Eulogy: Jobs

The nature of finite things is to contain the germ of destruction as their inmost being; "the hour of their birth is the hour of their death." 


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/opinion/mona-simpsons-eulogy-for-steve-jobs.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

Norman O. Brown's 'Life Against Death' -- in bite size

http://www.psych-culture.com/docs/brown-life_against_death.pdf

A memoir; a father's journal to a son ...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/23/books/23gree.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/01/us/01charles.html?_r=2&th&emc=th&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

In Chekhov’s 1892 short story “The Grasshopper” an ambitious young society woman marries a quiet doctor nine years her senior. Though tall and broad-shouldered, Dr. Osip Dymov seems small and insignificant in the glittering company of his wife’s artistic and literary friends: he looks “as though he had on somebody else’s coat.” At their wedding the young woman, Olga Ivanovna, dashes from friend to friend, urging, “Look at him; isn’t it true that there is something in him?,” as if she wanted to explain “why she was marrying a simple, very ordinary, and in no way remarkable man.”

Dana Canedy with her fiancé, First Sgt. Charles Monroe King.

A JOURNAL FOR JORDAN

A Story of Love and Honor

By Dana Canedy

Illustrated. 279 pp. Crown Publishers. $25.95.

Multimedia

Audio & Photos

Lessons From a Soldier to His Son

Related

An Appreciation: From Father to Son, Last Words to Live By(January 1, 2007)

Dana Canedy’s powerful memoir, “A Journal for Jordan,” begins by sounding similar notes. She has climbed from working-class roots, the daughter of an African-American military family at Fort Knox, into journalism’s highest echelons: reporter for The New York Times and part of thePulitzer Prize-winning team that created the 2001 series “How Race Is Lived in America.” She dates the managing editor of The Boston Globe and vacations on Martha’s Vineyard, enjoying lobster, single-malt Scotch and evenings of Scrabble.

But that relationship fades, and in its aftermath Ms. Canedy visits home. In her parents’ living room in Radcliff, Ky., she encounters First Sgt. Charles Monroe King. A tall, handsome and heavily decorated soldier eight years her senior, he had served in Operation Desert Storm, Kuwait and Guantánamo Bay.

“I wondered how a man blessed with so much beauty could possibly be bashful,” Ms. Canedy writes. But she also finds him stiff, old-fashioned and provincial. Sergeant King is not a voracious reader of books and newspapers; he makes grammatical errors; in a 45 miles-per-hour zone, he drives 45 m.p.h.

After Ms. Canedy returns to Manhattan, Sergeant King pursues her by phone. “I was instantly conscious of how little interest I had in dating a soldier,” she writes. “My ideal man,” she says, “looked like Charles but wore a suit to work and carried The Wall Street Journal under his arm.”

“He’s not exactly my type,” she tells a girlfriend. “I mean, what if I have to introduce him to the executive editor at a Times event? He mispronounces words and doesn’t keep up with the news.”

Chekhov’s Olga gets her comeuppance, like a character in an O. Henry story: her obsession with the imagined talents of her fellow social climbers eclipses her recognition of her husband’s true brilliance. As Dr. Dymov dies of diphtheria contracted from a patient, attending doctors snarl at Olga: “What a loss for science! Compare him with all of us. He was a great man, an extraordinary man! ... Merciful God, ... we shall never look on his like again.”

I wish Chekhov had pushed deeper to explain that Olga grieves not for her husband, but for the lost status his eminence would have given her.

Like the fictional Dr. Dymov, the real-life Charles King is of quiet excellence. He is full of decency and honor. He is trusted and beloved by the men he leads, and to the last, he will never betray their trust. He offers Ms. Canedy respectful, full-hearted adoration. She accepts his courtship, but still frets that he is beneath her.

“I wondered if Charles could truly be happy married to a willful woman who earned considerably more than he did,” she writes.

There is subtle parsing here of crosscurrents of race and class: both Ms. Canedy and Sergeant King have climbed beyond the sphere of their parents’ achievements and of their modest neighborhoods, but Ms. Canedy has scaled higher. Dare she turn around now and reach back for this man? The writer is hard on herself, letting the best light fall on Sergeant King.

But, unlike Olga’s tale, Ms. Canedy’s narrative becomes a love story. Sergeant King’s goodness wins her heart. “Even though I still found it irritating when he mispronounced a word, I had grown to love his mind.” Not all great love stories are ignited by the lightning bolt of love at first glance; this humbler I’m-going-to-talk-myself-into-this-good-man version is believable and real.

They hope to marry, but now time is short. George W. Bush is elected; the twin towers fall; the White House purveys false assertions of weapons of mass destruction; Iraq is invaded; Sergeant King is called up. The two cling to each other whenever he can find time away from training his troops. The couple conceive a baby, then Sergeant King leaves for Iraq. In his duffel bag he carries one of Ms. Canedy’s last gifts to him, a new-father’s journal.

Sergeant King will leave Iraq only once, for two weeks, to meet his 5-month-old son, Jordan. He does not speak of the war. Instead the new parents nestle with their jolly boy and try not to count off the days. Sergeant King writes in his journal every night, committing a lifetime of wisdom to its pages, in case he fails to return to raise Jordan. The father’s journal forms the backbone of this memoir. (It was also the subject of a Times article by Ms. Canedy in 2007, “From Father to Son, Last Words to Live By.”)

On his last visit Sergeant King presents Ms. Canedy with a painting he has made: a self-portrait of a man with angel’s wings, kneeling before God. She shoves it back at him in a panic. They say goodbye, then each stands alone and sobs — Ms. Canedy in her apartment, Sergeant King (she learns later) in the lobby. On Oct. 14, 2006, Sgt. Charles King is killed when an improvised explosive device rips through his Humvee.

There are no politics here, no accusations against the Bush White House. Ms. Canedy, having fallen in love with a career soldier, respects his sense of duty too much to rail against his orders. But “A Journal for Jordan” is impossible to read without a sense of bitter knowledge that this principled man fell at the behest of leaders less guided by honor. That is no trick O. Henry ending. It is a denouement full of suffering, worthy of Chekhov.

Goldbuggery

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_standard

Russell: What I Have Lived For

"Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind ...  


Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer."

http://users.drew.edu/jlenz/br-prolog.html
http://www.amazon.com/Autobiography-Bertrand-Russell/dp/041522862X

Thompson Invictus

Fred Inglis - The Nation  - 20 Sept 1993

[The late E.P. Thompson, U.K. correspondent for The Nation, conveyed
his nuclear disarmament message to an American audience via powerful
articles in our pages.  We asked a friend to evoke the stature of the
man.]

----------

The greatest living historian of the English-speaking world died on
August 28.  Edward Thompson was the son of an American mother and a
British father, a methodist poet-preacher who almost became a Buddhist
and who was a close friend of Nehru as a result of his passionate
advocacy of Indian independence.  Edward's brother, Frank - poet,
scholar, naturalist, hero - was executed while fighting with the
partisans against the Bulgarian fascists at a moement when, as Edward
came to believe the Allied negotiators could have bargained him out
of captivity if only the first frosts of the cold war had not begun to
glint in Sofia.
   

Thompson carried all this history into *his* history: the history
that he wrote and the history that he made.  Seen from down here, his
life was a victory wrung out of many defeats.
  

He was, to begin with, a Communist, like his brother.  His
communism was drawn from that best strain of genteel English idealism,
compounded of more or less equal parts of Marx and William Morris (of
whom he wrote an early biography) and of the great blast of
excellently high-minded and public-spririted generosity that blew from
his father's Oxford at the end of the nineteenth century.  Thompson
stood squarely in that grand tradition, and reached beyond it as
well, to Swift, Wordsworth and Paine, to the Dissenting Academies of
whose quarrelsome and fraternal formation he was so great a
chronicler, and above all to William Blake, whose contradictory and
ardent vision and whose richly comic caricatures of Old Corruption
brought such color and power to Thompson's own imaginative
dramatization of class and world politics.  (Thompson's last work, his
long-pondered book on Blake, comes out this fall.)
   

In 1956, like so many honest Communists in Britain and North
America, he left the party - just before it threw him out (for
continuing to publish what became *New Left Review*) - quietly, and
without any of the breastbeating that attended loss of faith in some
quarters.  Indeed, he didn't lose faith; not in equality, liberty,
fraternity, or faith in the absolute calling of the intellecutal to
oppose coarse old power, Blake's Nobodaddy, and its monstrous rutting
in lies and cruelty.

   

His idealism had taken him already to the scarred and fledgling
nation of Yugoslavia in 1947, where for a year he helped build one of
the railway lines that was to lead Tito's delicate federation into a
prosperous future.  After 1956, it took him to work in that peculiarly
British institution, the extramural department of an industrial
university, where students come in the evenings to voluntary classes
with a curriculum designed in partnership with their tutor and
intended to answer questions about their experience largely ignored by
more official reading lists.
   

Out of that teaching came Thompson's 1963
masterpiece, *The Making of the English Working Class*, an enormous
Marxist-Morrisan history of the years between the French Revolution
and England's modest substitute, the Reform Act of 1832.  The book
spoke like a novel of that great slow surge of feeling and self-making
that both drove along and held together the fissiparous movement of
the poor and the propertyless as they sought to understand and endure
the apocalypse of capitalism in its first headquarters over those four
decades.
   

In the meantime Thompson began his thirty-odd years of devotion to
the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.  In 1957 and for a few years
afterward that was a largely British affair, and he fought the fight
on the spot.  He went briefly to head the Center for the Study of
Social History at the newly founded University of Warwick in 1965 but,
discovering that the local businessmen who were so prominent in that
university's affairs had never noticed the propinquity of social to
socialist, resigned in a characteristically principled and noisy way,
and turned full time to the lonely, ill-paid craft of writer and the
dodo role of man of letters.
   

Yugoslavia; communism; disarmament; the labor movement; the
business university.  In 1973, soon after the murder of his comrade
Salvado Allende, alone in the lovely, provinical, almost Palladian
house in which he and his wife, Dorothy, lived these past thiry years,
Thompson reckoned up a few of his defeats in a poem apostrophizing his
old typewriter, "In answer to your call/ I rush out in this rattling
harvester/ And thrash you into type."
   

The biggest defeat was still to come.  In 1979 he published a
little pamphlet with a minority press called *Protest and Survive*
(which he rewrote for a U.S. audience; it appeared in the January 24,
1981, *Nation*). Its title parodied a ludicrous booklet issued to the
country advising its citizens on how to survive a nuclear attack.
("If you have a home fire extinguisher--keep it handy").  The pamphlet
called to action "the people of England" and charged them to refuse th
installation of the new generation of cruise missles in the English
countryside without benefit of parliamentary debate.
   

The second cold war had been declared by Carter, fervently affirmed
by Reagan and ear-piercingly seconded by Thatcher.  Thompson moved
for the opposition of the people.
   

They came.  They came by the millions from all over Europe, and not
a few from North America.  The missles arrived and were reviled.  The
people stayed.  Thompson spoke for them.  In a few pages of
pamphleteering, on a few hundred platforms, in the pages of the
liberal press, tired, tirelessly, he wrote a different account of the
history that had been and the history that might be.  He summoned up
the hideous nightmare of what he called "exterminism," and
counterposed a vision of free peoples refusing to do what the hairy
ogre Nobodaddy told them to do.  And in the end--in Prague, Berlin,
Bucharest and elsewhere--they didn't.  It was even a sort of victory.
A great writer captures the best feelings flowing through a
given historical moment and gives them form.  Thompson caught and held
the feeling of two generations utterly fed up with the mendacity,
waste and pointless cruelty of the cold war; and having held them, he
made the feelings speak and tell.  To do this, he broke off his proper
scholarship and created an idiom for the weeklies that outstrips all
the great journalistic masters.
   

Now, there is nobody left who commands the prose with which to
summon the somnambulist people of England to defend their ancient
liberties.  And there is nobody left who could live the life of writer
and man of letters as Thompson did.  Yet the line of defeats that make
up his life and that, taken together, constitute the triumphant victor
of his life, may still teach us much, on this or that side of the
Atlantic.  What they teach was best spoken in a single poem much
admired by Thompson himself.  Its strong, familiar and stirring
Victorianness has its place in the obituary of such a man: "Say not
the struggle naught availeth...."

----------

Fred Inglis is a professor of cultural studies at the University of Warwick and author, 

most recently, of The Cruel Peace (Basic).

Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth

Say not the struggle naught availeth, The labour and the wounds are vain, The enemy faints not, nor faileth And as things have been, things remain. If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars; It may be, in yon smoke concealed Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers, And, but for you, posses the field. For while the tired waves, vainly breaking Seem here no painful inch to gain Far back through the creeks and inlets making Came, silent, flooding in, the main, And not by eastern windows only When daylight comes, comes in the light In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly, But westward, look, the land is bright. http://exagminations.tripod.com/id27.html http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20081223221740AA9bYUw

Nisbet, conservative sociologist

http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north120.html

Fascinating appreciation of Robert Nisbet (whose 'Sociological Tradition' was in the Penang Free School library) by a conservative, Gary North.  


"Was Nisbet a conservative or a liberal? I shall now make a statement that may get me into a lot trouble: there have been no prominent conservative philosophers in the Anglo-American conservative movement. They have all been classical liberals. Nisbet was no exception.

What is my definition of a conservative? It is a person who believes that the irreducible unit of civil law is not the individual citizen."

Recent book by Brad Lowell Stone, Robert Nisbet: Communitarian Traditionalist(2000).

Marriage in Time: A Primer

IN THE 1990S, Stephanie Coontz, a social historian at Evergreen State College in Washington, noticed an uptick in questions from reporters and audiences asking if the institution of marriage was falling apart. She didn’t think it was, and was struck by how everyone believed in some mythical Golden Age of Marriage and saw mounting divorce rates as evidence of the dissolution of this halcyon past. She decided to write a book discrediting the notion and proving that the ways in which we think about and construct the legal union between a man and a woman have always been in flux.

What Coontz found was even more interesting than she’d originally expected. In her fascinating Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage, she surveys 5,000 years of human habits, from our days as hunters and gatherers up until the present, showing our social arrangements to be more complex and varied than could ever seem possible. She’d long known that the Leave It to Beaver–style family model popular in the 1950s and ’60s had been a flash in the pan, and like a lot of historians, she couldn’t understand how people had become so attached to an idea that had developed so late and been so short-lived.

For thousands of years, marriage had been a primarily economic and political contract between two people, negotiated and policed by their families, church, and community. It took more than one person to make a farm or business thrive, and so a potential mate’s skills, resources, thrift, and industriousness were valued as highly as personality and attractiveness. This held true for all classes. In the American colonies, wealthy merchants entrusted business matters to their landlocked wives while off at sea, just as sailors, vulnerable to the unpredictability of seasonal employment, relied on their wives’ steady income as domestics in elite households. Two-income families were the norm.

Not until the 18th century did labor begin to be divided along a sharp line: wage-earning for the men and unpaid maintenance of household and children for the women. Coontz notes that as recently as the late 17th century, women’s contributions to the family economy were openly recognized, and advice books urged husbands and wives to share domestic tasks. But as labor became separated, so did our spheres of experience—the marketplace versus the home—one founded on reason and action, the other on compassion and comfort. Not until the post-war gains of the 1950s, however, were a majority of American families able to actually afford living off a single breadwinner.

All of this was intriguing, for sure—but even more surprising to Coontz was the realization that those alarmed reporters and audiences might be onto something. Coontz still didn’t think that marriage was falling apart, but she came to see that it was undergoing a transformation far more radical than anyone could have predicted, and that our current attitudes and arrangements are without precedent. “Today we are experiencing a historical revolution every bit as wrenching, far-reaching, and irreversible as the Industrial Revolution,” she wrote.

Last summer I called Coontz to talk to her about this revolution. “We are without a doubt in the midst of an extraordinary sea change,” she told me. “The transformation is momentous—immensely liberating and immensely scary. When it comes to what people actually want and expect from marriage and relationships, and how they organize their sexual and romantic lives, all the old ways have broken down.”
For starters, we keep putting marriage off. In 1960, the median age of first marriage in the U.S. was 23 for men and 20 for women; today it is 28 and 26. Today, a smaller proportion of American women in their early 30s are married than at any other point since the 1950s, if not earlier.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/11/all-the-single-ladies/8654/

http://www.stephaniecoontz.com/about.htm


http://www.amazon.com/Marriage-History-How-Love-Conquered/dp/014303667X/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_1

Victimhood and its Uses

http://www.jesusandmo.net/2011/10/19/badge2/

Michael Mann on Power in the 21st Century; Lukes' review of Gellner biography

http://www.amazon.com/Power-21st-Century-Conversations-John/dp/product-description/0745653235/ref=dp_proddesc_0?ie=UTF8&n=283155&s=books


http://www.amazon.com/Ernest-Gellner-Intellectual-John-Hall/dp/1844676021
http://newleftreview.org/?view=2922&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nlr71


In an interview with John Davis he remarked that ‘not having had a faith, I think I do understand . . . what Descartes and Hume and Kant were about, namely, the struggle to establish the foundations of knowledge’, and ‘[n]ever having been a member of a community but having been on the margins of a number gave me an understanding of . . . what the yearning for community is all about.’ 

When I first saw Berber villages of the central Atlas, each building clinging to the next, the style wholly homogeneous, the totality crying out that this was a Gemeinschaft, I knew at once that I wanted desperately to know, as far as an outsider ever could, what it was like inside.

It is clear that his life experience led him, as Perry Anderson observed, to a far less intense and exalted view of national allegiance than that of Max Weber, another figure who loomed large in his intellectual firmament. What Gellner favoured was the limited, liberal nationalism of Masaryk’s Czechoslovak Republic, namely,

the acceptance of ‘forms of life,’ from styles of food, handshakes and wallpapers to political rituals or personal relationships—but an acceptance which no longer endows anything with an aura of the absolute, but is ironic, tentative, optional, and above all discontinuous with serious knowledge and real conviction. In this limited sphere of ‘culture,’ relativism is indeed valid. In the sphere of serious conviction, on the other hand, relativism is not an option open to us at all.

Bertrand Russell on Work - and Idleness

http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html


First of all: what is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. The second kind is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders, but those who give advice as to what orders should be given. Usually two opposite kinds of advice are given simultaneously by two organized bodies of men; this is called politics. The skill required for this kind of work is not knowledge of the subjects as to which advice is given, but knowledge of the art of persuasive speaking and writing, i.e. of advertising.

Angelus Novus: 'Progress'

A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.


-  Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History

Turkey & Kemalism: a masterly conspectus by Perry Anderson

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n17/perry-anderson/kemalism

In the spring of 1924, Kemal scrapped the caliphate, a religious institution still revered across the Muslim world (there was a wave of protest as far away as India), and was soon closing down shrines and suppressing dervishes, banning the fez, changing the calendar, substituting civil law for the sharia, and replacing Arabic with Latin script. The scale and speed of this assault on religious tradition and household custom, embracing faith, time, dress, family, language, remain unique in the Umma to this day. No one could have guessed at such radicalism in advance. Its visionary drive separated Kemal from his predecessors with éclat.

But systematic though it was, the transformation that now gripped Turkey was a strange one: a cultural revolution without a social revolution, something historically very rare, indeed that might look a priori impossible. The structure of society, the rules of property, the pattern of class relations, remained unaltered. The CUP had repressed any strikes or labour organisation from the start. Kemal followed suit: Communists were killed or jailed, however good diplomatic relations were with Moscow. But if there was no anti-capitalist impulse in Kemalism, nor was there was any significant anti-feudal dimension to it. Ottoman rule, centred on an office-holding state, had never required or permitted a powerful landowning class in the countryside, least of all in Anatolia, where peasant holdings had traditionally prevailed – the only real exception being areas of the Kurdish south-east controlled by tribal chiefs. The scope for agrarian reform was thus anyway much more limited than in Russia, or even parts of the Balkans, and no attempt at it was made.

Yet the social landscape hit by the cultural revolution was at the same time the opposite of a stable traditional order, in one crucial respect. If no class struggles lay behind the dynamics of Kemalism, ethnic upheavals on a gigantic scale had reshaped Anatolian society. The influx of Turks and Circassians, refugees from Russian or Balkan wars, the extirpation of the Armenians, the expulsion of the Greeks, had produced a vast brassage of populations and properties in a still backward agricultural economy. It was in this shattered setting that a cultural revolution from above could be imposed without violent reaction from below. The extent of deracination, moral and material, at the conclusion of wars that had continued virtually without interruption for more than a decade – twice as long as in Europe – permitted a Kulturkampf that might otherwise have provoked an unmanageable explosion. But by the same token the revolution acquired no active popular impetus: Kemalism remained a vertical affair.

Though it broke, sharply and abruptly, with Ottoman culture in one fundamental respect by abolishing its script and so at a stroke cutting off new generations from all written connection with the past, in its distance from the masses Kemalism not only inherited an Ottoman tradition, but accentuated it. All premodern ruling groups spoke idioms differing in one way or another, if only in accent or vocabulary, from those they ruled. But the Ottoman elite, for long composed not even principally of Turks, was peculiarly detached from its subjects, as a corps of state servants bonded by command of a sophisticated language that was a mixture of Persian, Arabic and Turkish, with many foreign loan words, incomprehensible to the ruled. Administrative Ottoman was less elaborate than its literary forms, and Turkish remained in household use, but there was nevertheless a huge – linguistically fixed – gulf between high and low cultures in the empire.

Kemalism set out to do away with this, by creating a modern Turkish that would no longer be the despised patois of Ottoman times, but a language spoken alike by all citizens of the new republic. But while it sought to close the gap between rulers and ruled where it had been widest in the past, at the same it opened up a gap that had never existed to the same extent before, leaving the overall distance between them as great as ever. Language reform might unify; religious reform was bound to divide. The faith of the Ottoman elites had little in common with the forms of popular piety – variegated cults and folk beliefs looked down on by the educated. But at least there was a shared commitment to Islam. This tie was sundered by Kemal. Once the state started to target shrines and brotherhoods, preachers and prayer meetings, it was hitting at traditional objects of reverence and attachment, and the masses resisted it. At this level, the cultural revolution misfired. Rejected by the rural and small-town majority, Kemalist secularism was, however, adopted with aggressive zeal in the cities by modernised descendants of the Ottoman elite – bureaucrats, officers, professionals. In this urban stratum, secularism became over time, as it remains today, in its blinkered intensity, something like an ersatz religion in its own right. But the rigidity of this secularism is a peculiarly brittle one. Not just because it is intellectually thin, or divorced from popular feeling, but more profoundly because of a structural bad faith that has always been inseparable from it.

There is no reason to suppose that Kemal himself was anything other than a robust atheist, of more or less French Third Republic stamp, throughout his life. In that sense, he is entitled to be remembered as a Turkish Emile Combes, scourge of monkish mystification and superstition. But in his rise to power, he could no more dispense with Islam than Talat or Enver had done. ‘God’s help and protection are with us in the sacred struggle which we have entered upon for our fatherland,’ he declared in 1920. The struggle for independence was a holy war, which he led as Gazi, the Warrior for the Faith of original Ottoman expansion, a title he held onto down to the mid-1930s. ‘God is one, and great is his glory!’ he announced without a blush, in a sermon to the faithful delivered in a mosque in 1923. When the constitution of the Turkish Republic was framed in the following year, Islam was declared the state religion. The spirit in which Kemal made use of Muslim piety in these years was that of Napoleon enthroning himself with the blessing of the pope. But as exercises in cynicism they moved in opposite directions: Napoleon rising to power as a revolutionary, and manipulating religion to stabilise it, Kemal manipulating religion to make a revolution and turning on it once his power was stabilised. After 1926 little more was heard of the deity.

Eagleton reviews Jacoby on Utopia:

http://www.thenation.com/article/just-my-imagination?page=0,2

"The worst is not," remarks a character in King Lear, "so long as we can say, 'This is the worst'"; and what goes for the worst also goes for the best. Anything we can speak of must by definition fall short of the otherness we desire. So perhaps it is better to imagine the future only negatively, as Kant thought that we could catch a glimpse of infinity only by pressing against the limits of the mind and watching them warp and buckle. For his part, Jacoby wants a utopian thought that "pines for the future but does not map it out."

For Theodor Adorno, this negative utopia is known as art. For others, the only true image of the future is the failure of the present. Or, for that matter, the failure of the past. As Walter Benjamin reminded us, it is memories of enslaved ancestors, not dreams of liberated grandchildren, that drive men and women to revolt. To avoid some cheap leftist triumphalism, we must move backward into the future with our eyes fixed mournfully on that great heap of wreckage that is the past. Otherwise we are merely callow modernizers or cavalier avant-gardists, who in seeking to eradicate the past will discover that it returns with a vengeance to plague us.

Yet there are problems with this option, too, which Jacoby does not fully take on board. For one thing, it leaves the left open to a familiar pincers movement on the part of its adversaries. If you can spell out what a radical future would look like, you are the prisoner of a soulless blueprint; if you refuse to do so, you are an idle visionary. Marx sought to elude this double bind by spelling out what would be necessary for constructing a socialist future but not what it would look like once it was in place. You cannot deduce what a thing might look like simply by examining its conditions of possibility.

' ... it is the hard-nosed pragmatists who behave as though the World Bank and caffe latte will be with us for the next two millennia who are the real dreamers, and those who are open to the as yet unfigurable future who are the true realists.'

Jacoby on bloodlust:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/26/opinion/26jacoby.html


Small variations frequently elicit more rage than large ones because they imperil identity - what Freud, dubbed “the narcissism of minor differences.” 

'99%': Who's workingclass in America

http://www.progressive.org/one_percent_barbara_ehrenreich.html#.TpYOSVcGWIA.facebook


'Workingclass' in high capitalism is everyone who's compelled to work or shall not eat or fall into debt-slavery or be foreclosed on; for capital is the power to command labour -- to impose work as a condition of life. 'Workingclass' isn't a statistical category, an income bracket, much less personal possessions or lack thereof. It is those of us who, absent income-generating assets, have no option but to work for wages. Maybe not '99%', but 90% answer to that description -- as varied (pink/white/blue collar) and un-united as we are. 

Anointed in India: Jobs at 19

http://www.quora.com/Steve-Jobs/What-are-some-great-stories-about-Steve-Jobs#ans744398


Playboy: Where you shaved your head.

Jobs: That's not quite the way it happened. I was walking around in the Himalayas and I stumbled onto this thing that turned out to be a religious festival. There was a baba, a holy man, who was the holy man of this particular festival, with his large group of followers. I could smell good food. I hadn't been fortunate enough to smell good food for a long time, so I wandered up to pay my respects and eat some lunch. For some reason, this baba, upon seeing me sitting there eating, immediately walked over to me and sat down and burst out laughing. He didn't speak much English and I spoke a little Hindi, but he tried to carry on a conversation and he was just rolling on the ground with laughter. Then he grabbed my arm and took me up this mountain trail. It was a little funny, because here were hundreds of Indians who had traveled for thousands of miles to hang out with this guy for ten seconds and I stumble in for something to eat and he's dragging me up this mountain path. We get to the top of this mountain half an hour later and there's this little well and pond at the top of this mountain, and he dunks my head in the water and pulls out a razor from his pocket and starts to shave my head. I'm completely stunned. I'm 19 years old, in a foreign country, up in the Himalayas, and here is this bizarre Indian baba who has just dragged me away from the rest of the crowd, shaving my head atop this mountain peak. I'm still not sure why he did it.

'The pain of living in the present world'

Written in the night: The pain of living in the present world

By John Berger, Le Monde diplomatique, February 2003

I WANT to say at least something about the pain existing in the world today. Consumerist ideology, which has become the most powerful and invasive on the planet, sets out to persuade us that pain is an accident, something that we can insure against. This is the logical basis for the ideology's pitilessness.

Everyone knows, of course, that pain is endemic to life, and wants to forget this or relativise it. All the variants of the myth of a Fall from the Golden Age, before pain existed, are an attempt to relativise the pain suffered on earth. So too is the invention of Hell, the adjacent kingdom of pain-as-punishment. Likewise the discovery of Sacrifice. And later, much later, the principle of Forgiveness. One could argue that philosophy began with the question: why pain?

Yet, when all this has been said, the present pain of living in the world is perhaps in some ways unprecedented.

I write in the night, although it is daytime. A day in early October 2002. For almost a week the sky above Paris has been blue. Each day the sunset is a little earlier and each day gloriously beautiful. Many fear that before the end of the month, US military forces will be launching the preventivewar against Iraq, so that the US oil corporations can lay their hands on further and supposedly safer oil supplies. Others hope that this can be avoided. Between the announced decisions and the secret calculations, everything is kept unclear, since lies prepare the way for missiles. I write in a night of shame. By shame I do not mean individual guilt. Shame, as I'm coming to understand it, is a species feeling which, in the long run, corrodes the capacity for hope and prevents us looking far ahead. We look down at our feet, thinking only of the next small step.

People everywhere, under very different conditions, are asking themselves - where are we? The question is historical not geographical. What are we living through? Where are we being taken? What have we lost? How to continue without a plausible vision of the future? Why have we lost any view of what is beyond a lifetime?

The well-heeled experts answer. Globalisation. Postmodernism. Communications revolution. Economic liberalism. The terms are tautological and evasive. To the anguished question of where are we, the experts murmur: nowhere. Might it not be better to see and declare that we are living through the most tyrannical - because the most pervasive - chaos that has ever existed? It's not easy to grasp the nature of the tyranny for its power structure (ranging from the 200 largest multinational corporations to the Pentagon) is interlocking yet diffuse, dictatorial yet anonymous, ubiquitous yet placeless. It tyrannises from off shore - not only in terms of fiscal law, but in terms of any political control beyond its own. Its aim is to delocalise the entire world. Its ideological strategy, besides which Osama bin Laden's is a fairy tale, is to undermine the existent so that everything collapses into its special version of the virtual, from the realm of which (and this is the tyranny's credo) there will be a never-ending source of profit. It sounds stupid. Tyrannies are stupid. This one is destroying at every level the life of the planet on which it operates.

Ideology apart, its power is based on two threats. The first is intervention from the sky by the most heavily armed state in the world. One could call it Threat B52. The second is of ruthless indebtment, bankruptcy, and hence, given the present productive relations in the world, starvation. One could call it Threat Zero.

The shame begins with the contestation (which we all acknowledge somewhere but, out of powerlessness, dismiss) that much of the present suffering could be alleviated or avoided if certain realistic and relatively simple decisions were taken. There is a very direct relation today between the minutes of meetings and minutes of agony.

Does anyone deserve to be condemned to certain death simply because they don't have access to treatment which would cost less than $2 a day? This was a question posed by the director of the World Health Organisation last July. She was talking about the Aids epidemic in Africa and elsewhere from which an estimated 68 million people will die within the next 18 years. I'm talking about the pain of living in the present world.

Most analyses and prognoses about what is happening are understandably presented and studied within the framework of their separate disciplines: economics, politics, media studies, public health, ecology, national defence, criminology, education. In reality each of these separ ate fields is joined to another to make up the real terrain of what is being lived. It happens that in their lives people suffer from wrongs which are classified in separate categories, and suffer them simultaneously and inseparably.

A current example: some Kurds, who fled last week to Cherbourg, have been refused asylum by the French government and risk being repatriated to Turkey, are poor, politically undesirable, landless, exhausted, illegal and the clients of nobody. And they suffer each of these conditions at one and the same second. To take in what is happening, an interdisciplinary vision is necessary in order to connect the fields which are institutionally kept separate. And any such vision is bound to be (in the original sense of the word) political. The precondition for thinking politically on a global scale is to see the unity of the unnecessary suffering taking place. This is the starting point.

I WRITE in the night, but I see not only the tyranny. If that were so, I would probably not have the courage to continue. I see people sleeping, stirring, getting up to drink water, whispering their projects or their fears, making love, praying, cooking something whilst the rest of the family is asleep, in Baghdad and Chicago. (Yes, I see too the forever invincible Kurds, 4,000 of whom were gassed, with US compliance, by Saddam Hussein.) I see pastrycooks working in Tehran and the shepherds, thought of as bandits, sleeping beside their sheep in Sardinia, I see a man in the Friedrichshain quarter of Berlin sitting in his pyjamas with a bottle of beer reading Heidegger, and he has the hands of a proletarian, I see a small boat of illegal immigrants off the Spanish coast near Alicante, I see a mother in Mali - her name is Aya which means born on Friday - swaying her baby to sleep, I see the ruins of Kabul and a man going home, and I know that, despite the pain, the ingenuity of the survivors is undiminished, an ingenuity which scavenges and collects energy, and in the ceaseless cunning of this ingenuity, there is a spiritual value, something like the Holy Ghost. I am convinced of this in the night, although I don't know why.

The next step is to reject all the tyranny's discourse. Its terms are crap. In the interminably repetitive speeches, announcements, press conferences and threats, the recurrent terms are Democracy, Justice, Human Rights, Terrorism. Each word in the context signifies the opposite of what it was once meant to. Each has been trafficked, each has become a gang's code-word, stolen from humanity.

Democracy is a proposal (rarely realised) about decision-making; it has little to do with election campaigns. Its promise is that political decisions be made after, and in the light of, consultation with the governed. This is depend ent upon the governed being adequately informed about the issues in question, and upon the decision-makers having the capacity and will to listen and take account of what they have heard. Democracy should not be confused with the freedom of binary choices, the publication of opinion polls or the crowding of people into statistics. These are its pretence. Today the fundamental decisions, which effect the unnecessary pain increasingly suffered across the planet, have been and are taken unilaterally without any open consultation or participation. For instance, how many US citizens, if consulted, would have said specifically yes to Bush's withdrawal from the Kyoto agreement about the carbon dioxide greenhouse effect which is already provoking disastrous floods in many places, and threatens, within the next 25 years, far worse disasters? Despite all the media-managers of consent, I would suspect a minority.

It is a little more than a century ago that Dvorák composed his Symphony From the New World. He wrote it whilst directing a conservatory of music in New York, and the writing of it inspired him to compose, 18 months later, still in New York, his sublime Cello Concerto. In the symphony the horizons and rolling hills of his native Bohemia become the promises of the New World. Not grandiloquent but loud and continuing, for they correspond to the longings of those without power, of those who are wrongly called simple, of those the US Constitution addressed in 1787.

I know of no other work of art which expresses so directly and yet so toughly (Dvorák was the son of a peasant and his father dreamt of his becoming a butcher) the beliefs which inspired generation after generation of migrants who became US citizens.

For Dvorák the force of these beliefs was inseparable from a kind of tenderness, a respect for life such as can be found intimately among the governed (as distinct from governors) everywhere. And it was in this spirit that the symphony was publicly received when it was first performed at Carnegie Hall (16 December 1893).

Dvorák was asked what he thought about the future of American music and he recommended that US composers listen to the music of the Indians and blacks. The Symphony From the New World expressed a hopefulness without frontiers which, paradoxically, is welcoming because centred on an idea of home. A utopian paradox.

Today the power of the same country which inspired such hopes has fallen into the hands of a coterie of fanatical (wanting to limit everything except the power of capital), ignorant (recognising only the reality of their own fire-power), hypo critical (two measures for all ethical judgments, one for us and another for them) and ruthless B52 plotters. How did this happen? How did Bush, Murdoch, Cheney, Kristol, Rumsfeld, et al et Arturo Ui, get where they did? The question is rhetorical, for there is no single answer, and it is idle, for no answer will dent their power yet. But to ask it in this way in the night reveals the enormity of what has happened. We are writing about the pain in the world.

The political mechanism of the new tyranny - although it needs highly sophisticated technology in order to function - is starkly simple. Usurp the words Democracy, Freedom, etc. Impose, whatever the disasters, the new profit-making and impoverishing economic chaos everywhere. Ensure that all frontiers are one-way: open to the tyranny, closed to others. And eliminate every opposition by calling it terrorist.

(No, I have not forgotten the couple who threw themselves from one of the Twin Towers instead of being burnt to death separately.)

There is a toy-like object which costs about $4 to manufacture and which is also incontestably terrorist. It is called the anti-personnel mine. Once launched, it is impossible to know who these mines will mutilate or kill, or when they will do so. There are more than 100 million lying on, or hidden in, the earth at this moment. The majority of victims have been or will be civilians.

The anti-personnel mine is meant to mutilate rather than kill. Its aim is to make cripples, and it is designed with shrapnel which, it is planned, will prolong the victim's medical treatment and render it more difficult. Most survivors have to undergo eight or nine surgical operations. Every month, as of now, 2,000 civilians somewhere are maimed or killed by these mines.

The description anti-personnel is linguistically murderous. Personnel are anonymous, nameless, without gender or age. Personnel is the opposite of people. As a term it ignores blood, limbs, pain, amputations, intimacy, and love. It abstracts totally. This is how its two words when joined to an explosive become terrorist.

The new tyranny, like other recent ones, depends to a large degree on a systematic abuse of language. Together we have to reclaim our hijacked words and reject the tyranny's nefarious euphemisms; if we do not, we will be left with only the word shame. Not a simple task, for most of its official discourse is pictorial, associative, evasive, full of innuendoes. Few things are said in black and white. Both military and economic strategists now realise that the media play a crucial role, not so much in defeating the current enemy as in foreclosing and preventing mutiny, protests or desertion.

Any tyranny's manipulation of the media is an index of its fears. The present one lives in fear of the world's desperation. A fear so deep that the adjective desperate, except when it means dangerous, is never used.

Without money each daily human need becomes a pain.

Those who have filched power - and they are not all in office, so they reckon on a continuity of that power beyond presidential elections - pretend to be saving the world and offering its population the chance to become their clients. The world consumer is sacred. What they don't add is that consumers only matter because they generate profit, which is the only thing that is really sacred. This sleight of hand leads us to the crux.

The claim to be saving the world masks the plotter's assumption that a large part of the world, including most of the continent of Africa and a considerable part of South America, is irredeemable. In fact, every corner which cannot be part of their centre is irredeemable. And such a conclusion follows inevitably from the dogma that the only salvation is money, and the only global future is the one their priorities insist upon, prior ities which, with false names given to them, are in reality nothing more nor less than their benefits.

Those who have different visions or hopes for the world, along with those who cannot buy and who survive from day to day (approximately 800 million) are backward relics from another age, or, when they resist, either peacefully or with arms, terrorists. They are feared as harbingers of death, carriers of disease or insurrection. When they have been downsized (one of the key words), the tyranny, in its naivety, assumes the world will be unified. It needs its fantasy of a happy ending. A fantasy which in reality will be its undoing. Every form of contestation against this tyranny is comprehensible. Dialogue with it, impossible. For us to live and die properly, things have to be named properly. Let us reclaim our words.

This is written in the night. In war the dark is on nobody's side, in love the dark confirms that we are together.

© Copyright John Berger

Original text in English
<http://MondeDiplo.com/2003/02/15pain>

John Berger: A radical returns

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2005/apr/03/art.art1


"The controversial success of Ways of Seeing was followed by his sole excursion into post-modernist fiction with G, an experimental novel that won him the fledgling Booker Prize. Long before the stage-managed hysteria that now surrounds the Booker, Berger created a storm of controversy by using his acceptance speech to castigate Booker McConnell for their historical trading interests in the West Indies, then announced that he was donating half his prize money to the Black Panthers. One of the Panthers accompanied him to the event, he admitted later, and, ironically, seemed rattled by the passionate intensity of Berger's speech, whispering 'Keep it cool, man, keep it cool' throughout."




" 'What seems to have been abandoned of late,' he tells me at one point, sounding, for the first time, regretful, 'and what is absolutely fundamental to all we have talked about, is the notion of solidarity. And it is not only to gain something that we should seek solidarity, because solidarity, in itself, is a meaningful quality, that is to say, a quality that gives meaning to life, which makes sense of life. So, I hope it's there in my work.' "

Ralph Miliband: a review of his biography

Susan Watkins, on his classic 1979 essay on the role of the individual in history, ‘Political Action, Determinism and Contingency’:  


"Miliband pinpoints the inadequacy of classical Marxist thought on the question—its lazy reliance on a few famous formulations. He carefully unpicks the argument that, if not Napoleon—or Hitler, or Stalin—the times would have thrown up another similar figure, with the same results; and that the role of such ‘accidents’ as character can only be to accelerate or delay the general course of development. 


Instead, he urges, we need to conceptualize two different, but interrelated, historical processes: ‘transgenerational’ changes taking place over centuries—the shift from feudalism to capitalism, for instance—in which contingencies will indeed have only a minor effect;  and ‘generational’ history, at the level of decades, where individual interventions—Lenin in 1917—may have a decisive impact. 


In a transgenerational perspective, the Bolshevik revolution will ‘work its way into the tissue of time’: Lenin loses his importance. 


Yet if these long-range processes suffuse generational history, they do not negate it. For nobody really worries about the posterity of twenty generations hence and ‘there is enough “openness” in generational history to make the actions of individuals count, and their involvement meaningful’."




http://newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2438




http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=700&issue=129