Oak Boat: I want to come back to that line you quoted earlier from the present-day American essayist Wesley Yang: “that our culture feeds off the plight of the poor in spirit in order to create new dependencies.” We might say: Let’s let Wes Yang meet Nicky Mach. And Wes, meet Nicky Mach, etcetera.[i]
Newt Monk: And who might you mean when you say “Nicky Mach?” Him I know not. (At least, I don’t think I do.)
Oak Boat: Well, Nicky Mach … I mean, you do know, it’s simple shorthand for Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527). (Yes, yes, that Machiavelli.) Ole Nicky, despite the popular trash of a myth that continues, even in 2024, to ostracize him as one of the meanest, most cynical humans being to have ever walked the earth, not unlike Caine in Kung Fu, Mr. Machiavelli was actually, believe it or not, quite human and even quite humane.
Newt Monk: Yeah, I might just believe it.
Oak Boat: So, in his book of Discourses, ole Nicky Mach expressing a fundamental political maxim where, essentially, for any and all human civilizations, hunger and poverty mark (and always mark) the two fundamental drives behind all laws and politics. In other words, all statutes, precedents, prohibitions, rule-making, and other public policies, along with all the methods and motivations behind their supposéd achievements, remain rooted in the prevention, restraint, treatment, acceptance (as well as denial) of a civilization’s risk against succumbing to either/or (or perhaps, “both/and’) widespread hunger and generational impoverishment.[ii]
Newt Monk: I sort of see what you’re saying Machiavelli once said. (Sort of). I don’t know if things are quite as absolute and formulaic as you and or ole Nicky Mach say they are. But I grant that general threats like widespread hunger, crop blight, disease, famine, and trade embargos, as well as economic depression and/or the decay of affluence across entire classes—yes, these things have been, and will continue to be, at the root of most political (dis)agreements and conflicts.
Oak Boat: Yeah, you’re following me correctly. What you’re saying is like what a pair of recent translators of Machiavelli’s Discourses, Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov, have suggested: that in that book Machiavelli “tries to show that to understand political situations correctly, one must not listen to the intent of the words people use but rather look at the necessities they face.”[iii]
Newt Monk: Ah yes, I’m starting to see the point. Just as food prices and retirement funds concern much of today’s day-to-day politics––and by “our” I include fellow followers like myself, who are fellow non-leaders of our communities––so too did the hopes (and despairs) of farmers (which includes ranching and fishing) and the general graft of those farmers’ bankers drive the politics of Nicky Mach’s world way back in the day.
Oak Boat: Yeah.
Newt Monk: And these twin drives that beat the heart of all the politics occurred in all the centuries before Nicky Mach ever dreamed of putting his own pen to paper?
Oak Boat: Yeah, that’s why you see today, writers like Yang observing how the leaders who govern us profit off the “plight of the poor in spirit.” You see how that kind of plight continues to constitute the bare essentials to these oh-so-lovely latter-day politics we fellow glitched-out Americans seem to find ourselves stuck in as we grumble toward the fall of 2024. [iv]
Newt Monk: So, ole Nicky Mach, meanwhile, offers in his Discourses no more thantwo reasons for why humans being, so long as they remain uncorrupted, desire freedom?
Oak Boat: Yeah, but do you understand the rationales for why he limited himself to just those two reasons? Do you see the two groups of humans being Nicky Mach divides, a division obvious to all individuals affected by political life for all situations?
Newt Monk: I would guess that his first reason, or the first group involves and includes only a slender few—a perpetual, numerical minority––a few who, for whatever reason, strongly desire the freedom to command others.
Oak Boat: Yeah, those are the ones who want to be free only to make others unfree!
Newt Monk: On the other hand, for the majority of a civilization’s citizens—which may even include mildly meek and moldy me!––they instead deeply yearn for an authentic freedom simply so that they––and that we!––may find a way to pay our overdue bills, to find a few minutes to prune a few overgrown vines and perhaps water some overlooked patio cacti as an overall reflection of how we have found a way to “live secure.”[v]
Oak Boat: Yeah, but often our leaders fail in their freedom to let us (their followers) freely live our lives securely. It happens all the time in all kinds of places.
Newt Monk: So it seems to go. So it seems.
Oak Boat: More like suck it seems to go, I’d say. Suck it seems. So it seems. I mean, that happened in the jim crow American South a century ago, where, instead of secure living, the political system offered to its followers through the leadership of its leaders, it instead, to quote Isabel Wilkerson from her study The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (2010): “mostly fear and dependence—and hatred of that dependence—on both sides,” both the leaders and followers who somehow lived in that South.[vi]
Newt Monk: Yeah, but as American political philosopher Sharon Krause has pointed out––in Liberalism with Honor (2002)––even in our own modern times, a growing number of members of the nation’s non-leadership class feel a certain sense of powerlessness with what the present has decided to present to them. Presently in 2024, the present seeks to present to we non-leaders a subtle sense of powerless confinement. Krause’s examples highlight how––
the special ‘bills of rights’ that have proliferated in recent years (patients’, victims’, parents’, children’s, now even air travelers’) speak more toa feeling of powerlessness and the need for protection from forces beyond one’s control than to new freedoms. [vii]
Oak Boat: Yet it’s not just academic types who’ve lately noticed, and have later written about, the seemingly ticking temporarily behind an apparent, ever-depleting expiration date for American rights and freedoms. And it’s not just me or you. Would you believe that occasional, prominent personalities who (at least momentarily) make up our popular culture media have sometimes spotted this, sometimes even spoken about it as well?
Newt Monk: I would believe you, and I will believe you, because I believe that you are the one who most wants to be believed. (And I even believe that you mostly believe the beliefs I just stated.)
Oak Boat: So you should then believe me when I take some (modestly popular?) media figure, like Stoya, for example. She’s a retired adult film actress who has shifted her endeavors to become quite an impressive essayist and cultural observer––like when she differentiates modern American notions of empowerment from their notions of entitlement. According to Stoya, when these two concepts are set side by side—or, at least when they are set so in twenty-first century America––the idea of being “empowered feels as though that power,” whether it’s political, cultural, or spiritual sort of power, “can be revoked according to someone else’s whim.” But on the other hand, the word “entitled” tends to mean, at least for Stoya, that “it is far easier to believe that that power is actually mine.”[viii]
Newt Monk: To her intriguing differentiation I might add a blunt line once given by the great comedian and thinker George Carlin when he said: “The powerful keep the power. That’s why they’re called the powerful.[ix]
Oak Boat: “So it goes,” said some sad saint from long ago. “So it goes.”[x]
NOTES
[i] Wesley Yang, The Souls of Yellow Folk, (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018), p. 25.
[ii] Machiavelli contends: “It is said that hunger and poverty make men industrious, and the laws make them good. Where a thing works well on its own without the law, the law is not necessary; but when some good custom is lacking, at once the law is necessary.” Thus, for Machiavelli: “There is greater virtue to be seen where choice has less authority.” See: Niccolò Machiavelli, Discorsi Sopra la Prima Deca di Tito Livio in Discourses on The First Ten Books of Titus Livius, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov, (University of Chicago Press, 1996), (I, iii), p. 15 (1st quotation); (I, i), p. 8 (2nd quotation).
[iii] Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov, “Introduction” to Machiavelli’s Discourses on The First Ten Books of Titus Livius, trans. Mansfield and Tarcov, (University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. xxxiii.
[v] On the point that they want to be free only to make others unfree, see Edmund Burke’s various warnings:
The effect of liberty to individuals is, that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do….
But liberty, when men act in bodies, is power. Considerate people, before they declare themselves, will observe the use which is made of power,—and particularly of so trying a thing as new power in new persons, of whose principles, tempers, and dispositions they have little or no experience, and in situations where those who appear the most stirring in the scene may possibly not be the real movers. (242)
And:
In all [political] bodies, those who will lead must also, in a considerable degree, follow. They must conform their propositions to the taste, talent, and disposition of those whom they wish to conduct: therefore, if an assembly is viciously or feebly composed in a very great part of it, nothing … will prevent the men of talents disseminated through it from becoming only the expert instruments of absurd projects….
In this political traffic, the leaders will be obliged to bow to the ignorance of their followers, and the followers to become subservient to the worst designs of their leaders. (284–85)
Burke goes on to say that “To secure any degree of sobriety in the propositions made by the leaders in any public assembly, they,” that is, the leaders “ought to respect, in some degree perhaps to fear, those whom they conduct”: their followers. But, continues Burke, “to be led any otherwise than blindly, the followers must be qualified, if not for actors, at least for judges; they must also be judges of natural weight and authority.” See: Edmund Burke, Reflections of the Revolution in France (1791) in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, (12 vols.; London: John C. Nimmo, 1887), III, pp. 242, 284–85; Machiavelli, Discourses, (I, xvi), p. 46.
[vi] Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, (New York: Random House/Vintage Books, 2010), p. 31.
[vii] Sharon Krause, Liberalism with Honor, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002), p. x.
[viii] Stoya, Philosophy, Pussycats, & Porn, (Los Angeles: Not a Cult, 2018), pp. 147–48.
[ix] George Carlin, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? (New York: Hyperion, 2004), p. 106.
[x] Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five, (New York: Dell, 1969; 1971).
Newt Monk: Of course, I would prefer no leadership, a civil way to live that involved no coaches, no captains, no jefes…. No bosses, no bullies, no bureaucrats and instead just jacks and jennies grazing green grass aplenty. I suppose it’s just a sentimental nostalgia for the imaginary anarchy of Arcadia and all that. If only a way of life could be found that involved no judges, no jailers … and no jerks!
Oak Boat: If only!
Newt Monk: Indeed. Instead I am stuck being an ass from one of Aesop’s old fables.
Oak Boat: How do you mean:
Newt Monk: Aesop of Egypt, the storyteller whom legend says was once a slave, has a fable that goes like this:
At the unexpected sound of an enemy approaching, an old man was stricken with terror and tried to persuade his donkey to run away so that he wouldn’t be captured. The donkey obstinately asked the old man, ‘tell me, do you suppose the victor will make me carry two pack saddles instead of one?’
The old man said he did not think so.
‘I rest my case,’ concluded the donkey. ‘What difference does it make who my master is, if I always carry one saddle at a time?’ [i]
Newt Monk: What strikes me is that how the worker (the ass) asks worthwhile questions, and even knows some of the correct answers to those questions. But that donkey’s master can only cower amid his own ignorance.
Oak Boat: Pitiful.
Newt Monk: Pretty plenty pitiful indeed. But what really strikes me as a reader-listener of this fable is my own self-awareness.
Oak Boat: How so?
Newt Monk: I am aware (and am aware that I am aware) that I am no master (of any sort) as found in the fable. I’d wager instead that I am akin to something between a man and an ass. Because I don’t sympathize with the old man’s ignorance the way I do with the ass’s indifference, because what drives that indifference is a human-all-too-human cry for freedom. I’d wager that’s why Caesar once observed that “all men naturally long for liberty and despise a state of servitude.” Caesar realized that because he too was once a slave.[ii]
Oak Boat: Still, no team can win all its games without a coach. All politics involves the question of who will rule?
Newt Monk: Yep. I’m afraid something to the effect of what you just said has already been said by every sagacious student of humans being from ancient Plato to the late-twentieth-century political philosopher Karl Popper (1902–1994) to the early-twenty-first-century British hip-hop artist, author, and social critic and advocate: Akala.
Oak Boat: How so?
Newt Monk: Plato’s formulation of all human politics boils down to: “the wise shall lead and rule, and the ignorant shall follow,” and “slaves should be subject to the control of their masters.” As a deep reader, and severe critic, of Plato’s ideas concerning governance, Popper has explained that, back in the days of old Athens, “Plato saw the fundamental problem of politics in the question: Who shall rule the state?” while these days, “modern writers … believe that the main problem is: Who should dictate? The capitalists or the workers?”[iii]
Oak Boat: Well, who do you think should, bucko?
Newt Monk: I said earlier: I’m no one’s master. I. Am. No. Leader. I am, therefore, someone who’s “for the workers,” of course. Thus the “most fundamental problem of all politics” is for Popper, “the control of the controller, of the dangerous accumulation of power represented in the state.”[iv] However….
Oak Boat: However! How about hownever, huh? How many “howevers” do we have to have here, bucko? Don’t you know it’s hot out here in the summertime?
Newt Monk: (ignoring him) And despite this seemingly fundamental question of “Who shall rule the state?” according to Sir Popper, most garden-variety Marxists residing in the free West during the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries “never realized the full significance of democracy as the only known means to achieve this control.” But I digress (I guess?) ….[v]
Oak Boat: I do not deny that you indeed did suggest: that you did digress.
Newt Monk: Well, I didn’t mean to, because I’m not really that interested in the Marxism stuff. I’m more interested in how and why Popper omits to mention throughout his magnus opus: The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) ….
Oak Boat: Ulf, that’s a big book! (But I did kind of like it.)
Newt Monk: No doubt. And, it’s not only big, but heavily (and occasionally highhandedly) critical of Plato’s teachings so that Popper essentially blames Plato for encouraging, promoting most of the totalitarian forms of government that have emerged in the West during the last two millennia.
Oak Boat: That’s a long stretch time there, bucko. Especially for blaming somebody for something, even if that somebody is Plato, and that something is totalitarianism.
Newt Monk: Yeah, a mighty long stretch of time, spanning not only within breathe of Plato’s own Ancient Athens, but extending down through the ages—all the way down to the fall of the final Reich; down to the slow decay of all-things-Soviet; then down to Balkans in 1990s; alongside the Bath Party of Iraq; down through the ages to twenty-first-century America and her domestic infestation of spliner faction militia movements all infected by messianic “identity” ideologies—they’re all totally totalitarian, dude!––though only partially the conceptual progeny sired by Old Man Plato (whom they will never call their “daddy”).
Oak Boat: Totally.
Newt Monk; But while Popper is busy pointing his finger at Plato, blaming the Athenian philosopher for much of the mess that various totalitarian ambitions of the past two thousand years of history have polluted and pock-marked across large portions of the Occidental side to Gaia’s bosom….
Oak Boat: The Occidental side of Gaia’s bosom? Oh, you mean the geopolitical teat we affectionally call “the West?”
Newt Monk: Yeah sure. But I say Sir Popper might also have had the courtesy to have reminded his readers that, amid all that critiquing of Plato as the prime source of totalitarianism, Plato had himself once been a slave—yes, a slave––not unlike Caesar, and not unlike Aesop.[vi]
Oak Boat: You’re saying that if we readers would consider (and dig into) Plato’s past enslavement a little more closely, it might well aid us in our attempt to better understand why the prescription an elderly Plato later dispenses at Laws (690B)––there where he formulates who should (and should not) be leaders as well as who should (and should not) be their followers in his (the author’s!) hypothetical city––seems so severe?
Newt Monk: Yeah, or at least, seems so “severe” to us so-called “moderns,” yeah.
Newt Monk: Basically.
Oak Boat: You’ve reminded me of a passage from a little book by an American philologist Alexander Welsh (1933–2018). It’s called What is Honor? A Question of Moral Imperatives (2008), and in it Welsh discusses the work of Jamaican-American sociologist Orlando Patterson, particularly Patterson’s studies into the historical origins of the concept of the Western idea of “freedom.” Summing up some of Patterson’s theories, Welsh writes:
Both Athenian democracy and the Roman republic derived their notion of free independent citizens from the condition of their opposites, the slaves who lived in their midst. The presence of slaves makes it all the more attractive to identify with a group of the citizens.[vii]
Newt Monk: Right, and if you’ve been a slave before, like Plato supposedly was––we’ll never really know for sure––you might sincerely find (as well as strongly feel) that being a citizen is rather “more attractive” than subservience.
Oak Boat: Certainly (I suppose).
Newt Monk: And while slavery remains, with the exception of our nation’s incarceration industrial complex, abolished throughout these United States of 2024, one of our country’s contemporary essayists, Wesley Yang, has I think, quite aptly articulated how our present political situations contain close parallels to the greater Greco-Roman slave situation(s) of the ancient past. Indeed, our present political situations may even project a distinct set of shadows to crawl across the general surface of history.
Oak Boat: How so?
Newt Monk: Because, at least from Yang’s perspective as a Gen X (or Y) American, “You could … say that our culture feeds off the plight of the poor in spirit in order to create new dependencies.”[viii]
Oak Boat: Ouch! If that’s the truth, it certainly does hurt.
Newt Monk: I’m sorry if it does. Along the same lines of the way ancient slaves were sorted from ancient citizens is the way we moderns partition all of our leaders away from us (their own followers) in day-to-day life! It is along these lines that British author, intellectual, and hip-hop artist Akala, in his book Natives: Race & Class in the Ruins of Empire (2018), questions how much “self-segregation is caused by the seemingly natural human appetite for tribalism, and how much is due to the social processes that shape a shared identity?”[ix]
Oak Boat: Hmm. While it’s, admittedly, quite a ways to stretch oneself across the Atlantic, I feel Akala’s point in regard to Great Britain partially overlaps with some of what Pulitzer Prize winner (and, for us, fellow Austinite) Lawrence Wright was getting at in his cultural survey God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State (2018). I particularly sense some overlap when Wright notes how “Texas enjoys the singular blessing that every distinct culture must have: a sense of its own apartness. “[x]
[i] Aesop, Fables, trans. Laura Gibbs, (New York, Oxford UP, 2002, 2008), no. 11, (Phaedrus 1.15 = Perry 476), p. 9.
[ii] Though Caesar was once a slave, his translator Carolyn Hammond reminds readers that “Caesar figures in the historical record as both destroyer of the Republic and founder of the Empire,” (“Introduction,” p. xii). The founders of the Roman Republic, Romulus and Remus, are said to have also suffered as slaves in their younger days. See: Gaius Julius Caesar, Commentarii de Bello Gallico (The Gallic War), trans. Carolyn Hammond, (New York: Oxford UP, 1996), (III, x), p. 59 (quotation); Livy, Ab Urbe Condita Libri (Books from the Foundation of the City) in The Rise of Rome, Books 1–5, trans. T. J. Luce, (New York: Oxford UP, 1998), (I, v–vii), pp. 9–12; Plutarch, Βίοι Παράλληλοι (Parallel Lives), trans. Bernadotte Perrin, (11 vols.; Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP; London, William Heinemann Ltd, 1919), Vol. I, “Theseus and Romulus,” (IV, i–ii), Vol. VII, “Julius Caesar,” (I, iv–II, iv).
[iii] Plato, Νόμοι (Laws), trans. Trevor J. Saunders, (New York: Penguin, 1970, 2004), (690B), p. 95; Karl Popper, “The Paradoxes of Sovereignty,” (1945) in Popper Selections, ed. David Miller, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1985), pp, 319, 320.
[iv] Popper, “Marx’s Theory of the State,” (1945) in Popper Selections, p. 335.
[v] Popper, “Marx’s Theory of the State,” (1945) in Popper Selections, p. 335.
[vi] Sonja Anderson, “This Newly Deciphered Papyrus Scroll Reveals the Location of Plato’s Grave,” Smithsonian Magazine, May 1, 2024; Diogenes Laertius, Βίοι καὶ γνῶμαι τῶν ἐν φιλοσοφίᾳ εὐδοκιμησάντων (Lives of Eminent Philosophers), trans. R.D. Hicks, (2 vols.; Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1925, 1972), Vol. I, “Plato,” (III, xviii–xix).
[vii] Alexander Welsh, What is Honor? A Question of Moral Imperatives, (New Haven, CN: Yale UP, 2008), pp. 23–24.
[viii] Wesley Yang, The Souls of Yellow Folk, (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018), p. 25.
[ix] Akala, Natives: Race & Class in the Ruins of Empire, (London: Two Roads, 2018), p. 194; Orlando Patterson, Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, (New York: Basic Books, 1991), pp. 17–18, 42–43, 135.
[x] Likewise, former Secretary of Defense (as well as former Director of CIA), Robert Gates was informed upon his arrival to be the 22nd President of Texas A&M University, in Aggieland (and elsewhere): “If you’re on the outside looking in, you can’t understand it. If you’re on the inside looking out, you can’t explain it.” See: Robert Gates, A Passion for Leadership: Lessons on Change and Reform from Fifty Years of Public Service, (New York: Knopf, 2015), p. 17; Lawrence Wright, God Save Texas; A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State, (New York: Knopf, 2018), p. 89.
Oak Boat: So why do we need this crap? Well, according to Dewitt T. Stame’s introduction to the Proverbs or Adages of Erasmus, proverbs and maxims (and maybe adyanta) are useful in four ways:
(1) to promote the understanding of philosophy, (2) to strengthen argument, (3) to add ornament and gracefulness in speech and writing, and (4) to clarify the meaning of some of the best authors.
And Stame also warns: “Erasmus cautions, however, that proverbs serve not as food but as condiments. They are not to be employed to weariness but for gracefulness.” [1]
Newt Monk: The world has too many condiments these days; it’s choice anxiety that will bring us asunder.
Oak Boat: Well, it’s always a good idea to remember that tent stakes are not condiments.
Newt Monk: Welp. And after Erasmus came Montesquieu:
With regard to mores, much is to be gained by keeping the old customs. Since corrupt peoples rarely do great things and have established few societies, founded few towns, and given few laws; and since, on the contrary, those with simple and austere mores have made most establishments, recalling men to the old maxims usually returns them to virtue. [2]
Oak Boat: Welp. And after Montesquieu came Rousseau (echoing ancient Solon):
The more you multiply laws, the more you cause them to be despised: and all the overseers you institute are nothing but new lawbreakers bound either to share [their bounty] with the old ones, or to do their plundering on their own. [3]
Newt Monk: Welp. And before them all was Emperor Aurelius, telling us, and telling himself, that: “You will never be remarkable for quick-wittedness.” [4]
Oak Boat: Welp. And before Aurelius came Confucius, telling us, and telling himself, that: “The superior man wishes to be slow in his speech and earnest in his conduct.”[5]
Newt Monk: Welp. And before Confucius came the end of the Third Age, where in the Red Book of Westmarch readers of this age are told that what we want to call a maxim (but can’t), and that thing that might be something between a catena and an adyanta, might once have been called a riddle. For:
In one thing you have not changed, dear friend,’ said Aragorn: ‘you still speak in riddles.’
‘What? In riddles?’ said Gandalf. ‘No! For I was talking aloud to myself. A habit of the old: they choose the wisest person present to speak to; the long explanations needed by the young are wearying.’ He laughed, but the sound now seemed warm and kindly as a gleam of sunshine.[6]
NOTES
[1] Dewitt T. Starnes, “Introduction,” Proverbs or Adages by Desiderius Erasmus Gathered Out of the Chiliades and Englished (1569) by Richard Taverner, (Gainesville, FL: Scholars Facsimile & Reprints, 1956), pp. viii, x.
[2] Baron de la Brède et de Montesquieu, De l’esprit des Loix (The Spirit of the Laws) (1748), trans. and eds. Anne Cohler, Basia C. Miller and Harold S. Stone, (Cambridge UP, 1989), (V, 7), p. 49.
[3] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur l’oeconomie politique (Discourse on Political Economy) (1755) in Rousseau: The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. and trans. Victor Gourevitch, (Cambridge UP, 1997, 2003), p. 14.
[4] Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, trans. Maxwell Staniforth, (New York: Penguin, 1962), (V, v).
[5] 孔子 Kong Fuzi (Confucius), 論語 (Analects) in The Complete Confucius, (ed.) Nicholas Tamblyn, trans. Tamblyn (?), (Melbourne: Golding Books, 2016), (IV), p. 11.
[6] J. R. R. Tolkien, “The White Rider,” The Two Towers in The Lord of the Rings, (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1954–55; 50th Anniversary Edition, 2004), (III, v), p. 496.
Newt Monk: Thus, do not listen to what I say or seem to say, but try to get a glimpse of what I say I saw in some book written by either Boethius or Machiavelli from long ago, particularly in regard to contemporary politics.[1] In those books I once found what used to be called “maxims” or “rules of thumb,” though better metaphors might now be needed. I therefore sometimes think of them as seeds, as pods, as starting points, as springboards, as tent stakes, as prefabricated political truths, as carbon-composite cookie-cutter constants, as givens, as groundings, as grounds keeping, hence the term “tent stakes” I keep returning to.
Oak Boat: Right, the important thing is that these things-once-called-maxims are not ends in themselves but means (methods, applications) to help scoot one along toward some distant end that will likely never actually be reached but, nonetheless, as an end personified, stares down and scowls at the stooped traveler across her whole journey.
Newt Monk: And as I can’t prove that any of my findings from Boethius and Machiavelli are in common use (particularly in central Texas), I must follow R. B. Y. Scott’s introduction to his 1965 translation of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes in The Anchor Bible: Vol. XVIII to say that what I found were not maxims but artifacts, like finding arrowheads in a field:
Strictly speaking, an epigram, an aphorism, or a maxim does not [p. 4] qualify as proverbial unless it has passed into common use. An epigram like Lord John Russell’s is a perceptive observation wittily expressed, but no one would quote it unless he were discussing the present subject. An aphorism like “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” is philosophical in tone and lacks the common touch. A maxim is an axiom or rule of conduct which may or may not gain widespread acceptance, such as “Knowledge is power.” The homeliness of the truth expressed and the simplicity, conciseness, and picturesqueness of its expression characterize the anonymous familiar popular saying. “Dead men tell no tales.” [“]A new broom sweeps clean.” “Chickens come home to roost.”[2]
Oak Boat: So you won’t call them maxims, these words, observations by dead authors. Rhetorically, one could say what you want is somewhat equal to eidolopoeia: presenting a dead person as speaking, or assigning words to the dead. Yet what you want is also somewhat equal to ethopoeia: putting oneself in the place of another to then understand, express that person’s feelings better.[3]
Newt Monk: Yes, this whittling down of terms, of finding which one is the sharpest, does help. I think what I found in Boethius and Machiavelli sometimes involves the usage of a kind of catena, which Old Oxford has defined as “a chronological series of extracts to prove the existence of a continuous tradition on some point of doctrine.” Plus, the idea of a literary catena was once envisioned by the great bookman Andrew Lang as being “a golden chain of bibliophiles,” that is, as in a chain of quotations from the best books on the best topics found by the best readers, the best lovers of books, etcetera.[4]
Oak Boat: So you won’t call them maxims––these words, observations by dead authors––but you might call them catenas…. Hmm. Rhetorically, one would say that what you ask for sometimes involves epicrisis: the quoting of a passage followed by commenting on it. Still, what you ask for appears to be more than mere antithesis: the attempt to conjoin contrasting ideas.[5]
Newt Monk: Indeed, I think at the end of the day I can only call this thing an adynata—a term that in medieval rhetoric meant something akin to stringing together impossibilities, as an attempted confession that all words eventually fail us. And so calling them “tent stakes” is as good a vivid metaphor for the abstract term adynata as any other I suppose.[6]
A man is a philosopher of genius only when he succeeds in transmuting the primitive and merely natural vision into an abstract idea belonging to the common stock of consciousness. This achievement, and this alone, constitutes his personal value, for which he may take credit without necessarily succumbing to inflation….
To the philosopher as well this vision comes as so much increment, and is simply a part of the common property of mankind, in which, in principle, everyone has a share.
(Die Beziehungen zwischen dem Ich und dem Unbewessten,(Zurich: Rascher Verlag, 1928), trans. by R. F. C. Hull as “Relations between ego and unconscious,” (1928) in The Jung Reader, ed. David Tacey, (New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 105)
And let me add from Walter Kaufmann:
Another question remains which in some cases may be most important of all: What did the author see? The answers to such questions as, for example, what concrete instances he had in mind and against what view he aimed his proposition, do not necessarily solve this central problem, though they are relevant and important. Nor is the difference between what an author saw and said necessarily reducible to the difference between what he meant and what his proposition means. What he meant to say may well have been as wrong as his proposition, and nevertheless he may have seen something important.
(Critique of Religion and Philosophy, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1958), pp. 72–73)
[2] R. B. Y. Scott, “General Introduction,” The Anchor Bible: Vol. XVIII Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, (New York: Doubleday, 1965), pp. 3–4.
[3] See Richard A. Lanham (ed.), A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms: Second Edition, (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1991).
[4] Andrew Lang, “Bibliomania in France,” Books and Bookmen, (London: Longman, Green, and Co; Second Edition, 1887), p. 105.
[5] Lanham, Handlist of Rhetorical Terms: Second Edition.
[6] Lanham, Handlist of Rhetorical Terms: Second Edition.
Chapter 0.0 Toward Political Riddles (Rather Than Maxims)?
0.1
Oak Boat: I remember you told me how one night in April 2016 your hosts in Rome took you on an after-dinner drive across La Roma, how the vehicle you rode in passed by the Vatican, passed the Colosseum––passed the Bocca della Verità (“Mouth of Truth”), which is that stone orifice into which Audrey Hepburn’s hand once slipped at the behest of Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday (1953)–– then you said your ride passed a well-lit mansion that the driver said was owned by billionaire ex-prime minister Berlusconi (famous for his “bunga bunga”parties).
Newt Monk: Yes, with our bellies full of pizza from one of our host’s favorite restaurants nestled in the non-tourist part of the Eternal City, we were afterward shown the city sites. And, as they drove us around and pointed at the various ancient stonework as seen under modern light fixtures, our Italian hosts picked our brains about American politics:
“Would it be Trump or Hillary?” (“Hillary, of course!”)
“What is your opinion about all these school shootings?” (“It’s a sort of pornography that the gun nuts enjoy indulging in.”)
There may’ve been other questions, better answers, but I don’t remember, except to make a note to myself to reread Boethius and Machiavelli once we got back home.
Oak Boat: Why?
Newt Monk: It just seemed (at the time at least) like a practical thing to do, being a participating citizen of the American democratic experiment. I’d read them before, found some rules of thumb that seemed (at the time) wise on the surface, noteworthy at first glance, possibly valuable for pondering, bothering to brood on later, in other words, I took notes while reading them.
Oak Boat: Oh yes. And now that you’ve pondered and brooded and done all that?
Newt Monk: It may be time to say goodbye to all that and now unlearn whatever it was I think I might’ve once learned.
Oak Boat: Is it that late in the day already?
Newt Monk: I’m afraid so. For the things we think we learn too often turn out to be completely separate and disassociated from whatever it is we’ve actually learned and apprehended and put into practice without thinking about it.
Oak Boat: “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.” [1]
Newt Monk: Yes, and I think it’s time I unlearned everything. It’s time for me to pour out that knowledge onto the ground, in a kenosis-kind-of-way,[2] I guess. Let’s let it evaporate (and thus we won’t let it ever poison Old Isaac’s well). Let it never reach the nether-aquifer we tramp on all the days of our lives.
Oak Boat: Yeah, pour it out, get it out of your system, like the character of Rosalind in Shakespeare:
I prithee tell me who is it quickly, and speak apace. I would thou could’st stammer, that thou mightst pour this conceal’d man out of thy mouth, as wine comes out of narrow-mouth’d bottle––either too much at once or none at all. I prithee take the cork out of thy mouth that I may drink thy tidings.[3]
Newt Monk: Before you now, Oak Boat, take I this oath, full of flowerily language, over-laden with pollen, overgrown with unpruned polyps:
The Oath
Let me fast forthwith and abstain ever more from indulging in the emotionalism that forever accompanies the consumption of:
any crumb (whether fresh or stale) of political wisdom,
any and all strategies for voting,
any philosophies of leadership (whose names, brands, and public relation campaigns merely disguise prescriptions of followership),
any more damned electoral divination—particularly that variety of divination as performed by jingo-journalists and soothsaying commentators and self-appointed experts in the name of their holy culture war (when cheap and simple Rorschach tests made of used sheets of toilet paper fished out of the pipelines of Shawshank Prison would better serve society).
Oak Boat: Truly you have said a mouthful.
Newt Monk: And though the words of that oath may bind me to their meaning, I also find freedom—a fresh kind of freedom—in recognizing, as one of the consequences of having taken the above oath, that philosophy, particularly political philosophy, can never coerce, but only point in some direction. It cannot unwillingly drag you down the rabbit hole (or Hobbit hole, or badger burrow, or through snake-filled tombs of prairie dog towns). As Iain McGilchrist has explained in The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World (2021):
With the best will in the world, on both sides, I can’t make you see what I experience as the truth. I can never convince you of a point of view unless you already, at some level, get it. As Friedrich Waismann [a writer whom both I Newt Monk and you, Oak Boat, know not a jot] put it,
We cannot constrain anyone who is unwilling to follow the new direction of a question; we can only extend the field of vision of the asker, loosen his prejudices, guide his gaze in a new direction: but all this can be achieved only with his consent. [How I See Philosophy, (Macmillan, 1968), p. 20).] [4]
Oak Boat:Yes, you have to content yourself with not being able to see the “whatever-it-is,” as McGilchrist calls it, that someone else sees, even if they think they saw it in something so quaint as an old book:
If I can’t see the moon, that doesn’t mean it stops being there for others. If we are all tuned in to the same whatever-it-is—and I believe it makes no sense to assert we are not—something very like what I can’t see is probably being seen by others, and ultimately that will affect me. It is perfectly possible to be deceived about, or to be in denial about, an aspect of whatever-it-is. [5]
[1] J. R. R. Tolkien, “The Shadow of the Past,” The Fellowship of the Ring in The Lord of the Rings, (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1954–55; 50th Anniversary Edition, 2004), (I, ii), p. 51.
[3] Shakespeare, As You Like It: or, What You Will, (III, ii).
[4] Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, (London: Perspectiva Press, 2021), (Introduction), p. 12.
From the 1982 essay by Edward Said (1935-2003): “Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community”:
Certainly there is a great deal to be said in favor of a university manifestly not influenced or controlled by coarse partisan politics.
But one thing in particular about the university—and here I speak about the modern university without distinguishing between European, American, or Third World and socialist universities—does appear to exercise an almost totally unrestrained influence: the principle that knowledge ought to exist, be sought after, and disseminated in a very divided form.
Whatever the social, political, economic, and ideological reasons underlying this principle, it has not long gone without its challengers.
Indeed, it may not be too much of an exaggeration to say that one of the most interesting motifs in modern world culture has been the debate between proponents of the belief that knowledge can exist in a synthetic universal form and, on the other hand, those who believe that knowledge is inevitably produced and nurtured in specialized compartments.
Georg Lukács’ attack on reification and his advocacy of “totality,” in my opinion, very tantalizingly resemble the wide-ranging discussions that have been taking place in the Islamic world since the late nineteenth century on the need for mediating between the claims of a totalizing Islamic vision and modern specialized science.
These epistemological controversies are therefore centrally important to the workplace of knowledge production, the university, in which what knowledge is and how it ought to be discovered are the very lifeblood of its being.
(Critical Inquiry, 9 (Sept. 1982) quoted from Reflections on Exile: and Other Essays, (London: Granta, 2001), p. 125)
Here are two poems that continue to stick with me—two poems that somewhat involve Texas as a place.
One poem, “Sailing Ashland Avenue,” (Fortnightly Review, Feb. 2023) by Robert Archambeau, spreads from Chicago to Omaha to Texas. And there is much about Chicago and Omaha and Texas––a strange, strong poem.
Another is “Easter 2022” (Fortnightly Review, Feb. 2023) by Michael Anania. This is a poem that spreads from Texas to Lviv, Ukraine to Poland––a fresh, fragrant poem.
Many things in life have I seen with great incorrectness and understood with immense inaccuracy, yet is it so crazy for me, now in middle age, to compare the human imagination (or at least some of its characteristics) to a baptistry?
But Barfield (I think) gets it right when he says in his book Romanticism Comes of Age (Middleton, CN: Wesleyan UP, 1967) that the imagination “seeks to sink itself entirely in the thing perceived.” (p. 63). One sinks into the waters to be baptized (when a Baptist); one sinks into the waters of the imagination to begin deep thinking (when a human).
Or let the metaphor be slightly altered: the human conscious sinks into the waters of the imagination, or is enveloped upon engaging in an imaginative (but certainly not imagined!) mode of thinking things through. Let the metaphor be slightly altered by the Venetian wordsmith Karl Kraus (1874–1936), as when he declares: “Imagination has the right to feast in the shade of the tree that it turns into a forest.” (Half–truths& one–and–a–halftruths: selected aphorisms, ed. and trans. Harry Zohn, (Chicago UP; Engendra Press, Montreal. Reprint, 1976), p. 48.)
Alas, maybe the metaphor of the baptistry is too idealistic and, like cotton candy, though there appears to be something of substance, upon closer inspection, it turns out that there’s mostly just air there. Maybe it’s not so pleasant to sink into the imagination. Maybe sinking into reality is a better course of action, as it was for the hero of the novel Cien años de soledad (1967) señor José Arcadio Buendía when his creator Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) writes:
Fascinated by an immediate reality that came to be more fantastic than the vast universe of his imagination, he [José Arcadio Buendía] lost all interest in the alchemist’s laboratory, put to rest the material that had become attenuated with months of manipulation, and went back to being the enterprising man of earlier days when he had decided upon the layout of the streets and the location of the new houses so that no one would enjoy privileges that everyone did not have.
(A Hundred Years of Solitude), trans. Gregory Rabassa, (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), p. 39.)
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), amid recalling Taoist texts, once contemplated the notion of one becoming trapped in a neither-world (neither in reality nor in imagination):
This suspicion that life is but a dream is, of course, among the most characteristic traits of Asian philosophy; examples from Indian philosophy are numerous. I shall give a Chinese example which his very telling because of its briefness. It reports a story told about the Taoist (i.e., anti-Confucian) philosopher Chuang Tzu. He “once dreamt he was a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn’t know he was Chuang Chou. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Chuang Chou. But he didn’t know if he was Chuang Chou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming it was Chuang Chou. Between Chuang Chou and a butterfly there must be some distinction!”
The Life of the Mind, (1971), ed. Mary McCarthy (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co, 1978), Volume I. Thinking, p. 198.)
But perhaps my Baptist background has made me incurably idealistic with regard to the imagination. Perhaps it cannot calm brutes and their brute thoughts. In the novel Grendel (New York: Knopf, 1971), the troll-protagonist penned by John Gardner (1933–1982) realizes:
Imagination, I knew. Some evil inside myself pushed out into the trees. I knew what I knew, the mindless, mechanical bruteness of things, and when the harper’s lure drew my mind away to hopeful dreams, the dark of what was and always was reached out and snatched my feet. (pp. 16–17)
And this same sentiment of a suspicion of the imagination plays out, much more gracefully and without as much brutishness, in the “tragedy of manners” novel The Remains of the Day (New York: Faber and Faber, 1989) by Kazuo Ishiguro. In that text, the butler Stephens has and hopes for grand plans to finally reunite and re-attract the attentions of Miss Kenton. But by being so swamped in his own imagination, he is unable to “see the writing on the wall” regarding their relationship.
But oh! is Stephens so refreshed, so sentimental, so “baptizing” upon his readers. Let us end this discussion with some examples of his imagination at play (sometimes occurring for Stephens while he is engaged in the act of reading):
My receiving the letter from Miss Kenton, containing as it did, along with its long, revealing passages, an unmistakable nostalgia for Darlington Hall, and—I am obliged me to see my staff plan afresh…. (p. 9)
I have, I should make clear, reread Miss Kenton’s recent letter several times, and there is no possibility I am merely imagining the presence of these hints on her part…. (p. 10)
They were written during the thirties, but much of it would still be up to date—after all, I do not imagine German bombs have altered our countryside so significantly…. (p. 11)
I imagine the experience of unease mixed with exhilaration often described in connection with this moment is very similar to what I felt in the Ford as the surroundings grew strange around me…. (p. 24)
What is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint…. (pp. 28–29)
But by and large, I believe these generalizations to be accurate, and indeed, such ‘idealistic’ motivations as I have described have played a large part in my own career. (p. 116)
Quotations in Action: My Piece on Round Church, Cambridge
I recently discussed how, as a writer, I’m now trying to use quotations better–to not just quote the best lines, but place them in the context in which they originally appeared.
So, I’m very glad to have my latest piece in The Fortnightly Review, “Cambridge, Round Church,” published–because this is the first piece published elsewhere, where I’ve tried to extensively apply these new rules I’ve given myself regarding quotations.
“Faux the Humanities?” When the (Lack of) Value in Literature Overtakes the (Lack of) Quality in Literature
A lot of talk going around (this is only one of the latest examples) about the demise of the humanities etcetera.
But I suspect it has something to do with mistaking the past-present-future value of literature for the present quality (which includes quantity) of literature.
Here are three quotations I’ve been pondering lately concerning this subject. No analysis to provide just yet (though that may come later), for there is plenty to ponder:
I admire the mediæval cathedrals as much as anybody, and I am perfectly prepared to recognize the greatness and uniqueness of mediæval craftsmanship. But I believe that æstheticism must never be used as an argument against humanitarianism.
(“Preface to the Second Edition” (1950), The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2013, 2020), (ch. 11, n. 61), pp. 663–64)
The next is from Noam Chomsky (b. 1928), on how one can’t draw conclusions from literature:
James Peck: You once said, “It is not unlikely that literature will forever give far deeper insight into what is sometimes called ‘the full human person’ than any modes of scientific inquiry may hope to do.”
Noam Chomsky: That’s perfectly true and I believe that. I would go on to say it’s not only not unlikely, but it’s almost certain. But still, if I want to understand, let’s say, the nature of China and its revolution, I ought to be cautious about literary renditions. Look, there’s no question that as a child, when I read about China, this influenced my attitudes—Rickshaw Boy, for example. That had a powerful effect when I read it. It was so long ago I don’t remember a thing about it, except the impact. And I don’t doubt that, for me, personally, like anybody, lots of my perceptions were heightened and attitudes changed by literature over a broad range—Hebrew literature, Russian literature, and so on. But ultimately, you have to face the world as it is on the basis of other sources of evidence that you can evaluate. Literature can heighten your imagination and insight and understanding, but it surely doesn’t provide the evidence that you need to draw conclusions and substantiate conclusions.
(“Interview [with James Peck],” The Chomsky Reader, ed. Peck, (New York: Pantheon, 1987), p. 4)
I readily accept that there is no cast-iron certainty here, but there isn’t any anywhere. So let’s get over it. There are, however, degrees of truth, some of them very great, and carrying increasing conviction with experience. Though truth is always my personal judgment, it is not just possible, but necessary, that my judgment should take into account your and many others. It is far from random, but it is, rather, informed by experiment, perception, reason, intuition and imagination. That doesn’t make it less reliable than being informed by a single source, such as reason, might have done, but more reliable. Acquiring a degree of judgment that can make these elements intelligently cohere is—or used to be—the whole purpose of education. It [p. 398] is why we study the humanities. What history and classics and literature tell us is not to be found in the sciences anywhere. Nowadays we seem to have forgotten this crucial insight, on which the future of our civilisation nonetheless hangs. Judgment used to be the foundation of the idea of reasonableness—a concept you may remember, but which we are in danger of losing, if we have not already done so, in a mechanised, bureaucratic society. The popular reaction to this has been only to intensify the mechanistic vision: no longer seeing complex, unique individuals but only representatives of groups, no longer open to appropriately nuanced, but simple ‘I’m right, you’re wrong’ positions, and shouting more and more loudly. Reasonableness is as far from unbridled emotion as it is from rote rationality, on the worst excesses of which it acts as a much-needed brake.
(The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, (London: Perspectiva Press, 2021), (II, x), pp. 397–98)
