Justin Erik Halldór Smith

Ezekias Woodward, Christ-Mas Day (1656)

Thomas Browne's Hydriotaphia: Early Modern Gothic Non-Fiction

Surveys of what is often called 'Gothic' literature (surely one of the most malleable labels in the history of style), generally begin with Coleridge and Byron in the early 19th century. I would argue that the Urtext of the genre, at least in its English expression, appeared two centuries earlier, and was not a work of literary fiction at all, but a straightforward scholarly treatise on the practical problems of dealing with and disposing of dead bodies, the variety of burial practices in different times and places, with especial attention to cremation.

I have in mind Thomas Browne's Hydriotaphia, urn-burial, or, A discours of the sepulchral urns lately found in Norfolk together with the Garden of Cyrus, or, The quincuncial lozenge, or network of plantations of the ancients, artificially, naturally, mystically considered (London, 1658 [repr. 1669]). As the title implies, it is also an archaeological treatise, impressed with "the Treasures of Time," which "lie high, in Urns, Coyns, and Monuments, scarce below the Roots of some Vegetables." It is a philosophical treatise, too, subtly chastising the authors of the more canonical works in this genre for focusing upon the wrong sort of question: "Many have taken voluminous pains to determine the state of the Soul upon Dis-union, but men have been most phantastical in the singular contrivances of their Corporal dissolution."

The philosophical subtlety extends through Browne's vast ethnographic observations. One of his core preoccupations has to do with the difference between the barbarism and civilization. The barbarians, as represented par excellence by the Scythians of northern Asia, he notes, are legendary for the cruel sacrifices of slaves and horses that accompany the funerals of great men. The Chinese, by contrast, well-known in the early modern period for their civility, had managed to replace the sacrificial victims with textual representations: "And the Chinois," he writes, "without Cremation or urnal Interrment of their Bodies... burn great numbers of printed draughts of Slaves and Horses over it; civilly content with their companies in effigie, which barbarous Nationes exact unto reality." The purpose of the treatise is to defend cremation against the view that it is, in some absolute sense, morally abhorrent, and to do so by drawing on the vast diversity of the ethnographic record. In this respect, the treatise serves something of the same rhetorical purpose as Montaigne's famous essay from the previous century, 'On Cannibals'.

Cremation was remarkable to Browne in part for what it revealed about the human being qua corporeal entity, namely, that there is really not much there. "How the bulk of a man should sink into so few pounds of Bones and Ashes," he writes, "may seem strange unto any who considers not its Constitution, and how slender a mass will remain, upon an open and urging Fire, of the carnal composition. Even Bones themselves reduced into Ashes do abate a notable proportion; and, consisting much of a volatile Salt, when that is fired out, make a light kinde of Cinders."

Not all bodies decay or burn in the same way, however. "Some Bones make best Skeletons, some Bodies quick and speediest Ashes." Bodies identified by Browne as 'hydropical', in particular, neither burn nor decay easily. Drawing on some pre-Socratic lore I have yet to decipher, he asks: "Who would expect a quick flame from Hydropical Heraclitus?" Surely the most vividly macabre passage of the treatise concerns the 'defiance to Corruption' in bodies of this sort:

Urnal Interrments and burnt Reliques lie not in fear of Worms, or to be an Heritage for Serpents: In carnal Sepulture Corruptions seem peculiar unto parts, and some speak of Snakes out of the Spinal Marrow. But while we suppose common Worms in Graves, 'tis not easie to finde any [snakes] there; few in Church-yards above a foot deep, fewer or none in Churches... Teeth, Bones and Hair give the most lasting defiance to Corruption. In an Hydropical Body ten years buried in a Church-yard we met with a fat concretion, where the Nitre of the Earth and the salt and lixivious Liquour of the Body had coagulated large lumps of Fat into the consistence of the hardest Castle-soap; whereof part remaineth with use.

In passing, we also see what to my knowledge is the earliest occurrence of the sort of craniometric physical anthropology that would become familiar at the end of the 18th century with authors such as Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. "[H]andsome-formed Sculls," Browne writes, "give some Analogy of Flesh-resemblance; a critical view of Bones makes a good distinction of Sexes. Even Colour is not beyond conjecture; since it is hard to be deceived in the distinction of Negro's Sculls."

Very much as in his more famous work, the Pseudodoxia epidemica of 1646, Browne offers a sequence of refutations of beliefs and practices so peculiar that it's hard to imagine he does not relish the very mention of them, even as he insists upon their abhorrence. He disapproves, for example, of the cultural practice whereby an "Archimime or Jester attend[s] the Funeral Train, and imitat[es] the speeches, gesture and manners of the deceased." He also wants to know, as if for him there could be any practical purpose in knowing, "[w]hether unto eight or ten Bodies of Men to adde one of a Woman, as being more inflammable, and unctuously constituted for the better pyrall Combustion, were any rational practice[?]"

But the Gothic quality of the work (and the same quality that ultimately makes all Gothic writing a variety of Christian devotional literature), lies in the contrast between the fate of the damned and the fate of the blessed, a contrast that always enjoys lingering in the sepulchral shadows and stench rather longer than do the hymns and parables, long enough to experience a proper charge of titillating horror. Browne invites us to "meet with Tombs enclosing Souls which denied their Immortalities," such as that of Epicurus and other heathen philosophers. And here we come back to that central philosophical problem: the fate of the soul after death. Browne complains that it is "the heaviest stone that Melancholy can throw at a man, to tell him he is at then end of his Nature; or that there is no farther State to come, unto which this seems progressional, and otherwise made in vain." But if the farther state is just a dank tomb, doesn't this still give some kind of comfort, if not as a glimmer of hope for our own souls, then at least as a source of dark fantasies that please the imagination even as they leave the supposedly more divine part of the soul unconsoled? Isn't that what the genre is really all about?

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote of the Hydriotaphia that "it smells in every word of the sepulchre." It does that, even as it remains in conversation with Montaigne and Descartes, and even as it anticipates figures as far apart as Byron and Blumenbach. 

The French Strikes and the Zomian Highlands: Reading James C. Scott on Anarchism

There was something about the French strikes that, like so many things recently, had me feeling out of step with my peers. It was not the particular content of the strikers' demands, in the particular context in which these demands were made, that bothered me; in fact I strongly supported the strikers' effort, and was disappointed when it failed.

It was rather the assumptions behind most of the international (read: North American academic) support for the strikers that I could not entirely accept. How many times did we hear phrases to the effect that the strikers, in fighting to keep in place the relatively generous social welfare system that had been built up in France over the course of the 20th century, were doing nothing less than fighting to defend the 'minimum conditions for a just society'? This got me asking myself: do the highland peasants of Southeast Asia, who live outside of the scope of nation-state control, live in unjust societies? Is there any conception of justice on which the minimal conditions of its being present need not be met by states, but instead might be met by sub-state associations of people? Even if such associations are not up to the task of maintaining the minimum conditions of justice in today's France or the US, is this sufficient reason to neglect them altogether as possible models for the future?

For a while, I had a tenuous and unsatisfying relationship to anarchism: I contented myself with a sort of 'anarchism of the spirit', which conceded that the abolition of government is wholly impracticable, but still insisted that one may, individually, live one's life free of any externally imposed arche. This 'anarchism' was of course only poorly disguised cosmopolitanism (not that there's anything wrong with cosmopolitanism): it had to do with the cultivation of an individual life and the refusal to anchor it in loyalty to some nation-state, with which a person can only ever hope to be contingently associated, rather than with any real conception of the social good.

There were two considerations that kept me dithering in mere cosmopolitanism: I hate village life, and I am afraid of thugs. As to the first, I supposed that if nation-states were to be phased out as the providers of services, utilities, health care, and so on, this would require a radical scaling back to a form of social life that could not include many of the things I enjoy, such as moving easily between cultures across vast geographical regions, sampling from them, taking what I like and rejecting what I don't. As to the second, I supposed like many people that wherever nation-states fail to exercise their famous monopoly on violence, more craven and ancestral forms of it would move in to take their place.

Reading James C. Scott, particularly The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (Yale, 2009), as well as Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Yale, 1998), has done much to end my dithering. On his treatment, non-state confederations are a sort of endangered species, like indigenous languages and polar megafauna; they are all being encroached upon by very much the same global process. In fact, Scott thinks that Zomia, a mountain region that extends across the borders of several states, including Vietnam, Laos, Burma, and Thailand, is perhaps the last non-state region in the world. (Similar subaltern accounts have been given of the relative vitality of the local economies of Sudanese villagers, a vitality World Bank functionaries for the most part do not even know how to measure.) This is the last remnant of a sort of sub-state or pre-state social organization that once extended as far as Europe with groups such as the Cossacks: groups consisting in people who were not by any viable measure worse off than the 'citizens' they would soon be forced to become.

With respect to my first concern, about the tedium of the sort of village life that can afford to do without state support (a concern which Scott does not share, and so does not address), it should first be admitted that whether or not I would feel comfortable living a certain kind of life says nothing about whether that life could be considered a good one. Second, upon reflection there is no reason in principle why --if the model of social organization presented by the Zomians were, by some miracle, to be adopted in places that currently have trouble conceptualizing a just society except as one whose upholding is the responsibility of the state-- innovations developed under state direction (the Internet being such a one par excellence) could not be retained and maintained collectively (it is a good deal more difficult to imagine the highway system and the aviation industry being maintained in this way, but I say good riddance), and thereby make possible an optique that extends beyond the Kinder, Kirche, Küche mantra that Marx, for example, thought was the inescapable frame of reference of village life.

With respect to my second concern, about the supposed natural tendency of anarchy towards thugocracy, one comes away from reading Scott (even if this is not his central argument) with a sharp sense of the implausibility of the popular belief that it is the state monopoly on violence that is keeping sub-state actors (my neighbor, the mob, a warlord) from doing me in or generally making my life miserable. For one thing, these parties have shown themselves to be perfectly capable of operating within states, frequently making comfortable arrangements with representatives of the state in order to carry on with their business. For another thing, the anthropology of violence simply makes it, like public copulation, unfeasible in most situations: it's not, or not primarily, law that keeps people from acting out, but custom, of which law is a recent accretion. Finally, it would be very difficult to make the case that sub-state aggressors, even if states do provide a genuine service in holding them back, could possibly do any more harm, if given carte blanche to rape and pillage and fill mass graves, than states themselves have done over the past century. Tribal warlords are nasty, but it is unlikely that villagers have had more reason to fear them than to fear the designs of generals with state-conferred authority.

I for one would not at all mind sitting at home, stateless, watching lolcat vids and reading Wikipedia articles about the indigenous languages of Southeast Asia. I would say hello to my neighbors every day, and if they ever got aggressive with me I would say: 'Shame on you'. If it continued, I'd get some local elders to shame them. I'd watch the seasons pass, and I'd get a lot of great writing done. If I were to get sick, there might be a local, natural remedy available, and if not, I might very well die at an earlier age than if there had been the sort of massive state- and corporate-sponsored medical industry most people think of as among the minimum conditions of 'justice'. That would indeed be too bad, but even with my world-renowned Canadian health benefits I note that I am far from immortal, and again, I refuse to admit that the vast majority of communities throughout human history were less just than the one I live in to the extent that they lacked these benefits.

In Marseille this past summer I recall seeing the posters put up by the Socialist Party: Pour nous la retraite, c'est 60 ans! I found myself thinking: wouldn't it be better to strive to bring about a world in which work is not so odious that one dreams of nothing more throughout one's working life than arriving at the age where one may be excused from it? I understand that I risk going off the utopian deep-end in having that sort of reaction to what is in the French context a perfectly laudable demand. But still, I can't help but think, and am very much emboldened by James C. Scott in thinking, that the lack of such a demand among the Zomians is a sign that they are somewhat closer to this utopia than Euro-Canadian democratic socialists are generally capable of seeing.

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'Intelligent Design' in the Human Sciences?

There has been much noble activism on the part of science educators over the past several years to combat the forces of darkness that would have public school children in the United States believe that bacterial flagella are 'irreducibly complex', that evolution is disproved by the fact that no 'missing links' have been found, and so on. A large part of the task of these educators is really elementary philosophy of science: to explain what a theory is, how it might be disproven, the difference between deduction and induction, and so on.

Keep up the good work, I say, but in the meantime might there also be room for a comparable campaign to elevate the sophistication of students' understanding of historical processes? I do not mean a campaign to ensure that students have adequately committed to memory a certain core set of historical facts (which facts belong in this core will always remain a subject of dispute). What I mean is that there should perhaps be a campaign to disabuse students, at some point in their teen years, of the childish view of history as a sequence of outcome-driven acts (to speak like an administrator) undertaken by exceptional individuals, where the ultimate outcome is the overall present state of the world.

The need for this becomes clear to me every year around Columbus Day, when the various factions gather, with law-like predictability, to either praise or denounce the legacy of this one man. As if there were anything there to take sides on! Columbus was a Genoan merchant, one of many, in an Asian-dominated world economy, and he managed to secure the funding for an expeditionary voyage that would open up new trade routes with the Far East. He came to some islands along the way, and met some people there, and said some things about them that would not go over well today, but were entirely in keeping with 15th-century Iberian anthropology (which was no more or less universalist than that of any contemporary empire in Asia or Mesoamerica). The misery of the reservation system, the Trail of Tears, and even the conquest of the Aztec Empire by Cortés some decades later are simply not Columbus's doing.

Jack Forbes calls Columbus a 'cannibal', by which, it turns out, he means not a member of the Carib people (who really were anthropophagous and whom Columbus really did have reason to fear), nor yet a person who literally eats people at all. Instead, Forbes maintains that Columbus's legacy shows him (retrospectively?) to be a sort of Wetiko, a mythical creature of the Algonkian cultural sphere (as if this had anything to do with the Caribbean!) that falls from its originally human state, loses all contact with the human social world, and lives isolated in the forest, gnawing on human flesh and even on its own limbs and lips. One can appreciate the despondency that drives Forbes's work, but at the same time denounce the naïveté of the implied understanding of historical agency. One must, moreover, work to ensure that this understanding be un-learned, preferably as early as high school, but certainly by the end of an undergraduate education.

To put things in perspective: the Pacific islands were only settled around 1500 years ago. If you agree with the official line of the Chilean school system, the Polynesian seafarers eventually made it as far as the South American coast. Whether they did or not (and there is in fact no solid evidence that they did), it is reasonable to suppose that they easily could have, and that if they had made such an expedition in, say, 700 or 800 CE, this would not have been a categorically different development than the one that took place 7 or 8 centuries later. Columbus's expedition, I mean to say, needs to be understood as a very recent development in the 70,000 year history of human migration: the blind, ignorant scavenging of homo sapiens that brought them to displace homo erectus from Asia, that later brought the Austronesians to displace the indigenous Australoid peoples from most of Southeast Asia, and so on. This is what history looks like when you imagine it from a perspective in the distant past and then watch it unfold, rather than looking back just a few hundred years or so from the present, and imagining that everything that people did or had done to them in that sliver of time was always inexorably destined, like the frames of a movie, to bring us to the present moment.

Seeing things in this way extinguishes any sense of a need for a special holiday to honor Columbus, but it also enables us to break out of the false dichotomy as between boosterism and demonization. And this, in turn, is, I think, a minimum condition of the attainment of something that might be called 'historical literacy', on analogy to what groups like the National Center for Science Education hope to bring about for our society's general understanding of how science works.

In both cases, in fact, what is to be fought against is a variety of 'intelligent design'. In the case of interest to us, it is the attribution of such a design to Columbus himself: a plan for the New World, for which he carried the blueprint, and which he set on its course with everything that was to come in clear view. In both cases of intelligent design, the properly scientific account of things is resisted for the same reason: because its acceptance is supposed, consciously or unconsciously, to imply meaninglessness, 'randomness' (as the kids say), disorder. In the case of history, dropping ID would require the loss of myths that likely have an even stronger hold on our understanding of ourselves than the myth of supernatural creation. How much easier it is, after all, to call upon a few sinister actors in the course of human history as an explanation of why things have gone so wrong, than to acknowledge that ethnic cleansing is simply what our species does, that it is not the result of individual moral failures, and that the chapter of it for which Columbus stands by way of metonymy is nothing exceptional. But as I never tire of repeating, there are surely more effective means of prevention than to stand slack-jawed at every new atrocity and to exclaim how exceptional it is.

Can an E-Book Be Burnt?

I want to join the fray and say a few words about the disgraceful side-show to this year’s commemoration of the September 11 attacks, but it will perhaps be best to enter upon this delicate subject by mentioning that, as a First-Amendment fundamentalist of the sort I seldom meet here in Canada, I wholly agree with Alexander Cockburn’s remarks on the non-event of the Rev. Terry Jones’s threatened Qur’an burning: “By the end of this week, the air was so thick with pieties about the need for tolerance and respect for all creeds that one yearned for the Rev. Terry Jones, mutton chop whiskers akimbo, to toss those Qurans in the burn barrels outside his Gainesville church in Florida and torch them on this year's anniversary of 9/11.”

I myself believe the Qur’an is a rich historical document, one among many others, and for this reason I hope you will understand that I can’t really convince myself that burning it would shake up the cosmic order any more than the incineration of old newspaper (a pastime at which I have much experience). I particularly don’t enjoy thinking that fear of reactions outside the United States should prevent people within the United States from performing a perfectly legal and merely symbolic act such as the burning of whatever book it is that they happen not to like. What would ordinarily be a distasteful gesture from a clueless yokel such as Jones is for me transformed by the threat of a violent reaction into a question of sovereignty and freedom.

But this should all have remained entirely off all of our radars, off Obama’s radar, off the radars of the rabble-rousers in Afghanistan and Pakistan, just as the Qur’an-burning remained that was successfully carried out by another thoroughly primitive Christian church in Kansas in 2008. It should not have been news, I mean to say, and I don’t want to draw it out any longer by treating it as news even after its expiration date (which arrived with the burning’s non-happening yesterday). Instead I want to use this non-event to ask a question about what book burning is, or indeed must be.

I am assuming that if Jones had gone through with it, the ‘Qur’ans’ used would have been the inexpensive, paperback English translations available in chain bookstores in not-exactly-bookish places like Gainesville, Florida. They certainly would not have been any more scholarly or authoritative than the Penguin edition of the Qur’an that I own, for which I paid $9.95 in 1994.

When the Qur’an was first dictated in the 7th century, by contrast, there were a few minimal conditions that had to be met in order for the resulting work to count as holy, and thus to count as the Qur’an at all. For one thing it had to be in Arabic. For another, it had to be written by hand. As Jack Goody expounds at length in his Logic of Writing and the Organisation of Society, the introduction of the printing press into the Muslim world was significantly slowed down by a widespread perception that a printed text cannot serve as an adequate replacement of a written text. This perception was rooted in particularities of both Islamic theology and of Arabic philosophy of language, and to suppose that any edition of a work, in any language, produced for any reason, can stand as an equal exemplar of that work relative to all others is surely a bit of Western cultural hegemony being allowed to dictate what a subaltern people thinks of as its distinctive homegrown ‘values’. In fact, not only has there often been serious debate as to whether a non-English approximation of the Qur’an can count as the Qur’an at all, but there was also a long period during which even a printed Arabic text could not pass the test of authenticity, which surely must precede the test of holiness.

I have already mentioned --by coincidence very recently-- that I believe books are on their way out, and that even my own library is probably destined for the flames. Though we have yet to hear much discussion of it, this epochal shift will no doubt have serious ramifications for all of the so-called peoples of the Book. One wonders whether a USB stick that contains a pdf of the Qur’an could ever be seen as a true token of the holy text, to the extent that the public destruction of this data-storage device (which in the end is all a book is) could lead to threats of violent revenge. What about taking a sledgehammer to a computer whose browser is open to www.quran.com? What about destroying a computer that simply has this URL in its browser history?

These examples sound facetious, but in the late-7th century it would have seemed no less strange to suggest to a devout Muslim that someday the enemies of Islam would find it a fitting expression of their hate to burn printed paperback translations, and that some Muslims in turn would find it fitting to take offense, believing that God himself considers these mass-produced, disposable, and now moribund bits of mass-cultural flotsam to be worthy of some particular protected status. As we transition from a book-based to a screen-based form of literacy, what it is for a ‘text’ to be ‘sacred’ will surely become a much more difficult question to answer. No doubt the devout will continue to find ways to be offended, and their enemies will find ways to taunt them, and we should not be too surprised to see some regions of the internet being designated as sites of sacredness. In any case the spectacle that failed to happen yesterday already seemed, to me anyway, rather quaint.

Fortunately for the various peoples of the Book, however, literature is an allographic and not an autographic art-form. It is a familiar point from Aesthetics 101 that you do not have to see Dostoyevsky’s ink-filled notebooks in order to claim to have fully experienced The Brothers Karamazov, and by the same token if you throw your copy of the novel in the trash, or donate it to the Salvation Army, you have not thereby lost anything of particular value. You can’t destroy the novel in the way you can destroy, say, a painting or a sculpture, because any given token of the novel is not the novel itself.

For better or for worse, the sacred texts of the Abrahamic faiths are of the same ontological variety. You can’t really do anything at all to them, because they are not physical objects. It follows from this more general fact that some cheap paperback English translation of the Qur’an is not the Qur’an. And it follows from this that it is not holy, or any more holy than old newspaper, and so also that the Rev. Jones could not have done anything particularly unholy no matter how hard he tried. The dignified response, therefore, would have been to ignore him. 

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Books

What is happening with books? University libraries now have sculptures made out of them in their opulent foyers. These are meant to signal that reading is an adventure, or fun, or something, but what they really announce is that reading, as it has been known for the past 500 years, is dead. Private citizens have rallied to photograph their own books and to post pictures of them on the internet. Some have suggested that this is a new sort of intellectual 'pornography'. I suspect the anxiety is dawning that if the books are not documented in this way, if they are not registered in the single great repository of all that exists, then their status will be merely antiquarian, home-decorative, or, for the more creative, perhaps, sculptural.

Anyone who has ever been invited past the threshold of my home or my office will be able to attest that I am an owner of books. At home or in the workplace, you cannot not notice them. Beyond their simple mass, what most people will also have noticed is that there is absolutely no principle of organization that dictates where they will be placed on the shelf. I make excuses. I tell them that when I moved in I had to hurry to get the books up off the floor, and that I've been meaning to get around to placing them in their natural order. But in fact I'm dissimulating. I have no idea what their proper order would be.

Or no, that's not quite right. I do know what their natural order would be, and this is it. Arranged in this way, with Strabo next to Losev next to Kripke next to Geulincx, I have brought about what Nicholas of Cusa would have called a perfect explicatio of the folds of my soul. The disorder of the bookshelves is an exact report upon what is going on in my head at all times. This is not to say that I have not managed to carve out a more narrow research specialization for myself, and to stick with it, but only that subjectively there is never any way for me to predict which author is going to impose himself upon my thinking next, just as there is no way to predict which book is going to be contiguous to any other. The thoughts come up like bad old tunes from the radio a generation ago. E. T. A. Hoffmann is like Lionel Ritchie: he barges in uninvited.

One of the enduring problems  with this arrangement has been the difficulty of determining which books belong in the office, and which at home. Now I am a philosopher, and I have therefore tried (I really have) to put all the philosophy books in the workplace, where the work of a philosopher is done, while leaving all the other books, on the things that interest me but do not pertain directly to the work of a philosopher, at home. I have failed utterly, for an enormous part of my holdings consists in books from the grey area, books that might conceivably at some point be of relevance to something I am doing as a philosopher, but that for one reason or another cannot be called philosophical texts stricto sensu: Cyrano de Bergerac's Histoire comique des états et empires de la Lune; books on the history of craniology; French-Huron dictionaries from the 17th century; Rosalind Krauss's The Originality of the Avant Garde; Richard Rorty.

So I drag these books back and forth a few at a time, never quite sure where their final resting place will be. And now my wife and I are moving again (her books by contrast seem to be ordered according to true natural principles), giving me another chance to randomize the arrangement on the shelves. Just today I bundled up stacks of books with string, and was delighted to fondle the mementos of my youthful modernism --Krapp's Last Tape, Gombrowicz's Trans-Atlantyk, etc.--, amazed to hold Der Zauberberg in my hands again, all 637 pages of it, and to think, I actually read this fucking thing.

The books look sad bundled up like that. They look like they are about to be sent off to the incinerator, which is probably what will happen to them sooner or later. The incinerator or some gaudy sculpture in my university's 'library'.

During my first year in grad school I had some crappy work-study job in the newspaper department in the basement of the library of the School of International and Public Affairs. It was my duty to bundle up all the old newspapers from all around the world with string, and to throw them into the dumpster after their expiration date (10 years, if I recall correctly). This was 1994, which means that I got to throw away newspapers from all over the world dating back to 1984. I threw away all the newspapers that announced that communism had been thrown onto 'the scrapheap of history'. It was around this time that I read Too Loud a Solitude, Bohumil Hrabal's novel about an elderly wastepaper worker in Prague. He loved his job, and I loved mine, too. I read all of those newspapers, many of them in languages I had never studied, and when I sent them to the dumpster I somehow felt that this was an expression of my love.

I love my books, too, even if with each passing year they are looking more and more like old newspaper. I should not have to say, by now, that this has something to do with the encroachment of the internet. This is not of course to say that books will disappear. But they will become, as has already been suggested by the new 'pornographers', a sort of fetish: intensely interesting to a quirky subculture, but wholly unnecessary for the advancement of learning.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

It is not hard to understand why, when Fortune magazine sent James Agee to rural Alabama to document the lives of poor white tenant farmers in 1936, this is not exactly the sort of reportage the editors were expecting:

A man and a woman are drawn together upon a bed and there is a child and there are children:

First they are mouths, then they become auxiliary instruments of labor: later they are drawn away, and become the fathers and mothers of children, who shall become the fathers and mothers of children:

Their father and their mother before them were, in their time, the children each of different parents, who in their time were each children of parents:

This has been happening for a long while: its beginning was before stars:

It will continue for a long while: no one knows where it will end:

While they are still drawn together within one shelter around the center of their parents, these children and their parents together compose a family:

This family must take care of itself; it has no mother or father: there is no other shelter, nor resource, nor any love, interest, sustaining strength or comfort, so near, nor can anything happy or sorrowful that comes to anyone in this family possibly mean to those outside it what it means to those within it: but it is, as I have told, inconceivably lonely, drawn upon itself as tramps are drawn round a fire in the cruelest weather; and thus and in such loneliness it exists among other families, each of which is no less lonely, nor any less without help or comfort, and is likewise drawn in upon itself:

Such a family lasts, for a while: the children are held to a magnetic center:

Then in time the magnetism weakens, both of itself in its tiredness of aging and sorrow, and against the strength of the growth of each child, and against the strength of pulls from outside, and one by one the children are drawn away:

Of those that are drawn away, each is drawn elsewhere toward another: once more a man and a woman, in a loneliness they are not liable at that time to notice, are tightened together upon a bed: and another family has begun:

Moreover, these flexions are taking place every where, like a simultaneous motion of all the waves of the water of the world: and these are the classic patterns, and this is the weaving, of human living: of whose fabric each individual is a part: and of all parts of this fabric let this be borne in mind:

Each is intimately connected with the bottom and extremest reach of time:

Each is composed of substances identical with the substance of all that surrounds him, both the common objects of his disregard, and the hot centers of stars:

All that each person is, and experiences, and shall never experience, in body and in mind, all these things are differing expressions of himself and of one root, and are identical: and not one of these things nor one of these persons is ever quite to be duplicated, nor replaced, nor has it ever quite had precedent: but each is a new and incommunicably tender life, wounded in every breath, and almost as hardly killed as easily wounded: sustaining, for a while, without defense, the enormous assaults of the universe:

So that how it can be that a stone, a plant, a star, can take on the burden of being; and how it is that a child can take on the burden of breathing; and how through so long a continuation and cumulation of the burden of each moment one on another, does any creature bear to exist, and not break utterly to fragments of nothing: these are matters too dreadful and fortitudes too gigantic to meditate long and not forever to worship.

*

I have been meaning to write something about Agee's work, which, as with many things that are great and American, I have only belatedly discovered. But as a preliminary exercise I wanted simply to transcribe this astounding passage, this effusion of pseudophilosophical grandiosity, in order to see whether, by channeling it through my own eyes and fingers, I might better understand what springs of inspiration this ingenious, cocky writer (and terrible journalist) is drawing upon. But anyway, more to follow shortly.

Same-Sex Marriage and Balkan Tradition: A Few Clarifications

There were a few things about which I might have been clearer in my post of a few days ago on Martha Nussbaum's work in defense of marriage equality. There are also a few things that commenters have brought up to me that have caused me to wish to retract or at least amend some of what I said.

First, to be clear: I support marriage equality, and I believe that people who oppose it in the political arena are stone-age thugs and opportunists. That said, I am not convinced that the arguments generally deployed in favor of marriage equality are as good as they might be, and I like to think that the movement is strong enough to withstand, and maybe even to benefit from, a bit of internal critique.

Some of the feedback I have received, however, has suggested to me that the best approach, should one wish to say something subtle about such a hot-button issue in the American culture wars, is to suppress that desire. This suggestion comes across just as loudly from the 'progressive' camp as from the thugs who are often portrayed as the exclusive opponents of free and open reflection. To my mind, the existence of slogans such as "If you're against same-sex marriage, then shut the fuck up and don't have one" reveals a disgraceful anti-intellectual evasion, where what is needed is serious engagement.

In particular, while we rightly denounce as bigots the politicians and the professional moralists who fight against marriage equality, it is simply a mistake to suppose that the great numbers of people in the world who assume that marriage is, as they say, 'between a man and a woman', are making this assumption out of bigotry. For the vastly greater part of human history in the vast majority of cultural settings, this  has indeed functioned as a perfectly serviceable definition for what marriage has been.

For this reason, if I had to characterize in two words the respect in which I disagree with the prevailing arguments of the marriage-equality movement, I would say that I am for a constructive approach, whereas what prevails is a corrective approach. That is, on the prevailing assumption, marriage has been a fundamentally unjust institution to the extent that it has been based on rules grounded in gender dimorphism. On this approach, it is generally assumed that marriage is an institution that ought to exist --or perhaps that simply does exist, by nature-- even if it is one that requires an additional adjustment in order to exist in the right way.

On the constructive approach, by contrast, marriage --monogamous pair-bonding made fast by solemn promises-- need not exist at all; it could just as well give way to polygyny, polyandry, or, as is apparently the case among the Na of China, it could give way to wanton promiscuity (see Cai Hua's fascinating book, Une société sans père ni mère. Les Na de Chine, PUF, 1997). Same-sex marriage cannot be natural or universally right, since monogamous pair-bonding isn't natural or universally right, and the latter includes the former. Once this much is admitted, it is impossible to think of the opening up of marriage to allow for same-sex unions as a final emendation, a final making good, of an institution that exists by right or by nature. Instead, it is a transformation of an institution that exists because we want it to, and in a way that makes it conform better to our sensibilities and preferences.

Reading Nussbaum in the Balkans

I still have fantasies about being an anthropologist, but I have to admit I would be terrible at it.  I don't mind being an observer, but to be a participant-observer, that's a bit too much to ask of me. Forget about living for years among rainforest-dwelling, insectivorous hunter-gatherers: I have trouble passing a single week in a provincial Romanian town, surviving on nothing but traditional home cooking (even though it's cooked with love). I prefer my meals meatless, largely uncooked, heavily based on imported and exotic fruits, grains, and pulses. Now that I am back in Bucharest, whenever I see a restaurant that advertises food that is 'just like home', I think to myself: Well in that case nevermind.

But still, the questions that anthropologists ask, if not the field investigations they undertake, attract me more than ever. This much was driven home to me after a leisurely morning of reading recently, during which I alternated between the eminent moral philosopher Martha Nussbaum's recent work in defense of same-sex marriage, and the eminent anthropologist Jack Goody's The Theft of History, a learned tirade against the remnants of Eurocentrism in the writing of world history. The contrast was stark: in the latter case, there was a thinker at work, surveying the range of possible ways human beings do in fact organize societies and attempting to draw general conclusions from these data about the nature of human social existence as such. In the former case, there was a thinker at work, surveying the prevailing opinions of her small community (educated, liberal Westerners), and then attempting to come up with a priori arguments in defense of them. 

I know which approach I prefer, and why I prefer it. A comparative, anthropological view of one's own society cannot but reveal the contingency of what we deem acceptable. To give but a very partial list, there simply is no good reason to believe that abortion, cremation, pork, same-sex marriage, incarceration, and public breastfeeding should be permitted, but not infanticide, ceremonial cannibalism, dog-meat, first-cousin marriage, polygamy, corporal punishment, and public urination. The first list contains some things that are widely accepted in our society and that those in the educated elite tolerate, and still other things that are not yet widely accepted but that those in the educated elite advocate. The second list contains, I believe, things that would not be tolerated either by the educated elite or by the broader society. Yet a comparative ethnographer could give you examples of perfectly well-functioning, healthy societies that practice at least some of the things in the second list, while abhorring everything in the first list. 

I am saying nothing here, of course, about my own views regarding any particular practice. What I am saying is that it would be a remarkable coincidence if the real moral order of the world just happened to match up with that list of things for which a person must express support in order to be admitted into Western educated liberal circles. In moral philosophy there seems to be a strong tendency to mistake the shibboleths of group identity for timeless truths. The problem with this is not just that it's provincial --a community that liked polygamy and obligatory euthanasia for the elderly but disliked abortion and same-sex marriage would be no less provincial-- but that it is unscientific: it is uninterested in real data on the range of ways human societies organize themselves. In the absence of these data, it is unable to adequately account for the deep-seated reasons for society's inflexibility in the face of its supposedly compelling moral arguments.

This inflexibility might have something to do with the moral shortcoming of the people one is hoping to persuade with one's arguments (thus Nussbaum's theory of 'projective disgust', recently misunderstood by the indefatigable Mike Huckabee). But it might be worth considering whether it is instead rooted in the sort of structures studied by anthropologists. Let's consider an imaginary example. If you were to suggest to me, say, that it should be legal and accepted for people to adopt as their own children other people who are older than they are, thus radically altering many people's previous conception of what adoption must be, I would not want to hear your moral arguments as to why such adoption is just and right. Instead I would want to know: has there ever been a society that practiced adoption in this way? How did it work? What were the other distinguishing features of this society? And so on. I would want to know whether the institution of adoption is in fact flexible enough to allow for this sort of variety. 

 

Insectotheology

Friedrich Christian Lesser, Insectotheology, or, A Reasonable and Literary Essay, Showing how a Man, through Careful Investigation of Otherwise Little-Noticed Insects, May Arrive at a Vivid Knowledge and a Sense of Marvel Before the Omnipotence, Wisdom, Goodness, and Justice of the Great God (Frankfurt and Leipzig: Michael Blochberger, 1738).

 

Frontispiece to Lesser, 1738.

A Note on the Arizona Immigration Bill

For a classic example of misplaced journalistic balance, read this New York Times article on the immigration 'debate' in Arizona. See how level-headed and concerned the supporters of the bill are! They don't hate Mexicans, see, it's just that they don't want them to be there illegally. 

The problem with this is that the American West was only able to appear as Anglo territory, for a spell, as a result of a relatively recent (late 19th century) and concerted campaign of ethnic cleansing. It is astounding to me that people have to be reminded of the historical fact that in order for the American West to become white, other people had to be displaced. To the extent that Americans recognize this at all, they tend to remember the displacement as targeting Native Americans, in contrast with 'Hispanics'. But what this distinction misses is that the population of Mexico is somewhere between 60 and 80% Mestizo, and that for them the line drawn by the Gadsden Purchase of 1853 reflects no natural or deep-seated historical boundary.

Consider this map of the pre-contact distribution of the Uto-Aztecan languages: the colored parts on the US side correspond roughly to that region of the US with a significant Latino population today. Uto-Aztecan is a family that includes Nahuatl (the language of the so-called 'Aztecs' from the area of the Mexico Federal District), as well as the Shoshone languages of California and Nevada, the Pima and Hopi of Arizona, and the Comanche of Texas. About these latter, I would strongly recommend The Comanche Empire (Yale University Press, 2008), Pekka Hämäläinen's masterpiece of revisionist history, in which he demonstrates that until the mid-19th century the Comanches ruled over a vast and complicated imperial system that extended from the Great Plains to northern Mexico with no concern for the borders placed by European powers, and that, located as it was at the neglected periphery of the colonial world, these European powers were not even aware of its existence. 

As in the not-so-distant time of the Comanche Empire, it makes good sense that the Hispanicized descendants of the Uto-Aztecans from one side of the recently imposed boundary should wish to move freely on the other side. There is a cultural-geographical family there that cannot be made to fit with the arbitrary borders of states. This is not at all to deny that the migration of people (I will not call it 'immigration') puts a strain on social services, or to assert that uncosmopolitan people who live in white ethnic enclaves in the Southwest are completely irrational in worrying about the loss of the world they've tried to build for themselves. But the fact that it is proving difficult to maintain the Anglo identity of the borderlands needs to be understood in terms of geography, demography, and history, not as a testament to the scofflaw character of the 'illegals'. And idiots like Pam Sutherland, who was interviewed for the New York Times article, should not be presented in the media as if their position were a well-thought-out one.

If there are too many 'illegals', then immigration policy needs to change to reflect the historical claim that the Mestizo populations have on the American Southwest. This claim is not comparable to, say, the case of Eastern Europeans overstaying their visas while visiting family members in New York or Chicago. There is no region of the US that is fundamentally Polish or Russian in its history. There are only isolated neighborhoods of cities, whose ethnic make-up tends to shift over time. It's a different matter with the Latino population of the US. The northern limit of Latin America in fact extends well to the north of the US-Mexican border, and the relatively recent efforts at Anglicization do not change this historical reality.

Please read my follow-up to this post here.