To consolidate his position as Chancellor Hitler insisted on holding a democratic election to end democracy. He was confident that, having squared the army with promises of rearmament and seduced big business with talk of establishing a stable economic climate, he could obtain an overwhelming endorsement at the polls. For he now commanded the entire resources of the State, including the radio. As Minister of the Interior in Prussia Hermann Goring was especially active in employing the state apparatus. A gangster in charge of the police, he transformed the Prussian force into an auxiliary of the SA. Their particular task was to sup-press the Communist opposition and Goring's instructions were to "Shoot first and ask questions afterwards."
The Fuhrer, who told army chiefs that the Red "rot within the state must be expunged . . . through terror," intended to teach them differently. He got his chance on the night of 27 February 1933, when the Reichstag building was set on fire. Most of the ugly sandstone structure on Konigsplatz survived the blaze. Hitler himself appeared in the Reichstag lobby, dressed in a flapping trench coat and a soft, broad-brimmed black hat. All his apocalyptic instincts were roused by the incendiary spectacle. But he at once began to seek ways of exploiting it politically. "God grant that this be the work of the Communists," he intoned. If the Reds got hold of Europe, he continued, warming to his theme, within two months "the whole con-tinent would be aflame like this building."
Hitler grasped Papen's hand convulsively: "This is a God-given signal, Herr Vice-Chancellor! If this fire, as I believe, is the work of the Communists, then we must crush out this murder pest with an iron fist."8 Some minutes more and Hitler had managed to work his furious suspicion into hysterical certainty. Leaning over the stone parapet of a balcony and "staring into the red sea of flame," his face scarlet with heat and excitement, he screamed at his entourage: Now there can be no mercy; whoever stands in our way will be mown down. The German people will not tolerate clemency. Every Commu-nist functionary will be shot wherever he is found. The Communist deputies must be hanged this very night.9 Nor should their allies be spared, the Fuhrer concluded, among whom he numbered the Social Democrats. The rest of the night Hitler spent at the offices of the Vakischer Beo-bachter working with Goebbels on the Nazi version of the fire. They represented it as the "signal for bloody revolution and civil war,"i° a St. Bartholomew's Day massacre to involve everything from political terror to the poisoning of reservoirs and communal soup kitchens. Though a Red insurrection was by no means impossible, few believed that the Communists would risk an open trial of strength with the Nazis. As The Times commented, "Clubs have been trumps and most of the trumps are in the hands of Goring."11 Thus many people, including some of the top Nazis themselves, accepted the Communist account of the fire. This was speed-ily advanced by Willi Munzenberg's ubiquitous Red propaganda organisation. Citing a mass of circumstantial evidence, mostly spurious, its Brown Book of the Hitler Terror and the Burning of the Reichstag (1933) asserted that the Nazis themselves had secretly torched the building as a pretext for establishing a dictatorship. Thus what appears to be the truth—that an unbalanced Dutch Marxist named Marinus van der Lubbe had started the fire as a solitary protest against Nazism—was obscured for a generation. Hitler benefited most from the confusion. On 28 February he issued a decree for the protection of the State and its citizens, which was signed by Hindenburg. Annulling rights enshrined in the Weimar constitution and giving the government wide emergency powers, it was the death warrant of democracy. Among other things it sanctioned arbitrary arrest, the con-fiscation of property, the banning of free assembly and the suppression of free speech. No wonder Hitler regarded the Reichstag fire as a heaven-sent "beacon.'''' In its flames he forged the fetters of tyranny.
Sunday, January 31, 2016
Friday, January 29, 2016
More Philip Roth
last excerpts from Operation: Shylock
The gun was manned by a grim, unshaven young soldier, who eyed us soberly while we handed our papers over to another guard, who tossed them onto his desk and, with a truculent gesture, indi-cated that we could go on.
"Sephardic boys," George told me as we continued toward a side door of the jail. "Moroccans. The Ashkenazis prefer to keep their hands clean. They get their darker brethren to do their torturing for them. The ignorant Arab haters from the Orient furnish the re-fined Ashkenazis with a very useful, all-purpose proletarian mob. Of course when they lived in Morocco they didn't hate Arabs. They lived harmoniously with Arabs for a thousand years. But The white Israelis have taught them that, too—how to hate the Arabs and how to hate themselves. The white Israelis have turned them into their thugs." The side door was guarded by a pair of soldiers who, like those we'd just encountered, looked to have been recruited from the meanest city streets. They let us through without a word, and we stepped into a shabby courtroom barely large enough for a couple of dozen spectators. Occupying half the seats were more Israeli soldiers, who weren't carrying weapons that I could see but who didn't appear as though they'd have much trouble putting down a disturbance with just their bare hands. In scruffy fatigues and combat boots, their shirt collars open and their heads bare, they sat lazily sprawled about but nonetheless looking very proprietary with their arms spread to either side along the back rail of the wooden benches. My first impression was of young toughs lolling in the outer lobby of an employment agency that specialized in placing bouncers.
and
To me he then confided, "This is the Middle East. We all know how to lie with a smile. Sincerity is not of this world, but these native boys make a specialty of underdoing it. That's something you find out about Arabs—perfectly natural in both roles at the same time. So convincing one way—just like you when you write—and then, the next moment, someone will walk out of the room, they'll turn around and be just the opposite." "And how do you account for this?" I asked him. "One's interest allows anything. Very, very basic. Comes from the desert. That blade of grass is mine and my animal is going to get it or die. It's my animal or your animal. That's where interest begins and it justifies all duplicity. There is in Islam this idea of taqiya. Generally called in English `dissimulation.' It's especially strong in Shi'ite Islam but it's all over Islamic culture. Doctrinally speaking, dissimulation is part of Islamic culture, and the permission to dissimulate is wide-spread. The culture doesn't expect that you'll speak in a way that endangers you and certainly not that you'll be candid and sincere. You would be considered foolish to do that. People say one thing, adopt a public position, and are then quite different on the inside and privately act in a totally different way. They have an expression for this: `the shifting sands'—ramal mutabarrika. An example. For all their bravado about opposing Zionism, throughout the Mandate they sold land to the Jews. Not just their run-of-the-mill opportunists but also their big leadership. But they have a wonderful proverb to justify this as well. Ad-daroori lib achkaam. `Necessity has its own rules.' Dissimulation, two-facedness, secretiveness—all highly regarded val-ues among your friends," he told me. "They don't think that other people have to know what is really on their minds. Very different from Jews, you see, telling everything that's on their minds to every-one nonstop. I used to think that God has given the Jew the Arab to bedevil his conscience and keep it Jewish. I know better since meet-ing George and the bard. God sent us the Arab so we could learn from him how to refine our own deviousness."
and
I heard myself next praising the greatest Diasporist of all, the father of the new Diasporist movement, Irving Berlin. "People ask where I got the idea. Well, I got it listening to the radio. The radio was playing 'Easter Parade' and I thought, But this is Jewish genius on a par with the Ten Commandments. God gave Moses the Ten Commandments and then He gave to Irving Berlin `Easter Parade' and 'White Christmas.' The two holidays that celebrate the divinity of Christ—the divinity that's the very heart of the Jewish rejection of Christianity—and what does Irving Berlin brilliantly do? He de-Christs them both! Easter he turns into a fashion show and Christmas into a holiday about snow. Gone is the gore and the mur-der of Christ—down with the crucifix and up with the bonnet! He turns their religion into schlock But nicely! Nicely! So nicely the goyim don't even know what hit 'em. They love it. Everybody loves it. The Jews especially. Jews loathe Jesus. People always tell me Jesus is Jewish. I never believe them. It's like when people used to tell me Cary Grant was Jewish. Bullshit Jews don't want to hear about Jesus. And can you blame them? So—Bing Crosby replaces Jesus as the beloved Son of God, and d the Jews, the Jews, go around whistling about Easter! And is that so disgraceful a means of defusing the enmity of centuries? Is anyone really dishonored by this? If schlockified Christianity is Christianity cleansed of Jew hatred, then three cheers for schlock. If supplanting Jesus Christ with snow can enable my people to cozy up to Christmas, then let it snow, let it snow, let it snow! Do you see my point?" I took more pride, I told them, in "Easter Parade" than in the victory of the Six Day War, found more security in "White Christmas" than in the Israeli nuclear reactor. I told them that if the Israelis ever reached a point where they believed their survival depended not merely on breaking hands but on drop-ping a nuclear bomb, that would be the end of Judaism, even if the state of Israel should survive. "Jews as Jews will simply disappear. A generation after Jews use nuclear weapons to save themselves from their enemies, there will no longer be people to identify themselves as Jews. The Israelis will have saved their state by destroying their people. They will never survive morally after that; and if they don't, why survive as Jews at all? They barely have the wherewithal to survive morally now. To put all these Jews in this tiny place, surrounded on all sides by tremendous hostility—how can you survive morally? Better to be marginal neurotics, anxious assimilationists, and everything else that the Zionists despise, better to lose the state than to lose your moral being by unleashing a nuclear war. Better Irving Berlin than Ariel Sharon. Better Irving Berlin than the Wailing Wall. Better Irving Berlin than Holy Jerusalem! What does owning Jerusalem, of all places, have to do with being Jews in 1988? Jerusalem is by now the worst thing that could possibly have happened to us. Last year in Jerusalem! Next year in Warsaw! Next year in Bucharest! Next year in Vilna and Cracow! Look, I know people call Diasporism a revolutionary idea, but it's not a revolution that I'm proposing, it's a retroversion, a turning back, the very thing Zionism itself once was. You go back to the crossing point and cross back the other way. Zionism went back too far, that's what went wrong with Zionism. Zionism went back to the crossing point of the dispersion—Diasporism goes back to the crossing point of Zionism."
and
I could have sat up on the bed and composed from there my remaining questions for Aharon, but instead, to safeguard what little equilibrium I still possessed, I chose to sit as I have been sitting all my life, in a chair, at a desk, under a lamp, substantiating my peculiar existence in the most consolidating way I know, taming temporarily with a string of words the unruly tyranny of my incoherence.
and
I waited for a decision to be made about operating on c\\ my obstructed arteries while in Bellow's The Bellarosa Connection. The book you clutch ile reading, not without some pleasure, the while awaiting the worst is a book you may never be capable of \\*\ summarizing coherently but whose clutching you never forget. When I was a small boy in my first classroom—I remembered this, itting obediently as a middle-aged man in what I could not help thinking might be my last classroom—I had been transfixed by the alphabet as it appeared in white on a black frieze some six inches high that extended horizontally atop the blackboard, "Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee," each letter exhibited there twice, in cursive script, parent and child, object and shadow, sound and echo, etc., etc. The twenty-six asymmetrical pairings suggested to an intelligent five-year-old every duality and correspondence a little mind could possibly conceive. Each was so variously interlocked and at odds, any two taken to-gether so tantalizing in their faintly unharmonious apposition that, even if viewed as I, for one, first apprehended the alphabet frieze—as figures in profile, the way Nineveh's low-relief sculptors depicted the royal lion hunt in 1000 B.c.—the procession marching immobilely toward the classroom door constituted an associative grab bag of inexhaustible proportions. And when it registered on me that the couples in this configuration—whose pictorial properties alone fur-nished such pure Rorschachish delight—each had a name of its own, mental delirium of the sweetest sort set in, as it might in anyone of any age. It only remained for me to be instructed in the secret of how these letters could be inveigled to become words for the ecstasy to be complete. There had been no pleasure so fortifying and none that so dynamically expanded the scope of consciousness since I'd learned to walk some fifteen hundred days before; and there would be nothing as remotely inspirational again until a stimulant no less potent than the force of language—the hazardous allurements of the flesh and the pecker's irrepressible urge to squirt—overturned an-gelic childhood. So this explains why I happened to be reading when Smilesburger appeared. The alphabet is all there is to protect me; it's what I was given instead of a gun. In September 1979, six years before he was thrown in his wheel-chair over the side of the Achille Lauro by Palestinian terrorists, Klinghoffer and his wife were on a cruise ship bound for Israel. This is what I read of what he'd written in the leather-bound diary with the rickshaw, the elephant, the camel, the gondola, the airliner, and the passenger ship engraved in gold on its cover.
9/5 Weather clear Friday. Sunny Took tour through Greek port of Piraeus and city of Athens. Guide was excellent. The city of Athens is a modern bustling city. Lots of traffic. Went up to the Acropolis and saw all the ancient ruins. It was a well-guided and interesting tour. Got home about 2.30. Quarter of 4 on way to Haifa, Israel. A very interesting afternoon. Tonight was the night. After dinner there was a singer from Israel. Gave a performance. I was one of the judges for queen of the ship. It was all hilarious. What a night. To bed at 12.30.
Would Jews without enemies be just as boring as everyone else?
and
Why are the Jews so lacking in the fundamental course sies of social intercourse even between themselves? Why must eve affront be magnified? Why must every provocation initiate a feud?" I had affronted no one. I had provoked no one. I could explain that million dollars. But to his satisfaction? Without Uri reappearing to feed me my lunch? I didn't answer. "The Jew's lack of love for his fellow Jew," Smilesburger said, "is the cause of much suffering among our people. The animosity, the ridicule, the sheer hatred of one Jew for another—why? Where is our forbearance and forgiveness of our neighbor? Why is there such divi-siveness among Jews? It isn't only in Jerusalem in 1988 that there is suddenly this discord—it was in the ghetto, God knows, a hundred years ago; it was at the destruction of the Second Temple two thou-sand years ago. Why was the Second Temple destroyed? Because of this hatred of one Jew for another. Why has the Messiah not come? Because of the angry hatred of one Jew for another. We not only need Anti-Semites Anonymous for the goy—we need it for the Jew himself. Angry disputes, verbal abuse, malicious backbiting, mocking gossip, scoffing, faultfinding, complaining, condemning, insulting—the black-est mark against our people is not the eating of pork, it is not even marrying with the non-Jew: worse than both is the sin of Jewish speech. We talk too much, we say too much, and we do not know when to stop. Part of the Jewish problem is that they never know what voice to speak in. Refined? Rabbinical? Hysterical? Ironical? Part of the Jewish problem is that the voice is too loud. Too insistent. Too aggressive. No matter what he says or how he says it, it's inappro-priate. Inappropriateness is the Jewish style. Awful. Tor each and every moment that a person remains silent, he earns a reward too great to be conceived of by any created being.' This is the Vilna Gaon quoting from the Midrash. 'What should a person's job be in this
bet world? To make himself like a mute.' This is from the Sages. As one of our most revered rabbinical scholars has beautifully expressed it in an admirably simple sentence not ten syllables long, 'Words generally only spoil things.'
and
"These Jews who may or may not be contributing money to the PLO, why haven't they a perfect right to do with their money whatever they wish without interference from the likes of you?" "Not only do they have a right as Jews, they have an inescapable moral duty as Jews, to make reparations to the Palestinians in what-ever form they choose. What we have done to the Palestinians is wicked. We have displaced them and we have oppressed them. We have expelled them, beaten them, tortured them, and murdered them. The Jewish state, from the day of its inception, has been dedicated to eliminating a Palestinian presence in historical Palestine and expropriating the land of an indigenous people. The Palestinians have been driven out, dispersed, and conquered by the Jews. To make a Jewish state we have betrayed our history—we have done unto the Palestinians what the Christians have done unto us: systematically transformed them into the despised and subjugated Other, thereby depriving them of their human status. Irrespective of terrorism or terrorists or the political stupidity of Yasir Arafat, the fact is this: as a people the Palestinians are totally innocent and as a people the Jews are totally guilty. To me the horror is not that a handful of rich Jews make large financial contributions to the PLO but that every last Jew in the world does not have it in his heart to contribute as well."
The gun was manned by a grim, unshaven young soldier, who eyed us soberly while we handed our papers over to another guard, who tossed them onto his desk and, with a truculent gesture, indi-cated that we could go on.
"Sephardic boys," George told me as we continued toward a side door of the jail. "Moroccans. The Ashkenazis prefer to keep their hands clean. They get their darker brethren to do their torturing for them. The ignorant Arab haters from the Orient furnish the re-fined Ashkenazis with a very useful, all-purpose proletarian mob. Of course when they lived in Morocco they didn't hate Arabs. They lived harmoniously with Arabs for a thousand years. But The white Israelis have taught them that, too—how to hate the Arabs and how to hate themselves. The white Israelis have turned them into their thugs." The side door was guarded by a pair of soldiers who, like those we'd just encountered, looked to have been recruited from the meanest city streets. They let us through without a word, and we stepped into a shabby courtroom barely large enough for a couple of dozen spectators. Occupying half the seats were more Israeli soldiers, who weren't carrying weapons that I could see but who didn't appear as though they'd have much trouble putting down a disturbance with just their bare hands. In scruffy fatigues and combat boots, their shirt collars open and their heads bare, they sat lazily sprawled about but nonetheless looking very proprietary with their arms spread to either side along the back rail of the wooden benches. My first impression was of young toughs lolling in the outer lobby of an employment agency that specialized in placing bouncers.
and
To me he then confided, "This is the Middle East. We all know how to lie with a smile. Sincerity is not of this world, but these native boys make a specialty of underdoing it. That's something you find out about Arabs—perfectly natural in both roles at the same time. So convincing one way—just like you when you write—and then, the next moment, someone will walk out of the room, they'll turn around and be just the opposite." "And how do you account for this?" I asked him. "One's interest allows anything. Very, very basic. Comes from the desert. That blade of grass is mine and my animal is going to get it or die. It's my animal or your animal. That's where interest begins and it justifies all duplicity. There is in Islam this idea of taqiya. Generally called in English `dissimulation.' It's especially strong in Shi'ite Islam but it's all over Islamic culture. Doctrinally speaking, dissimulation is part of Islamic culture, and the permission to dissimulate is wide-spread. The culture doesn't expect that you'll speak in a way that endangers you and certainly not that you'll be candid and sincere. You would be considered foolish to do that. People say one thing, adopt a public position, and are then quite different on the inside and privately act in a totally different way. They have an expression for this: `the shifting sands'—ramal mutabarrika. An example. For all their bravado about opposing Zionism, throughout the Mandate they sold land to the Jews. Not just their run-of-the-mill opportunists but also their big leadership. But they have a wonderful proverb to justify this as well. Ad-daroori lib achkaam. `Necessity has its own rules.' Dissimulation, two-facedness, secretiveness—all highly regarded val-ues among your friends," he told me. "They don't think that other people have to know what is really on their minds. Very different from Jews, you see, telling everything that's on their minds to every-one nonstop. I used to think that God has given the Jew the Arab to bedevil his conscience and keep it Jewish. I know better since meet-ing George and the bard. God sent us the Arab so we could learn from him how to refine our own deviousness."
and
I heard myself next praising the greatest Diasporist of all, the father of the new Diasporist movement, Irving Berlin. "People ask where I got the idea. Well, I got it listening to the radio. The radio was playing 'Easter Parade' and I thought, But this is Jewish genius on a par with the Ten Commandments. God gave Moses the Ten Commandments and then He gave to Irving Berlin `Easter Parade' and 'White Christmas.' The two holidays that celebrate the divinity of Christ—the divinity that's the very heart of the Jewish rejection of Christianity—and what does Irving Berlin brilliantly do? He de-Christs them both! Easter he turns into a fashion show and Christmas into a holiday about snow. Gone is the gore and the mur-der of Christ—down with the crucifix and up with the bonnet! He turns their religion into schlock But nicely! Nicely! So nicely the goyim don't even know what hit 'em. They love it. Everybody loves it. The Jews especially. Jews loathe Jesus. People always tell me Jesus is Jewish. I never believe them. It's like when people used to tell me Cary Grant was Jewish. Bullshit Jews don't want to hear about Jesus. And can you blame them? So—Bing Crosby replaces Jesus as the beloved Son of God, and d the Jews, the Jews, go around whistling about Easter! And is that so disgraceful a means of defusing the enmity of centuries? Is anyone really dishonored by this? If schlockified Christianity is Christianity cleansed of Jew hatred, then three cheers for schlock. If supplanting Jesus Christ with snow can enable my people to cozy up to Christmas, then let it snow, let it snow, let it snow! Do you see my point?" I took more pride, I told them, in "Easter Parade" than in the victory of the Six Day War, found more security in "White Christmas" than in the Israeli nuclear reactor. I told them that if the Israelis ever reached a point where they believed their survival depended not merely on breaking hands but on drop-ping a nuclear bomb, that would be the end of Judaism, even if the state of Israel should survive. "Jews as Jews will simply disappear. A generation after Jews use nuclear weapons to save themselves from their enemies, there will no longer be people to identify themselves as Jews. The Israelis will have saved their state by destroying their people. They will never survive morally after that; and if they don't, why survive as Jews at all? They barely have the wherewithal to survive morally now. To put all these Jews in this tiny place, surrounded on all sides by tremendous hostility—how can you survive morally? Better to be marginal neurotics, anxious assimilationists, and everything else that the Zionists despise, better to lose the state than to lose your moral being by unleashing a nuclear war. Better Irving Berlin than Ariel Sharon. Better Irving Berlin than the Wailing Wall. Better Irving Berlin than Holy Jerusalem! What does owning Jerusalem, of all places, have to do with being Jews in 1988? Jerusalem is by now the worst thing that could possibly have happened to us. Last year in Jerusalem! Next year in Warsaw! Next year in Bucharest! Next year in Vilna and Cracow! Look, I know people call Diasporism a revolutionary idea, but it's not a revolution that I'm proposing, it's a retroversion, a turning back, the very thing Zionism itself once was. You go back to the crossing point and cross back the other way. Zionism went back too far, that's what went wrong with Zionism. Zionism went back to the crossing point of the dispersion—Diasporism goes back to the crossing point of Zionism."
and
I could have sat up on the bed and composed from there my remaining questions for Aharon, but instead, to safeguard what little equilibrium I still possessed, I chose to sit as I have been sitting all my life, in a chair, at a desk, under a lamp, substantiating my peculiar existence in the most consolidating way I know, taming temporarily with a string of words the unruly tyranny of my incoherence.
and
I waited for a decision to be made about operating on c\\ my obstructed arteries while in Bellow's The Bellarosa Connection. The book you clutch ile reading, not without some pleasure, the while awaiting the worst is a book you may never be capable of \\*\ summarizing coherently but whose clutching you never forget. When I was a small boy in my first classroom—I remembered this, itting obediently as a middle-aged man in what I could not help thinking might be my last classroom—I had been transfixed by the alphabet as it appeared in white on a black frieze some six inches high that extended horizontally atop the blackboard, "Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee," each letter exhibited there twice, in cursive script, parent and child, object and shadow, sound and echo, etc., etc. The twenty-six asymmetrical pairings suggested to an intelligent five-year-old every duality and correspondence a little mind could possibly conceive. Each was so variously interlocked and at odds, any two taken to-gether so tantalizing in their faintly unharmonious apposition that, even if viewed as I, for one, first apprehended the alphabet frieze—as figures in profile, the way Nineveh's low-relief sculptors depicted the royal lion hunt in 1000 B.c.—the procession marching immobilely toward the classroom door constituted an associative grab bag of inexhaustible proportions. And when it registered on me that the couples in this configuration—whose pictorial properties alone fur-nished such pure Rorschachish delight—each had a name of its own, mental delirium of the sweetest sort set in, as it might in anyone of any age. It only remained for me to be instructed in the secret of how these letters could be inveigled to become words for the ecstasy to be complete. There had been no pleasure so fortifying and none that so dynamically expanded the scope of consciousness since I'd learned to walk some fifteen hundred days before; and there would be nothing as remotely inspirational again until a stimulant no less potent than the force of language—the hazardous allurements of the flesh and the pecker's irrepressible urge to squirt—overturned an-gelic childhood. So this explains why I happened to be reading when Smilesburger appeared. The alphabet is all there is to protect me; it's what I was given instead of a gun. In September 1979, six years before he was thrown in his wheel-chair over the side of the Achille Lauro by Palestinian terrorists, Klinghoffer and his wife were on a cruise ship bound for Israel. This is what I read of what he'd written in the leather-bound diary with the rickshaw, the elephant, the camel, the gondola, the airliner, and the passenger ship engraved in gold on its cover.
9/5 Weather clear Friday. Sunny Took tour through Greek port of Piraeus and city of Athens. Guide was excellent. The city of Athens is a modern bustling city. Lots of traffic. Went up to the Acropolis and saw all the ancient ruins. It was a well-guided and interesting tour. Got home about 2.30. Quarter of 4 on way to Haifa, Israel. A very interesting afternoon. Tonight was the night. After dinner there was a singer from Israel. Gave a performance. I was one of the judges for queen of the ship. It was all hilarious. What a night. To bed at 12.30.
Would Jews without enemies be just as boring as everyone else?
and
Why are the Jews so lacking in the fundamental course sies of social intercourse even between themselves? Why must eve affront be magnified? Why must every provocation initiate a feud?" I had affronted no one. I had provoked no one. I could explain that million dollars. But to his satisfaction? Without Uri reappearing to feed me my lunch? I didn't answer. "The Jew's lack of love for his fellow Jew," Smilesburger said, "is the cause of much suffering among our people. The animosity, the ridicule, the sheer hatred of one Jew for another—why? Where is our forbearance and forgiveness of our neighbor? Why is there such divi-siveness among Jews? It isn't only in Jerusalem in 1988 that there is suddenly this discord—it was in the ghetto, God knows, a hundred years ago; it was at the destruction of the Second Temple two thou-sand years ago. Why was the Second Temple destroyed? Because of this hatred of one Jew for another. Why has the Messiah not come? Because of the angry hatred of one Jew for another. We not only need Anti-Semites Anonymous for the goy—we need it for the Jew himself. Angry disputes, verbal abuse, malicious backbiting, mocking gossip, scoffing, faultfinding, complaining, condemning, insulting—the black-est mark against our people is not the eating of pork, it is not even marrying with the non-Jew: worse than both is the sin of Jewish speech. We talk too much, we say too much, and we do not know when to stop. Part of the Jewish problem is that they never know what voice to speak in. Refined? Rabbinical? Hysterical? Ironical? Part of the Jewish problem is that the voice is too loud. Too insistent. Too aggressive. No matter what he says or how he says it, it's inappro-priate. Inappropriateness is the Jewish style. Awful. Tor each and every moment that a person remains silent, he earns a reward too great to be conceived of by any created being.' This is the Vilna Gaon quoting from the Midrash. 'What should a person's job be in this
bet world? To make himself like a mute.' This is from the Sages. As one of our most revered rabbinical scholars has beautifully expressed it in an admirably simple sentence not ten syllables long, 'Words generally only spoil things.'
and
"These Jews who may or may not be contributing money to the PLO, why haven't they a perfect right to do with their money whatever they wish without interference from the likes of you?" "Not only do they have a right as Jews, they have an inescapable moral duty as Jews, to make reparations to the Palestinians in what-ever form they choose. What we have done to the Palestinians is wicked. We have displaced them and we have oppressed them. We have expelled them, beaten them, tortured them, and murdered them. The Jewish state, from the day of its inception, has been dedicated to eliminating a Palestinian presence in historical Palestine and expropriating the land of an indigenous people. The Palestinians have been driven out, dispersed, and conquered by the Jews. To make a Jewish state we have betrayed our history—we have done unto the Palestinians what the Christians have done unto us: systematically transformed them into the despised and subjugated Other, thereby depriving them of their human status. Irrespective of terrorism or terrorists or the political stupidity of Yasir Arafat, the fact is this: as a people the Palestinians are totally innocent and as a people the Jews are totally guilty. To me the horror is not that a handful of rich Jews make large financial contributions to the PLO but that every last Jew in the world does not have it in his heart to contribute as well."
Ford Madox Ford
In the case of Mr. E. E. Cummings I had decided after reading ten lines of his that I would open the Trans-atlantic Review with the poems he sent me. There then was the transatlantic review—without capitals. I had no motive in printing the title without capitals. I had seen the name of a shop somewhere on the Boulevard without capital letters and had rather liked the effect. Then, by a mere coincidence, Mr. Cummings' poems had no capitals. The conjunction made a great sensation. It was of course taken to be a display of Communism. We were suspected of beheading initial letters as if they had been kings. The American Women's Club in Paris solemnly burned the second number of the Review in their hall fire, thus giving a lead to Mr. Hitler. Their accusation was that we were not only Communists but indecent—that, on account of a really quite innocent story in French by my extraordinarily staid friend M. Georges Pillement. But one of the scenes took place in a . . . bathroom. It seemed to me that it would be better if some American ladies did not read French. It might cause international complications if they set up a censorship in Paris. After I had written that the Club cut off its subscription. Bringing out the first number was rather hectic. The misprints made by the Russian printers were natural, but their corrections made the pages look like a Soviet battlefield and their procrastination was without parallel. The White Russian Colonel almost went out of his mind because he read communism into every incomprehensible English sentence. Finally everything was ready except for the proof of my editorial which conveyed a slight aperfu of the Arts in Paris at that mo-ment. It had cost me a good deal of work. There seemed to be no way of getting this proof from the printers. The White Russian Colonel now resigned. He said with a great deal of dignity that he would probably starve. But it was inconsistent with his honour to go on taking money from an organ that was now definitely proved to be an agency of the U. R. S. S. I didn't argue with or even question him. The Soviet Republic loomed enormously large in the Paris of those days for Paris is an excitable city and the finger of Lenin was traced to the most unlikely things. Even the mark of a newly invented rubber boot-heel! It was taken to print a trail by means of which Soviet agents could follow each other's movements. . . . I had nevertheless, within a week, offers of every kind of service from every kind of White Russian noble or army officer or their wives. I refused them. I was in rather a hole. The only person at the printer's who spoke comprehensible French or seemed reason-ably sane was the manager. He had taken the opportunity to go sick. The rest of the staff who appeared to be mad flew into frenzies whenever I entered their office. My Russian is very limited and Miss Reid was afraid to go near that madhouse.
Wednesday, January 27, 2016
F.D.R.
IF Roosevelt had not lifted the Depression in his first hundred days as President, he had dissipated the pall of fear which hung over the United States. It was a task that had seemed impossible when he took office. At the beginning of March 1933 one supporter had written, "I really tremble for the new administration because the great rank and file of the people are expecting a miracle."58 After Roosevelt's inaugural address many Americans felt that he was the man to perform it: "They were ready tc believe that he could see in the dark."59 By the middle of June they con-cluded that a miracle had indeed occurred. As the New York Times noted, Roosevelt had turned the emergency into a personal triumph: That was because he seemed to the American people to be riding the whirlwind and directing the storm. The country was ready and even anxious to accept any leadership. From President Roosevelt it got a rapid succession of courageous speeches and efforts and achievements which inclined millions of his fellow citizens to acclaim him as the heaven-sent man of the hour.6°
Roosevelt's measures may have been largely unpremeditated, surprisingly incoherent and frequently ineffective. All too often his overlapping agen-cies engaged in feuds of their own and he never harnessed their energies to achieve real economic recovery. Yet in just over three months the President averted catastrophe, restored the nation to psychological equilibrium and incidentally buttered his own political parsnips for life. He imbued the United States with a sense of purpose, unity and dynamism. He epito-mised compassion in government. He reinvigorated public service and, li like John F. Kennedy after him, got the young involved. He gave promis that the resources of democracy were equal to the crisis and that capit " could heal itself. He exuded optimism. As Harold Ickes said, "It's m than a New Deal. It's a New World."6' Roosevelt's achievement was indeed a personal one. He conveyed a sense that the New Deal was a great adventure, a heroic struggle which would culminate in victory over the Depression. His zest for this enter-prise found expression in the obvious delight he took in the appurte-nances of his office. The White House itself was transformed by his exhilarating presence. When H. G. Wells had visited Hoover there he had found "a sickly overworked and overwhelmed man" inhabiting "a queer ramshackle place like a nest of waiting-rooms with hat-stands everywhere, and unexpected doors . . . through which hurrying distraught officials appeared and vanished." Calling on Roosevelt he "found that this magic White House had changed back again to a large leisurely comfortable pri-vate home."Where Hoover had addressed Wells like a public meeting, everything under Roosevelt was informal and relaxed. The house was lived in to the point of shabbiness. The food was notori-ously bad: gourmet visitors were particularly revolted by the salads, which sometimes concealed "bits of marshmallow in their dreadful depths."63 The patrician President sent away for bargain mail-order shirts. His bed-room was almost Spartan: he slept on a thin mattress in a narrow iron bedstead covered with a white seersucker counterpane; there was little in the way of decoration except pictures, a collection of miniature pigs on the marble mantelpiece and the tail of his father's horse Gloucester over the door. The adjoining second-floor Oval Study was scarcely less modest. The walls were painted battleship grey and a large green rug covered the floor. The President's massive oak desk, made from the timbers of the Resolute, was crowded with curios, gadgets and souvenirs. Books, model ships, photographs, naval paintings and flags added to the clutter. The impression that 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was a family home was strengthened by the First Lady, whose hospitality was as warm as it was frugal. Vulnerable and impulsive, radiating "spiritual energy" but pos-sessing the common touch, Eleanor Roosevelt not only acted as her hus-band's (frequently ignored) liberal conscience, she also acted as his hostess in a singularly unpretentious White House. Her efforts had more than domestic import since, as one of her staff said: "This goldfish bowl is made out of magnifying glass."65 What people saw inside it was the smil-ing face of democracy. Nevertheless critics, some of whom had earlier called for a dictatorship, increasingly damned Roosevelt for having established one. This charge, which reveals much about the power of ideas to transcend reality, soon became the common currency of polite conversation. It was repeated in the press, most rabidly by Colonel Robert R. McCormick's Chicago Trib-une, which described Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler and Roosevelt as the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. It was first heard from the pulpit in the sum-mer of 1933, when Roosevelt was denounced as a "dictator" by the Presi-dent of the Church of Latter-day Saints.66 Similarities can be adduced, it is true, between Roosevelt's remedies for the Depression and those of fas-cist and Communist leaders. FDR himself said that he was doing, in a more orderly way, "some of the things that were being done in Russia and even some of the things that were being done under Hitler in Germany."67 The President built highways while the Rihrer built autobahns. Roosevelt regarded the CCC work camps as a means of getting young people "off the city street corners"; Hitler described similar projects as a way to keep the youth from "rotting helplessly in the streets." When Roosevelt refused to cooperate at the World Economic Conference of June 1933—he feared its attempts to stabilise international currency would interfere with his price-raising efforts in the United States—Hjalmar Schacht, President of the Reichsbank, congratulated him for being an economic nationalist like the Fiihrer. He may even have been influenced by writers such as Stu-art Chase, populariser of the term "New Deal," who likened Communism to "the flaming sword of Allah" seen "over the plains of Mecca." However, Roosevelt's diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union in November 1933 was not prompted by any ideological sympathy. On the contrary, religious Americans went so far as to hope that he had "restored God to Russia."7° In fact the President wanted good relations with the USSR to counter Japan and to promote trade. At home he was clearly try-ing to preserve the American way of life. His version of the planned economy was not socialism but state capitalism. His purpose was to rein-vigorate private enterprise with injections of public spirit—and public money. Roosevelt's New Deal was a world away from Stalin's perelom, his break with the past. Despite what Hearst might say, the TVA was by no means Soviet. The AAA could not be confused with Stalin's agrarian revo-lution: Wallace was trying to save American kulaks. The public works schemes of Hopkins and Ickes were designed to restore individual dignity, not to promote collectivism. Though often called a "Parlour Pink," Rexford Tugwell was, as General Johnson said, "about as Red as a blue hen." Sinister enough in all conscience, J. Edgar Hoover's Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was no "miniature American Chekevz in fact, pro-moted with Hollywood hoop-la, it smacked less of the secret police than the Keystone Kops. Roosevelt's emergency measures aimed to increase national prosperity rather than to augment presidential power. Nothing could have induced him to emulate the brutal Caesarism of Stalin. Equally, the President was repelled by Hitler's organised savagery, espe-cially as expressed in war-mongering and anti-Semitism--though in prac-tice FDR would do as little to succour German Jews as to assist Ameri-can blacks. As chief of the world's greatest trading nation he did not, like Hitler and Mussolini, lust for autarky; though at a time when Euro-pean states were refusing to pay their war debts Roosevelt was inclined to ignore the warning of his Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, that eco-nomic wars are the germs of real wars. While the President was influenced by isolationism—he wrecked the World Economic Conference with his bombshell message urging each nation to set its own house in order—he aspired (as his later policies showed) towards internationalism. Further-more Roosevelt's New Deal hardly compares in essentials with Hitler's Gleichschaltung (coordination). The Blue Eagle could not be mistaken for the swastika. The fireside chat was the antithesis of the Nuremberg rally. Organised labour flourished under Roosevelt, whereas Hitler smashed the trade unions. Roosevelt's manipulation of the media bore no relation to the national brainwashing attempted by Goebbels. The President did not possess, as the New York Times sagely observed, "a private army of, say, 2,000,000 Blueshirts." The American constitution remained intact. No senators were sent to concentration camps; no congressmen were forcibly fed on castor oil. True, there were Americans who believed that a little castor oil might have started the wheels of industry going, not least the red-necked, red-suspendered, Red-hating Governor Eugene Talmadge of Georgia. But Roosevelt organised no "Fascist movement"—a vital necessity, in the opinion of Sir Oswald Mosley, if the President were to become a bona fide dictator. The fact is that, more than most presidents, Roosevelt existed in a deliberate dimension of ambiguity. He was eclectic and evasive to the point of contradiction and obfuscation. He was prepared to try whatever expedient looked good at the time. When the small boom that coincided with the first hundred days of the New Deal began to falter, Roosevelt initiated another of his overlapping relief agencies, Harry Hopkins's short-lived Civil Works Administration, which found temporary employment for over four million people during the cold winter of 1933-4. On the false assumption that the Depression could be cured by fixing prices rather than stimulating demand, over the winter he juggled with the value of gold over the dollar. To his admirers Roosevelt was a bold empiricist who was wonderfully accessible to new ideas. To his enemies, he was an unscrupulous opportunist who would embrace any creed to remain there.
In the 1936 election, Roosevelt shamelessly wore his warm heart on his sleeve. Alf Landon, the modest, liberal REpublican candidate could not match his opponent's rhetoric let alone FDR's comment on his emblem the Kansas sunflower: it was yellow, had a black heart and always died before November.
From... The Dark Valley by Piers Brendon
Roosevelt's measures may have been largely unpremeditated, surprisingly incoherent and frequently ineffective. All too often his overlapping agen-cies engaged in feuds of their own and he never harnessed their energies to achieve real economic recovery. Yet in just over three months the President averted catastrophe, restored the nation to psychological equilibrium and incidentally buttered his own political parsnips for life. He imbued the United States with a sense of purpose, unity and dynamism. He epito-mised compassion in government. He reinvigorated public service and, li like John F. Kennedy after him, got the young involved. He gave promis that the resources of democracy were equal to the crisis and that capit " could heal itself. He exuded optimism. As Harold Ickes said, "It's m than a New Deal. It's a New World."6' Roosevelt's achievement was indeed a personal one. He conveyed a sense that the New Deal was a great adventure, a heroic struggle which would culminate in victory over the Depression. His zest for this enter-prise found expression in the obvious delight he took in the appurte-nances of his office. The White House itself was transformed by his exhilarating presence. When H. G. Wells had visited Hoover there he had found "a sickly overworked and overwhelmed man" inhabiting "a queer ramshackle place like a nest of waiting-rooms with hat-stands everywhere, and unexpected doors . . . through which hurrying distraught officials appeared and vanished." Calling on Roosevelt he "found that this magic White House had changed back again to a large leisurely comfortable pri-vate home."Where Hoover had addressed Wells like a public meeting, everything under Roosevelt was informal and relaxed. The house was lived in to the point of shabbiness. The food was notori-ously bad: gourmet visitors were particularly revolted by the salads, which sometimes concealed "bits of marshmallow in their dreadful depths."63 The patrician President sent away for bargain mail-order shirts. His bed-room was almost Spartan: he slept on a thin mattress in a narrow iron bedstead covered with a white seersucker counterpane; there was little in the way of decoration except pictures, a collection of miniature pigs on the marble mantelpiece and the tail of his father's horse Gloucester over the door. The adjoining second-floor Oval Study was scarcely less modest. The walls were painted battleship grey and a large green rug covered the floor. The President's massive oak desk, made from the timbers of the Resolute, was crowded with curios, gadgets and souvenirs. Books, model ships, photographs, naval paintings and flags added to the clutter. The impression that 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was a family home was strengthened by the First Lady, whose hospitality was as warm as it was frugal. Vulnerable and impulsive, radiating "spiritual energy" but pos-sessing the common touch, Eleanor Roosevelt not only acted as her hus-band's (frequently ignored) liberal conscience, she also acted as his hostess in a singularly unpretentious White House. Her efforts had more than domestic import since, as one of her staff said: "This goldfish bowl is made out of magnifying glass."65 What people saw inside it was the smil-ing face of democracy. Nevertheless critics, some of whom had earlier called for a dictatorship, increasingly damned Roosevelt for having established one. This charge, which reveals much about the power of ideas to transcend reality, soon became the common currency of polite conversation. It was repeated in the press, most rabidly by Colonel Robert R. McCormick's Chicago Trib-une, which described Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler and Roosevelt as the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. It was first heard from the pulpit in the sum-mer of 1933, when Roosevelt was denounced as a "dictator" by the Presi-dent of the Church of Latter-day Saints.66 Similarities can be adduced, it is true, between Roosevelt's remedies for the Depression and those of fas-cist and Communist leaders. FDR himself said that he was doing, in a more orderly way, "some of the things that were being done in Russia and even some of the things that were being done under Hitler in Germany."67 The President built highways while the Rihrer built autobahns. Roosevelt regarded the CCC work camps as a means of getting young people "off the city street corners"; Hitler described similar projects as a way to keep the youth from "rotting helplessly in the streets." When Roosevelt refused to cooperate at the World Economic Conference of June 1933—he feared its attempts to stabilise international currency would interfere with his price-raising efforts in the United States—Hjalmar Schacht, President of the Reichsbank, congratulated him for being an economic nationalist like the Fiihrer. He may even have been influenced by writers such as Stu-art Chase, populariser of the term "New Deal," who likened Communism to "the flaming sword of Allah" seen "over the plains of Mecca." However, Roosevelt's diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union in November 1933 was not prompted by any ideological sympathy. On the contrary, religious Americans went so far as to hope that he had "restored God to Russia."7° In fact the President wanted good relations with the USSR to counter Japan and to promote trade. At home he was clearly try-ing to preserve the American way of life. His version of the planned economy was not socialism but state capitalism. His purpose was to rein-vigorate private enterprise with injections of public spirit—and public money. Roosevelt's New Deal was a world away from Stalin's perelom, his break with the past. Despite what Hearst might say, the TVA was by no means Soviet. The AAA could not be confused with Stalin's agrarian revo-lution: Wallace was trying to save American kulaks. The public works schemes of Hopkins and Ickes were designed to restore individual dignity, not to promote collectivism. Though often called a "Parlour Pink," Rexford Tugwell was, as General Johnson said, "about as Red as a blue hen." Sinister enough in all conscience, J. Edgar Hoover's Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was no "miniature American Chekevz in fact, pro-moted with Hollywood hoop-la, it smacked less of the secret police than the Keystone Kops. Roosevelt's emergency measures aimed to increase national prosperity rather than to augment presidential power. Nothing could have induced him to emulate the brutal Caesarism of Stalin. Equally, the President was repelled by Hitler's organised savagery, espe-cially as expressed in war-mongering and anti-Semitism--though in prac-tice FDR would do as little to succour German Jews as to assist Ameri-can blacks. As chief of the world's greatest trading nation he did not, like Hitler and Mussolini, lust for autarky; though at a time when Euro-pean states were refusing to pay their war debts Roosevelt was inclined to ignore the warning of his Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, that eco-nomic wars are the germs of real wars. While the President was influenced by isolationism—he wrecked the World Economic Conference with his bombshell message urging each nation to set its own house in order—he aspired (as his later policies showed) towards internationalism. Further-more Roosevelt's New Deal hardly compares in essentials with Hitler's Gleichschaltung (coordination). The Blue Eagle could not be mistaken for the swastika. The fireside chat was the antithesis of the Nuremberg rally. Organised labour flourished under Roosevelt, whereas Hitler smashed the trade unions. Roosevelt's manipulation of the media bore no relation to the national brainwashing attempted by Goebbels. The President did not possess, as the New York Times sagely observed, "a private army of, say, 2,000,000 Blueshirts." The American constitution remained intact. No senators were sent to concentration camps; no congressmen were forcibly fed on castor oil. True, there were Americans who believed that a little castor oil might have started the wheels of industry going, not least the red-necked, red-suspendered, Red-hating Governor Eugene Talmadge of Georgia. But Roosevelt organised no "Fascist movement"—a vital necessity, in the opinion of Sir Oswald Mosley, if the President were to become a bona fide dictator. The fact is that, more than most presidents, Roosevelt existed in a deliberate dimension of ambiguity. He was eclectic and evasive to the point of contradiction and obfuscation. He was prepared to try whatever expedient looked good at the time. When the small boom that coincided with the first hundred days of the New Deal began to falter, Roosevelt initiated another of his overlapping relief agencies, Harry Hopkins's short-lived Civil Works Administration, which found temporary employment for over four million people during the cold winter of 1933-4. On the false assumption that the Depression could be cured by fixing prices rather than stimulating demand, over the winter he juggled with the value of gold over the dollar. To his admirers Roosevelt was a bold empiricist who was wonderfully accessible to new ideas. To his enemies, he was an unscrupulous opportunist who would embrace any creed to remain there.
In the 1936 election, Roosevelt shamelessly wore his warm heart on his sleeve. Alf Landon, the modest, liberal REpublican candidate could not match his opponent's rhetoric let alone FDR's comment on his emblem the Kansas sunflower: it was yellow, had a black heart and always died before November.
From... The Dark Valley by Piers Brendon
Friday, January 22, 2016
Stalin's programs from The Dark Valley
Lenin had become, in his final state, a weird embodiment of dialectical materialism: the corporeal phantom of revolution, the hollow incarnation of Bolshevism. But the ox-blood ziggurat was important less as a tomb for Lenin than as a platform for Stalin. From its polished eminence he presided over interminable parades in the vast asphalt amphitheatre of Red Square.
The campaign which Stalin launched six days after his fiftieth birthday, a campaign resisted so violently that only his inflated prestige enabled him to carry it through—and to survive. Having found that his plans to revolutionise industry were being jeopardised by a shortage of grain, Stalin determined to speed up his programme of forcing peasants (muzhiks) into collective farms and he announced a new policy of "liquidating the kulaks as a class." The kulaks (literally, grasping "fists"; metaphorically, rich peasants) were portrayed as a reactionary agricul-tural bourgeoisie intent on choking Communism with "the bony hand of famine." It is true that these more enterprising farmers had taken advan-tage of Lenin's New Economic Policy, introduced after his own attempt to squeeze grain out of the peasantry had led to widespread revolt and famine in 1921, to sell their surplus produce on the open market and acquire a few implements and animals. Moreover they preferred to hoard their grain or feed it to their livestock (meat and dairy products fetched higher prices than cereals) rather than dispose of it to the State. But these better-off peasants were anything but the greedy capitalists of Stalin's fantasies. As Zinoviev said, "We are fond of describing any peasant who has enough to eat as a kulak." Nevertheless Stalin decreed that the kulaks were class ene-mies. Their persecution would terrify the lesser peasants into joining collectives, which would in turn reap huge benefits from exploiting the kulaks' property. Thus socialism would come to the countryside and peas-ants would be transformed into proletarians. Huge agricultural factories would produce the food without which Russia must remain a backward nation; food itself became a State monopoly. In the Communist historical process the eradication of the kulaks was incidental to the elimination of private farming. Stalin quoted the Russian proverb: "When the head is cut off, one does not mourn for the hair. "33 So Stalin declared war on his own people—a class war to end class. In the first two months of 1930 perhaps a million kulaks, weakened by previ-ous victimisation, were stripped of their possessions and uprooted from their farmsteads. They were among the earliest of "over five million"34 souls deported during the next three years, most of whom perished. Brigades of workers conscripted from the towns, backed by contingents of the Red Army and the OGPU (which had replaced the Cheka), swept through the countryside "like raging beasts."35 They rounded up the best farmers and their families, banished them to the barren outskirts of their villages or drove them into the northern wastes. Often they shot the heads of households, cramming their dependents into "death trains"—a pro-longed process owing to a shortage of the blood-coloured cattle trucks known as "red cows." While they waited, women and children expired of cold, hunger and disease. Muscovites, at first shocked by glimpses of the terror being inflicted on the countryside, became inured to the sight of peasants being herded from one station to another at gunpoint. A witness wrote:
Trainloads of deported peasants left for the icy North, the forests, the steppes, the deserts. There were whole populations, denuded of every-thing; the old folk starved to death in mid-journey, new-born babies were buried on the banks of the roadside, and each wilderness had its crop of little crosses of boughs or white wood.36 The survivors of these ghastly odysseys were concentrated in primitive camps which they often had to scratch with their bare hands from taiga or tundra. They were then set to work at digging canals, lumbering and other projects, Stalin having recently been dazzled by the prospect of "construct-ing socialism through the use of prison labour."37 Whatever Stalin may have envisaged, the assault on the kulaks was less like a considered piece of social engineering than "a nation-wide pogrom." Often the urban cadres simply pillaged for private gain, eating the kulaks' food and drinking their vodka on the spot, donning their felt boots and clothes, right down to their woollen underwear. Moreover, the spoliation was marked by caprice and chaos since it was virtually impossible to decide which peasants were kulaks. Peasants of all sorts (including women) resisted, fighting back with anything from sporadic terror to full-scale revolt. There were major uprisings in Moldavia, the Ukraine, the Caucasus, Crimea, Azerbaijan, Soviet Central Asia and elsewhere. To quell them Stalin employed tanks and even military aircraft, unusual adjuncts to agrarian reform (though Lenin had also used poison gas). Some tried to bribe their persecutors. Some committed suicide. Some appealed for mercy, of all Communist commodities the one in shortest supply. Like the troops, some Party members were indeed horrified at the vicious acts which they were called upon to perform. One exclaimed, "We are no longer people, we are animals." Many were brutes, official gangsters who revelled in licensed thuggery. Others carried out the persecutions for fear of join-ing the victims. Others belonged to the semi-Christian "tradition of social levelling stretching back to the peasant commune." Still others were idealists of a different stamp, convinced that they were doing their "revolutionary duty."They had no time for what Trotsky had once called the "papist-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life."According to Marx's iron laws of history, they shed the blood of the kulaks to achieve the dictatorship of the proletariat. Without this sacrifice the Soviet Union could not modernise and socialism could not survive. As one apparatchik expressed it: "When you are attacking there is no place for mercy; don't think of the kulak's hungry children; in the class struggle philanthropy is evil." This view, incidentally, was often shared by Western fellow-travellers. Upton Sinclair and A. J. P. Taylor both argued that to preserve the Workers' State the kulaks "had to be destroyed.
Whether facing expropriation and exile or collectivisation and servi-tude, masses of peasants retaliated by smashing their implements and killing their animals—live beasts would have to be handed over to the col-lectives whereas meat and hides could be respectively consumed and concealed. A quarter of the nation's livestock perished- a loss not made up until the 1960's.
*
Now, thanks to Stalin, the pall had lifted and the reign of terror had ceased. It was a false dawn. Stalin was retreating the better to advance. The only Bolshevik leader whose parents had been serfs, he knew the peasants and regarded them as the scum of the earth. Not for him the romanticism of a Tolstoy, who saw the muzhik as a spontaneous child of nature. Rather, Stalin agreed with Maxim Gorky who wrote that "the fundamental obstacle on the path of Russia's progress towards Europeanisation and culture" was "the overwhelming predominance of the illiterate countryside over the town, the zoological individualism of the peasantry and its almost total lack of social feelings."47 Known as thorny narod, "the dark people," the peasants were indeed brutal and obscurantist. Scattered in 600,000 villages and other small settlements over the interminable steppe, they dwelt in fly-ridden, cockroach-infested hovels with thatched roofs and mud floors, sharing the space, as often as not, with their animals. Thrashing their lean oxen or their gaunt women, millions tilled the soil with wooden ploughs "at least as old as the Pharaohs."48 More like the coolies of Asia than the farmers of Europe, the muzhiks knew nothing but poverty. Indeed, they had kept hunger at bay only since the mid-1920s. Bundled into putrid layers of ragged homespun (though some factory-made garments were appearing), they huddled around their stoves during the long dark winters, gossiping and brawling just as Chekhov had described in his classic story "Peasants." They saw their children and animals die and their huts go up in flames—"the red cockerel" devoured 400,000 homes a year. They resisted outside authority and visited barbarous punishments of their own on wrongdoers within the community. They smoked home-cured tobacco rolled up in newspaper. Otherwise their anodynes were religion, sex and drink. Smoke-blackened icons filled their houses, portents of heavenly recompense for lives nasty, brutish and short. Promiscuity was almost universal and the "most daring familiarities" took place in public, while the "usual talk was a running fire of obscenities and the gestures were as bad as the language." Drunkenness was such a "normal phenomenon" that Party members themselves defended it as "necessary for the worker in view of the hard conditions of his life"; so they could scarcely blame the peasant for drowning his sorrows in vodka. Stalin, however, though not averse to binges of his own, was determined to subject the muzhik to socialist discipline, to change his character by continuing the revolutionary change in his circumstances. In the autumn of 1930 he resumed the policy of forcible collectivisation. Peasant anguish was fed by rumours that women would be socialised, that unproductive old people would be prematurely cremated and that children were to be sent to creches in China. Such fears did not seem extravagant, for the authorities were themselves offering peasants apocalyptic inducements to join the collectives: "They promised golden mountains . . . They said that women would be freed from doing the washing, from milking and clean-ing the animals, weeding the garden, etc. Electricity can do that, they said." Under the hammer and sickle all things would be made new In 1930, Year XIII of the Communist era, a new calendar was intro-duced. It began the year on 1 November and established a five-day week: Sundays were abolished and rest days rotated so that work could be con-tinuous. The anti-God crusade became more vicious and the church was portrayed as the "kulaks' agitprop [agitation and propaganda agency]."5' Priests were persecuted. Icons were burned and replaced with portraits of Stalin. The bells of basilicas were silenced, many being melted down for the metal. Monasteries were demolished or turned into prison camps. Abbeys and convents were smashed to pieces and factories rose on their ruins. Churches were destroyed, scores in Moscow itself. Chief among them was the gold-domed Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer, Russia's largest place of worship and (according to the League of Militant Atheists) "the ideological fortress of the accursed old world,"52 which was dyna-mited to make way for the Palace of Soviets on 5 December 1931. Stalin was unprepared for the explosion and asked tremulously, "Where's the bombardment?"53 The new Russian orthodoxy was instilled through everything from schools in which pupils learned to chant thanks to Comrade Stalin for their happy childhood to libraries purged of "harmful literature," from atheistic playing-cards to ideologically sound performances by circus clowns. An early signal that the Party was becoming the arbiter of all intel-lectual life was the suicide of Vladimir Mayakovsky: he was tormented by having turned himself into a poetry factory; he had stepped "on the throat of my own song."54 (Even so he became a posthumous propagandist: as Pasternak wrote, "Mayakovsky began to be introduced forcibly, like pota-toes under Catherine the Great. This was his second death. He had no hand in it.") 55 Of more concern to the average Soviet citizen was the social-ist transformation of everyday life: the final elimination of small traders and private businessmen, the establishment of communal kitchens and lavatories, the direction of labour, the proliferation of informers (a marble monument was raised to Pavel Morozov, who supposedly denounced his father as a kulak), the purging of "wreckers" and the attempt to impose "iron discipline" 56 at every level. Stalin called for an increase in the power of the State to assist in its withering away. Like Peter the Great, he would bend Russia to his will even if he had to decimate the inhabitants as he had once presciently observed, "full conformity of views can be achieved only at a cemetery." Destroying the nation's best farmers, disrupting the agricultural system and extracting grain from a famished countryside to export in return for Western technology—all this had a fatal impact on the Soviet standard of living. By 1930 bread and other foodstuffs were rationed, as were staple goods such as soap. But even rations were hard to get: sugar, for example, had "ceased to exist as a commodity." The cooperative shops were gener-ally empty, though gathering dust on their shelves were items that no one wanted, among them French horns and hockey sticks. There were also "tantalisingly realistic and mouth-watering" wooden cheeses, dummy hams, enamelled cakes and other fake promises of future abundance. On the black market bread cost 45 roubles a kilo while the average collective farmer earned 3 roubles a day.6° Some Muscovite workers shortened the slogan "pobeda"(victory) to "obeda"(food), or even to "beda"(misfortune).6' In response to such scarcity the Communist urge to acquire private property was rampant. Rubbish was not thrown away but traded. Queue-ing was universal and people often joined lines without knowing what commodity they were waiting for. They began to gather outside butchers' shops in the capital at 2:00 A.M. But they were philosophical about it, jok-ing that in Russia freedom consisted of being able to join another queue. (It was possible to get a permit to buy railway tickets without queueing, but when a foreign journalist tried to use one he found himself joining a queue of other such permit holders.) Muscovites lived mainly on sour black bread; grey, cardboard-like macaroni; vegetables such as beetroot and cabbage; salted smoked Arctic fish which made their gums bleed and a sausage known as "Budenny's First Cavalry." All the restaurants were now under socialist control and their offerings were revolting. Works can-teens dispensed dishwater soup or (like the one at the Dnepostroi hydro-electric plant) a "bluish swill that stinks like a corpse and a cesspool." It was possible to acquire better food from semi-legal bazaars (often by barter) and from some government shops. These were known, because of their displays of rare luxury goods, as "Stalin museums." Buyers could obtain delicacies such as radishes ("Stalin lard") and rabbits ("Stalin cows")—in fact Stalin did support rabbit farms and an institute to pro-mote the "Rabbitization of Russia" was set up outside Moscow in 1932, followed shortly by the first trial of "rabbit-wreckers."64 Best stocked of all were the hard-currency Torgsin shops (opened in 1931) where some cus-tomers literally paid with the gold fillings from their teeth. Russian life was everywhere crumbling under the iron heel of Stalin's socialism. Moscow, an Asiatic sprawl of zigzag streets, squat wooden houses and multicoloured cupolas, seemed like a city at war. Gone were the garish signs of the bearded, long-mantled free traders who had loved to drink vodka and eat cucumbers in Slovanski Bazaar. Gone were fur-coated women on the pavements. Going were horse-cabs in the streets, along with their blue-robed peasant drivers. Instead, wrote Eugene Lyons, "Viscous ooze of swarming dung-coloured people, not ugly but incredibly soiled, patched, drab; the odour and colour of ingrained poverty, fetid bundles, stale clothes."65 Visitors were especially struck by the unmistak-able smell of Moscow. It was a compound of sheepskin, sawdust, vodka, black bread, drains, disinfectant, cheap perfume and unwashed humanity which stank (according to Henry Luce) of "rotten eggs in a damp cellar."66 With accommodation for one million people, Moscow housed over three million. The overcrowding was so oppressive that those who had permanent titles to apartments stayed put even if they were in danger of being arrested—a danger increased by jealous neighbours who sometimes denounced them in the hope of succeeding to their homes. Such was the medieval squalor of the capital that Frank Lloyd Wright proposed razing it to the ground and building a new garden city on its foundations. Le Cor-busier, who scoffed that Moscow's layout was based on donkey tracks, put forward an equally devastating plan. Utopian socialists, too, visualised the withering away of the metropolis. It should be assisted, according to archi-tect Konstantia Melnikov, by a "Laboratory of Sleep" which would nightly submerge citizens in sounds and smells scientifically chosen to induce a rural, collectivist mentality.
The campaign which Stalin launched six days after his fiftieth birthday, a campaign resisted so violently that only his inflated prestige enabled him to carry it through—and to survive. Having found that his plans to revolutionise industry were being jeopardised by a shortage of grain, Stalin determined to speed up his programme of forcing peasants (muzhiks) into collective farms and he announced a new policy of "liquidating the kulaks as a class." The kulaks (literally, grasping "fists"; metaphorically, rich peasants) were portrayed as a reactionary agricul-tural bourgeoisie intent on choking Communism with "the bony hand of famine." It is true that these more enterprising farmers had taken advan-tage of Lenin's New Economic Policy, introduced after his own attempt to squeeze grain out of the peasantry had led to widespread revolt and famine in 1921, to sell their surplus produce on the open market and acquire a few implements and animals. Moreover they preferred to hoard their grain or feed it to their livestock (meat and dairy products fetched higher prices than cereals) rather than dispose of it to the State. But these better-off peasants were anything but the greedy capitalists of Stalin's fantasies. As Zinoviev said, "We are fond of describing any peasant who has enough to eat as a kulak." Nevertheless Stalin decreed that the kulaks were class ene-mies. Their persecution would terrify the lesser peasants into joining collectives, which would in turn reap huge benefits from exploiting the kulaks' property. Thus socialism would come to the countryside and peas-ants would be transformed into proletarians. Huge agricultural factories would produce the food without which Russia must remain a backward nation; food itself became a State monopoly. In the Communist historical process the eradication of the kulaks was incidental to the elimination of private farming. Stalin quoted the Russian proverb: "When the head is cut off, one does not mourn for the hair. "33 So Stalin declared war on his own people—a class war to end class. In the first two months of 1930 perhaps a million kulaks, weakened by previ-ous victimisation, were stripped of their possessions and uprooted from their farmsteads. They were among the earliest of "over five million"34 souls deported during the next three years, most of whom perished. Brigades of workers conscripted from the towns, backed by contingents of the Red Army and the OGPU (which had replaced the Cheka), swept through the countryside "like raging beasts."35 They rounded up the best farmers and their families, banished them to the barren outskirts of their villages or drove them into the northern wastes. Often they shot the heads of households, cramming their dependents into "death trains"—a pro-longed process owing to a shortage of the blood-coloured cattle trucks known as "red cows." While they waited, women and children expired of cold, hunger and disease. Muscovites, at first shocked by glimpses of the terror being inflicted on the countryside, became inured to the sight of peasants being herded from one station to another at gunpoint. A witness wrote:
Trainloads of deported peasants left for the icy North, the forests, the steppes, the deserts. There were whole populations, denuded of every-thing; the old folk starved to death in mid-journey, new-born babies were buried on the banks of the roadside, and each wilderness had its crop of little crosses of boughs or white wood.36 The survivors of these ghastly odysseys were concentrated in primitive camps which they often had to scratch with their bare hands from taiga or tundra. They were then set to work at digging canals, lumbering and other projects, Stalin having recently been dazzled by the prospect of "construct-ing socialism through the use of prison labour."37 Whatever Stalin may have envisaged, the assault on the kulaks was less like a considered piece of social engineering than "a nation-wide pogrom." Often the urban cadres simply pillaged for private gain, eating the kulaks' food and drinking their vodka on the spot, donning their felt boots and clothes, right down to their woollen underwear. Moreover, the spoliation was marked by caprice and chaos since it was virtually impossible to decide which peasants were kulaks. Peasants of all sorts (including women) resisted, fighting back with anything from sporadic terror to full-scale revolt. There were major uprisings in Moldavia, the Ukraine, the Caucasus, Crimea, Azerbaijan, Soviet Central Asia and elsewhere. To quell them Stalin employed tanks and even military aircraft, unusual adjuncts to agrarian reform (though Lenin had also used poison gas). Some tried to bribe their persecutors. Some committed suicide. Some appealed for mercy, of all Communist commodities the one in shortest supply. Like the troops, some Party members were indeed horrified at the vicious acts which they were called upon to perform. One exclaimed, "We are no longer people, we are animals." Many were brutes, official gangsters who revelled in licensed thuggery. Others carried out the persecutions for fear of join-ing the victims. Others belonged to the semi-Christian "tradition of social levelling stretching back to the peasant commune." Still others were idealists of a different stamp, convinced that they were doing their "revolutionary duty."They had no time for what Trotsky had once called the "papist-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life."According to Marx's iron laws of history, they shed the blood of the kulaks to achieve the dictatorship of the proletariat. Without this sacrifice the Soviet Union could not modernise and socialism could not survive. As one apparatchik expressed it: "When you are attacking there is no place for mercy; don't think of the kulak's hungry children; in the class struggle philanthropy is evil." This view, incidentally, was often shared by Western fellow-travellers. Upton Sinclair and A. J. P. Taylor both argued that to preserve the Workers' State the kulaks "had to be destroyed.
Whether facing expropriation and exile or collectivisation and servi-tude, masses of peasants retaliated by smashing their implements and killing their animals—live beasts would have to be handed over to the col-lectives whereas meat and hides could be respectively consumed and concealed. A quarter of the nation's livestock perished- a loss not made up until the 1960's.
*
Now, thanks to Stalin, the pall had lifted and the reign of terror had ceased. It was a false dawn. Stalin was retreating the better to advance. The only Bolshevik leader whose parents had been serfs, he knew the peasants and regarded them as the scum of the earth. Not for him the romanticism of a Tolstoy, who saw the muzhik as a spontaneous child of nature. Rather, Stalin agreed with Maxim Gorky who wrote that "the fundamental obstacle on the path of Russia's progress towards Europeanisation and culture" was "the overwhelming predominance of the illiterate countryside over the town, the zoological individualism of the peasantry and its almost total lack of social feelings."47 Known as thorny narod, "the dark people," the peasants were indeed brutal and obscurantist. Scattered in 600,000 villages and other small settlements over the interminable steppe, they dwelt in fly-ridden, cockroach-infested hovels with thatched roofs and mud floors, sharing the space, as often as not, with their animals. Thrashing their lean oxen or their gaunt women, millions tilled the soil with wooden ploughs "at least as old as the Pharaohs."48 More like the coolies of Asia than the farmers of Europe, the muzhiks knew nothing but poverty. Indeed, they had kept hunger at bay only since the mid-1920s. Bundled into putrid layers of ragged homespun (though some factory-made garments were appearing), they huddled around their stoves during the long dark winters, gossiping and brawling just as Chekhov had described in his classic story "Peasants." They saw their children and animals die and their huts go up in flames—"the red cockerel" devoured 400,000 homes a year. They resisted outside authority and visited barbarous punishments of their own on wrongdoers within the community. They smoked home-cured tobacco rolled up in newspaper. Otherwise their anodynes were religion, sex and drink. Smoke-blackened icons filled their houses, portents of heavenly recompense for lives nasty, brutish and short. Promiscuity was almost universal and the "most daring familiarities" took place in public, while the "usual talk was a running fire of obscenities and the gestures were as bad as the language." Drunkenness was such a "normal phenomenon" that Party members themselves defended it as "necessary for the worker in view of the hard conditions of his life"; so they could scarcely blame the peasant for drowning his sorrows in vodka. Stalin, however, though not averse to binges of his own, was determined to subject the muzhik to socialist discipline, to change his character by continuing the revolutionary change in his circumstances. In the autumn of 1930 he resumed the policy of forcible collectivisation. Peasant anguish was fed by rumours that women would be socialised, that unproductive old people would be prematurely cremated and that children were to be sent to creches in China. Such fears did not seem extravagant, for the authorities were themselves offering peasants apocalyptic inducements to join the collectives: "They promised golden mountains . . . They said that women would be freed from doing the washing, from milking and clean-ing the animals, weeding the garden, etc. Electricity can do that, they said." Under the hammer and sickle all things would be made new In 1930, Year XIII of the Communist era, a new calendar was intro-duced. It began the year on 1 November and established a five-day week: Sundays were abolished and rest days rotated so that work could be con-tinuous. The anti-God crusade became more vicious and the church was portrayed as the "kulaks' agitprop [agitation and propaganda agency]."5' Priests were persecuted. Icons were burned and replaced with portraits of Stalin. The bells of basilicas were silenced, many being melted down for the metal. Monasteries were demolished or turned into prison camps. Abbeys and convents were smashed to pieces and factories rose on their ruins. Churches were destroyed, scores in Moscow itself. Chief among them was the gold-domed Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer, Russia's largest place of worship and (according to the League of Militant Atheists) "the ideological fortress of the accursed old world,"52 which was dyna-mited to make way for the Palace of Soviets on 5 December 1931. Stalin was unprepared for the explosion and asked tremulously, "Where's the bombardment?"53 The new Russian orthodoxy was instilled through everything from schools in which pupils learned to chant thanks to Comrade Stalin for their happy childhood to libraries purged of "harmful literature," from atheistic playing-cards to ideologically sound performances by circus clowns. An early signal that the Party was becoming the arbiter of all intel-lectual life was the suicide of Vladimir Mayakovsky: he was tormented by having turned himself into a poetry factory; he had stepped "on the throat of my own song."54 (Even so he became a posthumous propagandist: as Pasternak wrote, "Mayakovsky began to be introduced forcibly, like pota-toes under Catherine the Great. This was his second death. He had no hand in it.") 55 Of more concern to the average Soviet citizen was the social-ist transformation of everyday life: the final elimination of small traders and private businessmen, the establishment of communal kitchens and lavatories, the direction of labour, the proliferation of informers (a marble monument was raised to Pavel Morozov, who supposedly denounced his father as a kulak), the purging of "wreckers" and the attempt to impose "iron discipline" 56 at every level. Stalin called for an increase in the power of the State to assist in its withering away. Like Peter the Great, he would bend Russia to his will even if he had to decimate the inhabitants as he had once presciently observed, "full conformity of views can be achieved only at a cemetery." Destroying the nation's best farmers, disrupting the agricultural system and extracting grain from a famished countryside to export in return for Western technology—all this had a fatal impact on the Soviet standard of living. By 1930 bread and other foodstuffs were rationed, as were staple goods such as soap. But even rations were hard to get: sugar, for example, had "ceased to exist as a commodity." The cooperative shops were gener-ally empty, though gathering dust on their shelves were items that no one wanted, among them French horns and hockey sticks. There were also "tantalisingly realistic and mouth-watering" wooden cheeses, dummy hams, enamelled cakes and other fake promises of future abundance. On the black market bread cost 45 roubles a kilo while the average collective farmer earned 3 roubles a day.6° Some Muscovite workers shortened the slogan "pobeda"(victory) to "obeda"(food), or even to "beda"(misfortune).6' In response to such scarcity the Communist urge to acquire private property was rampant. Rubbish was not thrown away but traded. Queue-ing was universal and people often joined lines without knowing what commodity they were waiting for. They began to gather outside butchers' shops in the capital at 2:00 A.M. But they were philosophical about it, jok-ing that in Russia freedom consisted of being able to join another queue. (It was possible to get a permit to buy railway tickets without queueing, but when a foreign journalist tried to use one he found himself joining a queue of other such permit holders.) Muscovites lived mainly on sour black bread; grey, cardboard-like macaroni; vegetables such as beetroot and cabbage; salted smoked Arctic fish which made their gums bleed and a sausage known as "Budenny's First Cavalry." All the restaurants were now under socialist control and their offerings were revolting. Works can-teens dispensed dishwater soup or (like the one at the Dnepostroi hydro-electric plant) a "bluish swill that stinks like a corpse and a cesspool." It was possible to acquire better food from semi-legal bazaars (often by barter) and from some government shops. These were known, because of their displays of rare luxury goods, as "Stalin museums." Buyers could obtain delicacies such as radishes ("Stalin lard") and rabbits ("Stalin cows")—in fact Stalin did support rabbit farms and an institute to pro-mote the "Rabbitization of Russia" was set up outside Moscow in 1932, followed shortly by the first trial of "rabbit-wreckers."64 Best stocked of all were the hard-currency Torgsin shops (opened in 1931) where some cus-tomers literally paid with the gold fillings from their teeth. Russian life was everywhere crumbling under the iron heel of Stalin's socialism. Moscow, an Asiatic sprawl of zigzag streets, squat wooden houses and multicoloured cupolas, seemed like a city at war. Gone were the garish signs of the bearded, long-mantled free traders who had loved to drink vodka and eat cucumbers in Slovanski Bazaar. Gone were fur-coated women on the pavements. Going were horse-cabs in the streets, along with their blue-robed peasant drivers. Instead, wrote Eugene Lyons, "Viscous ooze of swarming dung-coloured people, not ugly but incredibly soiled, patched, drab; the odour and colour of ingrained poverty, fetid bundles, stale clothes."65 Visitors were especially struck by the unmistak-able smell of Moscow. It was a compound of sheepskin, sawdust, vodka, black bread, drains, disinfectant, cheap perfume and unwashed humanity which stank (according to Henry Luce) of "rotten eggs in a damp cellar."66 With accommodation for one million people, Moscow housed over three million. The overcrowding was so oppressive that those who had permanent titles to apartments stayed put even if they were in danger of being arrested—a danger increased by jealous neighbours who sometimes denounced them in the hope of succeeding to their homes. Such was the medieval squalor of the capital that Frank Lloyd Wright proposed razing it to the ground and building a new garden city on its foundations. Le Cor-busier, who scoffed that Moscow's layout was based on donkey tracks, put forward an equally devastating plan. Utopian socialists, too, visualised the withering away of the metropolis. It should be assisted, according to archi-tect Konstantia Melnikov, by a "Laboratory of Sleep" which would nightly submerge citizens in sounds and smells scientifically chosen to induce a rural, collectivist mentality.
Sunday, January 17, 2016
The end of Romanticism
From The Age of Wonder:
Thomas Carlyle in 1829 in the Edinburgh review "announced the demise of Romanticism and the relentless arrival of the "age of machinery".
and on the manufacture of the term scientist:
At one meeting, chaired by William Whewell, Coleridge was drawn into a passionate discussion of semantics. It revolved around the question of what exactly someone who works 'in the real sciences' (as he had phrased it) should be called. This is how Whewell reported the British Association debate in the Quarterly Review of 1834: Formerly the 'learned' embraced in their wide grasp all the branches of the tree of knowledge, mathematicians as well as philologers, physical as well as antiquarian speculators. But these days are past ... This difficulty was felt very oppressively by the members of the BAAS at Cambridge last summer. There was no general term by which these gentlemen could describe themselves with reference to their pursuits. `Philosophers' was felt to be too wide and lofty a term, and was very properly forbidden them by Mr. Coleridge, both in his capacity as philologer and metaphysician. `Savans' was rather assuming and besides too French; but some ingenious gentleman [in fact Whewell himself] pro-posed that, by analogy with 'artist, they might form 'scientist' — and added that there could be no scruple to this term since we already have such words as 'economist' and 'atheist' — but this was not generally palatable.
*
This argument over a single word — 'scientists' — gave a clue to the much larger debate that was steadily surfacing in Britain at this crucial period of transition 1830-34. Lurking beneath the semantics lay the whole question of whether the new generation of professional 'scientists' would promote safe religious belief or a dangerous secular materialism. Hitherto, either austere intellectual Deism, held for example by William Herschel, or else the rather more picturesque Natural Theology conve-niently accepted by Davy (at least in his public lectures) had disguised this problem, whatever the revelations of astronomy or geology, or the inspired ragings of Shelley. For many Romantic scientists, with a robust intellectual belief in the `argument by Design, there was no immediate contradiction between religion and science: rather the opposite. Science was a gift of God or Providence to mankind, and its purpose was to reveal the wonders of His design. This indeed was the essence of 'natural' religion, as promoted for example by William Paley in his Natural Theology (1802), with its famous analogy with the divine watchmaker. It was the faith that brought Mungo Park back alive from his first Niger expedition. It was the faith that inspired Michael Faraday to become a Deacon in the Sandemanian Church in July 1832. But public faith often differed from private beliefs. Whatever he said in his famous lectures, Davy's poetry and his posthumous writings, such as Consolations in Travel, suggested a kind of science mysticism that cer-tainly precluded a Christian God, and possibly even any kind of Creator at all. Others, like William Herschel, had been content to rely on an instinctive, perhaps deliberately unexamined, belief in a benign Creator somewhere distantly behind the great unfolding scheme of nature. Though in Herschel's case, his own observations had shown how extremely — appallingly — distant, both in time and space, that Creator must be. Moreover, his sister Caroline never once mentioned God any-where in her journals.41 As for Joseph Banks, his sister Sophia had had no high opinion of his natural piety.
450
YOUNG SCIENTISTS
I • "I
of _ _ _ Yet with the growing public knowledge or geology and astronomy, unumy, anti the recognition of 'deep space' and 'deep time', fewer and fewer men or women of education can have believed in a literal, Biblical six days of creation. However, science itself had yet to produce its own theory (or myth) of creation, and there was no alternative Newtonian Book of Genesis — as yet. That is why Darwin's On the Origin of Species appeared so devastating when it was finally published in 1859. It was not that it reduced the six days of Biblical creation to myth: this had already been largely done by Lyell and the geologists. What it demonstrated was that there was no need for a divine creation at all. There was no divine cre-ation of species, no miraculous invention of butterflies' wings or cats' eyes or birds' song. The process of evolution by 'natural selection' replaced any need for 'intelligent design' in nature. Darwin had indeed written a new Book of Genesis.4 Over the following five years, the well-meaning 8th Earl of Bridgewater would commission a whole series of booklets by the leading men of science, intended to show how British scientific research and discovery unfailingly underpinned Christian — and specifically Anglican —belief. They were to illustrate what might have been called an unproven hypothesis: 'The Goodness of God as Manifested in the Creation'. Reading one of these Bridgewater Treatises (1830-36) on geology, Mary Somerville mournfully observed, "Facts are such stubborn things!"
There was a premonition of the evolutionary idea in an anonymous 'evolutionary' book, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, which caused a sensation in 1844. But Darwin had worked by John Herschel's rules of pure induction: assembling a mass of precise data (e.g. the evolution of finches' beaks) until the simplest and most convincing hypothesis emerged. Consequently the great mainstay of so many scientists — Natural Theology and the Argument by Design — was worse than untrue: it was unnecessary. The spiritual upheavals this caused devout Victorian scientists were famously described by Edmund Gosse in Father and Son (1908). But it was the earlier, preliminary impact of geology, on ordinary thinking men and women, which was recorded by Tennyson in several sections (56 and 102) of In Memoriam (1833-50). The subject and inspiration of this poem was his Cambridge friend Arthur Hallam, who died in exactly this year of the third BAAS meeting.
`So careful of the type?' but no. From scarped cliff and quarried stone She cries, 'A thousand types are gone: I care for nothing, all shall go ... '
and another age dawns:
While these public battles raged, Michael Faraday quietly continued his experiments at the Royal Institution. He was now released from Davy's oppressive shadow, yet still clearly inspired by his memory. He worked immensely hard, giving his first Bakerian Lecture to the Royal Society in 1829, and also accepting a simultaneous post as Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich. He expanded his work on electro-magnetism, and began the construction of the first electrical generators, by producing an 'alternating' electrical current. This would lead to electrical dynamos that would ultimately revolutionise industry as much as James Watt's steam engine. His experiment with magnetic coils and a galvanome-ter (which was made to move without physical contact), carried out at the Institution's laboratory on 29 August 1831, was said to have ended 'the Age of Steam' at a stroke, and begun the new 'Age of Electricity'.
Thomas Carlyle in 1829 in the Edinburgh review "announced the demise of Romanticism and the relentless arrival of the "age of machinery".
and on the manufacture of the term scientist:
At one meeting, chaired by William Whewell, Coleridge was drawn into a passionate discussion of semantics. It revolved around the question of what exactly someone who works 'in the real sciences' (as he had phrased it) should be called. This is how Whewell reported the British Association debate in the Quarterly Review of 1834: Formerly the 'learned' embraced in their wide grasp all the branches of the tree of knowledge, mathematicians as well as philologers, physical as well as antiquarian speculators. But these days are past ... This difficulty was felt very oppressively by the members of the BAAS at Cambridge last summer. There was no general term by which these gentlemen could describe themselves with reference to their pursuits. `Philosophers' was felt to be too wide and lofty a term, and was very properly forbidden them by Mr. Coleridge, both in his capacity as philologer and metaphysician. `Savans' was rather assuming and besides too French; but some ingenious gentleman [in fact Whewell himself] pro-posed that, by analogy with 'artist, they might form 'scientist' — and added that there could be no scruple to this term since we already have such words as 'economist' and 'atheist' — but this was not generally palatable.
*
This argument over a single word — 'scientists' — gave a clue to the much larger debate that was steadily surfacing in Britain at this crucial period of transition 1830-34. Lurking beneath the semantics lay the whole question of whether the new generation of professional 'scientists' would promote safe religious belief or a dangerous secular materialism. Hitherto, either austere intellectual Deism, held for example by William Herschel, or else the rather more picturesque Natural Theology conve-niently accepted by Davy (at least in his public lectures) had disguised this problem, whatever the revelations of astronomy or geology, or the inspired ragings of Shelley. For many Romantic scientists, with a robust intellectual belief in the `argument by Design, there was no immediate contradiction between religion and science: rather the opposite. Science was a gift of God or Providence to mankind, and its purpose was to reveal the wonders of His design. This indeed was the essence of 'natural' religion, as promoted for example by William Paley in his Natural Theology (1802), with its famous analogy with the divine watchmaker. It was the faith that brought Mungo Park back alive from his first Niger expedition. It was the faith that inspired Michael Faraday to become a Deacon in the Sandemanian Church in July 1832. But public faith often differed from private beliefs. Whatever he said in his famous lectures, Davy's poetry and his posthumous writings, such as Consolations in Travel, suggested a kind of science mysticism that cer-tainly precluded a Christian God, and possibly even any kind of Creator at all. Others, like William Herschel, had been content to rely on an instinctive, perhaps deliberately unexamined, belief in a benign Creator somewhere distantly behind the great unfolding scheme of nature. Though in Herschel's case, his own observations had shown how extremely — appallingly — distant, both in time and space, that Creator must be. Moreover, his sister Caroline never once mentioned God any-where in her journals.41 As for Joseph Banks, his sister Sophia had had no high opinion of his natural piety.
450
YOUNG SCIENTISTS
I • "I
of _ _ _ Yet with the growing public knowledge or geology and astronomy, unumy, anti the recognition of 'deep space' and 'deep time', fewer and fewer men or women of education can have believed in a literal, Biblical six days of creation. However, science itself had yet to produce its own theory (or myth) of creation, and there was no alternative Newtonian Book of Genesis — as yet. That is why Darwin's On the Origin of Species appeared so devastating when it was finally published in 1859. It was not that it reduced the six days of Biblical creation to myth: this had already been largely done by Lyell and the geologists. What it demonstrated was that there was no need for a divine creation at all. There was no divine cre-ation of species, no miraculous invention of butterflies' wings or cats' eyes or birds' song. The process of evolution by 'natural selection' replaced any need for 'intelligent design' in nature. Darwin had indeed written a new Book of Genesis.4 Over the following five years, the well-meaning 8th Earl of Bridgewater would commission a whole series of booklets by the leading men of science, intended to show how British scientific research and discovery unfailingly underpinned Christian — and specifically Anglican —belief. They were to illustrate what might have been called an unproven hypothesis: 'The Goodness of God as Manifested in the Creation'. Reading one of these Bridgewater Treatises (1830-36) on geology, Mary Somerville mournfully observed, "Facts are such stubborn things!"
There was a premonition of the evolutionary idea in an anonymous 'evolutionary' book, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, which caused a sensation in 1844. But Darwin had worked by John Herschel's rules of pure induction: assembling a mass of precise data (e.g. the evolution of finches' beaks) until the simplest and most convincing hypothesis emerged. Consequently the great mainstay of so many scientists — Natural Theology and the Argument by Design — was worse than untrue: it was unnecessary. The spiritual upheavals this caused devout Victorian scientists were famously described by Edmund Gosse in Father and Son (1908). But it was the earlier, preliminary impact of geology, on ordinary thinking men and women, which was recorded by Tennyson in several sections (56 and 102) of In Memoriam (1833-50). The subject and inspiration of this poem was his Cambridge friend Arthur Hallam, who died in exactly this year of the third BAAS meeting.
`So careful of the type?' but no. From scarped cliff and quarried stone She cries, 'A thousand types are gone: I care for nothing, all shall go ... '
and another age dawns:
While these public battles raged, Michael Faraday quietly continued his experiments at the Royal Institution. He was now released from Davy's oppressive shadow, yet still clearly inspired by his memory. He worked immensely hard, giving his first Bakerian Lecture to the Royal Society in 1829, and also accepting a simultaneous post as Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich. He expanded his work on electro-magnetism, and began the construction of the first electrical generators, by producing an 'alternating' electrical current. This would lead to electrical dynamos that would ultimately revolutionise industry as much as James Watt's steam engine. His experiment with magnetic coils and a galvanome-ter (which was made to move without physical contact), carried out at the Institution's laboratory on 29 August 1831, was said to have ended 'the Age of Steam' at a stroke, and begun the new 'Age of Electricity'.
Saturday, January 16, 2016
Marriage what now?
It may have been a marginal incident but it was in many ways a central and symbolic moment in the history of the English Reformation and of Jacobean England. Reduced to essentials, the struggle at the heart of the European Reformation had been the conflicting claims of word and of ceremony, of the verbal and the visual, of a naked and direct relationship to God through scripture against a mediated, elaborated and socialised approach through an ancient church, guided by tradition. And that was precisely the conflict that was in play at Scrooby. Surplices, the cross, bishops, authority, kneeling and all the elaboration of a symbolic religion were rejected in favour of the word. It was the word that drove them into prison, near-shipwreck, exile, and later, for many of them, struggle and an early death in the New World. The sheer wordiness of the Separatists' religion was extra-ordinary. In each four-hour service, several passages would be read from the Geneva Bible and then long, analytical expla-nations given of what they meant. Before any psalms were sung (without accompaniment) they too would be explained. Prose expanded to fill the time. After the psalms and after the readings, members of the congregation would then give their own in-terpretation of what the texts meant. All this was done standing up, after the practice of the primitive church. Very occasionally, a simplified form of communion and of adult baptism for new members of the church would be enacted but no Separatist was ever married in church, because there is no hint of a marriage ceremony in scripture and the primitive church had not con-sidered marriage a sacrament before AD 537.
The words of scripture, and an intellectual consideration of them, were the essence of Separatist Christianity and in many ways of Protestant Christianity itself. Some Separatist pastors took this one step further: if the Bible was the word of God, it was intended to be conveyed to men in its original languages. Every translation, however good, was bound to contain errors and so by definition could not be used. If God had spoken in Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic, then those were the languages in which he should be heard. John Smyth, originally from Gains-borough, but by 16o8 pastor of the Brethren of the Separation of the Second English Church at Amsterdam, its congregation made up of Lincolnshire farmers, decided that they needed to hear the scriptures in the original. One can only imagine the effect on the poor exiles from Gainsborough: hour on hour of Smyth reading out passages of Hebrew and Greek of which they had not the faintest understanding, desperately looking for the sanctity in this. Smyth was an eccentric — after realising that no other ecclesi-astical authority could be as pure as himself, he dunked himself in holy water and became famous as the Se-Baptizer or Self-Baptist — but his position is only a distortion and exaggeration of what everyone in Protestant Europe believed. John Reynolds, the moderate Oxford Puritan, had encouraged his students to read 'the Worde of God, and that, if it may be, ovt of the uerie well-spring, not out of the brookes of translacyons'. But even in translation, the word ruled. In early seventeenth-century Eng-land, endlessly and repetitively, the word of God was preached in the 8,000 or so pulpits across England. It was the ocean in which everyone swam. Attendance at sermons was compulsory. Many people would hear two or three on a Sunday in which every last echo of meaning would be squeezed from the words of the Bible.
The words of scripture, and an intellectual consideration of them, were the essence of Separatist Christianity and in many ways of Protestant Christianity itself. Some Separatist pastors took this one step further: if the Bible was the word of God, it was intended to be conveyed to men in its original languages. Every translation, however good, was bound to contain errors and so by definition could not be used. If God had spoken in Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic, then those were the languages in which he should be heard. John Smyth, originally from Gains-borough, but by 16o8 pastor of the Brethren of the Separation of the Second English Church at Amsterdam, its congregation made up of Lincolnshire farmers, decided that they needed to hear the scriptures in the original. One can only imagine the effect on the poor exiles from Gainsborough: hour on hour of Smyth reading out passages of Hebrew and Greek of which they had not the faintest understanding, desperately looking for the sanctity in this. Smyth was an eccentric — after realising that no other ecclesi-astical authority could be as pure as himself, he dunked himself in holy water and became famous as the Se-Baptizer or Self-Baptist — but his position is only a distortion and exaggeration of what everyone in Protestant Europe believed. John Reynolds, the moderate Oxford Puritan, had encouraged his students to read 'the Worde of God, and that, if it may be, ovt of the uerie well-spring, not out of the brookes of translacyons'. But even in translation, the word ruled. In early seventeenth-century Eng-land, endlessly and repetitively, the word of God was preached in the 8,000 or so pulpits across England. It was the ocean in which everyone swam. Attendance at sermons was compulsory. Many people would hear two or three on a Sunday in which every last echo of meaning would be squeezed from the words of the Bible.
Friday, January 15, 2016
Brunelleschi's Dome
But Filippo, in Manetti's account, refused to work with Lorenzo, demanding that he alone be given charge of the work. This too sounds plausible considering that Filippo's arrogant self-confidence, irascibility, and stubborn unwillingness to work with others is a theme that repeats itself throughout his life. According to Manetti, Filippo withdrew from the competition when his demand for complete control was refused, leaving the project in the hands of his rival. From that moment, he renounced sculpture—he would never again work in bronze—and quit Florence for Rome. Here he lived intermittently for the next fifteen years, making clocks and set-ting gems to support himself while he studied the crumbling ruins of ancient Rome. Lorenzo meanwhile was to spend the next twenty-two years at work on the bronze doors, which ultimately weighed ten tons and are acknowledged to be among the great masterpieces of Florentine art. And what of Giangaleazzo Visconti? As the Milanese armies besieged Florence in the summer of 1402, a holy hermit in the Tuscan countryside prophesied that the tyrant would die before the year was out. As it transpired, the prophecy was fulfilled with several months to spare. In the middle of August, in the sweltering Tuscan heat, just when Florence seemed within his grasp, Giangaleazzo fell ill with a fever, lingered for several weeks, then expired at the beginning of September, aged fifty-two. Shortly thereafter the siege was lifted. The Milanese troops disbanded, and the blockade was at an end. Florence had been spared, and the greatest century in the history of the Republic—what Voltaire calls one of the greatest eras in the history of the world—was ready to commence.
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Now in middle age, Filippo was short, bald, and pugnacious looking, with an aquiline nose, thin lips, and a weak chin. His appearance was not helped by his dirty and disheveled clothing. Yet in Florence such an unsightly display was almost a badge of genius, and Filippo was simply the latest in a long and illustrious line of ugly or unkempt artists. The name of the painter Cimabue means "ox head," and Giotto was so unattractive that Giovanni Boccaccio devoted a tale to his appearance in the Decameron, marveling at how "Nature has frequently planted astonishing genius in men of monstrously ugly appearance." Later, Michelangelo would become legendary for his ugliness, which was partly the result of a broken nose earned in a fracas with the sculptor Pietro Torrigiani. And like both Giotto and Filippo, Michelangelo was indifferent to the state of his dress, often going for months on end without changing his dogskin breeches. In the end, ugly and eccentric artists would become so much the norm that Filippo's biographer, the painter and architect Giorgio Vasari—himself an uncouth man, with a skin disease and dirty, uncut fingernails—marveled that an artist as talented as Raphael should actually have been physically handsome. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Filippo was unmarried. But although in Florence bachelorhood was not unusual for a man in his forties, since men married late and generally took much younger women as their brides, Filippo would never marry, and in this abstention from family life he also became part of a long and glorious tradition of artists that included Donatello, Masaccio, Leonardo da Vinci, and Michelangelo. Many Florentine artists and thinkers took a dim view of both marriage and women. Boccaccio, who never married, criticized Dante for having done so, claiming that a wife was a hindrance to study.
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Perspective is the method of representing three-dimensional objects in recession on a two-dimensional surface in order to give the same impression of relative position, size, or distance as the actual objects do when viewed from a particular point. Filippo is generally regarded as its inventor, the one who discovered (or rediscovered) its mathematical laws. For example, he worked out the principle of the vanishing point, which was known to the Greeks and Romans but, like so much other knowledge, had long since been lost. Greek vase paintings and marble reliefs show an understanding of perspective, as do some of the scene paintings for Greek tragedies staged in Athens, including those of Aeschylus. The Roman scientist Pliny the Elder claimed that this method of representation (which he calls imagines obliquae, "slanting images") had been invented by a painter of the sixth century B. c. named Kimon of Kleonai. The Romans made use of perspective in their wall paintings, and some of its principles were described by the architect Vitruvius. Furthermore, it seems inconceivable that buildings such as the Pantheon or the Colosseum could have been built without their architects executing perspective drawings of some sort. After the decline of the Roman Empire, however, the technique of perspective drawing was lost or abandoned. Plato had condemned perspective as a deceit, and the Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus (A.D. 205-27o) praised the flattened art of the ancient Egyptians for showing figures in their "true" proportions. This prejudice against the "dishonesty" of perspective was adopted in Christian art, with the result that naturalistic space was renounced throughout the Middle Ages. Only in the first decades of the fourteenth century did the ancient methods of perspective reappear when Giotto began using chiaroscuro—a treatment of light and shade—to create realistic three-dimensional effects. Filippo might have seen examples of ancient perspective painting during his travels through Italy. But he probably worked out the principles of perspective from quite different sources. The procedures for executing his own painting—plotting lines of sight on a plane surface—he could have learned from the surveying techniques he employed while measuring the ruins of Rome.' Perspective drawing is, after all, similar to surveying in that both involve determining the relative positions of three-dimensional objects for the purpose of protracting them on paper or canvas. The practice of measuring and surveying was highly developed by Filippo's time: his great leap appears to have been an application of its principles and techniques to the art of painting. Filippo's experiment consisted of an almost magical optical trick, a trompe 1'061 painting that, in its clever confusion of life and art, prefigured much later experiments with optical devices such as cameras obscura, panoramas, dioramas, and catoptric art. This painting—one of the most famous in the history of art—has long since been lost to the world. Last known to have been in the possession of Lorenzo the Magnificent, it vanished after the occupation of Florence by Charles VIII of France in 1494, when many works of Florentine art were looted. It was clearly described, however, by Antonio Manetti, who claimed to have held it in his hands and attempted the experiment himself. For the subject of his perspective painting Filippo chose one of Florence's most familiar sights: the Baptistery of San Giovanni. Positioning himself a short distance inside the middle portal of Santa Maria del Fiore, some 115 feet from the Baptistery, he painted onto a small panel, in perfect perspective, using a geometrically constructed picture plane, everything that was visible through the "frame" of the cathedral's doorway: the Baptistery and its surrounding streets, including the wafer makers in the Casa della Misericordia and the cornier of the sheep market. In place of a painted sky he substituted a piece of burnished silver, a mirror that would reflect the clouds, birds, and changing sunlight of the actual sky. Finally, he drilled a small hole the size of a lentil bean into the vanishing point of the painting, or that central point on the horizon where the receding parallel lines appear to converge.
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Altogether as many as 300 men worked on the dome, including those in the quarries.' Their week was a long one, running from Monday to Saturday, often from dawn to dusk, which in the summer could mean a fourteen-hour day. Payment came every Saturday, when the foreman, Battista d'Antonio, issued the men chits, or scritte, which were redeemed from the pay clerk of the Opera. If fortunate, they might be dismissed an hour or two early, giving them time to buy their food in the stalls of the nearby Mercato Vecchio, which, like everything else, was closed on Sundays. All work was forbidden on the Sabbath and during religious feasts, though an exception was made for the men whose job it was to water the masonry on feast days in order to keep it moist and therefore workable. The spreading of manure over the walls—a common method used in the Middle Ages for keeping the masonry moist and protecting it from the elements—does not appear to have been employed at the cathedral. One reason for this might have been that, for reasons of hygiene, it was illegal to import manure into the city. Religious feasts offered the masons what must have been a welcome relief from their work. On these days they would march in procession through streets swept clear of prostitutes and moneylenders or else make pilgrimages in search of the indulgences sold in stalls along the Via San Gallo. Their most important festival was the eighth of November, the feast of their patron saints, the Quattro Coronati: four Christian sculptors martyred by the emperor Diocletian for refusing to carve a statue of the pagan god Aesculapius. On this day the men would hear a mass together, then take food and drink—the latter sometimes to excess, for the guild's statutes state that some of the men conducted themselves on this solemn occasion come se fussino alla taverna,"as if they were in a tavern." Taking the Sabbath and these religious feasts into account, a full-time laborer could expect approximately 270 days of work on the dome each year, though in fact because of the weather he would probably work a good deal less, perhaps as few as 200. When it was too cold, wet, or windy for anyone to work on the summit, the names of all the masons would be put into a leather pouch, and Battista d'Antonio would draw those of five men, who were set to work in the shelter, plastering or bricklaying, while the rest of the workers were sent home without pay. Longer layoffs were also a possibility. These were the uncertain conditions, then, in which the masons would set off for the cathedral each working day. Church bells rang in every district of the city to rouse them from their beds and summon them to their labors. They carried their own tools, which the Opera expected them to supply themselves: chisels, T squares, hammers, trowels, and mallets, all of which could be repaired or sharpened by a blacksmith who operated a forge on the site. Upon arriving at the cathedral, the men had their names inscribed on a gesso board, rather like punching a clock in a factory, while the working hours were recorded by a sand hourglass. Filippo appears to have been a strict master. Later he would institute an even more precise form of discipline on the building site of Santo Spirito, where an oriuolo di mezz'oro, a half-hour clock, regulated the working day by chiming every thirty minutes. The conception of time was changing in the fifteenth century. Throughout the Middle Ages it had been associated with the liturgical hours. The Latin word hora, "hour," was in fact synonymous with prayer. Each of these hours had been divided into four parts of ten minutes' duration, while each minute was divided into forty "moments" By 1400, however, it had become the custom to divide the hour into sixty minutes, and each minute into sixty seconds. The pace of life was increasing.' Besides their tools, the men also carried their food with them in leather pouches. The noon meal, the comesto, was taken at eleven o'clock, when the church bells sounded a second time. We know that the comesto was normally eaten aloft because in 1426, in order to foil idlers, the Opera decreed that no mason could descend from the dome during the day. This must have meant that even on the hottest summer days the workers did not enjoy their dolce far niente, "sweet idleness," the afternoon siesta when all labors would usually cease because of the scorching temperatures.
+
To function effectively, the circumferential stones, which met at 45-degree angles, needed to be linked tightly at their ends. This was achieved by iron clamps that coupled them together. Filippo traveled to Pistoia to oversee the casting of these clamps, which were so specialized that the ironmongers, like the stonemasons, could barely understand what was required of them. Once forged, these clamps were glazed with lead to prevent the iron from rusting and therefore causing the surrounding masonry to crack. Many thousands of pounds of lead were used for rustproofing both these clamps and the iron bars installed elsewhere in the cathedral. Plumbers (whose name comes from the Latin plumbum, "lead") were employed at most cathedrals in the Middle Ages to rustproof iron or make lead tiles for the steeples. Such a recourse, naturally, meant one more danger for the workers at Santa Maria del Fiore, for it had been known at least since the time of the Romans, when the architect Faventinus observed the "deformity" and "dreadful anaemic pallor" of plumbers, that lead was a poisonous metal.'
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A familiar scapegoat was used to explain the Florentines' ineptness in battle: homo-sexuality. For years clergymen such as the Franciscan firebrand Bernardino of Siena had been raging from the pulpit that the crime of sodomy was destroying the city. So famous was Florence for homosexual activity that during the fourteenth century the German slang for "sodomite" was Florenzer. In 1432 the government took steps to curtail this perceived root of its troubles on the battlefield by establishing an agency to identify and prosecute homosexuals, the Ufficiali di Notte, "Office of the Night" (a name made even more colorful by the fact that notte was slang for "bugger"). This vice squad worked in tandem with the Orwellian-sounding Ufficiali dell'Onesta, "Office of Decency," which was charged with licensing and administering the municipal brothels that had been created in the area around the Mercato Vecchio.* The specific aim of these public brothels was to wean Florentine men from the "greater evil" of sodomy. Prostitutes became a common sight in Florence, not least because the law required them to wear distinctive garb: gloves, high-heeled shoes, and a bell on the head. Despite these measures the Florentines fared little better on the battlefield. The duke of Milan persuaded Genoa, Siena, and Piombino to enter into a league against the battered Republic. Seeing the writing on the wall, the Florentines sued for peace, and a truce was finally signed in 1433, though hostilities with Milan would not really end until the duke's death over a decade later.
* A less official method of detecting homosexuals was for mothers to rattle their sons' coin bags: if the coins exclaimed, "fire, fire, fire," the money was said to be the gift of a sodomite.
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The words genius and ingenious are etymologically related to words that describe the building of machines. In medieval Latin the word for machine was ingenium and an ingeniator was someone who built them, generally for military purposes.
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Now in middle age, Filippo was short, bald, and pugnacious looking, with an aquiline nose, thin lips, and a weak chin. His appearance was not helped by his dirty and disheveled clothing. Yet in Florence such an unsightly display was almost a badge of genius, and Filippo was simply the latest in a long and illustrious line of ugly or unkempt artists. The name of the painter Cimabue means "ox head," and Giotto was so unattractive that Giovanni Boccaccio devoted a tale to his appearance in the Decameron, marveling at how "Nature has frequently planted astonishing genius in men of monstrously ugly appearance." Later, Michelangelo would become legendary for his ugliness, which was partly the result of a broken nose earned in a fracas with the sculptor Pietro Torrigiani. And like both Giotto and Filippo, Michelangelo was indifferent to the state of his dress, often going for months on end without changing his dogskin breeches. In the end, ugly and eccentric artists would become so much the norm that Filippo's biographer, the painter and architect Giorgio Vasari—himself an uncouth man, with a skin disease and dirty, uncut fingernails—marveled that an artist as talented as Raphael should actually have been physically handsome. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Filippo was unmarried. But although in Florence bachelorhood was not unusual for a man in his forties, since men married late and generally took much younger women as their brides, Filippo would never marry, and in this abstention from family life he also became part of a long and glorious tradition of artists that included Donatello, Masaccio, Leonardo da Vinci, and Michelangelo. Many Florentine artists and thinkers took a dim view of both marriage and women. Boccaccio, who never married, criticized Dante for having done so, claiming that a wife was a hindrance to study.
+
Perspective is the method of representing three-dimensional objects in recession on a two-dimensional surface in order to give the same impression of relative position, size, or distance as the actual objects do when viewed from a particular point. Filippo is generally regarded as its inventor, the one who discovered (or rediscovered) its mathematical laws. For example, he worked out the principle of the vanishing point, which was known to the Greeks and Romans but, like so much other knowledge, had long since been lost. Greek vase paintings and marble reliefs show an understanding of perspective, as do some of the scene paintings for Greek tragedies staged in Athens, including those of Aeschylus. The Roman scientist Pliny the Elder claimed that this method of representation (which he calls imagines obliquae, "slanting images") had been invented by a painter of the sixth century B. c. named Kimon of Kleonai. The Romans made use of perspective in their wall paintings, and some of its principles were described by the architect Vitruvius. Furthermore, it seems inconceivable that buildings such as the Pantheon or the Colosseum could have been built without their architects executing perspective drawings of some sort. After the decline of the Roman Empire, however, the technique of perspective drawing was lost or abandoned. Plato had condemned perspective as a deceit, and the Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus (A.D. 205-27o) praised the flattened art of the ancient Egyptians for showing figures in their "true" proportions. This prejudice against the "dishonesty" of perspective was adopted in Christian art, with the result that naturalistic space was renounced throughout the Middle Ages. Only in the first decades of the fourteenth century did the ancient methods of perspective reappear when Giotto began using chiaroscuro—a treatment of light and shade—to create realistic three-dimensional effects. Filippo might have seen examples of ancient perspective painting during his travels through Italy. But he probably worked out the principles of perspective from quite different sources. The procedures for executing his own painting—plotting lines of sight on a plane surface—he could have learned from the surveying techniques he employed while measuring the ruins of Rome.' Perspective drawing is, after all, similar to surveying in that both involve determining the relative positions of three-dimensional objects for the purpose of protracting them on paper or canvas. The practice of measuring and surveying was highly developed by Filippo's time: his great leap appears to have been an application of its principles and techniques to the art of painting. Filippo's experiment consisted of an almost magical optical trick, a trompe 1'061 painting that, in its clever confusion of life and art, prefigured much later experiments with optical devices such as cameras obscura, panoramas, dioramas, and catoptric art. This painting—one of the most famous in the history of art—has long since been lost to the world. Last known to have been in the possession of Lorenzo the Magnificent, it vanished after the occupation of Florence by Charles VIII of France in 1494, when many works of Florentine art were looted. It was clearly described, however, by Antonio Manetti, who claimed to have held it in his hands and attempted the experiment himself. For the subject of his perspective painting Filippo chose one of Florence's most familiar sights: the Baptistery of San Giovanni. Positioning himself a short distance inside the middle portal of Santa Maria del Fiore, some 115 feet from the Baptistery, he painted onto a small panel, in perfect perspective, using a geometrically constructed picture plane, everything that was visible through the "frame" of the cathedral's doorway: the Baptistery and its surrounding streets, including the wafer makers in the Casa della Misericordia and the cornier of the sheep market. In place of a painted sky he substituted a piece of burnished silver, a mirror that would reflect the clouds, birds, and changing sunlight of the actual sky. Finally, he drilled a small hole the size of a lentil bean into the vanishing point of the painting, or that central point on the horizon where the receding parallel lines appear to converge.
+
Altogether as many as 300 men worked on the dome, including those in the quarries.' Their week was a long one, running from Monday to Saturday, often from dawn to dusk, which in the summer could mean a fourteen-hour day. Payment came every Saturday, when the foreman, Battista d'Antonio, issued the men chits, or scritte, which were redeemed from the pay clerk of the Opera. If fortunate, they might be dismissed an hour or two early, giving them time to buy their food in the stalls of the nearby Mercato Vecchio, which, like everything else, was closed on Sundays. All work was forbidden on the Sabbath and during religious feasts, though an exception was made for the men whose job it was to water the masonry on feast days in order to keep it moist and therefore workable. The spreading of manure over the walls—a common method used in the Middle Ages for keeping the masonry moist and protecting it from the elements—does not appear to have been employed at the cathedral. One reason for this might have been that, for reasons of hygiene, it was illegal to import manure into the city. Religious feasts offered the masons what must have been a welcome relief from their work. On these days they would march in procession through streets swept clear of prostitutes and moneylenders or else make pilgrimages in search of the indulgences sold in stalls along the Via San Gallo. Their most important festival was the eighth of November, the feast of their patron saints, the Quattro Coronati: four Christian sculptors martyred by the emperor Diocletian for refusing to carve a statue of the pagan god Aesculapius. On this day the men would hear a mass together, then take food and drink—the latter sometimes to excess, for the guild's statutes state that some of the men conducted themselves on this solemn occasion come se fussino alla taverna,"as if they were in a tavern." Taking the Sabbath and these religious feasts into account, a full-time laborer could expect approximately 270 days of work on the dome each year, though in fact because of the weather he would probably work a good deal less, perhaps as few as 200. When it was too cold, wet, or windy for anyone to work on the summit, the names of all the masons would be put into a leather pouch, and Battista d'Antonio would draw those of five men, who were set to work in the shelter, plastering or bricklaying, while the rest of the workers were sent home without pay. Longer layoffs were also a possibility. These were the uncertain conditions, then, in which the masons would set off for the cathedral each working day. Church bells rang in every district of the city to rouse them from their beds and summon them to their labors. They carried their own tools, which the Opera expected them to supply themselves: chisels, T squares, hammers, trowels, and mallets, all of which could be repaired or sharpened by a blacksmith who operated a forge on the site. Upon arriving at the cathedral, the men had their names inscribed on a gesso board, rather like punching a clock in a factory, while the working hours were recorded by a sand hourglass. Filippo appears to have been a strict master. Later he would institute an even more precise form of discipline on the building site of Santo Spirito, where an oriuolo di mezz'oro, a half-hour clock, regulated the working day by chiming every thirty minutes. The conception of time was changing in the fifteenth century. Throughout the Middle Ages it had been associated with the liturgical hours. The Latin word hora, "hour," was in fact synonymous with prayer. Each of these hours had been divided into four parts of ten minutes' duration, while each minute was divided into forty "moments" By 1400, however, it had become the custom to divide the hour into sixty minutes, and each minute into sixty seconds. The pace of life was increasing.' Besides their tools, the men also carried their food with them in leather pouches. The noon meal, the comesto, was taken at eleven o'clock, when the church bells sounded a second time. We know that the comesto was normally eaten aloft because in 1426, in order to foil idlers, the Opera decreed that no mason could descend from the dome during the day. This must have meant that even on the hottest summer days the workers did not enjoy their dolce far niente, "sweet idleness," the afternoon siesta when all labors would usually cease because of the scorching temperatures.
+
To function effectively, the circumferential stones, which met at 45-degree angles, needed to be linked tightly at their ends. This was achieved by iron clamps that coupled them together. Filippo traveled to Pistoia to oversee the casting of these clamps, which were so specialized that the ironmongers, like the stonemasons, could barely understand what was required of them. Once forged, these clamps were glazed with lead to prevent the iron from rusting and therefore causing the surrounding masonry to crack. Many thousands of pounds of lead were used for rustproofing both these clamps and the iron bars installed elsewhere in the cathedral. Plumbers (whose name comes from the Latin plumbum, "lead") were employed at most cathedrals in the Middle Ages to rustproof iron or make lead tiles for the steeples. Such a recourse, naturally, meant one more danger for the workers at Santa Maria del Fiore, for it had been known at least since the time of the Romans, when the architect Faventinus observed the "deformity" and "dreadful anaemic pallor" of plumbers, that lead was a poisonous metal.'
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A familiar scapegoat was used to explain the Florentines' ineptness in battle: homo-sexuality. For years clergymen such as the Franciscan firebrand Bernardino of Siena had been raging from the pulpit that the crime of sodomy was destroying the city. So famous was Florence for homosexual activity that during the fourteenth century the German slang for "sodomite" was Florenzer. In 1432 the government took steps to curtail this perceived root of its troubles on the battlefield by establishing an agency to identify and prosecute homosexuals, the Ufficiali di Notte, "Office of the Night" (a name made even more colorful by the fact that notte was slang for "bugger"). This vice squad worked in tandem with the Orwellian-sounding Ufficiali dell'Onesta, "Office of Decency," which was charged with licensing and administering the municipal brothels that had been created in the area around the Mercato Vecchio.* The specific aim of these public brothels was to wean Florentine men from the "greater evil" of sodomy. Prostitutes became a common sight in Florence, not least because the law required them to wear distinctive garb: gloves, high-heeled shoes, and a bell on the head. Despite these measures the Florentines fared little better on the battlefield. The duke of Milan persuaded Genoa, Siena, and Piombino to enter into a league against the battered Republic. Seeing the writing on the wall, the Florentines sued for peace, and a truce was finally signed in 1433, though hostilities with Milan would not really end until the duke's death over a decade later.
* A less official method of detecting homosexuals was for mothers to rattle their sons' coin bags: if the coins exclaimed, "fire, fire, fire," the money was said to be the gift of a sodomite.
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The words genius and ingenious are etymologically related to words that describe the building of machines. In medieval Latin the word for machine was ingenium and an ingeniator was someone who built them, generally for military purposes.
Wednesday, January 13, 2016
FMFord meets Joyce meets Proust
I was engaged in avoiding Mr. Quinn whom I disliked because he had pretended to mistake me for George Moore. I was also engaged in trying not to be near Mr. Joyce. For Mr. Joyce's work I had the greatest admiration and for his person the greatest esteem. I also liked his private society very much. He made then little jokes, told rather simple stories and talked about his work very enlighteningly. But to be anywhere near Mr. Joyce at any sort of reception or public event was embarrassing. I should be at once seized on by the hostess, two stiff chairs would be placed side by side and, surrounded by a ring of Mr. Joyce's faithful, we should be expected to talk. To Mr. Joyce this was by no means embarrassing. He was used to it. But to me, as a young man from the country it was very trying. Mr. Joyce would maintain an easy but absolute silence, the faithful hanging on his lips. I would try to find topics of conversation to which the author of "Ulysses" would reply with a sharp "yes" or a "no." . . . At last I found a formula. I used to beseech Mr. Joyce to drink red, not white, wine. I was really very much in earnest and not quite with-out official warrant. I have always held a brief against white wine. Its whiteness is caused by the absence of
tartaric acid that renders red wine assimilable. I never drink white wine except when politeness demands it and then, if I take only a small glass, I find myself troubled with depression of a gouty nature. And it happened that, on Joyce's own recommendation I had gone to a great oculist in Nice. The oculist had operated on Joyce. He told me that there was nothing the matter with my eyes, recommended me when I smoked cigarettes to do so at the end of the longest cigarette holder possible. The smoke if it gets into your eyes will damage them—like any other smoke. Otherwise smoking does no harm at all. He added: "And never drink white wine. It is ruinous to the eyesight. . . ." And then: "If Mr. Joyce had never drunk white wine his eyes would not be as bad as they are. I beg you, if you have any influence at all with Mr. Joyce, to beseech him never to drink white wine. Let him drink three, five, seven, ten times as much red wine. It will not harm him. But white is poison." I fancy that oculist was guilty of professional indiscretion. But his concern for his patient was so genuine that it may well be pardoned to him. I could not, even for his sake, warn Mr. Joyce against drinking white wine on every occasion that I met him. But I thought the topic would be an admirable one for public ceremonials. I was a little guileful too. I imagined that if some 'I of the faithful heard me they might repeat my plea and, being nearer as it were to the throne, might be listened to. I had of course misestimated the nature of Faith. . . . The faithful would rather see their divinity die than that he should be ministered to by a stranger from without the gates. That was seen when Pope Leo, being very sick, called in secret a Saracen leech who came under safeguard to Rome from Tarascon. The Cardinals poisoned the Pope. So when on the boulevards I would meet one or other of them and told them that Joyce was dining with me at 7.30 in order to taste my Chateau Mouton Rothschild 1885 they would cry with one accord: "Mr. Joyce never dines with anybody. He never dines before 9.3o. He never drinks anything but white wine. .. ." On the occasion of the Pound's reception—it was in honour of Mr. Quinn—the Faithful were not present and I found myself at last beside Mr. Joyce. I took the occasion to tell him that I would like to print in my Review some pages of the book he was writing. I was going to devote a section of my magazine to Work in Progress of persons like himself and Picasso so as to make it a real chronicle of the world's artistic activities. He said it was a pity that I had not been in time to ask that of Proust. He had been told that a single sentence of Proust would fill a whole magazine. Not that he had read any Proust to speak of. His eyes would not let him read any work of other people. He could just see to correct his own proofs. I said that I myself had read no Proust. I may add that I have since. A French critic having said that I was one of Proust's closest imitators I was in a position to say—though of course I did not say it! —that I had never
read a word of Proust. And having then worked myself in my mind into the strategic strongpoint that I desired to occupy I at once bought a copy of "A Cote de Chez Swann." I read it and "A la Recherche du Temps Perdu," in one weekend at Guermantes and I found in Proust's work all the supernatural hypnosis that his most devoted followers obtain from it. But I do not think I have imitated him since. . . . When he heard me say that I had read no Proust he confirmed for me a story of his meeting Proust that I had heard from the lips of the lady in whose house it had happened. Let her be called, in honour of another novelist, Mrs. Leo Hunter. .. . The lady had asked Joyce to a reception to meet Proust. Joyce, knowing nothing of Proust's habits and no hour having been named, attended at about eleven. Proust in those days rose at four in the morning. But in honour of Mr. Joyce he had got up that night at two and arrived about two-thirty. Mr. Joyce was then tired. Two stiff chairs were obtained and placed, facing the one the other, in the aperture of a folding doorway between two rooms. The faithful of Mr. Joyce disposed themselves in a half circle in one room; those of M. Proust completed the circle in the other. Mr. Joyce and M. Proust sat upright, facing each other and ver-tically parallel. They were incited to converse. They did. Said M. Proust: "Comore j'ai dit, Monsieur, dans 'A Cote de Chez Swann' que sans doute vous avez lu. . . ." Mr. Joyce gave a tiny vertical jump on his chair seat and said: "Non, monsieur. . . ." Then Mr. Joyce took up the conversation. He said: "As Mr. Blum says in my 'Ulysses,' which, Mon-sieur, you have doubtless read. . . ." M. Proust gave a slightly higher vertical jump on his chair seat. He said: "Mais, non, monsieur." Service fell again to M. Proust. He apologised for the lateness of his arrival. He said it was due to a malady of the liver. He detailed clearly and with minuteness the symptoms of his illness. ". . . Tiens, monsieur," Joyce interrupted. "I have almost exactly the same symptoms. Only in my case the analysis. . . ." So till eight next morning, in perfect amity and enthusiasm, surrounded by the awed faithful they discussed their maladies.
Tuesday, January 12, 2016
Monica Dickens
recounts the marriage of her parents. She was the great-granddaughter of Charles Dickens and was born in 1915.
"The streets (in Notting Hill) used to be a center for all kinds of strange occult sects with weird signs on the doors. My parents were told that they could not marry until they could afford two servants. So they were engaged for four years but it never occurred to them to get married before that. After the wedding they were driving away from the church and my mother turned to my father and said, "NOW will you tell me what Oscar Wilde did?" as he had promised her that he would let her know only after they were married.
"The streets (in Notting Hill) used to be a center for all kinds of strange occult sects with weird signs on the doors. My parents were told that they could not marry until they could afford two servants. So they were engaged for four years but it never occurred to them to get married before that. After the wedding they were driving away from the church and my mother turned to my father and said, "NOW will you tell me what Oscar Wilde did?" as he had promised her that he would let her know only after they were married.
Monday, January 11, 2016
Anecdotes of Modern Art by Hall and Wykes
Derain:
Many painters gain energy in old age but not Derain. On the contrary, old age confirmed loss of vitality, loss of talent, loss of prestige. Of all the artists he had known, and he had known them all, only two of note stayed faithful: Giacometti and Balthus. Sun-day lunches at the estate in Chambourcy grew steadily more morose. Derain was not granted even the modest consolation of a dignified farewell to failure. One day he was run down by a careless motoris The injuries at first did not seem serious. Alberto went several ti see him in the hospital at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Then his mind to go, and he lingered for some weeks in a vagueness. Asked ass failing if there was anything he wanted, he said, "A bicycle and a piece of blue sky." Two hours later he died, the date September 8, 1954. Few people took the trouble to attend his funeral. Only a single artist of stature: Alberto Giacometti. It was a sorry end to the wild venture that had started off with such colorful exuberance half a century before. —LORD.
Utrillo:
Exceptionally fond of his mother Suzanne Valadon who kept a goat in her studio and fed it bad drawings, he tended to worship distant female figures.... like Joan of Arc.
Georgia O'Keefe:
A niece from Lake George remembers meeting her for the first time. Rehearsed by grandmother Lizzie, and with all the concentration of a not-quite-three-year-old, I offered my hand, performed my curtsy, and pronounced on cue, "How do you do, Aunt Georgia?"—to which her instantaneous response was a cheek-stinging slap and a blazing "Don't ever call me Aunt!"
The sexuality of her paintings was always an issue. One woman who owned a big O'Keeffe flower painting was shocked to discover someone teaching a child the facts of life from it. When she hastily rehung it in her bedroom, a friend remarked, "Oh, I'm so glad you moved that vagina out of the living room."
There were always other expectations. In 1954, when she greeted art critic Emily Genauer while carrying some flowers, Miss Genauer exclaimed, "How perfect to meet you with flowers in your hands." Still acutely sensitive about the subject, O'Keeffe snapped, "I hate flowers—I paint them because they're cheaper than models and they don't move!"
Joseph Cornell:
Cornell loved his brother who was spastic and severely handicapped. The meals he made for him always consisted of dishes like nuts and fruit Jello of the most incredible colors. There was never any real food, but it was colorful. He used to squeeze violets on top of mushroom soup to make it violet.
Many painters gain energy in old age but not Derain. On the contrary, old age confirmed loss of vitality, loss of talent, loss of prestige. Of all the artists he had known, and he had known them all, only two of note stayed faithful: Giacometti and Balthus. Sun-day lunches at the estate in Chambourcy grew steadily more morose. Derain was not granted even the modest consolation of a dignified farewell to failure. One day he was run down by a careless motoris The injuries at first did not seem serious. Alberto went several ti see him in the hospital at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Then his mind to go, and he lingered for some weeks in a vagueness. Asked ass failing if there was anything he wanted, he said, "A bicycle and a piece of blue sky." Two hours later he died, the date September 8, 1954. Few people took the trouble to attend his funeral. Only a single artist of stature: Alberto Giacometti. It was a sorry end to the wild venture that had started off with such colorful exuberance half a century before. —LORD.
Utrillo:
Exceptionally fond of his mother Suzanne Valadon who kept a goat in her studio and fed it bad drawings, he tended to worship distant female figures.... like Joan of Arc.
Georgia O'Keefe:
A niece from Lake George remembers meeting her for the first time. Rehearsed by grandmother Lizzie, and with all the concentration of a not-quite-three-year-old, I offered my hand, performed my curtsy, and pronounced on cue, "How do you do, Aunt Georgia?"—to which her instantaneous response was a cheek-stinging slap and a blazing "Don't ever call me Aunt!"
The sexuality of her paintings was always an issue. One woman who owned a big O'Keeffe flower painting was shocked to discover someone teaching a child the facts of life from it. When she hastily rehung it in her bedroom, a friend remarked, "Oh, I'm so glad you moved that vagina out of the living room."
There were always other expectations. In 1954, when she greeted art critic Emily Genauer while carrying some flowers, Miss Genauer exclaimed, "How perfect to meet you with flowers in your hands." Still acutely sensitive about the subject, O'Keeffe snapped, "I hate flowers—I paint them because they're cheaper than models and they don't move!"
Joseph Cornell:
Cornell loved his brother who was spastic and severely handicapped. The meals he made for him always consisted of dishes like nuts and fruit Jello of the most incredible colors. There was never any real food, but it was colorful. He used to squeeze violets on top of mushroom soup to make it violet.
Monday, January 04, 2016
Leibniz and Spinoza
The 17th century was an age of glitter and strife; of spiritual awakenings followed by religious wars, civil wars, revolutions, invasions, and acts of ethnic cleansing; of explosive growth in international trade, the formation of global empires, rapid urbanization in the major capitals, inevitably accompanied by epic plagues and fires; and, at least in the eyes of a select few, of a new kind of science rising with all the promise of a slumbering god. Historians have since called it "the century of genius"; but informed opinion at the time generally held that it was an age of exceptional wickedness. If there is a single thread that runs through the rich and confusing tapestry of seventeenth-century life, it is that this was an age of transition—the time in which the theocratic order of the medieval era ceded to the secular order of modernity. Spinoza did not invent the modern world, but he was perhaps the first to observe it well. He was the first to attempt to answer the ancient questions of philosophy from a distinctly modern perspective. In his philosophical system, he offers a concept of God befitting the uni-verse revealed by modern science—a universe ruled only by the cause and effect of natural laws, without purpose or design. He describes what it means to be human after our pretension to occupy a special place in nature has been shattered. He prescribes a means to find happiness and virtue in an era when the old theologies have no credibility. And he advocates a liberal, democratic system of govern-ment suitable for an inherently fragmented and diverse society. His is the first and archetypal instance of the active response to moder-nity—an affirmation of the modern world that today we associate mainly with secular liberalism. Leibniz was no less farsighted than his rival, and no less grand in his ambitions. He, too, put his faith in the guidance of reason, and it was this faith that impelled him on his journey to The Hague. But the two men who met in that windy November belonged to their age in very different ways. In circumstances of birth, in social posi-tion, in personal aspirations, in eating habits, fashion sense, and the infinity of small things that make up what we call character, the glamorous polymath of Hanover and the saintly revolutionary of The Hague were nearly perfect contraries. And there are no two finer examples of the dictum that character is philosophy. In large part as a direct result of his meeting with Spinoza, Leibniz came to represent his own original and antithetical response to the challenges of the modern era. In his philosophical writings, he articulates a strategy for recovering something of the old ideas about God and man by means of an analysis of the limits of reason. He claims to discover the meaning and purpose of life in all that modernity fails to comprehend. He presents a vision of a modern society united to serve goals of justice and charity that transcend self-interest. His metaphysical system is the paradigm for the reactive response to modernity—or what today we associate mainly with religious conservatism. In the most widely accepted versions of the history of philosophy, Spinoza and Leibniz are understood to represent a speculative meta-physical program that long ago succumbed to academic progress. In
fact, taking a broader view of events, it is clear that the two greatest philosophers of the seventeenth century remain unsurpassed, and should perhaps be considered the twin founders of modern thought. We live in an age defined by its reaction to Spinoza and to all that he recorded in his philosophy. And there is no more compelling expres-sion of this reaction than the philosophy Leibniz developed in the long years after his return from Holland. Contemporary debates con-cerning the separation of church and state, the clash of civilizations, and the theory of natural selection, to name just a few examples, are all continuations of the discussion that began in November 1676. Even today, the two men who met in The Hague stand for a choice that we all must make and have implicitly already made.
-from The Courtier and the Heretic
fact, taking a broader view of events, it is clear that the two greatest philosophers of the seventeenth century remain unsurpassed, and should perhaps be considered the twin founders of modern thought. We live in an age defined by its reaction to Spinoza and to all that he recorded in his philosophy. And there is no more compelling expres-sion of this reaction than the philosophy Leibniz developed in the long years after his return from Holland. Contemporary debates con-cerning the separation of church and state, the clash of civilizations, and the theory of natural selection, to name just a few examples, are all continuations of the discussion that began in November 1676. Even today, the two men who met in The Hague stand for a choice that we all must make and have implicitly already made.
-from The Courtier and the Heretic
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