Into the Woods

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Up through the 1970s, this type of ink, made by Scheaffer, was available just about everywhere. As I recall, the available colors included black, blue-black, red, and green. Scheaffer also made inexpensive fountain pens that were sold into the student market. Just about everybody had one. I wore out (and lost) a great many of them. The nice thing about the Skrip ink bottle was that the bottle had its own ink well at the bottle’s neck. Source: eBay.

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How many types of ink do you have in your house? I’m guessing that modern households are likely to have no more than two types: ballpoint or felt-tip pens with ink inside, and maybe an inkjet printer. Ink stains on our fingers are a thing of the past. That’s a bit sad.

When I think back about it, and though I greatly love computers, I am ashamed of how long it took me to realize just how much we lost when computers pushed the ink out of our lives. It was the recent revival of my love of typewriters that started me thinking about ink. Typewriter ribbons, of course, are saturated with ink. Change the typewriter’s ribbon and you’ll get ink on your hands.

But it was a slippery slope. As I started typing letters on typewriters as a kind of retro exercise (letters to send to friends who have typewriters or friends who I hope will acquire a typewriter), it became obvious that typewritten letters need to be signed. Then it became equally obvious, because I was born with ink in my veins, that the only way to properly sign a typewritten letter is with a fountain pen. I had not owned a fountain pen in many years. If you buy a fountain pen (I bought two), then you will surely buy some ink as well. And before you know it, you will frequently have ink on your fingers, just like our ancestors.

Though you can’t buy ink at Woolworth’s anymore, there are many types of ink available on Amazon. Lots of weird people still use lots of ink — artists, for example.

An excellent black ink from Pelikan, and a so-so blue-black ink from Parker. The Pelikan ink flows much more smoothly and has a richer color. (The retro adding machine in the background is a Monroe 145 in like new condition.)

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According to Wikipedia, human beings have been using ink for as long as 4,000 years (in China). The decline in the use of ink for personal communications started, of course, in the 1980s, as computers became increasingly common. How did we ever live without email and texting? And yet, let us be ever so grateful that our postal services are still with us. They’d still be very happy to transport a letter for you. My letters to Scotland arrive in about six days, and, to France, eight days. That, I believe, is faster than 40 years ago. Wouldn’t it be nice to occasionally find a real letter in your mailbox? But, of course, to get some letters you have to write some letters. Typed or handwritten are equally good.

Our ancestors may not have been obsessive about whether the lines were straight in handwritten letters. To get straight lines, one technique was to slip a sheet of ruled paper underneath the plain white paper. If the paper is not too thick, the rules will show through. The scrivener’s art is almost lost, but for better-looking letters today, a lighted tracing tablet (about $18 on eBay) will work better, with a sheet underneath with heavy rules showing the base lines and margins.

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Soon some friend of mine will receive a letter from me written with pen and ink. Have I ever even done that before? After the age of eleven, when I got my first typewriter, I typed everything. But first I need some practice with pen and ink. Many years ago I had a very legible cursive. I’ve completely lost that. But I can still print pretty well. Fountain pens want to move more slowly than ballpoint pens anyway, so printing is not excessively slow (even though I can type ten times faster).

As I reflected on these things, I recovered a memory of the only honor society I got into in high school. That was Quill and Scroll. To my surprise, it still exists. How my pin survived all these years I have no idea. It must have meant something to me. It turned out that journalism and newspapers were my career. And once again there is ink on my fingers as well as ink in my blood.

The “I.H.S.H.S.J” stands for International High School Honor Society for Journalism. According to Wikipedia, fountain pens were invented in 1827 and started replacing quills. What progress! It was no longer necessary to repeatedly dip the quill in a bottle of ink.

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I was hesitant to watch this. What I’d read about it made the story seem contrived. A sea monster? Really? Was it a bodice-ripper? If so, that’s not my genre. I also knew that the story was set in the flats and fens and swamps of southeastern England — a part of England you probably want to visit only if you’ve already been everywhere else or if you need to catch a ferry to the Hook of Holland. But I love well done period pieces, and I trusted Claire Danes and Tom Hiddleston not to sign up for a weak project. The series is based on a novel by Sarah Perry.

Four episodes in (there are six episodes), I still had my doubts. Much of the dialogue is a bit unpolished and ragged around the edges. Sometimes the dramatic logic seems a little off, with what the characters say and do not always making sense. I frequently wondered whether it was going to be possible to like (and therefore to care about) Claire Danes’ and Tom Hiddleston’s characters. Two of the best characters, really, are supporting cast — Clémence Poésy as Stella and Caspar Griffiths as Frankie, an 1893 example of a boy we would today classify as autistic. The writer, I was afraid, didn’t have full control of the story. But by the last episode, the writer had dotted all the i’s, crossed all the t’s, and stitched the plot into a complete and complex Gothic embroidery.

“The Essex Serpent” can be streamed on Apple TV+.

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The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress. Peter Singer. Princeton University Press. Second edition, 2011; first published 1981. 208 pages.

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Peter Singer, born in 1946, is one of our most progressive moral philosophers. In 1975, he published Animal Liberation. For years, he has argued for altruism, from utililitarian principles. In 2015, he published The Most Good You Can Do, which holds that we have a duty to, at the very least, donate money to help alleviate global poverty.

Singer looks largely to David Hume (1711-1776) for the roots of his utilitarian philosophy. Singer’s concern in this book is how it was that moral progress has continued since the time of Hume, as rights were extended to slaves, to women, and even, to a much lesser degree, to animals. Singer calls this the expanding circle. I would call it the arc of justice.

It is reason, Singer believes, that leads to this ever-expanding circle of rights. Applying reason to rights and justice, Singer writes, is like stepping onto an escalator. Once you take the first step, you must ride all the way to the top; there is no way on the way up to get off. There is no reason at all, Singer believes, why animals should not have the same rights as human beings. And Singer is entirely open to the idea, somewhere much higher up on the escalator, that plants have rights, as does the land, a mountain, or a river. On that subject, his sympathy is with Aldo Leopold.

Singer, in this book though, gets into a serious quarrel with the sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson, who died in 2021. Singer entirely accepts Wilson’s case that our “moral intuitions” including altruism have their roots in our human evolution as social animals. But Singer believes that Wilson was entirely wrong in claiming that these moral intuitions are the last word in moral philosophy, with no moral progress possible beyond what is innate in our instincts. We are reasoning beings as well as social beings, Singer argues, and it is reason that leads us up the escalator to an ever-expanding and increasingly altruistic concept of rights and duties.

Singer makes a strong objection to Wilson’s criticism of John Rawls (A Theory of Justice, 1971). Wilson wrote that Rawls’ concept of justice (which is of course based on reason) may be “an ideal state for disembodied spirits,” but is “in no way explanatory or predictive with reference to human beings.” Singer does not discuss Rawls in this book except to defend Rawls against Wilson. But I think it would be safe to assume that Singer has no argument with Rawls. As I’ve mentioned here in the past, Rawls — having stepped onto the escalator of reason — does not attempt in A Theory of Justice to extend to animals his concept of justice as fairness. But as I read Rawls, he almost begs someone else to do that work.¹

Why am I so interested in moral philosophy? I would argue that we all should be interested in moral philosophy, as a means of holding our ground and preserving our confidence in an era in which religion and politics increasingly have gone insane, actually belittling the effort toward moral progress as “woke,” using insulting terms such as “social justice warrior.” Religion and right-wingery have always worked to block moral progress. But in the present era they are increasingly open to using violence and corrupting our institutions to gain power and cruelly turn back the clock to a far more primitive time.

Singer paraphrases Leviticus 25:39-46, which I quote here from the Christian Standard translation:

“If your brother among you becomes destitute and sells himself to you, you must not force him to do slave labor. Let him stay with you as a hired worker or temporary resident; he may work for you until the Year of Jubilee. Then he and his children are to be released from you, and he may return to his clan and his ancestral property. They are not to be sold as slaves, because they are my servants that I brought out of the land of Egypt. You are not to rule over them harshly but fear your God. Your male and female slaves are to be from the nations around you; you may purchase male and female slaves. You may also purchase them from the aliens residing with you, or from their families living among you – those born in your land. These may become your property. You may leave them to your sons after you to inherit as property; you can make them slaves for life. But concerning your brothers, the Israelites, you must not rule over one another harshly.”

Though that passage is more than 2,000 years old, it is shocking that, until the Enlightenment, with the church unchallenged, the arc of justice moved so slowly. It was not until 150 years ago that owning and inheriting slaves was outlawed in this country. And now the heirs of the Confederacy² are reasserting themselves, actually claiming moral superiority for themselves and ridiculing resistance as “woke.”

What does one say to people like that? More important, what does one do to resist them? I return again and again to the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was hanged by the Nazis in 1945:

“We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice; we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.”

But how?

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Notes:

1. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 448.

2. Heather Cox Richardson, How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America, 2020.

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Generation War, a German production, 2013

We Americans have seen many movies about World War II, but we probably haven’t seen a movie about how the war looked from a German perspective. Generation War is hard to watch, as the misery and disillusion of the Germans escalate year after awful year. The stories of the five young people in Generation War make it clear that the lies behind the war were as cruel as the war itself, adding existential agony to the physical agony.

The series is in three parts, each about an hour and a half long. The cast is charismatic. It’s a beautiful period piece, shot in Germany, Lithuania, and Latvia.

Generation War can be streamed on Netflix and Amazon Prime Video.