Arts & Letters

What We Lose When We Lose Winston

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Your heroes will help you find good in yourself

Your friends won’t forsake you for somebody else.

They’ll both stand beside you thru thick and thru thin

And that’s how it goes with heroes and friends.

from “Heroes and Friends” by Don Schlitz and Randy Travis.

My heroes say Brian Lamb and Denis Dutton help me become more tolerant and curious. Franklin’s example helps me work a bit harder; the loving generosity of a woman in my Sunday School class encourages me to be more gentle with my tongue. Kids need heroes but so do adults. We make better choices because our imagination has been stretched with the sense of heroic possibilities. If we assume that we share with others a common humanity, a common human nature, and each of us has the potential to act in a way that transcends our baser selves, then stories of heroism resonate (no matter who nor where the actor). Those we admire may be consistently virtuous or consistently heroic, but often they are not; still, in an act of nobility and purpose we see something that makes our breast swell with pride because we have seen the potential of our common humanity. We come to know that the hero at the Alamo drank too much, that Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, Abraham Lincoln took a long while to reach the ideas of the Emancipation Proclamation, Faulkner wasn’t always faithful. But we also know that, in the end, they made heroic choices, probably because they, too, could draw from narratives of others they nurtured within their hearts. Narratives give us strength; that the founders were willing to risk fortunes, reputations and even lives is admirable. They are like us; but they delved into themselves and found courage, wit, perseverance, nobility.

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Telling Stories

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Jonathan beat me to one of the core ideas of a post I’ve been working on for a few days – a post about evil, art, and self-delusion. Here goes anyway.

Concerning the New Deal, John Updike is a poet in the Platonic sense. And I don’t mean that as a compliment.

The impression of recovery–the impression that a President was bending the old rules and, drawing upon his own courage and flamboyance in adversity and illness, stirring things up on behalf of the down-and-out–mattered more than any miscalculations in the moot mathematics of economics.

To which the great Greg Mankiw replies:

When evaluating political leaders, it is better to trust “the moot mathematics of economics” than “the impression of recovery.”

Wise words, but hardly new ones. In the fourth century B.C.E., Plato is said to have uttered pretty much the same thing:

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Accommodation Versus Innovation

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Appleton covers more thoroughly the ground mapped out by Barone; a useful discussion that touches on some of this is John Jay’s post. Advocates of global warming make it increasingly clear their interest is less in solutions than political & cultural revolutions.

It’s harder to take Al Gore seriously if you reread sections of Wigglesworth’s “Day of Doom” every semester and have some sense of human nature. We love to create a certain frisson of terror at the results of our own evildoing. I’m not sure that is all that bad – we aren’t truly innocent and a real if controllable fear helps reign in our willfulness. Besides, well, it’s human nature. Poe & Hitchcock, artists who strive primarily for effect (Poe’s primary goal), derive their power from recognizing we like to be scared; bogeymen buried in our consciousness want out out every once in a while & we like to feel a little horror of recognition before we pop them back. And we know, without often expressing it or acknowledging the appropriate gratitude we should feel, that life is easier, than it has perhaps ever been: we live in a world in which entertainment is one of our larger budgetary expenses. We feel a little guilt.

Measuring the Political Temperature, Josie Appleton discusses less the effects of global warming than the context in which it is posed – finding motivations less in tune with science or technology than patterns in our cultural history and human nature. (Arts & Letters links to a Spiked review.) She introduces her argument by noting the patterns of the use of science:

But there is another way to approach this question, which is to look at the political circumstances in which climatic science is produced, a process that also has its own laws and patterns. It is strange, at a time when the social construction of science is an established idea (Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which he describes science’s progress through ‘paradigms’, is on every undergraduate’s reading list) that nobody thinks to look at the social construction of global warming theories. Global warming science is being produced in highly febrile times; and history tells us that the more the political temperature rises, the more science’s view of nature is distorted.

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Howl & Reality

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After reading the comments on Shannon’s piece, I went into class. Today we talked of Ginsberg & Howl. I could teach the power of his incantatory lines, his use of repetition, ways he took what Whitman had discovered & made it his own; but, then, I found myself unable to speak. Shannon’s piece, the comments, Cho, so many memories – I just didn’t feel like letting these words lie on the page. I talked for a moment about America in those years and about this romanticism, this belief society was fallen but man wasn’t. These beliefs were not always true, not even useful. Sometimes we’re not noble savages thwarted by a society that sacrifices us to Moloch – sometimes we’re just nuts and need help. And then we turned to Bishop, whose life, too, had plenty of tragedies and whose inclinations, too, were not conventional; still she created a world that better helps us understand and even appreciate our own.

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Related posts:
One of Those Things We Forget About the 50’s & 60’s
Imagine Insanity
Again

The Rough Zones of the Ten Commandments

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Lex’s link to Robert Fogel reinforces much that is said and said often on this blog. It doesn’t seem to me particularly good if we have a wide divergence in wealth and some is back scratching. Nonetheless, I’d worry more if all incomes were the same for all the reasons mentioned here so often. It isn’t just, or even mainly, productivity that is gauged by differing wages. Our desires are different; so are our priorities. Someone who spends twenty hours a week reading to and playing with her child may not expect to be as compensated in money as if she were working a 60-hour executive week; she is, however, richly rewarded in other ways. As Fogel observes, the differences between the way we can live is not all that dramatic and many differences are driven by choice. As the comments indicate, discussions of poverty are often snapshots in time. My children should not be making the wage that their parents, after forty years of work experience and three degrees do; my husband’s mother deserves comfort but is not, at 88, a wage earner nor is she building capital but rather spending it.

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