Sunday, August 25, 2019
Saturday, August 24, 2019
The Walking Englishman
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The most visited free content web site for walking in Great Britain with the most popular National Parks and walking areas covered. Included are personal commentaries, statistical data and complimentary pictures of every walk featured. Download files in GPS and Google Earth formats for all the routes are provided, all for free. Further information on routes and the walking areas is also available on request.
The Walking Englishman is a website with no subscription required, no mailing lists, no cookie intrusions and no pop-ups. Come and go as you please to this informative site about walking in Great Britain which includes personal reflections of walks I have enjoyed. Feel free to browse and download any walks you choose, all of which include maps, journals, statistics, elevations, photographs and reports
Friday, August 23, 2019
Thursday, August 22, 2019
Wednesday, August 21, 2019
Suetonious - the Life of Tiberius
"A fisherman appeared unexpectedly and offered the Emperor a huge mullet; whereupon in his alarm that the man had clambered up to him from the back of the island over rough and pathless rocks, he had the poor fellow's face scrubbed with the fish. And because in the midst of his torture the man thanked his stars that he had not given the Emperor an enormous crab that he had caught, Tiberius sent his guards to retrieve it and had his face torn with the Crab also."
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Tuesday, August 20, 2019
Monday, August 19, 2019
Sunday, August 18, 2019
Studies in Pessimism, by Arthur Schopenhauer
On the Sufferings of the World.
Unless suffering is the direct and immediate object of life, our existence must entirely fail of its aim. It is absurd to look upon the enormous amount of pain that abounds everywhere in the world, and originates in needs and necessities inseparable from life itself, as serving no purpose at all and the result of mere chance. Each separate misfortune, as it comes, seems, no doubt, to be something exceptional; but misfortune in general is the rule.
I know of no greater absurdity than that propounded by most systems of philosophy in declaring evil to be negative in its character. Evil is just what is positive; it makes its own existence felt. Leibnitz is particularly concerned to defend this absurdity; and he seeks to strengthen his position by using a palpable and paltry sophism.1 It is the good which is negative; in other words, happiness and satisfaction always imply some desire fulfilled, some state of pain brought to an end.
1 Translator’s Note, cf. Thèod, §153. — Leibnitz argued that evil is a negative quality — i.e., the absence of good; and that its active and seemingly positive character is an incidental and not an essential part of its nature. Cold, he said, is only the absence of the power of heat, and the active power of expansion in freezing water is an incidental and not an essential part of the nature of cold. The fact is, that the power of expansion in freezing water is really an increase of repulsion amongst its molecules; and Schopenhauer is quite right in calling the whole argument a sophism.]
This explains the fact that we generally find pleasure to be not nearly so pleasant as we expected, and pain very much more painful.
The pleasure in this world, it has been said, outweighs the pain; or, at any rate, there is an even balance between the two. If the reader wishes to see shortly whether this statement is true, let him compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is engaged in eating the other.
The best consolation in misfortune or affliction of any kind will be the thought of other people who are in a still worse plight than yourself; and this is a form of consolation open to every one. But what an awful fate this means for mankind as a whole!
We are like lambs in a field, disporting themselves under the eye of the butcher, who chooses out first one and then another for his prey. So it is that in our good days we are all unconscious of the evil Fate may have presently in store for us — sickness, poverty, mutilation, loss of sight or reason.
No little part of the torment of existence lies in this, that Time is continually pressing upon us, never letting us take breath, but always coming after us, like a taskmaster with a whip. If at any moment Time stays his hand, it is only when we are delivered over to the misery of boredom.
But misfortune has its uses; for, as our bodily frame would burst asunder if the pressure of the atmosphere was removed, so, if the lives of men were relieved of all need, hardship and adversity; if everything they took in hand were successful, they would be so swollen with arrogance that, though they might not burst, they would present the spectacle of unbridled folly — nay, they would go mad. And I may say, further, that a certain amount of care or pain or trouble is necessary for every man at all times. A ship without ballast is unstable and will not go straight.
Certain it is that work, worry, labor and trouble, form the lot of almost all men their whole life long. But if all wishes were fulfilled as soon as they arose, how would men occupy their lives? what would they do with their time? If the world were a paradise of luxury and ease, a land flowing with milk and honey, where every Jack obtained his Jill at once and without any difficulty, men would either die of boredom or hang themselves; or there would be wars, massacres, and murders; so that in the end mankind would inflict more suffering on itself than it has now to accept at the hands of Nature.
In early youth, as we contemplate our coming life, we are like children in a theatre before the curtain is raised, sitting there in high spirits and eagerly waiting for the play to begin. It is a blessing that we do not know what is really going to happen. Could we foresee it, there are times when children might seem like innocent prisoners, condemned, not to death, but to life, and as yet all unconscious of what their sentence means. Nevertheless, every man desires to reach old age; in other words, a state of life of which it may be said: “It is bad to-day, and it will be worse to-morrow; and so on till the worst of all.”
If you try to imagine, as nearly as you can, what an amount of misery, pain and suffering of every kind the sun shines upon in its course, you will admit that it would be much better if, on the earth as little as on the moon, the sun were able to call forth the phenomena of life; and if, here as there, the surface were still in a crystalline state.
Again, you may look upon life as an unprofitable episode, disturbing the blessed calm of non-existence. And, in any case, even though things have gone with you tolerably well, the longer you live the more clearly you will feel that, on the whole, life is a disappointment, nay, a cheat.
If two men who were friends in their youth meet again when they are old, after being separated for a life-time, the chief feeling they will have at the sight of each other will be one of complete disappointment at life as a whole; because their thoughts will be carried back to that earlier time when life seemed so fair as it lay spread out before them in the rosy light of dawn, promised so much — and then performed so little. This feeling will so completely predominate over every other that they will not even consider it necessary to give it words; but on either side it will be silently assumed, and form the ground-work of all they have to talk about.
He who lives to see two or three generations is like a man who sits some time in the conjurer’s booth at a fair, and witnesses the performance twice or thrice in succession. The tricks were meant to be seen only once; and when they are no longer a novelty and cease to deceive, their effect is gone.
While no man is much to be envied for his lot, there are countless numbers whose fate is to be deplored.
Life is a task to be done. It is a fine thing to say defunctus est; it means that the man has done his task.
If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence? or at any rate not take it upon himself to impose that burden upon it in cold blood.
I shall be told, I suppose, that my philosophy is comfortless — because I speak the truth; and people prefer to be assured that everything the Lord has made is good. Go to the priests, then, and leave philosophers in peace! At any rate, do not ask us to accommodate our doctrines to the lessons you have been taught. That is what those rascals of sham philosophers will do for you. Ask them for any doctrine you please, and you will get it. Your University professors are bound to preach optimism; and it is an easy and agreeable task to upset their theories.
I have reminded the reader that every state of welfare, every feeling of satisfaction, is negative in its character; that is to say, it consists in freedom from pain, which is the positive element of existence. It follows, therefore, that the happiness of any given life is to be measured, not by its joys and pleasures, but by the extent to which it has been free from suffering — from positive evil. If this is the true standpoint, the lower animals appear to enjoy a happier destiny than man. Let us examine the matter a little more closely.
However varied the forms that human happiness and misery may take, leading a man to seek the one and shun the other, the material basis of it all is bodily pleasure or bodily pain. This basis is very restricted: it is simply health, food, protection from wet and cold, the satisfaction of the sexual instinct; or else the absence of these things. Consequently, as far as real physical pleasure is concerned, the man is not better off than the brute, except in so far as the higher possibilities of his nervous system make him more sensitive to every kind of pleasure, but also, it must be remembered, to every kind of pain. But then compared with the brute, how much stronger are the passions aroused in him! what an immeasurable difference there is in the depth and vehemence of his emotions! — and yet, in the one case, as in the other, all to produce the same result in the end: namely, health, food, clothing, and so on.
The chief source of all this passion is that thought for what is absent and future, which, with man, exercises such a powerful influence upon all he does. It is this that is the real origin of his cares, his hopes, his fears — emotions which affect him much more deeply than could ever be the case with those present joys and sufferings to which the brute is confined. In his powers of reflection, memory and foresight, man possesses, as it were, a machine for condensing and storing up his pleasures and his sorrows. But the brute has nothing of the kind; whenever it is in pain, it is as though it were suffering for the first time, even though the same thing should have previously happened to it times out of number. It has no power of summing up its feelings. Hence its careless and placid temper: how much it is to be envied! But in man reflection comes in, with all the emotions to which it gives rise; and taking up the same elements of pleasure and pain which are common to him and the brute, it develops his susceptibility to happiness and misery to such a degree that, at one moment the man is brought in an instant to a state of delight that may even prove fatal, at another to the depths of despair and suicide.
If we carry our analysis a step farther, we shall find that, in order to increase his pleasures, man has intentionally added to the number and pressure of his needs, which in their original state were not much more difficult to satisfy than those of the brute. Hence luxury in all its forms; delicate food, the use of tobacco and opium, spirituous liquors, fine clothes, and the thousand and one things than he considers necessary to his existence.
And above and beyond all this, there is a separate and peculiar source of pleasure, and consequently of pain, which man has established for himself, also as the result of using his powers of reflection; and this occupies him out of all proportion to its value, nay, almost more than all his other interests put together — I mean ambition and the feeling of honor and shame; in plain words, what he thinks about the opinion other people have of him. Taking a thousand forms, often very strange ones, this becomes the goal of almost all the efforts he makes that are not rooted in physical pleasure or pain. It is true that besides the sources of pleasure which he has in common with the brute, man has the pleasures of the mind as well. These admit of many gradations, from the most innocent trifling or the merest talk up to the highest intellectual achievements; but there is the accompanying boredom to be set against them on the side of suffering. Boredom is a form of suffering unknown to brutes, at any rate in their natural state; it is only the very cleverest of them who show faint traces of it when they are domesticated; whereas in the case of man it has become a downright scourge. The crowd of miserable wretches whose one aim in life is to fill their purses but never to put anything into their heads, offers a singular instance of this torment of boredom. Their wealth becomes a punishment by delivering them up to misery of having nothing to do; for, to escape it, they will rush about in all directions, traveling here, there and everywhere. No sooner do they arrive in a place than they are anxious to know what amusements it affords; just as though they were beggars asking where they could receive a dole! Of a truth, need and boredom are the two poles of human life. Finally, I may mention that as regards the sexual relation, a man is committed to a peculiar arrangement which drives him obstinately to choose one person. This feeling grows, now and then, into a more or less passionate love,2 which is the source of little pleasure and much suffering.
2 I have treated this subject at length in a special chapter of the second volume of my chief work.]
It is, however, a wonderful thing that the mere addition of thought should serve to raise such a vast and lofty structure of human happiness and misery; resting, too, on the same narrow basis of joy and sorrow as man holds in common with the brute, and exposing him to such violent emotions, to so many storms of passion, so much convulsion of feeling, that what he has suffered stands written and may be read in the lines on his face. And yet, when all is told, he has been struggling ultimately for the very same things as the brute has attained, and with an incomparably smaller expenditure of passion and pain.
But all this contributes to increase the measures of suffering in human life out of all proportion to its pleasures; and the pains of life are made much worse for man by the fact that death is something very real to him. The brute flies from death instinctively without really knowing what it is, and therefore without ever contemplating it in the way natural to a man, who has this prospect always before his eyes. So that even if only a few brutes die a natural death, and most of them live only just long enough to transmit their species, and then, if not earlier, become the prey of some other animal — whilst man, on the other hand, manages to make so-called natural death the rule, to which, however, there are a good many exceptions — the advantage is on the side of the brute, for the reason stated above. But the fact is that man attains the natural term of years just as seldom as the brute; because the unnatural way in which he lives, and the strain of work and emotion, lead to a degeneration of the race; and so his goal is not often reached.
The brute is much more content with mere existence than man; the plant is wholly so; and man finds satisfaction in it just in proportion as he is dull and obtuse. Accordingly, the life of the brute carries less of sorrow with it, but also less of joy, when compared with the life of man; and while this may be traced, on the one side, to freedom from the torment of careand anxiety, it is also due to the fact that hope, in any real sense, is unknown to the brute. It is thus deprived of any share in that which gives us the most and best of our joys and pleasures, the mental anticipation of a happy future, and the inspiriting play of phantasy, both of which we owe to our power of imagination. If the brute is free from care, it is also, in this sense, without hope; in either case, because its consciousness is limited to the present moment, to what it can actually see before it. The brute is an embodiment of present impulses, and hence what elements of fear and hope exist in its nature — and they do not go very far — arise only in relation to objects that lie before it and within reach of those impulses: whereas a man’s range of vision embraces the whole of his life, and extends far into the past and future.
Following upon this, there is one respect in which brutes show real wisdom when compared with us — I mean, their quiet, placid enjoyment of the present moment. The tranquillity of mind which this seems to give them often puts us to shame for the many times we allow our thoughts and our cares to make us restless and discontented. And, in fact, those pleasures of hope and anticipation which I have been mentioning are not to be had for nothing. The delight which a man has in hoping for and looking forward to some special satisfaction is a part of the real pleasure attaching to it enjoyed in advance. This is afterwards deducted; for the more we look forward to anything, the less satisfaction we find in it when it comes. But the brute’s enjoyment is not anticipated, and therefore, suffers no deduction; so that the actual pleasure of the moment comes to it whole and unimpaired. In the same way, too, evil presses upon the brute only with its own intrinsic weight; whereas with us the fear of its coming often makes its burden ten times more grievous.
It is just this characteristic way in which the brute gives itself up entirely to the present moment that contributes so much to the delight we take in our domestic pets. They are the present moment personified, and in some respects they make us feel the value of every hour that is free from trouble and annoyance, which we, with our thoughts and preoccupations, mostly disregard. But man, that selfish and heartless creature, misuses this quality of the brute to be more content than we are with mere existence, and often works it to such an extent that he allows the brute absolutely nothing more than mere, bare life. The bird which was made so that it might rove over half of the world, he shuts up into the space of a cubic foot, there to die a slow death in longing and crying for freedom; for in a cage it does not sing for the pleasure of it. And when I see how man misuses the dog, his best friend; how he ties up this intelligent animal with a chain, I feel the deepest sympathy with the brute and burning indignation against its master.
We shall see later that by taking a very high standpoint it is possible to justify the sufferings of mankind. But this justification cannot apply to animals, whose sufferings, while in a great measure brought about by men, are often considerable even apart from their agency.3 And so we are forced to ask, Why and for what purpose does all this torment and agony exist? There is nothing here to give the will pause; it is not free to deny itself and so obtain redemption. There is only one consideration that may serve to explain the sufferings of animals. It is this: that the will to live, which underlies the whole world of phenomena, must, in their case satisfy its cravings by feeding upon itself. This it does by forming a gradation of phenomena, every one of which exists at the expense of another. I have shown, however, that the capacity for suffering is less in animals than in man. Any further explanation that may be given of their fate will be in the nature of hypothesis, if not actually mythical in its character; and I may leave the reader to speculate upon the matter for himself.
3 Cf. Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, vol. ii. p. 404.]
Brahma is said to have produced the world by a kind of fall or mistake; and in order to atone for his folly, he is bound to remain in it himself until he works out his redemption. As an account of the origin of things, that is admirable! According to the doctrines of Buddhism, the world came into being as the result of some inexplicable disturbance in the heavenly calm of Nirvana, that blessed state obtained by expiation, which had endured so long a time — the change taking place by a kind of fatality. This explanation must be understood as having at bottom some moral bearing; although it is illustrated by an exactly parallel theory in the domain of physical science, which places the origin of the sun in a primitive streak of mist, formed one knows not how. Subsequently, by a series of moral errors, the world became gradually worse and worse — true of the physical orders as well — until it assumed the dismal aspect it wears to-day. Excellent! The Greeks looked upon the world and the gods as the work of an inscrutable necessity. A passable explanation: we may be content with it until we can get a better. Again, Ormuzd and Ahriman are rival powers, continually at war. That is not bad. But that a God like Jehovah should have created this world of misery and woe, out of pure caprice, and because he enjoyed doing it, and should then have clapped his hands in praise of his own work, and declared everything to be very good — that will not do at all! In its explanation of the origin of the world, Judaism is inferior to any other form of religious doctrine professed by a civilized nation; and it is quite in keeping with this that it is the only one which presents no trace whatever of any belief in the immortality of the soul.4
4 See Parerga, vol. i. pp. 139 et seq.]
Even though Leibnitz’ contention, that this is the best of all possible worlds, were correct, that would not justify God in having created it. For he is the Creator not of the world only, but of possibility itself; and, therefore, he ought to have so ordered possibility as that it would admit of something better.
There are two things which make it impossible to believe that this world is the successful work of an all-wise, all-good, and, at the same time, all-powerful Being; firstly, the misery which abounds in it everywhere; and secondly, the obvious imperfection of its highest product, man, who is a burlesque of what he should be. These things cannot be reconciled with any such belief. On the contrary, they are just the facts which support what I have been saying; they are our authority for viewing the world as the outcome of our own misdeeds, and therefore, as something that had better not have been. Whilst, under the former hypothesis, they amount to a bitter accusation against the Creator, and supply material for sarcasm; under the latter they form an indictment against our own nature, our own will, and teach us a lesson of humility. They lead us to see that, like the children of a libertine, we come into the world with the burden of sin upon us; and that it is only through having continually to atone for this sin that our existence is so miserable, and that its end is death.
There is nothing more certain than the general truth that it is the grievous sin of the world which has produced the grievous suffering of the world. I am not referring here to the physical connection between these two things lying in the realm of experience; my meaning is metaphysical. Accordingly, the sole thing that reconciles me to the Old Testament is the story of the Fall. In my eyes, it is the only metaphysical truth in that book, even though it appears in the form of an allegory. There seems to me no better explanation of our existence than that it is the result of some false step, some sin of which we are paying the penalty. I cannot refrain from recommending the thoughtful reader a popular, but at the same time, profound treatise on this subject by Claudius5 which exhibits the essentially pessimistic spirit of Christianity. It is entitled: Cursed is the ground for thy sake.
5 Translator’s Note. — Matthias Claudius (1740-1815), a popular poet, and friend of Klopstock, Herder and Leasing. He edited the Wandsbecker Bote, in the fourth part of which appeared the treatise mentioned above. He generally wrote under the pseudonym of Asmus, and Schopenhauer often refers to him by this name.]
Between the ethics of the Greeks and the ethics of the Hindoos, there is a glaring contrast. In the one case (with the exception, it must be confessed, of Plato), the object of ethics is to enable a man to lead a happy life; in the other, it is to free and redeem him from life altogether — as is directly stated in the very first words of the Sankhya Karika.
Allied with this is the contrast between the Greek and the Christian idea of death. It is strikingly presented in a visible form on a fine antique sarcophagus in the gallery of Florence, which exhibits, in relief, the whole series of ceremonies attending a wedding in ancient times, from the formal offer to the evening when Hymen’s torch lights the happy couple home. Compare with that the Christian coffin, draped in mournful black and surmounted with a crucifix! How much significance there is in these two ways of finding comfort in death. They are opposed to each other, but each is right. The one points to the affirmation of the will to live, which remains sure of life for all time, however rapidly its forms may change. The other, in the symbol of suffering and death, points to the denial of the will to live, to redemption from this world, the domain of death and devil. And in the question between the affirmation and the denial of the will to live, Christianity is in the last resort right.
The contrast which the New Testament presents when compared with the Old, according to the ecclesiastical view of the matter, is just that existing between my ethical system and the moral philosophy of Europe. The Old Testament represents man as under the dominion of Law, in which, however, there is no redemption. The New Testament declares Law to have failed, frees man from its dominion,6 and in its stead preaches the kingdom of grace, to be won by faith, love of neighbor and entire sacrifice of self. This is the path of redemption from the evil of the world. The spirit of the New Testament is undoubtedly asceticism, however your protestants and rationalists may twist it to suit their purpose. Asceticism is the denial of the will to live; and the transition from the Old Testament to the New, from the dominion of Law to that of Faith, from justification by works to redemption through the Mediator, from the domain of sin and death to eternal life in Christ, means, when taken in its real sense, the transition from the merely moral virtues to the denial of the will to live. My philosophy shows the metaphysical foundation of justice and the love of mankind, and points to the goal to which these virtues necessarily lead, if they are practised in perfection. At the same time it is candid in confessing that a man must turn his back upon the world, and that the denial of the will to live is the way of redemption. It is therefore really at one with the spirit of the New Testament, whilst all other systems are couched in the spirit of the Old; that is to say, theoretically as well as practically, their result is Judaism — mere despotic theism. In this sense, then, my doctrine might be called the only true Christian philosophy — however paradoxical a statement this may seem to people who take superficial views instead of penetrating to the heart of the matter.
6 Cf. Romans vii; Galatians ii, iii.]
If you want a safe compass to guide you through life, and to banish all doubt as to the right way of looking at it, you cannot do better than accustom yourself to regard this world as a penitentiary, a sort of a penal colony, or [Greek: ergastaerion] as the earliest philosopher called it.7Amongst the Christian Fathers, Origen, with praiseworthy courage, took this view,8 which is further justified by certain objective theories of life. I refer, not to my own philosophy alone, but to the wisdom of all ages, as expressed in Brahmanism and Buddhism, and in the sayings of Greek philosophers like Empedocles and Pythagoras; as also by Cicero, in his remark that the wise men of old used to teach that we come into this world to pay the penalty of crime committed in another state of existence — a doctrine which formed part of the initiation into the mysteries.9 And Vanini — whom his contemporaries burned, finding that an easier task than to confute him — puts the same thing in a very forcible way. Man, he says, is so full of every kind of misery that, were it not repugnant to the Christian religion, I should venture to affirm that if evil spirits exist at all, they have posed into human form and are now atoning for their crimes.10And true Christianity — using the word in its right sense — also regards our existence as the consequence of sin and error.
7 Cf. Clem. Alex. Strom. L. iii, c, 3, p. 399.]
8 Augustine de cìvitate Dei., L. xi. c. 23.]
9 Cf. Fragmenta de philosophia.]
10 De admirandis naturae arcanis; dial L. p. 35.]
If you accustom yourself to this view of life you will regulate your expectations accordingly, and cease to look upon all its disagreeable incidents, great and small, its sufferings, its worries, its misery, as anything unusual or irregular; nay, you will find that everything is as it should be, in a world where each of us pays the penalty of existence in his own peculiar way. Amongst the evils of a penal colony is the society of those who form it; and if the reader is worthy of better company, he will need no words from me to remind him of what he has to put up with at present. If he has a soul above the common, or if he is a man of genius, he will occasionally feel like some noble prisoner of state, condemned to work in the galleys with common criminals; and he will follow his example and try to isolate himself.
In general, however, it should be said that this view of life will enable us to contemplate the so-called imperfections of the great majority of men, their moral and intellectual deficiencies and the resulting base type of countenance, without any surprise, to say nothing of indignation; for we shall never cease to reflect where we are, and that the men about us are beings conceived and born in sin, and living to atone for it. That is what Christianity means in speaking of the sinful nature of man.
Pardon’s the word to all! 11 Whatever folly men commit, be their shortcomings or their vices what they may, let us exercise forbearance; remembering that when these faults appear in others, it is our follies and vices that we behold. They are the shortcomings of humanity, to which we belong; whose faults, one and all, we share; yes, even those very faults at which we now wax so indignant, merely because they have not yet appeared in ourselves. They are faults that do not lie on the surface. But they exist down there in the depths of our nature; and should anything call them forth, they will come and show themselves, just as we now see them in others. One man, it is true, may have faults that are absent in his fellow; and it is undeniable that the sum total of bad qualities is in some cases very large; for the difference of individuality between man and man passes all measure.
11 “Cymbeline,” Act v. Sc. 5.]
In fact, the conviction that the world and man is something that had better not have been, is of a kind to fill us with indulgence towards one another. Nay, from this point of view, we might well consider the proper form of address to be, not Monsieur, Sir, mein Herr, but my fellow-sufferer, Socî malorum, compagnon de miseres! This may perhaps sound strange, but it is in keeping with the facts; it puts others in a right light; and it reminds us of that which is after all the most necessary thing in life — the tolerance, patience, regard, and love of neighbor, of which everyone stands in need, and which, therefore, every man owes to his fello
Saturday, August 17, 2019
Class politics cannot be rebuilt, regenerated or rescued today
...so how can we set about changing society? Frank Füredi raises some new questions for our changed times.
Politics today has little in common with the passions and conflicts that have shaped people's commitments and hatreds over the past century. There is no longer room for either the ardent defender of the free market faith, or the robust advocate of revolutionary transformation.
The big issues of the past - the ownership and control of society's wealth, the production and allocation of resources - have been narrowed down to an occasional pleading for the homeless or the extremely frail pensioner. There is still concern about things like unemployment and poverty - but they are increasingly seen as painful facts of life, rather than social and economic problems susceptible to political solutions.
Surveys confirm that the problems which most concern people these days are usually to do with personal behaviour and threats to the individual, rather than broader questions of how society is organised and run. Crime, health and countless forms of abuse seem to exercise the contemporary imagination.
As a result, a mood of weariness informs political debate. Politicians are no longer interested in big ideas about society or socialism v capitalism, which risk causing controversy and division. Instead they tend to stick to the safe moralisms and banalities of the centre ground. Tony Blair articulated this trend during the general election campaign, when he argued that drug abuse was now as important a problem in Britain as poverty had been in the past.
Most attempts to make sense of the profound shifts in political life have proved hopelessly superficial. Instead of rigorous analysis of the underlying trends, too many commentators have chosen to react either by declaring that everything has changed, or by insisting that everything is as it was in the past.
Those who insist that everything has changed like to use terms like the 'End of History', 'post-capitalism', 'information society', to indicate that we live in a world that is fundamentally different to old-fashioned capitalism. These claims are usually backed up with statistical evidence of change. The spread of computers, the rise of the Internet, the increase in service employment, the decline of traditional manufacturing industries, the emergence of new patterns of consumption, have all been offered as proof that we live in a different world. This analytical approach is characterised by the tendency to exaggerate the importance of many new developments, by treating quantitative changes in technical matters as if they indicated a qualitative transformation of society.
The corollary of the tendency to exaggerate the changes taking place is to inflate the problems facing society. We live in an era of permanent panics. Commentators appear to revel in warning their readers about the numerous perils that threaten civilisation. From the water we drink to the most ordinary sexual encounter, it appears that hidden and invisible risks threaten human beings on all sides. This obsession with problems - nothing ever seems to go right - reveals the real meaning of the present day usage of the concept 'change'.
The changes that commentators highlight today are seen as the products of globalised forces beyond human intervention. In this context the inflation of change, and of the dangers involved, is actually a confession that society that has lost control over its direction. According to this model, the world is out of control and there is little that human beings can do to master these developments or influence their destiny. Instead we are surrounded by change in the way that one might be caught in the middle of a tornado. Deprived of choice and options, humanity is forced into a world-view which Margaret Thatcher aptly described as Tina - There Is No Alternative.
Unfortunately the intellectual riposte to Tina is extremely weak. Most of the old radical critics of the system have fallen into the trap of closing their eyes to the real world. As a result, left-wing commentators tend to do little more than repeat the refrain that nothing important has changed. They see the new mood as a temporary aberration that will soon revert to the patterns of the past. They almost seem to take a perverse pleasure in pointing out that there are still people who are poor, and that the capitalist system is still exploitative. Every time a group of workers takes industrial action, the rump of the old left perks up in the expectation that this anticipates the revival of the working class.
The arguments of the nothing-has-changed brigade boil down to the old adage that 'the poor are always with us', or at worst a repetition of the rhetorical question, 'what about the workers?'. This is an approach which implicitly seeks to reassure us that we still live in an unfair world. But its claims to be a radical criticism of the status quo actually obscure a profoundly conservative instinct. Like their more mainstream counterparts, radical thinkers now continually point to the mounting dangers facing human existence. Indeed they are often even more promiscuous in their doom-mongering than are conservative commentators. They revel in stories about X-files style cover-ups over poisoned food, lethal pollutants, new diseases and other threats to human health. The problem is, however, that when everything is treated as a cover-up brought about by secret conspirators, then nothing and nobody gets properly criticised.
It seems that, regardless of their point of departure, commentators of different shades of opinion are now likely to arrive at a strikingly similar conclusion: that the world is an increasingly dangerous, out-of-control place. The target of their concern may differ - some are more anxious about the rise of street crime, while others are obsessed by the variety of abuses that children face. However, such differences in emphasis are resolved through a common belief in the need to extend authoritarian controls. Conflicts of interpretation and ideological commitments do not stand in the way of a consensus that inflates the crisis of society. As a result, the entire spectrum of mainstream politics is devoted to extending the policing of everyday life. All sides share the view that human passions need to be controlled rather than encouraged.
Against this background, the conclusion of almost every discussion is that people are not trustworthy and cannot be expected to live their lives responsibly. The tendency to treat adults as children informs the action of the entire political class. Many of today's major political 'debates' are really an exchange of different proposals about the most effective way to limit human aspirations. Individuals are no longer presented as the 'political man' and still less as members of the 'revolutionary class' of former days. Instead, according to today's political vocabulary, we have the victim, the bullied, the client, the end user, the consumer or the stakeholder. The more passive and restricted role assigned to the client shows how far we have come from the days when the individual was at least rhetorically considered to be a 'political man'.
But what about class?
Class conflict has played a crucial role in the evolution of world politics. Most distinctively modern ideologies have had a strong foundation in the experience and aspirations of a particular class. So it is not surprising that those who remain committed to some form of fundamental social transformation are concerned about the decline of class politics.
Those who are waiting and hoping for a revival of class politics or class solidarity have missed the fundamental changes at work. The past two decades have been marked by the decomposition of class institutions.
Working class institutions like the trade unions have been exposed as empty shells, while important political institutions of the ruling classes, from the monarchy to parliament, have been similarly discredited. The full explanation for this development lies outside the scope of this essay, but the defeat of former political experiments, the exhaustion of political traditions and the erosion of old solidarities have all taken their toll. As a result, individual experiences are now rarely mediated through wider institutions of solidarity. People still live and work near each other, and obviously empathise with one another, but they lack the institutional means to give any meaning to that which binds them together.
The insignificance that people attach to class in a political sense is not the consequence of media manipulation in the way that some on the old left claim. For example, the long-running Liverpool dockers' strike has received little attention from the British media. No doubt national newspaper editors and television producers are not particularly sympathetic to the fate of striking workers. But then, nobody else cares much about them either. The reason why this industrial action is not news is partly because a lot of working people cannot, at this point in time, relate to this experience.
Inevitably, classes still exist in a divided society. But the institutions of solidarity which could give those classes a clear identity and meaning are weak if not non-existent. There are still a few strikes and people do take action in pursuit of their interests. But in the absence of clearly defined arrangements of solidarity, such actions acquire a meaning that falls outside the traditional vocabulary of class. Take the recent example of industrial action by auto workers in Europe. Here were workers of different nationalities, marching alongside each other in Brussels in a display of solidarity. However, their aim was to get support from the EU bureaucracy as much as each other; the coherence of the Brussels business machine probably appeared more useful and relevant to them than their own outmoded organisations.
If you want to see an extreme example of the weakening of old institutional arrangements and solidarities, look to the chaos in Albania. The recent unrest there began with an outburst of anger and resentment against the consequences of free market economics. The people involved were unquestionably working class. Yet in the absence of any institutional or ideological loyalties, the protests turned into a bad case of 'every person for themselves'. It was a mass outburst, but one which developed in a brutally privatised and individuated form. This was not some Balkan mystery, but an illustration in an extreme case of how social conflict can proceed in a situation of dissipated solidarities.
In today's circumstances class politics cannot be reinvented, rebuilt, reinvigorated or rescued. Why? Because any dynamic political outlook needs to exist in an interaction with existing individual consciousness. And contemporary forms of consciousness in our atomised societies cannot be used as the foundation for a more developed politics of solidarity. What most commentators have missed is that it has not only been a class outlook that has declined. The decline of class has been paralleled by a far more important and fundamental process - the decline of subjectivity. A mood has been created which discourages any idea that people can, by interacting with each other and their circumstances, shape their own destinies. Instead of acting as a history-making subject, humanity has effectively been recast in the role of object to which things happen that are beyond all control.
The increasing fragmentation of social experience has had a major impact on people's lives, helping to normalise a more privatised and individuated way of living. Many commentators claim that this more privatised existence has encouraged the development of a thrusting individual consciousness, of the kind they now associate with the 'greedy eighties'.
But they could not be more wrong. Without known points of contact and a reliable system of support, individuation will only encourage a sense of powerlessness. The sense of being on your own and of having to rely on individual solutions has led to a heightened consciousness of isolation. It has had the effect of altering the way that people see their relationship with the world, helping to induce an exaggerated sense of weakness and a fatalistic outlook. The numerous surveys which claim that people expect that the future will be worse than today is symptomatic of this trend. So is the powerful tendency continually to emphasise the negative side of every development. The disappearance of the elusive 'feelgood factor' is but an expression of a mood in which the anticipation of the worst possible outcome has become routine.
The heightened sense of individual insecurity that prevails today cannot be radicalised or harnessed to some kind of emancipatory project. This kind of consciousness can only fluctuate between passivity and a sporadic outburst of fear, of the kind that characterises public reaction to Dunblane or to Aids or to BSE. The coincidence of social passivity with outbursts of anxiety has helped to endow political action with a peculiarly conservative bias. Today's causes tend to be about the politics of survival - ban guns, save the trees, control population. It is ironic that at a time of so-called information revolutions and technological advances, so much of society's imagination seems fixed on the most basic aim of survival for its own sake. The view that little can be taken for granted informs a consciousness that does not trust itself.
The politics of self limitation
Probably the most significant development in the past two decades has been the alteration in the relationship between the individual and society. Individual attitudes are mediated through a complex of institutions and relations; classes are one important relation through which individuals make sense of the world. During the past two centuries, the dynamic of capitalist development and the resistance to it has served to widen people's horizons. Among other developments, it helped to forge a sense of human agency. The development of individual ambition and of a class-based vision of social change often expressed contradictory aspirations. But what such responses had in common was a perception of future possibilities, and the belief that human action could make an important difference.
Today, this human-centred view of the world has been replaced by one in which the range of possible options has been severely narrowed. This is most clearly expressed in the field of politics where, as the general election campaign has made clear, debate has become dull and technical. Politics matters less to people for the very simple reason that what people can do does not matter. This sense of impotence often takes on the form of attacking politics itself. Anti-politics, the cynical dismissal of the elected politician and the obsession with sleaze and corruption, expresses a deeply reactionary view of the human experience. It renounces the
history-making potential of people on the grounds that trying to do something either makes no difference or makes matters worse. If this was simply a case of saying that there is no point voting for any of today's major parties, it would be fair enough. But the current cynicism goes way beyond that. The conviction that we cannot trust politics is ultimately a roundabout way of saying that we cannot trust anybody - including ourselves.
Instead of striving to achieve new goals, society now encourages the politics of self limitation. Contemporary culture pours scorn on those with 'excessive' ambition. Those who try to determine the outcome of significant aspects of their lives are dismissed as control freaks. People who refuse to publicise their weaknesses are said to be 'in denial'. Risk takers are denounced for putting others at risk. Heroism is no longer about going beyond the limits, but about being able to suffer and survive. Putting up with adversity is now described as bravery. And truly heroic acts are dismissed as the macho posturing of Don Quixotes. Human exploration, whether in space or in the scientific laboratory, is represented as a colossal waste of money or as positively dangerous to the planet. In schools, competitive sports are under attack and many teachers now believe that failing students is wrong because it undermines their self-esteem.
The overall effect of the culture of self limitation is to reinforce the sense of individuation. Isolation and the experience of insecurity provide fertile terrain for the culture of limits. People who feel that they are on their own can easily develop a sense of paralysis which seems consistent with the prevailing culture of the diminished subject. It is not surprising that people accommodate to this degraded state of affairs at a time when those who suffer the most innocuous set-back are offered counselling. Indeed society positively encourages us to revel in our weakness. Ordinary interpersonal tensions are today often labelled as bullying or as an act of abuse that will scar the victims for life. In such a climate, the most elementary relationships become highly ambiguous, and an individual's responsibility for his or her own actions becomes obscured. We can trust nobody, and expect to do no more with our lives than survive in some kind of a permanent state of therapy.
The diminished human subject is underpinned by a highly conservative world-view, one that requires the denial of the essence of humanism. Traditional politics is indeed irrelevant in this environment. For the key issue today is not this or that policy, but the more basic struggle against the culture of limits. In this situation concepts like class politics or socialism are abstractions that remain external to an environment where the very belief in the human potential faces scorn and cynicism.
For a while at least, politics with a big P is indeed irrelevant. Those of us who want to do something face a more fundamental problem: how to strengthen the conviction that we have the potential for changing our circumstances. Whether this is done through appealing to self-interest or idealism or a belief in some higher purpose than survival is neither here nor there. There is a need to regroup all those who understand that when human beings cease to play for high stakes, to explore and to take risks or try to transform their circumstances, the world becomes a sad and dangerous place.
Reproduced from LM issue 100, May 1997
Friday, August 16, 2019
Thursday, August 15, 2019
Citizenship’s Insular Cases, from Ancient Greece and Rome to Puerto Rico
Abstract:
Engaging equally with ancient Greco-Roman and contemporary Euro-American paradigms of citizenship, this essay argues that experiences of civic integration are structured around figurations of island and archipelago. In elaboration of this claim, I offer a transhistorical account of how institutions and imaginaries of citizenship take shape around an “insular scheme” whose defining characteristic is displacement. Shuttling from Homer and Livy to Imbolo Mbue and Danez Smith, I rely on the work of postcolonial literary critics and political theorists to map those repetitive deferrals of civic status to which immigrants and refugees in particular are uniquely subject.
1. Introduction
“No man is an island,” the seventeenth-century poet and cleric John Donne memorably mused (Meditation 17). The modern banalization of Donne’s insight has tended to obscure the imaginative work entailed by equating islands with humans, even if only for the purposes of disavowal. Yet Donne’s presumption of island insularity would not pass muster among contemporary practitioners of what has come to be known as the new thalassology, for whom the very notion of the island as a self-contained and bounded entity—shorn of any connective ligatures—is dead on arrival; “only connect” is the principle to which many students of island networks nowadays subscribe.1Taking root in the gap between these two models, this article locates an unusually felicitous transubstantiation of the paradoxical island in the institution of citizenship, especially as experienced by immigrants. From a transhistorical perspective, it is this institution that sublimates, and in the process mystifies, the myriad human transits from one insular civic body to another. The migrant’s suspension between welcome and rejection in the course of these transits is apparent not only during the initial exodus across expanses of water (or desert) but through the compulsive repetition that forces the differentiated citizen to remember their difference. To lift an image and a model from the Caribbeanist critic Antonio Benítez-Rojo, the island is ceaselessly repeated (Benítez-Rojo 1992). The dance of repetition commences at the very moment of arrival on the liminal shore, where the migrant—naked, Odysseus-like, before the searching gaze of a prospective host community—has to earn the polity’s trust. This dance’s choreography is describable both as a historical process and as an ideational phenomenon; the opening section of this article briefly considers the affordances recoverable from each.
Wednesday, August 14, 2019
Tuesday, August 13, 2019
Monday, August 12, 2019
Ratanāgiri Rock: The place where Siddhārtha ate food offered by Sujātā
http://nalanda-insatiableinoffering.blogspot.com/2019/01/ratanagiri-rock-place-where-siddhartha.html
Ratanāgiri Rock, Bakrour
The offering of food by Sujātā to Bodhisattva Siddhārtha is considered a turning point event in Siddhārtha’s journey towards his enlightenment. In his travelogues the Chinese monk- pilgrim Faxian (Fahien, 5th CE) - mentions a rock on which Bodhisattva Siddhārtha (the Buddha) sat, facing east, and ate the food offered by the village girl Sujātā.
Recently, the Ratanāgiri rock, has been discovered 200mt east of village Bakrour in Bodhgayā with the indication of the rock site mentioned by Faxian.
Ratanāgiri Rock, Bakrour
The offering of food by Sujātā to Bodhisattva Siddhārtha is considered a turning point event in Siddhārtha’s journey towards his enlightenment. In his travelogues the Chinese monk- pilgrim Faxian (Fahien, 5th CE) - mentions a rock on which Bodhisattva Siddhārtha (the Buddha) sat, facing east, and ate the food offered by the village girl Sujātā.
Recently, the Ratanāgiri rock, has been discovered 200mt east of village Bakrour in Bodhgayā with the indication of the rock site mentioned by Faxian.
Sunday, August 11, 2019
LYRICAL BALLADS, WITH A FEW OTHER POEMS
It is the honourable characteristic of Poetry that its materials are to be found in every subject which can interest the human mind. The evidence of this fact is to be sought, not in the writings of Critics, but in those of Poets themselves.
The majority of the following poems are to be considered as experiments. They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure. Readers accustomed to the gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers, if they persist in reading this book to its conclusion, will perhaps frequently have to struggle with feelings of strangeness and aukwardness: they will look round for poetry, and will be induced to enquire by what species of courtesy these attempts can be permitted to assume that title. It is desirable that such readers, for their own sakes, should not suffer the solitary word Poetry, a word of very disputed meaning, to stand in the way of their gratification; but that, while they are perusing this book, they should ask themselves if it contains a natural delineation of human passions, human characters, and human incidents; and if the answer be favourable to the author's wishes, that they should consent to be pleased in spite of that most dreadful enemy to our pleasures, our own pre-established codes of decision.
Readers of superior judgment may disapprove of the style in which many of these pieces are executed it must be expected that many lines and phrases will not exactly suit their taste. It will perhaps appear to them, that wishing to avoid the prevalent fault of the day, the author has sometimes descended too low, and that many of his expressions are too familiar, and not of sufficient dignity. It is apprehended, that the more conversant the reader is with our elder writers, and with those in modern times who have been the most successful in painting manners and passions, the fewer complaints of this kind will he have to make.
An accurate taste in poetry, and in all the other arts, Sir Joshua Reynolds has observed, is an acquired talent, which can only be produced by severe thought, and a long continued intercourse with the best models of composition. This is mentioned not with so ridiculous a purpose as to prevent the most inexperienced reader from judging for himself; but merely to temper the rashness of decision, and to suggest that if poetry be a subject on which much time has not been bestowed, the judgment may be erroneous, and that in many cases it necessarily will be so.
The tale of Goody Blake and Harry Gill is founded on a well-authenticated fact which happened in Warwickshire. Of the other poems in the collection, it may be proper to say that they are either absolute inventions of the author, or facts which took place within his personal observation or that of his friends. The poem of the Thorn, as the reader will soon discover, is not supposed to be spoken in the author's own person: the character of the loquacious narrator will sufficiently shew itself in the course of the story. The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere was professedly written in imitation of the style, as well as of the spirit of the elder poets; but with a few exceptions, the Author believes that the language adopted in it has been equally intelligible for these three last centuries. The lines entitled Expostulation and Reply, and those which follow, arose out of conversation with a friend who was somewhat unreasonably attached to modern books of moral philosophy.
