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.

WILLIAM GOLIDNG'S THE INHERITORS AN APPRECIATION CONCLUSION

Which brings us to William Golding's lovely novel, The Inheritors.  Golding [1911-1993] was an English novelist and poet, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, who is best known for his novel, Lord of the Flies.  The Inheritors is a short novel, only 213 pages in my PocketBooks paperback edition, which tells the tragic story of an encounter between a small band of Neanderthal and a group of Cro Magnon, from the point of view of the Neanderthal!  The genius of Golding's artistic creation lies in his ability to imagine the world as the Neanderthal experience it.

Golding conceives the Neanderthal thought processes as essentially visual and pictorial, rather than analytic or linear.  "There was too much to see and [Lok] became eyes again that registered and perhaps would later remember what now he was not aware of."  The Neanderthal share the pictures in their heads by a primitive form of telepathy, which considerably supplements their rudimentary speech.  They are able, in effect, to show one another the pictures they imagine, and thus to communicate plans of action or feelings.

The plot is quite simple.  The little band of six or seven Neanderthal have just welcomed a "new one," a baby, into the group.  The death of an old one or the birth of a new one are terribly important events for the little group, whose survival depends on maintaining some minimum number.  The old woman is the keeper of fire -- when the group travel from place to place, she embeds the glowing embers in moist clay, and then blows them into flame when they arrive.  [As Golding imagines the Neanderthal, the females are wiser and more responsible than the males, incidentally.  Just the opposite is true of the Cro Magnon, as he represents them.]  The Neanderthal encounter the Cro Magnon, who steal the new one, the baby.  With the Cro Magnon's vastly superior technology -- they use dugout canoes and bows and arrows -- the outcome is never in doubt.

The pleasure of the novel, for me at any rate, lies almost entirely in Golding's ability to conjure a plausible image of the thought processes of the Neanderthal.  They experience the world visually, sensorily.  They experience surfaces.  Thus, when they see the new people, the Cro Magnon, paddling their canoes, Golding's rendering of what they see goes like this:  "Someone dug noisily in the water, and the logs bumped."  At one point [I cannot find the passage], Lok sees one of the Cro Magnon hold a bent stick with a twig across it [a bow and arrow.]  Then a twig suddenly grows out of the tree next to his head.  It takes a moment for the reader to understand that the Cro Magnon has shot an arrow that has embedded itself in the tree next to, Lok's head.  But that is not the way Lok experiences it.

Much of the central part of the novel is taken up with the desperate and unsuccessful efforts of the Neanderthal to retrieve the stolen new one [who has been taken by a Cro Magnon woman who seems to have lost her own baby.]   Then abruptly, seventeen pages before the end of the novel, the narrative perspective shifts, and the remainder of the story is told from the point of view of the Cro Magnon, who load up their canoes and paddle off into the distance, leaving the Neanderthal literally, historically, evolutionarily, and narratively behind.

And there it is.  The Inheritors is a simple novel, exquisitely conceived and carried off, that upends our customary expectations and evaluations and suggests what has been lost in the dying out of the Neanderthal and the triumph of modern homo sapiens sapiens.  It is a quick read, and I think well worth the effort.  I recommend it strongly.  In a sense, it can be thought of as a prequel to Golding's much more famous Lord of the Flies.

WILLIAM GOLDING'S THE INHERITORS AN APPRECIATION PART ONE

A few explanatory words of a personal nature are necessary before I begin my discussion of The Inheritors.  When I was a boy, I was fascinated by the paleontological reports of the remains of early man and pre-human species.  A great deal is known now about the complex evolutionary lineages of hominid and pre-hominid species, in part as a consequence of sophisticated analyses of DNA remains in fossilized bones.  We know that hominids evolved first in Southern Africa, and migrated out of Africa into the Near East, Europe, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, and beyond in at least two separate waves of migration -- the first perhaps a million years ago or more, the second quite recently as geological time is measured, perhaps 100,000 years ago or less.  We know that there was some measure of interbreeding among the several hominid species, so that 3 or 4 percent of the DNA of modern homo sapiens sapiens comes from other hominid species.  

But none of this was known when I was a boy.  What science had, at that point, was some bones.  And one of the best collections of those old bones was to be found in the Museum of Natural History on the upper West Side of Manhattan.  There, in long glass-covered exhibit tables, were mandibles, crania, teeth, ulnae, and other odds and ends from the best-known of the "ape-men," homo neanderthalensis, or Neanderthal Man [named for the Neander Valley in Germany], side by side with the quite different mandibles, crania, and whatnot of our true ancestors, Cro Magnon Man.  On Saturdays, I would take the subway to the museum and spend hours staring at the bones, consulting my little Handbook of Physical Anthropometry, written by Harry L. Shapiro, who was actually on the staff of the museum.  I became knowledgeable about ascending rami and sigmoid notches and zygomatic arches.  I learned that Neanderthal Man had a heavy bony orbital ridge [useful for keeping rain out of the eyes], and a brainpan as large as, or larger than, that of modern man.  I knew that he had heavy bones, capable of supporting powerful muscles, that he made stone tools, and had learned the use of fire.  I knew that he had managed to survive the series of ice ages and wild temperature swings that beset northern Europe over a period of several hundred thousand years, and that he seemed to have disappeared from the paleontological record some thirty or thirty-five thousand years ago.

Cro Magnon man, by contrast, was slender, gracile, with a lighter, less massive mandible, a slender ascending ramus, and a deeper sigmoid notch, and without the heavy oribital ridge.  Cro Magnon man had a more sophisticated toolkit, including an array of tools worked from bone.  He too had the use of fire, and in a number of caves in Southwest France and Spain had left astonishingly beautiful paintings of a variety of animals indigenous to the area.  Genetically, Cro Magnon man, it seems, is identical with modern human beings -- our true ancestors.  There really was not that much time, viewed paleontologically, between the remains of Cro Magnon man and the pyramids or the epics of Homer.

The message of the early paleontology was clear:  Cro Magnon were the good guys, and Neanderthal were the heavies.

Which brings us to William Golding's lovely novel, The Inheritors.  Golding [1911-1993] was an English novelist and poet, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, who is best known for his novel, Lord of the Flies.  The Inheritors, published in 1955, is a short novel, only 213 pages in my PocketBooks paperback edition, which tells the tragic story of an encounter between a small band of Neanderthal and a group of Cro Magnon, from the point of view of the Neanderthal!  In a genuine tour de force, Golding manages to create a believable portrait of a small band of Neanderthal from the inside, as it were.

THE THREAT OF AN ISRAELI ATTACK ON IRAN

I am well aware that uttering simple, obvious truths regarding the state of Israel will bring down on my head a firestorm of calumny.  So be it.  There is nothing at all that I can do to affect in the slightest the events unfolding in the Middle East, but so long as I presume to run a blog, I have an obligation at least to speak.  Accordingly, here are a few obvious truths:

1.  Israel is currently the dominant military power in the Middle East as a consequence of being the only nuclear-armed state in the entire region.  No state in the Middle East has the military power to destroy Israel;  Isreal has the military power to destroy any state in the Middle East.

2.  Iran seeks to acquire nuclear weapons.  In so doing, it threatens Israel's military hegemony.  If one sets aside Israel's carefully cultivated myth of victimhood, that is the real significance of Iran's attempt to develop nuclear weapons.  Iran seeks nuclear weapons in order to increase its influence in the region.  Israel is now threatening to launch a preemptive strike against Iran to degrade Iran's nuclear capability, thereby maintaining for a while longer its military hegemony in the region.

3.  For complex domestic reasons that involve both the American Jewish Lobby and the end-times religious fantasies of evangelical Christians, The United States government is prepared to support Israel's aggressive military adventures, even though those adventures are contrary to the national self-interest of the United States.

4.  Israel is an apartheid state.  It is currently the only nation state in the world that rules a large occupied population.  Israel is also a vibrant, lively, open democracy by any customary measure.  These two propositions are not in the slightest contradictory.  I can attest from personal observation that apartheid South Africa was far and away the liveliest, most open, most democratic society in Southern Africa -- for Whites.  I use the term of opprobrium "apartheid" advisedly.  The wall Israel has constructed, and the patchwork of territories into which it has forced the Palestinian people, is fully as oppressive, fully as dedicated to "separateness" [the meaning in Afrikaans of "apartheid"] as the South African system of pass control laws, influx control laws, townships, and bantustans.

5.  Israel's existence is not threatened, by Iran or by any other Middle Eastern state.  Israel's military hegemony in the region is threatened by Iran's attempt to develop nuclear weapons.  The United States has no national interest in maintaining Israel's military hegemony in the Middle East.

BACK IN THE SADDLE

My five week long health crisis has taken me away from this blog more than I would have liked.  I think perhaps it is time to essay another "Appreciation."  Accordingly, tomorrrow I will initiate a brief discussion of William Golding's extraordinary novel, The Inheritors.