The Passwords and the Barbarians

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I’ve previously cited a passage from the novel of ideas Citadelle (aka Wisdom of the Sands) by the French writer-aviator Antoine de St Exupery.  Citadelle represents the musings of a fictional desert prince: on society, on government, and on humanity.  Here are some excerpts from the passage I want to discuss:

“Nevertheless,” I mused, “these men live not by things but by the meaning of things, and thus it is needful that they should transmit the passwords to each other, generation by generation.  That is why I see them, no sooner a child is born, making haste to inure him in the usage of their language; for truly it is the key to their treasure.  So as to be able to transport him into this harvest of golden wonders they have reaped, they spare no toil in opening up within him the ways of portage.  For hard to put into words, weighty yet subtle, are the harvests it behooves us to transmit from one generation to another.

“..But if the new generation lives in houses about which it knows nothing save their utility, what will it find to do in such a desert of a world?  For even as your children must first be taught the art of music, if they are to take pleasure in playing a stringed instrument; even so, if you would have them, when they come to man’s estate, capable of the emotions worthiest of man, you must teach them to discern, behind the diversity of things, the true lineaments of your house, your domain, your empire.

“Else that new generation will but pitch camp therein, like a horde of savages in a town they have captured. And what joy would such barbarians get of your treasures?  Lacking the key of your language, they would know not how to turn them to account….(the barbarian) throws down your walls and scatters your possessions to the winds.  This he does to revenge himself on the instrument which he knows not how to play, and presently he sets the village on fire–which at least rewards him with a little light!  But soon he loses interest, and yawns. For you must know what you are burning, if you are to find beauty in its light.  Thus with the candle you burn before your god. But to the barbarian the flames of your house will say nothing, for they are not a sacrificial fire.

“..This, too, is why I bid you bring up your children to be like you.  It is not the function of some petty officer to hand down to him their inheritance, for this is something not comprised in his manual of Regulations..You shall build your children in your image, lest in late days they come to drag their lives out joyously in a land which will seem to them but an empty camping place, and whose treasures they will allow to rot away uncared-for, because they have not been given its keys.”

Doesn’t this passage go a long way toward explaining what has been going on at places like Columbia University?  We see a confluence of two categories of barbarians:  American natives who never learned the passwords, having either never heard of them or been told to actively despise them…and foreign students / immigrants who come from cultures with entirely different passwords and, unlike previous generations of immigrants, have no interest in learning the American ones.

I’m also remembering something Hilaire Belloc wrote:

The Barbarian hopes — and that is the mark of him, that he can have his cake and eat it too. He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being. Discipline seems to him irrational, on which account he is ever marvelling that civilization, should have offended him with priests and soldiers.

The Barbarian wonders what strange meaning may lurk in that ancient and solemn truth, “Sine Auctoritate nulla vita.” In a word, the Barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this, that he cannot make: that he can befog and destroy but that he cannot sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilization exactly that has been true.

We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid.

We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creed refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.

My previous post referencing St-Exupery’s Citadelle are Transmitting the Passwords–or Not,  When Sleep the Sentinels, and Of Springs and Cables.

Your thoughts?

The Democrats and the Necronomicon

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The other week a group staged an ambush outside of a Texas ICE detention facility, firing some 20 to 30 rounds from AR-15-style rifles, hitting one local police officer in the neck. A number of the group had staged a riot outside the facility, vandalizing buildings and cars, presumably to lure ICE personnel and local police to the scene where they could be ambushed.

Local law enforcement quickly made 10 arrests, with many of the suspects armed and in tactical gear. A search warrant executed on a suspect’s Dallas house, which served as an assembly point for the group, found Antifa literature.

Antifa, you say?

Byron York had a piece earlier that week about the increasing pressure Democratic politicians were facing from constituents and activists to do more to confront the Trump Administration.

“Our own base is telling us that what we’re doing is not good enough,” said one Democratic lawmaker (out of nine) quoted in the Axios article. “Some of them have suggested … what we really need to do is be willing to get shot [in protests at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities] … that there needs to be blood to grab the attention of the press and the public.”

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Book Review: Nice Work, by David Lodge (rerun)

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What happens when an expert on 19th-century British industrial novels—who is a professor, a feminist, and a deconstructionist—finds herself in an actual factory?

This not being a time-travel novel, the factory is a contemporary one for the book’s setting in mid-1980s Britain.  It is a metalworking plant called Pringle’s, run by managing director Vic Wilcox.  Vic is not thrilled when his boss  (Pringle’s is owned by a conglomerate) suggests that he participate in something called the “shadow” program, designed to make academics and businesspeople better-acquainted with one another, but he goes along with the request.

Robyn Penrose, literature professor at a nearby university, is also not thrilled about her nomination to participate in the program, but she is concerned about her job in an era of reduced university funding, and also thinks she had better do as asked.  The way the program works is that Robyn will be Vic’s “shadow,”  joining him at the plant every Wednesday, sitting in on his regular activities, and learning just a bit about what is involved in managing a business.

Vic is a self-made man, not well-educated and with few interests outside work.  He is acutely aware of the danger that faces Pringle’s under the current economic climate, and is resolved that his factory will not join the long list of those that have been tossed on the scrapheap.

There is nothing quite so forlorn as a closed factory, Vic Wilcox knows, having supervised a shutdown himself in his time.  A factory is sustained by the energy of its own functioning, the throb and whine of machinery, the unceasing motion of assembly lines, the ebb and flow of workers changing shifts, the hiss of airbrakes and the growl of diesel engines from wagons delivering raw materials at one gate, taking away finished goods at the other.  When you put a stop to all that, when the place is silent and empty, all that is left is a large, ramshackle shed, cold, filthy and depressing.  Well, that won’t happen at Pringle’s, hopefully, as they say.  Hopefully.

Robyn and Vic dislike each other on first meeting:  Vic sees Robyn’s profession as useless, while Robyn sees Vic’s managerial role as brutal and greedy.  She is appalled by what she sees in her first tour of the factory…especially the foundry:

They crossed another yard, where hulks of obsolete machinery crouched, bleeding rust into their blankets of snow, and entered a large building with a high vaulted roof hidden in gloom.  This space rang with the most barbaric noise Robyn had ever experienced…The floor was covered with a black substance that looked like soot, but grated under the soles of her boots like sand.  The air reeked with a sulphurous, resinous smell, and a fine drizzle of black dust fell on their heads from the roof.  Here and there the open doors of furnaces glowed a dangerous red, and in the far corner of the building what looked like a stream of molten lava trickled down a curved channel from roof to floor…It was the most terrible place she had ever been in her life.  To say that to herself restored the original meaning of the word “terrible”:  it provoked terror, even a kind of awe. To think of being that man, wrestling with the heavy awkward lumps of metal in that maelstrom of heat, dust and stench, deafened by the unspeakable noise of the vibrating grid, working like that for hour after hour, day after day….That he was black seemed the final indignity:  her heart swelled with the recognition of the spectacle’s powerful symbolism.

But still:

The situation was so bizarre, so totally unlike her usual environment, that there was a kind of exhilaration to be found in it…She thought of what her colleagues and students might be doing this Wednesday morning, earnestly discussing the poetry of John Donne or the novels of Jane Austen or the nature of modernism, in centrally heated, carpeted rooms…Penny Black would be feeding more statistics on wife-beating in the West Midlands into her data-base, and Robyn’s mother would be giving a coffee morning for some charitable cause…What would they all think if they could see her now?

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Not Your Grandfather’s Socialism

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We now have an open socialist, Zohran Mamdani, who may well become the next mayor of New York City. Mamdani has made his views on economic organization pretty clear, speaking about “seizing the means of production.”

Increasingly, though, I see posts from Left-oriented people who don’t seem to realize that production is necessary at all. The assertion is made that abundance is the natural state of man, and scarcity is caused by capitalists fencing everything off to deliberately create scarcity. I saw one particularly exemplary post along these lines I was intending to cite, but it seems to have disappeared. Here’s another post, along the same lines though not quite as extreme: Link.

For roughly 190,000 of humanity’s 200,000 years, this was simply how life worked. Food was shared because people understood their interdependence. Communities ensured everyone’s survival not through legal obligation or market exchange, but through social bonds and mutual recognition of common humanity…One day your food isn’t guaranteed. Common lands are ‘enclosed’, stolen and claimed as private property. The next day it is under someone else’s control. Shared granaries become privately owned warehouses.

In reality, of course, your food was never guaranteed, as any American Indian or European villager could have explained based on personal experience. And that “recognition of common humanity” tended to be strongly limited by tribal boundaries.

Richard Fulmer explained:

Your view of the past is just a bit romantic. It ignores floods, droughts, famines, plagues, bandits, and wars; imagines that no one was ever exiled for refusing to work; that weak or sickly infants weren’t sometimes killed or left to die; that the elderly were never abandoned to starvation or the wolves; and that peasants didn’t live with their livestock, sharing parasites and disease.

…and offered some ‘slightly more realistic’ versions of the stories in the original post.

There’s a lot of the abundance-is-natural kind of thinking floating around at present. Here’s another example.

Earlier generations of leftists got a lot wrong, but generally  at least understood  that we were not born into the Garden of Eden and that abundance needs to be created–it is not and never was there auomatically. Here is the Fabian socialist Sidney Webb, writing about the importance to humanity of what he called the Machine Age.

What can be done to remedy the failure to understand that abundance isn’t automatic?  Some have suggested that the answer lies in the universal teaching of economics in high school and college. Maybe this could help, but equally or more important, IMO, would be teaching the history of technology–with ‘technology’ broadly defined. There needs to be a better understanding of what it really meant to be at the mercy of nature unmediated by human knowledge and skill.

Your thoughts?

The Rain It Raineth on the Just*

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So, as readers may have gathered from the screaming headlines in the Establishment Media Organs, we in Central Texas had a spot of rain this last weekend. What wasn’t in the mainstream news was the fact that we have had local warnings and alerts of rain and thunderstorms and the like, about every other day for the last two or three weeks, and most of those warnings amounted to just a piddling few drops – with one exception, about two weeks ago. My backyard rain gauge registered 6 and a half inches in the space of an hour and a half around 3 in the morning on that day. Such weather antics have kept my garden lush and green into midsummer, and the lawns of those of my neighbors who have them, similarly lush. Some of our summers are like that, alternated with summers that go three digit-temperatures without a drop of rain in sight for three months in a row.

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