Im not going to apologize for being thoroughly pessimistic in the past month of posts; or if I do ask pardon then I should start by craving it of myself. I have to live with meand it aint easy these days! When a few national commentators dare to go off the script and mention the number of suicides that our lockdown will inspire I know exactly what they mean. Ive never been less afraid of death. I keep thinking of the first words uttered by Sophocles Teiresias when the blind prophet is led onto the stage of
Oedipus Tyrannos: What a fearful thing is thinking when it brings no profit to the thinker!"
Stay busy: yes thats always good advice. Ive been in lifeboat" mode now for several months really. By that I mean that I have given the ship up as lost and am occupying myself with considering alternatives for possible survival on the dark cold sea. Only since President Trump has begun signing off on multi-trillion dollar stimulus packages" though have I actually been consuming distinctly less political commentary from sources I used to trust. Theres too much stuff that begins This is our last chance" or We need to act immediately if we are to avoid disaster." Wrong. The last chance has come and gone. Those spending bills were one helluva big iceberg that just carried away half of our hull. I cant tolerate any more evasion of such hard facts. Lower the damn lifeboats.
But survival does indeed call for
profitable thinking... so disillusion and even pessimism mustnt turn to abject despair. Weve lost the big one: now lets win some little ones. I scarcely know where to start. I continue my routine of trying to acquire greater understanding however as a retired academic who mucks about in his infant orchards much of the day. Ive begun reading two works that I probably should have read long ago: Karl Poppers
The Open Society and Its Enemies and F.A. Hayeks
Road to Serfdom. As part of my regimen I try to read new books in one of the non-English languages that Ive studied for yearsnot in the illusion that Ill ever use" them in the future (whatever that means) but just because I hate to let a skill lapse into decay. You fire up your old Triumph and give her a little spin around the block once a week not because youll ever seriously use the thing for transportation but because... well she deserves not to die if keeping her alive costs so little.
So anyway here I am reading Popper in Italian and Hayek in Spanish. (Somebody might murmur wryly Youre going to need that Spanish"... but no the Spanish I read isnt anything remotely like the jabber we hear at Wal-Mart.) The irony is that both of these men came to English as a second language; so Im accessing their thoughts through a tongue into which the original text has been renderedbut that text itself represented a tongue with which they struggled. Could there be a better illustration of the Spirit taking serene shape above a great cacophony of words? We are one even in our misery.
I havent actually read quite a third of either book at this point but Ive seen enough to be intrigued. Hayeks much-reprinted classic is littered with forewards and prefaces in the early going. I infer from all the explanations and further explanations that he was greatly surprised by the works success especially in the U.S.; that he was nevertheless dismayed at how it had become caught up in a political tug-of-war as Joe McCarthy brought to public attention the degree of communist infiltration in our society; that he had never intended to condemn all kinds of government planification" out of hand or to declare that their presence made totalitarian rule inevitable; and that his primary concern was simply that exposure to the notion of paternalistic government begins a long long process of corrupted and surrendered freedoms. There is a mildness to this man I find that indeed makes him an unlikely dynamo at the center of a whirlwind. I see in him an apt illustration of a phenomenon weve come to know only too well: the slanderous caricature by the Left of anyone who dare question centralist statist orthodoxy. McCarthy himself was thus tarred and feathered and with scarcely more reason.
For my own purposes considering where I am (i.e. deep in the hole of despair) I find a kind of comfort in Hayeks big picturea comfort of course which he would have been chagrined to provide. He obviously believed that we yet had time to reverse course in the Fifties and even the Seventies (when the final edition of
Road to Serfdom appeared). I suppose we probably did have time even in the Nineties... but instead of regretting our bite of the apple we came back and stripped the tree (with no less zeal during the two terms of George W. Bush than in any other era). The air of fatality which Hayek so heroically rejected settles in retrospect quite heavily over the past thirty years or so.
My sons generation in short was not sold down the river into slavery only by Pelosi/McCormick stimuli" and President Trumps compliant pen. The dark stranger has been riding down the road since that distant day when we might first have spotted him exiting the mountains pass. And here Ill toss a bone to the enemies of capitalism and slanderers of innocents like F.A. Hayek: our ravenous appetite for ease and convenience is deeply implicated in our rush to greet this sooty rider. Weve been reared at least since the end of World War II to desire more stuff cheaper stuff and stuff of ever greater frivolity. The market made us such uncritical undisciplined consumers. The cry that spurred us on from the new screens before which we were reared was Get it now cheaper than ever! You deserve it!" Has not such thinking fedyes
inevitablyinto the yet more seductive cry Get it now paid for by the rich! Youd already have it if they hadnt stolen it from you!" The devilish rhetoric of the sell was indeed inevitable. It was our response that might have offered up resistance… but you know getting something free at the expense of the rich" is an even better deal than getting it cheap at the expense of Chinese slave labor.
Karl Popper seems an odd companion in this discussion. I was surprised upon consideration at how perfectly
The Open Society slides right in. I had no initial inkling that the book was a study of Platos utopian project in
The Republic... and I was a little let down honestly upon making that discovery. Why would the previous centurys premier philosopher of science (as I like to think of him) be scribbling away like the antiquarians with whom I attended graduate school? Poppers footnotes indeed were so voluminous that they posed a major obstacle to finding a publisher for the book. Among additional obstacles were the authors self-imposed and shifting exile as Hitler tightened his grip on Central Europe his struggles with the English language (as Ive noted) and his need of American friends and contacts to mediate as he met with one rejection after another from publishing houses. Hayek was running up against exactly the same barriers at the same historical moment.
But at least one Austrian was tackling the central ideological issues of our time while the other was retreating to... Plato? Not a retreat however: no but rather a recognition that these very issues were not at all distinct to our time but were embedded in the human condition. As I muddled through the first pages of Poppers tome (its title grotesquely caricatured by George Soros that living master of satanically torturing words to mean their opposites) I made the further error of supposing that he was just thrusting his personal preoccupations where they didnt belong. What had Plato to do with Hitler and Stalin? (And both Popper and Hayek by the way realized that those two miscreants had issued from the same sulfurous ideological womb.)
I wont exhaust both myself and the reader by trying to encapsulate Professor Poppers reading of Plato. A brutal compression would be to say that Plato everybodys most admired philosophical transcriptionist is unmasked as having commandeered the reputation of Socrateseverybodys most admired philosopherto sell a totalitarian vision. (Just one example: Socrates a man with power should always beware of his ignorance" becomes Platos a man with power should be purged of ignorance".) Its all finely reasoned and meticulously documented I promise you: hence the merciless footnotes. Yet I had never heard a peep about such interpretive possibilities during all my years in the academy. By the way that interpretation turns out to fit. It isnt the whimsy of an expatriate who subconsciously imposes the shadow of the dictator he so detests upon every bird cloud and blade of grass. Its all perfectly convincing.
By way of illustration Ill confine myself to the Platonic theory of Forms or Ideas. I recall being exposed to this first as a college freshman and thinking Those ancient Greeks... what a strange lot! Did they really think that were born with a Table Archetype in our heads that allows us to recognize a table?" Plato was offered up in just such incoherent irrelevant terms; and as I say nothing I later heard in any ivory corridor added any profundity to my initial impressions.
Poppers view however makes of the Forms something very like what Ive written of recently as future worship": the adoration of hazy objectives that is merely because they exist in tomorrow" where were assured of having transformative superpowers. It is an irony to be sure that Platos gilded castles exist in the remotest of yesterdaysin the atavistic Heroic Age when men feasted with gods. Yet behind the irony is the link which binds Hitler and Stalin Nazism and communism. Both visions take as their destination a point whose accesswhose mere realitycannot be validated by current perceptions common sense and humane moral imperatives. Both require that we become something were simply not; or inasmuch as they acknowledge our being unequal to the task both urge upon us the acceptance of a superman or a super-race. Both concede that the Peerless Leaders superior authority cannot be logically deduced or rationally defended. Both demand of us therefore that we embrace a cultic fanaticismthat we suppress our individuality and merge ourselves into an obedient herd.
Precisely. This is true its brilliant... and its disparaged or ignored by our academic institutions and broadcast media as they condition forthcoming generations to chew the cud of totalitarianism. Add Hayek to Popper and you have an all-too-prophetic warning that the adoration of the Charismatic Leader who solves all of our problems for us is forever leaking into human societies drop by drop decade after decade. Didnt the Old Testament teach us about our self-destructive craving for kings?
How is the combination implied in permanent collapse" possible I wonder? How can things forever be deteriorating in Hesiodic fashion if there were no genuine Heroic Age at the head of all the fallen dominoes? If we have always been as we are nowflawed corrupt creatures in need of a redeemer outside our earthly time framethen how can we also always be getting worse? Since weve always been bad how do we manage to keep doubling down on it?
I dont know my friends... but such is the truth or what little we can see of it. Perhaps it is our societies that are forever coming unraveledand perhaps it is only redeemed individuals who forever keep bits and pieces of them from careening over the precipice: just enough for yet another try where the run-off of Edens gentle rain puddles.
