Millay’s sonnets. The New Yorker writes: “But other poems demonstrated Millay’s sophistication. She was not just a master of the sonnet but a student of it. Late in life, she started an essay about the form, naming Shakespeare as an influence.”

These days, I’m afraid, a poet who wrote sonnets would be called not “sophisticated,” but rather would be shamed as laughably obsolete. I admit that I have a hostile view of contemporary poetry (with few exceptions, such as some Irish poetry). The kind of poetry that the New Yorker publishes, for example, to me seems intentionally, militantly, and snobbishly unreadable and ugly, as though the point is to flaunt a sophistication very unlike Millay’s, a kind of sophistication that I don’t aspire to, nor do I know anyone who does. The Irish still read poetry, and so the quality of a poem can be measured by how it touches readers. Whereas (please excuse my bad attitude) the New Yorker’s standard seems to measure the quality of a poem by how it baffles readers and how dull and empty it is.

I discovered Shakespeare’s sonnets at the age of 19 or 20, from the beautiful 1964 edition with commentary by A.L. Rowse. I greatly admired the musicality of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and I developed, I think, a taste in poetry a lot like my musical taste — an admiration for what genius can create within a strict form — a fugue by Bach, a sonnet by Shakespeare.

A few years later I discovered Millay. A friend in New York had taken me to a one-woman show off-off-off Broadway. The actress, on a small and spare stage, became Edna St. Vincent Millay, talked about her life, and recited many of her poems. I became hooked on Millay and quickly suspected that Millay’s sonnets were inspired by Shakespeare’s.

About sonnet form: Sonnets are always 14 lines of iambic pentameter. The rhyme-scheme may vary some as long as it is even. The rhyme-scheme of this sonnet is ABBA, ABBA, CDC, DCD.