Dr. Pangloss?

Voltaire by Nicholas de Largilliere

It's not necessarily an exercise in pessimism to tell the truth. There are, of course, philosophical nihilists like Turgenev’s Basarov in Father and Sons and Svidrigailov in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Within an absurd, meaningless and Godless universe, anything goes for these cynics. But there's a realism that a good psychiatrist or psychoanalyst traffics in when he or she realizes that a patient may be carrying an insurmountable burden and that the only end of the therapy lies in an awareness of how difficult the problems will be to overcome. Self-knowledge rather than transcendence will be the gift that such a practitioner provides. The too often quoted Yeats line “the best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are filled with passionate intensity,” unfortunately may be the best epitaph for those brave souls unwilling to tell people what they want to hear. Remember Dr. Pangloss in Candide. Voltaire’s parody of the Leibnitz argued that “all’s for the best in the best of all possible worlds.” He was a l8th century Dr. Feelgood. Realism is not a terribly saleble notion. People do not rush to buy self-help tomes that argue for acceptance; the idea that only solace will reward the Sisyphean task of examining the nature of character and personality is not charismatic. On the other hand, hope, in and of itself, is not necessarily always a good thing, as O'Neill's barroom full of drunks demonstrates in The Iceman Cometh.

Panglossian it Over

San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 (photo: H.D. Chadwick)

Have you ever been around the kind of person who has something disgustingly positive to say about everything? There are people who lose the ability to feel pain. It’s actually a serious condition since however nice it might be eliminate the nerve receptors that are sensitive to discomfort, we would also be deprived of one of nature’s warning systems. On the psychic level the same came be said of depression. Pharmaceutical companies make huge amounts of money producing anti-depressants that sometimes provide a dubious service. Numb and Number could be yet another sequel to Dumb and Dumber. But let’s go back to the juggernaut of positive emotions expressed by our hypothetical obnoxious acquaintance. Imagine him or her getting kidnapped by terrorists and attempting to explain the good side of being held incommunicado in a coffin sized box for days. Imagine the self same person being mistakenly detained, undergoing “extraordinarily rendition" and trying to express their excitement about being waterboarded or the glamour of getting maced. Imagine someone describing the joys of a head-on car crash, a mugging or a mountain climbing accident. As far flung as it may seem, you have undoubtedly encountered people who display this kind of disconnect. Their iterations of human existence display a homogeneity and are always recounted in the same sing songy tones. “Daddy was so happy to see all of us, before he finally croaked,” “Bob seems perfectly OK about the loss of his job, his wife and his house,” “I was so happy to get the lousy evaluation at work since I know my boss was right.” You ask one of these creatures how they're doing after their life’s work has come to naught and they exclaim, “I can’t complain!” Sure they can, but they can’t and there’s the rub. Many of these gargoyles are probably deeply traumatized individuals who might murder themselves or others if they faced their so-called feelings. Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss (a stand-in for Leibnitz) who famously said “all’s for the best" in the "best of all possible worlds,” was the pied piper of delusional optimism. And Voltaire’s great work ends with Candide rejecting his mentor’s misguided view of the world.

To Be or Not?

Dresden February l945 (German Federal Archive)

In a Times Sunday Review piece “Do I Have a Right to Be?” (NYT, 7/5/14)  Peter Atterton, quotes the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas thusly: “What is natural becomes the most problematic. Do I have the right to be? Is being in the world not taking the place of someone?” Attterton is positing a variation of Edward Lorenz’s “Butterfly Effect” which he describes as “the manner in which small occurrences (like the flutter of a butterfly’s wings) can have enormous consequences.” His “Barbarian Effect” is slightly larger in scope since it asks about the effect of genocide and proposes the notion that for every living person there is someone who did not come into existence because of mass extinction--whether it’s the Holocaust, the Inquisition or the Lisbon earthquake which Voltaire memorialized in Candide. But Atherton’s point is actually more profound since it is pointing to the fact that our current devils whether they are Boko Haram or ISIL have no monopoly on terror. We are all creatures whose existences have been predicated on calamities. Some of them are accidents of nature like the plague, but many others are man made. How many native Americans didn’t come into the world due to colonization. How the West Was Won was the title of a popular 60’s movie. Besides the 6,000,000 murdered in the Holocaust, there are Hiroshima and Nagasaki which claimed almost 250,000 and Dresden in which approxiately 25,000 may have died in one concerted aerial attack. Life settles down and the illusion of normalcy occurs, but history is like a haunted house filled with the ghosts not just of the murdered, but of those who never had a chance to live.

Grand Illusion

Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion currently being revived at Film Forum is an essay on identity politics of the most loving and global kind, which is to say a kind of identity politics that doesn’t exist today. All the elements of race, class and religious background that separate men are fully at work in the film and yet are ultimately assertions of the humanistic or liberal premise that there can be an empathy and unity of purpose amidst difference. Still differences are literally what makes horse races. The two aristocrats de Boldieu (Pierre Fresnay) and von Rauffenstein (Erich von Stroheim) are denizens of the same Parisian restaurants, Maxim’s and Fouquets, and also share a code of honor. “Je vous demand pardon,” von Rauffenstein says, after shooting his counterpart. De Boldieu sloughs off the apology. It will be all over for the Frenchman, but it’s von Rauffenstein who will have to carry on. However the grand illusion itself is ambiguous. On the simplest level, it’s an illusion that men are separated, but the term is also ironically employed to the extent that the notion of conflict and war ending is also a grand illusion. The film has a picaresque quality that’s almost reminiscent of Candide, particularly when the working class Marechal (Jean Gabin) and the Jewish Rosenthal (Marcel Dalio) find an idyllic respite in the middle of their grueling escape to Switzerland. It’s reminiscent of Voltaire’s ironic reiterations of Leibnitz’s reality defying optimism, “all’s for the best in the best of all possible worlds.” When Gabin says goodbye to the saintly German widow, Elsa (Dita Parlo), who has taken him in (and has become his lover), we know that despite all the protestations, these two will never see each other again. The gap between the worlds they inhabit is too great.

Chile Journal: Prologue

The North American who hasn’t visited Latin America may feel a little like Candide arrrivng with Cunegonde in Buenos Aires and meeting the governor Don Fernando d’Ibarra y Figueroa, y Macacarens, y Lampourdos, y Souza. While Europe and even far away spots like China, India and Japan are familiar to many Americans, Latin America still has a certain exoticism, a certain mystique whose flames are fanned by magical realists like Marquez and sexual realists like Vargas Ilosa. Americans know about Rio with its reputation for Carnival, Venezuela, Oil, Columbia, drugs and Peru, the Shining Path. We are aware that Paraguay, which was once a place of refuge for Nazis, had a dictator named Stroessner and that Chile had Pinochet and Argentina, the legendary Eva Peron. But Argentina while also providing a place of refuge for Adolf Eichmann and others also became home for refugee Jews who were at home in a Latin American city that is particularly known for its European flavor. Buenos Aires still hosts a thriving psychoanalytic community, which evidences the kind of influences which still make it an outpost of European cosmopolitanism on the Latin American continent. You don’t need to travel to Latin America to participate in these generalizations and yet they along with the Andes and the Amazon, two of the most monumental natural wonders on earth carry an enormous sway in the  imagination.  Allende, the democratically elected president of Chile, was overthrown by Pinochet  Pork barrel politics obviously exist in Latin America as they do everywhere else on earth, but the result is more often than not a metaphoric boudin in which tantalizing scents emerge from the blood.

Panglossing it Over

Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist, and Joshua S. Goldstein,  a professor emeritus of international relations at the American University, wrote an Op-Ed piece in last Sunday’s Times entitled “War Really Is Going out of Style,” NYT, 12/17/11). For Pinker, the Op-Ed  piece seems to be an extension of the argument that he makes in his recently published The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. The three reasons that Pinker and Goldstein give for the decline of war are 1) political 2) economic and 3)social. In terms of political boundaries, no one is really the winner. “Since shortly after World War II, virtually no borders have changed by force,” Pinker and Goldstein argue.  Further, economic hegemony has been more effective than geographic invasion. “Today, wealth comes from trade, and war only hurts,” they continue. Lastly on the social front mankind has evolved. “Brutal customs that were commonplace for millennia have been largely abolished: cannibalism, human sacrifice, heretic-burning chattel slavery, punitive mutilation, sadistic executions.”  The natural extension of Pinker and Goldstein’s argument is that benevolence has become naturally selective and that mankind has found a better way of dealing with its aggressive impulses, by making love not war to re-invoke the 60’s. The explosion of pornography might evidence the latter, if the majority of sites weren’t so involved with conquest and submission on an ontogenic basis. Not to be judgmental about playful sex, but the sex on Kink.com makes water boarding seem like a sport. The question is, are Pinker and Goldstein talking about the two new planets discovered orbiting the star Kepler 20 reported by Dennis Overbye in the Times (“Two Earth-Sized Planets Are Discovered, “ NYT, 12/20/11)?  Do we occupy the same planet as these two eggheads ? They sound like  Voltaire's Pangloss, whose reaction to a succession of brutalities, “all’s for the best in the best of all possible worlds," takes aim at another egghead named Leibnitz.  What about the brutalities perpetrated by the Janjaweed militia in thee Sudan, the brutal dictatorship of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, whose fortunes are again on the rise due to a windfall from the country's diamond industry? OK Qaddafi was toppled in Libya and Mubarak in Egypt, but even the reports of Qaddafi’s brutal capture create suspicion about the prospects for peace in that troubled land and the recent accounts of the Egyptian military’s sexual humiliations of women protestors seem to show throw doubt on the old  adage that “every cloud has a silver lining.” Make no mistake the lining of Mubarak regime was a military that controlled the economy of the country. We need turn no further than troubled Afghanistan if we want evidence of the fact that age old customs die slowly. Let the women with severed noses and burned faces testify to the progress of the human race. As for our so-called more advanced Western societies, who walked off with the shekels at MF Global and what made such a sterling institution as Goldman Sachs bet against the collateralized debt obligations it was offering its customers? And what about hazing at FAMU where the drum majors now must bang the drum slowly in mourning for a hard working 26 year old who was beaten to death? Go up to the South Bronx and watch the promoters of cock fights placing razors in the beaks of their contenders and then tell us about mankind tempering its aggressive instincts as two hapless birds run around with heads cut off. Happy Holidays!