083019 Krugman, Trump, The Music Man, Iowa, & Farmers

Professor Harold Hill, a/k/a The Music Man

I have to admit that from the time that our current president became a candidate for president, in lighter moments, I identified him with the figure of "Professor" Harold Hill, a/k/a "The Music Man." The association just popped into my head. Meredith Wilsons's musical about "River City," Iowa was on the big screen when I was young, with Robert Preston in the title role. My mom took me to the (old) Page Theatre to see it. It turns out that contrary, skeptical Iowans* could be bamboozled by a fast-talkin' city-slicker. The good folks of River City were taken-in, but through the redeeming love of "Marian, madame librarian," Hill is reformed, and all ends well.

After three wives and innumerable mistresses and one-night stands, there's been no redemption of Trump. And so many Iowans were bamboozled again in 2016 with no happy ending in sight. (A shout-out to Iowa City and Johnson County for resisting the tide.) In the article below, Paul Krugman details how Iowa (and other) farmers have been fleeced. And while getting fleeced, mocked by the miscreants ("the whine cellar"). It's a sad and disturbing tale. Farming is hard, dangerous work, full of challenges and subject to Nature's whims as well as those of markets and governments. Farmers don't need more problems.

I do question whether Krugman's attribution of motives is accurate, however. PK overlooks that fact that Iowa was 2x carried by Obama, and voted for Al Gore in 2000. There are many Iowa voters (and others around the country) that voted for Obama and then turned around and voted for Trump. This is a turn-around that has perplexed me since the election. It could be we have different voters who turned out in each of those three elections, but that certainly can't account for the switch in the state-wide vote tally. And neither, obviously, can mere brand (party) loyalty explain the results. Most voters, I believe, claim to vote for "the candidate." I surmise that many of those votes that switched from Obama to Trump were protest votes; a desperate "why not?" attitude when Trump's opponent came to be identified with a status quo that has become increasingly difficult for rural and small-town voters. Let's hope for all our sakes that folks wake-up to the reality around us.

*"And we're so by God stubborn/ We could stand touchin' noses/ For a week at a time/ And never see eye-to-eye")

I

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NYTIMES.COM

Opinion | The Frauding of America’s Farmers

Trump’s biggest supporters are his biggest victims.

Has the World Gone Mad? Episode 1

The Pied Piper leading the children to their doom

Reading the paper this morning, one headline struck me as almost insane, causing me shock, dismay, and anger. Sometimes you don't know how to respond, how to name your feelings. The caption read

E.P.A. to Roll Back Regulations on Methane, a Potent Greenhouse Gas

This caption comes hard on the heels of articles about the extreme number of fires in the Amazon. The Brazilian president, Bolinsaro-- a demagogue--reacted with disdain to cries of outrage from around the world. He changed his tune, however, when the Europeans (led by France) threatened to cancel a trade deal with Brazil. These actions--to reduce efforts to quell methane emissions and to promote the destruction of the Amazon's vital rain forest--are suicidally stupid.  

These events, and the many more like them, may seem almost hum-drum given the steady drumbeat of dismaying news that we all experience. But stop and think about it: these decisions are insane--the public policy equivalent of playing Russian roulette with a six-shooter. Are we--are our leaders--crazy? The answer is--at least in part--yes. And we elected them. (Well, sort of; most often in a pseudo-democratic manner, oftentimes in the way of a weighted plebiscite sufficient to provide a patina of democratic legitimacy.  About whom am I thinking? Trump, Boris Johnson (UK), Victor Orban (Hungary), Recep Erdogan (Turkey), Putin (Russia), Duarte (Philippines), Chavez-Maduro (Venezuala). And this is just an off-the-top-of-my-head list. 

Now you should say, of course, we've always had demagogues and dictators. True. But of the autocrats listed above all obtained power in either established or aspiring democracies. In other words, nations with enough of a culture and set of institutions not to have fallen prey to--or continue to follow--the illusions of these demagogues. But men [sic] of this ilk have gained control--even in the U.S. Never have Americans experienced a president so incompetent, ignorant, and disdainful of American values. His lack of any sense of civic duty or shared visions has been obvious since he entered into the public limelight. He doesn't try to hide his narcissistic nihilism. How did he get elected?*

What's going on? 

The answer is no doubt complex and perhaps ultimately unknowable with any certainty. We must anticipate that any explanation tendered will prompt other accounts, or claims that what we think is a real threat is only a mirage.

The human herd is spooked. This is nothing new. History is replete with incidents of mass delusion and social breakdown. Go back and look at medieval history and various millenarian movements in that era. Consider the Terror of the French Revolution, the Taiping Rebellion, the First World War, the Second World War, the Holocaust, the Killing Fields of Cambodia. Alas, I could go on and on. Remember also that the Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany through a legitimate process--just as the scoundrels that I listed above have done. (They throw the window-dressing of democracy and the rule of law out the window at their earliest possible convenience, however.) 

So what explanation might we tender for our current time of malaise? Economic (and now ecological) uncertainty plays a part. Perhaps a sense of foreboding as population demands, the "brave new world" of automation, and the ever-present reality of nukes, cyber warfare, and terrorism take their toll on our collective psyche. Also, the growing inequality in the U.S., especially, with the decline in quality of life among less-educated whites, plays a crucial role. (This group was a solid block that supported Trump.)  

I intend to come back to this topic, and I invite comments and suggestions. I'll also try to identify various trains of thought about this topic. Just for starters, here are a couple of works that I've found insightful: 

Peter Turchin, Ages of Discord: A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History. 

Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present. 

*However, most Americans did not vote for Trump. More voters voted for Clinton. 

Ecology & the Politics of Scarcity Revisited by William Ophuls & A. Stephen Boyan, Jr.

Published in 1992 but still worth the time.

The first question to ask about this book is why anyone would want to read a book that was originally published in in 1977 and then revised in 1992 about topics such as the environment and ecology, about which we've gathered so much new data and written so much in the intervening years.  Haven’t things changed a great deal since then?  Won’t the information contained in this book prove ridiculously out of date?  The answer to these questions is both yes and no, but the gist of the book remains remarkably pertinent to our current situation.  My intention in reading this book was to further mine the insights of its primary author, William Ophuls.  I have already read the five books that Ophuls has published since Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity Revisited (1992), but I’m eager for more.

In this work, which is an updated version of his 1977 original, Ophuls and coauthor A . Stephen Boyan, Jr. continue the original project that Ophuls undertook: to come to terms with the implications of the science of ecology and the environmental degradation that had gained public and political attention in the 1960s and 1970s.  I’m not aware of any other work that so directly addresses the political implications of adopting an ecological mode of thinking and our need to confront our environmental sins.  Ophuls comes to the project with a doctorate in political science from Yale, but he’s done his homework in the science of ecology as well.

The first part of the book addresses the premises of ecological thinking and the current state of our environment.  As Ophuls himself notes in his Afterward to this updated edition, facts and circumstances have both changed and not changed. However, the fundamental dilemmas remain virtually unaltered since 1977 (when his work was first published) and even since the “revisit” of 1992. I  believe that in the 27 years since the publication of this book—although the particulars have changed—the fundamental dilemmas remain and have become starkly apparent.  One benefit of reading Ophuls’s book is that it takes my mind off of the increasingly frightening realities of climate change. It forces me to appreciate that we face a host of other environmental dilemmas that include pressing issues of scarcity and pollution.  And when one thinks systematically about these issues, the number of challenges that we continue to face—no doubt even more compelling than in 1992--leaves me with a sense of foreboding.  Ophuls never glosses over problems or provides comforting bromides or easy solutions.

So the first part of the book remains useful, although particulars are different today than in 1992.  The second part of the book addresses the political implications of ecological scarcity. The political analysis and vision that Ophuls provides are the hallmarks of his work, and these insights make the price of admission (time and money) well worth the expenditure. This book and Requiem for Modern Politics (1997)  provide insights that his later works, Plato’sRevenge (2011), Immoderate Greatness (2012), and Sane Polity (2013), and Apologies to the Grandchildren (2018) don’t address as thoroughly, such as the realities of American politics. The later works explore the need and the possibilities of a new political order, while Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity spends more time on current political realities. (Sadly, those realities remain as real now as they did then—albeit in worse shape.) Thus, even as many of the factual particulars at the beginning of the book are dated, the book is worth reading to receive the benefit of Ophuls’s understanding of American politics and the degree to which our politics depends on an economy of abundance and growth.  As we move toward the 2020 election cycle, we can see that the underlying premise of American political life hasn’t changed, although it is badly frayed by new realities. Candidates must talk about economic growth and expansion—it’s a much easier and comforting sell then talking about the stark realities of climate change and environmental degradation. But if the economic pie can no longer expand (and will likely shrink), what will happen to American politics?  Even vexing national issues, like the role of labor unions, civil rights, and women’s rights were resolved (in some measure) via a tacit understanding that the national economic pie would expand. This frame allowed more groups into the American dream of material abundance without impinging significantly upon those who already hold wealth and power.  But as the decline of the white working-class has continued, we see the politics of fear and desperation coming to the forefront. How can we channel our whole enterprise in a completely new direction?

 In this early work, Ophuls provides the first draft of an alternative politics that he believes the realities of ecological scarcity and limits will impose upon us.  And as we see in his later works, Ophuls draws much of his inspiration and insight from some of the great names in the Western political tradition: Plato, Hobbes, Rousseau, and Burke, and from the American tradition, Jefferson and Thoreau. (He also draws, although to a lesser extent, on the Asian traditions.)  From his references to these thinkers and others, we readily discern that Ophuls’s thinking defies any current popular categories of political thought.  He is at once conservative, liberal, reactionary, and anarchist if one would attempt to classify him. Ophuls’s project is not so much about new political institutions as the need for a whole new political culture and consciousness.  Ophuls uses that Gospel term, “metanoia,” which indicates a change—or conversion—of the heart-mind of a person; to wit, a complete reorientation of values.  Ophuls argues that our entire culture needs to undergo a metanoia that will involve a  new way of experiencing the world ( ecological) and a new way of acting in the world that will replace the dominant paradigms of modernity, including those of upon which our economy and our politics currently operate.  

This new (best case) political order will call upon ways of decision-making that will realize Rousseau’s “the general will” as opposed to “the will of all.” I've been exposed to writers (such as Robert Nisbet) who attribute Rousseau’s “general will” and his injunction that men must be “forced to be free” as the root of hideous modern tyrannies. Thus, these references caused me to pause. But Ophuls never posits a position on the assumption that we humans will become angels--although we’d find ourselves much better off if we learned to curb our appetites. Ophuls’s position, following Rousseau, addresses fundamental issues of game theory that any collective undertaking must resolve to reach some level of success. Given the extreme anti-“collectivist” feeling in the U.S. (and the attendant immiseration of public goods and services that we experience), we realize what a long way we will have to go if we are to achieve the best-case scenario that Ophuls promotes.

For me, going back into this first effort by Ophuls to bring the issues of ecological thinking and environmental realities was well worth the time and effort. It’s not comforting—little that Ophuls writes is reassuring—but it’s good to know the enemy. And through reading Ophuls, we have met the enemy. And it is us.

Collingwood on Spinoza

Words of R.G. Collingwood to contemplate:

'The maxim of Spinoza is neither to condemn nor to deride the feelings and actions of men, but to understand them. It might seem a truism that this rule must be obeyed by all students of human custom and belief; but that is not so. many people who claim to be students of human nature think that by condemning others they are proving their own superior virtue, and in deriding them their own superior wisdom; or rather, they do not think about it at all, but act as if they thought thus, because of a devil inside them that can only be appeased by this self-glorification at the expense of others. Here the professed study of human nature is simply a pretense for gratifying odium humani generis [hatred of the human race]. . . . These rules, so far as they are rules of scientific method, are not mere rules of manners or morals; they are indispensable means to arriving at the truth. . . . [T]he adoption of Spinoza's maxim is not only a point of scientific method, it is a moral discipline for the whole man, for the whole of our civilization. We must learn to face the savage* within us if we are to understand the savage outside us. The savage within us must be not be stamped down out of sight. He too, by the same Spinozistic rule, must be neither be condemned nor derided, but understood. Just as the savages around us, when thus understand, cease to appear as savages and become human beings, courteous and friendly and honourable and worthy of admiration for their virtues and of love for their humanity, so the savage within us, on the same terms, will become no longer a thing of horror but a friend and helper: no savage, but the heart and root of our own civilization."

Spinoza: 'I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, not to hate them, but to understand them.' TRACTATUS THEOLOGICO-POLITICUS (1670).

R. G. Collingwood, THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENCHANTMENT: STUDIES IN FOLKTALES, CULTURAL CRITICISM, & ANTHROPOLOGY, (ed. by Boucher, James, & Smallwood), pp. 184, 185, 186.

*Earlier in his text, Collingwood had derided the use of terms such as "savages,", "primitives," and the like by social scientists as condescending and misleading. Thus, in the current context, Collingwood's use of the term "savage" should be read as an ironic turn that disarms its malignant use by applying it to himself, his contemporaries, and to those whom he would ascribe its misuse.

Lost Knowledge of the Imagination by Gary Lachman

Let me begin my review by sharing some thoughts that I held about imagination before first reading this book.

Imagination is one of those terms, such as freedom or love, that we can’t conclusively define, but which we can’t do without. Imagination, however, seems to have fallen out of favor in comparison to the more widely used contemporary term, “creativity.” Creativity, however, strikes me a much shallower concept. To my mind, creativity denotes more of a surface ingenuity, a clever retelling or reworking of existing schemes, structures, or stories. A typical example of this sense of creativity comes from contemporary public art, which often runs from the whimsical or merely clever (in the American sense) to the disjointed, if not merely dull or ugly. Imagination, on the other hand, exists at a deeper—one might even say archetypal—level. By going deeper, below the surface, it goes beyond the common human trait of reworking the surface of things by recognizing the deep structures of reality and how they may be contemplated and explored. It is from within the depths of the human mind that imagination springs. Thus, my sense of the distinction between creativity and imagination and where I find much of our contemporary infatuation with creativity misses the mark. In times of trouble, in which we certainly live, we need to move beyond creativity into the deep wellsprings of imagination.

It was with the frame of mind described above that I eagerly dove into Gary Lachman’s Lost Knowledge of the Imagination. As I’ve come to expect from Lachman’s books, he’s gone before me to explore and give voice to thoughts that I often held as no more than intuitions. And when someone says something that you’re inclined to think in any event (and if you can overcome the envy in realizes the other’s superior talent and effort), you quickly are taken in by a book or argument, as I was with this book. Lachman entitles his opening chapter “A Different Way of Knowing,” and he had me there. Lachman explores the profound shift in ways of knowing that came to fruition in the Scientific Revolution of the 17^th-century with its emphasis on empirical observations and mathematical-logical thinking that emphasized the role of quantity. This, Lachman writes, was not a slow shift, but a sharp break with tradition, although essential thinkers of the era, such as Pascal, realized that this new method was an addition to older ways of thinking, not a full replacement. Lachman quotes Jacques Barzun (referencing Pascal): “the spirit of geometry ‘works with exact definitions and abstractions in science or mathematics’, while the spirit of finesse ‘works with ideas and perceptions not capable of exact definition’”. Lachman, Gary. Lost Knowledge of the Imagination. Floris Books. Kindle Edition. But not all of Pascal’s contemporaries, nor Barzun’s in our own time, appreciate and realize this distinction. Lachman goes on to explain some of the ramifications of failing to appreciate this distinction:

“The drawback here is that because the lack of definition is rooted in its subjects themselves, and not due to insufficient information or ‘facts’ about them – when will we have all the facts about love or freedom? – those who follow the spirit of finesse find it difficult, if not impossible, to explain how they know what they know. There are no steps 1, 2, and 3; it just hits them and it is obvious, self-evident. We hear a sonata by Beethoven and we know it is beautiful and meaningful; we do not arrive at this knowledge through a series of logical steps. We do not say to ourselves, ‘Well, it has x number of notes in this passage, which means that …’ and so on. But if asked how we know it is beautiful and meaningful, and even worse, if we can prove it, we draw a blank. The spirit of geometry can take us by the hand and lead us from definition, theorem, and axiom to the goal. But the process is mechanical, practically tautological, as each definition is merely another way of stating the same thing (4 is only another way of saying 2 + 2). And it works best with practical, utilitarian things, not with those that have a purchase on our emotional being.” Id.

Lachman goes on to discuss others who’ve arrived at very similar insights, from the 20^th-century German thinker Ernest Junger to Michael Polanyi, Alfred North Whitehead, and the contemporary literary scholar-turned-neuroscientist, Iain McGilchrist. These thinkers—and many others—have described and appreciated the distinctions between these different modes of thought, while much of the broader culture clings to a simplistic emphasis on the abstractness (and resulting barrenness) of the "scientific method.” To be clear, Lachman isn’t rejecting the scientific method or the value of science, only “scientism,” which recognizes the abstractions and conclusions of natural science as the only means of knowledge and arriving at “truth.” From this foundation in the history of Western thought, Lachman proceeds to establish the value of the ways of knowing that have been mostly (although not entirely) lost. He describes his project:

“This book is about this ‘lost’ knowledge of the imagination. Yet, while this may give us a handy phrase under which we can put examples of the other kind of knowing I have been speaking about, it is not immediately clear what we mean by ‘imagination’. Imagination is one of those things which we all know intimately but which we would find difficult to pin down exactly. It is one of those things that, as Whitehead said, are ‘incapable of analysis in terms of factors more far-reaching than themselves’. . .. Memory, self-consciousness, thought, perception: all inform and are informed by imagination and are difficult, if not impossible, to pry apart from it or each other. This should not be surprising. Imagination does not follow the clear axioms and definitions of the spirit of geometry, but the wayward, vague, surprising insights of the spirit of finesse.” Id.

Lachman, having set the terms of his project, moves on to explore a variety of thinkers who have developed and explored insights into this different way of knowing.  For instance, he explores the towering figure of the German Enlightenment and Romanticism, Goethe, and the (underappreciated) 20^th-century British thinker, Owen Barfield. And, I must add, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, about whom Barfield wrote a book-length study. I must pause here because of what I wrote about at the opening of this review about my distinction between “creativity” and “imagination.” As is inevitably the case, someone arrived at 'my' keen insight long before I did—in this case, no mean figure: Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lachman writes, “[T]he distinction that the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge made between fantasy and imagination, with fantasy doing collage work, and imagination creating something that is truly ‘new’. For Coleridge a unicorn or a flying pig is a product of fantasy, of putting together different bits and pieces of our snapshots. True imagination is something else.” Id. Like I said. 

Lachman goes more deeply into Coleridge’s perspective by tying his insight with that of Goethe’s work on plants and Goethe’s imaginative insight about what the first plants must have looked like:

The non-existing plants that Goethe could hypothetically create would not be monsters in the original sense of the word – aberrations of nature – but in perfect keeping with Nature’s designs. This is because Goethe had matched the ‘unknown law’ in the outer world, Nature, with the ‘unknown law’ in his inner one, his imagination. As I mentioned, these ‘unknown laws’ are what Coleridge called ‘facts of mind’, necessities of the imagination, that must be met in order for it to be something more than a ‘madman’s cornerstone’. Failing this, imagination sinks to being merely what Coleridge called ‘fancy’, which is nothing more than ‘a mode of Memory’, a way of re-arranging elements obtained through the senses (‘flying pigs’), which is all the ‘blank slate’ school of psychology will allow us. Or worse, it becomes a distortion of reality, Paracelsus’s ‘madman’s cornerstone’ or the kinds of images being produced by much of modern art that Barfield found indicative of a spiritual bankruptcy and which, with something like Yeats’ warning in mind, he feared could eventually produce a ‘fantastically hideous world’. Id.

Do we live in a “fantastically hideous world”? As, no doubt, the world has always been, it’s a mixed lot. But much of what passes for imagination today we can more accurately describe as (at its best) mere creativity or fancy, and at its worst, a nightmarish parody of reality, where fake and real become interchangeable and indistinct. Lachman discusses (and greatly appreciates) the work of the 20^th-century British poet and essayist Kathleen Raine, and in exploring her work in “the Tradition.” He writes

Decades before its popularity, Raine predicted the rise of ‘reality TV’, pointing out that what is on the screen is often no different from the lives of those watching it. ‘Viewers and viewed’, she observed, ‘could change places and nothing would be altered’. If a work of imagination had once been a ‘magic glass in which we discover that nature to which actuality is barely an approximation’, it had become in our time a kind of brightly lit bathroom mirror, in which all the blemishes and wrinkles of ‘real life’ were magnified a hundredfold. Id.

I can only add that in the U.S., in the era of the reality-TV president, we need more from our imaginations that ever.

I haven’t addressed many other themes and thinkers explored in this wonderful work. “Imagination” is one of those significant terms that one could explore almost endlessly (and I hope to explore the topic further). There are many works and thinkers to reference in such a project. But it’s hard to—imagine?—a better book with which to begin such a quest. In fact, there is so much that Lachman covers in this (relatively) short work that I’ve not mentioned that I feel guilty leaving so much out, but the best way to alleviate my shortcoming (my guilt is my own stuff) is the read this outstanding work.

A Brief Postscript:

I read this book immediately on its release in October 2017, but because of some other demands on my time I set aside writing a review and didn’t get back to it when it was fresh enough in my mind to attempt to do it some justice. Just don’t let the tardiness of my review belie my enthusiasm for it. (My tardiness did provide me a good excuse for a complete second reading.)  Also, I blame Lachman himself (facetiously) for my delay in writing this review because he referenced a review on his blog that was comprehensive and excellent. When I read that review (here), I knew I couldn’t improve upon it. But now with more time and an understanding that writing this review (as with most) was impelled by my need to edify myself as much as by my hope to edify others. So, I throw it out there.