Modern Society Archives - Page 2 of 21

Salome is Always With Us

“It is thy mouth that I desire, Iokanaan. Thy mouth is like a band of scarlet on a tower of ivory. It is like a pomegranate cut in twain with a knife of ivory. The pomegranate flowers that blossom in the gardens of Tyre, and are redder than roses, are not so red. The red blasts of trumpets that herald the approach of kings, and make afraid the enemy, are not so red. Thy mouth is redder than the feet of those who tread the wine in the wine-press. It is redder than the feet of the doves who inhabit the temples and are fed by the priests. It is redder than the feet of him who cometh from a forest where he hath slain a lion, and seen gilded tigers. Thy mouth is like a branch of coral that fishers have found in the twilight of the sea, the coral that they keep for the kings!…It is like the vermilion that the Moabites find in the mines of Moab, the vermilion that the kings take from them. It is like the bow of the King of the Persians, that is painted with vermilion, and is tipped with coral. There is nothing in the world so red as thy mouth….Suffer me to kiss thy mouth. […]I will kiss thy mouth, Iokanaan. I will kiss thy mouth.”

Ardent, over-the-top love poetry? Not exactly.

The quotation comes from Oscar Wilde’s play, Salome, which is a retelling of the story of the beheading of John the Baptist. Iokanaan is John. The speaker is Salome, step-daughter of Herod. Iokanaan has been imprisoned by Herod. Herodias, Herod’s wife and Salome’s mother, hates Iokanaan because he has been loudly and publicly condemning her behavior. So far, the story closely follows that of the gospels.

But, of course Wilde would never just write an adaptation of a Biblical story for the purpose of inspiring faithful Christians. The twist? Salome desperately tries to seduce Iokanaan. She has him hauled out of the cistern where he is imprisoned and launches into a lengthy seduction routine. Iokanaan is unmoved. Herod then wanders in; he is a bit drunk and heads out from his party to get some air. He asks Salome to dance for him. Herodias vehemently objects; she doesn’t like the way Herod looks at her daughter. Salome dances the Dance of the Seven Veils. Herod, completely besotted and rather aroused, promises to give her whatever she asks. Salome demands the head of Iokanaan. Note: she does not consult her mother here. She wants the head for herself. Herod reluctantly agrees.

Salome gets the head. “Ah! Thou wouldst not suffer me to kiss thy mouth, Iokanaan. Well! I will kiss it now. I will bite it with my teeth as one bites a ripe fruit. Yes, I will kiss thy mouth, Iokanaan.[…]Ah! I have kissed thy mouth. Iokanaan, I have kissed thy mouth. There was a bitter taste on thy lips. Was it the taste of blood?…Nay, but perchance it was the taste of love.”

Seeing Salome fervently kissing the still bleeding head is a bit much for even Herod. He calls out to his soldiers “Kill that woman!” They do. End of play.

Do you want to watch the play now? It is a very short and for the most part lightweight play. The only reason to watch it is to watch the depravity of Salome. You get to watch a woman kissing a severed head! How has this not been made into a Hollywood movie yet? (Curiously, there is a 1953 movie entitled Salome (starring Rita Hayworth), but it is not based on Wilde’s play—rather than ending with Hayworth kissing a severed head, it ends with her listening to Christ delivering the Sermon on the Mount. Ah, the innocent 1950s.)

If you watch Wilde’s play, you also get to see the Dance of the Seven Veils. What is that dance? You probably think it is some ancient Middle Eastern striptease. It isn’t ancient at all. Wilde just made up the title of the dance and tossed it into the play. But it sure sounds like a real dance, doesn’t it? It subsequently became a real dance. Richard Strauss liked Wilde’s play and wrote and opera based on it. The opera has a section for the Dance of the Seven Veils. Rita Hayworth does the dance in the movie! You can also watch the operatic version if you prefer.

The play was banned in England. But, it is not clear that the ban had a real effect. In Wilde’s lifetime, it was only performed twice in France. When the ban in England was eventually lifted, it didn’t exactly become a hit. It truly is a rather shallow play, relying on the shock value for its raison d’etre.

So, is this just vulgarity for the sake of shocking the rubes? Conditioned as we are in the modern age to an endless stream of shallow vulgarity, it is easy to dismiss the play as such. But, there is one aspect of the play that should give us pause before tossing it aside.

Remember Wilde’s source material. The Biblical story is also a rather shockingly vulgar affair. One of the problems with the way we read the Bible is that the horror is lost. We read this story and think that Herod is nasty guy. We remember his father, also Herod, ordered the slaughter of the innocents. The beheading of John the Baptist becomes a tale showing the apple did not fall far from the tree. Wilde didn’t invent the erotic dance leading to a head on a platter. Is right there in the New Testament. But, it seems like a much tamer story in the Bible.

Read the gospel account of the story. Matthew 14:3-11 (Herod had seized John and bound him and put him in prison for the sake of Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife, because John had been saying to him, “It is not lawful for you to have her.” And though he wanted to put him to death, he feared the people, because they held him to be a prophet. But when Herod’s birthday came, the daughter of Herodias danced before the company and pleased Herod, so that he promised with an oath to give her whatever she might ask. Prompted by her mother, she said, “Give me the head of John the Baptist here on a platter.” And the king was sorry, but because of his oaths and his guests he commanded it to be given. He sent and had John beheaded in the prison, and his head was brought on a platter and given to the girl, and she brought it to her mother.

Now translate that story to modern times today. A governor of one of the smaller states, Rhode Island or Wyoming, is married to his brother’s wife. A local Baptist pastor has publicly condemned the relationship. One night, the governor is hosting a dinner party at the governor’s mansion for his birthday. As entertainment for the guests, he asks his step-daughter to do a striptease. Filled with lust, the governor promises to give her whatever she wants. She asks for the head of the Baptist pastor on a platter. The head, still dripping with blood, is delivered on a platter to the girl in front of all the guests.

You think outrageous things happen in the world of politics today. I don’t care what Outrage of the Day is particularly bothersome to you. The story of Herod and John the Baptist is a whole lot worse.

People are depraved. This is not a new phenomenon. Wilde didn’t invent depravity. So, why are we still shocked when people do depraved things?

Related Posts
McCarthy, Cormac Blood Meridian “Apathy in the Face of Evil”
Wilde, Oscar The Picture of Dorian Gray “Art of the Quip”

Free to Explore Ideas

From an Interview published by the Academic Freedom Alliance.

Q.: You frequently publish articles at a variety of outlets. Many of your writings deal with important economic matters, but you also explore other big questions through the topics of literature, art, and culture. Finding controversy seems to be getting easier these days, even with subjects that were completely uncontroversial only years ago. My question is this, how important is the protection of extramural speech, as part of a broader defense of academic freedom, for academics who want to write and publish as you do?

A: The idea of academic specialization is relatively new. Before the start of the 20^th century, it was common for scholars to write about matters beyond the narrow fields in which they had expertise. One of the advantages of working at a small liberal arts college is that there is not the expectation of staying in your narrow research lane. Ideas are not bound by the modern divisions in the academy; there is much to be learned when experts in one area of knowledge explore other areas. For academic freedom to have any meaning, a scholar must have the freedom to roam widely on the intellectual terrain. If academic freedom only applies to narrow bands of research and others are allowed to determine what constitutes that narrow band, then there really is no academic freedom.

It is true that not all speech is covered by academic freedom. A scholar cannot make death threats and then plead that academic freedom means they should not be fired for doing so. But, we need to be very careful to keep small the realm of speech uncovered by academic freedom. This is particularly vital in the classroom. There is a strong temptation in colleges to claim that academic freedom does not include the right to say things which upset students. This temptation must be fiercely opposed if academic freedom is to have any meaning.

You can read the rest of the interview at the Academic Freedom Alliance

Related Posts
Lukianioff, Greg The Coddling of the American Mind “Coddling College Students”
Hitz, Zena, Lost in Thought “Lost in Thought”

Get Woke, Go Broke?

Woke Capitalism is a growing and troubling dimension of contemporary economic and political life, especially among the mammoth multinational corporations that dominate so many aspects of our lives.” Such laments have become omnipresent in conservative circles. It has become hard to keep up with the Outrage of the Day. Woke Corporations have adopted the norms of the Left’s pet programs, both in advertising and public declarations, as well as in adopting ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) and DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) guidelines, leaving conservatives fuming.

What is surprising is that the opening quotation was not written by a conservative. It is the assessment of Carl Rhodes in Woke Capitalism: How Corporate Morality is Sabotaging Democracy. Rhodes, a Professor of Organization Studies at the University of Technology Sydney, is a very proud progressive. While he hates Woke Capitalism every bit as much as all those “right-wing reactionaries,” he goes to great lengths to reassure the reader on nearly every page that he is not one of them.

Have we finally found a place where conservatives and progressives can agree?

Read the rest at Law and Liberty

Related Posts
Friedman, Milton and Anna Schwartz A Monetary History of the United States “How the Fed’s Hubris Has Contributed to Inflation”
Chaucer, Geoffrey The Canterbury Tales “Do Goods Have an Inherently Just Price?”

Pseudo-Intellectuals and Their Opponents

Yet Trissotin, I must admit,
So irks me that there’s no controlling it.
I can’t to gain his advocacy stoop
To praise the works of such a nincompoop.
It was those works which introduced me to him;
Before I ever saw the man, I knew him;
From the vile way he wrote, I saw with ease
What, in the flesh, must be his qualities:
The absolute presumption, the complete
And dauntless nature of his self-conceit,
The calm assurance of his superior worth
Which renders him the smuggest man on earth,
So that he stands in awe and hugs himself
Before his volumes ranged upon the shelf,
And would not trade his baseless reputation
For that of any general in the nation.

That is Clitandre in Moliere’s The Learned Ladies. It (and all the quotations which follow) are from the absolutely brilliant Richard Wilbur translation. (Side note: Wilbur’s translations of Moliere’s verse plays are extraordinary; somehow there is never a forced rhyme.)

As the play opens, we get dueling portraits of Trissotin. As is obvious from the above, Clitandre is not impressed. Clitandre’s mother, Philaminte, is highly impressed, so much so that she is arranging to marry off her daughter to this scholar she esteems so highly. (Fear not, Dear Reader, in the end Clitandre will marry the true love of her life and all will be well.)

If you want an example of how things never really change, you can do no better than this play from 1672.

When we meet Trissotin later in the play, we predictably discover that Clitandre is right. Trissotin is an intellectual fraud. The question for us today is why does Philaminte believe that Trissotin is so brilliant? Why doesn’t she see that there is absolutely no depth of thought in her intellectual hero; why is she so willing to accept that what he is saying must be true?

Consider the following conversation:

Trissotin: For method, Aristotle suits me well.
Philaminte: But in abstractions, Plato does excel.
Armande: The thought of Epicurus is very keen.
Belise: I rather like his atoms, but as between
            A vacuum and a field of subtle matter
            I find it easier to accept the latter.
Trissotin: On magnetism, Descartes supports my notions.
Armande: I love his falling worlds…
Philaminte:                  And whirling motions!

Here is the question: What did you think when you read that conversation? Are Trissotin, Philaminte, Armande and Belise having an intellectual conversation, full of insight and wit? Did you see the name-dropping and assume these all must be super smart people having a super smart conversation? Or did you notice that none of them are actually saying anything beyond platitudes? They are simply name-dropping.

I have noticed this phenomena a lot, probably because I spend way too much time in gatherings with Ph.D.s. (My favorite example occurred at a pre-talk dinner where one of my colleagues and the guest speaker spent a considerable time showing off their ability to mention great museums. “The museum in Detroit is really excellent.” “Yes, but have you ever been to the one in Cincinnati?” And so on for a good 10 minutes. Somehow neither one of them ever manage to actually say anything substantive about any of the museums they mentioned. It was hard not to laugh out loud at them.) In the popular imagination, if you have a lot of years of education, you must be really smart and know a lot of stuff. In reality, most Ph.D.s I have met are the equivalent of an idiot savant. They know a whole lot about one small thing; that is how they earned their Ph.D.

But, does someone with a Ph.D. know anything about any subject outside of their narrow area of expertise? Maybe. (Frequently told joke which is funny because it is true: Ph.D.s are people who have learned more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing.) Just like people in any walk of life, some people are widely knowledgeable and well-read and some are not. Some lawyers and doctors and pastors and electricians and barbers know things beyond their narrow expertise; some really don’t know much of anything else. Yet, there is a presumption that people with Ph.D.s know a lot of things.

Why does this matter? Think for a moment about the effect of this assumption that intellectuals have knowledge and wisdom on things beyond their narrow expertise. What would be the effect of this assumption if the academics start believing it themselves?

Moliere’s describes it perfectly in a discussion of the aims of this society of the “learned.”

Regarding language, we aim to renovate
Our tongue through laws which soon we’ll promulgate.
Each of us has conceived a hatred, based
On outraged reason or offended taste,
For certain nouns and verbs. We’ve gathered these
Into a list of shared antipathies,
And shall proceed to doom and banish them.
At each of our learned gatherings, we’ll condemn
In mordant terms those words which we propose
To purge from usage, whether in verse or prose.

Looking at the state of the modern Academy, it is really hard to believe those words were written over three centuries ago. Certain nouns and verbs shall henceforth be verboten! Forbidden words! Words that we all know should be hated! We’ll gather together and denounce these words!

What gives the characters in this play the confidence that they can decide which words needs to go? Do you even have to ask? These people are the learned! They are the ones who have that scintillating discussion above about Aristotle and Plato and Epicurus and Descartes and thus they know more than the plebeians who live outside their learned society. One of the goals of the learned society, perhaps the most important goal, is to purge society from the use of improper language. (Earlier in the play Philaminte fired a servant because the servant’s grammar was improper!)

Drawing the connection to contemporary society is not difficult. But, then a funny thing happened. The hoi polloi outside the Academy banded together to oppose the attempt of the learned to ban words from use. Sadly, the result is not an argument for freedom of speech. The result is an attempt to ban a different set of words and thoughts from educational institutions.

We are quickly heading for a world in which academic institutions have dueling speech codes. Both speech codes are being promulgated by “experts,” people who pose as all-knowing mandarins happy to use their status to advance the idea that those other people out there are talking in really really bad ways. There are a lot of Trissotins in the modern world.

There is no better example of this baleful problem than Penguin Random House, which has recently done both of these things:

1. Decided that the Roald Dahl books need to be edited to remove offensive language.
2. Filed a lawsuit in Florida to oppose attempts to remove books other people find offensive from school libraries.

If that seems like Penguin Random House is contradicting itself, you are under the mistake impression that anyone cares about free speech anymore. Free speech is for me, not for thee.

Sadly, Penguin Random House is all too typical. The result has been a whole bunch of people relying on their own Most Favored Intellectuals, who are happy to issues directives from on high about how all the rest of us should think.

Where does this lead? Moliere again:

By our high standards we shall criticize
Whatever’s written, and be severe with it.
We’ll show that only we and our friends have wit.
We’ll search out faults in everything, while citing
Ourselves alone for pure and flawless writing.

In 1672, that was satirical wit. Now? It is the motto of just about everyone involved with education on both sides of the duel.

What is the solution? Lose the idea that there is anyone out there whose ideas are so pure and flawless they can be accepted without critique. It is painfully easy to notice the pseudo-intellectuals amongst those with whom you disagree. Remember that there are many pseudo-intellectuals in your tribe too. A little intellectual humility would go a long way.

Related Posts
Moliere The Misanthrope “Will You Be Honest With Me?“
Deneen, Patrick Why Liberalism Failed “Make the Holy Roman Empire Great Again”

The Canary in the Fed’s Coal Mine

Timing is everything. Imagine publishing a book two weeks before a major crisis that is perfectly explained in its pages. Jeanna Smialek just did that.

If you want to understand the financial crisis slowly unfolding right now, you can do no better than to read Limitless: The Federal Reserve Takes on a New Age of Crisis.

If you took an economics course back when you were an undergraduate, you may think that you know what the Federal Reserve does. Your monetary policy education, however, is probably out of date. March 23, 2020, is a date that means little to most people, but it is, as Smialek dubs it in a chapter title, “The Day the Fed Changed.” This is the story of a revolution, but because there were so many things happening in those days of Covid panic, not many people noticed.

Read the rest at Law and Liberty

Related Posts
Menand, Lev The Fed Unbound “A Brave New Financial World”
Friedman, Milton A Monetary History of the United States “How the Fed’s Hubris Has Contributed to Inflation”

The Cult of Heinlein

“Philosophically, just one line of ink can make a different universe as surely as having the continent of Europe missing. Is the old ‘branching time streams’ and ‘multiple universes’ notion correct? Did I bounce into a different universe, different because I had monkeyed with the setup?”

The Door Into Summer by Robert Heinlein raises that question.

It does not even attempt to answer that question.

Therein lies a tale.

Let’s begin on a positive note! If you are looking for a lightweight, easy-reading romp-through-time sort of book, the type of book you read on a lazy Thursday evening or Saturday afternoon, then pick up a copy of The Door Into Summer. If you like time travel books with quirky oddities about an imagined future, then this book is right up your alley. If you want one of those science fiction books that are fun as long as you put it out of your mind right after reading it, this book is great. If you want so see someone writing in 1957 and predicting Roomba, you have come to the right place.

All of the previous paragraph is genuinely meant positively. Sometimes you just want an easy reading book like you want a glass of lemonade on a hot day. You don’t analyze the lemonade, you just enjoy it because it is the right drink at the right time.

But, if you read it and start, you know, thinking about it, the joy will dissipate quickly. So, why has this book been republished as part of a series called “SF Masterworks”? Cover blurb? “One of the most readable books in the world…short, fast and deeply enjoyable.” Why are there similar breathlessly positive reviews all over the internet about this book? Indeed, of all the cotton candy science fiction written in the late 1950s, why is this one still in print? Because Robert Heinlein wrote it.

Heinlein is one of those authors who has a fan base that is rabid. He is near Ayn Rand levels of rabidity. That comparison is apt. Nobody reads and adores Ayn Rand because she was a masterful storyteller with impeccable prose. She wasn’t. People love Rand because she writes long, easy reading novels which validate a particular strain of libertarian thought. If you are young with libertarian leanings, you read Rand and then if you want to maintain your street cred, you tell everyone how great her novels are.

Heinlein is another “rational anarchist” novelist. If you like his politics, you are required to praise his novels. To say otherwise means you are one of those…insert shudder…communists.

Unlike Rand, however, Heinlein is actually a good novelist. He writes well and he actually says things besides “Freedom is Excellent.” But it is important to note, at his very best he is good, not truly great. If you like the genre, his best novels are well worth reading. If you are not an aficionado of science fiction, there are better places to embark upon the journey into the genre.

The Door Into Summer is not one of his best novels. Not even close. Any high praise you hear about this story is simply the aura of Heinlein leaking into the review.

Start with the time travel. The plot hinges on a time loop. Near the outset of the story, our hero Dan Davis goes forward in time via the Long Sleep. Then he goes back in time to right after he went forward in time. Then he goes forward in time to right after he went backward in time. Everything is all wrapped up in a tidy little ball of happiness. Then he ruminates about time travel—see the quotation at the outset of this blog post. Then the novel ends without bothering about how that time travel question can be answered. Alas, in order to make any sense of the story, that time travel question needs to be answered. Heinlein obviously knew the story was internally incoherent, so he added the bit in which Dan acknowledges he can’t make any sense about how this whole thing could possibly have worked.

The problem is that rather than work out the details, Heinlein just cheats. The Long Sleep is purely forward travel and isn’t really time travel at all. The body gets put into some sort of suspended animation and then is awakened at some future date. It’s simply Rip van Winkle. Sleep for a long time and wake up in a strange new world. Nothing wrong with that; it can make for an entertaining story as the hero discovers the oddities of the future.

But, after the Long Sleep, (take a deep breath), Dan wants to go back in time and suddenly we find out there was a secret government program that invented backward time travel, but it didn’t get used all that much before the whole thing was shut down, but fortunately the guy who invented the backward time travel machine is still alive, though retired, and even more fortunately the university at which he worked kept his lab intact, and even more fortunately the time machine still works, but alas, it is impossible to know if the object or person about to embark on time travel using this machine will go backward or forward in time, but that doesn’t matter to Dan, so then, in the most improbable part of the book, Dan convinces the old inventor of the time machine to send him off by taunting the old fellow that the machine never really did work, and so the old inventor gets annoyed and Dan gets a free trip in time, which mirabile dictu, sends him backward instead of forward in time.

Then, to go back forward in time, Dan just heads to a place offering the Long Sleep.

The whole backward time travel part comes out of nowhere, just suddenly tossed into the novel in an off-hand manner to allow Dan to go back in time without creating any wonder about why lots of people don’t go back in time. That’s cheating, but I can live with cheating on that scale.

Where the story becomes intolerable: why does Dan decide to go back in time after he went forward in time? And why was Dan not worried that the machine might just send him further forward in time? (Are you sure you are ready for this?) While in the future, Dan discovered that he had done things in the past after he went into the Long Sleep, so he knew he went back in time, which means not only that it was possible to go back in time, but that he had done it. Right there, we have a massive problem. If the only reason Dan went back in time was because he knew he went back in time, then how did he go back in time in the first place? One might think that a noted science fiction author might be interested in that question in a novel about time travel that he was writing. Instead, Heinlein lazily ends the novel with Dan stating he has no idea how that all could possibly have worked.

After that you can toss in a few other odd bits. Dan goes back in time while he is in a laboratory, but the laboratory wasn’t around back when Dan was originally alive, so when he goes back he finds himself in a nudist colony. Why? Who knows? Fortunately the naked couple who finds Dan clothed in the nudist colony is not as horrified as they say all the other nudists would be and so they are able to convince Dan to take off all his clothes so he won’t get thrown out of the nudist colony and even more fortunately the naked guy is a lawyer who is able to help Dan with all sorts of the tricky legal matters time travel requires Dan to solve.

Yeah, the nudist colony bit is weird, but that touches on one of the obsessions (see Stranger in a Strange Land…) which the Reader must ignore to pleasantly read Heinlein. It is a bit harder to ignore another example of Heinlein’s obsession in this novel, however. One of the reasons for Dan to go back in time was to arrange for his love interest to also take the Long Sleep so that Dan and his love interest can live happily ever after in the future. His love interest is 12 years old. Ah, but he convinces her to wait six years before going to sleep, so then in the future he can spend his evenings with the 18 year old version of his 12 year old love interest, so that makes everything OK.

Like I said, just don’t think about it, and the book is a nice read. But, when you hear someone praising it as one of the greatest science fiction books of the 20^th century, ask if you can see their membership card for the Heinlein Radical Anarchist Society.

Related Posts
Dick, Philip Minority Report “I Know What You Did Next Summer”
Leiber, Frtiz The Big Time “Is All Time Redeemable?”