A MEDITATION ON CONSPIRACY THEORIES

The oldest, simplest, and most easily comprehensible explanation of dramatic military, political, or economic events is the conspiracy theory: Brutus conspiring with the assassins of Caesar, Hotspur conspiring with Glendower, politicos in a smoke-filled room, fat cats forming secret cartels in posh boardrooms. The facts may be devilishly hard to come by, but the explanation is alluringly simple. All really good spy novels [one of which, by Daniel Silva, I am now reading] take it as their fundamental premise that things happen because people [good or bad, as the case may be] get together in secret and plot them. The benign version of this principle of explanation has been given a name by historians: The Great Man Theory of History. From this principle flow the exposes and the biographies of important men and women that regularly show up as History Book Club selections and on best seller lists.

For somewhat more than two centuries now, the very best social scientists have labored to free us from the meretricious attractions of conspiracy theories, and to replace them with deeper, more complex [and, inevitably, less exciting] structural explanations of major historical movements. The forefather of these efforts is Adam Smith's Invisible Hand, but it is in the writings of Karl Marx that the debunking of conspiracy theories really hits its stride. Marx sought the "laws of motion of capitalist economy," and he brushed aside as superficial and "utopian" the notion that the personalities or individual plans and intentions of economic actors played any important role in the unfolding of those laws. He considered ludicrous the notion that economic crashes were caused by greed, or that the rigors of the factory floor were traceable to the malign intentions of entrepreneurs. Since Marx wrote, all of the great social theorists have followed the same path. "Social relationships of production," "manifest and latent functions of social institutions," "socio-economic status," even "the paranoid style in American politics," which last, despite its apparent appeal to the character of individual personalities, is really a social explanation of political phenomena.

It is always a bit of a comedown, for those of us who cut our eyeteeth on structural/functional explanations of social phenomena, to discover that bad people really do get together behind closed doors and plot. Why slog through all those pages of Max Weber and Karl Mannheim and Robert Merton and Talcott Parsons if all we need is a few more Daniel Ellsbergs?

I have labored long and hard in this blog to find a structural explanation for the current fate of the health care reform bill. And yet now, as we approach the final hours, it really does seem as though the pettiness, mean-spiritedness, and bitterness of one passive aggressive wretch explains more than all of my structural/functional theorizing.

It was Marx's view that individuals do not make history. Classes make history, structures of production and exploitation make history, economic contradictions make history. The Napoleons and Wellingtons, the Lincolns and Booths, even the Hitlers and Stalins, simply ride the wave of history.

Who knows? Maybe I should spend my time reading Matt Drudge rather than The Statistical Abstract of the United States.

KRUGMAN AND HEALTH CARE REFORM

I am not an enormous fan of Paul Krugman, perhaps because he was an early and fervent supporter of Hillary Clinton in the presidential primary. But his column today in the NY TIMES on health care is exactly right. If I were technologically more sophisticated, I would put an link right here on which you could click, but you can simply go to http://www.nytimes.com and find his column on the front page. I recommend it.

Meanwhile, I am engaged in the far more important mission of locating somewhere that I can buy the one brand of cat food that Murray is willing to eat. Were I religious, I would conclude that God is testing me.

WIMPISHNESS IN THE SOUTHLAND

As many of you no doubt know, a large pre-winter storm has been working its way East. The weather predictions here in Chapel Hill call for perhaps as much as an inch of snow. Judging from what happened last year when we had a touch of snow one day, the entire Triangle area will close down for a week, all services will cease, people will stop driving, and emergency relief workers will set out on snowshoes with backpacks of candles and cans of food to rescue stranded travelers. Meanwhile, we relocated Northerners will snicker and smirk and cover our mouths to conceal our laughter at these wimpy Southerners. This, of course, is the way Minnesotans would respond to denizens of the Bay State when we would freak out over a mere foot or two of snow. I guess there are Inuits who have a good laugh at Minnsotans.

These days, when my emotions are in turmoil over the train wreck of health care reform and the parlous condition of my cat, Murray, it is oddly soothing to have some weather to grouse about.

A PLEA FOR HELP

Four weeks from now, I will launch my series of lectures on The Thought of Sigmund Freud in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Duke University. Today, I ordered from Amazon.com a digital voice recorder. I would like to upload my lectures to my blog, but I can not figure out how to do it. Pictures, yes, but voice recordings, not so. Can any of you make suggestions about how I might do this? There is, of course, the possibility that no one in the world is interested, but the very act of blogging presupposes a certain narcissistic self-involvement, so I shall simply assume that someone out there wants to know what I have to say about Freud.

RICHARD III AN ANSWER TO MATT AND OTHERS

Richard III's great entrance line, "Now is the winter of our discontent/Made glorious summer by this sun of York," is of course bitterly ironic and malicious in its true intent, but as is the case with many of Shakespeare's words, the line so perfectly captures an idea that it has become detached from its dramatic context and resides in our mind as the perfect expression of a complex feeling. That was the way I, and countless others, felt when Barack Obama miraculously ascended to the presidency. For many of us on the left, that winter of our discontent had lasted for so many winters, springs, summers, and falls that it seemed -- if I may descend from the sublime to the slightly ridiculous -- as though we were trapped in the endless frost of Narnia's Ice Queen.

I am not a fool, and by virtue of having long ago declared myself a radical [when another sun of York, Jack Kennedy, invaded Cuba], I am schooled to expect that the best American politics can offer falls tragically short of the fulfillment of my chiliastic dreams. I paid attention to Obama when he declared, late and soon, that he would pursue the war in Afghanistan. I knew, as any armchair Marxist must, that in an economic crisis, it would be the interests of the monied classes that would be served first by even a Democratic Congress. I confess not to foreseeing that so egregiously obnoxious a self-server as Lawrence Summers would be set atop the new administration's economic team, but a better choice would have made only a marginal difference, after all. And as for Joe Lieberman, about whom I have said more than enough, the Senate throughout my long life has been filled with moral excrescences in positions of eternal longevity. After all, I watched Strom Thumond run for the presidency when I was a boy of fourteen, and it is only by surviving as long as I have that I finally saw the old bastard die. Trust me. To paraphrase Lloyd Bensen, I knew Strom Thurmond, and Joe Lieberman is no Strom Thurmond.

And yet, and yet. Is that all we can say? Must we, like the intellectuals in Stalin's Russia, perform an "inner migration" and seek in the safety of our studies and coffee houses, in the pages of our books and the lines of our poetry, some escape from a world we can neither love nor change? There is too much in me of Tigger and not enough of Eyeore to settle into resignation, even as I find myself only eleven days from my seventy-sixth birthday.

My situation is made more complex by the fact that none of the things that distress me, with one signal exception, have the slightest measurable effect on my actual life. I am financially secure, with two pensions and Social Security, none of which is at all threatened by the current economic crisis. Like many Americans, though not nearly enough, I have excellent health care insurance. The vagaries of old age are apolitical in their incidence, and can hardly be attributed to the ideological coloration of this or any other administration. It is only Obama's failure, thus far, to fulfill the promises he made to the LGBT community that touch me, through the fortunes of my younger son. If truth be told, my emotions at this moment are completely engaged with the health of my cat, Murray, whom we brought home yesterday evening from yet another stay at the vet, with instructions for eight doses of different medications a day. It was his fate, and not that of the Medicare Buy-In Option, that destroyed my sleep last night.

Nevertheless, as the readers of this blog will know, I care deeply about the larger ideological and political turmoil that is currently engaging the nation. Somehow, I must strive to achieve and maintain some balance in my estimation of that turmoil. I must try -- to use a phrase that I have always most particularly and personally hated -- to take things philosophically. I knew that Obama was not the Second Coming, and not having any expectations of the advent of the Rapture, I fully expected to go to my grave with all my fillings and crowns intact. [For those of you mystified by this last turn of phrase, I strongly recommend Googling "rapture" and discovering what tens of millions of your fellow countrymen believe.]

There are, so far as I can see, only four possible responses to the world as we now find it. The first is to embrace the revolutionary vision of a coming upheaval, and hope to live long enough to see it. But for the reasons that I have detailed in my paper, "The Future of Socialism," that is a forlorn hope. Whatever the future will bring, a genuinely humane democratic socialism is not in the cards. The second is resignation and bitterness, for which there is ample justification, heaven knows, but that is simply incompatible with my penchant for engagement [things always sound a great deal more important in French]. The third is emigration, but that is, for me, an unappealing fantasy. There are no better worlds awaiting the determined emgrant -- not France, not England, not Cuba, not Sweden or Norway or Finland. The popular music is just as bad everywhere!

Which leaves the least dramatic of the options -- soldiering on, making a small difference in the way one can, speaking out for what one believes, and trying, either face to face or through the magic of the internet, to find a community of comrades with whom one can make common cause. That, after all, was the greatest appeal of the socialist vision when my grandfather embhraced it, more than a century ago, and it remains the most reliable consolation today. None of us is going to get out of this world alive, as the old saying has it, but as we march toward our inevitable death, let us at least march together, arms linked, singing the Internationale or Bruce Springsteen, as the case may be.

JOE LIEBERMAN

It is a slow Monday morning, foggy here in Chapel Hill. I have a half hour before I take my four mile walk [I hate to start while it is still dark -- I cannot see where to put my feet], so I thought I would take a few minutes to explain why I hate Joe Lieberman so much.

It isn't really political, although right now he is threatening yet again to destroy the coalition for health care reform. Objectively speaking, Lieberman's voting record in Congress is reasonably liberal -- certainly vastly more so than the voting record of Sessions or Kyl or McCain or Hatch or any of the other Republican senators. No, the reason is personal, even though I have never met Lieberman, nor even seen him in person.

There is a certain kind of Jewish man for whom the phrase "passive aggressive" was coined. This is a sweet, slightly sad man with a wry smile about his lips, whose voice is soft and a trifle crooning, who will tell you to your face how much he cares for you and feels your pain, and then knife you in the back every chance he gets. He tends to marry a strong woman to whom he professes undying devotion, even as he shares unvoiced with his fellow men the secret that they are all afraid of their wives. He never exhibits strong passions of any sort -- not anger, not lust, not even real love. Each time he does a sneaky, vicious, underhanded, immoral thing, he gets a sad look on his face as though it were something being done to him, rather than something he has done. In effect, he lives his entire life in the passive rather than the active voice, acknowledging no responsibility for the pain he inflicts, and managing always to communicate that it is hurting him so much that his victim really ought to feel pity for him, rather than rage at what he has done. These passive aggressive Jewish men are, at bottom, bitter. Their supposed sweetness is all sham, made doubly intolerable by their inability ever to admit that it is a sham.

My family was full of men like this. My rage at them is visceral and deeply rooted. To keep from becoming that way, it was necessary for me to reject the unspoken offers of love and affection that came from them, because the price of that love was a willingness to be complicit in the shared lie that they were really decent honorable men. For those who recall my rant about the recent film, A Serious Man, the root of my revulsion was the presence in the movie of an entire community of such men.

Every time I watch Lieberman on television, and hear that sad little catch in his voice, see that sweet, sorrowful smile, I recognize him for the snake he is and want nothing more than -- in the words of the Old Testament that I am sure he carries with him always -- to crush him under my heel.

Well, that was fun. Now for my walk.

FREUD REDEEMS HIMSELF

Yesterday, I mentioned that I was fuming at Freud's The Future of an Illusion because he seemed to me to be tone deaf to religion. I have now finished reading the short book [I don't read very fast], and in the final pages, he redeems himself. Freud shows himself to be, perhaps, the last unreconstructed Enlightenment rationalist, deeply committed to the conviction that only scientific reason can serve us well in our parlous journey through life. Freud famously said, "Where Id was, let Ego be." The true force of this maxim is somewhat lost in the translation from the German, because in English, the convention has been adopted of using the Latin terms for "it" [Id] and "I" [Ego], whereas in German they are rendered precisely as Es and Ich. "Where It was, let I be," is the proper translation, and it captures perfectly Freud's belief that it is the conscious rational self that is the true I, for all that, as was the first to show us scientifically, that self arises out of, and is forever built on, the instinctual drives and energies that he refers to as It.

Freud hated America, a fact the irony of which has been often noted, inasmuch as psychoanalysis had its most enthusiastic reception in the United States. The Future of an Illusion was published in 1927, during the reign of Prohibition in America. Here is Freud's biting comment on what was happening on this side of the Atlantic:

"That the effect of religious consolations may be likened to that of a narcotic is well illustrated by what is happening in America. There they are now trying -- obviously under the influence of petticoat government -- to deprive people of all stimulants, intoxicants, and other pleasure-producing substances, and instead, by way of compensation, are surfeiting them with piety."

This passage has an eerily contemporary ring. What Freud failed to recognize was the iron grip that religious illusion has on all strata of society, not merely on those whom Freud persisted in calling the lower orders. Despite the flourishing of so-called higher education in this country, Americans of all strata remain irrationally and inseparably wedded to religious beliefs of the most anti-scientific character. Where, save in the United States and in Iran, can one find candidates for public office enthusiastically denying the simple evidence of scientific truth?