Headbutt

Is it ever possible for a human being to change his or her view of the world. There are the famous biblical stories of conversion relating to St. Augustine and the Apostle Paul (aka Saul of Tarsus). But these are miracles. Life may be closer to picture painted by Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov, where the three brothers, Ivan, Dimitri and Alyosha, offer different paradigms of human existence. In fact one of the most dramatic sections of the novel is The Grand Inquisitor sequence, related by the skeptical Ivan to the spiritually inclined Alyosha. People rarely change even after they go through supposedly life changing experiences. If you are a Trump or Clinton supporter and have tried to effect a conversion, you know how difficult this can be. Mental health professionals are always attempting to isolate varying stages of human life in which personality or character are shaped. Freudians talk about the oedipal triangle; other psychoanalysts gravitate towards the pre-oedipal child and there has always been the larger discussion of nature versus nurture. The fact is that much of what makes human beings tick is stamped on them by a host of congenital biologic and genetic footprints. You may not be born an Upper West Side Jewish Liberal, a Ohio Republican or a New Mexico born libertarian, but you came into the world with certain propensities which your identical twin might not even possess. Those who have survived catastrophic situations can testify that people with similar upbringing can have radically different responses to trauma. While one survivor may be crushed by an experience, another emerges with a countervailingly optimistic attitude, despite the travails he or she has suffered. Ecco, et bien voila! This is the world--whole societies of individuals locked inside themselves and butting heads.

When It's Bad to Be Good

Some of the greatest atrocities have been perpetrated in the name of the good. Certainly the Inquisition was one of these. In The Grand Inquisitor section of The Brothers Karamazov Dostoevsky describes the condition of Christ being brought before the Grand Inquisitor for sacrilege though it was Christianity that the Inquisition was supposed to be protecting. Goodness can become a juggernaut, a tsumani in which initial objectives may be lost in the whirlwind, the inertial force of the movement itself. Max Weber distinguished between a sect and a church, with the sect representing the institutionalization of extemporaneous fervor. It’s like that with adherence to the cause of Goodness, whose original principals may be lost in the bureaucracy that's left in its wake. "The road to hell is paved with good intentions" goes the old homily and Goodness is supposed to be the best good intention. When Armageddon comes as a result of a nuclear device being dropped to thwart evil, what will we be able to say about the triumph of Good? You might say that Goodness can only be defined as a process, a means rather than an end, as a way of deterring those who would commit destructive deeds under the banner of Goodness. But Goodness itself is elusive. It’s a public relations device that creates a sanctimonious, self-congratulatory air around  its adherents and that buys them immunity from detection or prosecution. When Bad Things Happen to Good People was a bestselling book about how misfortune can befall even the most well-meaning of people. But sometimes it's just bad to be a goody two shoes.

Cracked!

First Issue Cracked (cover art, Bill Everett)

Saying that there would have been no ISIS if the US hadn’t invaded Iraq is little like claiming that Ray Rice wouldn’t have gotten into his current difficulties if he and his wife hadn’t taken the elevator or gone to Atlantic City. The Saddam Hussein regime was tantamount in brutality to Bashar al-Assad’s in Syria and if the US had never intervened it might well have run into problems soon after Arab spring with another revolutionary force that the dialectics of history produced. The opposition might have been Shiite rather than Sunni but Newton’s Third Law, “every action creates an equal and opposite reaction,” is as applicable to politics as it is to science. The fodder for despots and terrorists is chaos and hopelessness and there's enough of that in the Mideast without the United States having to raise a finger in the name of oil or democracy or both. This isn’t the first time in history that we've seen social cohesion and purpose coming out of violence. The rise of fascism in Germany can almost directly be tied to the onerous effects of the Versailles Treaty—which crippled the German economy. Marx said “religion...is the opiate of the masses" and Raymond Aron famously titled his critique of Marxism as The Opium of the Intellectuals. But the fact is that the history of the civilization records the search for varying kinds of anodynes for despair. Some are benign delusions such as the notion there is a meaning and purpose in the universe. But some addictive substances and beliefs can turn people into monsters, as the Grand Inquisitor chapter of The Brothers Karamazov demonstrates. Terrorism is civilization’s crack.

How Are You Is Not Fine

Thomas Paine by Auguste Milliere

Thank God for the Russians. Russia produced The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, Anna Karenina, War and Peace and Pussy Riot. OK Sochi might not be the best choice for the Winter Olympics, but you can’t say the Russians are running away from the challenge. Now in a Times Op- Ed piece “The ‘How Are You?’ Culture Clash,” (NYT, 1/20/14), Alina Simone points out that Russians don’t simply take “fine" as an answer. When you ask a Russia “how are you,” you might get Chekhov’s wonderful short story, “The Lady With the Dog,” Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time or Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. Your average Russian is going to tell it like it is. Simone writes, “Ask a        Russian, ‘How are you?’ and you will hear, for better or worse, the truth. A blunt pronouncement of dissatisfaction punctuated by, say, the details of any recent digestive troubles. I have endured many painful minutes of elevator silence after my grandmother (who lived in the Soviet Union until moving to the United States in the 60’s) delivered her stock response: ‘Terrible,' to which she might add, 'Why? Because being old is terrible.’ Beat. ‘And I am very old’" What’s ironic is that Russia is still not a free society. Russian citizens are routinely persecuted for their beliefs and there are many egregious examples like the case of the Sergei Magnitsky, the 37 year old tax lawyer who died in jail after refusing to testify for the authorities (“Lawyer Held in Tax Case in Russia Dies in Jail,” NYT 11/17/13). The Yukos billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky who spoke out against Putin was recently released and deported after spending l0 years in prison (“Russian Tycoon Is Free, but His Money Is Still Tied Up,”  NYT, 12/20/13). Perhaps it’s a little like samizdat, the uncensored poetry that was so prized during the most repressive period of Soviet history. Maybe the private exchange is even more prized since public expressions of truth were and are so limited. Commenting on the theory of a prominent Russian cultural historian, Anya von Bremzen, Simone says, “As a citizen of a Communist utopia, you were pretty much supposed to feel fine all the time.” Americans seem to be attending a perpetual small talk convention in which “how are you” and “fine” are the lingua franca, but they won’t go to jail because of a negative Twitter feed about the President Obama. Nothing, of course, is worse than those Americans who abuse the privilege of living in a free society by responding to “how are you? with “I can’t complain.” If Tom Paine could hear such drivel, he'd roll in his grave.

The Torquemada Fantasy

Tomas de Torquemada

Say some one has Torquemada fantasies and wants to roast infidels over hot coals, can they go to jail for e mailing these thoughts to a friend? Recently the Times ran a follow up to case about Gilberto Valle, the New York City policeman convicted of plotting cannibalism ,“Two More Are Accused of Plotting to Kidnap, Torture and Kill Women,” (NYT, 4/15/13).  One of those accused was apparently a former librarian at Stuyvesant and the Times writers Joseph Goldstein and William K Rashbaum did take the unusual (for the Times) step of remarking “Everything about the case, from the two suspects to the alleged crime, sounded unlikely.” Of course, you never know what runs through a librarian’s head. After years of students asking where's All Quiet on the Western Front, anything is possible. According to the Times piece the two suspects were apprehended after the FBI agents intercepted “the e mail of Michael Vanhise, an auto mechanic who was later charged with conspiring with Officer Valle.” Mr. Vanhise, according to the Times sought out the librarian and the other suspect since he “had been trying to find someone willing to kidnap, rape and kill his wife and other relatives.” The “other relatives” will probably be a sticky point in the prosecution of this “unlikely” case. It’s like Diogenes search for an honest man. The amount of jokes about irritating mother-in-laws suggest that others have shared similar fantasies. Still in all, when is the line crossed? When does sadistic fantasizing become a crime? Prosecuting someone who spells out a fantasy in detail could have chilling effects on expression? When does fantasy become conspiracy? Would you arrest Dostoevsky for "The Grand Inquisitor" chapter of The Brothers Karamazov?