A Biblical Story: Jacob's Two Marriages

By the standards of Genesis, the story of Jacob and his two marriages, first to Leah, and then to Rachel, with Leah remaining as his wife, is told at a leisurely pace. It covers Genesis 29-Genesis 31 and is detailed in its incidents, borrowing for a narrative the practice of the chronicle sections of Genesis and so recounts the names of his children by both of his wives and those of his children borne by the handmaidens of his wives. That is much longer than the story of Abraham, who also has to deal with both a wife and a handmaiden and the children born to them, which is dealt with in a much briefer narrative, Genesis 21, even though the span of time is the same in each story: about a generation. The reason for the slower and more stately telling of Jacob’s family story is, I think, because the author is trying to convey a sense of how it takes time for familial relationships to change, and there is much merit in the wisdom being offered, even if we must apply it today to a world without polygamy and where people by and large don’t marry their first cousins. It also may be that the story of Jacob and his marriages is a reworking of a story that appears just a short time earlier in Genesis 24. That is the story of how Isaac met his wife. It has some of the same plot motifs, such as meeting at a well. But the earlier story has been simplified in that the servant delivering the offer has been dropped even though that adds a nice “Beowulf”-like set of repetitions. The loss of the literary mannerisms suggests that the author or editor of the later story was striving for a simplicity of storytelling that would allow the poignancy of the story to come through.

Read More

The Autonomy of Field Commanders

The field commanders of armies are notoriously unreliable. In fact, the Romans forbade them from sending their armies across the Rubicon lest they try to overthrow the government. Troops were, until recently, more loyal to their commanders than they were to their polity, perhaps because it was the military units that enforced military discipline. You could be killed for insubordination. That was the power over you, not the politicians in Rome. What is remarkable and surprising, however, is that the autonomy of field commanders to do what they wanted with their troops lasted until recent times-- the First World War, I would say. This is partly because armies in the past relied on their own supplies and the funds provided to them to keep them in the field. But twentieth century armies had come to rely on supplies of oil and munitions and tanks supplied for them by their various defense ministries and so were no longer autonomous. How this balance of field command and high command alters over the past two hundred years explains a lot about the wars fought during that time period.

Read More

Charity is an Outdated Idea

There are fewer beggars on the streets of New York than there used to be but you run into them everyday on the subway and sitting on cardboard in the streets with signs announcing what led them to beg: illness, PTSS, a dog that needed to be fed. People are likely to identify some beggars as more deserving of charity than others, and so the moral question of whether to give becomes complicated. If we are more likely to give our handouts to those beggars who look most nearly like ordinary people, and so evoke sym[athy, then charity is given for our own well being because it has become possible to identify with one of God’s less fortunate creatures by having overcome only a minimum of disgust or disquiet because this person seems capable of becoming even more like us. On the other hand, if handouts are more likely to be given to those who look most needy, then the giver is perversely catering to his sense of disgust because he rewards those who are most grotesque and so gives tacit approval to those people who maim themselves or appear maimed or drag along children to increase their take.

Read More

A Primer on Liberalism & Conservatism

Recent books have suggested that Liberalism is on the wane or is confused in its beliefs or was a movement of the moment that lasted from 1932 through 1968. I want to suggest, to the contrary, that Liberalism is one of the political philosophies that emerged in Early Modern Europe as a way to find a basis for authority and the way to organize the self that is different from the one that is provided by the Christian Church, which offers as its answers to these questions God-inspired monarchical leadership and a sense of people as being flawed by original sin but saved through the intervention of Christ. The alternative to Liberalism is a philosophy that emerged at the same time: Conservatism. These two philosophies continue to stand as the two alternatives, whatever are the short term successes and setbacks for each of them, and it does not seem to me that either of them will be soon supplanted by a very different understanding of what people really are.

Read More

The Shutdown

Well, I thought that something important might have really happened on our way to the Mueller Report: the shutdown of the federal government because the Congress and the President couldn’t agree on a bill to fund the government. But Chuck Schumer decided he would prefer a shaky promise from Mitch McConnell to anything Trump might say, and so backed down. And it is not surprising that Schumer offered to build Trump’s wall in exchange for a deal on the Dreamers. Democrats are prone to think they can arrive at some grand bargain with Republicans if they put something they care about on the table. Remember that Obama wanted to create a grand bargain with Boehner which would have included entitlement reforms. Democrats are willing to sacrifice their interests to get the government functioning again, but Republicans are not, and the Republican wisdom, as that is verified by election results, is that the American people don’t care if the government functions (so long as nothing changes in their own lives). So a shutdown seemed like a dynamite blast to shake the government loose, and so people like me, who opposed the last government shutdown, were in favor of it. Do something.

Read More

Carrying Charges

Not too long ago, commentators were saying that some people voted for Trump because they were economically pressed in that wages were stagnating, this assessment based on national wage figures. That is an economic change of which people may not be aware, but which will somehow go into their calculations of how well off they are. Somehow, voters have a sense of how only statistically significant increases or decreases in wages impinged on their own lives and respond accordingly. That is not very plausible and it is a factor in life that, one would presume, would be easily enough washed out by cultural issues like abortion or thinking that coastal people are condescending towards middle Americans. At this moment, however, a very different economic logic is being pursued by commentators trying to forecast the impact of the Trump tax bill. It may not do much good for the country, this giving away of a trillion dollars to rich people without any requirement that they invest it in productive ways, but it will put a thousand dollars or so in the pockets of many of the middle class and that is something concrete, a real if small gain, and so may lead them to stick with Trump. Note the difference between the two argument: in the first case, there is an incremental change in people’s disposable income as a result of a lack of increase in paychecks, a change of which people may not be aware, but which will somehow go into their calculations of how well off they are, and in the second case, there is an increase in take home pay because of a decrease in payroll deductions and people will be aware of this change even though it is not very sizable. I want to apply this second kind of logic, of what people know as a change in their own lives, to addressing the first question, which is why people feel squeezed, and so dispense with any need for economic metaphysics.

Read More

The Nominal Role of the Politician

George Orwell got it all wrong in his famous essay “Shooting An Elephant” when he says that people wanted him to exercise his authority as a policeman in India and shoot an elephant. Orwell says the locals did so because they identified authority with the English. Rather, I would say, they wanted him to assume authority so that the elephant would get shot. He would make the decision, take the risk, get the job done, and take the blame should he mess up. Otherwise, there would have been no end of haggling about who should be appointed to do the job or whether it should be done by a committee. His title was an excuse to do what had to be done, and he had considerable discretion, as all bosses do, about what that title required him to do. Any boss can follow his personality and be more or less aggressive in the policies he asks his subordinates to administer or in how he responds to the demands of clientele. Orwell could have pooh-poohed the request or referred it to local game officials.

Read More

Standby & Operating Institutions

All organizations, and not just governments, are either standby or operating institutions, or some combination of the two, and an important basis for the division between conservatives and liberals, a distinction that goes back to the French Revolution or before, and is part of the fabric of the modern world, rests on whether government should be primarily one or the other. This is just one of the underlying and overlapping emotions and ideas that give rise to the chasm between conservatives and liberals. Another, well elaborated by Karl Mannheim about one hundred years ago, is the distinction between those who look backwards to a golden age and those who look forward to a utopia as the focus of their political imaginations. Both ideas are creatures of the imagination but both also have very different consequences. A traditionalist mind finds conventional morality and politics preferable to what seem to be the hopeless dreams of the Utopian, even though what a utopian predicts will often come true, as happened in the United States, for example, when African Americans went from being a caste to an ethnic group in two generations, from the time miscegenation was made legal to the time a mixed race person was elected President.

Read More

Gender Prejudice & Sexual Harassment

Since I assume, with everyone else, and as data indicates, that women are on average smarter than men (they, for example, do better at school) and more interested in explicating personal relationships than are men, it is amazing that during the current frenzy over sexual harassment, the distinction between that and gender prejudice is obscured or neglected, which is evidence, I take it, that we are indeed in the midst of a frenzy, when an entire gender has lost its mind, something that they will recover, hopefully, before too much time has passed--say, by the end of the decade or a few years after that. So in the hope of getting things right, I will reiterate the distinction and apply it to present circumstances. But my hopes of alleviating the frenzy are dim because the basis of the frenzy is so emotionally deeply seated in the psyches of the two sexes.

Read More

Freud & Sexual Harassment

Sigmund Freud was a major intellectual force from the Thirties through the Seventies, so much so that humanistic intellectuals during the time when I became exposed to cultural developments, the Fifties and Sixties, were deeply into the question of how to reconcile Freud and Marx, those two great explorers into the science of society, those humanistic intellectuals blissfully unaware that there were other savants, like Weber and Parsons, who also had to be reckoned with. Freud went into decline after it became clear that his method of cure, talking to people at great length, was not reliable and also very expensive, and that, as Grunwald showed, rigorous scientific experimentation did not justify Freud’s theories. Moreover, cheaper and more effective cures and mitigations of mental troubles could be accomplished through drugs. Better living through chemistry. Nowadays, Freud seems additionally discredited by the claims of people like Frederick Crews that his case studies were fraudulent reports and that Freud was himself not a very nice man, the latter charge obvious to anyone who defended the great man’s theories, whatever his shortcomings as a person, given that he two timed his wife, dismissed as worthless most of those who broke with him (though not Jung, whom he thought went on to do good work) or how cruel he was to his daughter, subjecting her to psychoanalysis with her own father. But put that all aside. There is still something to be said for his insights, which do capture the feel of the underground life we all lead with regard to our sexuality and these insights even illuminate the present public controversy concerning sexual harassment.

Read More

Trump's First Year

Now is the time when I am supposed to admit that I was wrong in the prediction I made this past spring that nothing much would happen in Washington until Mueller made his report. Well, there have been preliminary indictments, but no final report, the expected end of the investigation ever more remote, and the networks and cable channels all now saying, contrary to what they said two weeks ago, which was before the passage of the new tax law, that Trump’s first year has, in fact, been one of accomplishment rather than inaction in that he got through a tax bill which also cut back on the mandate that people pay a penalty if they do not buy health insurance, and that he has made numerous judicial appointments, including one to the Supreme Court, and that he has gotten his way with the agencies and is getting drilling for oil started in parts of Alaska where it had been barred. That is quite an achievement-- except that it is not so, especially in view of the fact that this President is such a nihilistic character that he wanted to bring down government in general, and in that light, or in even a more moderate light, he hasn’t accomplished all that much at all.

Read More

"The Last Jedi" & Self-Referentiality: "Flash Gordon" to "Blade Runner"

The Star Wars saga is remarkable for being overwhelmingly self-referential, and that may account for the duration of the franchise, the first Star Wars movie having appeared in 1978. Most science fiction movies are hardly about the future; they are recycling of ancient and contemporary allusions. The frame for “Blade Runner” was cinema noire and references to race relations in the United States, the artificial life creatures taking the place of American Blacks as those who are hounded down and killed for going off the plantation. The frame for the Terminator movies, for their part, was the Jesus and Mary story, a person from the future fathering a child whose mother protects him so that he can be the salvation of the world even though people think she is crazy for believing this story. H. G. Wells had the prospect of World War II in mind when he created “Preview of Things to Come”, fleets of aircraft destroying cities and civilization, when the war that came proved surprising in that cities such as Berlin remained as organized communities even as their buildings were overwhelmingly destroyed. “The Last Jedi”, the latest story in the Star Wars saga is noteworthy for how true it remains to the basic storyline, it’s imagery, and its own mythology and has few contemporary concerns. This self-referentiality constitutes a kind of originality, however much the Star Wars saga still remains something considerably short of art.

Read More

Sovereignty & Its Discontents: Blade runner or H.G. Wells?

The idea of sovereignty has been the prevailing theory of the state for at least a thousand years. It is the idea that the power of government was entrusted by God to kings and then, in the view of seventeenth century political theorists, the locus of power was shifted to officeholders responsible, in some sense, to the will of the people. In all of these cases, government was what the early twentieth century sociologist Max Weber defined it to be: a legitimate monopoly on the use of violence that could be exercised on any matters that came to concern the imagination of the government. First, there was the control of warfare, in that everything else was ruled by custom; then, ever more intrusion into the economy, violence used to enforce economic reforms such as collectivization or the regulation of the sale of bread; then, into ever more intrusion into social structure, so that violence or the threat of violence influences changes in the class structure and even the caste structure of the Jim Crow American South; and then into culture, strictly speaking, as journalists are swept off to gulags or killed. As Hugo Grotius, another seventeenth century savant, elaborated, the relation of nations to one another was one of perpetual war or potential war. Order existed only within the individual nation state. This is a long way from Kant’s Enlightenment vision of a state of perpetual peace ushered in by the gradual consolidation of nations into a giant single state.

Read More

Fifty Years Later: Anniversary of the March on Washington

A number of people, including myself, found the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington, which took place a few years ago while Obama still held the con, discouraging as well as a cause for celebration. It is worth trying to recapture that moment for why it was the anniversary of only a partial victory, just as gun control legislation, even if it came about, would be only a very partial victory against the cultural preoccupation of Americans with guns and gun culture, something that has little place in the modern urban world but only in the minds of those who idealize a Wild West which, contrary to fact, does not have gun totters deposit their weapons at the saloon door or at the Sheriff’s office.

Read More

The Al Franken Resignation

As I say, nothing much will happen in Washington until Mueller winds up his investigation, probably with a report to Congress saying that Trump is beholden to the Russians because of all the money he owes to them or has laundered for them, but until then the cable networks and other news outlets are in a frenzy about sexual harassment, the most significant victim of that frenzy so far being Al Franken, who was forced to resign from the Senate, which did not grant him the expedited ethics hearing that I presume he wanted, but came to judgment on the basis of accusations by six women, at least three of whom remain anonymous. Put aside the hypocrisy of the women Senators who said they were shocked to find themselves forced to insist on his resignation in spite of the fact that he was a friend of theirs. That is not the way a friend behaves, sticking in the knife along with everyone else, rather than trying to find a plausible explanation for bad behavior. They were never his friends, just political colleagues never overmuch concerned with personal loyalty. Let us turn instead to the nature of this frenzy, which is a form of McCarthyism, this time from the left rather than from the right.

Read More

Social Problems & Role Theory

Social structures are invisible because they are, after all, nothing more than names for coordinated activities between people, and so are not available to the five senses even though they are made up of events and so are empirical. And yet people have an apperception of these structures even if they cannot give names to them because different structures do, in fact, have different “feels” to them, the job of giving specific names to distinct social structures left to professionals, the ordinary layperson knowing well enough about how the social world works so that he or she can live in it and manipulate it. Here is an example of one of those social structures, social problems, that people sense and therefore know about without needing to know about it with any precision except when a social crisis arises as happens, for instance, when there is a President of the United States who is clearly unsuited to the job and the American people have to decide how unsuited he has to be to be turned out of office.

Read More

Anticipation

Here is a simple guide to human motivation.

People play amusing games with Sari, the voice of Google. They ask to marry her. They ask her trick and obscure questions about history. They remark on how she never gets tired of giving you new directions when you have gone a block beyond where you were supposed to turn. What is funny about her is that she never loses her patience, even though she seems to be a human voice, and we know why that is true. She is, after all, a machine. People, on the other hand, get annoyed if you repeat a question more than a few times; they take offense at lewd remarks; they are displeased when they display themselves as ignorant. That is because they are reflective about where they fall short of their images of themselves, of their self-conscious selves. They know how they anticipate how they will act or have their actions looked at and so can measure where they fall short. This solipsism is the beginning of wisdom because it can be stretched to include all the many ways in which people anticipate the consequences of their actions and of collective action. Machines, on the other hand, are infinitely patient, never jumping to the future, because, after all, they are not exercising patience at all but merely being what they are, which is procedures whereby things get done through physical and electronic arrangements, whether that is a lever, always there to serve, or an automobile, whether or not it is driverless, and computers, that do get unplugged, but do not go mad, except in a metaphorical sense, as happens with any old fashioned IBM calculator when you tried to divide by zero: it just started jumping around the table. This distinction between people and machines, people having intentions and machines not, provides a lever into understanding motivation.

Read More

The Right to Secession

The Founding Fathers put into the United States Constitution at least two remedies should it happen that the splendid mechanism they had devised should show imperfections either in systems or in practice. First off, they provided for a process of amendment whereby, with great difficulty, Congress or the states could alter the Constitution, the process not being hasty lest it be engaged in for mischievous reasons. Second of all, they provided for impeachment, whereby even the President could be removed from office, his powers so great that he might be suspected of wanting to overstep them, and there had to be a way of doing that without resorting to his execution, an expedient which the British had used in their own past and whose lesson was not lost on the Founding Fathers: find a way to peacefully get rid of the one who presides over the nation. The Founding Fathers did not expect this power to be used lightly, for then it would have turned the new nation into something of a parliamentary democracy, the President subject to the political inclinations of his legislature. To the contrary, the spirit of the Founding Fathers was to make as many things as possible about their system objective rather than political, and so the term of service of the President was set as a fixed number of years, just as the allocation of seats in the Congress to the various states was on the basis of a census of the people of the United States so as to prevent the existence of “rotten boroughs”, which are districts without many persons living there, which happened in the British system because it was by act of Parliament that an area had a seat in Parliament or had one withdrawn.

Read More

Old Age is a Disease

People are more interesting when they are seventeen or twenty seven than when they are seventy seven, which is the age I have just achieved. At seventeen, they wonder about what kind of person they will be and what kind of occupation they will hold when they grow up; at twenty seven they think about whether they are good husbands and wives and whether they are any good at what they do for a living. People are concerned at twenty seven with whatever project they have taken on in life, whether that is a career goal or simply a way to provide support for the family they now hold up as the dearest thing in the world to them. But at seventy seven, as I just found out at my high school’s sixtieth reunion, people want to talk about their grandchildren, as do I, and what diseases are knocking off the people you and your interlocutor may know. It is not that the younger person is still not there, deep inside, but the self has become sufficiently polished so that only externals show.

Read More