Great Persons

Konstantin Leontev, Conservative Russian Philosopher

2009-03-11T15:44:00.000-07:00

As far as the conservative Russian philosopher, Konstantin Leontev, was concerned, a one-hundred year old tree is worth more than twenty faceless, scurrying, modern men. As for neoteric man’s Machine Age, more and faster movement does not mean more life: "The machine runs but the living tree stands firm." With the exception of the new machine gun, Leontev had a visceral aversion for the latest technology. Neither was he fond of the older, "passive technology" - the telegraph and railroads.

Leontev was widely read but hardly heeded during his lifetime. After his death nearly a century ago, he received scant attention until the fall of the Soviet Union. His writings presently enjoy a revival among intellectuals interested in the direction of Russia's post-Communist development during the globalization process and in the Conservative Christian response to material progress. Leontev was one of the first Russians to scorn the supposedly enlightened progress of European liberal democracy, and to propose that Russians have a duty to resist its poisonous spread instead of embracing it. Since the eruption of the French Revolution, Europe had been wasting away under cover of the suicidal rationalizations of Kant and the Utilitarians. Progressive thinkers were praising the mediocre man, who was going nowhere, instead of emulating outstanding heroes and prophets. Europeans were running themselves ragged and making themselves sick. Suffering from a pervasive malaise, they were burying the flowers of their dying civilization in museums along with artifacts they had imported from exotic lands.

Leontev, a devout Orthodox Christian, believed in a grand future for Russia - which he felt was in an earlier stage of development than the rest of the world - provided it could be "frozen" into a sort of state of suspended animation to protect it from the leveling effect of democracy and technological modernization. He thought the average Nineteenth-century European was an instrument of global destruction, and he was not sorry to say so in The Average European as the Ideal and Instrument of Universal Destruction (1884) While his Slavophile contemporaries extolled their alternative, extolling the native virtues of Slavdom, Leontev, who was not a racist, expounded his doctrine of byzantinism - the merger of Caesarism and Christiandom. Although the Byzantine Empire has never been a popular historical subject, Leontev held it in high regard because it combined Roman imperialism with the spiritualism of the Orthodox Christian Church - the East had become the province of the Orthodox Church following the great schism with Rome. Under this synthesis of church and state, the emperor was both political caesar and spiritual pope of Holy Russia, the "Third Roman Empire." The Orthodox Church is then Christianity without heresy and protests. It is a true Christianity, disillusioned of the utopian ideals of earthly happiness, purity, and universal well-being. It is the very antithesis of the heretical or atheistic humanist doctrines of equality, freedom, perfection and happiness for everyone. It is a Christianity that opens its door to all, but knows fully well that everybody will not come in; therefore it is a Christianity of exclusiveness, for those who do not enter in shall be damned not be saved. Furthermore, Leontev's byzantinism asserts the virtues of centralism in state and church, and affirms the primacy of state and church over individual rights. Thus Leontev's byzantinism fiercely opposes liberalism.

Indeed, our conservative Russian philosopher believed that liberalism was a leveling plague. Arising from German feudalism, the liberal plague is destined to reduce civilization to a corrupt corpse decaying into its constituent particles. Mankind's history follows the course of an individual human: from birth, through life, to death and rotting decadence; that is, the history of mankind is a triunal, biological development: from "primeval simplicity" to "complex flowering" to "resimplification."

Leontev was a romantic pessimist. He wrote with a flair, fondly portraying the diverse expressions of human nature that were, alas, being leveled to the flat mundane plane of banal, bourgeois mediocrity. Nothing disgusted him more than to walk down a street and be confronted by the drab architectural similarity of its buildings and the repulsively uniform attire of the town's inhabitants. He was an aesthete whose appreciation of the universe depended on sensibility and the love of beauty. His idea of beauty implied a diversity of sensation under the "despotism" of its unity, its organic "Idea." Furthermore, his artistic penchant for organic diversity favored ethnic diversity and multiculturalism. He embraced almost everything the decadent Nineteenth century opposed: He defended class strife, passion, prejudice, superstition, and fanaticism.

The struggle for beauty is not simply something an artist does. It is the objective process of evolution culminating with beauty, where the "highest degree of complexity (is) held together by a certain inner and despotic cohesiveness", Leontev declared. "The fundamental law of the Beautiful is...diversity in unity." When the "complex flowering" outgrows itself, the organism, including the organization of humanity, declines and dies. We are not surprised to hear that Leontev, trained in medicine at Moscow University, served as an army doctor in the Crimean War, where he acquired a somewhat morbid interest in the putrefaction of corpses.

Now our conservative philosopher’s ascetic religious inclination conflicted with his exalted aesthetics of flowering complexity. At first Leontev loved the beauty of the pomp and circumstance of the Church with its icons and elaborate services, but he eventually tended towards the complete renunciation of things. Shortly before his death in 1891, he took the ascetic vows, but his conversion actually took place twenty years prior, in 1871. He had entered a Greek Orthodox monastery on Mount Athos, following a "religious crisis". His wife was mentally and physically ill at the time, and his mother had died far away, calling his name. He came down with cholera, and as He was resting on his sofa, his eyes fell upon the icon of Virgin Mary. He suddenly believed in the "existence and the might of the Mother of God" as a genuine and real person. He begged Madonna for his life, saying he was not ready to die, for he had great works to do, then he confessed his sins. Thus Mary became his new mother, replacing the one who had died. Some time later he repeated the old French adage "Cherchez la femme!", saying one must seek the woman during every serious crisis in life.

Leontev used the phrase "transcendental egoism" to identify his religious doctrine, meaning that religion is not a collective enterprise but an intimate personal undertaking, a personal relation between the believer and God. Notwithstanding his opposition to political individualism, he held fast to egoism in art and religion. What mattered to him, first of all, was his personal salvation. First things first: he asked his servant, "How can one save anyone else not having been saved himself?" Of course his emphasis on personal salvation is traditional: the early Christians were not interested in fighting for Rome or for the public welfare - they cared not for this world, but for the next and the saved person in it. In fact, Leontev thought "pink" Christianity and its efforts to bring social peace and heaven to Earth were absurd. In his view, peace and heaven on Earth is an oxymoron, an impossible antinomy; if it could exist it would be the end of Christianity if not of all religions. "From the Christian standpoint it can be said, the reign of perpetual peace, prosperity, concord and general security, all that democratic progress has so unsuccessfully espoused, would be the greatest imaginable calamity in the Christian sense....", he said. In other words, in order to exist, God needs Satan; society is satanic; salvation Christianity is in this sense anti-social.

Leontev's faith in God was rooted in fear. He averred that fear is the very essence of faith. "One must reach the point of really fearing God with an almost animal fear....The holy father and teachers of the Church have emphasized that the beginning of wisdom... is the fear of God... Love without fear and humility is one of the manifestations... of that individualism and that adoration of the rights of dignity of man... which destroyed faith in anything transcendental...." A true believer is one who, being truly scared to death, surrenders his mind to God. First there must be that fear. Only then can true love exist. But such fear is unfortunately rejected by liberals and pink Christians. Life on earth is vain and the only thing certain is that all things will end. Only God is permanent. Truth is not found or realized in vainly hoping for happiness, or in rights and liberties. Hope and belief in worldly life contradicts Christ's teachings. Only by recognizing what a hell on Earth this life is can a person be reconciled with his or her life and the power of others over it. According Leontev’s version of Christianity, the further we "progress", the worse off we are.

Ironically, many people, particularly the so-called existentialists, have found a great deal of joy in realizing that life on Earth is meaningless, futile, hopeless. While some people are depressed with inklings of this truth, others find great comfort in acknowledging the futility of life, in wholeheartedly tossing their vain hopes for the future into the trash can. Still we might retain our animal faith, and, like Leontev, enjoy life's aesthetic detours along the highway of transcendental egoism.

Of course we may sympathize with Leontev's views while disagreeing with them. In fact, a person often disagrees secretly, in his heart, with his own philosophy. A man’s philosophy, the Wisdom he loves for its abstract consolation, might be a poor substitute for his sainted mother or wife or the Virgin Mary. Indeed, his actions, based on feelings, might give the lie to his thoughts. This leads us to ask, “What sort of man was Konstantin Leontev?”

We hear that he was a nice man. He loved his wife and he took care of her himself or made certain she was cared for when she fell ill. He had his good friends; he and his wife were the dearest of friends. He was kind to people. Although he did not believe in a great collective future for mankind, the records show that he was kind to the people he encountered during his life, and that he was well-liked in turn. Despite his poverty, he was a charitable man, and his charity was for the rich as well as the poor. According to his biographer, Stephen Lukashevich, Leontev's philosophy was the antithesis of his life. He advocated vigorous health - he was constantly ill. He preached virility - he was effeminate. He praised amorality and violence - he was meek, compassionate, and remorseful. He wanted to reform Russia with his writings - he was a failed writer. The eminent Russian philosopher of freedom, Nicolas Berdyaev, deemed Leontev important enough to write a book about him. Although Berdyaev takes Leontev to task for his weaknesses, the biography is written with obvious affection for the man and for his work. There is something likeable about the man, and his old-fashioned contradictions provide us with considerable insight into our own predicament.

Reference Quoted:

Stephan Lukashevich, KONSTANTIN LEONTEV (1831-1891): A Study in Russian Heroic Vitalism, New York: Pageant, 1967

Suggested Reading:

Nicolas Berdyaev, LEONTIEV, Maine: Academic International, 1968

AGAINST THE CURRENT (Selections from Leontev), New York: Weybright and Talley.

RUSSIAN PHILOSOPHY, Vol. II, 'The Average European as an Ideal and Instrument of Universal Destruction' by Leontev, Trans. William Shafer and George L. Kline, Chicago: Quadrangle Books

George Soros

2008-05-27T15:14:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time George Soros was the young Hungarian man named Schwartz Gyorgy who spoke Esperanto fluently because his dad taught it. He was the tyke renamed George Soros, purportedly to hide his Jewish roots. He was the teenager who assumed a Christian identity, avoided the extermination of 500,000 Hungarian Jews, and survived the Communist and Nazi house-to-house battle over Budapest. He was the youth who defected from the Communist regime while attending an Esperanto youth congress, and got a degree from the London School of Economics. He was the man who headed for America with a Wall Street career and Professor Popper’s metaphysical science of scientific uncertainty in mind, the very man who eventually made four-thousand percent on his quantum-leaping Quantum Fund, ringing up a net worth of several billions of dollars in ten years flat. He is the bubble man who thrives on punctured bubbles, the man who profits on market manias and panics, he is the man who capitalizes on the wild swings or extreme disequilibrium of free markets and then philanthropically plunges a goodly portion of the plunder into propagating the political-economic reform of the system that made him rich.

Needless to say, but we repeat it again and again to reinforce the inspiring notion that almost any poor slob can get filthy rich in America if he really wants to, George has done awfully well with his hunches. He is the boom-bust-cycle man, the bubble punctuator who, for example, allegedly broke the Bank of England and ran the Malaysian and Thai currencies into the ground. He is the man who bragged about doubling his money on the mortgage-trust bust among many other things exemplary of the consequences of human fallibility. And he is the man who recently scooped up $4,000,000,000 on the housing crisis. In fact, he considers the current mortgage meltdown and foreclosure run up to be indicative of the biggest financial crisis of his lifetime, hence much more is to be made if the capitalist system does not completely collapse for want of appropriate regulation of animal instincts. In that case, no doubt the great market alchemist would turn the dross of civilization’s ruination into gold.

George has lost a lot of dough too, and his fat lady has yet to sing her aria; but we do not expect him to crash and burn given his fabulous fortune, which would be impossible to personally spend, especially given his age. He is giving hundreds of millions away to propagate liberal causes; perhaps he should turn his entire fortune over to Open Society Incorporated for the salvation of the world from the depredations of the regressive neoconservative faction – perchance Open Society Incorporated could buy its own continent one day. Yes, it is true that the doom he predicted for 1998 did not come about, but he is predicting doom again; given his record, we doubt that his hunch is probably wrong. What are we cattle to do? Stampede into the Great Depression? May Open Society Incorporated save us!

We know George makes his big hauls on radical, short-term moves. Cattle are directed to invest for the long run, dollar-cost-averaging along the way; yet in the long run each and every one of us in fact doomed, so why not go for broke now? Sure, we may gradually pile up a fortune for our old age, for our kids and grandkids, and for charitable works. A certain Canadian gentleman has seats on several exchanges, seats that he keeps, he says, simply to keep up with what is going on while he looks for investment opportunities that he and his clients can salt away for their kids. He does not try to outwit the market as a whole, but looks for particular opportunities he understands. Fine, but the sharp incline of the S-curve and the anarchic irrationality of free-marketers gives us cause to believe that the apocalypse is nigh, that the last of Toynbee’s civilizations is about to bite the dust. We are doomed all the more if there is no god nor gods to appease; if there is one or more of them, we had better find better rituals.

Let Doom be damned! Liberal-minded, nonjudgmental people have little faith in the domination of Dom or in Dom’s Doom or in redemption. Still, we like the excitement of periodic bloodbaths that cleanse the channels for the compound growth of our personal investments, so let the lion eat his predecessor’s cubs and plant his own. We want to make a big crop with a little seed if not get something for nothing. Others want to make a fast buck by all means, including risking everything. After all, the average return is boring. The fixed point or soul of a stable equilibrium is death. It does not exist among the living, and its existence after death is highly unlikely despite the ancient absurdity of ultimate skepticism, to the effect that nothing exists because nothing is permanent. So let life swing from mania to panic while we study the psychology of crowds and wonder when the market will break and where the inflation will go next.

Enter George Soros to take advantage of volatility, the speculator’s best friend. Anybody can have a hunch. We should not rely on hunches without the benefit of a great deal of water under the bridge and numerous imaginative exercises in respect to what the future might bring. He reflects a great deal before having a hunch that things are reflexively overvalued or undervalued by the elite, who ride herd on the manic-depressive market until paranoia mounts, shots are randomly fired, and the crowd stampedes from delusions of grandeur to delusions of persecution. He runs with the cattle until his animal instinct informs him that the lowing herd is about to run off the wall of worry, and then he scoops up a lion’s portion of the kill.

Back spasms are reportedly the reflex that moves George to place his bets. They must be a symptom of his intuition, a subconscious judgment on his considerable experience and education if not a transcendental revelation from the money-god. Let us not underestimate the potential of the human brain mounted on the economic animal; surely a randomly walking monkey could not chalk up as many wins as George. Nor should we overestimate the workings of the marvelously complex biological brain: he may be enjoying a rather long lucky streak. Almost every extraordinarily successful person takes a bow to Lady Luck or Bon Fortuna after giving standard lip-service to the virtues of hard work and long hours. And many hard-working traders prosper because they know what they are doing, and their knowledge is sometimes a hunch in some hysterical form, such as a back spasm or itching palm. Any one of them might have been George Soros, but they did not take his place on the curve, and for good reason: their fate was not his.

George has said that he is not to blame for the downfalls, for if he had not taken his position someone else would have enjoyed the windfalls from the punctured bubbles. Now he is not the man who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge at midnight on New Year’s Eve because only 85 had jumped before he arrived, and he wanted to obey the so-called law of averages, which stated that 86 people on the average jump off the bridge annually. No, George was pushed off the bridge, not to plummet fatally but to catch the updraft and circle far above the madding Wall Street crowd. The cause of his success is, in a word, Fate. Perchance George Soros would contest the circular argument that he is the world’s greatest speculator because he is the world’s greatest speculator, which in effect is to say that the effect is the cause, but that is his problem, not ours. That is not to say that we discount his acumen or begrudge him his fate; we celebrate both.

The Russian Philosopher of Freedom

2006-03-20T09:32:00.000-08:00

Nicolas Berdyaev (Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdiaev, (1874-1948), dubbed 'the Philosopher of Freedom,' was a religious idealist and leading Christian personalist. His most important notion, that of mystic freedom, was derived from the ideas of the astute German businessman and great mystic, Jakob Boehme (1575-1624), whom Hegel identified as the first German philosopher.

Boehme of course was the subjective pantheist who took up the willing self, which he said was derived from life-feeling, as the source of all knowledge. For Boehme, god is the Ground of Everything, the willing Nothing that searches for something by means of its will and finds everything within itself. Conflict emerges from the differentiation produced by the will at the core of Nothing, wherefore nature, the outer reflection of the inner discovery, is the image of god, hence a mystical identity of god and nature abhorrent to dualists. The progressive elaboration of the either/or struggle in which one decides for/against god is via the Trinity. The meaning of this moving life is in Christ, and its purpose is to retrieve the lost unity by allowing the fire of love of Christ heart to embrace all. Boehme had a profound influence not only on Berdyaev but on many others including but by no means limited to Descartes, Newton, Goethe, Hegel, Schelling, Blake.

As for politics, Berdyaev was a socialist who studied Marx, but he was not a Communist. He was in fact a foremost critic of the Russian implementation of Marxism (Marxist-Leninism or Bolshevism). Berdyaev was further influenced by such thinkers as Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Jaspers.

Berdyaev studied law at the University of Kiev until 1898, when he was expelled for radical activities. That ended his formal education except for a semester in 1903 under the neo-Kantian professor Wilhelm Windelband at Heidelberg. Neo-Kantian philosophy was largely a "spiritual" reaction to materialism, another 'Romantic' reaction. It was a confused revival of either the human spirit or the transcendental spirit. Berdyaev's philosophy opposed both the human and divine spirit to nature. Berdyaev, like many other non-conformist European thinkers, was not satisfied with "objective" materialism, and attempted to merge Kantian with Marxist thought.

Berdyaev, student of the German idealism, was the best Russian representative of the Christian version of the new spiritualism. It was best represented in Germany by the Christian professor, Rudolf Eucken, who won the Nobel prize for Literature in 1908 over the objections of critics who said philosophy was not literature. Eucken is barely heard of today, and then as a neo-Kantian curiosity. He was disgraced, perhaps unfairly, by his patriotism - his devotion to the German cause in the Great War and especially his endorsement with other notable German scientists and philosophers of the infamous paper whitewashing the German atrocities in Belgium, where he sometimes addressed German soldiers.

The philosophy of neo-Kantian Christians was more or less a subjective philosophy of life, somewhat vague and obscure, one might say 'romantic' - Eucken was criticized for his indefinite Christian "activism," while Berdyaev's work is sometimes referred to as "impressionistic." Berdyaev attempted to elaborate a coherent philosophy, yet he like other neo-Kantian inclined philosophers rejected systematic or mechanistic thought in favor of a dynamic dialectic. He emphasized the freedom of the individual. He therefore was not averse to accepting the tag "existentialist" when the pop-culture sobriquet was eventually applied to him.

Berdyaev had welcomed the Russian Revolution of February 1917, but he detested the policies of the Bolsheviks who seized power in October. Despite his opposition, he was in good graces with the Revolutionary government for awhile. In 1919 he founded the Free Academy of Spiritual Culture, and he became professor of philosophy at Moscow University (1920). However, in 1922, he and more than 100 other non-Marxist exiles were expelled from the Soviet Union for refusing to embrace "orthodox" Communism - they could only return to Russia on pain of death.

Berdyaev and other exiles in Berlin founded the Academy of Philosophy and Religion. He transferred the Academy to Paris in 1924 and soon became France's leading Russian émigré. He founded PUT - the Way - (1925-1940), dedicating the religious-philosophical journal to criticism of Russian Communism. He was Editor-in-chief (1924-1948) for the YMCA-Press in Paris, the main outlet for Russian religious philosophers.

For Berdyaev, truth is not the product of rational inquest but comes from a transcendental light. By virtue of the transcendental light human beings can penetrate environmental confusion and arrive at the truth. He prophesized the advent of a progressive era of divine-human "creation."

The reader no matter how "highly" educated will recognize the fact that the fundamental revolutionary notion mentioned above is timeless. Berdyaev's song is relatively modern and it is somewhat unique in the expression of its truth. We shall listen to a phrase or two, and return when we will with our reflections:

"The idea of the existence of eternal principles of life has a double significance. It is has positive significance when freedom, justice, the brotherhood of men, the supreme value of human personality as that which must not be turned into a means to an end, are acknowledged as eternal principles. And it has negative significance when relative historical social and political forms are made absolute, when concrete historical institutions, represented as organic, are given the prestige and authority of sacred things, as, for example, monarchy or some particular form of property.

"It can be expressed in this way, that the eternal principles of social life are values which can be realized in subjective spirit and not concrete forms which can be realized in the objectivization of history. The conservative tendency of the organic theory of society which defends the sacred character of concrete historical institutions cannot be recognized as Christian, not only because it contradicts Christian personalism, but also because it contradicts Christian eschatology. In the objective historical world there are no sacred things which can be transferred to eternal life; there is nothing worthy of eternal life, and for this reason there exists a moral obligation that the world should come to an end and be judged by a higher judgment. Organic theories of society are anti-eschatological; there is a false optimism, a reactionary optimism in them." (1)

(1) Slavery and Freedom by Nicolas Berdyaev, New York: Scribner's 1944

Emma Goldman

2005-12-19T10:22:00.000-08:00

I have received a note on patriotism from an anarchist, mentioning the illustrious anarcho-communist, Emma Goldman, one of the foremost troublemaking immigrants of her day.

Emma Goldman was born in Russia in 1869. She moved to St. Petersburg and worked in factories, just in time for the assassination of Tsar Nicholas II in 1881. She was inspired by such progressive ideals as the equality of the sexes and cooperative labor, and soon became one of fifteen rebellious youth exiled to America to face the sweatshops and slums.

After several anarchists were hanged, for bombing the police at Chicago's Haymarket Square rally for an 8-hour day in 1886, Emma decided she would be a revolutionary anarchist. She unsuccessfully tried to prostitute herself to raise money to buy a gun to kill Henry Clay Finch. Finch was slightly wounded when the attempt was finally made, but Emma's condonation of it branded her as a "terrorist". During her career thereafter she was jailed several times, for advocating the taking of bread by force; distributing birth control literature; and organizing anti-draft leagues during the First World War. Hoover declared her to be "one of the most dangerous women in America." She was deported as a 'Red' to Russia in 1912 for obstructing the draft. She witnessed the Russian Revolution while there. At first enthusiastic, she soon became disillusioned by the Bolshevik's despotic absolutism, and was alone in condemning it at the time.

Emma was an "anarchistic communist" before practical experience showed that the phrase is a contradiction of terms. She joined the Spanish Revolution when she was 67, believing that the revolting youth would prove that anarchism is not "chaos." But Emma and other anarchists finally wound up making concessions to militarism. As for terrorism in general, Emma's mature position was that it should be limited to self-defense and must not be allowed to become a counter-revolutionary institution.

Emma Goldman is admired by many feminists today for her feminist agenda. She and most other leading feminists of her day were encouraged if not personally loved by sexologist Havelock Ellis. Ellis, a psychologist who was far more popular than Freud, sanctioned sexual liberation scientifically, from an authoritarian male perspective which women quickly seized in their own behalf. His work had a greater liberating effect than Freud's, leading to the Sexual Revolution of the Sixties.

Emma believed that a woman is a person, not a sex commodity. A woman has a right to her own body. A woman has a right to make her own fortune, and to refuse service to God, state, society, husband, family. Women do not have to marry men in order to love them. Finally - and here she varied from the majority viewpoint - women can only be freed by revolution, not by the ballot. Emma died in 1940 and was buried in Chicago not far from Haymarket Square.

The Marquis de Condorcet

2005-12-04T12:40:00.000-08:00

The Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794) was the youngest and only philosophe of note who played a major role in the French Revolution. He was already a celebrated mathematician when he a took up politics and became a member of Voltaire's Enlightenment clique. Opposed to the sentimental appoach of Rousseau to human nature, Condorcet employed mathematical language, extending differential calculus and the theory of probability from physics to moral and social behavior, applying statistical methods for the analysis of sociological phenomena.

Human evil, he believed, was largely due to the miscalculation of human interest. In sum: evil outcomes are due to errors in judgment. Humans are natural-born gamblers: they instinctively weigh the chance of one result against another. To obtain better results, a scientific method is needed to eliminate error; to wit: the social calculus of probability. The application of mathematics and political arithmetic to social science provides us with a quantitative degree of certainty about what outcomes will obtain when conditions are manipulated.

Presumably social scientists conduct their studies for the benefit of society, that society may improve, or progress, if you will. Of course the Marquis de Condorcet believed in progress - he is still best known for pioneering perhaps the first modern theory of progress. The social scientist presumes that human behavior like the rest of nature is subject to certain laws which he might discover through the careful observation of phenomena and reflections thereupon, leading to the formulation of hypotheses for experimentation.

No doubt nature is subject to laws, but we may modify the application of natural laws to our personal and mutual advantage, for we are endowed for our own improvement with the power of reason. Our ability to reason is natural, therefore so is progress. Reasoning may be employed to ascertain logical means to measurable progress. For instance, probability theory employs symbolic logic to determine what course of action is most likely to succeed. Hence progress in is augmented by a precise language grounded in facts of sense.

Wherefore it would seem that human progress is entirely up to us, that it is not dependent on the miraculous intervention of transcendental forces - forces beyond our apprehension and comprehension. Therefore Condorcet was "anti-Christian" as Christianity was then conceived. He was raised by Jesuits, who do seem to have a knack, at least when confronted with rebellious young minds, for cultivating brilliant "atheists," particularly in France.

Human beings, he asserted, progress from conditions of brute enslavement, including enslavement to their own passions, towards mastery over those conditions. Mastery is achieved by the removal of certain obstacles to the ultimate perfectibility of humankind, obstacles such as elitism, tyranny, popular prejudice, ignorance. Such impediments to progress can be removed from the progressive highway by scientific and technological advances and political revolution.

Of course the goal of progress is freedom. But absolute freedom from restraints, absolute power, is impossible, not to be had except in Chaos, whereas relative freedom is always from an evil towards a good; yet the perfectibility of man, which is indefinite, is by no means assured. National and class inequalities are eventually reduced and the lot of individuals improved via the historical movement is towards equality - not absolute, totalitarian equality, but the equality of rights, the equality of freedom without regard to race, color, creed or sex - Condorcet was an advanced feminist. Wherefore Condorcet advocated freedom in order; freedom under law; freedom legally constituted with a constitution, preferably that of a liberal democracy. He was in fact enthusiastic about the outbreak of the Revolution, but he did not conceive of Reason as a raving lunatic or murderous fanatic - and his independent adherence to reason instead of the bloodthirsty mob cost him his life.

The Marquis de Condorcet had considerable influence in England. For example, his thinking had an impact on an eccentric inventor and English radical by the name of Charles Stanhope (Lord Mahon). Stanhope, the son of a mathematician, was like his father in some important respects. Joseph Priestley, a man very much admired by Condorcet, dedicated his third volume of 'Experiments on Air' to Charles Stanhope's father. Condorcet also admired Stanhope's associate, Richard Price, an important adviser to the fledgling United States of America. Price pioneered actuarial methodology for mutual aid societies, devising sinking fund schemes to fund social security and reduce the national debt. As a matter of fact, all radicals worth their roots were once intensely enthusiastic about social mathematics and political arithmetic; but that is not to say they were cold-hearted, calculating, mean-minded men.

Condorcet is sometimes wrongly depicted as an arid, heartless man. We often discover that an emphasis on reason is compensation for underlying passion. Condorcet tried to thwart the Jacobin movement, and lost his life in the process. Condorcet had been "proscribed" by the Jacobins - he was to be decapitated - so he went into hiding. He eventually left the house he was hiding in because he feared for the safety of the painter's widow who insisted on harboring him there despite his protests - he finally left the house in disguise. After wandering about in the sticks for three days with a tattered copy of Horace, he walked into a tavern where he was pointed out and arrested. On the day of his imprisonment, while awaiting the guillotine, he died, some say by self-administered poison he allegedly kept hidden in his ring. Suicide would certainly be fitting, because he always said that, although there are laws regulating the universe, including man's behavior, man has the natural power to modify their application for his own benefit - and that is his freedom.

Condorcet circumspectly warned his daughter against unregulated passion shortly before he died, highly recommending reason as passion's proper guide. And he wrote his incredibly optimistic essay on the history of progress as he was under the shadow of the guillotine. No doubt he had his doubts in those circumstances, but he still enjoyed a degree of certainty he called "hope", hope not for his own fate but for man's movement into the next epoch along the long road of indefinite perfectibility. He eschewed the opposite, pessimistic perspective on probability that considers the long-term disadvantage, that the house always wins in the long run, because if something can go wrong it eventually will, even if the residents are under the advice of Nobel-prize winning quants.

No, the Marquis de Condorcet was certainly not a cold-blooded, heartless being, but rather enthusiastically human.

Upgrading Our Great Men

2005-06-18T08:58:00.000-07:00

"We are getting richer, and when a person has more to eat he gets more democratic." N.S. Khrushchev May 1959

David Satter, in his article, 'What Gulag?' (May 16, 2005, New York Times), reported that the 60th anniversary of the Allied victory over Nazi Germany had "unleashed a wave of Soviet nostalgia. The great belief of the Russian veterans in the righteousness of their cause, reported the Russian press, had helped the Soviet Union survive the worst war of the 20th Century. At last year's Victory Day ceremonies, Vladimir Putin had said, "We were victorious in the most just war of the 20th century. May 9 is the pinnacle of our glory." More recently President Putin referred to the Soviet breakup as "The greatest geopolitical catastrophe of our times."

"This nostalgia," Mr. Satter writes, "is not harmless. Not only does it ignore the fact that the Soviet Union was just as terroristic as Nazi Germany, it also reflects what Hannah Arendt called 'pervasive, public stupidity.'" Mr. Satter believes in history as our teacher; if only we would learn its lessons, we might not make the same mistakes. We are all familiar with the platitude, yet we usually repeat the mistakes time and time again, as if they were warranted by divine or diabolical providence, and that history simply teaches us that we are natural born killers destined to kill each other despite our ideals or because of them. Technology simply makes us more efficient; perpetual innovation will lead to total annihilation in the near future, or at least drastically reduce the population, the growth of which is, according to some experts, the greatest long-term threat to humankind.

In any case, no national 'race' is exempt from public stupidity and mass-organized, paranoid terrorism against enemies, not even the United States of America, patriotically self-described as "the sole superpower in the world on which an attack is an attack on civilization itself." American stupidity and violence is merely more sophisticated or "civilized". Americans who fund their military-industrial complex are certainly do not deem themselves responsible for the "collateral damage" of war and economic sanctions: nearly a million deaths in Iraq alone since the First Bush War on Iraq. The most bellicose and mendacious of all presidents are celebrated accordingly, as "great men", instead of being impeached for their lies to the American people and their crimes against humanity. They are, after all, representative men; they represent those who admire them for the power that human beings have always respected, to the point of projecting, personifying, and worshipping divine Power despite its ambiguity and ambivalence when applied on Earth..

Notwithstanding the fall of the Iron Curtain and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, we hear that photographs of the brutal dictator Stalin are being taken out of the closet, dusted off and hung on the walls. Statues of Stalin are also being polished and erected around the country. We are not certain of just how many millions of deaths Stalin is generally responsible for; 40 million might approximate the total. Mr. Satter reports that the town council of Orel demanded of President Putin that Stalin's "honor" be restored to the revised history books, that statues be erected and his name applied to streets. Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov said Russia "should once again render honor to Stalin for his role in building socialism and saving human civilization from the Nazi plague." Of course Stalin's nation-building role included economic policies that starved millions to death. His use of slave labor is well known: the "best" intellectuals, those who resisted totalitarianism with individualism, were consigned to slave camps, where their suffering gave them even further cause to appreciate liberty and to publish tracts on the subject if they survived.

Russian lives lost in the Second World War numbered 27 million. Most people living today, particularly Americans, do not have the slightest notion of the horrors and suffering experienced by the Russian people, of the native lands and lives wasted at the hands of their arch enemy, the Huns. Pearl Harbor and September 11 are insignificant in comparison. 9/11 was no doubt a terrible criminal attack, but the hysterical reaction, fear mongering, and rush to war against Iraq was a monumental demonstration of public stupidity and official mendacity.

Recent reports on the revival of Stalin's prestige are somewhat deceptive in the sense that Stalin's numbers have always been as high as the most recent poll - the majority of those recently polled believed Stalin was a "great man." Stalin, as a matter of fact, despite the fact that it has been politically incorrect to openly admire him, has always enjoyed a relatively high standing among his people; for, as awful as he might have been to them, he belonged to them. Besides, universal human nature respects awe-inspiring men.

Edward Crankshaw wrote several books about Russia from personal experience; he was attached to the British Military Mission in Moscow from 1941 to 1943, and visited Russian thereafter. One most interesting book in the context of great men is his Khrushchev's Russia (1959) - the book is must reading for all those who are still concerned with the eventual realization of social utopia. Stalin drastically diminished agricultural production with his murderous collectivization program: he cared less about the plight of the starving farmer and most about feeding the urban industrial worker the bare minimum needed to ramp up to the modern industrial world. Khrushchev did his best to undo Stalin's mismanagement and to revive agricultural and industrial production. He succeeded in part on the agricultural front, which had not changed much since the Dark Ages, by personally touring the farms with an expert (Lysenko) whose theories were absurd - but he had a treasure trove of commonsense farming wisdom at hand; although his famous maize-growing program earned him the pejorative name 'Maize', it had a good effect on morale and agricultural production; and his Virgin Lands settlement program pioneered the development of large regions of uncultivated land. As for industry, he decentralized top-heavy industry and broke up the managerial class that was most interested in preserving the status quo in its own interest.

"At a single blow," observed Crankshaw, "Krushchev took control of industry away from the new managerial class, atomized the powerful bureaucratic concentration in Moscow, drastically reduced the Council of Ministers [industrial tsars) in size and in importance, and put the power into the hands of his own agents in 105 separate regions."

Khrushchev, we recall, blew the whistle on Stalin in his famous speech and proceeded with radical reforms - Kruschchev of course had participated in the Stalinist policies he criticized; of course he did not mention that in his speech. Krushchev's predecessor, Prime Minister Malenkov, deserves a great deal of credit for instituting many important reforms; Malenkov felt the new business class should lead the country, whereas Khrushchev emphasized political leadership and selected the moribund Party as his tool for radical reform . Khrushchev wanted to transform the Soviet Union into an enlightened society in accord with the Leninist ideals. He was a "crude" man, a verbose drunk, a champion of poor people, appeared to be a clown at times; but he was a consummate politician, organizer and manager. Although popular among the poor, he was mistrusted and unpopular among the more comfortable, conservative classes, who wanted more and more for themselves.

Khrushchev was not popular with patriotic Americans who feared communism; they counted his demerits to the exclusion of his merits. He preferred gentle purges - retirement instead of liquidation or exile - but his occasional backsliding and crackdowns were high-handed if not brutal. Still, he had his fans in America, especially after he banged his shoe on the table at the United Nations. I remember him well. The first time I got drunk, the police stopped me, I ran my mouth off, and they threw me in the tank. I refused to give my real name lest my father be alerted; I said I was 'Nikita Khrushchev'. No, I am not a communist - I am a welfare capitalist. But hardly any one in the world dared to publicly admire Stalin, not after his myth had been debunked, thanks to Khrushchev's famous speech.

Most recently, Saddam Hussein idolized Stalin. But the majority of Russians still admire him - Hitler is also highly regarded but in much smaller circles. Stalin is responsible for the creation of the modern phrase, "the personality cult" - the heroic cult is ancient history. The Russian people, we were taught, love strong men at their head, no matter how cruel and immoral they might be - Russians may not be peculiar in that respect - were not all the old gods at once merciful and cruel? Edward Crankshaw explains from his perspective in the 50s:

"For most Russians, in spite of the hot denials of refugees and 'defectors', have a deep hankering after a stern, remote father-figure, standing high above the hurly-burly of ordinary life. If he is terrible and cruel they will still respect him even as they hate him, as witness the ambivalence of their feelings about Stalin: Stalin may have been the most terrible man-eater in the world; but at least he was our man-eater! One of the most interesting aspects of the reaction to Khrushchev's attack on Stalin was the exaggerated impact of that part of his speech which dealt with Stalin's shortcomings as a war-leader, at any rate among the young. The recital of Stalin's crimes against his one-time colleagues and subordinates they took more or less in their stride; of course we all knew terrible things were going on; but nevertheless, he was a great and strong man, and we needed a great man! ... On the other hand, the revelation that this great man had failed abjectly in the early days of the war was almost too much to bear; and even today it is the thing that rankles the most."

Even if we know only the most recent history of the United States, we know that great men do not admit to being foolish or to misleading people into a disastrous war based on a pack of lies. That is not to say that we would necessarily classify the second President Bush, for example, with Stalin, in the great-man category.

First of all, Stalin's great defensive war against the Nazis was just in all respects. His sacrifice of humanity to achieve his ends - a modern industrial superpower - were far more brutal than the civilized methods now employed by President Bush to spread his elite version democracy and to enrich the elite, worsening the disparity of income. President Bush's democracy is a democracy among the rich and powerful served by a huge underclass. Aristotle noted well that a large middle class is essential to social democracy.

Stalin demanded from subordinates everywhere an uncompromising aggressiveness, toughness, and eagerness to achieve ends by any means available. High intellect and competence were not required. When subordinates rose to high positions, he set them against one another and exterminated them at will. But President Bush is loyal to his ministers, and he rewards them for their loyalty no matter how badly they behave on his behalf. Integrity therefore is defined in Bush quarters as uncompromising loyalty to one's own, no matter how right or wrong one or his own might be. Krushchev, by the way, did not mind liquidating a friend or two in order to accomplish his public ends, but he was not nearly as ruthless and arbitrary as Stalin..

No matter how foolhardy and deceptive and even malicious the American neoconservative militarists and their commander-in-chief might be, President Bush can do no wrong, and in that respect he suits the popular definition of a great man. The more warlike and mighty he appears to be, the more beloved he is; even greater things might be said about the great actor Ronald Reagan, who is considered to be a much greater man than President Bush, who lacks communication skills, including the appearance of sincerity.

President Bush's brand of integrity does not wash among his political opponents. True conservative democrats, in spite of their perversity, hold to the view that integrity means an uncompromising adherence to high morality and sublime principles of ethics. Incidentally, Khrushchev returned to the Leninist line, which he considered to be on a higher moral ground than the business line derived from special selfish interests.

Interestingly enough, the president's most ardent supporters can be found among the young, whose hormones are wont to clamor for violent competition - that is why the elders of old sent them out of the village to prey on strangers instead of the local folk

We shall see how the historians shall treat President Bush, whom some of us believe should be impeached. Chances are he will go down in the history books as a great man, and might even take precedence over George Washington some day, provided that his pre-emptive war against Iraq turns out relatively well - the rest of his agenda has been less than mediocre as well as anti-democratic.

An eclectic French philosopher by the name of Victor Cousin (1792-1867) expounded a Great Man Theory. Cousin, who was influenced by his German friend Hegel, called his philosophy "spiritualism" because of its romantic or spirit-over-matter bent. His views were popular among the New England Transcendentalists. He identified three types of individuals in his Course of the history of modern philosophy (New York: Appleton & Co.1857)

Ordinary Individuals: "There are individuals who have, so to speak, a general character only, that of their age and of their country, mere echoes of the voices of their times; they form the crowd, and are, thus to call them, the anonymous beings of the human species.... ordinary men, a numerous class, honest, useful... excellent soldiers of the spirit of the people; the form the army of every great cause that finds sufficient captains; it is with them, and them only, that one can perform great things: they know how to obey."

Original Individuals: "At the other extreme are the friends of individuality... who seize for a moment upon their poor individuality... cling to it... proudly insurgent against all authority. The mania of individuality is to cut the knot which binds the individual to common sense by authority. There are the originals of the human species: they form a class apart: the give themselves out as the heroes of independence, and are, in general men without energy and without character; they are agitated for a moment without doing anything, and pass away without leaving any trace in history... (They are) unsusceptible of discipline, unworthy to command, incapable of obeying... their great aim upon this vast scene of the world is to represent, what? Themselves, and nothing more."

Great Individuals: "A great man is equally removed from the original and the ordinary man. He is the nation, and he is himself too; he is the harmony of generality and individuality... the spirit of his nation and of his times is the stuff of which the great man is made... it is from the height of the spirit, common to all, that he is great and commands all."

Warriors are the first and most popular rank of great men, followed by Cousin's own class, the philosophers - Cousin was world-famous in his time; he received a standing ovation for the lecture here quoted.

"It is upon the field of battle that energetic and faith representatives are necessary, and there they are never wanting. Glory is an unexceptional witness of the importance of the true greatness of men. Now, what are the greatest glories? In fact, they are those of warriors.... Nowhere do the masses identify themselves more visibly with the great man than on the field of battle; but if this identification is more brilliant in the great captain, it is more intimate and more profound in the great philosopher.

The highest lip-service must be paid to Philosophy:

"...it must be observed that nowhere are there more great men than in philosophy. The highest degree of individuality is reflection, which separates us from all that is not ourselves, and puts us face to face with ourselves; at the same time the object of philosophical reflection is what is most general in thought. Reflection has generality for its foundation, and individuality for its form. It is precisely the highest alliance of these two elements which constitutes the great man."

Great political leaders and heroes govern and defend their respective nations and find glory in getting deeds done or in doing them. Although reputation is a paltry and petty thing, glory is glorious:

"...whatever is human is made so by humanity; to curse power... is to blaspheme humanity; to accuse glory, is simply to accuse humanity that decrees it. What is glory? The judgment of humanity upon one of its members, and humanity is always right.... There are a thousand ways to acquire a reputation; it is an enterprise just like any other, it does not even suppose a great ambition. What distinguishes reputation from glory is, that reputation is the judgment of the few, while glory is the judgment of a great number... With the masses, deeds are everything.... (Humanity) wishes great results.... Great results cannot be contested, and glory, which is their expression, can none the more be contested."

We find in Cousin the ancient militant feeling that might is right, or, at least might is required to make right. Force must be exerted to accomplish anything at all; in order to perform his work, the great man must move ahead and take all - he must win, and no matter what happens we should be on the side of the winners, not the losers:

"...the strife of nations is sorrowful, if the vanquished excites our pity, our greatest sympathy must be reserved for the vanquisher, since very victory infallibly draws after it a progress of humanity... we must be on the side of the victor, for that is always the side of civilization, the side of the present and the future, while the side of the conquered is always that of the past. The great man conquered is a great man out of place in his times; and his defeat must be applauded, since it was just and useful, since with his great qualities, his virtue and his genius, he marched contrary to humanity and the times."

When we evaluate great men, we should ignore their sordid individuality and ask, What did they do for the nation?

"The fundamental rule of philosophy in regard to great men is to do as humanity does... to neglect the description of weaknesses inherent in their individuality and which have perished with it... to fasten itself upon the great things which they have done, which have served humanity, and which still endure in the memories of men... to search out what has given them power and glory, namely, the idea they represent, and their intimate relation with the spirit of their times and their nation...."

Furthermore, great men are called by the times and do not come into being unless there is something for them to do: their work - Cousin notes that many of them are fatalists, superstitious, hesitant and inactive until definitely called.

"It is the fortune of a great man to represent better than any other man of his times the ideas of those times, their interests, their wants. All the individuals composing a nation have the same general ideas, the same interests, the same wants, but without the energy necessary to realize and to satisfy them; they represent their times and their nation, but in a powerless, unfaithful, obscure manner. But as soon as the true representative shows himself, all recognize him distinctly what they have confusedly seized upon in themselves; they recognize the spirit of their times, the spirit even which is in themselves; they consider the great man as their true image, as their idea; and under this title they adore and follow him who is their idol and their chief...."

And what is the objective of the general Spirit of History? Liberty, of course. Liberty - call her Democracy if you will -would encompass the global if great men have their way. Alas that the means to that end have so often been dictatorial where Hegelian Great Men have been involved; according to Hegel, individuals are mere grist for the Spirit's mill. The end justifies any and all means. Might not only is right, might makes right.

And it seems that the end in America, as well as the end of the United States if the trend continues, is to broaden the great divide between rich and poor, so that the rich, democratic among themselves, have the lion's share of liberty, while the democratic dust below divide the scraps equally.

Khrushchev is not considered to be a great man today, but American might make good use of its own kind of Khrushchev at this juncture of history. Perhaps Providence shall provide a representative man or woman competent to the task in his or her own crude sort of way, preferably someone who drinks vodka and swears on the cross.

Characterization of William Randolph Hearst

2005-04-15T11:22:00.000-07:00

Public figures are seldom whom we think they are. We are most intimate with our own selves, but we often have great difficulty knowing ourselves very well, and we often charge our intimates with misjudging us. The tendency for the human mind to generalize often sums up people wrongly, as if they were the stereotypical characters found in popular novels and films. We often use those characters as our models for characterizing others. One of the most realistic characters of modern Realism is Madame Bovary, but what can we say of her nature except that her adultery was beside the point, that she read too many bad novels and suffered an incurable longing for the immediate realization of the impossible?

The true nature of the modern man is as much as mystery as the nature of the unknown god he projects. Some thinkers today opine that the "self" is in fact nothing at all, hence may never be known. We often hear that a man, especially a successful or rich man, is just a "hollow shell" of a man. But the shell is the hollow characterization of the man, who is undoubtedly more complex than we would like him to be so that we might believe that we are more substantial than he is despite his success or riches.

Muckrakers all over the country attacked William Randolph Hearst, the pioneering publisher of sensationalist journalism. For instance, an editorial in the September 21, 1906 issue of North American Review called him dishonest, unscrupulous, reckless, brutal, and "a burning disgrace to the craft (journalism)." In August 1906, the New York Post declared Mr. Hearst to be "a myth, a syndicate, a trademark, an empty name." Others referred to him as a hollow shell of insincerity and mediocrity, a mere checkbook, an unscrupulous, politically ambitious press lord.

Foremost American muckraker Lincoln Steffens interviewed Mr. Hearst five times to find out who he really was and to determine if he was fit for the office of President of the United States. Mr. Steffens wondered why a mere myth could be considered a public "menace" by “respectable people”, who assumed that Hearst was "a yellow millionaire, without a mind of his own or the morals of other people; suppose his inherited millions have fallen under the control of an unscrupulous group of able men who, by pandering in journalism to the love of the vices, and playing in politics with the hatred of the rich, propose to bring on class war and destroy the U.S. government."

Mr. Steffens concluded that respectable people's opinions of Mr. Hearst were wrong. His findings were published under the headline, 'Hearst, The Man of Mystery', in the November 1906 issue of The American Magazine. Mr. Steffen's colleagues at the magazine hated Mr. Hearst with a passion, wherefore they pressured Mr. Steffens to reflect their prejudices:

"I did not say what I really thought," Mr. Steffens recounted in his autobiography. "I thought that Hearst was a great man, able, self-dependent, self-educated (though he had been to Harvard), and clear-headed; he had no moral illusions; he saw straight as far as he saw, and he saw pretty far, further than I did then; and, studious of the methods which he adopted after experimentation, he was driving toward his unannounced purpose: to establish some measure of democracy, with patient but ruthless force."

Mr. Hearst was seemingly immune to criticism, reported Mr. Steffens in ‘Man of Mystery.’ He was a man generous with his money but not with affection. He did not need friends. He did not try to win people over or to take them into his confidence. He was a "lonely soul", but "deadly earnest." A tireless worker, he was not pushy: "His orders to his editors go to them as suggestions and queries." Earning money had never been the goal for his papers: he wanted leadership and accomplishment. As for the brutal sensationalist style of the crime reporting, he admitted falling short of his ambition to portray the "tragedies and romances" of life. He was more a man of will than an intellectual man. He was not a socialist, but rather a Jeffersonian Democrat with a keen interest in Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon and Jefferson as leaders of popular causes.

Mr. Steffens said he had not realized the extent of Mr. Hearst's penchant for dictatorship at the time of the interview. Mr. Hearst, he reflected, was a pro-labor demagogue who wanted to give people democracy just as rich men distribute charity. He was out to win circulation by playing to the bottom of society with sensationalist news. He believed Mr. Hearst's chief fault was his amorality:

"I was just getting over my own righteousness, but I had not yet arrived where Hearst was born, apparently, at the point of view whence one sees that it is economic, rather than moral forces that count, as with me in this very article.... I have compromised in it with my colleagues to keep my job. The only criticism I think now, since I have watched his career, to be worth writing is that Hearst, with his patience, his superb tolerance, does not require is own editors to understand his policies. He is so far ahead of his staffs that they can hardly see him; and so, of course, they cannot make either this remarkable man or his perfectly rational ideas comprehensible to his readers, the people Hearst would like to see served."

Mr. Steffen’s final generalization does not dispel the mystery of the man – far from it. Much more can be said of Mr. Hearst’s character based on a detailed study of his life. But Mr. Steffen’s report does teach us to be careful with our characterization of William Randolph Hearst, or with that of any other man or woman for that matter.

Introduction to Great Men

2005-02-05T08:36:00.000-08:00

For Sara Mosher

WE NEED TO IMITATE in order to survive, thus are we natural born mimes. Furthermore, we want to get ahead with a meaningful social life. Wherefore we have our native interest in successful persons, a tendency to refer to and identify with those great examples after whom we model our behavior. We find successful examples of greatness in all walks of life, but first of all let us refer generally to men who have had a greater positive influence on society as a whole than most other people whom we call great.

It obviously behooves us to study great men for our edification. Many historians have discarded the Great Man Theory of History, but a multitude of lesser men are indisposed to give up their great men: indeed, we cling for dear life to our precious biographies. Of couse experience teaches us not to place undue emphasis on either the importance of the leader's characteristics or the type of situation, but to carefully consider the interactions between the two.

No doubt the great-man theory of history is preposterous when it puts the cart before the horse by presuming great men make the masses move by pushing people around. It is more appropriate nowadays to hypothesize that great men are pressed forward by the masses for a reason, say in critical times, to emerge from the masses as representatives in order to organize and lead responses to external or internal threats against social stability and progress.

We are all familiar with the ancient adage that the great leader, although apparently out ahead of the pack, is really its best follower. If such be true, we are responsible for the greatness of our leaders even though we may not become members of the leading aristocracy or power elite. That is to say, we deserve our leaders, even absent a republic or democracy; therefore, everyone should strive to be a better leader in order to press the best leaders forward and to remove the worst ones from office by the best means available for the change or overthrow of governments. It is with that in mind that I make my small symbolic contribution to the subject traditionally referred to as Great Men, and I do so with equal if not greater respect for Great Women who have been more than equal to their traditional circumstances.

SINCE I AM NOT A GREAT MAN MYSELF, I shall, to get a better symbolic grasp of our great subject, stand on the shoulders of a man who enjoyed a few years of greatness, a professor whose tenth lecture in his Course of the History of Modern Philosophy was entitled 'Great Men': Victor Cousin (1792-1867). A brief biography of Cousin is needed to introduce his eclectic theory of great men.

Cousin was born into humble circumstances in 1792. He became a street urchin in Paris, where he saved a rich boy from getting trounced in a fist fight. The boy's mom had witnessed the event; she was grateful, placed Victor in the Lycee Charlemagne and helped him become a prize scholar. He entered the Normal School at age eighteen, eventually became a professor, then rose up the strict ranks to become head of the university. He was well known and highly regarded for his eloquent theatrical lectures at the Normal School - they were faithfully recorded by stenographers.

Cousin ran afoul of the monarchy for his liberal preaching, which had helped inspire a large student movement. But Cousin was not a revolutionary: he was a moderate who favored constitutional monarchy as the most suitable form of government at the time. He was asked to step down from his university post in 1820; his chair remained vacant until he was reinstated in 1828. During that long sabbatical, he translated Plato and traveled to Germany: in 1824, he was arrested in Dresden, charged with being a liberal agitator, and was imprisoned in Berlin for a few months until he managed with the help of German friends to smooth-talk his way out. He conversed with Germany's leading lights, including Goethe, Hegel, Schelling and Schleirmacher.

Cousin visited Germany again, in 1831, to study its schools. His 1833 report on the Prussian educational system established him as a powerful authority on education in France; the report was acclaimed in the United States as well and it is perhaps the widest read report on education of all time. He became a peer of France, and climbed the career ladder to the position of minister of public instruction, in 1840. He was the supreme dictator over what sort of philosophy should be taught in France and who should teach it; the socialist Pierre Leroux wrote:

"M. Cousin is the educative power of France. He exercises an official empire, limitless and uncontrolled, over the teaching of philosophy, and thereby over all public education."

PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT ACADEMICALLY INCLINED hear nothing of Victor Cousin in the United States today, despite his influence on education, and on the development of American idealism and spiritualism via the movement known as New England Transcendentalism. He was acclaimed throughout the West as a the greatest French philosopher of his day. The Transcendentalist Theodore Parker writes in his memorable 'Experience as a Minister' (1859):

"The works of Cousin, more systematic, and more profound as a whole, and far more catholic and comprehensive, continental, not insular, in his range... became familiar to the Americans - reviews and translations going where the eloquent original was not heard - and helped free the young mind from the gross sensationalism of the academic philosophy on one side, and the grosser supernaturalism of the ecclesiastic theology on the other."

Indeed, by1841, Cousin was very much in vogue in the United States. According to the North American Review, his writings formed "the popular philosophy of the day." Even his detractors were moved to bow to popular opinion and praise him before calling him an unoriginal charlatan and plagiarist; we see quote this from the British review published in the November 15, 1843 edition of The Present:

"M. Cousin is one of the most celebrated living metaphysians... A splendor of diction; a richness, variety and purity of exposition; an enthusiasm in manner, and an erudition extensive... He is brilliant... It is impossible to read his works without delight and even profit. It is impossible to contemplate the activity of his life without admiration of its versatility and untiring energy. He enjoys a high and wide reputation...

In 1828, a year after visiting Hegel, Cousin ascended the chair of philosophy again. Crowds at the Sorbonne welcomed with loud acclaim the delivery of his brilliant lectures, known as the 'Cours de l'Historie de la Philosophie.'

"The lectures," claimed the British reviewer, "presented striking generalizations of human history, subtle ontological speculations, splendid eloquence, exquisite diction, apposite and abundant illustration, and an animation which rendered the abstrusest subjects interesting; with such qualities their success is not surprising..."

AS IF THEY WERE FLIES ON HONEY, Cousin's corpus attracted, despite its world-wide appeal, many professional detractors. And what was his original sin? What contaminated this so-called "showy" teacher's wondrous lectures? His original sin was in not being original. In fact, he expressly denied being original. Furthermore, he advised all students of truth to be dutiful apprentices, to dig diligently into history for past expressions of truth and to bring them alive; otherwise. truth cannot be presently known and understood. Cousin's "new" philosophy was a new phase of the decomposition and recomposition, or analysis and synthesis cycle; it was a recomposition of what had been decomposed into the philosophical contraries then known as sensualism and idealism.

In other words and at risk of seeming unoriginal, Cousin sought to revitalize truth by employing spirit to bring mind and body into sane harmony; after all, spirit is the living relation of mind and body that enlivens both. Again, Cousin was a moderate: in philosophy, he did not cotton to sensationalist or mentalist extremes.

Cousin composed a harmonious balance of palatable platitudes. He borrowed truths from around the globe and dished them back to the hungry world in a delectable course he called Eclecticism. Most appealing to the New England Trancendentalists were Kant's liberating morsels from the transcendental realm of Pure Reason, leftovers which Cousin reheated and represented, with a more positive mental attitude towards their availability and utility on Earth.

And much to the delight of those who have a taste for the catholic or ecumenical view of history, Cousin used Hegel's trinitarian method to cook up his eclectical course. His thesis on great men as well as other dishes of his course was borrowed from his friend Hegel, who said, after reviewing them, "Cousin has taken some few of my fish, but has added a considerable quantity of his ownsauce."

The British reviewer not only flattered Cousin but also accused the master French chef of professorial plagiary; to wit, of having some poor unemployed students and his disciples translate his popular translations of Plato and Kant. Professor Cousin, in turn, or so the scandal goes, merely added prefaces and facile criticisms, then signed the title pages, taking full credit for the works. Thus, it is claimed, the most important, interpretive aspect of the translations is not Cousin's at all! Of course we know very well that native speakers everywhere claim it is impossible for foreigners to translate the true meaning of their discourse into foreign languages, not to mention the fact that native speakers of a tongue often have difficulty translating their own writing to each other - and even to themselves, long after they wrote the text in question. In any event, Cousin had corrected and smoothed over the translations in his usual urbane manner; the fact they are easily understood must have been quite an insult to the native intelligence of Greeks and Germans and to the Platonist and Kantian cults who speculate in foreign languages, as well as to every ordinary critic who cannot make heads or tails of Plato and Kant in any language. Fortunately for their posterity, Socrates' claim to wisdom was that he was the only one who knew he did not have answers to the ultimate questions, and Kant was exceedingly skeptical about things in themselves and the illusions we entertain about them.

The British reviewer proceeded to contradict himself in respect to his chief complaint, Cousin's lack of originality, saying, "He has worked upon other men's ideas without adding any new ones of his own..." Then, "He has always more or less misrepresented ... the doctrines he professed to expound..." Then, "No man was ever completely original." However, this man Cousin made others do his dirty work, and so on - Cousin was a good delegator no doubt. Anyway, there is nothing new under the metaphysical Sun, at least not in our universities where sophists still have the gall to charge for truth and to neglect to give full credit to each and every "original" source.

At this point we may be moved to attend to a wee voice of guilty conscience implanted in me by feminist influences: "What about great women? This great man of yours, not to mention his male critics, probably does not mention a single great woman in his whole essay!"

LADIES SHOULD NOT BE PUT OFF by "Great Men", for modern men, especially historians such as Victor Cousin, openly admit the existence of Great Women despite the sexual politics of any given period including their own. Anti-woman polemics were rife in Cousin's mid-nineteenth century society; some scholars attribute the antipathy to the fear of reversion to one of the horrors of the Revolution - radical women donning men's attire and taking up arms - and the pen as well.

Now Cousin, while minister of education, was not averse to women of letters; in fact, he sponsored the ravishingly beautiful poetess Louise Colet; there is some question as to whether it was her physical beauty or her charming poetry that won awards including pensions. She amply inspired her ardent romantic intimates, which included the likes of Gustav Flaubert, author of the notorious Madame Bovary - the great pioneer of realism disparaged women according to the custom of the day:

"Woman, a vulgar animal... Woman is a production of man; she is a mere result of civilization, a factitious creature."

Regardless of status or intelligence, Colet believed beauty was classically a very good and wonderful thing - she complained beauty was being dishonored by pious Christian women. Her own great women were martyrs of the Revolution; George Sand scolded her for writing Charlotte Corday and Madame Roland. Colet was a bit given to Romantic histrionics in her own life: when she was almost nine months' pregnant with her daughter, she stabbed an anti-feminist critic in the back: he had identified Cousin, whom he hated, as the child's father. The knife hit bone and glanced off; the critic hung it on the wall of his apartment as a momento. Colet's husband praised her valor. Cousin flattered her with this epigram:

"I am a quintessential woman, but I know how to act like a man."

Whomever the father was, Cousin provided support for her daughter. Colet's success was largly due to his influence; she was convinced it was due to the merits of her work. Some time after their affair ended, he expressed misgivings about literary women, and said their "secret beauties" should not be vulgarly exposed by booksellers.

Apparently the right place for great women is in the salon: Louise Colet found nice quarters for her salon in 1841; it was meagerly furnished but well attended by the capital's foremost progressive intellectuals; people were sometimes astonished to see Cousin, peer of France, serving as a doorman there. We know salons have had an enormous influence over the destiny of France including its sexual politics. Great women enjoyed an extraordinary, exalted status in Paris because of their salons. Their wit was accepted as equal to men's, and their gracious virtues were literally worshiped by romantic gallants - great women were not merely show pieces on pedestals.

A popular great woman, known as the Grand Mademoiselle (Princess Anne Marie Louise d' Orleans), leader of the Amazons, actually "manned" a cannon on the Bastille in 1652 and fired it to cover the Grand Conde's retreat during the second war of the Fronde; the shot was said to have ruined her almost certain chance to marry Louis XIV - she was booted from the palace and wound up in a convent instead.

Cousin as an historian was so intrigued by the French salons that he took to writing about several of their illustrious women. He literally worshiped the salon enthusiast, Duchess de Longueville. She was the revolutionary sister of the Great Conde - a famous soldier - he led the second rebellion of the rather farcical, seventeenth-century civil war of the Fronde, a last-ditch stand of nobility and parliament against absolute monarchy. Tall, beautiful and romantic, the Duchess de Longueville frequented Madame de Rambouillett's seventeenth-century, pioneering salon, a salon credited with raising France to a high stage of civilization. A wit wrote this satirical epitaph: "Here lies Victor Cousin, the great philosopher, in love with the Duchess de Longueville, who died a century and a half before he was born."

Yes, Victor Cousin recognized and loved great women. That being said, let us turn to his theory about great men.

To Be Continued

Principal Sources:

Cousin, M. Victor, Course of the History of Modern Philosophy, transl. O.W. Wight, New York: Appleton, 1857

Brewer, Walter Vance, Victor Cousin as a Comparative Educator, New York: Teachers College Press, 1971

Jones, Howard Mumford, America and French Culture, London: Oxford, 1927

The Present, Vol. I, No. III, November 15, 1843

Francine du Plessix Gray, Rage and Fire, A Life of Louise Colet, Pioneer Feminist, Literary Star, Flaubert's Muse, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994. I highly recommend this book as well as the author's other books to readers and to students of the biographical form of writing.

Price, Eleanor C., A Princess of the Old World, New York: Putnam's, 1907. The author provides an entertaining account of the life of The Grand Mademoiselle.

Clergue, Helen, The Salon, New York: Putnam's, 1907.

Mason, Amelia Gere, The Women of the French Salons, New York: Century, 1891. See Chapter II, 'The Hotel de Rambouillet.'

Maland, David, Culture and Society in Seventeenth-Century France, London: Batsford, 1970. See Chapter Two, 'Order and Civility in Society and the Theatre.'

Hamel, Frank, Famous French Salons, New York: Brentano's 1909. See Chapter 1. 'The Hotel de Rambouilett, The Salon of Manners.'

Guizot, M., History of France, transl. Robert Black, Boston: Dana Estes, 18??. See Volume V., Chapter XLIII, 'Louis XIV., The Fronde, and the Government of Cardinal Mazarin. (1648-1661). M. Guizot, historian and statesman, was Cousin's contemporary.

Schleiermacher, Friedrich, On the Different Methods of Translation, transl. Andre Lefevere

Maurois, Andre, The Miracle of France, transl. Henry L. Binsse, New York: Harper, 1948. See Chapter XXIII, 'How the Fronde Was a Revolution - and How It Miscarried.' I highly recommend this concise history of France.

'Company Manners' (1854) Elizabeth Gaskell on Cousin's salon studies.

Brief Internet Biography of the Duchess de Longueville

An Average Woman

2004-08-18T06:54:00.000-07:00

For Gerdta

The title of Stefan Zweig's bestselling biography Marie Antoinette, The Portrait of an Average Woman, gave bookshop browsers cause to wonder, How could a queen be an average woman? We may turn to Zweig's postface for an answer:

"Not to idolize, not to deify, but to humanize, is the supreme task of creative psychological study; not to excuse with a wealth of farfetched arguments, but to explain, is its true mission," Zweig explained. "That is what I have attempted in the case of a woman of average character, who owes her long-lasting influence to an incomparable fate, and whose inward greatness was but the outcome of unprecedented misfortunes. My hope that, in default of all exaggeration, this character will arouse the sympathy and enjoy the understanding of the present because she was of one flesh with ourselves."

Marie Antoinette, an average woman, a human being. Stefan Zweig the humanist was of course keenly interested in humanism: for instance, he wrote an exellent biography of the great pioneer of humanism, Desiderius Erasmus, whom we might describe as Zweig's adopted spiritual master. The following lines from his Erasmus provide us with considerable insight into Zweig's personality:

"Erasmus was a master of the gentle art of turning aside from everything that might be unpleasantness to him, and he could keep his personal free intact no matter what garb he wore or what discipline he was compelled to obey." Moreover, "(W)henever an issue became serious he slipped away out of the danger zone... (he) could remain faithful to no one but himself. Instinctively he avoided making any decision becuase by doing so he would be bound."

"(It was) not for (Erasmus) to carry his independence, his 'nulli concede', like a monstrance before him, but to hide it as a thief's dark-lantern beneath his cloak. He crept away into corners and on to devious paths during the wildest outbursts of popular madness; but - and this is what proves of greatest importance - he kept his spiritual treasure, his belief in mankind, intact and brought it safely out of the terrible storm of hate which rages around him; and it was from this tiny flame that Spinoza, Lessing, and Voltaire, not to mention all the 'good Europeans', who trod the same road, were able to kindle their lamps."

Stefan Zweig, a staunch pacifist when other pacifists like Bertrand Russell were advocating war, avoided confronting the Nazis. He set up his final camp in Petropolis, Brazil, where he eventually despaired and committed suicide with his wife; wherefore his legacy has been obscured by criticism of his pacifism and his unseemly end. It seemed that the war proved that his ideal, of European unity, would never be achieved by pacific means, just as Erasmus' cosmopolitan argument had been disproved centuries prior, and that he had lost faith in the coming dawn.

Stefan Zweig was an Austrian Jew, and as such he was duly alarmed by the Italian fascists and German Nazis as they rose to power, yet he laid relatively low when pressed by Jews to lend his powerful voice to the resistance. His rationale: the ceaseless verbal attacks on the Third Reich had begun to lose their effect because people were bored by the repetition. Furthermore, the constant focus on the Jewish question did not attract the attention of potential allies in other countries where the question was not so pressing. And, he felt that more could be accomplished by addressing the general causes of the fascist plague than by addressing its particular symptoms. He later regretted his silence in regards to Russia, but he upheld his overall strategy.

"So much has changed," Zweig wrote to Rene Schickele in 1940. "I see that I was too indulgent towards Russia, which invented psychological terror and the propaganda machine, instruments which now cross Germany like a steam roller. I simply think that it is our task, not like the journalists and polemic-writers to attack every single manifestation, but to proceed against the causes themselves. I have made an attempt with my Erasmus, the man who defends himself firmly against every form of fanaticism, against every attempt to reduce thought to a common norm."

ALthough he had supported the Great War (WW I) early on, Zweig, like Tolstoy, was a radical pacifist. That is, killing other human beings for any reason whatsoever is wrong, is gross injustice. It is better to suffer an injustice than to do one. A life that must be killed for is not worth living. It is better to be killed than to kill. His letter continues:

"We are a very few, who occupy the most thankless and most dangerous post - in the middle, the no-man's land between the trenches, the non-combatants who do not shoot but continue with the plowing. What holds us together is not to be seen, but is thereby perhaps a strong link than slogans and congresses; and a secret feeling tells me that we act rightly if we remain true to humanity and renounce the temptation to take sides."

Stefan Zweig was a keen student of the new psychoanalsis, augmenting his biographies with depth psychology. He wrote a trilogy of essays on the great 'psychic' leaders, Mesmer, Mary Baker Eddy, Freud. Freud was fond of Zweig's work although he had reservations about his comparatively amateurish psychoanalytical techniques and his slighting of the principle of association. Of course Freud, if anyone, ought to know what a self is; he did not arrive at a final conclusion about his own self, with whom he was most intimate, let alone anyone else's self; he maintained a skeptical, scientific attitude even after the final analysis, which was never really final. He warned Zweig of the futility of biographical projects in a letter dated May 31, 1936:

"He who undertakes a biography commits himself to lies, dissimulation, hypocrisy, lack of comprehension; for biographical truth is not to be had, and even if one did attain it, it would be of no value."

Stefan Zweig already had fame and fortune, but he believed that he had fallen sorrowfully short of his exalted artistic ideal of literary perfection, and that he would not have enough time to realize it. He was exceedingly anxious about his age. On his fiftieth birthday in November of 1931, he felt "that typical crisis of the fifties... in which one feels one has lived one's life wrongly." Today many unemployed, middle-aged, middle managers feel all washed up at fifty. The youth culture of our own day can perhaps sympathize with young Marie Antoinette's conduct when she became the fashion-setting Queen of Roccoco:

"Scarely had Marie Antoinette settled into her bright and cheerful abode, when she began to ply a new broom," wrote Zweig. "The first thing was to get rid of the elders, for old people are wearisome and ugly.... They were continually preaching foresight and thoughtfulness, whereas the Queen had had more than enough of leading strings and lectures in her days as Dauphiness."

Why did Zweig write a biography of Marie Antoinette? After all, Zweig had penned Erasmus. That biography certainly might be deemed a sufficient Erasmian answer to Hitler, a more demonic Luther - Erasmus failed to achieve his ideal too, as Luther plunged the world into bloody discord. Yet Zweig said that he longed to write "something that could bring inward hope, something inspiring and satisfying...." Wherefore he wrote Marie Antoinette, an internationally acclaimed biographical novel. We might say, figurately speaking, that it was an autobiographical novel to some extent, that Zweig might say of Antoinette, like Flaubert said of Madamame Bovary, "C'est moi." Marie Antoinette and Stefan Zweig, two bourgeois butterflies, very much wanted to escape into their respective fanciful spheres. Zweig's united European utopia was more intellectual and cosmopolitan than Antoinette's pleasurable, parochial Trianon, but what is the ultimate difference provided the escape from reality is made good? Both flew vainly, so to speak, about their egos, both were crushed by overwhelming circumstances. Yet, in the final analysis, Marie became, albeit unwillingly, a dignified and courageous queen, giving due credit to her social role, while Stefan bowed out, we might say, for personal, not public reasons.

Zweig's biographer, D.A. Prater, in European of Yesterday, claims that Zweig did not approach his stated aim for Marie Antoinette, to inspire his contemporaries; that, in fact, the biography escaped the troubled times by means of a flight into the past, into the French Revolution.

"In reality this was self-deception," opined Prater, "and we search in vain for any sort of message for the times, however indirect, in a work which, paradoxically, was to be one of his most popular."

Marie Antoinette is an "intuitive" biography, an extensive and repetitive prose poem on the feelings and thoughts of a frivolous yet tragic queen who was the epitome of spoiled bourgeois mediocrity. Her behavior today might cause her doctor to prescribe Ritalin for attention-deficit, hyperactivity disorder characterized by inattentiveness, difficulty concentrating, underperformance, impulsivity, trouble meeting deadlines, procrastination, poor planning skills, a quick temper (witness the beginning of her downfall with the arrest and trial of the most eminent cardinal, Cardinal Rohan, in the Diamond Necklace scandal).

"Sitting still... listening, reading, resposeful thinking, and even (in some measure) sleep, were an intolerable tax upon her patience," Zweig explained. "She liked to buzz hither and thither, to be always beginning some new task which she would never finish, to be continually occupied without an serious exception; she loved to feel that time was not standing still with her, or that she was out-running time. To be quick at her meals, content perhaps with eating a sweatmeat or two; to sleep only for a short time, never to think long, to be perpetually on the go, frittering away her days - such were her desires - the twenty years, or rather less, during which Marie Antoinette was Queen were characterized by an unceasing movement in an orbit around her ego. Since, outside this orbit, she had no goal, nor any inward conviction of an aim, from the human and political standpoint she was circling in the void."

Furthermore, Marie Antoinette is a tribute to a queen who eventually did rise to her royal dignity, but much too late despite the excellent advice of her mother:

"Your luck will not last forever," wrote Empress Maria Theresa to her beloved daughter, "and by your own fault you will be plunged into the depths of misfortune. The trouble arises because you lead a terribly dissipated a life and never apply your mind to anything. What books have you read? Yet you venture to thrust your finger into every pie, to meddle with affairs of state, with the choice of ministers! ... You will recognize the truth some day, but then it will be too late."

Her brother, Joseph II, also warned her: "In very truth, I tremble for your happiness, seeing that in the long run things cannot go on like this.... The revolution will be a cruel one, and perhaps of your own making."

Joseph visited France "incognito" - the crowds following him around knew very well who he was. He did what leaders in all walks of life should occasionally do: he came down from his high office and walked the streets in order to find out what was really going on instead of relying on hearsay and second-hand reports (the United States had a president, George Bush II, who did not bother to read the papers or watch television, who made sure all "negative" opinions were kept out of sight, with disastrous consequences). Emperor Joseph found out what was going on in France: travelling without security, he visited infirmaries and served soup to the inmates; he sat in at the Academy and audited the Parliament of Paris; he associated with boatmen, shopkeepers, and craftsmen. If his sister the queen had done the same, she might have kept her crown and been idolized by millions of Frenchmen. At the very least she could have mingled with the nobles and other powerful people and gained their support. But no, she wanted to live her life pursuing happiness, unhindered by the crowd and ancient tradition. And she might have gotten away with if but were it not for her meddling in state affairs, arbitrarily appointing officials to please her coterie of personal favorites. Women, even queens, were not supposed to meddle in the men's world; even so, some noted critics insist that she should have done even more or at least she should have acted differently; in fact, she was damned no matter what she did or did not do, and, as afar as she was concerned before her gruesome end, she had really done nothing wrongly.

"I defy the universe to show that I have done anything wrong!" exclaimed Antoinette. As a matter of course, of course, the show goes on to this very day.

Stefan Zweig has been criticized for his biographical exuberance, for overdoing his biographies. His Marie Antoinette is oft criticized for its sheer redundancy. Indeed, readers of this wildly popular autobiographical novel may pause and wonder why they are so fascinated with so much ado about the queen's experiences, personality and character - the adjective, 'redundant', certainly comes to mind. But persons who are compelled by their personal interest in persons pick up the book and start reading again. After all, we are cratures of habit, and most of our lives are more redundant than novel.

And who would not want to live vicariously with Marie Antoinette for a spell? That is precisely the novel's charming allure. Zweig deceives us: he is a mesmerizer of sorts. And he gives us an exalted view of human nature even at its worst. Even during the Terror, even in terrible times, the artful spirit gives wings to the imagination, that it may soar above the horrible scene, the obscene; wherefore we see an alternative to the real in the reality of the imagination, which might, in turn, be realized, if only we will, and will we will.

The murderous mob can kill our bodies but not our souls providing we take no part in the mob and thereby narcistically lose our selves in it. Sometimes we need to escape into the imaginary when the real is overbearing. Alas, Marie Antoinette was apprehended and beheaded after she learned her lesson. Stefan Zweig actually escaped, to the Americas, where he executed himself. He, like his hero Erasmus, was an oversensitive man, a man who would rather suffer violence than do violence. He knew WW II was coming, and, for him, war was inherently evil; therefore one must run away to do well elsewhere, or stay and be a martyr; the latter would be a waste of good talent which could be applied pacifically elsewhere. For Zweig it did not matter which side of violence someone was on: violence in itself was dead wrong. Zweig suffered grievously albeit vicariously for the homeless, the dead, the wounded on all sides. Wealthy, acclaimed worldwide, safe in England, then North and South America, he still felt that he was a homeless, wandering Jew. He missed Europe, especially his beloved Austria.

South Americans loved Zweig. They were proud of themselves when he honored their countries with his presence - his lectures were sold out. He found sanctuary in lovely, exotic Brazil. However, the horrible news from abroad; the feeling that his European past was destroyed; the absence of his library; the belief that he did not have enough time left to achieve greatness as an artist; - all this and more depressed him. Even the Carnivale in Rio failed to lift his spirits. Approaching sixty years of age, thinking sixty was much too old, he committed suicide in 1942, taking Lotte, his ailing wife, with him.

"... After one's sixtieth year unusual powers are needed in order to make another wholly new beginning. Those that I possess have been exhausted by the long years of homeless wandering. So I hold it better to conclude in good time and with erect bearing a life for which intellectual labor was always the purest joy and personal freedom the highest good on the earth...."

Thus reads one paragraph of the suicide note that stunned intellectuals in the civilized pockets of the world. Zweig's suicide was unexpected at the time, yet we can see it coming in retrospect, even ten years prior to the event: he was afraid of becoming old and weak. Many intellectuals believed that Zweig had lost hope for a dawn after the darkness, that he had, in effect, caved in to the fascist oppressors. They might be mistaken: Zweig's cause was self-centered, centered in the free ideal self; for him, the truly free and independent man is the highest form of humanity, and he felt his freedom and independence slipping into the darkness. He could not stand invasions of his privacy or hindrances to his exercise of personal liberty. That is what saved him from the Nazis: after his apartment in Salzburg was subjected to a merely pro forma search by the Austrian authorities under pretext of looking for machine guns supposedly hidden somewhere by the radical workers' Schutzbund organization, he packed up and left for London; once safely in London, he gave notice to the Salzburg authorities that he was reliquishing his residency there. But his undying love of self-defined personal freedom eventually killed him, for, according to some Stoics, suicide is the ultimate expression of personal freedom.

To a certain extent, like his famous femme fatale and average woman, Queen Marie Antoinette, whose high rank made her free for a brief but fatal spell, Stefan Zweig was living for a summer palace, his very own Trianon, or for an ivory tower to heaven on similar, naturally contrived grounds.

"(At Trianon) she wanted to live her own life without hindrance; to be nothing but the spoiled, honoured, and uncontrolled young woman who, busied among a thousand trifles, forgot everything else; forgot her realm, her spouse, the court, time, and the world - and, often - perhaps these were her happiest hours - forgot even herself."

Almost every thoughtful writer will tell us that he needs plenty of 'leisure', that is, time unhindered by reality, time to think things over, time to write. A family cottage near Rouen, not to far from Paris, such as Flaubert had, would do nicely; Flaubert even kept his Muse, Louise Colet, one of the most beautiful women in France, at arm's length - passionate muses have oft complained of being put off by their lovers' mental onanism. Zweig loved his friends when present but he could not wait to get away from them after a brief visit. Writing like other forms of work is an escape, a distraction from reality; it is at once a complaint about reality - else why bother with it? Zweig had a paradise in Petropolis, Brazil; however, while Marie Antoinette, on the one hand, would not at first let bad news reach her, Zweig read his letters and the papers all along the tragic path, and he was sorely grieved by the woeful and awful stories, especially by the deaths of his friends. Furthermore, he could not stand his isolation in Brazil, so far from the 'united Europe' of his dreams - and he believed his most imortant tool, his precious library in London, had been destroyed.

Even Paradise can be hell, a virtual prison to an sensitive, imaginative person. Unfortunately for those whom he left behind, Zweig did not respond to his virtual prison as Marie Antoinette, "whose inward greatness was but the outcome of unprecedented misfortunes," responded to her real one. She, the apotheosis of embourgeoisement, the virtual goddess of a materialistic culture that every independent intellectual arising from that base mediocrity learns to despise, was at bottom a noble woman: after botched escape attempts, she resigned herself heroically to her fate, but she showed no despair - she displayed utter contempt for the "national razor" and for those who wielded it until their own heads were chopped off the the blood caught in pitchers to be sold as a health drink.

What has not been done for Liberty to the detriment of human happiness? Who is this Liberty adored by Marie Antoinette, by her biographer, by the French nobility, by the bourgeoisie, the proletariat, the peasants? If she loves them all, is not murder and suicide in her name blasphemous and absurd?

"The executioners have wheeled away the body in little hand-cart," wrote Zweig, "the head thrust between the legs. A few gendarmes are left to guard the scaffold. No one troubles about the blood which is slowly soaking into the ground. Except for the gendarmes the only spectator left in the Place de la Revolution is the Goddess of Liberty, motionless, petrified, looking out as before (the beheading) into the distance, towards the invisible goal. Of the happenings that morning in the square she has seen and heard nothing. Severe of aspect, disregarding the savageries and follies of mankind, she contemplates the eternal distance. She knows not, nor wishes to know, the deeds that are done in her name."

Stefan Zweig's self-execution was absurd, and, after he committed himself and his wife to it, he must have regretted the decision very much, yet he went ahead with the plan conceived, as a stubborn, stoical exercise of will-power. He must have been overcome by his strong imagination and by a despairing Romantic temperament; Romantic aesthetes tend to withdraw into and suffer art for its own sake; nothing, except perhaps the primordial good old days, is good enough for them, as imaginary Beauty dissolves and recedes into the infinite nothingness.

On the other hand, authors who survived the death camps went on to write excellent books. Renowned authors endured excruciating pain in their later years and wrote excellent books; for instance, both Sigmund Freud and General Grant had terminal oral cancer. No, life is not over at sixty as long as one is still alive. Histories have been written by eighty-year old authors. No doubt most authors could survive fame and fortune and sanctuary in Brazil at sixty years of age, and still crank out a few good books. Write or die. Zweig felt he could no longer write. This portion of Zweig's suicide note is most meaningful:

"... intellectual labor was always the purest joy and personal freedom the highest good on the earth...."

Aristotle remarked, in the text his posterity named 'Metaphysics', that the most impratical or useless endeavors are the highest or most valuable endeavors. Both pure scientists and theologians might agree. We note that no sooner does man get a few bites to eat than he turns his mind to higher things; observe for instance that even starving children in famine stricken regions make toys out of junk to play with before they grow too weak to do so, and die. Puritanical persons fear that man, if left to his own devises, is lazy, originally guilty of deadly, sinful sloth, wherefore he must be run out of paradise and regularly beaten with a stick, or nothing much will get done. They underestimated the restless, creative power of men and women when left to their own devices, even when they are well fed. Some write books while others have their hairdressers adorn their heads with ships sailing the seas or with revolutionary scenes replete with castles and canons.

"I am terrified of being bored," Marie Antoinette said. In these words Marie Antoinette summed up the whole attitude of her generation and of the society in which she moved. Methinks our generation knows how she felt.

Woman's Leading Role
by David Arthur Walters

Bloody Rosa - a sketch

2004-08-17T14:06:00.000-07:00

Hannah Arendt called Rosa Luxemburg a "revolutionary heroine." Rosa was the most notable representative of those left-wing socialists who clung to what was once the major plank of the orthodox socialist party: international pacifism. The international socialists found the cause of war in those greedy capitalists who presided over private capitalism, the very structure of evil.

As for Rosa, she was an award-winning Polish economist and communist agitator, especially admired in Berlin as a teacher of political economics who made that dismal and obscure subject interesting and clear. Of course her version of economics was "materialistic" and "socialistic," emphasizing the broad distribution of produce to to the laboring producers, hence its moral content was more attractive to the majority of Germans - Social Democrats - than the money-grubbing, selfish doctrines of private capitalism.

Rosa believed that the strong German socialist party would be the salvation of international socialism; after obtaining her doctorate degree in Zurich, she entered into a marriage of convenience with a German citizen and, in 1899, moved to Berlin where she agitated and taught economics at the Social Democratic Party school. Berliners were astonished to encounter a woman who had a doctorate degree; her lectures on economy, which were histories of economics, were quite popular. She poked fun at the ambiguous and absurd obfuscations of professional economists, then got down to the brass tacks, which, of course, held down a carpet of communist propaganda. Her democratic spirit still makes up for the communist line - it appears monotonous today, yet inspired millions of people in its time.

Rosa's bloody image, reinforced by a photograph of her corpse after it was fished out of the river, has been revised by historians. She was been called 'Bloody' Rosa by her murderers and others who contemned her; nonetheless, the record indicates that she advocated agitation instead of terrorism - she averred that bomb-throwing had no more effect on government than killing a gnat. The capitalist government would be overthrown by the people once they were educated to the truth about capitalism.

Rosa opposed the Marx-Trotsky line on dictatorship: she insisted on a dictatorship by the educated proletariat at large, and not of the proletariat by a party elite. Her view reminds us of the seemingly oxymoronic label, 'anarcho-communism', used by Emma Goldman and comrades - we might speculate that Rosa used the term 'democracy' instead of 'anarchy' because she had reserved 'anarchy' to denote the essence of neo-Darwinian capitalism and international warfare.

By the way, Rosa was not a cold-hearted political bird: her prison letters reveal a woman who loved birds and plants as much as a humanitarian revolution - she was dismayed that flora and fauna, just like the Native American culture, were being extinguished. Neither did she want to be cast as a brazen feminist: she objected to being a 'token woman.'

Rosa emigrated from Poland to Berlin. Of course she was not a typical Berliner, but even among native Berliners who was typical? Too much has been made of 'typical Berliners' and "typical Germans.' The several searches for the stereotypical Berliner has been a wild-goose chase - when we examine the characteristics of specific, concrete individuals, they differ from the stereotypical views. Suffice it to say that, if typical Berliners exist, Rosa was a representative member of a typical crowd of disobedient Berliners.

Since the agitation Rosa recommended in lieu of immediate violence was actually a careful preparation for or devised prelude to the armed overthrow of national governments at the propitious moment, say, during war, she was not, strictly speaking, a pacifist. The socialist revolution would be a revolution to end all wars. However, the revisionist socialists sacrificed the immediate realization of their internationalist ideal in hopes of preserving their national means - the socialist parties within the nations - which would presumably be able to gradually help along the inevitable rise of the proletariat and the achievement of international peace. Yet Rosa held to the internationalist line to the bitter end.

Now we recall that Austria's ultimatum to Serbia on July 23, 1914, excluded any possibility of its acceptance, hence war was the foregone conclusion. A few days later, Rosa appeared at a great rally in Brussels against the impending war. Juares, the great French socialist, spoke as eloquently as usual - he would be murdered shortly thereafter. The workers were optimistic, believing war could be averted, or, if not, that they would still have their international socialist organization for moral support. Rosa stood up to speak, looked into the faces of the workers, but said nothing, sat down, and put her face in her hands. Time and time again the crowd pleaded with her to speak, but she sorrowfully demurred. Paul Frolich explains:

"From the lessons of history, and especially from the experience of the Russo-Japanese War, she was familiar with the blinding and bewildering effects that nationalism had on the popular masses at the beginning of a war.... This explains why she looked so searchingly into the mass of people in that hall, people who turned to the International with hope and faith. Could she speak to these people? Could she tell them the awful truth, destroy their faith and produce a panic? This she could not bring herself to do - for both psychological and political reasons. Yet it would have been just as impossible for her to compromise with a lie, to feign optimism, to strengthen futile hopes among the masses, to deceive them. She therefore remained silent." (Rosa Luxemburg, ideas in action)

Rosa saw many years of work going down the drain; for the first time, the strong-woman of the socialist revolution was depressed and discouraged, but she soon became outraged. In February 1915 she wound up in prison yet again, wherein she proceeded to compose her thoughts and commit them to writing. Her writing was secreted out of prison and eventually published as the revolutionary booklet, The Junius Pamphlet - named after Lucius Junius Brutus, the legendary republican leader who overthrew the Roman monarchy. A few excerpts shall evoke her mood at the time:

"Particularly in the fight against militarism and the war the position taken by the German Social Democracy has always been decisive. 'We Germans cannot accept that,' was usually sufficient to determine the orientation of the International. Blindly confident, it submitted to the leadership of the much admired, mighty German Social Democracy. It was the pride of every Socialist, the horror of the ruling classes of all countries."

"And what happened to Germany when the great historical crisis came? The deepest fall, the mightiest cataclysm. Nowhere was the organization of the proletariat made so completely subservient to imperialism. No where was the press so thoroughly gagged, public opinion so completely choked off; nowhere was the political and industrial class struggle of the working class so completely abandoned as in Germany."

"War is methodical, organized, gigantic murder. But in normal human beings this systematic murder is possible only when a state of intoxication and been previously created. This has always been the tried and proven method of those who make war. Bestiality of action must find a commensurate bestiality of thought and senses. The latter must prepare and accompany the former."

"Mass murder has become a monotonous.... Gone is the first mad delirium.... The show is over. The curtain has fallen on trains filled with reservists, as they pull out among the joyous cries of enthusiastic maidens.... Into the disillusioned atmosphere of pale daylight there rings a different chorus; the hoarse croak of the hawks and hyenas of the battle field.... Business is flourishing upon the ruins... Shamed, dishonoured, wading in blood and dripping with filth, thus capitalist society stands. Not as we usually see it, playing the roles of peace and righteousness, of order, of philosophy, of ethics - as a roaring beast, as an orgy of anarchy, as a pestilential breath devastating culture and humanity - so it appears in all its hideous nakedness. And in the midst of this orgy a world tragedy has occurred: the capitulation of the Social Democracy...."

After the outbreak of the war, Rosa, along with Karl Liebknecht and Clara Zetkin, formed a faction within the Social Democratic Party in Berlin called the Sparticists. When the pacific socialists split off from the Social Democratic Party, the Sparticists went along, then became the Sparticist League in 1918 - one of the founding groups of the German Communist Party. During the revolutionary period at the end of the Great War, Rosa and her colleague, Karl Liebknecht, had a price on their heads; they were taken into custody by the government and brutally murdered.

Rosa firmly believed that so-called "free trade" conducted at gunpoint to enable private capitalists to rid themselves of surpluses abroad rather than distribute them to labor exploited at home was the cause of internationally organized mass-terrorism and war. Of course private capitalism is still standing a century later, but its form has been modified over the course of its struggles with socialism. Capital is much more broadly socialized today albeit into seemingly private hands. Individual shareholders still have little control over the large corporation. An interlocking power elite control the economy. There is some circulation between the economic classes, but moving into the highest bracket is mostly a matter of luck whether by accident of birth or by meritorious action. Consumers, however, indirectly own the means of production, for they may boycott a business and shut production down rendering the means of production worthless; further, producers can strike. Therefore regressive thinkers condemn the strikes and boycotts as a perverse, immoral course of action. Likewise, voters in the United States have in their hands the power to realize radical reforms and even to revise the foundational constitution of the state. But they will not do so. The majority of any population, unless made desperate, are not inclined to radical changes. Hedonists prefer to twiddle their thumbs over computers, tweak the status quo under the rubric of "reform," and tolerate vicious governments presided over by war-mongering, power-hungry liars rather than to make the necessary sacrifices to morally improve their lot as a whole.

Introduction to a Minority of One

2004-07-21T14:13:00.000-07:00

Charles Stanhope (1753-1816), Third Earl of Stanhope, was an eccentric by temperament and a minority of one. By trade he was a radical politician and an experimental scientist. As such he was both ahead of and behind his time. Today he is a relatively unknown soldier of the Enlightenment in comparison to such notable figures as Ben Franklin, yet Stanhope's dogged defense of civil liberties was very well known to his colleagues; for that he was grudgingly respected by liberals and conservatives alike - almost everyone is at least fond of their own liberty. In any event, Stanhope was highly regarded by those British radicals who wanted to dilate the circle of freedom with a broader political franchise, progressive economic reforms, and the abolition of wars fought for the enrichment or aggrandizement of the few.

Stanhope's penchant for inventing new-fangled machines gave his detractors ample cause for ridicule. Just imagine steam-powered ships that sail against waves and wind! and hand-held logic-machines to eliminate fallacies! Stanhope also invented a stereotype printing process which threatened to broaden and quicken the dissemination of sensitive information - during a speech in Parliament, he threatened to use his invention against the Lords. His desire to redesign the prevailing political machine gave them ample cause to lampoon him.

Furthermore, Lord Stanhope's opposition to Britian's war on Terrorism - the war with Revolutionary France - provoked the outspoken contempt of his lordly peers. A few of them, however, just shook their heads, understanding that the motives if not the awkward motions of the "noble mover" were pure. During a parliamentary debate he instigated in January 1795, Stanhope argued so vehemently against British intervention in the domestic affairs of France that his opponents called him a Jacobin, one of the most despicable political types in their noble estimation. The division on his motion was 66 against to his 1 in favor, hence the 'Minority of One' event was commemorated with the issuance of the Stanhope Medal; the other side of the medal read: "Stanhope the friend of Trial by Jury, Liberty of the Press, Parliamentary Reform, Annual Parliaments, Habeas Corpus Act, Abolition of Sinecures, and of Speedy Peace with France."

The general enthusiasm for the rational Enlightenment Stanhope loved so much was waning fast. The sober praise and practice of the empirical sort of universal analysis which frees individuals from glittering generalities was everywhere being eclipsed by the romantic reaction and its aggressive nationalism. Alarmed by news of the unanticipated, successful advances of popular French forces, Britain's heriditary powers locked arms, raised troops, and moved to stifle domestic dissent. Heaven forbid! France had promised to free everyone who joined her. Not only did the French Revolution raise high hopes against the vestiges of feudal regimes throughout Europe, citizens of the brand new United States were ringing the liberty bell so enthusiastically that the reigning Federalists, accused of being British-loving monarchists, proceeded to legally suppress free speech with Alien and Seditions laws and to build an authoritarian regime bolstered by a large standing army - the threat was really from the French principles or the Revolution within the American revolution - which was more of a civil war resulting in the changing of the guard - and not from French troops.

After six years of vigorous radical activism in Britain during the 1790s, the British government's repressive measures as well as the increasing upopularity of the antiwar movement drove radical intellectuals underground for a generation, where they harmlessly blew off steam with arcane, symbolic gestures in marked contrast to the profane clarity of the old revolutionary speeches. But Earl Stanhope never toned down or glossed over his antipathy to the illiberal trend, although all the inventor could do against it as a peer was shout and wave his arms at it,without much effect except to be painted by his amused detractors as a crazy caricature of the Enlightenment and a Jacobitic Citizen.

There is no doubt about it: Citizen Stanhope was a peculiar man, indeed, an excellent subject for political caricatures and lampoons. He placed too much faith in human reason and freedom for his own good. Still, the earl was a man of principle who stringently adhered to his principles, principles he firmly believed were sound in any and all circumstances - the mark radicals both right and left. He enumerated his political principles during a speech he delivered at the Crown and Anchor Tavern on February 4, 1795:

"There are certain fundamental principles which I have adopted as essential to freedom and to which I pledge myself uniformly to adhere. First a fair, free and equal representation of the people. Secondly the ancient law of short and even annual Parliaments. Thirdly the Habeas Corpus Act which was (and I wish I could say which is) the safeguard of the personal liberty of the citizen. Fourthly the sacred liberty of the Press. Fifthly, the inestimable trial by jury."

That liberal list hardly seems radical today. Stanhope probably had much more in mind, especially appertaining to the methodical application of the abstract principles voiced. Be that as it may, he believed that the people of France were fighting for fair, free and equal representation, and he had the perfection of same in mind for his own country. His antiwar sentiment alienated him from patriots who believed the war with France was just in several respects besides self-defense. We recall Samuel Johnson's (1709-1784) famous statement, that patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels, and presume that the motives included self-enrichment.

Incidentally, Stanhope also opposed the 1812 war with the United States. But he was not an absolute pacifist: after all, his steamship invention was intended for warships - he also invented a mine-sweeping paravane, 'The Straddler', to counteract the explosive machines invented by Robert Fulton for the French.

Whatever the applicable principles for an action might be, being a man of principle instead of an opportunist was still considered to be a noble virtue in Merry England and other quarters of the civilized world. Aaron Burr's opportunism in America, the land of opportunity if not noble virtue, got him into hot water. Burr suffered at the hands of Hamilton and Jefferson, who were otherwise archenemies, men of opposing principles purportedly much in contrast to the opportunistic Burr. Of course there is a certain point somewhere along the course of conduct where being a man of principle turns persistent virtue into stubborn vice; furthermore, principles may be too broad or too narrow, with evil consquences.

As for Lord Stanhope, he did not want to bring down his country's constitution. He was not an anarchist: he believed freedom had to be legally constituted and protected. He defended the good old liberties subsumed by freedom, and he wanted them extended. Yet his enthusiasm for the French Revolution indicates that he, like Jefferson, another son of the French Enlightenment, believed that Lady Liberty had novel liberties in store.

Ironically, due to the perseverence of principled ideologists such as Stanhope, politicians are free to be "pragmatic" and to shelve their principles when taking the hypocritical oath of office, ostensibly to serve God and People, but really to do whatever is necessary and convenient to obtain and hold office. A brief account of Charles Stanhope's life may give us cause to reflect on our own principles if we have any. Although my sources of information are meagre in the United States, I trust the little I have gleaned of his life from others will be fascinating to each and every Minority of One still living.

to be continued

The Pharoah of Love

2004-07-07T14:01:00.000-07:00

The ultimate sacred power cannot be arbitrarily confined to an idol nor can it be contained by a city of a god, not even the ideal city the prophet Jeremiah had in mind instead of the Jerusalem he resided in. A spiritual iconoclast disavows the worship of a city even if it happens to be the throne of a god or the central seat of political power. He would disavow the exaltation of any object, not only a carved idol, a painted image and such, but an entire city; for example, the dream city built by the iconoclastic pharaoh, Akhnaton (He-who-serves-Aton), during the end of Egypt's Eighteenth Dynasty, the city he named Akhetaton, or 'City of the Horizon of the Sun-disk.'

Akhnaton (c.1395-1366 B.C.E.) found the site for his holy city in the black virgin soil undefiled by man and the pantheon of gods Egypt had accumulated over the centuries: "For it was Aton, my Father, that brought me to this City of the Horizon. There was not a noble who directed me to it; there was not any man in the whole land who led me to it, saying, 'It is fitting for his majesty that he make a City of the Horizon of Aton in this place'...Behold the Pharaoh found that this site belonged not to a prince, nor to a princess. There was no right for any man to act as owner of it."

So there Akhnaton built the ark that was to carry the seeds of the revolutionary race consecrated to the Sun-god. He built it quickly of brick and mortar along modern, "natural" lines - there was no time for massive quarrying - and inscribed on a stone tablet his vow never to leave it: "I will not pass beyond it, for ever and ever," he promised. He declared his oath and the tablet upon which it was written would forever endure: "It shall not be erased. It shall not be washed out. It shall not be kicked. It shall not be struck with stones." Ironically, Akhnaton's city flourished for only twenty-five years. Nonetheless, never before had a king built a city so thoroughly suited to the worship of one god.

What sort of person was Akhnaton? His unusual conduct and personal appearance have been the subject of considerable speculation. He was portrayed with an oddly shaped head, a thin face with a brooding, in-drawn expression, a slender neck, narrow sloping shoulders, protruding breasts, a pot-belly and wide hips -his physiognomy was once believed to be the product of incestuous inbreeding, but that hypothesis has been discarded. He apparently wore simple clothing and did not adorn himself with jewelry. Of course his personal characteristics were caricatured in the naturalistic art of his reign - artists naturally flattered the royal model of natural human beauty. Akhnaton has been variously described by modern critics as an introspective intellectual; iconoclast; heretic; reformer; revolutionary; the world's first individualist, idealist and modernist; and an hallucinating mystic - not to mention a hermaphrodite. Furthermore, given the incest noted by travelers to ancient Egypt, he may have been Sophocles' model for 'Oedipus'. A rather far-fetched theory opines that he was an androgynous being descended from outer space. However, a down-to-earth report states he was the last child descended from the marriage of a common woman who became Queen Tiy and her husband, Amenhotep III. Hence Akhnaton was originally Amenhotep IV, a member of a dynasty that worshipped Amon. He later changed his name from Amenhotep (Amon-is-satisfied) to Akhnaton (He-serves-Aton) to reflect his dedication to Aton. As for his sexual orientation and reproductive status, we know Akhnaton and his beautiful queen Nefertiti had six daughters; the family's mutual affection was openly displayed; his obvious compassion and tenderness and the portrayal of female participation in public life is evidence of a strong feminism.

Some authorities believe Ahknaton received his ideas about Aton at a very early age, while under the influence of Mitanni women at the royal court in Thebes. The Mitannis had been ruled by the "Aryans" of India, and had brought Surya, the Vedic version of the solar god,in whom the supreme power resides, to the Egyptian court with them. Surya was initially represented abstractly, as a disk, wheel, or swastika, but eventually took on an anthropomorphic form as a god. Now with liberal Mitanni women on the one hand and the strict conservative priests of Amon on the other, Akhnaton was apparently a troubled teenager, quite eager to get out of Thebes, out from under the priests of Amon, in order to do his own thing, to found his City of the Horizon at what is now called Tell-el-Amarna (rediscovered in the 1820's), which he dedicated to the one god symbolized by the Sun-disk.

Monotheistic Jeremiah would have sympathized with Akhnaton's one, universal god. Akhnaton proclaimed: "O thou sole God, whose powers no other possesseth, Thou didst create the earth according to Thy desire, whilst Thou wast alone: men, all cattle large and small, all that are upon the earth, that go about upon their feet; all that are on high, that fly with their wings. The countries of Syria and Nubia, the land of Egypt; Thou settest every man in his place, Thou suppliest their necessities. Every one had his possessions, and his days are reckoned. Their tongues are divers in speech, their forms likewise and their skins, for Thou, divider, hast divided the peoples."

Of course Akhnaton did not invent Sun-worship: life on Earth is necessarily devoted to the Sun. Actually, Akhnaton forbade the perennial worship of the Sun per se, and emphasized instead the "Heat-in-the-Sun" and "Light-in-the-Sun." He must have believed the perceived forms of energy should only be regarded as the manifestations of the hidden, original cause. Indeed, enthusiasts have credited Akhnaton with the discovery of the "principle of equivalence" of heat, light, and other forms of energy, as well as the equation of matter and energy set forth in the modern theory of relativity. No doubt the discoveries and inventions of our modern solar physicists would fascinate Akhnaton and provide him with further verification of the wonders of Aton.

The Egyptian gods whom Akhnaton was confronted with as a youth were evolved "mythopoetic" conceptions designated by the sundry terms of language. As is usually the case given the liberty of the human imagination, different Egyptian terms designated the same basic ideas; concepts overlapped; underlying substances were subject to mysterious modifications; the metamorphisizing gods took different forms, perhaps according to their functions or because of some chance juxtaposition of events observed in nature. The ancients may appear hopelessly confused to us, but their logic worked well for them. In any event, through the hierarchical process of generalizing, especially in the moral province of ultimate values, and through the competition of "my god is better than your god", certain ideas and gods came to predominate over others in a sort of crude pyramidal scheme, with the first family or trinity at its apex; indeed, the underlying logic of the trinity is familial although the female is sometimes ignored: the natural form is, In the Name of the Father, the Child, and the Mother, as One (Amon, Amen). We find in Egypt, for example, Osiris and Isis and their child Horus. It seems all good things come in threes.

As for Re and Amon, predominant in Akhnaton's time, Re, the Sun-god, was amalgamated with the invisible god of air, Amon. Amon could be portrayed as a man painted blue to connote invisibility. The combined Amon-Re was the predominant national god who, at one time or another, could be separately considered either as Amon, the prevailing god at Thebes, or as Re, prevailing god at Heliopolis. Among the Hebrews, Amon was a competitor to Yahweh; the Greeks compared Amon to their Zeus: Egypt periodically sent ambassadors of Amon to Athens. An early divine trinity comprised Amon-Re the Father, husband of his mother; Mut the Mother, Queen of Darkness (the Black Virgin); and Khons the Child. A later trinity absent the feminine element was Re the Father; Ptah the Son; Amon the Spirit; an Amon hymn of the Nineteenth Dynasty states: "Amon, who came into being at the beginning, so that the mysterious nature is unknown. His image is not displayed in writing. Hidden (amen) is his name as Amon, he is Re in the face and his body is Ptah."

Of course there were many other gods; one or the other god might seem to prevail here and there according to the predilection of the worshipper and the occasion. It was a common practice to flatter the god presently worshipped by saying he or she was "the sole god besides whom there is no other." Leaving that aside, Akhnaton brought the syncretic evolution of the pantheon to focus on a single symbol of the signified divine being: Aton, the Sun-disk, symbol of divine energy radiating rays with hands at the end of them ministering to all. The "stimulating" form of the Vedic deity Surya also reached out with "golden arms" to all beings.

Aton was not concealed in an ark or in a darkened chamber at the end of a temple, nor was he subject of occult incantations and ritual rigmarole. Quite to the contrary: although Aton's essence was invisible, his symbol and forms were celebrated in plain view by the broad light of day. Aton's temples had no roofs and their doors were flung wide open; there were no sacred icons or holy images within; artistic decoration consisted of natural scenes, flowers, plants and animals. And there was no abracadabra mumbo-jumbo: Atonism simply described Aton's effulgent beauty as it is experienced in nature. There was no wrath, jealousy, revenge, thou-shalt-nots, or dead stiffness of eternity. The emphasis was on the positive, on love, on the lively. The only "shalt" was to have positive gratitude for life. The hidden was revealed by the unhidden nature, and occult secrecy was replaced by exoteric publicity. The Sun stood not as a symbol for the other world, the world of the dead, but was a symbol for life in this world. Aton's food was ma'at, or truth, exemplified by the candor of the Sun and by the pharaoh's candid life expressed in the revolutionary "naturalism" of contemporary art.

Ordinary people still had their household idols, but Akhnaton ordered all public references to Amon as well as references to plural "gods" hacked out with hatchets, hammers and chisels. The Egyptians were well aware of the magical hold names have on the mind, of the pervasive influence of words inscribed on tablets and temples, tombs and other monuments; they believed the visible sign signified an invisible double that could be obliterated with the destruction of the sign; they were, therefore, firm believers in iconoclasm as the antidote for undesirable gods and propaganda. Akhnaton's solar disk was the most convenient visible symbol for the universal deity: the solar sign might be effaced, but the all powerful Sun would defiantly remain as evidence of the invisible essence of the one god.

In the City of the Horizon the only personification of Aton permitted was the pharaoh, the Son-of-Re the father, a form of Aton. Akhnaton was, for his people, the Son of God. He asserted the Divine Right of Pharaoh. His iconoclastic policy was to destroy the organized polytheistic religion of Egypt together with its political and economic trappings. Many people of the old priestly order lost their jobs and influence while newcomers found theirs. But Atonism was an abstract religion of intellectuals; ordinary people missed their vulgar icons and idols as well as the related handicraft industry, just as much as the old elite missed their powers. Hence the Egyptian Reformation began and ended with Akhnaton, the rebel pharaoh; after he died, Amon was easily restored along with his human sycophants. Most imortantly, the old god Amon had been a triumphant god of war who had built up the Empire, whereas Aton, the god of Love, had in the space of a few years lost all the hard-won gains excepting for a small corner of Palestine.

We have the correspondence. We know Akhnaton virtually ignored the desperate pleas for military help coming in from his vassals. The Empire was his personal property: he turned his cheek and gave away his cloak, or so the story goes. His pragmatic mother Queen Tiy eventually came down from Thebes to set him straight. A coregent was named and sent obediently backsliding to Thebes and Amon. But Queen Nefertiti was no backslider; she refused to cooperate with the militant reform, hence was relocated to a northern suburb of the dream city on the horizon - where she presumably continued to faithfully adore Aton and her husband. His end is even more sketchy than his beginning: he died, perhaps of the plague - several members of the royal family presumably succumbed to it as well. A few years thereafter his glorious City of the Horizon was abandoned. The general of his army, General Horemheb, ascended to the throne, and determined there would be no anarchy under his watch. He ordered workmen to destroy the signs of Aton and Akhnaton. Some time later Ramses the Great continued to blot out the official city of Akhnaton, using its monuments as a quarry for the building of Hermopolis. It became a crime to even mention Akhnaton's name: he could only be officially referred to as "that criminal."

In retrospect we might assume that the world was not ready for universal love yet, that Akhnaton was too preoccupied with his pacific ideals to ensure their protection by force of arms. Modern writers criticize Atonism for being too reliant on the "oceanic feeling of oneness." They claim such a "nebulous, romantic idealism", devoid of priorities, is unsuitable for the complexities of real life, hence is an inadequate guide to conduct. Furthermore, the religion of absolute love ignores the need for "just wars" and "limited violence" to limit violence, the need for terrorists to be identified and exterminated by freedom fighters. The faith in love held by the few at the core of the love-is-god religion must be violently defended from attack until that faith is universal. Unconditional love simply will not work until - as Jeremiah prophesied - love is inscribed in every heart. Merely chiseling the word on stone tablets or erecting whole cities to it is futile. Pending that internal change of heart, war is inevitable and providence will continue to try the consciences of lovers and the arms of warriors.

T

Note:

This view of Akhanaton is based on the popular legend. A few archeologists and revisionist historians now insist that certain evidence at Amarna, such as a well-worn footpath around the perimeter, indicates the existence of a heavy military presence, suggesting that Akhnaton might have been an oppressive despot rather than an enlightened pharoah of Love.

Mourn Only the Benefactors

2004-07-06T07:04:00.000-07:00

Count de Mirabeau's speech to the National Assembly on the death of Benjamin Franklin:

GENTLEMEN, Franklin is dead.... The genius which freed America and poured over Europe a flood of light has returned to the bosom of divinity.

The sage whom two worlds claim as their own, the man for whom the history of science and the history of empires are contending, held without a doubt a lofty rank in the human race.

Long enough have political cabinets made formal note of the death of those who ere great only in their funeral eulogies. Long enough has the etiquette of courts proclaimed hypocritical mourning. Nations should only go into mourning for their benefactors. The representatives of nations should only recommend homage for the heroes of humanity.

Congress has declared in the fourteen States of the confederation two month's mourning for Franklin, and America at this moment is paying this tribute of veneration to one of the fathers of her constitution. Would it not beseem us gentlemen, to unite with America in this religious act, to participate in this homage rendered before the universe, both to the rights of man, and to the philosopher who most contributed to the propagation of their dominion throughout the earth. Antiquity would have raised altars to the vast and powerful genius, who, for the welfare of mortals, embracing in his thought both he heavens and the earth, could alike subdue thunderbolts and tyrants. France, enlightened and free, over at least some pledge of remembrance and regret for one of the greatest of the men who ever served philosophy and liberty.

I propose that it be decreed that the National Assembly wear mourning for three days in memory of Benjamin Franklin.

Source: The Stoddard Library, Chicago: Shuman 1915

A Bad Comic Book

2004-07-02T09:48:00.000-07:00

A few journalists who dared to liberally criticize Ronald Reagan's policies and personal characteristics during the mourning period after his death were unduly alarmed by the hateful response they drew from the poison keyboards of a few of the late president's adulators. The revolutionary intellectuals of course deserved the venom of their neoconservative counter-critics, not because the reactionaries were right, but because it is discourteous to dispraise a great man while a legend is being made of him on his way to the grave. President Reagan's popularity was already legendary several years before his body followed his mind to heaven. The grief-stricken populace moved prominent journalists to update the obituaries waiting on his death, and endow Ronald Reagan with the most prestigious democratic title of all, "the People's President."

Ronald Reagan will never, like Mirabeau, become retroactively unpopular after the discovery of secret documents. No, the Gipper's remains will never be taken from their place of honor and thrown into a trench in an obscure corner of a cemetery, nor will his corpse be, like Cromwell's, disinterred and hung. Reagan weathered the worst sort of scandal during his lifetime, after it was discovered that he had fostered international drug- and gun-dealing, money-laundering, and crimes against humanity. The First Lady said he didn't know what was going on, but never mind; he was deemed a hero for presiding over the wrongdoings as alleged. Of course he sincerely believed that he and his free-wheeling delegates were "doing the right thing." The American people who really counted at the polls, the anti-liberal, authoritarian multitude, agreed with him.

As far as his supporters are concerned, the People's President was no moron: he knew what was going on because he made the right thing happen for the greater good. Hearsay will suffice here: according to George Schultz, President Reagan, referring to the Iran-Contra conspiracy, said, "I'll try to do the right thing, and even if it's controversial, I can explain it. And if it's the right thing, the American people will wind up supporting it." That certainly sounds like the man who penned the words inscribed at his library: "In know in my heart that man is good, that what is right will always triumph, and that there is a purpose and worth to each and every life." Furthermore, President Reagan's model president, Calvin Coolidge, once said, "There is only one form of political strategy in which I have any confidence, and that is to try to do the right thing and sometimes succeed." President Reagan broke domestic and international law doing the right thing, but never mind the law of mere mortals and their relative good and evil, for he was doing the right thing absolutely, the divine thing, and those who cannot stand ambiguity know exactly what that is. In any case, good , for its existence, depends on some terrifying evil opposed to it, therefore the terrible means to peaceful ends are consequently justified by the fall of the Evil Empire and the rise of the World War on Terrorism.

Terrorism is the natural response to the self-righteousness that impoverishes and enslaves so many for the salvation of the elect few, the anti-intellectual elite who love gross matter more than elevated morals. The United States, the Soviet Union, the State of Israel, to name a few, were founded by terrorists. Who knows what forms the latest round of terrorism will take? Will some overpowering form become legitimate because might makes right ? Shall the pseudo-conservatives (neoconservatives) maintain their regressive regime for a thousand years? a regime established on the selfish-interest of property holders and justified by the authority of wealth under the money-god? whose political doctrine of unregulated individualism and inequality is contrary to the interests of most individuals who espouse it?

Ronald Reagan's funereal critics should not have been so surprised by the vilifications they received from non-professional therefore "self-styled" critics. They should not even mind the death threats, especially after they recall that, long before President Reagan died, political brutes were enraged by any adverse criticism whatsoever of their beloved representative. As for me, I did not admire Ronald Reagan's misdeeds - I believe he should have been impeached, convicted and removed from office for his political misdeeds; then tried, and, if convicted, sentenced to life in prison for his crimes - that would of course be followed by a full presidential pardon. In my case, the massive outpouring of grief over his death reinforced old lessons I had learned about the nature of Christian forgiveness and democracy; and popularity - Reagan's invincible popularity posed a daunting problem to the conscientious persons around him who believed that means to good ends should be ethical if not moral, but who failed to act scrupulously because they feared for their fortunes.

The President is dead, long live the President! Liberal journalists who are outraged by the decline of liberty and the dementedness of their countrymen should bury their anti-Reagan hatchets where the historians can find them. Old folks love history all the more because their own future is in the past. It bodes ill for liberty when liberal journalists focus too much on the history of mistakes instead of the potential of current events. To save liberty for humankind, journalists must move on to their current President and his constituents, for the obnoxious notions he represents pose a terrible threat to humane humankind.

We might feel the pain of the liberal journalists who just cannot let Reagan go, who persist in recounting the reprehensible deeds of the man, who keep blaming him personally for the regressive decline of the United States. But we know they are unduly astonished by the vulgar and vicious character of their demented respondents, political thugs who peruse their columns because they love to hate people who cast blame on their idol or his deeds. Anal-retentive primitives love to use scatological instead of sexual terms; they do not bother with euphemisms, such as ordure, for the liberal expulsions they so much resent as they hold their wads tight. Indeed, if they really disliked the excretions and execrations so much, they would not come back again and again to lick under the rims of the bowls prepared for them. In truth they are afraid for their own vanity, in which they rightfully have no faith, and must in their uncertainty attack everyone who is skeptical.

The memorials and funerals for the surviving public convinced this self-styled critic that Ronald Reagan was not solely to blame for the new wave of injustices. The history of his presidency is certainly a good study, but it really makes no further sense to entirely blame him for it since he can no longer do anything about it. We can do something about the sociopathic surge he represented, for it still prevails. No doubt the sociopaths did have and still have due cause to fear extreme socialism, but they went too far. They found an excellent spokesman in Ronald Reagan. They now enjoy a bad actor in his stead. We should not blame the leaders for being the geniuses or the morons of their times. The electorate in our democratic republic is responsible for the extremely unwise policies of the political thuggees. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush are not to blame; nor are the neoconservative ideologues; nor are the Christian Right or the Moral Majority.

The voters and those who failed to vote have the leaders they deserve. That is a fact: accept it. Presidents are not the tribunes they should be. That is our fault. That they continue as they do is no credit to them but is rather the fault of those who should get rid of them forthwith. Instead of trying to pin the tail on some old donkey, liberal-minded journalists should take a hard look around at the people who are ultimately responsible for the political, economic, and spiritual leaders they have. I say a hard look because lucidity is hard to come by and we might not like what we see when the fog clears and we face ourselves and each other.

Pardon me for speaking subjectively, but the world is beginnning to look like a bad comic book to me, and that is no joke.

Eulogies for President Garfield

2004-06-23T13:55:00.000-07:00

"He must be insane," said President Garfield after he was shot. "Why should he want to kill me?" Someone answered, "It was a disappointed office-seeker." The President responded, quoting Pensance, "I expected he supposed that 'it was a glorious thing to be a pirate king.'"

President James Garfield was perhaps the most popular man in the United States when he was suddenly shot in the back at the train station on the way to board a train to visit with his boys at Elberon, New Jersey. He planned on introducing them to his alma mater, Williams College at Williamstown, New Jersey, where he had the privilege of studying under Mark Hopkins, one of the finest college presidents in the country; when he arrived in 1854, he was so impressed by Ralph Waldo Emerson's commencement speech that he quoted from it for the rest of his life.

President Garfield represented liberty and justice for all under the law during his long and illustrious career. The high hopes that he held were not his alone but were intimately felt by all Americans who had in civil crisis forged their reunion in battle, then found themselves at a critical political-economic juncture in the ongoing world revolution, the scientific industrial revolution. Furthermore, President Garfield, like President Lincoln, had ascended from Log Cabin to White House; that success added to the high hopes every ordinary person had for their own success, and even more so for their children.

We notice a much higher moral tone of voice in the eulogies of those days. Perhaps people wanted a better moral education in those days and appreciated good examples. James Garfield, when he was a teacher, spoke often of the promise the young hold out to the world, in contrast to those already set in their ways. We find this in a speech he made at Hiram College: "If the Superior Being of the universe would look down upon the world to find the most interesting object, it would be the unfinished, unformed character of the young man or young woman. Those who have passed into middle manhood and middle womanhood are about what they shall always be and there is but little left of interest, as their characters are all developed."

The phenomenal outpouring of grief and the eulogies around the world after the President's death on September 19, 1881 were certainly something the world had not experienced before - the United States of America itself the great hope of the world despite the Civil War that tore it apart.

In England, when the Archbishop of Canterbury was asked why so many English mourned Garfield's death, he answered that they did so because they had learned of his wonderful career cut short, how great men were formed in America, and how a boy, raised by his mother, had by hard work and adventures come to lead his country.

At the September 24, 1881, memorial at Cleveland Monument, Rev. Isaac Errett of Cincinnati took as his text, "And the archers shot King Josiah, and the King said to his servants, have me away, for I am sore wounded...."

Reverend Errett claimed there had never been a like mourning in the history of the world than the mourning of President Garfield. Given the Garfield's old love, as U.S. Senator, for the budding science of political arithmetic, he would have smiled at the statistic cited:

"I am not speaking extravagantly," claimed Rev. Errett, "for I am told it is the result of calculations carefully made that certainly not less than 300,000,000 of the human race share in the sadness and the lamentations, the sorrow and the mourning that belong to this occasion here to-day. It is the chill shadow of calamity that has extended itself into every home in all this land and into every heart, and that has projected itself over vast seas and oceans into distant lands and awakened the sincerest and profoundest sympathies with us in the hearts of the good of all nations and among all peoples."

The reverend said there was good reason for the entire world to be downcast by the tragic death of the president. "The great lesson to which I desire to call to your attention can be expressed in a few words. James A. Garfield went through his whole public life without surrendering for a single moment his Christian integrity, or his love of the spiritual. Coming into the exciting conflicts of political life with a nature as capable as any of feeling the force of every temptation; with temptation to unholy ambition, with unlawful prizes within his reach, with every inducement to surrender all his religious faith and be known merely as a successful man of the world, from the first to last he has manfully adhered to his religious convictions and found the more praise, and gathers in his death all the pure inspiration of the hope of everlasting life."

We find this from Reverend J.P. Bodfish, who spoke in Boston on September 25, 1881. "Would you be beloved by your fellow citizens and your death mourned by a nation? Then imitate the illustrious dead. Be a man, good and true and without reproach, and the end shall be a glorious one."

"Not even when Lincoln was slain was there such universal sympathy," said Henry Ward Beecher on 23 September in Peekskill, New York. "Four names in the line of presidents will stand conspicuous in history: Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Garfield." And in Brooklyn on 25 September: "He was a man who united the best elements of his countrymen. He was firm, yet gentle, and in him the lion and the lamb seemed to lie down together; he was not an empty partisan, but he looked at all questions with a calm and unbiased man. He had a love for learning, and he had acquired it by hard and incessant labor. He had been bred on hardship and poverty, and he had lived by he sweat of his brow; moreover, he had been a preacher of righteousness."

"One could see that he was poor," reminisced Dr. Franklin Noble, an old class-mate. "He began poor, and never had time to grow rich. With his talents and opportunities he remained poor, only because he would not make money corruptly."

Elder J.Z. Taylor, at the 26 September memorial held in Kansas City, Missouri, said, "We come to express this tribute to the greatest man of all ages.... The history of this man and his success lies in the fact that he was the embodiment of all that was grand, noble and pure in human life. Around his suffering he gathered the hearts of fifty-million people."

Congressman Hayes remembered, "He was the most laborious man in the halls of Congress. He was a man characterized by virtues and upright habits. He carried these habits throughout his life. He was, however, a man of deep conviction. He said, 'There is one with whom I must always be on good terms. I am compelled to walk with him, eat with him, sleep with him - I mean myself.' James A. Garfield's life demonstrates the fact that a man may be a Christian and a politician and a statesman at the same time. We may learn that the American people will hold in their hearts a noble aim and an honorable life. It will teach future aspirants that if they would attain to the highest place of honor they must be men of virtue and integrity. We learn further the lesson that it is in the power of the humblest to attain positions of honor. This great country offers such hopes to every young man in the United States."

Gandhi's Christianity

2004-06-21T09:36:00.000-07:00

Mahatma Gandhi loved Jesus, or rather the conception of Jesus he gleaned from the Sermon on the Mount. In fact, Gandhi's detractors charged him with being a secret Christian. Some of his admirers said he was one of the most Christ-like men in history although he was not at all a Christian.

"If I could call myself, say, a Christian or a Moslem, with my own interpretation of the Bible or Koran, I could not hesitate to call myself either. For the Hindu, Christian, and Moslem would be synonymous terms. I do believe that in the other world there are neither Hindus, nor Christians or Moslems," Gandhi said.

In his paper, 'Young India' (1929), Gandhi said he got his idea of passive resistance from the Sermon on the Mount.

In a 1927 address to the YMCA in Ceylon, Gandhi declared:

"If then I had to face only the Sermon on the Mount and my own interpretation of it, I should not hesitate to say, 'Oh, yes, I am a Christian'...But negatively I can tell you that much of what passes as Christianity is a negation of the Sermon on the Mount."

While in London nearly forty years prior to that statement, Gandhi found time to read a Bible introduced to him by a Bible salesman. The Old Testament bored him, put him to sleep - he did not get past Levticus and Numbers. The New Testament was a different story, one that held his attention, and the Sermon on the Mount went "straight to my heart", especially the provisions for resisting not evil, turning the right cheek, and giving more than is received or taken.

Gandhi met Madame H.P. Blavatsky and her protege, the activist Annie Besant, in London, and read their books on theosophy. Blavatsky's KEY TO THEOSOPHY particularly inspired his interest in Hinduism. He found certain parallels between the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount and theBhagavad Gita; he synthesized what he learned into his own version of the doctrine of renunciation, a doctrine he thought expressed the highest form of religion.

After having four sons, Gandhi took the vow of brahmacharya in order to devote maximum energy to the public good. Thus he eventually turned from Christianity and Theosophy directly to Hinduism and its morale of selfless service, nonpossession, and action without attachment to results - his "infallible guide to conduct."

Gandhi's beliefs were further influenced by Henry David Thoreau's essay, 'Civil Disobedience'. He borrowed a copy from the library of the South African prison he was sentenced to in 1908. Although the essay's influence on him seems obvious, he denied it was the source of his related, "Satyagraha" concept, which is also similar to the Christian ideas he studied.

Satyagraha, or "holding onto truth", is a continuous searching for truth. That quest includes non-violent resistance and self-suffering, hence is not merely passive resistance - it is active, constructive disobedience, resistance pursuant to Gandhi's maxim, "Means are ends in the making."

Gandhi once said that he is a Christian only to the extent he interprets what Christianity really is. He discountenanced every element of Christianity disagreeable to his "inner conscience". Now a few Christians still believe scripture literally means what it says, hence it leaves no room for personal interpretations, while others find scripture confusing if not contradictory and prefer to rely on the judgments and interpretations of a traditional ministry. Yet others, whose numbers are dwindling, believe that Christ appeared to free individuals from external authority: they are reliant on their own consciences and are glad to protest any infringement of authority on that freedom of conscience even though their fellows might accuse them of the "sin of pride" and condemn them to suffer eternal damnation in hell for doing so. Perhaps Gandhi falls within the latter group, the cult of individual freedom of conscience and of personal responsibility for one's own actions. Hinduism, the "umbrella" for a variety of religious systmes and their attendant philosophies, is tolerant of the view that God is within the self although not contained by the self. Thus God is directly available to each individual, who can become liberated from nescience by becoming one with God. For that end, various methods of unification with God are recommended. Of course one finds authorities guiding this liberating process: the novice needs a bona fide spiritual master to show the way. Such spiritual masters are legion in spiritually inclined India; there are a wide variety of spiritual masters who are well prepared to help the willing disciple.

That being said, Gandhi's political beliefs and their religious underpinnings are apparent. Self-rule is the order of the day, self-rule by the individual and for India. Psychologically, the individual must gain self-control, and self-mastery of fear. Politically, there must be a high degree of self-sufficiency in all political units, from the village right on up. Change begins with individuals in relation to their relations, friends, and adversaries, hence only in those relations is self-fulfillment possible. Moreover, public institutions should be organizations devoted to independence. Most importantly, real progress can only be measured in terms of helping the desperately poor; all the social forces must be rallied around that aim, without which there is no real political progress. Helping the poor entails helping them to help themselves. Even brahman holy men, who traditionally depended on others to support them because they were owed a living, should follow the self-help rule. Gandhi did not cater to able-bodied mendicants with alms bowls.

People who are socially inclined would not beg to differ with Gandhi here either on religious or political grounds. After all, only an anti-social religion or politic would not preach the universal betterment of life. Gandhi's program is appealing inasmuch as the "selfish" individual takes personal responsibility for bettering his own conditions, and does so by establishing helpful and cooperative relations with other people. And cooperation might include active civil disobedience of the religious and political authorities who are the enemies of progress, liberty, and truth.

Which brings us to Gandhi's complaints regarding those who profess social progress while bringing society to ruin, particulary Christian hypocrites. He was profoundly disturbed by the intolerance of those Christian missionaries in India who were constantly disparaging Hindus, their customs and gods, while converting them to alcoholism, meat-eating, and the wearing of vulgar European clothes. This reminds us of the old but true story about how Christians saved themselves in from being persecuted as Muslims or Hindus in some areas by declaring, "I smoke, drink, and curse. I'm a Christian!" Of course such desecrations of the spiritual temple are blasphemies to the best Christians, who are well aware that addictions destructive of the personal and social body are deadly adulteries.

Gandhi was understandably averse to missionary activities, given his experience with the hatred and bigotry of so-called Christians. His dislike for missionaries was not without precedent: Jews have said, one way to murder a Jew is to convert him; therefore hating missionaries is sanctioned right along hating enemies during wars; however, no doubt Gandhi's dislike of missionaries fell far short of hatred given his loving precepts. In any event, alien busybodies who must go about publicly recruiting sheep for their faith, who are constantly seeking security in numbers, do not seem to be very secure in their faith. However that may be, Gandhi believed faith is a matter of personal conscience.

A faithful Christian did inform Gandhi of the following: intolerance of other religions is unchristian; wise Christians know Christianity was born from the finest thoughts of its antecedents, hence there is no real gulf between religions. The Christian cited Mithras' cult as an example: the cult practiced baptism, communion, and confirmation; taught morality, continence, chastity, self-denial; and its adherents believed in immortality and the resurrection of the dead.

As far as Gandhi was concerned, the belief that Jesus is the only incarnation of God is absurd, for, if God could have sons, we are all his sons. And he disbelieved that only Christians have souls. He accepted metaphors about Jesus, but not mysteries. Nor did the mahatma think Christianity was philosophically superior or different than the best of other religions. He accepted Jesus as a teacher, but he did not accept him as most perfect or most divine.

Enlightened people cannot blame Gandhi for his disbeliefs; for the self-serving beliefs he disavowed are signs of arrogance: they constitute the height of the "sin of pride" which some misguided Christians rely on, while taking Jesus Christ's name in vain, to maintain their professional dictation of bigoted ("by-god") authority. We still observe a growing number of hate-mongering anti-christians plaguing the world who believe their every sin will be forgiven as long as they give lip-service to God's names.

On the subject of sin, Gandhi did not believe the blood of the murdered Jesus redeemed the murderers. When a Christian explained to him how sins are redeemed by Jesus, Gandhi said, after observing the Christian sinning as usual, "I do not seek redemption from the consequences of my sin. I seek to be redeemed from sin itself, or rather from the very thought of sin. Until I have attained that end, I shall be content to be restless."

In Mahatma Gandhi we have a student, a father, a frustrated Christian, a theosophist, a Hindu, a free thinker, a lawyer, a union leader, a political activist, who is at once a hero and a great soul yet who is just a man who believed, "The seeker after truth should be humbler than dust." We have a mortal who was murdered by a brahman extremist. We have a saint to many who said, "God is not encased in a safe to be approached through a little hole bored in it, but He is open to be approached through billions of openings by those who are humble and pure of heart."
Mahatma Gandhi was asked, "If there is only one God, should not there be only one religion?"

"A tree has a million leaves," Gandhi replied, "There are as many religions as there are men and women, but they are all rooted in God."

In the Name of the Past, the Present, and the Future, as One

References, Suggested Reading:

Mahatma Gandhi, AUTOBIOGRAPHY, the story of my experience with truth, Trans. Mahadev Desai, Boston: Beacon 1957

THE COLLECTED WORKS OF MAHATMA GANDHI, New Delhi: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India 1988

Chitambar, Jashwant Rao, MAHATMA GANDHI, his life, work, and influence, Philadelphia: John Winston c1933

Fischer, Louis, THE LIFE OF MAHATMA GANDHI, New York: Collier 1962

Previous Commentary: rorajoey 03 Nov 2000 - I don't really care whether he was a Christian or not, but this was still an interesting article. I have a lot of opinions about religion, and I almost want to comment on several points you raised, but this is not the place. Let me just thank you for encouraging me to think about it. :) sleeper 14 Dec 2000 - This is a great article. I suspected this to be true about Gandhi. The other day I even gave Ghandi as an example for a man that followed the principles of Jesus Christ, without necessarily being a Christian. You added a good deal to my knowledge base on Gandhi, and I feel that I'm catching little by little upon Hinduism. I appreciate your work and wish I had time to read it all. I will, but slowly. anjita14 Dec 2000 - This made me think. there is a lot more to mahatma and his religere...the one man who jesus may not talk to ever! this man used religion to galvanize a movement. He never loved his people enough..read up his notions on caste heirarchy.they are an eye-opener...this guy didn't have a religion...and of course no faith. talk about christianity...you must be kidding!!! He wasn't even a true hindu...to ever be a true christian, that's a laugh! vasundhara 14 Dec 2000 I am amazed at your insight into Gandhi. He was a very well-read and erudite person and did have vast knowledge about most religions. However, Gandhi seldom did anything without a motive. Also, the concept of Satyagraha and the emphasis on non-violence is less to do with religion than practicality. In a poor nation the only way to fight colonialism was to cloak the Freedom Movement in a certain ideological-religious manner. He couldn't arm the nation physically so he did it mentally. Further, the fact that he was impressed with the Sermon on Mt. Sinai is not conclusive proof of his having believed in Christianity. Gandhi was that way. He praised certain features of all religions but only he knew if he mean it. He was a Hindu through and through. he came in for much criticism for having supported the Indian caste system that religiously legitimised the exploitation of lower castes by upper caste Hindus. He did try to act like the messiah of the downtrodden, but as Dr. Ambedkar would say in "What the Congress and Gandhi have done to the Untouchables", he did absolutely nothing for them, save terming them as "Harijans". Gandhi played on the peoples' superstitions and tried to color every issue by giving it a moral dimension. For more on Gandhi and to see how his mind really functioned impracticably do read "Hind Swaraj" where he holds "civilization" responsible for India's poor state. Also, Dr. Ambedkar's writings verbally accusing Gandhi of irreligion would be interesting. Further, do read "The Mahatma and the Poet" that talks about the intellectual debate between Gandhi and Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore where Tagore wins. All of this I hope will create an awareness about the man who was accused of trying to turn the Congress into a "Spinners' Association" by MN Roy. He was also caled a Bourgeois Marxist and if this holds, I would conclude that Gandhi did not believe in religion. He just used it. It cost the Congress a fortune to keep Gandhi in poverty. So I doubt Gandhi could ever have been remotely inclined to Christianity. white_lace15 Dec 2000 - I have to agree with ppl that U R the BEST! LUV U! ¤¿¤ moffsawyer15 Dec 2000 - YEAH!!!!!! Keep these coming! Sometimes I didn't know who was saying what in the quotes, but the ideas flowed well. You did include some of your own it seems... i couldn't tell if this was an information or persuasion oriented. Both I guess! sekhmet16 Dec 2000 - Ghandi, like most Hindus, was a monolatrist. I think Ghandi's distress at Christians was because he could see the God was such a large concept it could change to suit the vision of Hindu, Christian, Muslim and any other faith in the world. He clearly saw the ONE in the Many names of the Divine. poornima shankar 23 Mar 2001 - A lot of hard work...but have to agree with Vasundhara's argument too! walters 1 Apr 2001 - Thank you all! The various points of view are all truly enlightening!.

The Model Republican President

2004-06-19T10:07:00.000-07:00

The present decline of the United States of America prompts me to reconsider Republican President James Garfield, the 20th president of our Republic. I have been inclined to write about this great man from time to time, but each time I pick up my pencil, I soon lay it back down again, discouraged by the breadth and gravity of the task before me. In comparison to the life of President Garfield, my own life is trivial. His deeds serve to prove that I am a moral cripple by comparison - we do have in common our love for libraries and education. Given my debility and creeping experience, how can I possibly understand let alone represent this courageous man? And given what has already been written about him by accredited authors, what can I possibly say to add to his public stature?

Nonetheless, faced with the demoralization and dementation of this declining nation of ours, I am compelled to say something about President Garfield, no matter how slight it may be, perchance to jog the memories of those who know something of his greatness, and to prompt those who know very little or nothing at all about him to make further inquiry into the history books. This small beginning of mine may forever remain small, yet I presently hope to build a modest book on it. The endeavor would certainly be worthwhile for me if not for the editors who reject my strivings for liberty, for our past is indeed of value to each and every one of us, providing we approach it rightly, not to relive it, but to retrace our steps when we believe we have gone astray, that we may return to the crossroads and evaluate the forgotten paths we did not tread, then choose a better path with our experience in mind.

Since President Garfield was in office only four months, how dare I say he was one of our greatest presidents? Because of the promise of genuine liberty he offered the United States of America if only it would stay the course charted by republicans, a liberty we might still realize if we have the courage to pick up where President Garfield left off. And it is with liberty in mind that I recite from General Garfield's Andersonville Reunion speech at Toledo, Ohio, on October 3, 1879:

"All these men, and all their comrades went out inspired by two immortal ideas. First, that liberty shall be universal in America. And, second, that this old flag is the flag of a Nation, and not of a State; that the Nation is supreme over all people and all corporations. Call it a State; call it a section; call it a South; call it a North; call it anything you wish, and yet armed with the nationality that God gave us, this is a Nation against all State sovereignty and secession whatever: It is the immortality of that truth that makes these reunions, and that makes this one. You believed it on the battlefield, you believed it in the hell of Andersonville, and you believe it to-day, thank God; and you will believe it to the last gasp."

Liberty is certainly not a thing to be owned and conserved by a forceful or fortunate few who are relatively free from constraint, but is rather the power of life given to all human beings to exercise at will as they can. Liberty would endure forever if only she could, hence she struggles for the broadest exercise of her power in all people. All people are liberals, for everyone loves their own liberty as they love their life, and they would like to have a little bit more of it at least. But a few individuals would get the most of the mundane means of liberty at the expense of many others. They would accumulate and conserve the freedom of others for themselves and demand laborious interest on their hoard, enslaving them unto death. Against this the radical liberal struggles to more broadly and equally distribute basic political and civic freedoms, that no part of humanity may enslave the whole. In that outward struggle liberty is pursued but not won, for no mere monogamist may fully win liberty over all to themselves, yet all may have their fair share.

The most fortunate master discovers his own freedom in the revolt of his slave. In other words, the revolution of the slave teaches the master about the right exercise of liberty and frees not only the slave but the master as well. Civilization owes the spread of its liberty therefore its progress to revolution against those who would conserve liberty within a small circle, limiting it to a ruling class or power elite. The modern master or captain of his soul owes much of his liberty to slaves, serfs, proletariat, Communists - Communism should have been given a kinder funeral. Modern men have feminists to thank for many of their freedoms - the status of women is the measure of the height of a civilization.

The Union struggled heroically to expand the circle of liberty in the United States of America. Abraham Lincoln, General Garfield, the Radical Republicans and many other valiant persons led the political struggle. The Republican party, however, was betrayed by traitors to the principle of liberty, who were eager to virtually return to the status quo ante bellum. General Garfield spoke of this at the 25th Reunion of Western Republicans held at Madison, Wisconsin, in July 1879:

"... The Republican party, organized a quarter of a century ago, was made a necessity to carry out the pledges of the fathers that this should be a land of liberty. There was in the early days of the Republic, a Republican party that dedicated this very territory, and all our vast territory, to freedom; that promised much for schools; that abolished imprisonment for debt, and that instituted many wise reforms. But there were many conservatives in those days, whose measures degenerated into treason; and the Republican party of to-day was but the revival of the Republic party of seventy years ago, under new and broaders conditions of usefulness....

" It is well to remember and honor the greatest names of the Republican party. One of these is Joshua R. Giddings, who for twenty years was freedom's champion in Congress, and, from a feeble minority of two, lived ot see a Republican Speaker elected, and himself to conduct him ot the chair. Another is Abraham Lincoln, the man raised up by god for a great mission. No man ever had a truer appreciation of the principles of the Declaration of Independence, that great charter which it was the mission of the Republican party to enforce....

"We are as a nation, emerging from difficulties, and the Republican party alone can probably claim that the brightest page of our country's history has been written by the true friends of freedom and progress. The Republican party has yet work to do. We are confronted to-day in Congress by nearly the same spirit that prevailed in the years before the war. They tell us that the National Government is but the servant of the States; that we shall not interpose, as a nation, to guard an honest election in a State....

"There are sentimentalists and optimists who may see no danger in this. There have been sentimentalists and optimists in the Republican party, but to-day all were stalwarts. President Hayes, when he came into office, was an optimists, but he saw all his hopes, conciliation frustrated, and all his advances met with scorn. We all now stand together on the issue as one."

The stalwart liberals as well as most Americans placed their high hopes in General Garfield, hence he was elected president. Alas, on July 2, 1881, he was shot while passing through the railroad depot at Washington, D.C., by one Charles J.Guiteau, a deranged office seeker. President Garfield eventually died on September 19, 1881 from the effects of his wounds -sepsis and internal bleeding. General Garfield delivered his inaugural address on the Capitol steps on March 4, 1881. These words ring true to this very day, hence I will end this beginning with them:

"The elevation of the negro race from slavery to the full rights of citizenship is the most important political change we have known since the adoption of the Constitution of 1787. No thoughtful man can fail to appreciate its beneficent effect upon our institutions and people."

Calvin Coolidge Revisited

2004-06-18T09:17:00.000-07:00

"There is only one form of political strategy in which I have any confidence, and that is to try to do the right thing and sometimes succeed." Calvin Coolidge

"In know in my heart that man is good, that what is right will always triumph, and that there is a purpose and worth to each and every life." Ronald Reagan

When Ronald Reagan moved into the White House, he had the portraits of Presidents Jefferson and Truman taken from the Cabinet Room, and a portrait of President Coolidge was hung next to the most honorable place. Nancy Reagan wrote in her memoirs that Reagan felt Coolidge had been underrated. During the June 2004 worldwide broadcast of President Ronald Reagan's funeral, America's leading journalists wondered out loud why John Calvin Coolidge was so highly regarded by President Reagan. After all, one journalist said, President Coolidge helped cause the 1929 Crash and the Great Depression. Calvin Coolidge revisited might help us better understand Reagan's affection for the man.

John Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933) gained various political offices before he voiced his homespun claim to national fame as Governor of Massachusetts - against a backdrop of national labor turmoil - during the Boston police strike in 1919: "There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, anytime," insisted Governor Coolidge. The nation agreed and applauded.

Coolidge was the thirtieth president of the United States, taking over the administration when Harding died in 1923. He was elected to serve another term in 1924. Given the political squabbling and the Harding scandals, people believed they could trust the honest Yankee from Vermont, the man who had already, as Vice President, ushered out the likes of Albert Fall and Edwin L. Denby. As for the fractious squabbling, the majority voted to "Keep cool with Coolidge." Furthermore, businessmen who wanted business to be the business of government knew Coolidge would be good for business. Coolidge won hands down - Robert M. LaFollette ran as a Progressive, spoiling the chances of Democrat John W. Davis.

"This is a business country, it wants a business government," Coolidge had declared on a radio show hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. And elsewhere he had said, "The chief business of the American people is business." Wherefore the President's economic policies precluded interference with business. Indeed, his noninterference caused liberals to cynically observe that Coolidge had provided the nation with the least amount of government. Let the regulatory agencies serve business, not hinder it -that was the Coolidge ticket to success. And reduce taxation on capital. Maintain high tariffs favoring industry. Practice economy and efficiency in government religiously.

"The business of the country, as a whole, is transacted on a small margin of profit," Vice President Coolidge had observed in his 1923 Memorial Day speech. ".... When taxes become too burdensome, either the price of commodities has to be raised to a point at which consumption is so diminished as greatly to curtail production, or so much of the returns from industry is required by the government that production becomes unprofitable and ceases for that reason. In either case there is a depression, lack of employment, idleness of investment and of wage earner, with the long line of attendant want and suffering on the part of the people. After order and liberty, economy is one of the highest essentials of a free government. It was in no small degree the unendurable burden of taxation which drove Europe into the Great war. Economy is always a guarantee of peace.... It is in peace that there lies the greatest opportunity for relief from burdensome taxation. Our country is at peace, not only legal but actual, with all other peoples..... Another necessity of the utmost urgency in this day, a necessity which is worldwide, is economy in government expenditure. This may seem the antithesis of military preparation, but, as a matter of fact, our present great debt is due, in a considerable extent, to creating our last military establishment under the condition of war haste and war prices, which added enormously to its cost."

The Republican President's complacency towards speculation in the stock market is credited with helping to set the skyrocketing platform for the 1929 Crash and the ensuing Great Depression which led to the continuation of world war. When he chose not to run again in 1928, his political timing was perfect - Herbert Hoover would have to take take the consequences and try to save the banks.

Charles Beard and Mary Beard called Coolidge's trickle-down economic program "transparent in its simplicity.....Taxes were to be reduced - not indeed on goods consumed by the masses but certainly on the incomes of those who sat highest at the American feast. This was to be done, he urged, with a view to leaving more money in the hands of the rich for investment, so that the opportunities of the poor to gain profitable employment might be multiplied. Correlatively, there was to be less interference with business through administrative orders and through the prosecution of trusts through the courts...."

The Beards remarked on the president's distaste for innovation that, "Never in all his career had he shocked his neighbors by advocating strange things prematurely; neither had he been the last of the faithful to appear on the scene in appropriate armor. Conciliation and prudence had been his watchwords; patience and simplicity his symbols of life."

Calvin Coolidge was a great over-simplifier with a knack for representing familiar myths in a persuasive, homespun way. Vice President Coolidge summed up human motivation in the1923 speech. "There are two fundamental motives which inspire human action. The first and most important, to which all else is subordinate, is righteousness. There is that in mankind, stronger than all else, which commands them to do right. When that requirement is satisfied, the next motive is that of gain. These are the moral motive and the material motive. While is some particular instance they might seem to be antagonistic, yet always, when broadly considered or applied to society as a whole, they are in harmony. American institutions meet the test of these two standards. They are founded on righteousness, they are productive of material prosperity. They compel the loyalty and support of the people because such action is right and because it is profitable. These are the main reasons for the formation of patriotic societies. Desire to promote the highest welfare of civilization, their chief purpose is to preserve and to extend American ideals....To live under the privileges of (U.S.) citizenship is the highest position of opportunity and achievement ever reached by a people. "

If government keeps its hands off of business, the divine invisible hand that provides everything with people's help will guide the nation to peace and prosperity. "If there be a destiny, it is of no avail for us unless we work with it. The ways of Providence will be of no advantage to us unless we proceed in the same direction. If we perceive a destiny in America, if we believe that Providence has been the guide, our own success, our own salvation requires that we should act and serve in harmony and obedience.... Who can fail to see in (America) the hand of destiny? Who can doubt that it has been guided by divine Providence? What has it not given to its people in material advantages, educational opportunity, and religious consolation? Our country has not failed, our country has been a success."

Not that the individual if left to his own devices will succeed. The individual must somehow be subjected to the ideal home life and be willing to work. He must be a thrifty individual. Then he should take up religion, education, and obedience. "But if our republic is to be maintained and improved," quoth Coolidge, "it will be through the efforts and character of the individual. It will be, first of all, because of the influences which exist in the home, for it is the ideals which prevail in the home life which make up the strength of the nation.... The real dignity, the real nobility of work must be cherished. It is only through industry that there is any hope for individual development. The viciousness of waste and the value of thrift must continue to be learned and understood. To these there most be added religion, education, and obedience to law. These are the foundation of all character in the individual and hope in the nation."

Coolidge minimized the problems he personally addressed. He delegated the difficult ones to his cabinet - his chief advisers were Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover and Secretary of Treasury Andrew Mellon. When Will Rogers asked the President how he kept fit, he responded, "By avoiding big problems." He abstained from the Prohibition mess and he steered clear of post-war reconstruction problems in Europe. He said he wanted to avoid entanglement in other nation's affairs. He opposed facing world problems in the League of Nations. He favored naval disarmament, and his administration approved of the 1927 Kellogg-Briand pact to outlaw war.

"Patriotism," Vice President Coolidge declared, "does not mean a regard for some special section or an attachment for some special interest, and a narrow prejudice against other sections and other interests; it means a love of the whole country.... The welfare of all is to be equally sought.... No private enterprise can succeed unless the public welfare be held supreme.... Our country does not want war, it wants peace. It has not decreed this memorial season as an honor to war, with its terrible waste and attendant train of suffering and hardship which reaches onward into the years of peace. Yet war is not the worst of evils, and these days have been set apart to do honor to all those, now gone, who made the cause of America their supreme course. Some fell with the words of Patrick Henry, "Give me liberty or give me death." .... It is not that principle (of liberty) that leads to conflict but to tranquility. It is not that principle which is the cause of war but the only foundation for an enduring peace. There can be no peace with the forces of evil. Peace comes only through the establishment of the supremacy of the forces of good. It was that the people of our country might live in a knowledge of the truth that these, our countrymen, are dead: 'Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friend.'"

However, Coolidge's policies towards Mexico, Nicaragua and other Latin American countries foreshadowed America's "Good Neighbor" policy - of course the left charged the righteous president with being an imperialist. One problem he did address head on was that of U.S. interests in Nicaragua. In 1912 President Diaz had asked for and received U.S. Marines to put down rebels. Nicaragua for some years was a virtually a U.S. colony. The Marines were finally pulled out 1925, but returned a year later. Nicaragua's pro-American president, Adolfo Diaz, appealed to the United States for aid in suppressing his liberal rival for the presidency, former vice president, Dr. Juan Sacasa. Dr. Sacasa was obtaining arms and munitions from Mexico; he was supported by Nicaraguan hero, Cesar Augusto Sandino, father of the Sandinistas. Coolidge sent along 2,000, but the fighting continued. The Marines organized and trained the Nicaragua National Guard to help fight the Sandinistas. President Coolidge sent Harry L. Stimson to Nicaragua in April 1927. A compromise was arranged between the parties, and the Liberal and Conservative factions were disarmed. Sandino however continued fighting 2,500 National Guard and 5,000 Marines. The U.S. stayed on to supervise the elections of 1928, 1930, and 1932, all of which were won by anti-American liberals. Sandino laid down his arms in 1933, after the Marines were pulled out pursuant to the Stimson accord. On February 21, 1934. He along with his brother and two friends were invited to dinner at Sacasa's house; after dinner they were taken to the airport machine-gunned to death. On that note, let's examine portions of President Coolidge's address to Congress on January 10, 1927, regarding U.S. intervention in Nicaragu.

"As a matter of fact, I have the most conclusive evidence that arms and munitions in large quantities have been, on several occasions since August 1926, shipped to the revolutionists in Nicaragua. Boats carrying these munitions have been fitted out in Mexican ports, and some of the munitions bear evidence of having belonged to the Mexican government.... At the end of November, after spending some time in Mexico City, Doctor Sacasa went back to Nicaragua, landing at Puerto Cabezas, near Bragmans Bluff. He immediately placed himself at the head of the insurrection and declared himself president of Nicaragua.... I deemed it unfair to prevent the recognized government from purchasing arms abroad, and, accordingly, the secretary of state notified the Diaz government that licenses would be issued for the export of arms and munitions purchased in this country.... During the last two months the government of the United States has received repeated requests from various American citizens... for the protection of their lives and property..... For many years numerous Americans have been living in Nicaragua, developing its industries and carrying on business. At the present time there are large investments in lumbering, mining, coffee growing, banana culture, shipping, and also in general mercantile and other collateral businesses.... There is no question that if the revolution continues, American investments and business interests in Nicaragua will be very seriously effected, it not destroyed..... The proprietary rights of the United States in the Nicaragua canal route, with the necessary implications growing out of it affecting the Panama Canal, together with the obligations flowing from the investments of all classes of our citizens in Nicaragua, place us in a position of peculiar responsibility. I am sure it is not the desire of the United States to intervene in the internal affairs of Nicaragua or of any other Central American republic. Nevertheless, it must be said that we have a very definite and special interest in the maintenance of order and good government in Nicaragua at the present time, and that the stability, prosperity, and independence of all Central American countries can never be a matter of indifference to us."

Our Man from Vermont was an optimist: "He talked and lived only sunshine," quipped Mencken, the nation's smartest smart aleck. He presented the image of a hard-working, Yankee individualist, one who of course professed patriotic pride in the traditional institutions of security - nation and faith. His presidencies were marked by an absence of crises and spectacular leadership. He was fortunate to preside over relatively good times, serving as a model for calm, practical, common-sense leadership. Perhaps his afternoon siestas kept him he calm. "He slept more than any other president," observed Mencken, "whether by day or night. Nero fiddled, but Coolidge only snored."

President Reagan, while recuperating from the attempt on his life, said the jokes about his model president were on the jokers. "Now you hear a lot of jokes about Silent Calvin Coolidge," Reagan mused, "but I think that the joke is on the people that make jokes because if you look at his record, he cut taxes four times. We had probably the greatest growth and prosperity that we've ever known. And I have taken heed of that because if he did nothing, maybe that's the answer for the federal government."

According to the "Silent Calvin Coolidge," the model American leader should work hard and stay out of the limelight: "Let men in public office substitute the light that comes from midnight oil for the limelight." His own reputation for reticence in that regard was a hoax. He was in fact a very talkative president, holding numerous press conferences with a small press corps, with whom he was relaxed and casual providing they did not ask unscheduled questions of the pointed sort; all questions had to be submitted to the President's secretary prior to the press conferences - only those questions chosen and considered in advance were to be answered. Furthermore, responses were to be attributed to "a source in the White House." But everyone knew who the source was: the hoax eventually became a public joke, but the President insisted on the procedure anyway.

No doubt President Reagan chuckled over the hoax when he read about it in Calvin Coolidge's biography. Now that we have briefly revisited Coolidge, we see some striking similarities. Of course the two men were also as different as Vermont and California. Perhaps they are now sitting together, chatting amiably in their rocking chairs on the porch of the White House in heaven above, where presidents who do the right thing belong.

Note: references to V.P. Coolidge's 1923 speech are taken from his 1923 Memorial Day Address

The Government of Ignorance

2004-06-16T09:58:00.000-07:00

The Government of Ignorance

Ronald Wilson Reagan put on a darn good show to say the very least. He was no wooden cowboy. He was much more than an accomplished actor: he was a star, a wizard, a grand projector, a master of national ceremonies. He certainly made excellent use of wooly platitudes, and he plagiarized the fine sayings of the greatest speakers. He took plenty of notes - he was almost at a loss without them. He took advantage of the latest technology. Television brought a charming, sincere, relaxed and casual Ronald Reagan into America's living rooms, where he informally spoke to the common man in simple terms, skillfully avoiding giving anyone cause for offense. His publicized life was fitting for the celebrity that he was - grand and gay. He may have won an important presidential popularity contest - during his impressive funeral, television bestowed on him the title, "The People's President."

Like many other great communicators, Reagan was an oversimplifier. He inspired his audience with glittering generalities, patriotic symbols, myths both old and new - he frequently fabricated suitable myths as well as "facts." Ideology was originally a science of ideas, but today it is a myth-making tool that politicians of diverse ideologies use to suit their purposes. For instance, Mussolini, Hitler, and Lenin denounced "liberalism" and embraced totalitarianism, yet they had the gall to do so in the name of democracy. Ironically, a foremost English writer once called Mussolini the greatest liberal who ever lived. Reagan successfully attacked the prestigious symbols of liberalism - the L-word became a dirty word - but he spoke very highly of democracy. Of course a democracy is no better than the public education provided to its demos. U.S. citizens must take tests to get a driver's license, but they are not thus qualified to vote. Leaders teach people and people get the leaders they deserve. Upward mobility in democratic politics does not mean that merit rises to the top or that virtue succeeds.

There is no rational method for selecting leaders in the United States, and the standard ritual method of hiring employees at lower levels is absurd or surd - deaf to reality. Of course individual initiative and education are still important factors in the American pursuit of happiness, but those who succeed are selected from the top-down. As everyone who is seeking employment or a promotion or a raise knows very well, ability is not the sole or the primary criterion of success, nor is classical conservative morality. Jesus would not be recognized in a Christian church, and Cato the Younger would have to live the life of a Cynic in a tub under some obscure porch in America - he like Confucius might not mind sleeping alongside of a road with his arm for a pillow given the higher immorality of the leadership. We find no cogent philosophy or ideology at the top of the U.S. power structures. We find a sort of mindlessness or highly credentialed stupidity. And we find no excellent models of virtue at the apex of American pyramids. God provides our leaders by mysterious means, that we may know the difference between the good and evil empires, wherefore we must abstain from interfering with the divine natural order, which is a conservative order, by the way. The results of Providence are not as invisible as the means: we observe the accumulation and conservation of wealth at the top of the golden chain of being. Money, the great demoralizer, has become the universal good, or, if you please, God, and ideologies are hired to justify the hoarding. Again, the pseudo-conservative or new conservative ideology had co-opted many of the liberal terms while denigrating the L-word. Pseudo-conservatism conserves the highest abstract good, money, and is the "classical" liberal, modern money-grubbing rationale of the bulging-belly bourgeoisie.

American traditionalists, while groping for a conservative tradition the United States of America simply does not have, love to speak of self-help, of self-made men; but successful men in modern mass organizations are really made-men, men made by the godfathers. They are men who conform; men who use themselves; men who play standard roles; men who excel in mediocrity; men who sacrifice themselves on the personality market to get ahead. The winners of personality contests present popular images, images that do not offend too many people, hence we find images not facts, forms without much content, advertising not news, faith not works, illusions not realities. The imaginary or hollow man wins to the extent that he successfully entertains the hollowed out masses with trivialities and distracts them from their anxieties. For safety's sake, the majority usually prefer leaders who will maintain the confusion of milling moderation during relatively stable times, leaders whose reform is little more than a tweaking of the cumbersome machine. In the absence of an immediate crisis, the majority would not have a radical actor in the lead, although they might be enormously entertained by a radical until push comes to shove at the polls. And during a crisis they do not want to change radical leaders in midstream, hence the moderate candidate who sits on the fence will probably lose the election.

An intelligent and wise democracy requires ample time to sort out, identify and carefully analyze problems and to propose and debate solutions to those problems. In the absence of critical thinking and healthy skepticism, a democracy is good for nothing. Unfortunately, the fast-paced, televised America mastered by Ronald Reagan does not have time for problems; it has a few seconds for fleeting images, sound bites, vapid slogans, shining symbols, rehashed myths, hackneyed phrases and the like. People have "issues" now, not problems - a man who beats his wife to death has "family issues," not family problems, therefore he should "seek counseling," he needs "appropriate treatment." There was no such thing as an insoluble problem or a tough problem in Reagan's book. He shunned hard decisions, he preferred to delegate difficult, complex problems to others. In that sense Reagan was a no-problem leader. He acquired a "Teflon" reputation for avoiding responsibility for mistakes, and that made others reluctant to question his policies or to propose painful solutions to real problems.

Ronald Reagan was a proverbial optimist. He was the image-making confidence man of the American System. He did not complain about problems. The problems he did recognize were not even hurdles - they were opportunities. He helped disgruntled new conservatives capitalize on the needs and wants of discontented Americans. Not all of them were greedy for more: many of them were afraid of losing what little they had acquired. And they had valid complaints. Progressives figured they had been duped; they became new conservatives. Yes, bourgeois Americans normally wanted more property than they really needed at the time, but they wanted something more than that, they wanted prestige. They wanted a higher status for themselves and their heirs so that the future might be secured against the encroachment of welfare liberalism. Somehow liberalism had tricked them into thinking that civilization protects the weak instead of strengthening the strong. They were being nickeled and dimed to death by government handouts to slackers; they were being enslaved by regulations; crime was running rampant. They wanted government to protect their property, not rip it off; to kill the communist infidels before they infect others (they are going to hell anyway so might as well dispatch them now); and, except for providing a few other basic services, to leave them alone. They provided a big political market for the new conservatives and their carefully chosen spokesman Ronald Reagan. After all, Reagan was a prestigious Name. The neoconservatives who chose him noted that he was a "prominent product," that he had "star quality," that he was a "salable commodity." His Goldwater Speech raked in a phenomenal eight-million bucks. Goldwater had disgraced the Republican Party with racist and nuclear war-mongering remarks - wherefore President Johnson and his Great Society. Ronald Reagan was the right man to save the hard core, right wing of the Republican Party, and the United States, from the welfare liberals. His neoconservative, anti-welfare platform, illuminated with patriotic fireworks in the Goldwater Speech, had three antagonistic planks: anti-government, anti-tax, anti-Communist. Let the record show that only the last battle, the anti-Communist battle, was won. Government grew in size and Reagan signed more tax increases than cuts.

Please do not image that They, the Reaganites, were the corporate elite. No, They were for the most part hard working, middle class people including their young - the bourgeois, if you please. And as usual, the lower class authoritarian personality appreciates the authority of the power and prestige it does not have but might have more of if it were not for the freeloaders on welfare. Now we know that They, the ones in the middle, got royally shafted during the Reagan boom. But They do not seem to mind much - people throughout the ages have acted contrary to their own real interests. The question that should be asked of the New Inequality is, Did Ronald Reagan or his backers intend the consequences obtained? Did the elite conspire against the poor and middle class? Some of his backers actually rejoiced in the rise of the rich and the decline of the rest, insisting that it was in accord with the law of the jungle.

Yes, Reagan's presidency might be called small-minded and mean-spirited, but it was indeed representative of the American if not human desire for an unregulated spirit. Selfish individualism was encouraged. One must look out for Numero Uno. Altruistic governance was openly discouraged, denigrated, despised. Those who got away with a bundle were admired - the current Enron scandal gives us a taste of the inner workings - the Enron Tapes are representative of the mood in the ranks. The higher immorality but not the wealth trickled down. Images are fronts for awareness, fronts that disguise the power behind the illusions. The actual consequences often differs from the motivating image. Indeed, images can be used as a means to unimagined and unexpected ends.

Nancy Reagan wrote, "The Ronald Reagan you see in public is the same Ronald Reagan I live with.... There is a common assumption that because Ronnie used to be an actor, everything he does must be an act. It's not, Ronald Reagan is not a fraud or a phony. He is what he seems to be." Of course Ronnie must not be disparaged because he was a fine actor, as if he were for that reason a phony, for we are all actors on the world stage. The Greeks called actors hypokrites - the pejorative spin was put on the term by Jewish scribes and Christians, to be applied to insincere men, namely godless men who did not have blind faith in the authorized god even if he did good works. Who is not somewhat of a hypocrite. Who does not share in the underlying crisis of human existence, the crisis between reality and the ideal? Who is not an actor? As for the real self, the subject, who has taken "Know Thyself" to heart only to discover that he is ignorant as to its nature? The role of an actor is to act, and Reagan gave a command performance. We believe he was as sincere as can be although many of his deeds did not match his fine words. That an author has personal weaknesses should not discredit his contrasting ideals. In any event, Ronald Reagan was a great actor, a great man of words, a great man - inasmuch as the title is suitable to a man who is representative of the dominant forces or genius of his time and place. He got the image out there and many people acted accordingly. We are left to argue over the effects, and to wonder why people who have different images in mind might act the same way, and why people who have the same image in mind might behave differently.

The battle against welfare liberalism brought social progress to a screeching halt in many vital areas: housing, environment, child nutrition, health, consumer protection, public transportation. The racial and ethnic divides widened with the growing gap between rich and poor. Predators and raiders thought the laissez faire image was a license to lie, cheat and steal like the pirates and robber barons of old. A number of political appointees who took the oath of office for their own good made out like bandits. Taxes were initially cut as promised, and more wealth was distributed wealth to the wealthy - the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. Billions were poured into guns instead of butter, into defense as America got tougher on Communism. Reagan admired Franklin Delano Roosevelt before he, Reagan, changed ideological coats: Reagan was really a frustrated Big Spender. He wanted to win one in Central America; everyone in the know down there knew the effort was futile. The U.S. had been "protecting its interests" with guns in Nicaragua since the Marines landed in 1912. Reagan's political idol, Calvin Coolidge, did the same. Right-wing thugs were supported. The U.S. had lost interest in the Nicaragua Canal long ago. What was going on? Were the Communists planning on building a canal to compete with the Panama Canal - we jest of course. Anyway, the higher immorality was invoked. International and domestic laws were broken. Money was laundered; guns and drugs were dealt; even crimes against humanity were fostered. The Iron Curtain fell, to be replaced by sporadic terrorism - to exist, gods need devils. The whole affair was quite a success; if the accounts do not balance presently, they surely will in the future; civilization on the whole is bound to prosper absent the Red Menace and with plenty of ammunition. Communism, after all, was viewed as the extreme form of welfare liberalism. As far as the anti-welfare neoconservatives are concerned, "socialists" are bound for hell anyway, hence they should be dispatched to the fires at once lest others be contaminated with the communal atheism of their evil empire.

Almost everyone involved in the pursuit of American happiness symbolized by wealth and stardom could look into Reagan's mirror, could see themselves and have faith in the ultimate value of their pursuit, whether their ambition paid off or not. The eloquent wizard painted the star-studded images of opulence that people wanted to see and to have faith in, and, if at all possible, to actually possess the property and power imagined. People were literally in love with themselves as ideally portrayed by their idol, hence the images took on a life of their own, replacing reality. They envisioned themselves unhampered by regulations, freed from restraints, powerful and wealthy. Jesus was portrayed in a popular book as a successful businessman preaching the gospel of greed. People had faith in mumbo jumbo again, not in works which have an embarrassing tendency to go wrongly. People could feel self-righteous, feel that they were "doing the right thing" no matter what they did.

All sorts of frustrated ideologues and disappointed moralists were attracted by Reagan's glittering generalities. Who needs an ideology or a morality? Powerful people might hire one ideologist or another to justify and protect their holdings. Power, especially purchasing power, is certainly divine.Whosoever has power has prestige. In the final analysis, how power is obtained is irrelevant, for might makes right, the winner is right.

Knowledge does not matter; it has been divorced from power. Knowledge is not power today; might is power. Knowledge can be purchased on the open market. But has not the sword always won over pen? Chinese authors in ancient times inscribed swords with word pictures after the battles. Lawyers are for sale, politicians are for sale, ideologists are for sale - Napoleon noted that one of the foremost Ideologues of the Revolution, Abbe Sieyes, was for sale.

Horatio Alger's ideology should serve the purpose of red-blooded Americans today; he was not beyond cheating deserving people out of their money; nor was the classical god of business for that matter - piracy was an honorable profession. Ambitious and cynical young people, college students, and Yuppies saw Reagan as their savior from ethical restraints. Reagan had the overwhelming support of college students, whom some mature observers called "the Nazi youth." They rode the Reagan wave and are in charge today. The so-called Nazi youth were relatively ignorant. Three out of four faculty members of liberal arts colleges surveyed in 1989 believed that undergraduates were "seriously underprepared in basic skills." In business, half the managers could not write a good paragraph. Skilled workers including bookkeepers could not use decimals and fractions in math problems. In 1986, not even a quarter of high school juniors knew what "Reconstruction" referred to, or that Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America. Half of Californians did not know where Japan was on the map; a quarter of them did not know were north and south were on the globe. But they certainly loved Reagan's imagery. In that there was something for everyone. President's Star Wars program, derived from a Reagan/Bancroft spy thriller, Murder in the Air, appealed to science fiction buffs.

None of the above defames Reagan any more than it defames Americans at large. He represented all Americans in one way or another. Many die-hard liberals and Reagan-haters buried their hatchets during Reagan's funeral ceremonies. "Reconciliation" was the key word for a few days. No doubt the usual hostilities will be resumed. The images painted by various spokesman for one ideology or party or another will have little to do with the real powers behind the thrones. Those who still have the courage to identify themselves as liberals are preoccupied with talking about talk, talking about the previous exercises of civil liberties instead of demanding justice now, instead of personally fighting for civil rights on and off the job - the intelligentsia are afraid for their jobs, have become moral cripples, and that is why the prestige of America has plummeted around the world. The speeches and columns support the talkers; what they say will have little relation to actual deeds done. There will be the usual clamor and shouts of "Hypocrite" all around. But a hypocrite can be found in each and every mirror. Ronald Reagan was us, but he is no more than a memory now. It is high time that we take a hard look at ourselves, study the living, and stop blaming the dead for our present misdeeds. If we do not deserve our leaders, then let us get rid of them and move on. It is to that end that we should wise up and govern our ignorance.

Mirabeau's Grand Funeral

2004-06-14T12:58:00.000-07:00

Honore-Gabriel Riqueti, the count of Mirabeau, also known as "The French Demosthenes," was given a grand state funeral.

"It was the first time in France that a man celebrated by his writings and his eloquence received honours which in the past has been accorded only to grand signeurs or to warriors," noted Mme. de Stael.

Mirabeau, born March 9, 1749, did acquire some military experience. At 18 he had served in a cavalry regiment at Saintes. His father, Victor Riqueti, the marquis of Mirabeau, was a political economist of the physiocratic school; the physiocratic doctrines of free exchange and the like were similar to those of Adam Smith but for the notion, ignoring labor, that land is the only source of wealth. Although the physiocrats believed that government policy should not interfere with the operation of natural laws, the marquis thought military discipline would do his wayward son some good. The young count, however, continued to behave according to his nature; that is, he misbehaved. Wherefore the marquis had him imprisoned without a trial, by means of a letter of cachet. He was eventually released and served with distinction as an army sublieutenant in Corsica.

Incidentally, Mirabeau contracted smallpox at the age of 3, leaving him with an "ugly" face, but the scars did not interfere with his talent for seducing women - some women said they had been hypnotized by his gaze. However that might be, the young count made amends with his father, then, in 1772, married a rich heiress. But his misconduct, especially his heavy spending, caused his father to have him imprisoned again, chiefly to escape his creditors. Mirabeau escaped from the prison, then fell in love with Sophie, the young wife of an elderly man. They eloped to Holland, where Mirabeau was arrested in 1777. Another letter of cachet from his father mercifully saved him from a death sentence for the amorous seduction and abduction. His wife and father renounced him, whereupon he renounced his aristocratic heritage and became an adventurer, pamphleteer and secret agent or sorts. He traveled to London, and to Berlin in 1786, where he wrote a scandalous account of the Berlin court, revealing confidential information.

Mirabeau had some cause to flatter his father, therefore he dedicated a book about the Prussian Monarchy under Frederick the Great to him. His father in turn invited him to Argenteuil. When he returned to France in 1788, Mirabeau aspired to be elected to the States General as an aristocratic deputy even though he had no political experience. He appeared in the Provence chamber of nobility and delivered violent declamations against the privileged classes, but to no avail, for he held no fief. Hence he stooped to the Third Estate, and was elected to represent Marseilles and Aix-en-Provence in the States General.

The French Demosthenes hated the tyranny of absolutism. He favored the doctrine of a limited or constitutional monarchy, but one without a second chamber of aristocrats. In fine, he was a moderate, a precursor of a later group of conservative liberals called Doctrinaires. Playing the middle against the extremes in critical times is bound to make enemies of fanatics on all sides. The left, for instance, called Mirabeau a traitor, accusing him of favoring the court's interests. The court and royalists, on the other hand, charged him with being a demagogue, a maniac who craved popularity. And he was popular with the French people, very popular indeed, and was famous throughout Europe.

The Citizen's President was a brilliant orator. Of course he had a workshop of collaborating thinkers and writers, but it was he who composed the speeches and so eloquently delivered them. He made a remarkably diplomatic speech on January 28, 1791, charting a middle course between alienating England and compromising Revolutionary principles. The next day he became president of the National Assembly.

The Jacobins begged askance of Mirabeau for advocating the interests of the king and emigres. Journalists on the left spread their charges of treason. Mirabeau was in fact secretly collaborating with the court although the court, preferring Lafayette, did not think much of his advice - Marie Antoinette, for one, despised him until his death - then her woman's intuition regretted the demise that forebode her own. Mirabeau was saved at the apex of his influence, by Death. He had lived the life of a libertine, literally running his body into the ground. Pierre Cabanis, his friend and personal doctor - the Ideologist of physiology whose ideology Thomas Jefferson disseminated in the United States - could not save him from his past excesses. Mirabeau was in fact Dr. Cabanis' only patient; but a physician was consulted; a surgeon was called in to bleed the great statesman. Rumours of poisoning were bandied about - the doctors deemed it best to keep silent on that subject lest the People go on a rampage and kill everyone of note.

On April 4, 1791, the Assembly with Mirabeau in mind adopted a decree of the Department of Paris, that the church of Sainte-Genevieve be consecrated as the sepulcher for Great Men, that the most illustrious dead of the era be deposited there. The citizens had been revolted by various indecencies, the shows, festivals and balls held on April 3, 1791, the day of Mirabeau's death. A group of aristocrats reportedly gave themselves up to dancing and joyous expressions on that very day, hence the citizens seized the leader of the "orgy," a chaplain, and threatened to hang him. Crowds broke up salons, insulted and threatened imprudent people. Citizens insisted, all due respects must be paid. A member of the Jacobin Club proposed that the whole club go into mourning and attend the funeral.

Three hundred thousand people participated in the grand procession led by the cavalry, proceeding from the house where Mirabeau had died. The Swiss Hundred led sappers and gunners of sixty battalions of the National Guard marching beside wounded veterans. Of course Layfayette was somewhere up front. Very few men were foolish enough not to make themselves seen. The Jacobin Club turned out as did nearly all the ministers. Petion, alone on the left, refused to attend, and a few on the right did not show up. There was no hearse: relays of eighteen citizen-soldiers each, of the La Grange-Bataliere, carried the coffin along the three-mile route - the statesman's heart was carried in a leaden box covered with flowers. There were drums, marches, cannon shots, but the silence of the grieving crowd was profound. The procession stopped at Sainte-Eustache for the funeral service, then marched into the night until the national pantheon at the church of Saint-Genevieve was reached at midnight. Mirabeau's body was laid inside, next to the remains of Descartes.

During an insurrection on August 10, 1792, an iron box bearing evidence of Mirabeau's secret relations with the court was found secreted in a wall at the Tuileries. There was nothing in his own handwriting, but the discovery was enough for the Convention. A report revealing the discoveries was made by Joseph Chenier, and the Convention, "considering that a man without virtue could not be great," ordered Honore-Gabriel Riqueti Mirabeau's body removed from the Pantheon and replaced with Marat's body. The deed was delayed by social turmoils, and was finally carried out towards the end of 1794. Mirabeau's remains were tossed into a ditch in the corner of the cemetery of Sainte-Catherine.

Ronald Reagan's Funeral

2004-06-11T09:44:00.000-07:00

Prestigious critics counsel lesser critics not to criticize Ronald Reagan negatively during his funeral. While all those in favor sing praises, those who are not as sunny as the deceased once was are advised to wait until he is buried and until the Sun goes down before they cast their overshadowing discourse over his grave. If, like Cromwell or Mirabeau, he is impeached some time after his death, then he might be virtually dug up and hung, or his bones might be taken from their place of honor and cast into a dark corner of history's graveyard, but for now let the chorus sing his praises. At least have some respect for his family and friends, particularly his best friend, his beloved wife, who is far more sensitive to cutting criticism than he was.

After all is said and done, everybody must die. Wherever good can be found, evil may be discovered as well, but at the moment of death a man is just a man, a mere mortal, and thereafter he is beyond the good and evil determinations of self-conscious creatures. To disparage a man and deprecate his deeds at the very hour of his inevitable fall seems unseemly, and even the more so if he happens to be a very important person, a celebrity, a great man. Wherefore anyone who has something negative to say about the Gipper or his deeds should remain silent for a spell while favorable critics, most of whom do not really know him, flatter themselves in his public limelight by praising him and his remarkable life.

Any one of us might have done things differently if only we had been in the President's shoes. Who does not want to at least try them on, perhaps even wear them for awhile? Every little boy might become president of this great nation of ours, and little girls will eventually have an equal opportunity. Therefore let negative critics pause and bow their heads in silence for a spell. When Ronnie's remains are moldering in the golden ground out West.... Well, there they go again.

Yet it is virtually impossible for skeptical critics to contain their freedom of speech even on this expensive national holiday, at a funeral fitting for a king. As far as skeptics and pessimists are concerned, silence smacks of tyranny. They might be right, but never mind them for now. Avast, ye swamp dwellers, make way for the stars! The presidential prestige of mass communication's Great Communicator has included the masses for an enchanting spell in an exclusive psychological resort. Honorary members of this virtual country club are honored simply because they are members. Now everyone has a phenomenal opportunity to shine like a star, to rub shoulders with the rich and famous, to be somebody very important, at least vicariously.

Washington was a swamp and still is a swamp of sorts, an apt place for muckrakers to reach for the stars. Washington is not a state of the United States, yet the shared status of the authorities gathered there for the funeral constitutes a dazzling mental state, buttressing their power, affirming their authority and shielding it from critical challenges. Prestige is a mysterious and irresistible force. Wherever it is personally located, it paralyzes the critical faculty of the crowd. Prestige should not be questioned today, dialectical discussion should not be permitted today, lest authority be disrespected and dishonored. Today is the day to show up and show some respect for the position if not for the man who held it. Washington has put on an impressive show for the nation. Ronald Reagan might be suitably impressed if it were not his funeral.

Great Man Theory

2004-06-10T12:52:00.000-07:00

"We thought that under his shadow we would live among the nations. Lamentations 4:20

It is our nature to imitate other people and to emulate the personal authorities given to us in order to survive. We are not always born under the best of parental examples, which we normally want to equal or to exceed, but we are given a wider variety of models to choose from as we mature and become, at least to some extent, the independent authors of our fates.

Every child wants most of all to be a grown up, a big person, and by extension a great adult. As children many of us dream of being great men and great women in terms of social status. We soon realize that the world needs few United States presidents, for example, therefore we learn to aspire to other positions, and sometimes we must vie for any position we can get. But we do not give up our dreams of social greatness; we enjoy greatness vicariously as we continue to admire the examples before us as well as those presented by historians. Of course we do not always admire great men and women, we despise them too, and we might not even know who they are; but whether we praise or blame them, or are ignorant of their existence, we generally recognize that our lives have been influenced by the conduct of great men and women.

Nonetheless, strange as it might seem, some historians believe the most important people in the history books were not very important after all, at least not in the general context of human progress. The Great Man Theory of history formulated by thinkers of an aristocratic bent of mind has been greatly discounted by socialist intellectuals who believe far too much credit has been given to great men for the course of history, a course historians have historically portrayed as a history of war and conquest from which all good things under civilization's cover have ensued. Socialist thinkers would rather not attribute progress to the crimes against humanity led by politicians, heroes, and generals, but would instead emphasize the part ordinary or common people play in the development of humane society.

The term 'elite' originally denoted a few powerful men who deserved praise and therefore had a right to be proud, but when that right was contested and subverted by popular demand because the right no longer seemed merited, especially when inherited, the term 'elite' took on a pejorative hue connoting the corrupt minority at the top who on average did not deserve their superior status. Of course the overthrow of the old regimes in favor of republican and democratic forms of government were led by great men who were often aristocratic defectors or who were sometimes great men arising from the ranks below. Therefore, if history supports enduring truths, it appears that the aristocratic intellectual's preference for the Great Man Theory is justified by reality. No matter how conservative or progressive it might be, society is always led by great men and women. In fact, modern studies of obedience and authority support the view that the majority of people, as if they love to be ruled, will support and follow current authority no matter what its character might be.

The intellectual process in itself raises the man above the brute, wherefore men strive to make the most of reason; those who succeed are often feared and resented by so-called 'anti-intellectuals' who use their own intellects to defame the intellect - an eloquent argument against the prime virtue of reason is certainly ironic. Thus in matters of mind the will to emulate, to equal and to overpower, exerts itself just as it does elsewhere, and the result is everywhere a 'pecking order', a hierarchy of ideas and a social stratification of people - not that the best ideas rise to the top.

Now the best socialist thinkers are the greatest men and women in their field; they are not champions of the Great Man Theory but of The People 'democratically' organized. Nonetheless everyone, no matter how humble they might be, would be a great man or woman in one way or another. Socialist equality needs great men to effect it; the arrogant elite are overthrown and another cult of personality is developed around the socialist leader. The communist party is democratically organized according to the self-contradictory tenets of 'anarchistic communism' or 'democratic socialism'; provisions are made for elections; a bureaucracy arises that survives those elections; eventually only one candidate is on the ballot; and, despite the constitutional separation of party and state, the party apparatus controls. Obviously, people will not give up their objective models of greatness regardless of what the current political hypothesis happens to be, and when they sincerely try to give them up, great men are shoved down their collective throat by a ruthless elite.

Therefore, since great men and women are here to stay, and since we all may be great in our own little ways nowadays, it behooves us to revisit the Great Man Theory no matter how unpopular it may be with the intellectual elite who would be lords of public opinion. To that end I have chosen to review the concept as presented by the French philosopher, Victor Cousin, for he was an eclectic philosopher or borrower of opinions who lived when kings and aristocrats were still falling with the rapid rise of modern nations, yet he still believed in great men and presented us with an abstract portrait of the Great Man who is no longer a master of a people but a servant of his nation. We should keep in mind that he borrowed heavily from his friend, Hegel, so much so that Hegel said Cousin had taken some of his fish and much of his sauce.

According to Cousin, people who best represent the spirit of a nation belong to an aristocracy of great men generated by that nation. The great man is not merely a particular individual who, standing alone, would be small, helpless, and miserable. Rather, he embodies the universal nature which endows him with a general power superior to his individuality. In actuality, he is just the right organic balance of universal and particular, an exemplary person, an ideally socialized individual. Of course the great man is also beautiful because we find in him the criterion of true beauty, the harmony of the universal - which is infinite, ideal and sublime - and of the particular - which is finite, real and pretty. He is a concrete universal; he is a living unity in diversity, not a handsome, immobile statue chiseled from stone or modeled in cement; he is a spiritual embodiment endowed with the highest qualities. In terms of social psychology, he is the most powerful interaction of individuality and situation.

The great man is a national representative but he is not necessarily its political representative. He may be a great legislator, warrior, artist, philosopher, pontiff, and so on. In any case, he represents a spirit common to all citizens; that is to say, a national spirit:

"A nation is veritably a nation on the condition of expressing an idea, which, entering into all the elements which compose the interior life of this nation, into its language, it religion, its manners, its arts, its laws, its philosophy, gives it a distinct physiognomy.... The spirit of a nation, the spirit common to all citizens, is what constitutes the country," Cousin lectured his audience.

Cousin identified three types of individuals:

Ordinary Individuals: "There are individuals who have, so to speak, a general character only, that of their age and of their country, mere echoes of the voices of their times; they form the crowd, and are, thus to call them, the anonymous beings of the human species.... ordinary men, a numerous class, honest, useful... excellent soldiers of the spirit of the people; the form the army of every great cause that finds sufficient captains; it is with them, and them only, that one can perform great things: they know how to obey."

Original Individuals: "At the other extreme are the friends of individuality... who seize for a moment upon their poor individuality... cling to it... proudly insurgent against all authority. The mania of individuality is to cut the knot which binds the individual to common sense by authority. There are the originals of the human species: they form a class apart: the give themselves out as the heroes of independence, and are, in general men without energy and without character; they are agitated for a moment without doing anything, and pass away without leaving any trace in history... (They are) unsusceptible of discipline, unworthy to command, incapable of obeying,their great aim upon this vast scene of the world is to represent, what? themselves, and nothing more."

Great Individuals: "A great man is equally removed from the original and the ordinary man. He is the nation, and he is himself too; he is the harmony of generality and individuality... the spirit of his nation and of his times is the stuff of which the great man is made... it is from the height of the spirit, common to all, that he is great and commands all."

Warriors are the first and most popular rank of great men, followed by Cousin's own class, the philosophers - Cousin was famous in his time and received a standing ovation for the lecture we are quoting here.

"It is upon the field of battle that energetic and faith representatives are necessary, and there they are never wanting. Glory is an unexceptional witness of the importance of the true greatness of men. Now, what are the greatest glories? In fact, they are those of warriors.... Nowhere do the masses identify themselves more visibly with the great man than on the field of battle; but if this identification is more brilliant in the great captain, it is more intimate and more profound in the great philosopher.

"...it must be observed that nowhere are there more great men than in philosophy. The highest degree of individuality is reflection, which separates us from all that is not ourselves, and puts us face to face with ourselves; at the same time the object of philosophical reflection is what is most general in thought. Reflection has generality for its foundation, and individuality for its form. It is precisely the highest alliance of these two elements which constitutes the great man."

Great political leaders and heroes govern and defend their respective nations and find glory in getting deeds done or in doing them. Although reputation is a paltry and petty thing, glory is glorious:

"...whatever is human is made so by humanity; to curse power... is to blaspheme humanity; to accuse glory, is simply to accuse humanity that decrees it. What is glory? The judgment of humanity upon one of its members, and humanity is always right.... There are a thousand ways to acquire a reputation; it is an enterprise just like any other, it does not even suppose a great ambition. What distinguishes reputation from glory is, that reputation is the judgment of the few, while glory is the judgment of a great number... With the masses, deeds are everything.... (Humanity) wishes great results.... Great results cannot be contested, and glory, which is their expression, can none the more be contested."

We sense in Cousin the ancient militant feeling that might is right, or, at least might is required to make right. Force must be exerted to accomplish anything at all; in order to perform his work, the great man must move ahead and take all - he must win, and no matter what happens we should be on the side of the winners, not the losers:

"...the strife of nations is sorrowful, if the vanquished excites our pity, our greatest sympathy must be reserved for the vanquisher, since very victory infallibly draws after it a progress of humanity... we must be on the side of the victor, for that is always the side of civilization, the side of the present and the future, while the side of the conquered is always that of the past. The great man conquered is a great man out of place in his times; and his defeat must be applauded, since it was just and useful, since with his great qualities, his virtue and his genius, he marched contrary to humanity and the times."

When we evaluate great men, we should ignore their sordid individuality and ask, What did they do for the nation?

"The fundamental rule of philosophy in regard to great men is to do as humanity does... to neglect the description of weaknesses inherent in their individuality and which have perished with it... to fasten itself upon the great things which they have done, which have served humanity, and which still endure in the memories of men... to search out what has given them power and glory, namely, the idea they represent, and their intimate relation with the spirit of their times and their nation...."

Furthermore, great men are called by the times and do not come into being unless there is something for them to do, their work - Cousin notes that many of them are fatalists, superstitious, hesitant and inactive until definitely called.

"It is the fortune of a great man to represent better than any other man of his times the ideas of those times, their interests, their wants. All the individuals composing a nation have the same general ideas, the same interests, the same wants, but without the energy necessary to realize and to satisfy them; they represent their times and their nation, but in a powerless, unfaithful, obscure manner. But as soon as the true representative shows himself, all recognize him distinctly what they have confusedly seized upon in themselves; they recognize the spirit of their times, the spirit even which is in themselves; they consider the great man as their true image, as their idea; and under this title they adore and follow him who is their idol and their chief...."

As for the great philosophers Cousin mentions after great heroes, they usually withdraw from immediate action to reflect at length, hence they become masters of symbolic activity. A king might be a frustrated philosopher or vice versa, but it is unwise for a philosopher interested in his immortal fame to associate too closely with the government of a nation or even the nation itself. It might be healthier for the dedicated philosopher to spit (my words) on national grounds from time to time. In any case, nations and civilizations rise and fall in due course of time, thus it behooves the philosopher to be a citizen of the cosmos no matter how powerful Athens and Rome might be at present. No doubt modern historians will associate a philosopher's philosophy with his historical period, and declare his thinking passe today, but the citizen of the cosmos is something more than the victim of his circumstances, and we may enjoy and be enlightened by the leftovers from his fire.

Cousin the philosopher did not take his own philosophical advice, to remain aloof from politics, to heart. How could he, if a great man represents his nation? Cousin associated with the current powers that be, and, although he was the most famous French philosopher of his day, his sway over the Cosmos was tainted by ephemeral politics; his shooting star soon fell from grace. Cousin was a liberal agitator before 1830; thereafter, he was a moderate 'doctrinaire', sharing with the Doctrinaires their 'chartist' enthusiasm for a 'constitutional monarchy' form of government, an English model with a French twist. Cousin rode the July Monarchy to its fall. By 1851, he was completely out of favor, demonstrating that he was correct to assume philosophers are ill-advised to meddle in politics. His nickname was 'Plato', after his famous translation of Plato, whose utopian 'Republic' was governed by a philosopher king; perhaps Cousin, against his better judgment, was unduly influenced by the Plato's political ideology, or maybe reading the German romantic philosophers made him rash.

In any case, a particular political theology is a dangerous enterprise for a searcher of truth to embark upon. Yet great men do take risks. Was Victor Cousin a great man? the type he identified as a 'Great Individual', in contrast to the Individual and Original types? He was obviously no ordinary individual; at one time he had virtual dictatorial control over the education of the French nation. And he was not an original, 'flash in the pan' sort of man either. Despite the world acclaim he enjoyed during his time, and his influence, for example, on the New England Transcendentalists and on the formation of the educational system of the United States, Cousin is often regarded as a 'mediocre' philosopher who lacked 'originality.' After all, his writing is an easy read and thus easy to criticize: a mere novice can understand what he is talking about. His philosophical platitudes are obvious. And, say his critics, Cousin's eclectic or 'borrowing' approach to the world's truths wants a criterion or method for deciding what to keep and what to throw away.

As a matter of fact, philosophical eclecticism is nothing new, and Cousin said he had no desire to be original. We have already seen what he thought about the original type of man. Then again, the great man may be original by not being original, but rather by incorporating the spirit of his people. Perhaps wisdom is moderation and obscure philosophies are mystical nonsense about common sense, or sophisticated variations on platitudes. The publicly 'great' man, then, would be unusual in his expression of the common spirit, and we would raise him up as 'original' because he either said what we already knew, thus confirming us in the truth. Walters Brewer puts it this way:

"Cousin insisted that if he were to be accused of having introduced foreign doctrines incompatible with traditional French systems of thought and practice, then he would have to be credited with a certain originality; the originality of his philosophy, he said, however, lay precisely in fact that it sought not to be original at all. Eclecticism was simply a way of looking at the various philosophies already propounded, an historical method that was in no sense a balance between the systems but that chose from among them... If the eclectic approach was to be assigned to a rubric, he added, then it would best come under spiritualism, that same doctrine at which Plato and Socrates began..." (Brewer, Walter Vance, Victor Cousin as a comparative educator, New York: Teachers College Press, 1971)

Now Cousin said that great men represent national spirits. He was an excellent expositor of the spirit of his nation. His writing speaks to us both passionately and formally, romantically and classically. Although a pragmatic logician or logical positivist might scoff at his presentation, Cousin gives us lyrical lines that make spiritual sense; after all, he held forth the simple proposition that the spirit of history advances our freedom in the world. He educates us to the spirit of his time. It is a mistake to call him a 'mediocre' philosopher for synthesizing and clearly expressing some of the ideas of Thomas Reid, Maine de Biran, Kant, Schelling and Hegel. Cousin was one of the best of his kind. Indeed, his supposed faults are occasionally attributed to the French at large; witness Hippolyte Taine's disdain for the French genius, a Latin genius which, step by step, reconciles the dirty details of the English genius and the lofty speculations of the German genius, presenting the spiritual synthesis in beautiful, romantic speeches; something which the Frenchman Taine was a master at himself despite himself: he said he fought against it! the very quality that makes his conservative history of the French Revolution a pleasing read even for liberals.

A legitimate 'theory' is supposed to be good for something; the Great Man Theory may sound good but what is it good for? Isn't it just rhetoric? Yes, if well plead, it is persuasive rhetoric, but even if it be badly presented, there is some motivating truth to it that, once recognized, causes one who wants to be great to be more enthusiastic about his ability to exceed himself, to become greater than he is. Victor Cousin and his contemporaries were enthusiastic about the spiritual development of national identities represented by great men, enthusiastic men who aspired to lead their nations to greatness. Given the tragic effects of excessive national zeal, we are much less sanguine in respect to national spirits today. All too often the love of country, patriotism, or father-ism, is hate-based love. Given the advancement of technology, the violent conflict of national spirits makes a universal hell out of Earth.

The philosophical developments leading up to and following the French Revolution, especially those woven by the German philosophers who influenced Cousin, had an enormous political impact, eventually dividing the world into totalitarian extremes of 'left' and 'right.' Gods and princes were thrown down from the high places and stoned to death; states were raised thereupon and sacrificed as the highest form of humanity. A French 'race', an English 'race', a German 'race', or a 'race of saints and so forth, represented by great men, did not satisfy the defrosted beast. Cousin's Great Man was replaced by the Super Man of a mythical 'Fire and Ice' Super Race, and the unfrozen beast ran amok.

Victor Cousin certainly had his blinding prejudices, some inherited from German philosophers. For instance, he found truth all over the globe but he did not find any great men in the Orient, not "between the mountains of Persia and the sea-shore of China." Today every European school kid should know of many great men in Oriental history; one of my favorites is Asoka, the amazing emperor of an Indian empire - Asoka is well known to Buddhists as 'Buddhism's Constantine.' In fact, China and India were admired by Europeans: China for its imperial state and moralism, and India for its spiritualism. India's Hinduism particularly inspired the transcendentally inclined German philosophers - Cousin described his own philosophy not only as 'electicism' but also as 'Spiritualism.'

Human spirits are personal and representative - the 'person' is the social 'interface' of the wilful individual. Abstract states and gods may be enlightening, but they do not give us the personal examples we need. Moral beings that we are, we tend to look for the best example; there are always a few persons who rise to the occasional although not to the perfect ideal we might desire. Now Cousin criticized India, saying its national spirit had been dissipated and its individual spirits throttled by the worship of impersonal infinity. As we know, Hindus do have a wide variety of personal forms available for worship although the Supreme Being of some schools is impersonal infinity - the Supreme Being can hypothetically take personal forms for particular purposes. We are well aware of the dangers of worshiping any definite person whether divine or, heaven forbid, human, therefore we look to the infinite possibilities beyond the imperfections that lead us astray. That is, we reach for the greatest beyond which no greater can be thought. Nevertheless, great men and women are indispensable for the advance of each and every person.

We might wonder whether or not the greatest leaders are the greatest followers and where each of us fits in to the scheme, but to doubt the existence and influence of great men and women would be fatal for the human race.

"When man does not regard himself seriously," Victor Cousin lectured, "and has no importance in his eyes, he takes no note of what he does... Man, not believing himself worthy of memory, abandons the world to the action of the forces of nature, and history to the gods."

XYX

Quoted Source:

Cousin, Victor 1792-1867, Course of the history of modern philosophy, New York: D. Appleton & company, 1857.

Contrary Note:

The view that great men are the products of history rather than its masters can be found, for instance, in Leo Tolstoy's WAR AND PEACE. His theoretical digressions on war and his philosophy of history is interspersed in Books Three and Four of that great work. Here are a few excerpts from Louise and Aylmer Maude's translation:

"On the 12th of June 1812 the forces of Western Europe crossed the Russian frontier and war began, that is, an event took place opposed to human reason and to human nature. Millions of men perpetrated against one another such innumerable crimes, frauds, treacheries, thefts, forgeries, issues of false money, burglaries, incendiarisms, and murders, as in whole centuries are not recorded in all the law courts of the world, but which those who committed them did not regard at the time as crimes."

"Without each of these (foregoing) causes nothing could have happened. So all these causes - myriads of causes - coincided to bring it about. And so there was no one cause for that occurence, but it had to occur because it had to. Millions of men, renouncing their human feelings and reason, had to go from west to east to slay their fellows, just as some centuries previously hordes of men had to come from the east to west slaying their fellows."

"We are forced to fall back on fatalism as an explanation of irrational events.... The more we try to explain such events in history reasonably, the more unreasonable and incomprehensible do they become."

"Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in the attainment of the historic, unversal, aims of humanity. A deed done is irrevocable, and its result coinciding in time with the actions of millions of other men assumes an historic significance. The higher a man stands on the social ladder, the more people he is connected with and the more power he has over others, the more evidence is the predestination and inevitability of his every action."

"A king is history's slave."

"In historic events the so-called great men are labels giving names to events, and like labels they have but the smallest connexion with the event itself. Each act of theirs, which appears to them an act of their own will, is in an historical sense involuntary, and is related to the whole course of history and predestined from eternity."

"The actors of 1812 have long since left the stage, their personal interests have vanished leaving no trace, and nothing remains of that time but its historic results. Providence compelled all these men, striving to attain personal aims, to further the accomplishment of a stupendous result no one of them at all expected - neither Napolean, nor Alexander, and still less any of those who did the actual fighting."