WHERE IS VOLTAIRE WHEN YOU NEED HIM?

The European Enlightenment was a fresh wind that blew the incense from the altar and the Sacristy and curdled the chrism that anointed the kings.  What a relief it must have been finally to put paid to a millennium of superstition masquerading as sanctimony and royal tyranny cloaking itself in the absurdity of divine right.  Oh, I understand why Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, legitimately bitter at the descent of Weimar into the hell of Nazism, penned their bilious tract.  But the delusions and deceptions of false reason do not demean true rational clarity, autonomy, and freedom of the mind, any more than the Cardiff Giant robbed evolution of its undeniable truth.  "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/ and to be young was very heaven."

My mind has turned to the Enlightenment as I have watched with dismay, but not surprise, the outcry at the threatened promulgation of a Federal rule that those offering health insurance to their employees, even if they be Catholic universities or hospitals, must include in that coverage birth control.  Never mind that 98% of Catholic women use birth control.  Never mind that a majority of Catholics approve of the proposed regulation.  Put to one side the fact that the Church, which proclaims birth control a mortal sin, has focused its outrage on the absence of a co-pay!  Let us not even think of the fact that those protesting most loudly -- the Catholic bishops -- are desperate to have America forget their two generation long enabling of child abuse by their ordained priests.  As one waggish tweet suggested, "If altar boys could get pregnant, the Catholic Church would be in favor of birth control."

Predictably, leading the drum-beating has been that aging altar boy, Rick Santorum, whose obsession with and simultaneous aversion to sex is well-documented.  What caught my attention was his most recent pronouncement.  Accusing Obama of being anti-religion, he told his audience that this was the work of the French Revolution.  "When you marginalize faith in America, when you remove the pillar of God-given rights then what's left is the French Revolution... What's left in France became the guillotine."

It is difficult to engage in an interesting and serious manner with someone who is both a bigot and an idiot.  That Santorum genuinely longs for a theocracy is obvious.  That he knows nothing about the French Revolution is also obvious.  Herewith some facts:  the guillotine was invented as a kinder, gentler, quicker way to execute people.  It was instantaneous and painless, unlike being broken on the wheel, torn apart by four horses, or even being hanged.  But never mind.  What is more, the guillotine, in the period known as the Terror, was used far more often to execute nascent capitalists seeking to benefit from the shortage of bread than to kill the nobility [Charles Dickens to the contrary notwithstanding.]  Those who wish to delve more deeply into this fascinating topic can consult a fine old monograph by Donald Greer entitled The Incidence of the Terror in the French Revolution.

But I digress.  The subject of this brief post is my nostalgia for the Enlightenment.  I am old enough to recall a time when it seemed that religion had finally loosed its vampire grip on the throat of civilization, when we could confidently look forward the churches in America, like those in France, being used more often for free concerts by aspiring baroque ensembles than for the mind-killing, soul-numbing rituals of fundamentalist religiosity.

Alas, it has not been so.  Religious fanaticism, In American but not on the Continent, has risen from the ashes again to threaten reason, decency, honor, and morality.  Are we at the dawn of a modern French Revolution?  A blessing devoutly to be wished for.

A JAUNDICED VIEW

Students of Philosophy are not required to know very much, aside from the content of a rather select canon of great texts.  Some logic, perhaps, and a bit of Classical Athenian history [to set the stage for the great early quadrivium of Platonic Dialogues:  The Crito, Euthyphro, Apology, and Phaedo.]  But those of us who persevered and read the classic texts of what we called "Modern Philosophy" -- which is to say, the works of Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Kant -- did actually pick up a few bits and tatters of information along the way, one of the most memorable of which was that to people afflicted with jaundice, the world looks yellowish.  This example of the subjectivity of perception was repeated so often in the Philosophy I read as a boy that by the time I encountered it in writings of modern sense-datum epistemologists like H. H. Price, I simply nodded and moved on.

One day, in an adult education class I was teaching, attended by men and women who had actually done something with their lives, I invoked this example and was brought up short by a "student" in the class who was a physician.  "That is not true," he said.  Now, as you can imagine, this is not a statement that a Philosophy Professor hears very often.  "I don't agree" -- one hopes and prays for that, as it can signal the beginning of a lively and useful debate.  But "That is not true"?  What on earth could he mean.

Well, it seems that people who have jaundice do not see the world tinted yellow.  Things do not look yellow to them.  They look yellow to things!  To be more precise, yellow pigment is deposited in the whites of their eyes [among other less obvious places], with the result that their eyes take on a yellow cast.  Four hundred years of great Philosophers had got it wrong, very probably just repeating what a prior thinker had said.  So much for the experimental method.

These odd thoughts have been prompted by the political events of the last twenty-four hours.  Suddenly, after swamping Gingrich with a multi-million dollar negative ad buy, Mitt Romney has been in turn humiliated hy a bigot in a Leave it to Beaver sweater.  Rick Santorum, whose bizarre sexual perversions lead him to think of polygymy and "man on dog" whenever he encounters the phenomenon of same-sex love, has emerged from the back of the pack as the current darling of the anyone-but-Mitt evangelical crowd.  One more day like yesterday, and Mitt is going to look like yesterday's fad.

I view all of this [yes, I am connecting it up] with a jaundiced eye.  I find myself no longer able to take a simple, boyish pleasure in the bizarrerie of the Republican field.  Too much is at stake to allow any of these appalling people to come anywhere close to the Oval Office.

The Republican aspirants are looking more and more like a sickening, cowardly, revulsion-inspiring yellow.  I think I shall retreat into H. H. Price's Hume's Construction of the External World to regain my composure, even of he did think that jaundice makes things look yellow.

SUPERBOWL SUNDAY

Yesterday evening, when dinner was over, I climbed into bed with a little plastic tub of Trader Joe's chocolate covered peanuts to watch the Super Bowl [my illness has had the disconcerting side effect of making me lose weight, so after a lifetime fighting the battle of the waistline, I am now allowing myself previously forbidden indulgences.]  Susie went into the living room and turned on that classic date movie, Sleepless in Seattle, whose lines I know as well as those of its inspiration, An Affair to Remember.

I was rooting for the Patriots, a holdover from a lifetime lived mostly in Massachusetts.  After a series of bonehead plays one would expect from a poorly coached high school team [twelve men on the field?], the Patriots scored a touchdown with eight seconds left in the half, to take a 10-9 lead.  There was just enough time for me to switch to the movie and watch Sam, Jonah, Annie, and Howard the Bear finally connect on the Observation Deck of the Empire State Building.  I turned off the TV and went to sleep.

When I got up in the middle of the night, as I do every night, I logged on and discovered that the Giants had beaten the Patriots 21-17.  I immediately put the game out of my mind and went back to sleep.

I have a theory as to why we invest so much emotion in sports teams, or, as in the case of Tiger Woods or the Williams sisters, individual sports stars.  We do it because what happens to them really does not matter.  We live in a perfectly awful world, in which exploitation, oppression, war, torture, and religious fanaticism make the lives of billions of men, women, and children miserable.  As I write these words, I am waiting to see whether Israel will launch a preemptive attack on Iran, doing its level best to drag America into yet another Middle Eastern war.  The share of the Gross National Product going to workers has hit its lowest point since records have been kept.  After two and a half centuries of slavery and a century of Jim Crow, White America has used the prison system and drug laws to drive African-American men into a third kind of second class status.  Everything I have spent my life believing in and fighting for is under assault or already suffering defeat, and there is virtually nothing I can do about that fact.

But sports offers me a chance to invest disproportionate emotion in the outcome of a game, with momentary exultation if my team wins, and no real disappointment if they lose.  So long as Tiger Woods dominated the professional golf world, I was a devoted TV viewer of PGA tournaments [even though, on the two occasions in my life when I actually played a little golf, I hated the game.]  As soon as he crashed and burned, never, apparently, to recover, I simply withdrew my emotions from golf and stopped watching.  When Venus and Serena were dominating Wimbledon and Forest Hills, I sat glued to the set.  When they began to age and decline, I turned off.

Sports fandom is soothing in its utter unimportance.  In these terrible times, we need some way to get through the day.

LAST WRITES

As one might expect, the medical nightmare I have been living through for the past six weeks has prompted in me some funereal thoughts about what meaning, if any, my life has had.  A Miami University law professor referred to me several days ago as a "grand old man," which gave me pause.  I have spent most of my life thinking of myself as a rambunctious young whippersnapper.  I fear that ship has sailed.

The deepest meaning of my life is to be found in my sons, Patrick and Tobias, and Patrick's son and daughter, Samuel [six] and Athena [three and a half].  As my father lay dying in a New York hospital, I said to him, "You have been a better father to me than your father was to you.  No man can be asked to do more.  I will try to be a better father to my sons than you were to me.  I love you."  I hope Patrick and Tobias can say the same to me when my time comes.

My life has been given unity and shape by my love for Susie, and her love for me.  She saved me by agreeing to rejoin me in mid-life.  I hope we will have many more years to enjoy the delights of Paris.

And then there are all those books.  Good lord, what a great fuss I have made over them as each one has dropped from my sleeve onto the page.  Most have already been forgotten, and the rest soon will be, with perhaps one exception.  In 1964, as I was about to begin a full-scale crushingly expensive psychoanalysis [$25 an hour, but then, my salary as a senior Columbia professor was only $11,000 a year], Arthur Danto offered me a $500 advance to write an eighty page essay on Political Philosophy for an ill-conceived Harper & Row publishing venture.  Twelve months later, I wrote the essay between summer school classes at Columbia, and five years later still it finally appeared as a slender volume, with a title stolen from Mark Twain's lovely literary essay, "In Defense of Harriet Shelly."

In Defense of Anarchism has taken on a life of its own, and will, I imagine, outlive me.  It is pleasant to imagine that some graduate student, decades or even generations from now, will become curious about whether the author of that tract ever wrote anything else, and will find his or her way to one of the books of which I am fonder.

But despite all that scribbling, I have never thought of myself as a writer.  Rather, if asked what I "do," I would unhesitatingly say "I am a teacher."  I remember so many of the thousands of young men and women who passed through my classes during my fifty-three year career as a university teacher.  Indeed, I can recall them more clearly than some of the books I have written!  The great radical poet, novelist, philosopher, social critic, educational theorist, and city planner Paul Goodman wrote movingly and insightfully about the erotic component of true teaching, and I believe that he was right.  I have loved my students like surrogate children, even when they have not reciprocated the affection.  I always revealed a good deal about myself in my classes, and was repeatedly puzzled, but not dissuaded, by student evaluations that said "talks too much about his family."

Genesis 3:19 has it about right:  "for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return."  It is enough if I live for a brief moment in the memories of my sons and my grandchildren and my students.

TALES PUBLICLY ALLOWED

Now that Willard "Mitt" Romney seems to have slimed Newton Leroy "Newt" Gingrich into irrelevance by a tsunami of anonymously funded attack ads, I think it behooves me as a sometime commentator on the political circus to come to terms with Romney's most deeply and authentically held belief, his adherence to the Mormon faith.  As is so often the case, I look to Thomas Hobbes for inspiration, and in Chapter 6 of his great work, Leviathan, find this coruscating definition:

"Feare of power invisible, feigned by the mind, or imagined from tales publiquely allowed, Religion; not allowed, Superstition. And when the power imagined is truly such as we imagine, True Religion."

All religious beliefs are nothing but fear of power invisible, feigned by the mind or imagined from tales.  If the tales are publicly allowed [by the State, one presumes], then we have religion.  If, however, the tales are not publicly allowed, but must be whispered fearfully in closets and secret gatherings, then we have superstition.

The practical effect of the U. S. Constitution's Establishment Clause [First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion ..."] is to obliterate Hobbes' useful distinction between superstition and religion.  Catholicism, the various versions of Protestantism, Judaism, Islam, Scientology [originally Dianetics, until it was transmuted into a religion to take advantage of the protections of the First Amendment], Hinduism, Buddhism, Shinto, Rastafarianism, and Mormonism have equal claims to be considered religions for the purposes of American public life and discourse.  All of them are rooted in "fear of power invisible, feigned by the mind, or imagined from tales," and thanks to the First Amendment, all of those tales are "publicly allowed."  [Don't start with me about Buddhism.]

Viewed from a sufficient distance [say, from Iraq, or Tibet, or Kyoto], Mormonism looks like just another Christian variant -- same Savior, Jesus -- many of the same divinely inspired texts -- The Old Testament, The New Testament -- but enough difference to ground the claims of the Church of Latter Day Saints that it is the one true faith.  But of course, in matters of religion, it is one's closest neighbors who are one's most excoriating critics.  To a Tibetan monk, Bethlehem may seem as exotic as Missouri, but the Mormon claim that Jesus visited earth in Missouri sets the teeth of Evangelical Christians on edge.  As does the claim the Joseph Smith was the recipient of an authentic and final revelation, in the form of gold tablets written in a mysterious language which he was able, by divine assistance, to translate.

Some of the Mormon practices are rather quaint and charming, like posthumous baptism, except when it leads to the posthumous baptism of several hundred thousand Holocaust victims, in which case it seems just a tad insensitive.  [To be fair, the Mormons say it never occurred to them that Jewish Holocaust survivors might be offended to learn that their murdered coreligionists had been baptised by busy Mormons, hustling about saving lost souls.  And one must keep in mind that according to the Mormon faith, those souls do have an opportunity, in the Mormon version of Purgatory, to accept or reject the blessing of posthumous baptism.]

Speaking as a philosopher, I am rather drawn to the Mormon view -- akin to that of Plato -- that God does not create the universe ex nihilo, but instead, like the demiurgos, simply organizes a chaos of pre-existing matter.

I have grown weary of the endless anatomization of Bain Capital and the details of Romney's tax status.  Who ever doubted that the super-rich get super-rich by writing favorable tax laws for themselves?  What good is capitalism if it cannot even protect the 1%!

So as the political season unfolds, I am looking forward to some searching examinations of the "tales publicly allowed" that constitute the essence of Romney's most deeply held beliefs.  Next to that, strapping a dog in a cage on the top of one's station wagon dwindles into insignificance.

WHAT'S A REVIEWER TO DO?

Since one of the mysterious side effects of the illness with which I have been contending is a loss of several pounds [to be distinguished from my deliberate and successful ten week diet last Fall], I have returned to my pre-diet routine of taking the Arts section of the NY TIMES to the Carolina Cafe, on the first floor of the condo complex in which I live, and there doing the crossword puzzle while eating a lemon poppy seed muffin and drinking decaf coffee.

The puzzle gets progressively more difficult as the week goes on, and Wednesday's puzzle is not much of a challenge, so I had time this morning to read most of the Arts section, including a review of William Christie conducting a Juilliard baroque music concert and a review of a guitar "marathon" at the great old 92nd St. Y [where Susie and I, as teenagers, would listen to the Bach Aria Group and the occasional Oscar Brand folk music concert.]

As I read the reviews, I was struck once more by how difficult it must be these days to work as a reviewer of classical music concerts.  When I was a boy, there were three transcendently great concert violinists:  Jascha Heifetz, Nathan Milstein, and David Oistrakh.  [Heifetz was born in Vilna.  Milstein and Oistrakh were both born in Odessa.  All three were Jewish.  Go figure.]  Their sheer technical virtuosity was so much greater than that of any other soloists that if I heard a violinist on the radio, I immediately knew whether it was one of those three.  [Personal memory:  As a teenager, I attended a Milstein concert in Town Hall in Manhattan, sitting in the balcony.  After a stunningly brilliant performance, Milstein started to play encores, as the audience simply would not let him go.  Now, every soloist has a few encores ready, in case there is a demand for them, but Milstein ran out of encores after a while.  Finally, he started to play an incredibly virtuosic "piece" that I did not recognize at all, running up and down the E string with great abandon.  At one point, he got himself all the way up in the umpteenth position and could not figure out any graceful way to get back down, so he simply jumped back into first position.  In a moment of eclairecissement, I realized that he was just playing exercises -- in effect doing tomorrow's practicing.  The audience loved it.  Then the house lights went up and we filed out.]

But in the past thirty years or so, the level of technical virtuosity has risen so dramatically in the world of concert performers -- violinists, pianists, cellists, violists, and period instrument performers as well -- that there are literally dozens of breathtakingly accomplished soloists who regularly perform at or beyond the level achieved by Heifetz, Milstein, and Oistrakh.  What is a reviewer to do?  Honesty should require that the reviewer write a series of unqualified raves.  But readers don't want that.  They want reviewers to draw distinctions, anoint favorites, praise Itzakh Perlman over Jonathan Bell, Annie-Sophie Mutter over Hilary Hahn.  As a sometime amateur violist, I am painfully aware of the endless hours of work that would be required to reach that magical level of performance at which technique no longer seems even a consideration.  [I once watched Mstislav Rostropovich playing the cello.  He was a big man, and he leaned away from the cello as he played, as though the physical work of producing sounds were so far beneath his notice that he scarcely needed to attend to the instrument.  He seemed to be listening to himself rather than playing.  It was an astonishing moment.]

Which brings me to a puzzle that has mystified Susie and me for some time now.  When we lived in Western Massachusetts, we attended each summer the series of concerts put on by an Early Music group called Aston Magna that performs on Saturdays in Great Barrington, MA.  The musical director of the group is violinist Daniel Stepner, who with his wife, Laura Jeppeson, a world-class performer on the viola da gamba, was for many years the mainstay of the Boston Fine Arts Museum trio.  The concerts, put on in this rural Western Massachusetts community, regularly achieved a truly transcendent level of technical precision and musicality on period instruments. 

When we bought our Paris apartment in 2004, we started going to a selection of the many, many early music concerts that are available during the Paris season -- some at the Cluny Museum of the Middle Ages, others in out of the way churches in higher numbered arrondissements.  Now, Paris is in every way a world-class city, of course, and one would therefore assume that the level of performance would be far beyond that of rural Western Massachusetts.  And yet, astonishingly, mysteriously, the concerts by Aston Magna and other Western Massachusetts early music ensembles are far, far superior to those available in Paris.  In our most recent visit to Paris, last December [the trip that ended with the onset of this mysterious disease with which I have been contending for five weeks], I actually took the plunge and splurged on a pair of tickets to a performance of Bach's Christmas Oratorio in the majestic Eglise de la Madeleine.  It was godawful!  Masses of singers making a muddy sound, adequate instrumentalists who seemed never quite precisely in time.  And, of course, a huge elegantly dressed audience who cheered this mess to the echo, demanding an encore.

These are strange times.

WHERE IS OSCAR WILDE WHEN WE NEED HIM?

One of the great bon mots of the last century was Oscar Wilde's description of the English upper class "sport" of fox hunting as "the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible."  This deathless line came to mind as I watched the results of the Florida Republican Primary dribbling in last night on MSNBC.  Regardless of strategic calculation or schadenfreudlichen lust, it is impossible to watch a mudfight between Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich with anything but revulsion.

As I have noted from time to time, this is a country of three hundred thirty million, so any characterological deformation or spiritual corruption, no matter how extreme, is sure to be exhibited by more than a few Americans.  What astonishes me is the exquisite precision with which the Republican Party has managed to filter through the entire nominally adult American population and gather into the ranks of its presidential aspirants so bizarre a collection of psychopathic personalities.  Under these circumstances, embracing anarchism seems to me as natural as rooting against the Yankees.  Perhaps it was a mistake on my part to struggle so manfully with my health problems so that I could return to the public world of political commentary.  A little obsessive navel-gazing might have a certain survival value.