Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor

In order to survive, we all need to eat, sleep, exercise, breathe, and maintain friendly relations. Books about exercise abound, and sleep itself has become a popular topic for authors with advice to give. And eating--oh, my goodness!--what a mess! Author after author after author tells us what we should and shouldn't eat, no two authors seeming ever to agree. And will they ever agree? Between human ignorance and fallibility and the profit motive, the idea of any consensus about the human diet seems a distant Shangri-La that exists in legend but that eludes us in practice. And, given the variety of human diets from the beginning of our species, this may not prove so surprising. Humans have existed on a variety of diets to fit the climate in which they live. About diet, about the only definitive conclusion that we can reach about diet is that our current Standard American Diet (SAD) is crap and it's killing us slowly.

At least we don't have to go to the store (yet) and buy whatever air we choose to breathe, thus avoiding the incentives that food producers have to persuade us by deception that their products are healthy and wholesome. And while the quality of the air that we breathe also affects us in subtle, long-term ways, let's set that aside for now as the topic of many other worthy books. Author James Nestor has chosen to focus on just this one topic in his book: how we breathe. Nestor examines how we breathe and how it makes a difference in our health and quality of life. And what makes reading this book an entertaining as well as an educational experience is the fact that humans have been experimenting and cultivating breathing techniques for thousands of years and have gained immense practical knowledge that we are now confirming and better understanding through scientific research. For instance, pranayama, the yoga of breathing, goes back thousands of years, and so do Taoist breathing techniques from China. Different as the cuisines of China and India are, for instance, when one looks at their interest in the breath and breathing techniques, we see distinct similarities (some no doubt indigenous to each culture and shared through cross-cultural exchange). But we in the West, especially in the modern, industrial West, have forgotten much of the lore about breath that developed on this side of the world and--at least until recently--we've ignored much of what we could have learned from traditional Chinese and Indian culture if we'd have had the good sense to do so (and a few did have such good sense, such as the explorer Alexandra David-Neel and Harvard physician Dr. Herbert Benson, to name just two who pop to mind).

But although we in the contemporary world have been dismissive and ignorant about the proper mechanics and potential benefits of breathing, we can make up for lost time quickly with this book. Nestor has combined in-depth scientific research and first-hand reporting about those teaching and exploring breath, and he conjoins his reporting with recounting his experiences about practicing a wide variety of breathing techniques. In an act of journalistic heroism perhaps second only to Morgan Spurlock's one month of eating only at McDonald's (for his documentary Supersize Me!), Nestor and a Sweedish student of breath (or "pulmonaut," as Nestor dubs those who experiment with breath), Anders Olsson, had their nostrils sealed by a physician for ten days, allowing them to breathe only through their mouths. Like Spurlock's experience, the toll on their health and well-being was dramatic and frightening. But also, like Spurlock, the return to normalcy (nose-breathing in Nestor's and Olsson's case) allowed a quick and marked return to health and well-being. All by just breathing through their noses!

Nestor reports on a variety of breathing techniques, such as those of Wim Hof and Buteyko, all of which provide different benefits.  Nestor also attends in detail to the science and to me, the most interesting science in the book (and all of it is interesting), is the change in human anatomy in the last three hundred years--since the advent of industrialism and significant changes in the human diet. During this time, it seems primarily because of softer foods (processing), the size and position of our jaws, facial bones, and nasal passages have shrunk. We didn't use it--our chewing capacity--and we lost bone and breathing capacity because of it. Humans around the globe almost all had straight teeth and enough room in their jaw for all their teeth (wisdom teeth included!). We don't. Also, the loss of bone density in our face, volume in our nasal cavity, and narrowing in our throats have led to snoring and sleep apnea that did occur much less in the past. Sometimes Mother Nature evolves very slowly, but sometimes she seems positively Lamarckian in her speed to drop that which we don't use the way originally intended (metaphorically speaking, of course).

This book is chock-full of information, experiences, and advice, and of value to any potential reader. I highly recommend it. But until you read it, let me leave you with Nestor's list of do's and don'ts about breathing. So simple and yet so important!

• Shut Your Mouth!
• Breathe Through Your Nose!
• Exhale!
• Chew!
• Breathe More, On Occasion!
• Hold Your Breath!

[N.B. I added the exclamation marks for emphasis and to convey a sense of the imperative of following these simple guidelines.]

By the way, the book includes valuable instructions about a wide variety of breathing techniques that Nestor has sampled and recommends as well as thorough notes and links to sites that provide video demonstrations and instructions. 

The Secret Body: Erotic & Esoteric Currents in the History of Religions by Jeffrey Kriipal

Something's happenin' here, what it is ain't exactly clear

This book continues my reading of Jeffrey Kripal, whose insights and speculations I find intriguing. This is my fourth book by Kripal that I've read, and each one has intrigued me. The Secret Body (2019) is unique because it serves as a summary of his work to date. It consists of a series of diverse essays with commentary about this personal and scholarly journey. As I mentioned in my review of The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind & the Future of Knowledge, Kripal grew-up in a small town in southeast Nebraska, which is the middle nowhere by most people's reckoning. I grew up in southwest Iowa, on the other side of the Missouri River, which is a fraction less of a nowhere than southeast Nebraska. (But, of course, in growing-up, one thinks of one's home turf as the Middle Earth, the Center of the Known Universe.) Anyway, that someone from such a bland background could go on to have such adventures (of the mind) as Kripal has serves as a reminder of what we are capable of in our capacities to grow and experience the larger world. Indeed, another particularly personal source of enjoyment in reading The Secret Body comes from reading about Kripal's Catholic boyhood and upbringing. I'm about nine years older than Kripal, and I grew up (in part) in the pre-Vatican II Church, an even more exotic experience than Kripal's post-Vatican II experience. Vatican II "Protestantized" the Ameican Catholic Church in many ways. (For a spot-on account of the pre-Vatican II American Catholic experience see Garry Wills's Bare-Ruined Choirs (1972).) So although Kripal missed out on what I might label "the full Catholic experience," his faith nevertheless provided a formative experience that set him on his way to his intellectual adventures. Finally, also in a personal vein, Kripal describes his visits to his home town and family in Nebraska as an adult, academic scholar of religions. These visits constitute a trip to an outwardly familiar but also alien world, almost as alien (or exotic) as his experiences with Hindu culture and religion and his investigations of paranormal experience. Kripal recognizes both the goodness of the folks who live there and their stubborn insularity that has allowed politicians--and especially the Great Orange Menace (my term, not Kripal's)--to act to the detriment of those good folks. Again, Kripal's experience resonates with me. One needn't be a wild-eyed radical (I'm certainly not) to see that many of the attitudes held by these folks "are neither [as] pure, nor wise, nor good" as they would believe, and their attitudes and decisions also hurt those of us who share this planet with them. Kripal is justly blunt but loving in his critique. 

Kripal's scholarly journey provides the backbone of his book, and while it may seem an esoteric topic--well, it is. During the time that Kripal spent as a monk, he underwent Freudian psychoanalysis to deal with anorexia (disguised as ascetic holiness), and he came to the realization that the monastery was in some sense a gay institution, although homosexuality was officially condemned by the Church. Kripal describes his transformation after his successful psychoanalysis and his insight into the monastic life: 

By the end of that year, the analyst, the buxom women, and I had cured the anorexia. 

 And I was really hungry. I ate everything in sight. I gained about seventy pounds over the next few months. I was a new man at twenty-two. Suddenly, I was also a sexual being.  

The seminary community was a hotbed of psychosocial exploration, but which I do not mean anything explicitly sexual, much less genital. I mean that those years constituted a four-year initiation in the sexual roots of the spiritual life and the spiritual roots of the sexual life. The basic point is this; I came into my early psychological awakening and intellectual calling as a confused and repressed straight man in what was, more or less (mostly more), a gay religious community.

Kripal goes on to ponder the implications of all this, and he recognizes (among many things) the deep debt he owes to both Jesus and Freud for coming to a greater understanding of his world. Indeed, these insights into sexuality became the basis of Kripal's early scholarly work, which he pursued via a doctorate in comparative religions at the University of Chicago and that he parlayed into a successful academic career (he's been at Rice University of many years now). Each of Kripal's first three books deals with mysticism and sexuality. (I've read The Serpent's Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion (2008) and it's a duzzy--perhaps my excuse for not having reviewed it yet.) As you may imagine, some people don't like to think about the sexuality of Jesus or of the nineteenth-century Hindu mystic Ramakrishna, and Kripal has drawn the wrath of fundamentalists in both the U.S. and India for his explorations and explications. And, of course, it's all fascinating. 

After becoming a persona non grata to Hindu fundamentalists, Kripal turned closer to home to explore what is often described as the "paranormal," and what he  has come to term the "super natural." This takes him into the world of Esalen (the counter-culture capital on the Big Sur), comic books, and UFOs, among other topics. And if you think that these topics are far from religion, then you haven't read enough Jeffrey Kripal. With each new topic, Kripal further explores and refines his thoughts as "the human as two." In fact, he develops twenty theses that he labels "gnomons," which Kripal describes as "a short aphorism and maxim . . . that [are] "gnostic" in nature," along with other enticing associations, including gnomes, those little creatures of the earth whose statues populate our gardens with their pointy hats. These brief statements provide a series of stations or markers that provide some conclusions or working hypotheses that Kripal has arrived at during the course of his investigations. He reveals each gnomon as his account progresses. But to be clear: this is not an intellectual biography as such. While Kripal includes aspects of his personal and scholarly biography along with way, he also includes a number of short scholarly articles he's written on various topics that highlight and explore his scholarly inquires. This interspacing of reminisces with articles written along his scholarly journal works well, each perspective casts further light on the other. 

As I reflect on this work, I'm struck by what a fun and exciting read this book provides. Perhaps Kripal's a little crazy, but perhaps not; perhaps his ideas are too out there; but perhaps not. I'm not sure if Kripal is chasing phantoms, and I suspect he'd be the first to suggest that the line between phantoms and "reality" is a thin, permeable line, which we can only intuit by extraordinary glances. In Kripal's persuasive view, we are "the human as two," with a whole lot going on that we as a species have been trying to understand and appreciate for our entire history. And it seems we're just getting going. 

Part 5: Collingwood on "Yahoos" from his New Leviathan

Jonathan Swift, to whom we owe the term Yahoos

 The final installment of R.G. Collingwood on Yahoos. 

30. 7. In the foregoing paragraphs I have outlined a picture of the Yahoo herd. From what sources have I drawn it? Partly from Hobbes; partly from Swift; partly from Dr. Trotter’s Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War; partly from Tarde’s Les Lois de l’imitation; partly from other books. But that is not the point. There is a thing which each of these authors has described in his way and I have tried to describe in mine. What is that thing? 

30. 71. The Yahoo herd is not a fact. It is not a state of human life known to historians by interpretation of evidence as having existed at some time in the remote past, like the Beaker Civilization. It is not a state of human life discovered by anthropologists as existing in their own time among members of some outlandish tribe like the Arunta. 

30. 72. The Yahoo herd is an abstraction.In painting a picture of it we have been trying to describe what human life would be like if men were not social. 

Collingwood, R. G.. The New Leviathan. Read Books Ltd. Kindle Edition. 

The New Leviathan or Man, Society, Civilization & Barbarism by R.G. Collingwood, rev. ed. David Boucher

The last work by Collingwood published before his death

The New Leviathan is the last book Collingwood published before his death at age 53 in early 1943.  Collingwood had suffered a series of increasingly debilitating strokes secondary to uncontrolled high blood pressure (for which doctors at the time could only prescribe "the rest cure"). In a race against death, Collingwood attempted to make sense of the political world in which he was then living, marred as it was by fascism and war. He did so by taking the architectonic work of modern political thought, The Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes, as his model. Let me introduce my brief consideration of this work with Collingwood's reflection on his project of building an understanding of politics from the ground up. I find it quite pertinent today.

12. 9. Our favourite nightmare in the twentieth century is about our powerlessness in the giant grip of economic and social and political structures; the nightmare which Professor Arnold Toynbee calls ‘The Intractableness of Institutions’.  

12. 91. The founders of modern political science made it clear once for all that these Leviathans are ‘Artificial Animals’, creatures formed by the art of man, ‘for whose protection and defence’ they were intended. 

12. 92. This is the ground of the nightmare. Oppression and exploitation, persecution and war, the torturing to death of human beings in vast helpless masses, are not new things on the face of the earth, and nobody thinks they are; nor are they done in the world on a greater scale or with more refinement of cruelty than they have been done in the past; nor have we grown more sensitive, to shrink, as men once did not, from blood.  

12. 93. But Hobbes (and others, but especially Hobbes) has for the first time in history held up a hope that there would be ‘protection and defence’ against these things; and by now the hope has sunk into our common consciousness; so that when we find it to be precisely the agents of this longed-for safety that are the chief authors of the evils for whose ending we have made them, hope turns to despair and we are ridden by another Frankenstein-nightmare, like Samuel Butler’s nightmare of humanity enslaved to its own machines, only worse.  

12. 94. But the despair, once more, is parasitic upon the hope.  

12. 95. If the hope went, the despair would go too. If we believed Marx’s monstrous lie that all States have always been organs for the oppression of one class by another, there would be nothing to make all this fuss about.  

12. 96. To strengthen the hope until it overcomes the nightmare, what must be done is to carry on the work, sadly neglected since Hobbes and a handful of successors began it, of constructing a science of politics appropriate for the modern world.  

12. 97. Towards such a science this book is offered as a contribution.

Collingwood, R. G.. The New Leviathan. Read Books Ltd. Kindle Edition. (All quotes to numbered paragraphs are in the Revised Edition edited by David Boucher published in 1992.)

Collingwood is known to most readers--if he's known at all--for his work in the philosophy of history. But his most comprehensive publication work in that field, The Idea of History, wasn't published until 1945, and it was in some measure incomplete because of the editorial choices of Collingwood's literary executor, T.M. Knox. Collingwood had also published in the fields of metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics (and archeology). In short, in some ways--but not in others--he was a traditional academic philosopher, educated and then later employed at Oxford University, finishing his career as the Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Magdalen College, Oxford. But in the late 1930s, his attention turned to the political world around him, which was marked by the rise of fascism and increasing violence. He shocked and disturbed some of his more staid colleagues by growing a beard and declaring in his Autobiography (1939), his intention to dive into contemporary political issues. He closed his Autobiography with these words: 

I am writing a description of the way in which those events [the rise and response to Fascism] impinged upon myself and broke up my pose of a detached professional thinker. I know now that the minute philosophers of my youth, for all their profession of a purely scientific detachment from practical affairs, were the propagandists of a coming Fascism. I know that Fascism means the end of clear thinking and the triumph of irrationalism. I know that all my life I have been engaged unawares in a political struggle, fighting against these things in the dark. Henceforth I shall fight in the daylight. 

Collingwood, R. G. An Autobiography. Read Books Ltd.. Kindle Edition. 

Having laid down his gauntlet, and in the face of his declining health, Collingwood embarked on his final work, which became The New Leviathan.  

In approaching this work, I have to admit I was a bit puzzled at the choice of Hobbes's great work as a model. My admittedly incomplete reading and knowledge of Hobbes pegged his work as solitary, nasty, brutish, but not short. And absolutist to boot. But Collingwood has earned my respect, and he addresses the issues concerning his role-model up-front. In his Preface, Collingwood writes: 

A READER may take the title of this book in whichever way he pleases. If he is one of those who think of Hobbes’s Leviathan as the classical exposition of a classical type of despotism, namely seventeenth-century absolutism, the portrait and anatomy of ‘that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMON-WEALTH, or STATE (in latine CIVITAS) which is but an Artificial Man; though of greater stature and strength than the Naturall’, he may take it to mean that I have set out in this ‘New Leviathan’ to portray and anatomize the new absolutism of the twentieth century, based (like that which Hobbes described) on the will of a people who in thus setting up a popular tyrant gave into his hands every right any one of them has hitherto possessed. For the immediate aim of this book is to study the new absolutism and inquire into its nature, causes, and prospects of success or failure; success, I mean, in either destroying all competitors and becoming the political form of the future, or at least contributing to the political life of the future some positive heritage of ideas and institutions which men will not forget.

Collingwood continues to defend his choice:

If he thinks of the Leviathan as a book which is unique in dealing with the entire body of political science and approaches its colossal subject from first principles, that is, from an examination of man, his faculties and interests, his virtues and vices; a book dealing first with man as such, then with political life as such, then with a well-ordered political life or a ‘CHRISTIAN COMMON-WEALTH’, and lastly with an ill-ordered political life or ‘KINGDOME OF DARKNESSE’; then he may take my title to mean, not that I have in fact dealt with these vast subjects exhaustively, but that in this book I have set out to deal with the same groups of problems in the same order, calling the four parts of my book ‘Man’, ‘Society’, ‘Civilization’, and ‘Barbarism’. Readers of the second school (though I have no quarrel with the others) will of the two be nearer to my own way of thinking. It is only now, towards the middle of the twentieth century, that men here and there are for the first time becoming able to appreciate Hobbes’s Leviathan at its true worth, as the world’s greatest store of political wisdom. I say that this is only now beginning to happen. From the time of its publication, when it impressed every reader with a force directly proportional to his own intelligence as the greatest work of political science the world had ever seen, but pleased nobody because there was no class of readers whose corns it left untrodden upon or whose withers it left unwrung, it fell more and more deeply into disfavour beneath a rising tide of ethical and political sentimentalism. Hardly a single political writer from the seventeenth century to the present day has been able so to clear his mind of that sentimentalism as to look Hobbes in the face and see behind those repellently grim features what manner of man he was; or to see behind the savage irony of his style how deeply he understood himself and his fellow men.

Collingwood, R. G.. The New Leviathan. Read Books Ltd. Kindle Edition. (Revised ed. ilx-lx)

(I'd apologize for the long quotes, but Collingwood is also a master prose-stylist whose pithy remarks I have a hard time trimming.) 

Collingwood thus proceeds to build his New Leviathan from the ground up, beginning with "Man," his term for individual psychology. In taking this course, Collingwood follows Hobbes's example in delving into the basics of the human animal. Unlike any of his earlier works, Collingwood works in numbered paragraphs (similar, for instance to Wittgenstein's Tractatus but without the austerity of style and expression). (One may see the numbered paragraphs in my quotes from this work, except in the Preface.) It is as if Collingwood wanted to make sure that he completed his foundation before moving on to the next level; he wanted to denote his thoughts as if they were a part of a schematic or engineering diagram. Happily, while this keeps his thoughts somewhat artificially separate and short, it doesn't necessarily reduce the felicity of his prose, metaphors, and analogies, which he deploys with such great effect. But it does serve to remind the reader of what a careful and thorough construction Collingwood is providing his reader. When needed, Collingwood can analyze and talk logic with the best of them. 

Because this is an architectonic work, it isn't easy to summarize. Each of the four parts into which he divides the book, "‘Man’, ‘Society’, ‘Civilization’, and ‘Barbarism’" are set forth at length and sometimes include some intriguing digressions. But for purposes of this review, let me only point to a couple of highlights to give a sense of where Collingwood takes his readers. For instance, he borrows the terms "Yahoos" from Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels to great effect. (I've previously posted a series of quotes on this blog, beginning here.) In another section, he sets forth what he describes as the "Three Laws of Politics," which, when I first read them, struck me as a bit simplistic, but which, upon further reflection, strike me as capturing some essences of political life. Collingwood describes his three laws as follows: 

25. 7. The FIRST LAW OF POLITICS is that a body politic is divided into a ruling class and a ruled class.
25. 8. The SECOND LAW OF POLITICS is that the barrier between the two classes is permeable in an upward sense.
25. 9. This brings us to the THIRD LAW OF POLITICS: namely that there is a correspondence between the ruler and the ruled, whereby the former become adapted to ruling these as distinct from other persons, and the latter to being ruled by these as distinct from other persons. 

Collingwood, R. G.. The New Leviathan. Read Books Ltd.. Kindle Edition. 

Collingwood's use of the term "ruling class" may jar some ears, but if you chose, you can substitute "elites," but the point remains. To Collingwood the (classical) liberal and democrat, the key fact isn't the existence of a ruling class, but that it is "permeable in an upward sense." But it is the Third Law that strikes me as most important today: the existence of a "correspondence between the ruler and the ruled." Collingwood elucidates his Third Law in the following: 

25. 91. Working directly, or from the ruling class downwards, the ruler sets the fashion, and the ruled fall in with his lead.  

25. 92. But the Third Law also works inversely, from the ruled class upwards, and determines that whoever is to rule a certain people must rule them in the way in which they will let themselves be ruled.  

25. 93. Both setting the fashion and following it may be done either consciously or unconsciously; but the process is most likely to take the inverse form when it originates unconsciously in the mere, blind, unpolitical stupidity of the ruled, imposing limits on what their rulers can do with them.  

25. 94. An example of this law occurs when vigorous rulers teach the ruled to co-operate with them and to develop, under their tuition, a vigorous political life, a similarity in political enterprise and resource, like their own. In this way that portion of the ruled class which is more closely in contact with the ruling class receive a training for political action which enables them to succeed, in time, their rulers. Here the freedom whereby the rulers rule percolates, owing simply to the process of ruling, without any intention that it shall do so, downwards through the strata of the body politic.  

25. 95. But this only happens when the rulers are vigorous. Let the rulers be of a slavish sort, and what will percolate is slavishness.  

25. 96. When that happens in a body politic, it is hard to say whether the percolation is downward or upward; and the inquiry has little importance.  

25. 97. What is important is to know whether the process to which the body politic is subject is increasing or diminishing. Here is a ruling class, of one or more: to what does its rule tend? To the advancement of freedom, and therefore the ability to cope with political problems, or to its diminution? It is no use raising the question whether freedom is a good thing or not: freedom in the ruling class is nothing else than the fact that the ruling class rules, and the cry against freedom which accompanies the rise of Fascism and Nazism is a confused propaganda for the abolition of one thing (freedom for the ruled) where the distinction between that and another thing (freedom for the ruler) is overlooked. Of course no Fascist or Nazi protests against freedom for the ruler!  

25. 98. In Plato’s Republic the ‘tyrant’ is not a skilful and determined politician who seizes power for himself, but a piece of flotsam floating on the political waves he pretends to control, shoved passively into power by the sheer lowness of its own specific gravity. This is quite possible by the inverse working of the Third Law of Politics. Hitler, referring to Plato’s sense of the word ‘democracy’, claims to be a democratic ruler. He claims that he has been, so to speak, ejected by the automatic working of a mob, which elevates to a position of supremacy over itself whatever is most devoid of free will, whatever can be entirely trusted to do what is dictated by the desires which the mob feels. 

Collingwood, R. G.. The New Leviathan. Read Books Ltd.. Kindle Edition. 

I can't read the words above without thinking about the current state of affairs in the U.S. without thinking about how our current "ruling class" (or the visible part of it), the Trump administration, has infected our entire body politic. When I first completed a reading of The New Leviathan in January 2016, I didn't know that the U.S. would elect a populist demagogue who would promote authoritarian values from the White House. I didn't appreciate the worldwide tide of authoritarianism abroad throughout the world. With this most recent reading, this book came alive to me in a new way. The words above (and others that I've quoted in earlier blog posts) speak to the world in which we live. Look again at Para. 25.98 (above) and tell me that you don't think of Trump! 

I intend to offer further reflect further upon Collingwood's The New Leviathan in a series of blog posts, but I want to address one other point before I close. As an undergraduate, I developed what I came to refer to as an "intellectual crush" on the work of Hannah Arendt. And with the election of Trump, I immediately turned to her work as a benchmark for attempting to come to grips with our predicament. Of late, this turn back to Arendt has been enhanced by joining a Virtual Reading Group sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. As to Collingwood, I didn't "discover" his work until around 2015, although I'd had a brief exposure as an undergraduate to his work in a Philosophy of History course. The exposure didn't take. (Dumb kid.) Now, as I've delved deeply into Collingwood's work, I perceive a number of similarities with Arendt's project. Both were what we might term "pure philosophers" during the early portions of their careers, but the events of the 1930s and 40s compelled both of them to turn their thoughts toward politics. Both were deeply schooled in the traditions of Greek and Latin antiquity, as well as modern philosophy. But most importantly, both emphasize the importance of speech, thought, and action in political affairs. I intend to explore the similarities between these two thinkers in the future. (N.B. I don't think that there are any direct connections between the two, but perhaps Arendt had some familiarity with Collingwood's work.) Both Arendt and Collingwood provide me with insights and models of politics that I find crucial in our dark times. 

sng 9 June 2020

Part 4: Collingwood on "Yahoos" from his New Leviathan

More about the Yahoos:

30. 67. It would always be at war with them ["intelligent human societies"]; but this war would only be a violent form of parasitism (already in essence forcible so far as it was fraudulent) which began by imitating its neighbours’ behaviour or stealing their tricks and ended by appropriating the fruits of their behaviour or stealing their goods. 

30. 68. Let us dignify the acts by which our Yahoo leader imposes order on the Yahoo herd (30. 54) with the name of a ‘policy’. It would not be a policy because it would not be deliberately or freely decided upon; but let us call it one. 

30. 69. Of that ‘policy’ war is an extension. The Yahoo policy is a systematic appeal to force within the Yahoo herd; not force dialectically conceived as preparing the way for agreement (30. 99), but force eristically conceived as operating by itself in a world of competing forces where the possibility of agreement is ruled out. Let policy be a name for the internal organization of the Yahoo herd, and Clausewitz is right: war is ‘a continuation of policy’.

Collingwood, R. G.. The New Leviathan. Read Books Ltd..Kindle Edition. 

Part 3: Collingwood on "Yahoos" from his New Leviathan

More about "Yahoos" from R.G. Collingwood, taken from his The New Leviathan. 

30. 62. The Yahoos would not be solitary. They would not, of course, be social, not having free wills; but they would be gregarious. They would find pleasure in each other’s company. They would crowd together with animal delight in propinquity. They would join together gleefully in hymns of corporate self-praise and praise of their adored leader. 

30. 63. They would quarrel, no doubt, and enjoy quarrelling; but only within limits. If their quarrels went so far as to endanger the corporate strength of the herd, which the leader, thinking in terms of enmity towards other such herds, would conceive as his own strength and cherish accordingly, the leader would check it. 

30. 64. Further, the Yahoo is more imitative than Hobbes knew. 

30. 65. There is a kind of imitation quite independent of any intelligent appreciation of the action imitated; and the Yahoo herd would be as imitative as a herd of monkeys. 

30. 66. If the Yahoo herd was surrounded by intelligent human societies it would certainly imitate their ways, though without sharing the intelligence on which these were based. If they cultivated the earth, sailed the sea, and the like, it would do the same; not because its members had the intelligence to invent these and other arts for themselves but because they imitated the actions of those who could. 

Collingwood, R. G.. The New Leviathan. Read Books Ltd. Kindle Edition. 

Reflection on Thomas B. Edsall, "White male conservatives," "purity," "loyalty," etc.

Thomas B. Edsall

As usual, Thomas B. Edsall of the NYT has written another fascinating column based upon contemporary social science research (which should always, IMHO, be taken only in carefully measured & monitored doses). But with that caveat in mind, let's start with his conclusion spiced with my comments following

Ditto [the name of a social scientist] puts the matter succinctly: “In 21st century American politics, truth is tribal.”

SNG: No, "truth" isn't tribal; "opinion" & "belief" are tribal. Truth is often elusive, hidden, shifty, and so it can point us towards conclusions that it doesn't support. Thus, we need to keep our BS detectors on high alert ALWAYS.

In other words, the pandemic has become another example of Trump’s mastery over his most loyal subjects, his ability to manipulate them into violating their own instincts. It is this power over a substantial bloc of the electorate that has put him in the White House — and continues to make him so dangerous.

 SNG: It's really amazing, isn't it, that loyalty toward the demagogue can trump {sic} even attitudes such as concern for health, family, and purity. Purity is a distinctive "conservative" value, according to the research and conclusions of Jonathan Haidt). So can we then surmise that loyalty--even to a false idol--trumps {sic} concerns for purity?

Because many on the political right see the lockdowns as impinging “on their liberty, the free market’s workings, and their financial well-being,” he continued, “many conservatives want the lockdowns ended as quickly as possible.”

[SNG: Of course, some of our freedom of movement has been impinged upon & our financial well-being compromised, but whom does this adversely affect? All of us!

In addition, Wilcox noted, “some (especially male) conservatives see the lockdowns and mask wearing as expressions of cowardice that they reject as unmanly.”

SNG: Did they not get the memo? A mask provides minimal protection to the wearer, but it helps cut potential transmission from the wearer. It's not about how tough you are (or young), but how much you are willing to respect the well-being of the more vulnerable: the elderly the sick, the doctors and nurses and delivery guys, etc.

They [a team of social scientists] found, for example, that 71.6 percent of white males conservatives who claim to understand global warming very well agreed that “recent temperature increases are not primarily due to human activities.” Among all conservative white men, the percentage in agreement fell to 58.5. Among everyone else, the percentage dropped to 31.5.

 SNG: Wow, the more profound the denial of scientific consensus, the greater the confidence in the opinion held. And what's with "conservative white males"? It can't be all of them--I'm a while male, conservative (in temperament) and older, to boot. Why is ethnicity & gender so distinctive here?

If you are a conservative, a key tenet of your ideology is that unregulated markets naturally produce good; they are the most efficient way that humans have ever seen for distributing goods, services, wealth, etc. Any attempts to regulate, intervene upon, steer, etc. an economic market will make it necessarily less efficient. A government driven by some sense of altruism — ‘dogooderism’ by ‘bleeding hearts’ — will only muck up the functioning of an efficient market.

 SNG: Amazing! That some business-types brought up on the Mt. Pellerin ideology of Friedman (Milton) & Hayek and the Chicago School, etc., I can understand the attachment; the well-to-do are less hurt & less yield to the collective well-being of all. But for so many Trump supporters, who live in areas in steep decline by neo-liberal policies, these attitudes are completely at odds with their well-being. Both Democrats and Republicans contributed to all of this, but while Democrats sipped from the poisoned cup of market ideology, the Republicans chugged it. Maybe Mr. Marx was on to something with "false consciousness"!

The partisan divide over how to respond to the coronavirus pandemic has deepened over the past few weeks.

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Opinion | When the Mask You’re Wearing ‘Tastes Like Socialism’

The partisan divide over how to respond to the coronavirus pandemic has deepened over the past few weeks.

Part 2: Collingwood on "Yahoos" from his New Leviathan

More from R.G. Collingwood about "Yahoos," the term he borrows from Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. In these paragraphs, Collingwood discusses the Yahoos under Yahoos, shall we say the lumpen-Yahoos? This suggests a hierarchy, or perhaps more accurately, a pecking order. "Bullying" becomes the modus operandi ("M.O." in cop talk) of the ascendant Yahoos over the lower Yahoos. In return for allowing themselves to be bullied, the herd receives some pittance of pleasure, the security of herd membership, and the appearance of a strong--albeit unpredictable--leader. 

30. 55. There might be a second herd [of Yahoos] consisting of this [the first] herd’s dependants or slaves, related to them somewhat as aphides are related to ants, but installed in this relation and maintained in it by violence on the part of the first herd towards the second. This second herd would superficially resemble a ruled class. 

30. 56. Such a herd would enjoy on the whole a happy life. Those who bullied the rest would not only obtain by doing so various gratifications for their various passions and desires; they would also, and chiefly, get gratification from the mere act of bullying. Those who were bullied would not only find happiness in the communal prosperity won for them by the strength and cunning of their leader; they would also, and chiefly, find happiness in simply being bullied; worshipping their leader with a dog-like devotion and revelling in the delightful feeling of herd solidarity with their fellows 

Collingwood, R. G.. The New Leviathan. Read Books Ltd. Kindle Edition. 

The Return of Holy Russia by Gary Lachman

When I think about Russia, two thoughts immediately pop into my mind. The first is Winston Churchill's observation (made in 1939) that Russia is "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma." The second thought is a visual image of Russian nesting dolls shown in the 1979 BBC production of John LeCare's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy starring Alex Guinness. As the opening credits roll*, one doll after another is removed until the final, innermost doll is revealed--and this doll has no face. Of course, in the context of the story, this final, faceless doll no doubt references the mole inside the Circus. But for me, it also represents the seeming inscrutability of the Russian mind and its culture. One needn't be an expert on Russian history and culture (and I'm not), to hold this sense of perplexity, at least those of us living to the "West" of Russia. 

But if you, like me, don't wish to remain in confused ignorance about this rich culture and the nation-state that it supports, then Gary Lachman's The Return of Holy Russia: Apocalyptic History, Mystical Awakening, and the Struggle for the Soul of the World (2020) can provide you a comprehensive and accessible tour of Russian history and culture that shines a light into the events, ideas, and attitudes that mark this complicated (and often perplexing) behemoth of a culture and nation. In this book, Lachman looks backward in time to unpack the nesting dolls of Russian culture that he broached in his Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump (2018). In that book, Lachman explored the many tributaries outside of mainstream cultures that altered (and continue to alter) political reality in the U.S., Europe, and Russia in this current time of troubles. In Dark Star Rising, Lachman ranges from Trump's New Thought heritage (via Norman Vincent Peale) to an extended consideration of the culture of Putin's contemporary Russia, a witch's brew of resuscitated czarist aspirations for empire and Slavic glory, Stalinism, Orthodoxy, and "Eurasianism," all overseen by a criminal syndicate posing as a national government. I suspect that as Lachman looked at the tangled mass of threads that run through the Putin regime, he must have wondered (or at least I did), where did all these threads come from? What among the many justifications (and lies) that this particular regime promotes to retain its control could resonate with enough ordinary Russians to maintain the legitimacy of the regime at a level sufficient to allow it to remain in power? The Return of Holy Russia is an attempt to identify those threads from near their beginning and then follow them through to the present. In undertaking this project, Lachman, in his typically thorough, well-paced, and accessible prose, has completed a comprehensive history of Russian thought and culture centered on its religious, philosophical, and high-cultural aspirations. So does this book answer the riddle, solve the mystery, and de-code the enigma? No, but it helps. In this book, Lachman serves as a tour guide in a massive museum of Russian history and culture, providing a grand tour that touches upon the significant exhibits without lingering on any one exhibit too long. By doing so, many readers will emerge from their reading experience wanting to further explore those exhibits that they found most intriguing. I recently read an interview of Lachman where he observed that reading the works of Colin Wilson was like receiving a liberal arts education. The same can be said for reading Lachman. 

In the Introduction and first two chapters, Lachman provides an overview of his subject and a sense of his undertaking, which is an exploration of the Russian "soul" or "character" through time, the result of accretions laid down over hundreds of years of history that lead us the ever-elusive present. Lachman, in these initial pages, identifies some of those who've looked deeply into Russian culture in attempts to arrive at an understanding of the Russian mind. (Lachman notes up-front that he doesn't read or speak the Russian language.) This undertaking by Lachman and his sources is by nature the equivalent of an impressionist painting as opposed to, for instance, an engineering blueprint. In an impressionist work, the colors are bright but often blended into one another and the lines are often blurred. We see the big picture but we remain relaxed toward the details, foregoing (or postponing) concerns with details of structure and causal relationships. In this extended metaphor, the Russian "mind," "soul," or "character" is the impressionist vision as a whole, taken-in while knowing that such entities consist of many individual minds that, like flowers, share many common, identifiable attributes, but that reveal individual markers upon close inspection. Lachman addresses the challenge in a footnote (p. 24): 

I apologize to readers who may find these comments about “the Russian character” or "soul” offensive and outdated, given our current concern with avoiding racial or national stereotypes. I personally do not find this danger so serious, and my outline of the characteristics of “Russian man”—and “Russian woman” too—are based on wide reading and multiple sources.

Anyone writing a history of ideas (or more broadly, of culture) must deal with negotiating between the Scylla of over or unjustified generalizations and the Charybdis of extreme skepticism about identifying shared traits among groups, be those groups as large and diverse as a nation or as small as a family. Of course, any observer must be careful to avoid convenient and popular stereotypes and lazy generalizations. And groups have outliers, those who don't fit the prevailing pattern of group norms and characteristics and who march to the beat of different drummers. In short, we have to use sound judgment and discernment before arriving at any conclusions. I find that Lachman negotiates these narrows artfully, not only in addressing generalizations or the ubiquity of cultural traits but in addressing all of the ideas that he identifies over the course of Russian history. Lachman maintains a light touch, not allowing his judgments to intrude into his subject matter. Indeed, one of the features that I enjoy when reading Lachman is to watch for those fleeting moments when he tips his hand--often ever so slightly--to reveal judgments he holds about his subject matter. In his introduction and conclusions, in this book and others, Lachman allows himself to emerge from behind the author's screen to share some more explicit judgments with readers, although I've never found that he proselytizes. Indeed, Lachman does a fine job of following the adage of the great British philosopher R. G. Collingwood that the historian should "re-enact" the thought of his historical subjects.** Only when one has, in a sense, gotten inside the head of one's historical subject can the historian place himself in a position to reach conclusions and pass judgments. 

Early in the book, Lachman ties three key figures from the Silver Age of Russian thought and culture to the present regime of Vladimir Putin. Putin recommended that his regional governors read specific works from three Silver Age thinkers: Vladimir Solovyev (d. 1900), an Orthodox mystic and labeled "Russia's greatest philosopher" by the American scholar of Russian thought, James P. Scanlan; Nicholas Berdyaev (d. 1948), the Orthodox philosopher and theologian exiled by Lenin who became one of the foremost "Christian existentialists" and whose ideas about freedom and creativity remain important;  and Ivan Ilyin (d. 1950), a philosopher also exiled by Lenin who became a proponent of fascism, although he and the Mussolini and Nazi regimes parted with differences. He ended his days living in Switzerland. Of the three, Ilych is the least surprising person among the three on Putin's reading list, while Solovyev and Berdyaev are perplexing. (Lachman wisely avoids offering an opinion about whether Putin himself has read any of these thinkers; it would be a safe "no" vote if Trump recommended reading certain books, but Putin? Who knows? So mysterious he is.) All three of these figures were products of Russia's "Silver Age" of 1890 until 1920, when Lenin and the Bolsheviks ended any meaningful philosophy or theology in Russia, although Berdyaev and Ilyin made their most significant contributions after they were exiled. In fact, the Silver Age may be seen as the fulcrum of Russian thought and spirituality, and Lachman's book is an account of the advance of Russian thought to this point and then its abrupt disbursal after 1920, with several Silver Age thinkers being recycled of late, which may--or may not--presage a genuine renewal and invigoration of Russian thought and spirituality. I'd wager that it is the Silver Age and some of its thinkers that most intrigue Lachman, as they attempt to forge a way that transcends the opposition between Western science, rationality, and material well-being, and the collective energy, passion, and spirituality of the Russian heritage. These thinkers were looking for a "third-way" that took Russia beyond political and economic servitude without buying the ethos of Western modernity in full. (If I were to hedge my bet, I'd put some money on Lachman saying "Just Dostoyevsky" as the most telling point in his survey.)

The book takes the reader back to the early days of Russia and patiently recounts the development of Russian culture as influenced by Byzantium, Orthodox Christianity, pagan traditions, and the continuing influx of horsemen from Central Asia with the Mongols (Tartars) as the final and perhaps most formative set of invaders from the east. Lachman also touches upon the struggle for control among the elites to claim dominion over the territories that eventually grew into Russia. This chronicle of elite struggles can become a bit repetitive, as chronicles are want to do unless you're into the type of raw data that gives rise to Robert Graves's Claudius books, the History Plays of Shakespeare, or George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones***. These works provide a sense of the futility and carnage that these repetitive struggles for power entail.  But while the early stages of the chronology of rulers and would-be rulers are noted, Lachman's main focus remains on the various influences of thought and practice that formed the Russian Orthodox tradition. While religious disputes remain on the whole less brutal than struggles for political control (to the extent the two arenas remain separate), the trends in Russian Orthodoxy are dynamic and contribute mightily--for good and ill--to the formation of modern Russia. Russian political history, too, eventually gets to the point where Peter the Great (the late 1600s) and Catherine the Great (the mid-late 1700s) come on the scene. Lachman addresses the efforts of these rulers to change Russian culture based on the innovations of Western Europe, especially in the fields of science and technology. By the 1600s, the West had begun the Scientific Revolution, which was also a revolution in the ability of societies and nations to gain control over nature through technology. And while Galileo, Bacon, Hooker, and Newton were the most significant names in science, Russians were also exposed to Western thought flowing from the Rennaissance and occult traditions (e.g., Freemasonry) and liberal political thought (e.g., Locke, Voltaire). It's at this point where ideas associated with Western modernity begin to clash with Russia's Orthodox Christian, Asian, and traditionalist heritages. Earlier in the book Lachman addresses the differences between Orthodox and Western (Catholic) Christianity, which seem subtle to the point of trivial at first glance--just try grasping the significance of the filioque clause on a first pass--but the sometimes perplexing differences that often seem over-emphasized by elite churchmen and theologians prompt quite different attitudes and practices in the religious life of the faithful (and sort-of faithful). 

When Lachman's narrative arrives at the nineteenth century, he moves into an era in which many of the names become familiar, especially in literature: Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Turgenev, and, most importantly, Dostoyevsky. In addition to the rich insights into Russian thought and life provided by these authors and their literary works, Russian thought blossomed in many other fields as well. And despite the efforts at the Congress of Vienna and the failures of the revolutionary movements of 1848 throughout Europe, pressure for political change and the political writing promoting change grew in importance. One might think given the eventual success of the Bolsheviks that Marxist thought dominated the political conversation, but this seems not to have been the case. Many members of the intelligentsia went through a youthful infatuation with Marxism before moving on. (Alas, Lenin and his ilk didn't move on.) This is also the era of Slavic and Russian nationalism, with writers of the magnitude of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, among many others, who promoted ideas about the importance of Christianity and Pan-Slavism. 

As I suggested earlier in this review, the Silver Age from 1890 to 1920 can be seen as a high point in Russian culture and thought. Vladimir Solovyev, as a philosopher and theologian, comes across as the most important thinker of that era. During this period, which involved significant social and political unrest, members of the intelligentsia were seeking ways to organize a new Russia, with or without the czar. Thinkers like Solovyev, Bulgakov, Berdyaev, and others wanted to bridge the gap between Russia's unique and deeply felt Orthodox Christian culture and the rationality of the West, to find, as it were, a "third way" (a term it seems as popular the end of the twentieth century as it was at the beginning). But, as Lachman recounts, the few thinkers and searchers lucky enough to have survived the initial stages of the Bolshevik seizure of control were shipped abroad by Lenin, including Berdyaev and Ilyin. 

Lachman takes his account to the present, bringing it up to where he first recounted it in Dark Star Rising. We learn of Putin's reading list of Silver Age thinkers and of his use of technology, propaganda, and political machinations (apologies to the misunderstood Machiavelli) to maintain his regime. Lachman describes what seems to be the attitude of Putin and many of those who buy into his narrative: what is the liberal West's dream is Russia's nightmare; indeed, there is a strain of the Russian character that sees history only as a nightmare. The horrors of the twentieth century in Russia certainly contribute to this dour outlook. But interestingly, Putin, in speaking of his self-described "conservative position" and defense of "traditional values," quotes Berdyaev. Lachman, channeling Putin, writes: 

The point of conservatism, Berdyaev, the spiritual anarchist, said was that it did not prevent movement “forward and upward,” but was a safeguard against a movement “backward and downward, into chaotic darkness and a return to a primitive state.”  (384)

As a Western liberal, albeit one living in a time of troubles, I can endorse Berdyaev's adage. Change is change: it may be for the better or for the worse. Some changes, such as many liberations, have been for the good. Changes that foster and enhance human dignity are highlights of the Western tradition. But not everything branded as "progress" has resulted in change for the better. No engine of change has been more pronounced than contemporary consumer capitalism and the material and technological worldview upon which it is based. This system, which has led us to untold material wealth, has also led us to frightening environmental degradation, disruptive economic inequality and dysfunction, and political and social incoherence--to provide only the short-list. And, of course, we quite often don't know in which direction change will take us. The best we can do is apply our reason and imagination to create our future. Lachman captures the dilemma for Russia and for the rest of us in this footnote that draws upon the insight of the British historian Arnold Toynbee: 

In some ways we can see the return of ancient pagan beliefs and the revival of futurist visions in post-Soviet Russia as an example of the historian Arnold Toynbee’s dictum that when faced with a “time of troubles,” a people respond in two stereotypical ways: by retreating into the past or leaping into the future. That examples of “archaism” and “futurism” can be found in the West as well, suggests that our current “time of troubles” is a global phenomenon.

We cannot live in the past; there is no past to return to. But we can benefit from it by exploring the wisdom and perspective that it provides us if we approach it with a spirit of reverence and truth. We can't leap into the future; the future only arrives one moment at a time. The future is shaped moment-to-moment by the forces of nature's inertia and the dynamics of human thought and action. We can't take a rocket ship to the future or upload a simulation to replace the reality of the present. The future is built moment-to-moment by humans making plans and choices, or by following the blind inertia of habit and instinct.

A history book like this one provides value by granting the reader access to information that the reader may not have held before. And this book does that quite well. But the mark of an even better book of this sort--one that addresses history, thought, and culture--is that it prompts the reader to want to learn even more about the topic. And Lachman's book does that. He's provided a wide-angle view of the course of Russian history and culture. With the encouragement and direction that Lachman has provided, I'm eager to explore further this terrain with other guides to explore a finer-grained resolution of the images that Lachman has identified, from the beauty of the great Russian writers to the "third way" of the Silver Age thinkers to the tangled-web of influences visible today in the era of Putin and his disruption-restoration. Or to return it to the beginning of this review, I'm encouraged to further seek to answer the riddle, solve the mystery, de-code the enigma, and keep removing the nesting dolls in an attempt to arrive at the essential core--if one can be found. 

*The opening credits of Tinker, Tailor begin to roll at about 2:12 into the video of the first episode. BTW, this is an extraordinarily fine production, very much worth watching. 

**Collingwood's use of the term "re-enact" has caused some commentators consternation. He at times used the term "reconstruct," which I find more felicitous, but the intended impetus remains the same: to get inside the head of historical actors to think and understand what they thought and understood before passing any judgments about them and their actions. 

*** Of course, each of these works comes in video as well as literary format. Anyone living probably knows of the Game of Thrones series. And there are many productions of the various History plays, with the recent BBC production of The Hollow Crown that includes Richard II, Henry IV (Parts 1 & 2), Henry V, and Richard III. But the gem that many may not be aware of is the I, Claudius series from 1976 with a superb cast, that included some (then) young and upcoming actors Derek Jacobi (Claudius), John Hurt (Caligula), and Patrick Stewart (Sejanus). Suetonius for television (with plenty of gore & sex). I'm sure that there are Russian dynastic rivalry plays or operas to match these and similar accounts. 

Part 1: Collingwood on "Yahoos" from his New Leviathan

A treatise on many things, including Yahoos

This is the first of a series wherein Collingwood writes about Yahoos. He borrows the term from Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726). All quotes are from Collingwood's The New Leviathan (1942).

The first dose:

30. 52. Let there be what we will call a Yahoo herd: a community whose members are hardly, if at all, distinguishable in bodily structure from human beings, at any rate to the superficial glance of the observer whose anatomical and physiological knowledge is small; but let them lack the intelligence we are accustomed to expect in human beings. To be precise, let their mental development have been arrested at the point . . . just short of free will.  

30. 53. This herd might have a sort of leader, dominant over the rest in virtue of his strength, his cunning, and the violence of his emotions.  

30. 54. He would in a sense know what he was doing; he would be conscious of the situation in which he was acting, and his actions would be to him second-order objects of consciousness; but they could not be objects of his will, for he would have no will. Purpose would be impossible to him. But he would exercise, though not voluntarily, a certain control over the rest of the herd; biting and beating them or making as if to bite and beat them whenever they did anything he disliked, and so forcing them into the mould of a communal life pleasing to himself. 

Collingwood, R. G.. The New Leviathan. Read Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

Does this remind anyone of any current movements or persons?