NOUS SOMMES ARRIVEES

Well, we are here, via London and the Eurostar.  We have spent some time in our favorite cafe, and are still unpacking.  Sunday is the final round of parliamentary elections in France.  Then we will know what sort of majority the new Socialist government has.  Once I am settled in, I shall report on things at Bennett College and resume my commentary on the passing scene.

BOB AND SUE'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE

Tomorrow at dawn, Susie and I leave for Amherst, MA, and then for Paris.  We shall return on July 15th.  I will of course continue to blog from Paris, where I will arrive just in time for the second round of parliamentary elections.  I know that Europe's socialist parties long ago gave up the dream of socialism, but it is still comforting in my dotage to spend time in a country whose new president actually calls himself a "socialist."

 One of the lovelier ideas of Paris' openly gay socialist mayor is fete de la musique, an event that occurs on the first night of Summer.  Everyone in Paris comes out into the streets and amateur soloists, duos, trios, combos, and quartets play music in every square and on every side street of the central city.  Place Maubert, our little square, is home to three or more duelling rock bands, each with a full set of amps.  Place des Vosges, the very ritzy and lovely old square in the 4th arrondissement, last year saw performances by everyone from Paris' gay men's choir to a quartet playing late Beethoven quite creditably.  Down by the Seine, one can hang over the railing of a bridge and watch the upper crust, attired in formal dress, assemble on a river boat for a dinner-dancing cruise.

Several years ago the mayor decided that those Parisians who could not afford an August trip to the Riviera nevertheless deserved a beach, so he trucked in sand, got some beach umbrellas, and turned the banks of the Seine into beachfront.  The attitude of the French to public spaces seems to be the polar opposite to that of Americans.  Two years ago, a number of "vertical gardens" sprang up around Paris.  These are lovely botanical displays of growing plants, not cut flowers, that rise up the side of a wall rather than spreading out horizontally.  Susie and I went here and there to see some of them, guided by an article in the 5th Arrondissement newsletter.

My gig at Bennett College is developing nicely, and in a few days, I hope to be able to tell you about it in more detail.  Now back to a few last minute packing chores.

HUMOR, AND OLD TECHNOLOGY

It has come to my attention that gentle humor and irony do not do too well in the medium of the blog.  I think for them to be effective, one must make eye contact with one's interlocutor.  Too often, well-meaning commentators seize on what was, from my point of view, a throwaway line or gentle bit of humor, rather than on the central idea of a post.  I fear my remarks about Homer, Google, and my granddaughter Athena have fallen victim to that difficulty.  As Marshall McCluhan observed  a long time ago, the medium is the message, or, as Aristotle argued somewhat earlier, form dominates matter.

As I prepare for five weeks away from home [leaving at dawn the day after tomorrow], I am reminded once again of the virtues of old technology.  This time I am not speaking of the standard typewriter or the fountain pen, but of two other instances of old technology whose virtues have proven themselves once again.

Susie and I live in a third floor condominium whose principal feature is a large porch or balcony, on which Susie has established a virtual arboretum of plants and flowers.  I am very much an indoor person, but she loves the outdoors, and so leaves the door to the porch open as much as she can.  Not surprisingly, we get flies.  What to do?  Well, it turns out that quite the most effective fly-killer available is old-fashioned flypaper.  The young among my readers may not even know what flypaper is, but anyone who grew up in the 1930's, which is to say before air conditioning, will be familiar with it.  Flypaper is a ribbon of extremely sticky paper that unrolls from a little cardboard tube and is pinned with a thumbtack to the ceiling or the underside of a high cabinet.  It is impregnated with something irresistible to flies, and they are drawn to it, fatally.  The slightest touch with a foot or a wing sticks them to the paper forever.  Over the period of several weeks, we accumulate so many dead flies on the flypaper that I must get up on a ladder, take it down, and replace it with another fresh piece.  Disposing of the old fly paper can be tricky, since it continues to stick to anything it touches.  I am quite convinced that nothing modern science could think up would get rid of flies as quickly and decisively as old fashioned flypaper.

The drive out to Bennett in Greensboro seems to be putting a strain on my back.  I have a forty year history of back trouble, and have spent my share of time with chiropractors and even the odd acupuncturist.  When we lived in Massachusetts, I built an indoor swimming pool into our home [or, to be exact, had it built] and for years found that regular swimming kept the back trouble at bay.  My regime of morning walks seems to be equally effective.

But after several trips to Greensboro last week, my back grew tired, and, as they say, compromised, and I could feel the old trouble threatening to return.  Once again, what to do?  There are any number of powerful medications. of course, as well as a variety of treatments -- heat, cold, electrostimulation, chiropractic adjustments.  But instead of these expensive and often quite invasive interventions, I took myself off to a medical supply store and for twenty dollars bought a firm back support pillow, identical to one I used for many years in Massachusetts.  Magically, on the drive home, my back felt fine, and getting out of the car, instead of the occasion for some pain, was entirely without incident.

I am not a Luddite, or an impossible old fogey, as I hope this blog has demonstrated.  But it is pleasant now and again to discover that there are some everyday problems that have long since been very nice solved.  Now if the transition from capitalism to socialism were just that easy.

THE GAUNTLET IS FLUNG DOWN

Just when I am thinking of chucking this whole blog thing because of my depression at the failure of the Wisconsin recall effort, "Pied Cow" issues a challenge that I cannot in honor ignore.  My last post was an idle jeu d'esprit, triggered by finding my late father's public library bookmark.  At the close of my fond reminiscences, I remarked that some day my little granddaughter Athena [who is, at three, already completely conversant with an IPad] might have a chip implanted in her brain that would make even Google unnecessary as a source of information.  It was a throwaway line to exit a post, but Pied Cow is having none of it.  What do I think of such a prospect? he asks.  What are the moral dimensions and implications of such a possibility?

Well, I am too distraught to read the news online, and since it is drizzling steadily, I cannot go for my daily four mile power walk [which I actually completed yesterday in fifty-seven minutes, a personal best], so until it is time to start packing for a one month stay in Paris, I think I owe it to Pied Cow to do a bit of armchair philosophizing [is there any other kind?]

As a philosopher, I feel a certain obligation to reflect on this question with some sense of historical perspective, so let us begin with Homer and the great tradition of the oral epic, which is to say the lengthy narrative poem memorized by a bard and proclaimed to audiences as a way of preserving and transmitting the collective history of a people.  When I was a lad at Harvard, there was a very distinguished scholar named, if memory serves, Albert Lord, who was said to be the world's leading expert on the Serbo-Croatian oral epic.  [Who even knew the Serbo-Croatians had oral epics?]  Sure enough, Google in seconds tells me that my memory is correct.  This is, of course, directly relevant to the subject of this post.

Committing an enormously long epic to memory and declaiming it or singing it on state occasions [the inauguration or the interment of a king, for example] is a tremendous feat, one that requires a prodigious memory and years of apprenticeship to an established bard.  Lord observed that the repetition in oral epics of ritual phrases ["wine dark sea," in Homer's case, for example] was, among other things, a sort of mnemonic crutch to help the bard keep his or her place and master the epic.

One can easily imagine the reaction of the traditional bards when someone got the dangerous idea of writing the epics down, so that they would be available to anyone with no more training than was required to learn to read.  "Oh well, sure, if you are going to do that, what's the big deal?"  Rather like lazy wannabe pianists who bypass years of practice by buying one of those electronic keyboards that let you, with the press of a button, supply an entire bass accompaniment while you pick out the tune with your forefinger.

Much the same reaction was provoked, I would imagine, by paper, by ink, by movable type, by the printing press, and by the typewriter.  I am old enough to recall the disdain with which serious writers like myself greeted the word processor [the very phrase, "word processor," is appalling, as though writing were nothing more than making sausage.]  I wrote my doctoral dissertation with a pen in longhand, and the physical act of pushing the pen across the page was inextricably linked to the shaping of my ideas.  Eventually I graduated to a standard typewriter, but I never made the move to an electric typewriter, and to this day I find it vaguely dishonorable to write as I am now doing on a computer keyboard. 

Each of us -- epic bard, medieval manuscript scribe, goose quill pen sharpener, fountain pen filler, typist, word processor -- thinks of the physical technique of his or her youth as the standard of rigor and moral worthiness, and views all of the more recent technological innovations as enticements along the path to Hell.

Which brings me to Google. 

In an earlier age, a considerable part of formal education consisted of nothing more than committing large numbers of facts to memory -- the emperors of Rome or kings of England or presidents of the United States, in their proper sequence, the periodic table of elements, even what was called, when I was in high school, the "bead tests" for chemical elements.  [Beads of different substances, when heated over a Bunsen burner, give off different colors, and as part of my high school chemistry course, I had to memorize those color indicators.]   I can recall, as a young man, hearing of scholars whose considerable claim to academic fame consisted of having laboriously constructed a concordance to the works of Spinoza or Shakespeare or the Bible, something that can now be done with a click of a mouse on a computer.

Those of us who periodically suffer what are generously referred to as "senior moments" use Google the way Homer used "wine dark sea," as an aid to memory.  If I know enough to know what key words to put into Google to come up with Albert Lord, can I not be said to know who Albert Lord is as truly as if I were able to call that item of information from my brain?  Is there really something valuable about being able to run off all those English kings in sequence, when Google will put the list before me more quickly than I can call it to mind?  I can still recall the Boy Scout oath ["On my honor, I promise to be trustworthy, loyal, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent" -- I almost got thrown out of Boy Scout camp in Pennsylvania at the age of twelve for refusing to say "reverent"], and I can name the sixteen principal points of the compass in less than ten seconds ["North, North Northeast, Northeast, East Northeast, East, East Southeast, Southeast, South Southeast, South, South Southwest, Southwest, West Southwest, West, West Northwest, Northwest, North Northwest, North"  whew.]  But this seems to me no more impressive than being able to pat your head and rub your stomach at the same time [or, to quote Lyndon Johnson, to walk and chew gum at the same time.]

Well, suppose it does come to pass that little Athena some day has a chip implanted in her brain that she can activate by her thoughts and that will do for her, anywhere in the world, what Google now does, what Katherine Hepburn and her team did in Desk Set, and what Homer and the Serbo-Croatian bards did?  Will this be the end of human civilization, the attack of the clones, the fulfilment of the dark vision of I, Robot?  Somehow, I doubt it.  Athena will be the same charming, bright, quirky person she is now.  And she will know, in an instant, all of the kings of England.

But she probably will not write longhand with a fountain pen.  Nothing is perfect.

HOW THE WORLD HAS CHANGED

One of the oddest things that remained after I had finished settling my father's estate in 1981 was a courtesy bookmark from the Vleigh Branch Library of the Queens Borough Public Library.  Vleigh Place was a little street perhaps a quarter of a mile from our home that sticks in my mind because of its unusual name.  The bookmark, a piece of decorated cardboard six inches long and an inch and a half wide, lists the hours of service -- 1-9 on Monday, 10 - 9 on Tuesday and Wednesday, and 10 - 5:30 on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.  It was the inscription printed on the back that entranced me when I read it for the first time a few moments ago:

                           "GET THE FACTS BY PHONE -- RE 9 - 1900"

"Next time you need information fast, just telephone the Queens Public Library.  Professional librarians, using a collection of 500 reference books of the handbook of statistical information type, will quickly supply the answer you need.... whether it be on business statistics, spelling, politics or sports, or as technical as 'how do you convert temperature from Fahrenheit to Centigrade?'

This is just one more way the Queens Public Library puts its extensive reference facilities within easy reach of the entire borough of Queens.  Make note of the number RE 9 - 1900."

There is a hilarious old Katherine Hepburn/Spencer Tracy movie in which Hepburn plays the super-efficient head of a TV station's research department and Tracy plays the techie called in to install a new [enormous, card-spitting] computer to take its place.  Needless to say, Hepburn, rather like John Henry, defeats the machine, and she and Tracy fall in love.

How much quieter and simpler my father's world was!  Today, all that information and vastly more is available on a computer or a cell phone, and with the right cellphone, one can simply ask the phone and it will tell you the answer.   Google has just informed me, in roughly fifteen seconds, that the movie I recall so fondly is Desk Set, 1957. 

I imagine by the time my granddaughter, Athena, is old enough to drive, she will have a chip implanted in  her brain that will obviate the onerous necessity of typing an inquiry or even speaking it.  The thought will be enough.

WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

I caught a bit of an interesting discussion on cable TV yesterday in which one of the commentators was talking about the attitudes of the Occupy Movement participants toward established political parties and the rules and regulations of voting, law-making, and such.  The thrust of this man's comment [I never caught his name] was that the Occupy folks are completely disenchanted with both parties and view Capitalism itself as the root of our current problems [rather than particular laws regulating Capitalist institutions and behavior.]  Instead of devoting their time and energy to political campaigns, he said, the people in the Movement to whom he talked had decided to commit themselves to direct action to make changes in the world around them.

This got me thinking, once again, about a very large question that has absorbed my attention for much of my life:  How do the fundamental economic and associated institutions of a society change, and what, if anything, can individuals do to influence the direction of that change?

It will not come as a surprise to the readers of this blog that whenever I think about this question, my first impulse is to return to Marx and remind myself of what he had to say, for all that he wrote a century and a half ago in a different country. 

Marx's thought about this question was deeply influenced by the ideas of the Physiocrats and Adam Smith, who conceived of the economy as a system, on the analogy to the physical system of nature, governed by general laws that operate more or less independently of the wishes and beliefs of particular individuals.  Marx liked to talk of the "laws of motion of Capitalist economy," invoking Newton.  He understood, of course, that this was at best an analogy.  Economic actors are persons with consciousness, desires, intentions, and beliefs, whereas physical objects have none of these characteristics.  Nevertheless, his study of the early capitalist economy of England convinced him that large structural changes, such as the transition from Feudalism to Capitalism, are the quite unintended result of the interaction of countless particular actions and decisions rather than the outcome of deliberate programmatic planning.  He wrote dismissively of people like Proudhon, Fourier, and Saint Simon, whom he called "Utopian Socialists" because they substituted wishful fantasies for rigorous analysis.

One of Marx's most powerful insights was that Capitalism is constantly changing, evolving, developing.  Marx identified three great tendencies or directions of change, all of which he thought would drive Capitalism in the direction of Socialism.  These major tendencies were, First, the irresistible concentration and centralization of capitals, leading to huge firms that would dominate entire industries;  Second, the corresponding unification of the Working Class, whose concentration in ever larger associations of workers would be the unintended by-product of the centralization of capitals; and Third, an ever more exacerbated succession of booms and busts, caused by the fratricidal competition of capitalist firms, which would end in a world-wide crash out of whose ashes Socialism would emerge.

In my opinion, Marx's fundamental approach was absolutely right.  He denied that Capitalism was simply rationality writ large [the view of the apologists for Capitalism], but instead was a particular socio-economic formation in a constant process of change, and he correctly identified ever-greater centralization of capital as the dominant tendency.  He was wrong about the corresponding unification of the Working Class, and although he was right about ever greater financial crises, he was wrong to think that in such crisis the Working Class would take control of the economy and society and carry through the final establishment of Socialism.

In my essay, "The Future of Socialism," which is on box.net and soon will be published by the Seattle University Law Journal, I went into a good deal of detail about exactly how I think fundamental changes are growing within the "womb of the old order," to quote Marx's evocative phrase.  The pessimistic conclusion of that analysis is that utopian projects for the transformation of Capitalism are no more likely to succeed now than they were in Marx's day.

I expect that governments will continue to become more skillful, by fits and starts, at managing the booms and busts of contemporary Capitalism.  I also expect that inequality will continue to grow as Capital finds that it can wrest profits from the economy despite the progressive immiseration of an ever-greater proportion of the working population.  It is possible, I suppose, to view such abominations as the Citizens United Supreme Court decision as evidence of the desperation of a Capitalist managerial class ever more fearful of a popular uprisings, though even a congenital optimist like me finds that rather fanciful.

But of one thing I am, unfortunately quite convinced, namely that small-scale, local, people-to-people actions will not, and indeed cannot, accrete into a force producing a fundamental change in the socio-economic organization of modern Capitalism.

What then is to be done? as Lenin famously asked.  It is, I suppose, an evidence of my advancing age that when I ask that question, my mind turns to Dylan Thomas' greatest poem:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

PROGRESS REPORT

My new project is moving along nicely, complex though it is.  I obtained a database of the incoming class of 2016, and have now chosen the sixty students who will participate in the Pilot Project.  One of the oddities of academic record keeping, with which I am fortunately familiar from my UMass days, is that several of the young women have High School GPAs higher than 4.0.  How is this possible, you might ask.  It seems that when colleges calculate GPAs, they add a point to the grades in Advanced Placement courses, so an A in AP Math, for example, is factored into the GPA as a 5, not a 4.

This, I discovered when I was running a program for minority students from Springfield, MA, has the unfortunate consequence of systematically disadvantaging students at "majority minority" high schools, where AP courses are less often offered.  Thus, no matter how talented and motivated a young Black or Latino student at such a school may be, he or she has very little opportunity to rack up a stellar GPA.

As I observed in my Autobiography [Volume Three], this is only one of the many hidden ways in which minority students are structurally discriminated against.  In general, I have found, senior administrators are quite ignorant of such details  -- their pay grade is too high for them to trouble themselves with the minutiae of day-to-day data assemblage.  They just read the executive summaries and look at the pie charts.

I am aware that I have not been blogging much lately.  My mind is entirely taken up with this new project.  Not only is it very much harder to change the world than merely to think about it;  changing the world even a little bit is also a great deal more absorbing.  Exactly how I design this program will have a real effect on the lives of the sixty students and ten faculty who participate in it, whereas what I think about Syria or the Unemployment Rate or even the recall of Governor Walker is entirely epiphenomenal.

Needless to say, I was greatly cheered by the Appellate Court judgment that the Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional, although my son, who is vastly knowledgerable about such things, tell me it is a complex and not entirely positive decision.  [He was quoted to this effect in a NY TIMES story yesterday.  Can you imagine the pride I feel when I reflect that I once read the entire three volumes of The Lord of the Rings to this brilliant, handsome, accomplished man?]