Justin Erik Halldór Smith

Of National Character

With Especial Attention to the Americans, the Muscovites, the Magyars, and Various Balkanic Peoples, touching particularly upon their Aspirations to Global Hegemony, and their Use of Air-Conditioning. 

Justin E. H. Smith

Organic nationalism, which emerged towards the end of the 18th century, supposed, or at least implied, that a nation bears some essential relationship to a particular territory. In the most mythologized version of this belief, the nation is thought, or at least said, to have arisen directly out of the earth, to be literally autochthonous, springing up from the depths without any connection to neighboring groups. Moderate nationalists of the period, such as Johann Gottfried Herder, sought for a way to defend national distinctness without resorting to such crude myth, and while they did not pretend that a people is born directly from the soil, they still hoped to tie national character to the way it is forged over the course of history out of a particular geographical nexus.

A clear demonstration that we are not in fact like plants, rooted in our national soil, is our ability to get up, should we so choose, and go somewhere else. We do not wilt and die, though we also do not remain quite the same. I am an expatriate, and it grows harder with each passing year for me to maintain a personal sense of what being American must mean. I have lived outside of the US steadily for seven years, and spent large segments of the decade before that outside of the country as well. Although I am fully connected, via the internet, to the American media that keep that country's pulse around the clock, it is increasingly difficult for me to maintain any real interest in domestic issues. Unlike nearly all the Americans I know, I am not really made angry, for example, by Glenn Beck. Outraged reactions to the latest stupid thing he has said strike me, I dare say, as a bit undignified. He is a buffoon, and he occupies a niche that has its equivalent in every time and place. Let him do his thing, and let us not stay tuned in to the networks that give him voice.

Expatriation, I mean to say, helps one to overcome the passions with understanding. As my identification with one or the other party to internal American conflicts diminishes, my perception grows sharper of the very long historical processes that give shape to current American life. Thus for example I often find myself trying to make sense for bewildered Europeans of western American crackpot libertarianism by arguing that it evolved directly from the settling of the frontier, with the ethnic cleansing and genocide that that involved, but also with a certain 'spirit' of freedom and individualism that cannot be valued nearly as much in dense urban centers. In turn, it seems reasonable to me to suppose that American imperialism, and the delusions of entitlement and superiority for which individual Americans abroad are so often criticized, flow directly from the late-18th and early-19th-century project of constructing America through expansion into the frontier. Oklahoma and the Phillipines and Iraq were just different stages of the same development, and this centuries-long process has something to do with the perception of the world, and of their place in it, often had by individual Americans.

Edward Tyson's Orang-Outang

Like the embalmed carcass of Jeremy Bentham on the other side of town, this skeleton is, to use the great utilitarian's own expression, a sort of auto-icon. 

It belonged to one of the most influential apes in modern history, a one-year-old male chimpanzee brought from the Angolan coast on a ship to London in 1698, who died shortly after arrival of an unknown illness, and was subsequently the subject of a lengthy anatomical study by the Royal Society physician Edward Tyson, entitled Orang-Outang, sive Homo sylvestris, Or, the Anatomy of a Pygmie, compared with that of a Monkey, an Ape, and a Man.

Although the description provided by the London Museum of Natural History portrays Tyson as one of the 'forerunners of Darwin', in fact his anatomical study is meant to prove a thesis he believes an a priori grounds, that inter hominem et non-hominem tertium non datur: there is nothing between man and non-man. Tyson's Orang-Outang is so influential because it serves, from the late 17th century until well into the 19th century, as the single most exhaustive account of the anatomical difference between apes and humans. In fact, this account of difference is identical in its content to an account of similarity, and as an accurate describer of natural things in the details of his work Tyson inevitably subverts his own a priori commitment to an absolute separation between humans and animals.

By ‘orang-outang’, Tyson has in mind a chimpanzee (pan troglodytes), while ‘homo sylvestris’ is simply a Latin rendering of the Malay term ‘orang utan’, which means ‘man of the forest’. ‘Pygmie’ is for Tyson a generic term meant to designate any of what we would describe as the ‘great apes’, and has nothing to do with the current ethnonym ‘pygmy’ (the first occurrence of the term is found in Homer’s Iliad, where a battle is described between the mythical pygmaioi and giant cranes).  By ‘monkeys’ Tyson means any primate species other than ‘orang-outangs’ and human beings, including what we today would describe as the lesser apes, including Barbary apes and gibbons.

The African chimpanzee was only marked off taxonomically from the Asian orangutan in the 1730s, and remarkably the existence of the reclusive gorilla was not firmly established until 1847.  Yet what changes by the end of the 16th century is that a growing concern develops to verify the reliability of reports about wild men of the forest, even if the finer-grained taxonomic distinctions between the apes would take some time to fall into place. By the time Tyson writes his treatise at the end of the 17th century, he has over a century of modern observations to draw on, though for the most part he is unsatisfied with all of them.  Tyson’s work is different from earlier writing on the topic of apes from early modern authors --such as Samuel Purchas, Conrad Gesner, Louis Le Comte, Olfert Dapper, Nicolaus Tulpius, and Jacobus Bontius-- in that it is firmly devoted to the extraction of a core of empirically based facts from the mountain of myths and rumors that had accumulated since the ancient period.  Tyson’s “chief design,” as he himself describes it, “is the Improvement of the Natural History of Animals; so I have made it my Business more, to find out the Truth, than to enlarge Mythology; to inform the Judgement, than to please the Phancy.”  

 
Tyson had a long career in comparative anatomy, and he approached each of the objects of his study with passion and wonder.  He makes a telling debut with his study of the “Scent-Bags in Poll-Cats” in 1676.  In 1682-83, Tyson performs a great number of dissections, most of which take place in front of members of the Royal Society and the results of which are subsequently published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London.  Noteworthy among these are his anatomical studies of an American rattlesnake, and numerous species of worms and insects.  In 1680, he published the Phocaena, an anatomical study of a porpoise in which he argued that its fin bones are modified hooves, and thus that some aquatic animals are descended from terrestrial quadruped.  This work is followed by a roughly 18-year hiatus in which he appears to have been engaged primarily in medicine, only to return to comparative anatomy in 1698 with the “Carigueya, seu Marsupiale Americanum, or The Anatomy of an Opossum,” followed by the Orang-Outang a year later.  The Orang-Outang is the culmination of Tyson’s life work, and certainly the most detailed and exhaustive anatomical study he made in his career.  It is also the most philosophically interesting, as it serves for him as an occasion to enter into early modern debates about human nature and human uniqueness among other creatures. Though the author of the Orang-Outang is not mentioned by name, his work provides important evidence for Leibniz in his 1704 refutation of Locke's nominalism in the Nouveaux essais sur l'entendement humain.

After writing a short article on Tyson's Orang-Outang a few years ago, I got it into my head that the world could stand to know a lot more about this creature. I proposed to edit a critical edition of the work for the Penguin Classics series, but was told that the text could not garner sufficient interest among readers to warrant publication. I put the project on hold for a few years, but now, after making a pilgrimage back to see this auto-icon of the difference --or, depending on how you look at it, the similarity-- between humans and apes, I am once again convinced that the Orang-Outang's story must be told.

Artefacts from the People without History

The glare from the glass case prevents us from seeing it clearly, but the object in the photo above is a lady's hat made out of twigs and spiderwebs. It was made in the early 20th century by a San tribesmember in southern Africa, and is currently on display in the Africa Room of the British Museum. This room appears not to attract very many visitors, for reasons I'll get to soon, but I wanted to dwell on this curious hat for a moment still.

Whether or not it meets the formal criteria for qualification as such, this hat is something very close to a cargo-cult object: a reproduction by members of a technologically simple culture, from naturally available materials, of an artefact associated with a dominant, technologically advanced culture. The first cargo cults were identified by western anthropologists in New Guinea, when, shortly after the end of World War II and the disappearance of the goods that the Japanese and American troops had brought into the region, the tribespeople attempted to summon them back by building non-functioning simulations of airports.

The British Museum's labelling tells us that we are supposed to admire the spiderweb hat, in more or less the same way we are supposed to praise the plaques made by casters in the brass foundries of the highly complex early modern Kingdom of Benin. The general message of the Africa Room --which is in fact the Africa Basement-- is that, first of all, there is a cohesive, unitary, and stable thing called 'Africa', and, second of all, that everything that comes out of Africa, whether made of brass or of spiderwebs, is equally and perfectly good.

This lesson is one that is very different from what we are taught in the other halls of the museum, where the labels carefully and conscientiously spell out for us the different stages in the rise and decline of classical Assyrian, Egyptian, and Mesoamerican civilizations. In this respect, the well-meaning 'Africa is good' message in fact perpetuates the myth of stagnation that Eric Wolf sought to dispel in his masterful book, Europe and the People without History of 1982.

There are significant differences between brass art and spiderweb art, as there are between societies with metal foundries, on the one hand, and, on the other, societies, dubbed 'resourceful' by the British Museum, whose technology involves only the transformation of things found in the immediate natural environment. If Africa were depicted as a historical rather than a stagnant continent, one thing visitors to the British Museum might learn is that it is members of the broader ethnic family that includes the former inhabitants of the Kingdom of Benin --namely, the Niger-Congo family-- that overran southern Africa long before the era of European expansion, and left the indigenous San and other Khoisan peoples only in isolated pockets or in areas too inhospitable to invite competition for resources. The European arrival at the Cape, then, was not the first time an indigenous people had been displaced or had its way of life disrupted in sub-Saharan Africa. As I always insist, ethnic cleansing is the default activity of humanity, not some unusual disruption of our ordinary commitment to harmonious sharing.

But what I had wanted to say is that, while the spiderweb hat is a fascinating thing that reveals something about humanity worth reflecting on, the brass plaques from 16th-century Benin are, for their part, formidable works of art. I am prepared to say that they are better than the Sans' spiderweb hats. And this brings me to something I'd been thinking about very much recently, prior to entering the Africa Room: how is it that one can compare cultures, make judgments as to the relative merit of their attainments, without lapsing away from one's ordinary commitment to universal equality?

There is a sort of illusion, whereby we believe that a society is a certain way because each of its members, individually, are a certain way. But it's much more likely that each individual is whatever way she or he is because of structural or institutional limitations on how one might be within a given society: the availability of basic goods, access to information about the outside world, and so on. Correlatively, the greatness of a society, which might be measured in its technologies and  accomplishments (going to the moon, etc.), says nothing about the greatness of individuals who belong to that society. I, for example, have never been to the moon, or helped in any way with the project of sending someone else there.

And correlative to this, I note, is a point about the supposed greatness of the human species: it is true that humans have come up with vastly more impressive inventions than have chimpanzees, but this is a cumulative record, and not a measure of the relative greatness of any given human brought into comparison with any chimpanzee. If you leave me to fend for myself on a desert island, what I will be able to come up with over the course of my life will not be much more impressive than what a chimp in similar circumstances might do; I would not invent the internet, or nuclear power, or the space shuttle, but at best some scrappy hut made out of twigs.

Matched one-to-one with other animals, humans really are nothing special; similarly matched, members of metal-forging societies have no obvious advantage over hunter-gatherers. What makes societal attainments possible is only a certain slow, quantitative build-up that happens now in one region, now in another, for reasons that are ultimately rooted in features of the natural environment. In this respect, it is to get things backwards to congratulate oneself on coming from a technologically advanced society, or to pity a member of a society capable only of basic transformations of the natural world.

I suspect that domination and exploitation, both within the human species and across species, flow to no small extent from a mistaken judgment about the way individuals living in technologically complex societies must be. We suppose that our society's complexity is a measure of our own individual complexity, and we suppose that failure to participate in an equally complex society must result from the fact that a given human or animal is, individually, quite simple. But once we see that it is in fact the other way around, it becomes perfectly easy at the same time to see how it is possible to go on with one's commitment to equality while nonetheless admitting to being more impressed by metal-forging societies than by web-gathering ones.

Admitting this much, though, would require a certain reorganization of the Africa Room of the British Museum, which, given that this is hardly that august institution's main attraction, probably will not be happening anytime soon.

Broody, Baba Yaga? A Note on Palindromes

Why are palindromes so far down on the hierarchy of literary genres? Roughly speaking, they seem to stand at the same distance from the rigorous formal experiments of an author like Georges Perec as bawdy limericks stand to Shakespeare's sonnets. This may be due to their own inherent tendency towards bawdiness, which I think can be explained by the fact that one must make use of concise, monosyllabic grunt-like words, and these words tend, at least in English, to be both part of our core Anglo-Saxon heritage, and generally to denote less than lofty things.

At the same time, the formal restrictions imposed in palindromy do exactly what Perec's did, exactly what makes restrictive rules of composition interesting: they force you up to the boundary of meaninglessness, and so challenge you to find that acceptable level of near-nonsense that nonetheless seems to say something.

To speak for a moment not of palindromy but of homonymy, years ago I heard the spoken sentence, "A strict syntax limits semantics," but understood by this that "A strict sin tax limits some antics." As it happens, both are true. Now I think orthography is a sub-syntactic feature of sentences (perhaps someone can fill me in here), but the principle is the same: it limits the range of things that can be said. 

On a plane yesterday, I passed the time tapping palindromes into my iPhone, having been struck, not for the first time, by the strangeness of many French abbreviations, in which the cropped part of a word leaves what's left with a terminal vowel: thus collabo, resto, déca, etc. I've always bristled when I've seen or heard the last of these, in fact a contraction of décaféiné, perhaps because it looks so much to the learner like some non-existent compound adverb formed on the model of au-delà, and also, perhaps, because I like the fact that decaf backwards gives us faced. With this in mind, I started tapping:

Face deep? Pee decaf.

This seems to make some intuitive sense. In general, though, the longer the palindrome runs, the further one veers into nonsense. Thus:

Faced foes? O, hose of decaf!

I've faced foes on a nose of decaf, Evi.

In the second of these, one would very much like to drop that terminal vocative, addressing a person whose name barely exists, or at least is not in our usual registers. But rules are rules.

It's possible of course to lengthen and shorten, by paying attention to the double effect of an addition on both sides of the sentence. Thus, from

Marc's face-deep in a milk tub. But, Kliman, I pee decaf. Scram! 

we can obtain

Marc's won, face-deep in a milk tub. But, Kliman, I pee decaf. Now scram!

Some palindromes veer towards nonsense in a useful and intriguing way. Others veer and seem to run aground, even though it would be hard to say what it is, formally, for a palindrome to 'not work', given that what we are talking about is nonsense. Thus

Wonk? I gut a tuba! But a tug? I know!

and

Klima got a tuba, but a toga? Milk!

seem to be failures, though my palindrome-critical ability leaves me unable to say exactly why. Here, though, is one with which I'm particularly pleased:

Broody, Baba Yaga? A gay? A baby? (Door B.)

It seems to tell a story, and a good one. Much of the narrative flow of it, such as it is, depends on the punctuation, and a palindrome purist might argue that the best sort of palindrome is one in which even that reads backwards the same as forwards. But as I've already confessed, I'm an amateur.

My all-time favorite palindrome is one that I did not think up myself. Here it is:

A man, a plan, a butt tub: anal Panama!

I like it because it is properly bawdy; it tells a story even as it balances on the brink of nonsense; and, most importantly, its story is a meta-story, riffing on that tired old palindrome about Teddy Roosevelt's designs for a certain canal, which I believe has largely been responsible for the Reader's Digest-ification of this otherwise promising genre.

Bodies Cannot Be without a Place

[From Valentin Weigel, Der Guldene Griff, Das ist, Alle Ding ohne Irrthumb zu erkennen, vielen Hochgelehrten unbekandt unnd doch allen Menschen nothwendig zu wissen (Neustadt, 1616)]

This visible world... stands in its depth in the Abyss of infinitude, which depth is without limit in its height and without limit in its breadth and without limit in its length and without limit in its depth in such a nothingness does the world stand that in all eternity no man can experience ground touch or conceive it, it is such that in height depth breadth and length no man can ever find its limit. All bodily things are contained and included in this world and beyond this world there is no bodily thing thus also no location or place. Locations and places are only within the world as the world is the place of trees beasts men the water is the place of fishes and nymphs the sky is the place of stars and air indeed the air quickens all bodily things as Theophrastus shows. Thus is the earth divided into Asia, Europe, Africa and America, Europe in turn into Spain, England, France, Germany, etc., Germany in turn into the other places as there are forests cities castles villages and in turn the cities into alleys houses and the houses into rooms chambers kitchens basements and these are all places and locations and there is a distance from the one to the other.  Thus every tree beast man has and needs its own place location or space. For every bodily thing must be definitively here or there surrounded by air like fish by water bodies cannot be without a place.

*

Diese sichtbare Welt stehet... in der Tieffe in Abysso infinitudinis, welche Tieffe ist nach der Höhe ohne Ende und nach der Breite ohne Ende und nach der Lenge ohn Ende und nach der Tieffe ohn Ende in einem solchen nichts stehet die Welt da niemand in Ewigkeit dasselbige erfahren ergründen begreiffen noch bedencken kan, es sey in die Höhe Tieffe Breite oder Lenge so findet man allezeit kein Ende. Alle leibliche Ding seynd in diese sichtbare Welt geschlossen und gefasset und ausserhalben der Welt ist kein leiblich Ding also auch keine Stelle noch Ort. Stellen und Örter sind nur inwendig in der Welt als die Erde ist ein Ort der Bäume Thieren Menschen das Wasser ist ein Ort der Fische und Nymphen der Himmel ist ein Ort der Sternen und Lufft ja die Lufft beschleut alle leibliche Dinge wie Theophrastus bezeuget. Also ist die Erde getheilet in Asiam, Europam, Aphricam und Americam, Europa wiederumb in Hispaniam, Angliam, Galliam, Germaniam, &c. Germania wiederumb in andere Örter als da sind Wälde Städte Schlösser Dörffer und wiederumb die Städte in Gassen Häuser u. Die Häuser in Stuben Kammern Küchen Keller u. das sind alles Örter und Stellen und geben eine Weite von einem zum andern. Also ein jeder Baum Thier Mensch hat und bedarff seines eigenen Ortes Stellen oder Raumes. Dann alle leibliche Ding müssen seyn hie und da beschliesslich mit der Lufft umbgeben wie die Fische mit dem Wasser die Corpora mögen ohn einen Ort nicht seyn. 

A Gratuitous, Essentializing, and Impressionistic Comparison of France and Finland

Why do I feel so much more at home in Finland than in France, in spite of having spent a good part of my adult life trying to fit in in the latter republic, jetting back and forth to Charles de Gaulle, learning to gossip about Sarkozy as if I cared, nodding knowingly when some third party, some briefcase-toting little man in a fine-tailored suit, is marked out as a normalien? I come back to Helsinki after 19 years, for only the second time in my life, the language is just as impenetrable as ever, and yet I experience the whole thing as fitting and easy, while every visit to Paris is experienced as nothing more than a resistance test.

What is it, exactly? There is a general feeling of at-homeness that I have not just in Finland, but in a certain swath of the world that extends mostly across the northern zones of the continents of the North Atlantic. I only very gradually came to realize that this swath is co-extensive with that small bit of the earth's surface which, 400-some years ago, was swept up in the spirit of Reformation. Now I would like to think that this is a distinction that does not matter. I spent a good part of my life in complete ignorance of it, and even have a distinct memory of being 13 and still being confused as to which of the pair of terms, 'Protestant' and 'prostitute', means what. But now it seems clear and undeniable to me that there is a deep cultural divide that, while it might not in fact trace its causes back to the wars of religion, somehow sits on the map in the same way as those wars' eventual boundaries.

If I can put this in a different way, and in a way that will at first sound like a change of subject: I think it's safe to say that one would be hard pressed to locate a single French academic in his thirties who could correctly identify a song by Motörhead. In my recent unscientific survey of a comparison class of Finnish philosophers, by contrast, I discovered that five out of five displayed a high level of Motörhead-recognition ability, could make fine-grained distinctions between black metal, death metal, Viking metal and other sub-sub-genres of metal, and, while not ignorant of baroque chamber music, certainly would not see familiarity with it as the key to upward mobility towards the cultural elite. What, one wonders, would Distinction have looked like if Bourdieu had been a Finn?

Of course, it would be nearly impossible to be Finnish and to remain ignorant of the sub-sub-genres of metal just alluded to, as it is hard to overemphasize to the outsider the tremendous cultural role that metal plays across Fennoscandia. This is a role that briefly moved into broader European consciousness a few years ago, when the Finnish satirical heavy metal band Lordi won the Eurovision song contest, much to the confusion, no doubt, of the sequined and synthesized pop products sent forth by the Catholic lands, looking like so many Olympic ice-dancers.

But the proliferation of metal and its subgenres in Scandinavia in recent decades is, I think, but a further development of a distinctive trend in Protestant lands that goes back at lest 50 years, to the beginning of the era of rock-and-roll. If I may be permitted to exaggerate, since as Thomas Bernhard says, there is no art greater than the art of exaggeration: there never really was such a thing as rock-and-roll in Catholic Europe (Latin America is a different story, and one I'm not ready to tell). There were glitzy television reviews that catered to mass, cross-generational taste, which remain immensely popular in countries like Italy today. Their closest American counterpart is that benchmark of out-dated kitsch, the now defunct Lawrence Welk Show. Like the bandleader from North Dakota, these Southern European entertainments offer a certain amount of rock-and-roll-themed musical numbers, in the same way that they might next put on a ragtime-themed, or a Caribbean-steel-drum-themed, performance.

In the Catholic lands, I mean to say, rock-and-roll is only an imitation, packaged for mass entertainment, of a musical tradition that one might call indigenous to the area surrounding the northern sea. Germany, being split down the middle geographically and demographically with respect to confession, takes part in both of these worlds: with some of the schmaltziest Schlager and some of the hardest hardcore existing side by side.

I read a rather mocking article in the New York Times a few months ago about an academic conference on heavy metal. One of the few papers to be summarized in any detail --from, I think, a junior professor in some obscure department of German-- argued that, at bottom, the ritual and symbolism of Norwegian black metal duplicates the Catholic liturgy. Effectively, the stuff about Satan on this account is not really worship of Satan, but rather the expression of a longing to return to a more ornate theology and demonology that had room for Satan at all. That is, a longing to return to Catholicism. Thus, the article argued, if I recall correctly, that Scandinavian black metal is in effect the sole surviving vestige of the Counter-Reformation. On this line of thinking, I suppose, the defenders of the legacy of punk, in turn, are the descendants of the radical Protestant sects like the ranters and the diggers, who wanted to level the cathedrals with the bishops still inside them.

It sounds reasonable enough to me. As Tom Petty once observed with incredible honesty, surely all this music fandom could not really be about the music: it's just not good enough to warrant such intense attachment and identification. If not the music, then what? Well presumably these subcultures descend from social movements that long precede the forms of music in the name of which the current members of the subcultures believe their scenes were born. 

From what I have been able to observe, a Finnish intellectual knows how to tell dark metal from Viking metal in roughly the same way that some Anglican wit might have relished running through the various extravagances of Popery. But the true musical identification of the Finnish intellectual is punk, probably with Iggy Pop as consummate reformer.

Now in France and Italy, the counterpart intellectual wears his suit, and carries his briefcase, and goes to chamber music concerts. A normalien dresses, and moves, and acts as a man already at an age when I, for one, was still entirely identified with my own youth subculture, and would have been escorted, as unwanted riff-raff, to the nearest exit from the opera house.

It's been pointed out that during the student movement of '68, one of the major differences between Paris and Berkeley was that Paris did not have rock-and-roll, but at most jazz. This could explain in part why the French chapter of this world-wide moment was characterized by hardcore Maoism, or the semblance of it, while the American version had much more to do with self-indulgence. A generation later, the production of the cultural elite in France, where youth culture was never really defined by its own distinct music, continued on as if nothing had changed, while in the parts of the world taken over by rock-and-roll the very notion of what it is to be a member of the cultural elite changed entirely. Fast-forward a bit more to 2010, and we find aging punks in Scandinavia producing scholarly research on the history of philosophy, with longish greying hair, still hoping to make it to make it to the show the next time Motörhead comes through town. (Lemmy is like Origen or some other Church Father, who stands pristinely before the later rifts, a universally revered figure on whom all combatant factions can agree.) 

I'm being ridiculously monocausal here, and I'm sure there are aspects of this history that I'm missing entirely. But as I've agreed to start calling this blog a 'blog', let it be just that, and not some imitation of a scholarly forum. Qua blogger, what I wanted to do was simply to reflect on why I feel so very much at home, with so little effort, here in Helsinki; and so very foreign, in spite of so much effort, in Paris. I think it has to do with Martin Luther, first of all; and, second, with the spread of musical subcultures throughout the world over the past half century, which, I suspect, did not supplant older cultural rifts, but only crusted over them; and, third and finally, with the fact, as I might have been naturally inclined to say had I not spent all these years following my own vain and misguided path to distinction, that Finnish philosophers are just so fucking cool.