The Woodstock of Capitalism

Capitalism encourages individual initiative. Socialism and Communism squelch it. By responding to the profit motive, productivity is increased as is innovation. By comparison economies predicated on the collectivity are less expansive. When the Soviet Union and China opened their economies to free enterprise they experienced huge growth spurts. However, while a free society may lead to the growth of private enterprise and mercantilism, it requires a kind of regulation that is not necessary in the already regulated economy which Marx termed “the dictatorship of the proletariat.” Individuals as Thomas Hobbes would have agreed have to be protected against each other or self-will will run riot. That’s why it’s almost disconcerting to read that one of the great capitalistic juggernauts of all times, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, is run totally on trust. Thomas Hobbes would have been shocked to read the headline of Andrew Ross Sorkin’s recent Dealbook, “Berkshire’s Radical Strategy: Trust” (NYT, 5/5/14) In the piece Charlie Munger, the vice chairman of Berkshire, is cited on the occasion of the company’s annual meeting, which Sorkin describes being “known as  'Woodstock for Capitalists.'” “By standards of the rest of the world, we overtrust,” Sorkin quotes Munger as saying. “So far it has worked very well for us.” Sorkin offers another Munger quote from 2007 thusly: “A lot of people think if you just had more process and more compliance—checks and double checks and so forth—you could create a better result in the world. Well, Berkshire has had practically no process. We had hardly any internal auditing until they forced it on us. We just try to operate in a seamless web of deserved trust and be careful whom we trust.” Herbert Spencer, who was responsible for the term “survival of the fittest," turned Darwin’s natural selection into a capitalist concept which rendered a dog eat dog view of human existence. But Munger obviously puts much stock in altruism which in the Berkshire model can also be naturally selective. If there had been a stock called Altruism, it would hit the ceiling every time Berkshire held one of its Woodstocks.

Nietzsche for Idiots

Photo of Friedrich Nietzsche by F. Hartmann

Nietzsche has always been as hard to spell as he is to swallow. You type out Nietsche or Nietzche and finally you get the added letter, but Nietzsche, like one says about some complicated people, is work.  An evening correcting the misspellings of his name can leave you feeling empty and emotionally exhausted.  If you’re having trouble with your Nietzsche, you might want to point the finger at someone other than yourself. What were Nietzsche's ancestors thinking when they decided to place an s after a z? No one is saying that there is anything wrong with the name. It’s Beyond Good and Evil. However Robert Heilbroner once wrote a book called The Worldly Philosophers, which totally bypassed Nietzsche in favor of thinkers like Karl Marx and Adam Smith. And the question is, why not make Nietzsche more worldly by coming up with some shorthand that makes his name and hopefully his ideas more user friendly. How’s about Nichi? It’s simpler and something kids will like too. Instead of being some hard to spell philosopher, his name will make him sound like a legendary martial artist. Nichi and Bruce Lee. Nichi is such a catchy name that it might be turned into a computer game that would be a challenge to Grand Theft Auto. Heidegger comes bearing a lot of freight, not the least of which are tongue twisters like Unheimlichkeit. But there isn’t too much leeway. Heidegger is a hard word to misspell, although Americans put off by his fascist leanings might warm up to him if his name were changed to Hy Digger.

Neither Progress Nor Perfection

John Gray

It’s always refreshing to read a jeremiad against the notion of progress. Millenarian ideologies, fundamentalist religions, pseudo-therapies and panderers to notions of esthetic beauty as the aim of art, all set a high bar which can be disconsonant with the inner being of the casually depressed observer of modern existence. In his review of John Gray’s The Silence of Animals: On progress and Other Modern Myths (“Backwards to the Future,” TLS 8/30/13) David Hawkes quotes an earlier line from the English philosopher’s Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions to the effect that “Belief in progress is the Prozac of the thinking class.” The line is reminiscent of Raymond Aron’s famous regurgitation of Marx’s “religion is the opiate of the masses,” in referring to Marxism as The Opium of the Intellectuals, and both Marx and Aron are relevant to the discussion. Summarizing Gray’s view in The Silence of Animals, Hawkes remarks, “To lose faith in progress is to lose the ability to see meaning in life. It is to abandon the notion, central to rationalism and religion alike, that empirical appearances conceal substantial essences. It breaks with any concept of a non-material mind, self or soul concealed within the body. It assumes, with neo-pragmatists and postmodernists, that signs do not refer to an external reality, but create their own referents. To lose faith in progress is to view the world as a depthless simulacrum with no underlying significance.” So finally someone speaks the truth. There is no meaning or order to anything. All is chaos and nothing is what’s meant to be either in terms of Hegelian dialectics or God. Unfortunately, this appears to be too much for Mr. Hawkes who loses his philosophical erection and insists on presenting an antidote to all this meaninglessness. “The possibility is that history does indeed have a meaning, purpose and end, and that these can easily be discerned by human beings, but that the direction of history’s development is backwards not forwards. History is not progress bur regress, not advance but decline, and it leads to destruction rather than to utopia.” “Hindsight is always twenty twenty,” might be the retort to Hawkes' last ditch attempt to make sense of life.

Look Back in Perpexity

Photo of Hanif Kureishi: Brett Weinstein

George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion was one of the greatest plays ever written about class and it developed directly out of the particularities of language that defined British society in a way that was notorious and sometimes clichéd. The genius of the play is not only to create a character like the cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle but to embellish the contrast by making her Pygmalion not only upper crust, but a student of language itself. Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady set it all to music. Language is of course what plays are made of, but it’s really only the tip of the iceberg. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were inhabitants of London who found a deeper explanation for class division. Das Kapital was Marx’s analysis of the workings of the capitalist economy. Later on Ralf Dahrendorf, a sociologist who was a member of both the German parliament and the House of Lords, would offer an post-Marxist understanding of society in Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society. And the legacy of colonialism evidenced in a movie like Stephen Frears' My Beautiful Laundrette, written by Hanif Kureishi, the son of a Pakistani immigrant, might better speak to class division than the facile linguistic dichotomies put forth by Shaw at the turn of the last century. But here comes Fiona Devine, a sociologist from Manchester University hired by the BBC to create The Great British Class Survey. According to the Times (“Multiplying the Old Divisions of Class in Britain,” NYT 4/3/13), the results of the survey responded to by 161,000 people were that “in today’s complicated world, there are now seven different social classes…These range from the ‘elite’ at the top, distinguished by money, connections and rarefied cultural interests, to the ‘precariat’ at the bottom, characterized by lack of money, lack of connections and unrarefied cultural interests.” The in- between categories that the study describes as quoted by the Times include “the ‘technical middle class,’ a group that has a lot of money but few superior social connections,” “’the emergent service workers,’ a young urban group that has li little money but a high amount of social and cultural capital” and “the ‘new affluent workers,’ who score high on social and cultural activity, but have only a middling amount of money.” Sounds like it’s no longer the mythological character of Pygmalion, but Pandora or Proteus, that the up and coming generation of British playwrights will turn to when they try to deal with the changing complexion of English Society at the Royal Court.

Sir Michael Dummett

When a philosopher by the name of Sir Michael Dummett died recently, Harvard University Press placed an “in memorium” in The New York Review of Books with the following quote from his Origins of Analytical Philosophy: “Frege was the grandfather of analytic philosophy, Husserl the founder of the phenomenological school, two radically different philosophical movements. In l903, say, how would they have appeared to any German student of philosophy who knew the work of both? Not, certainly, as two deeply opposed thinkers: rather as remarkably close in orientation, despite some divergences of interests. They may be compared with the Rhine and the Danube, which rise quite close to one another and for a time pursue roughly parallel courses, only to diverge in utterly different directions and flow into different seas. Why, then did this happen? What small ingredient into the thought of each was eventually magnified into so great an effect?”  This brilliant quote can describe so many human situations and institutions in which the path followed by individuals originally brought together for a common purpose eventually separates. Certainly it was true say of Lenin and Trotsky or of Freud and Jung—both examples of individuals united by their devotion to common causes who ended up representing irreconcilable ideologies. In the case of Marxism and psychoanalysis it’s easy to understand the nature of the shared purpose, ie social and individual liberation. Dummett’s quote ends up by asking what element catalyzed the creation of antinomies. But what was the ovum out of which language philosophy and phenomenology were born? It’s a question that can also be asked about the world’s three great and often warring religions, Islam, Christianity and Judaism? 

Quiddity

Quiddity refers to the whatness of things, and it is precisely this whatness that is lost as we advance ever further into technological bridge building. In his famous graveside speech, Hamlet says, “Where be his quiddities now, his quillets, his cases, his tenures?” referring to a departed lawyer. Cybernetics allows for an increase in efficiency at the price of progress. This is not to suggest that everyone must do the Boston AIDS ride to get a feeling for the distance that is lost when traveling by plane or car. Arguing for purity is like chasing windmills, but there are qualitative things that can be done to improve one’s relationship to the world of objects. In his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx argued that the means of production resulted in the worker’s alienation from the world of things. The automobile production line epitomizes the kind of anomie in which workers are chronically estranged from the products they produce, but in modern life, more and more conveniences make it ever more difficult to actually have a hands-on relationship with anything. We push too many buttons. For instance, a new service called Doodle allows people to effectively coordinate group activities through an online calendar. It sets up future human interactions by surgically triaging all its clients before presenting a neat little diagram of availability. Seems innocuous enough, right? But it’s not. Such applications prevent all the usual grousing, bickering and love-hate that accompanies human congregation. It’s proven that even animals need others animals, and of all mammals Homo sapiens are perhaps most defined by their social needs. However, with the advent of cyber universes like Second Life, humans may no longer even have to have first-hand contact to arrange social events. Their avatars will Doodle via Google.

L'Age d'Or

Even the stage sets of the famous ‘50s Lone Ranger TV series were primitive. The Lone Ranger and Tonto always seemed to arrive at the same mountain pass, with the same pair of boulders that looked a little worse for the wear. In essence, neither the Lone Ranger nor Tonto were going anywhere. They were not what today would be called socially mobile, either as fictional characters or as beneficiaries of the myth of the Wild West.

   

Let’s turn to another classic, The Life of Riley, with the all-but-forgotten William Bendix in the title role. The protagonist works in an aeronautics factory and carries one of those lunch boxes that look like a miniature airplane hanger. Looming in the background is the post-war prosperity of Imperial America. Riley works on an assembly line, but lives in a cheery split-level house with flower boxes on the window-sills. There is something value-free about his occupation. Though the series was made in the post-war period, plants that made aircraft consumed the war economy of the previous decade. The Life of Riley is the lighter side of the project. Riley bears no responsibility for the finished product or the murder that his productivity wreaks. He is merely a cog, taking orders from his superiors. He exemplifies the early Marx papers of 1848, with their emphasis on the alienation of the worker caused by two premises of capitalist production—division of labor and economies of scale. Yet he is as happy as a bird.

   

Exhibit three: The Honeymooners. Ralph Kramden is a New York City bus driver who lives in a tenement where the fire escape is as constant a part of the set as the boulders in The Lone Ranger. He has argumentative relationships with his wife Alice, his best friend Norton, and Norton’s wife Trixy. In the lingo of our current culture, Ralph and Alice would be described as a dysfunctional family, in which the wife parries an ever-increasing crescendo of insults from her sadistic husband. If Ralph’s rage were to cross the line from verbal to physical, he could easily be placed in the Joel Steinberg category, as his insults and character assassination are remorseless, unrelenting, and fundamentally aimed at extinguishing the will and identities of those closest to him.

   

The Golden Age of Television unwittingly echoed the Theater of the Absurd—epitomized by Beckett, Ionesco and Pinter—and it’s not hard to imagine scripts for The Lone Ranger, The Life of Riley, or The Honeymooners being performed in the tiny Théâtre de la Huchette, where Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano and The Lesson have played in repertory since 1957. The spare, unchanging sets, the opaque humor of the dialogue, with its barely repressed violence, and the droning sense of time could easily turn the scripts for these popular ‘50s television series into the basis for a new avant-garde theater movement, which could be named after Buñuel’s famed surrealist masterpiece, L’Age d’Or.