The Anxiety of Intellect

You usually associate street smarts with some one who knows how to negotiate in business. Donald Trump apparently considers this ability to be a top of the line requirement for statesmanship and something which qualifies him to be president of the United States. He has boasted that he will have a wall built between Mexico and the United States which the Mexicans will pay for. You don’t usually associate streets smarts with the world of intellect, but indeed there are intellectuals who exhibit the same kind of intuitive abilities that work in deal making within the realm of intellectual arguments. That is to say there are intellectuals who approach such questions as the branch falling in the forest with no one listening or the question of whether you would turn the trolley in the direction of one hapless soul in order to save five (the Trolley problem) with some degree of swagger. Such thinkers are way beyond reason and deductive logic. For instance Harold Bloom, the literary scholar who coined the term “anxiety of influence” probably can reiterate his theories about the provenance of poetry in his sleep, ditto Steven Greenblatt the Shakespearean authority who wrote Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. Trump who has been around the block a few times when it comes to business probably thinks that he can run rings around a tough guy like Vladimir Putin (and part of his credential may relate to the fact that two of his wives Ivana and Melania come from the Czech Republic and Slovenia respectively) or the notorious bumptious Kim Jong-un. Similarly if you are a street smart intellectual you have to know how to handle the likes of the deconstructionist maeven Stanley Fish, if you’re going to get your feet wet at the MLA. And you’d better have the brashness of a Bill Maher if you find yourself knocking heads on the subject of race with the philosopher Cornel West. Imagine a series like The Sopranos, except set it in the competitive world of upper west Jewish intellectuals, the inheritors of the mantle held by Irving Howe, Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, Susan Sontag and the old Partisan Review crowd. Remember Woody Allen’s line “I had heard that Commentary and Dissent  had merged and formed Dysentery?" You need an intellectual shock jock, a kind of Donald Trump of ideas, to make a dent amongst these kinds of egghead mafiosi.

Pornosophy: Coitus Interruptus

sperm fertilizing egg

There was a time when sex was about reproduction, but them days have passed. One of the villains is probably idealization, the vehicle by which instinct negotiates the shoals of consciousness. If you believe that consciousness is what separates man from animals than it is easy to get a clear view of this dichotomy between sex as a biological process whose pheromones and hormones produce pure and simply urge as it for instance expresses itself in the estrous of female mammals. A female human may dig someone and it may occur during her procreative years, hence camouflaging the wolf in sheep’s clothing, but the net is that her instincts remain at the service of her mind. Hence the simple mating season for animal becomes a whole Megillah once you in introduce thought. Sex is literally coitus interruptus where memory and anticipation, two major constituents of consciousness, are involved.  Is this really the meaning of the fall? Was Eden unthinking animal life? Was sex placed on the auction block in the post Adamic world, where it was  offered to the highest bidder on the Darwinian food chain, as the holy grail of that mixture of mind and body known as human pleasure?  In an essay entitled “The Divorce of Coitus from Reproduction,” (The New York Review of Books, 9/25/15), the chemist and novelist Carl Djerassi presents another product of consciousness—science—which has also served to remove sex from the burden of procreation. Djerassi remarks, “During the l960’s, with the introduction of the Pill, sex became separated from its reproductive consequences. In l977, the British scientists Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe successfully carried out an in vitro fertilization (IVF), the process by which an egg is fertilized outside the body—ex utero—and the embryo is transferred into a woman’s uterus several days later.” It’s a familiar scenario. Progress, in the forms of civilization and domestication, has created certain liberties—for which there has also been price to pay. The question is, have we arrived in heaven or inadvertently been condemned to hell?

Pornosophy: Meta-Sex

Estrous Cycle (Out slide)                                         

Can we all agree that from an evolutionary perspective the purpose of sex was, at least initially, procreation? Pleasure was in the service of genome preservation which inevitably was a matter of natural selection. Similarly ingestion was a function of survival with somewhere along the way taste whetting appetite, as the world became a more competitive place. With the development of culture, sexual pleasure like taste began to become a more a complex matter and there came a point in history where both pleasure and appetite were cultivated for their own sake. Sex began to have its codes and mores which were formulated in ancient texts like the Kama Sutra and in the case of food, numerous treatises written by theorizers from Epicurus to Escoffier. The cultivation of pleasure and appetite were actually proto acts of post-modernism since they put both “sex,” once a matter-of-fact biological moment in human or animal life, marked say by estrus in a female mammals, and “feeding” for nourishment, in quotes. The purposes of sex and eating were no longer limited by the original function of procreation and nourishment. The philosopher Thomas Nagel famously wrote “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” And there have been some very interesting experiments in which parakeets have been taught words and phrases. But essentially it’s impossible to know what animals are thinking. Indeed it seems improbable that there's any species outside of man who has attained a high enough level of self-reflexive consciousness to experience what we might called meta-sex, or that form of sex in which pleasure rather than procreation plays the major role. There is a famous statue of Atlas carrying the world on his shoulders in Rockefeller Center and that's a little bit like the predicament posed by thought. Like Atlas mankind in general has been given extraordinary powers which can also turn into a burden. Again while it’s hard to tell, most anecdotal evidence would point that to the fact that once its mating period has ended, the average mammal seeks out different pleasures. However, the neurogenic pathways of men and women are so wired by thinking that they seek to relive the memory of past pleasures which they ideate and conceive, long past their biological mechanism’s ability to effectively convert  urge into action. In lay terms, a youthful consciousness is not a very good tenant for an aging body.

Ben Marcus’ “Cold Little Bird"

photo of Ben Marcus          

There is a moment in Ben Marcus’ recent New Yorker short story, “Cold Little Bird," when the parents Rachel and Martin take their precocious10 year old, Jonah, to a therapist after he is caught reading a book, Lies, whose typeface, “glazed in blood,” describes how “the Jews” according to Jonah “caused 9/11 and they all stayed home that day so they wouldn’t get killed.” Jonah had already been acting strangely and in particular “angry, depressed, anxious, remote, bizarre…a Jew-hating Jewish child who might very well be dead inside.”  He refuses to hug them. ”What you are upset about, in relation to your son, may not fall under the purview of medicine, though” the therapist concludes. “To be honest, I was on the fence about medication. Whatever is going on with Jonah, it does not present as depression. In my opinion Jonah does not have a medical condition.” The scene recalls a theme Marcus developed in an earlier story, “The Dark Arts,” about an elusive illness the main character is suffering from and in turn The Magic Mountain and Death in Venice which both deal with a spiritual malady camouflaged by medical symptoms. Jonah is a wonderful creation, an example of the child as the vehicle for the unspoken inner life of his parents. While Martin claims to be proud of his identity, he and his wife are, in effect, the typical assimilated couple. “Last month was Yom Kippur and you didn’t fast. You didn’t go to services. You don’t ever say Happy New Year on Rosh Hashanah,” Jonah says accusatorily. And talk about lack of emotion or emptiness here is a description of the mechanical sex that Jonah’s parents employ to comfort each other. “They used a cream. They used their hands. They used an object or two. During the brief strain of actual fornication they persisted with casual conversation about the next day’s errands.” Is it surprising that this child doesn’t like being touched? Like father, like son, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. All the old homilies apply. What’s really upsetting about Jonah as a character is ultimately how loyal he is to his parents and their values. It’s a little like the curse on the House of Atreus in the Oresteia. If you remember, the mother of the troubled child in The Bad Seed finds out, in the course of the drama, that her real mother was a serial killer.

Bridge of Spies

Steven Spielberg is an expert at pulling heartstrings. A.I., Schindler’s List, Empire of the Sun and Lincoln were some of his great tearjerkers. But what elevates his films above mere melodrama is the profundity of the moral premises that infuse the narratives. In the case of Spielberg’s latest outing, Bridge of Spies, a cold war thriller, the morality centers around the principle of due process which. as his crusading lawyer James B. Donovan (Tom Hanks) says in arguing for inalienable rights in the face of the national hysteria which was gripping America during the height of the nuclear arms race, is what precisely separates us from the enemy. The film is particularly relevant today due to threats to our legal system posed, ironically, by the outrage over injustice. There isn’t a day when some victimized group is not aching to speed up the process, just as the judge in the trial of the Russian spy Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance) was ready to do when he refused to throw out inadmissible evidence. By the way, Rylance’s performance is the proof that there’s nothing like a great Shakespearean actor when you're trying to play the part of a stoic spy whose morality derives from his unbreakability. The expression about people wearing many hats is particularly apt in the case of Bridge of Spies. It’s the 50’s and everyone wears them and in the dramatic penultimate scene when U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers (Austin Stowell) is traded for Abel the two prisoners are wearing the hats of their captors, respectively Russian Ushanka and a fedora. Joel and Ethan Coen wrote the screenplay so we shouldn’t be surprised at the masterful orchestration of these and other themes in a succession of musical leitmotifs. If constitutional issues provide the spine, the art of negotiation, at which the real life character on whom Hanks' role is based apparently excelled, provides the suspense. Donovan was an insurance investigator and the movie begins with him representing the bad guys and arguing to limit liability; at the end playing the opposite role he successfully argues for more, effecting the release of two Americans (Powers and a Yale economics graduate student named Frederic Pryor, played in the film by Will Rogers). Both the global themes and the minor details (Donovan’s wife serves a perfectly 50’s meal of meatloaf, carrots and peas and his kids watch 77 Sunset Strip when they aren’t being haunted by jeremiads about nuclear attack) are seamlessly woven into a final product which only gives one pause because of how neatly its tied together and how inexorably And Quiet Flows the Don.

What is Philanthropy?

"Francis of Assisi” by Cimabue

Eleemosynary refers to the philanthropic impulse and it derives from the Latin word for alms. But what is the nature of philanthropy? The philanthropists you see in the paper are usually wealthy people whose very public activities in giving relatively small percentages of their earnings to charity constitute a form of image building and public relations and oftentimes the giving can actually be related to dispelling negative associations created by their business affairs. For instance recently the Coca Cola company sponsored a campaign calling attention to obesity. Of course Coke is one of the biggest offenders as a substance when it comes to weight gain.  An article in The Wall Street Journal, "Charitable Gifts From Wealthy Koch Brothers Often Prompt Partisan Reactions" (WSJ, 8/3/14) shows how gifts to medical and cultural institutions can varnish an industrialist’s reactionary image. El Chapo, known for the violence he used to dominate the Mexican drug trade, is beloved as a Robin Hood type character by many of the poor mountain people who now protect him. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett two of the wealthiest men in the world are notoriously philanthropic. In 201l, they created The Giving Pledge which encourages the richest people on the planet to give away most of their money. But when you have over 60 billion dollars and you pledge to give away 99% of it (which is what Buffet did), that still leaves you with over $600 million to live on—not exactly chump change. On the other side of the fence Franciscan monks, who probably start with very little, take a vow of poverty in which they give away everything. Larissa MacFarquhar deals with the subject of extreme altruism of this kind in recently published book Strangers Drowning: Grappling with Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Overpowering Urge to Help and there are some geneticists who believe such altruism is actually naturally selective. In an essay/review of David Sloan Wilson’s Does Altruism Exist?: Culture, Genes, and the Welfare of Others, “The Biology of Being Good  to Others,” (The New York Review of Books,” 3/19/15) H. Allen Orr writes: “This view was popularized in l976 by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene. But the real breakthrough came in the l960’s with W.D. Hamilton’s theory of kin selection. Hamilton saw mathematically that a gene that encourages an organism to act altruistically can actually increase in numbers from one generation to the next by natural selection if those who benefit from the altruism tend to be relatives of the altruist. The reason is that, as kin, these beneficiaries of altruistic behavior often also carry the gene for altruism." But there’s a big difference between willingly choosing penury and remaining wealthy enough to take advantage of a foolhardy Supreme Court decision (Citizens United v. FEC) which allows the rich to control politics. Further most philanthropy is biased. You only give to what you’re interested in. If you’re tired of the abuses of vegetarians, you might want to “free the vegetables:” if you’re an animal lover you’ll give to “save the whales.” But with the exception of the few who take a vow of poverty or attempt to reign in their own desires, some philanthropy can also turn out to have selfish motives.