Eucatastrophe Reader

"I wouldn’t give myself."

“In short, Edna Pontilier was not a mother-woman”

Kate Chopin’s character, Edna Pontillier, feels owned and wishes to feel instead that her life is a gift and not a possession. That is what Chopin’s story, The Awakening seems to be about. Edna is 28 years old and in a brief summer by a summer sea off the coast of Louisiana, becomes aware of just how vital freedom is to a human soul. Alas for her, she is possessed by a husband who possesses her well and thoughtfully - Someone who has given her two children who also find her “essential” to their well-being.

“Looking at his wife as one looks at a valuable piece of property which has suffered some damage,” Mr. Pontilier reveals the sort of “love” that his wife will come to resent. “Mr. Pontellier was very fond of walking about his house examining its various appointments and details, or see that nothing was amiss,” Chopin later writes,

“He greatly valued his possessions, chiefly because they were his, and derived genuine pleasure from contemplating a painting, a statuette, a rare lace curtain – no matter what – after he had bought it and placed it among his household gods.”

For him, a wife is of value to the degree that she cares for and protects his other things and  Chopin characterizes him as such in the following paragraph,

“He reproached his wife with her inattention, her habitual neglect of the children. If it was not a mother’s place to look after children, whose on earth was it? He himself had his hands full with his brokerage business. He could not be in two places at once; making a living for his family on the street, and staying at home to see that no harm befell them. He talked in a monotonous, insistent way.”

And Edna Pontillier responds accordingly.

“An indescribable oppression, which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of her consciousness, filled her with a vague anguish...like a shadow... a mist passing across her soul's summer day.”

And all the while the sounds of the sea shore in the Gulf of Mexico bids one to think of sailing away, of freedom from an external life that had not been entirely freely chosen.

“The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation. . . . A certain light was beginning to dawn dimly within her, - the light which showing the way, forbids it.  . . . Even as a child she had lived her own small life all within herself. At a very early period she had apprehended instinctively the dual life – that outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions.”

This desire to give herself to life as a gift rather than to live out life as a possession purchased is what Chopin, I think, refers to as “the awakening.” For Edna Pontillier, it begins with a song played on a piano. Ironically, Chopin’s Impromptu

“The very first chords which Mademoiselle Reisz struck upon the piano sent a keen tremor down Mrs. Pontellier’s spinal column. It was not the first time she had heard an artist at the piano. Perhaps it was the first time she was ready, perhaps the first time her being was tempered to take an impress of the abiding truth.”

There is a certain irony to the fact that Edna Pontillier, surrounded as she is by the only recently freed slaves that serve her in her New Orleans mansion, longs for a feminist emancipation. And Chopin has her throw herself into her emancipation entirely.

“She was blindly following whatever impulse moved her, as if she had placed herself in alien hands for direction, and freed her soul of responsibility.”

And it is in this state that she begins to entertain dreams of liberation in all ways. She goes for a sail with the rakish Robert Lebrun.

“Sailing across the bay to the Chênière Caminada, Edna felt as if she were being borne away from some anchorage which had held her fast, whose chains had been loosening – had snapped the night before when the mystic spirit was abroad, leaving her free to drift whithersoever she chose to set her sails.”

Throughout the book, Chopin returns to the despair one feels when they are owned. And the elation they feel when they feel they are freely giving. Responsible love versus infatuated love. “I would give up the unessential; I would give my money, I would give my life for my children;” says Edna one day, “but I wouldn’t give myself. I can’t make it more clear; it’s only something which I am beginning to comprehend, which is revealing itself to me.”

I wouldn’t give myself.

Why people wait until they are married for seven years and have children to “awaken” to their need for the freedom to “be themselves” is a question of culture and perhaps choice of reading and maybe even brain chemistry. We wish to be authentic and to have offspring, and some people do not value these things in that order chronologically (as I can well attest).

“She let her mind wander back over her stay at Grand Isle; and she tried to discover wherein this summer had been different from any and every other summer of her life. She could only realize that she herself – her present self – was in some way different from the other self. That she was seeing with different eyes and making the acquaintance of new conditions in herself that colored and changed her environment, she did not yet suspect.

For the first time she recognized anew the symptoms of infatuation which she had felt incipiently as a child, as a girl in her earliest teens, and later as a young woman. The recognition did not lessen the reality, the poignancy of the revelation by any suggestion or promise of instability. The past was nothing to her; offered no lesson which she was willing to heed. The future was a mystery which she never attempted to penetrate. The present alone was significant; was hers, to torture her as it was doing then with the biting conviction that she had lost that which she had held, that she had been denied that which her impassioned, newly awakened being demanded.

And what should Robert, feeling the same way about her do? Respect her status as “owned” or her desire to freely give? Responsibly, he leaves for Mexico, as though distance changes anything. Edna feels his departure deeply.

“Robert’s going had some way taken the brightness, the color, the meaning out of everything. The conditions of her life were in no way changed, but her whole existence was dulled, like a faded garment which seems to be no longer worth wearing. She sought him everywhere – in others whom she induced to talk about him.”

In The Awakening, Madame Ratignolle serves as a foil to Edna Pontillier for Madame Ratignolle has found herself a husband who both owns her well and can be the recipient of a freely given love too. Edna makes the following observation of Mr. and Mrs Ratignolle, betraying perhaps that she can tolerate no alloy of being owned any more even though it may well be a healthy part of any truly solid relationship.

“She was moved by a kind of commiseration for Madame Ratignolle — a pity for that colorless existence which never uplifted its possessor beyond the region of blind contentment, in which no moment of anguish ever visited her soul, in which she would never have the taste of life’s delirium.

I suspect that here is where the reader should begin to ask what Kate Chopin intends the reader to think and feel for Mrs. Pontillier’s dilemma. Has she come to resent being “needed” so much that she can not enjoy or appreciate a life where being owned makes up a portion of responsible existence? Is she letting herself become “spoiled” as it were, believing in something that can never be for anyone? Completely free of obligation?

Poor Mr. Pontillier, who, as Chopin describes him, “could not see that she was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world.” Little does he know that his wife is “awakening.”  Like “some beautiful, sleek animal waking up in the sun.”

Of her sister’s wedding, Edna says “a wedding is one of the most lamentable spectacles on earth."

She seems to believe that the “love” that causes a woman to marry is an illusory and deceiving thing.

"Do you suppose a woman knows why she loves? Does she select? Does she say to herself, 'Go to! here is a distinguished statesman with presidential possibilities; I shall proceed to fall in love with him.' or, 'I shall set my heart upon this musician, whose fame is on every tongue?' or 'this financier, who controls the world's money markets?'"

“She had resolved never again to belong to another than herself” Chopin tells us.  “I am no longer one of Mr. Pontelliere's possessions to dispose of or not,” Edna tells Robert upon his return from Mexico. “I give myself where I choose. If he were to say, 'here Robert, take her and be happy; she is yours,' I should laugh at you both"

Would a person be better off never to “awaken” to a desire for this sort of “freedom”?

"The years that are gone seem like dreams -if one might go on sleeping and dreaming- but to wake up and find -oh! well! perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all ones life."

In the last chapter, Edna resolves that in the end, she would, in the words of the New Hampshire State motto, “live free or die.”

“Despondency had come upon her there in the wakeful night, and had never lifted. There was no one thing in the world that she desired. There was no human being whom she wanted near her except Robert; and she even realized that the day would come when he, too, and the thought of him would melt out of her existence, leaving her alone. The children appeared before her like antagonists who had overcome her; who had overpowered and sought to drag her into the soul’s slavery for the rest of her days. But she knew a way to elude them. She was not thinking of these things when she walked down to the beach.”

And in this frame of mind, she takes off her clothes and swims out into the Gulf of Mexico, leaving Robert, Mr. Pontillier, her children, and an entire world that gives none of us all the freedom that the artist within us might crave.

In a way, Edna Pontillier has become a victim of that which has done in humans by the millions. A desire for a perfect life. As Chopin writes of Edna’s “Last Supper” scene,

“As she sat there amid her guests, she felt the old ennui overtaking her; the hopelessness which so often assailed her, which came upon her like an obsession, like something extraneous, independent of volition. It was something which announced itself; a chill breath that seemed to issue from some vast cavern wherein discords wailed. There came over her the acute longing which always summoned into her spiritual vision the presence of the beloved one, overpowering her at once with a sense of the unattainable.”

Yes, the “unattainable” – why are some of us willing to suffer so much for it? “Mrs. Pontilier, you are cruel” Robert says to her in their last conversation,

"Maybe not intentionally cruel; but you seem to be forcing me into disclosures which can result in nothing; as if you would have me bare a wound for the pleasure of looking at it, without the intention or power of healing it."

The words might well apply to Kate Chopin herself.

Question for Comment: “He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose” the Christian missionary martyr, Jim Elliot once wrote in his journal (I remember reading it in college). Might it be equally truthfully said that he is no fool who gives up what he could easily have for what he will never have? It seems to be the Romantic’s creed.

"Once more into the fray. Into the last good fight I'll ever know."

One of the questions that the Bioethics textbook I am using asks at the end of chapter two refers to the film Million Dollar Baby - a film about a paralyzed boxer who wants to end her life while she can still remember the sound of the successes she has had only recently in life. Interested in the question of end of life decisions, I decided to go see the new Liam Neeson film, The Grey today. It is a film about a man who works as a wolf killer on oil rigs in the Arctic (or Alaska or somewhere). In the opening scene of the film, he is contemplating taking his life. There is a moment of decision in which he decides not to and then, his plane crashes in a frozen wolf-infested wilderness. Seven men survive the crash and the film is all about their various responses to the coming of what seems to be a certain death (and after all, what is death if not certain?)

In a way, the film serves as something of a parable about the choices of attitude that we all have available to us as we face death (and though that will come in the form of a wolf for few of us, the film makes a clear linkage between the ways that these men may die and the ways that we are likely to). Among those options we see denial. We see fear. We see courage. We see greed. We see selflessness. We see anger. We see indifference. One man dies because he does not have a healthy enough fear of the wolves. Another dies because has bad luck. Another dies because he cannot keep up. Another dies because he loses his mental capacity to function and care for himself. Another, because he surrenders to death. Another, because he cannot see enough meaning in his life to make it worth the effort to go on. In a way, I believe the director has essentially used the various characters as tokens of a menu of choices.

Liam Neeson’s character harkens back to his wife’s face saying to him that he does not need to be afraid and to his father’s poem telling him that life, is essentially to be lived tenaciously.

Once more into the fray.
Into the last good fight I'll ever know.
Live or die on this day.
Live or die on this day.

It seems to me that the law can no more legalize our attitude towards death than it can our attitude towards the Superbowl or taxes. In The Grey Liam Neeson’s character accepts the decision of one of the men to sit down in the presence of a beautiful mountain range and let himself die there. But he does not accept easily the death of a man who is unconscious at the time he is dying. Another man who is bleeding to death, he comforts, asking him not to fight but to surrender in the comfort of peaceful thoughts. Another man, he demands face his fear and stop pretending. In a sense, his character reveals a flexibility towards death that says to us that maybe each person and each death will be a different transaction that must be met differently, whether it be our own death that is threatened or someone else’s. Neeson is able to calculate a number of factors into his responses. What was this man’s life like? How likely is it that he will survive long? How conscious is he that he is dying? What does the man want? How does he feel about dying? Etc.

In the book, Cultural Changes in Attitudes Toward Death, Dying, and Bereavement by Bert Hayslip, Cynthia A. Peveto, the authors contend that this ability to contextualize and provide flexibility may be the essential objective for a truly human approach to death and dying. As with education, one size may fit nobody. We all die. We do not all die well. The secret may well be to surround ourselves with people who will help us make that transition in precisely the way that leaves us with a maximum amount of human dignity, whether that be by helping us to fight or helping us not to.

Question for Comment: Is there an approach to dying that is as unique to you as a person as your way of pursuing education or matchmaking or home making or parenting?

"He has authored a good story"

Surprised By Oxford by Carolyn Weber

In the tradition of Augustine’s Confessions and C.S. Lewis’ Surprised by Joy, Carolyn Weber spins a tale of her own conversion during a year at Oxford University studying Romantic Literature. In that light, it is not a story of an intellect choosing between world-views on a buffet. It is a story of a person sought, pursued, and won. It is a story of a courtship between two people and between God and one of his lost sheep. Very “few people,” Weber quotes Goethe, “have the imagination for reality.” And in her own imagination, “Caro” sees her soul pursued by what she calls “a relentless truthfulness” until the pivotal moment in the book where she says quite simply “I knew that Jesus was who He said he was …” She does not tell  a story of a young woman trying to figure out what she believed but of a young woman drawn into the tractor beam of love and trust, both human and divine.

One is reminded of the pivotal moment in the Gospel of Mark when Jesus heals a blind man in two stages and then opens Peter’s eyes to the truth of his own identity.  

“We will tell [our children] our story and the story of how God loves a good story,” Weber writes in the conclusion to her own story, “And how He has authored a good story, for each of us – the best story there was, and is, and ever will be.”

 What Carolyn Weber does in this book is to take her own story and use it as a template for understanding the conversion process. She takes us from her own sense of deficiency to a moment when she is forced to reconsider something certain (a poem about the sudducing power of God's grace by John Donne) and from that moment to her exposure to the Gospel the first time. She takes us from that first exposure and navigates that period of transformation between evangel and epiphany while an old world view dies in the presence of the new world view rising. She takes us from the “Damascus road experience” to the process of acclimation and assimilation into the Christian community. And she details the painful process of redemption as it begins its work in the broken soul. A Christian could learn a lot about how the process “should work” from this story. It is simply another refrain of John Newton’s “I once was lost but now am found. Was blind but now I see.”

Should her story be evaluated in the harsh light of the many people who have stories less supportive of the central thesis? Perhaps. But I have called this blog Eucatastrophe Reader for a reason. My hats off to all those who managed to find what they were searching for in this tale. (I wonder what happened to Miss Georgia?)

Question for Comment: Often in life, we find that our reason and will has to “catch up” to our intuition. The thought “I must be loved by my own father” seems like one that we all have to believe and find true somehow.  Would you agree?

The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge

“There is no dignity quite so impressive, and no independence quite so important, as living within your means.” Calvin Coolidge

Today I had the opportunity to read the autobiography of Calvin Coolidge. It seems odd to me that I have been teaching college courses on Vermont History for many years but have not yet done so.

I was struck by Coolidge’s basic trust in people and it is not hard to see that his policies were largely of those who expected much of himself and assumed the best of those he called neighbors. Of his father, Coolidge says

“He trusted nearly everybody, but lost a surprisingly small amount. Sometimes people he had not seen for years would return and pay him the whole bill.”

For Coolidge, I think the character of his father and that of his neighbors in Plymouth Vermont where he grew up with the default characters of all. “The neighborhood around The Notch was made up of people of exemplary habits, he says of Plymoutyh,

“Their speech was clean and their lives were above reproach. They had no mortgages on their farms. If any debts were contracted they were promptly paid. Credit was good and there was money in the savings bank. The break of day saw them stirring. Their industry continued until twilight. They kept up no church organization, and as there was little regular preaching the outward manifestation of religion through public profession had little opportunity, but they were without exception a people of faith and charity and of good works. They cherished the teachings of the Bible and sought to live in accordance with its precepts.”

In this world, there was no hierarchy or aristocracy other than an aristocracy of merit. “While he would have looked upon rank as only pretense,” he says of his father, “he looked upon merit with great respect.” He was equally impressed by the way that the people of Vermont attributed value to work as work rather than to various types of work. “They drew no class distinctions except towards those who assumed superior airs, he says,

“Those they held in contempt, They held strongly to the doctrine of equality. Whenever the hired man or the hired girl wanted to go anywhere they were always understood to be entitled to my place in the wagon, in which case I remained at home. This gave me a very early training in democratic ideas and impressed upon me very forcibly the dignity and power, if not the superiority of labor.”

And because he lived in a world where work was rewarded, he could never see the logic of creating systems that might reward anyone indiscriminately. Much of Coolidge’s fame for frugality is based on this logic and not some sort of Scroogian parsimony “What! Are there no poorhouses?” Coolidge recalls memories of collecting taxes with his father, a town official entrusted with the task.

“As I went about with my father when he collected taxes, I knew that when taxes were laid some one had to work to earn the money to pay them, I saw that a public debt was a burden on all the people in a community, and while it was necessary to meet the needs of a disaster it cost much in interest and ought to be retired as soon as possible.”

Throughout the warp and woof of Coolidges tale of life as he experienced it, we see an essential bedrock of trust in his fellow man. “It seems as though good influences had always been coming into my life, he writes,

“Perhaps I have been more fortunate in that respect than others. But while I am not disposed to minimize the amount of evil in the world I am convinced that the good predominates and that it is constantly all about us, ready for our service if only we will accept it!. . . . The ethics of the Northampton Bar were high. It was made up of men who had, and were entitled to have, the confidence and respect of their neighbors who knew them best. They put the interests of their clients above their own, and the public interests above them both.

Coolidge’s world is a good world and fair. It is a world where persistence pays off.

“If I had permitted my failures, or what seemed to me at the time a lack of success, to discourage me I cannot see any way in which I would ever have made progress. If we keep our faith in ourselves, and what is even more important, keep our faith in regular and persistent application to hard work, we need not worry about the outcome.”

It almost seems that only the tragic death of his teenage son is the only event of his life that can shake his faith in an intelligent and maternally trustworthy Providence.

The irony is that Coolidge’s belief in the goodness of the common business man may have been (I say may) been misplaced when it came to the goodness of the great industrialists who may have taken advantage of that trust to exploit laborers and consumers under his administration. He clearly had no intention of creating  an oligarchy by means of his policy of deregulation and minimal government.

“In spite of his many vagaries it was shown that in saving the nation from the danger of falling under the domination of an oligarchy, and in establishing a firm rule of the people which was forever to remain, he vindicated the soundness of our political institutions.”

He speaks of his efforts to curb the ability of unscrupulous railroads to use their powers to drive competitors out of business unfairly.

“During the session I helped draft, and the Committee reported, a bill to prevent large concerns from selling at a lower price in one locality than they did in others, for the purpose of injuring their competitor. This seemed to me an unfair trade practice that should be abolished.”

If abuses were prevalent, it was not a consequence of governmental conspiracy. Following is a portion of Calvin Coolidge’s famous speech Have Faith in Massachusetts. It captures well the essence of Calvin Coolidge’s core beliefs.

“The commonwealth is one. We are all members of one body. The welfare of the weakest and the welfare of the most powerful are inseparably bound together. Industry cannot flourish if labor languish. Transportation cannot prosper if manufactures decline. The general welfare cannot be provided for in any one act, but it is well to remember that the benefit of one is the benefit of all, and the neglect of one is the neglect of all. The suspension of one man's dividends is the suspension of another man's pay envelope. . . .

Government cannot relieve from toil. It can provide no substitute for the rewards of service. It can, of course, care for the defective and recognize distinguished merit. The normal must care for themselves. Self government means self support. Man is born into the universe with a personality that is his own. He has a right that is founded upon the constitution of the universe to have property that is his own. Ultimately, property rights and personal rights are the same thing. The one cannot be preserved if the other be violated. Each man is entitled to his rights and the rewards of his service be they never so large or never so small.

. . . History reveals no civilized people among whom there were not a highly educated class, and large aggregations of wealth, represented usually by the clergy and the nobility. Inspiration has always come from above. Diffusion of learning has come down from the university to the common school, the kindergarten is last. No one would now expect to aid the common school by abolishing higher education. It may be that the diffusion of wealth works in an analogous way. As the little red schoolhouse is builded in the college, it may be that the fostering and protection of large aggregations of wealth are the only foundation on which to build the prosperity of the whole people. Large profits mean large pay rolls. But profits must be the result of service performed. In no land are there so many and such large aggregations of wealth as here; in no land do they perform larger service . . .”

“Don't expect to build up the weak by pulling down the strong. Don't hurry to legislate. Give administration a chance to catch up with legislation. We need a broader, firmer, deeper faith in the people; A faith that men desire to do right, that the Commonwealth is founded upon a righteousness which will endure . . . “

Recognize the immortal worth and dignity of man. Let the laws of Massachusetts proclaim to her humblest citizen, performing the most menial task, the recognition of his manhood, the recognition that all men are peers, the humblest with the most exalted, the recognition that all work is glorified. Such is the path to equality before the law. Such is the foundation of liberty under the law. Such is the sublime revelation of man's relation to man, Democracy!”

Question for Comment: Would you vote for Calvin Coolidge today? Why or why not?

History as Gravedigger of the Present

I woke up at 4:30 this morning and could not get back to sleep so, I did what any thinking person would do. I picked up a Frederick Nietzsche book and began to read an essay on the uses and abuses of history (Nietzsche likes to write in long dense paragraphs that go on endlessly which makes for good verbal insomnia medicine).

His essay begins with a quote by Johan Von Goethe:

"Incidentally, I despise everything which merely instructs me without increasing or immediately enlivening my activity."

Nietzsche believes that history should “serve the living” though he argues that it often “buries them.” History, he argues, is used to keep many people from living. “Observe the herd which is grazing beside you,” he writes:

“It does not know what yesterday or today is. It springs around, eats, rests, digests, jumps up again, and so from morning to night and from day to day, with its likes and dislikes closely tied to the peg of the moment, and thus is neither melancholy nor weary. . . .”

It is the ability of beasts to enjoy the very moment unalloyed with memory that we envy, he suggests. Man wonders why he is unable to learn to forget the past. “No matter how far or how fast he may run, the chain runs with him,” writes Nietzsche,

“It is something amazing: the moment, in one sudden motion there, in one sudden motion gone, before nothing, afterwards nothing, nevertheless comes back again as a ghost and disturbs the tranquillity of a later moment. A leaf is continuously released from the roll of time, falls out, flutters away—and suddenly flutters back again into the man’s lap. For the man says, “I remember,” and envies the beast, which immediately forgets and sees each moment really perish, sink back in cloud and night, and vanish forever.”

The philosopher who writes the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes had come to the same point. Humans have no advantage over the animals in that they can store and reflect so comprehensively on their memories.

“In this way the beast lives unhistorically. For it goes into the present like a number without any odd fraction left over,” Nietzsche suggests

“it does not know how to play a part, hides nothing, and appears in each moment exactly and entirely what it is. Thus, a beast can be nothing other than honest. The human being, by contrast, braces himself against the large and ever-increasing burden of the past, which pushes him down or bows him over.”

Only human children he argues, beings who have “no past to deny and play in blissful blindness between the fences of the past and future” can enjoy moments.

“. . . And so it moves [a man], as if he imagined a lost paradise, to see the grazing herd or, something more closely familiar, the child, which does not yet have a past to deny. Nonetheless, this game must be upset for the child. It will be summoned all too soon out of its forgetfulness. For it learns to understand the expression “It was,” that password with which struggle, suffering, and weariness come over human beings, so as to remind him what his existence basically is—a past tense that is never over and done with.”

Thus does memory become the “gravedigger of the present” as Nietzsche puts it noting that in some people, their inability to forget eventually kills their present. “There are people,” he says,

“who possess so little of this force [forgetfulness] that they bleed to death incurably from a single experience, a single pain, often even from a single tender injustice, as from a really small bloody scratch.”

Nietzsche goes on to observe three specific ways in which history is used and misused.  He speaks of monumental history (where we go to history to draw inspiration for great deeds that we would achieve in the present).

“History belongs, above all, to the active and powerful man, the one who fights a great battle, who needs the exemplary men, teachers, and comforters and cannot find them among his contemporary companions.”

He then speaks of antiquarian history (where we go to history and revere it so as to render present times impervious to change), and then critical history (where we go to history and destroy the foundations of that which has come to be in our present worlds – an act precursor to demolishing what is)

In speaking of antiquarian history, he says,

 “. . . Thus, antiquarian history hinders the powerful willing of new things; it cripples the active man, who always, as an active person, will and must set aside reverence to some extent. The fact that something has become old now gives birth to the demand that it must be immortal, for when a person reckons what every such ancient fact—an old custom of his fathers, a religious belief, an inherited political right—has undergone throughout its existence, what a sum of reverence and admiration from individuals and generations ever since, then it seems presumptuous or even criminal to replace such an antiquity with something new and to set up in opposition to such a numerous cluster of revered and admired things the single fact of what is coming into being and what is present.”

Of critical history he suggests that it can be made to “serve the living” by its ability to undermine the power of contemporary practices and institutions that no longer serve life.

“In order to be able to live, a person must have the power and from time to time use it to break a past and to dissolve it. He manages to do this by dragging the past before the court of justice, investigating it meticulously, and finally condemning it. Every past is worthy of condemnation, for that is how it stands with human things . . . And people or ages serving life in this way, by judging and destroying a past, are always dangerous and in danger.”:

“These are the services which history can carry out for living,” he concludes,

“Every person and every people, according to its goals, forces, and needs, uses a certain knowledge of the past, sometimes as monumental history, sometimes as antiquarian history, and sometimes as critical history”

Friedrich Nietzsche: On the Use and Abuse of History for Life [Revised Edition, 2010]
Translated by Ian Johnston, Vancouver Island University, Nanaimo, BC, Canada.

Question for Comment: How does the work of a historian or history teacher benefit the world or incapacitate it?

Worm: The First Digital World War

Worm: The First Digital World War

Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down has done us all who depend on the Internet and know little about it a service here. Worm brings you into a place where there be dragons still – and knights valiantly trying to slay them. What becomes clear is that it is much easier to create havoc in the world than to prevent it. The Conficker worm opens a door into a computer, locks that door to prevent other intruders, and then starts to set up shop. It spreads and in a few days, begins to send out signals that it is ready to take orders from its “botmaster” – yeah – that’s what they call them. Over time, it assembles an army of “zombies” – computers that could be given a command to do some nefarious thing – like say ALL send requests to the same dating sight (or worse). In short, if all the computers that owe it allegiance were to “attack a single sight, it could bring it down. In a better world, the ubernerds that Bowden highlights in his book would have brought it down and found the genius-lunatic that created it. But … thus far, they haven’t.

Facinating read. And plenty of education to boot. One is reinded of just how little they know about something they depend on so much.

Feel free to read the Wikipedia report on the worm HERE but prepare to have your eyes glaze over.  

“He tries hard. He speaks in clipped phrases, ratcheting down his natural mental velocity. But still the sentences come fast. Crisp. To the point. You can hear him straining to avoid the tricky territory of broader context, but then, failing, inevitably, as his unstoppable enthusiasm for the subject matter slips out of low gear and he’s off at turbo speed into Wired World: . . . bringing down the IRC server . . . the current UTC date . . . exploiting the buffer’s capacity . . . utilizing the peerto- peer mechanism . . . Suffice it to say, Phil is a man who has come face-to-face many times with the Glaze, the unmistakable look of profound confusion and uninterest that descends whenever a conversation turns to the inner workings of a computer.

The Glaze is familiar to every geek ever called upon to repair a malfunctioning machine—Look, dude, spare me the details, just fix it! Most people, even well-educated people with formidable language skills, folks with more than a passing knowledge of word-processing software and spreadsheets and dynamic graphical displays, people who spend hours every day with their fingertips on keyboards, whose livelihoods and even leisuretime preferences increasingly depend on fluency with a variety of software, remain utterly clueless about how any of it works. The innards of mainframes and operating systems and networks are considered not just unfathomable but somehow unknowable, or even not worth knowing, in the way that many people are content to regard electricity as voodoo. The technical side of the modern world took a sharp turn with the discovery of electricity, and then accelerated off the ramp with electromagnetism into the Realm of the Hopelessly Obtuse, so that everyday life has come to coexist in strict parallel with a mysterious techno dimension.” – From Worm: The First Digital World War

 

"The Last Hippie"

The Music Never Stopped

This movie, based on an essay entiled “The Last Hippie” by Oliver Sacks, centers on a father (Henry) and son (Gabriel) relationship severed by the son’s tumor and profound inability to form any long term memories. In the course of therapy, we discover that those memories that were associated with music remain in tact for Gabriel. To Henry’s great chagrine, all of Gabriel’s music was the primary source of great tension and conflict between them historically. The paradox presents Henry with a dilemma? Is he willing to go back to the very source of the distance between himself and his son because therein lies the only source of possible connection?

Take a moment to reflect on your own severed relationships in life. As you look back at the people who you have fought with, abandoned, disconnected from, hurt, and been hurt by; what were the specific issues that created the antagonism? What if the only way to heal the relationship was to enter back into the very fire of that subject because there was no other way? What if that person could remember nothing besides that issue – could connect with you in no other way than to relive it?

In The Music Never Stopped we see a father doing just that. A lover of classical music and jazz himself, he raised his son to love music (albeit, his own music). When, as a teenager in the 1960’s, Gabriel began to form attachments to his own music – to the Beatles, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stone, the Grateful Dead, etc. conflicts arose between father and son over it. There were, and I assume that you know something about the music of the 60’s here, multiple associations between the music of the day and the moral, political, and spiritual values of opposing generations. Robert Bork calls the 60’s “the vertical invasion of the barbarians” and it was often led by its musicians. Realizing that his only pathway into real relationship with his son will be through the music that his son remembers and loves, Henry trades in his collection of music for an assortment of Gabriel's and begins to give himself an education.

The result is somewhat magical. I have discovered that almost any film about separated people reconnecting makes me cry. Be warned if you fall into the same category.

Question for Comment: Who is someone who you have become disconnected from? In what way might you open yourself up to something – some way of seeing the world or expressing yourself – that might help to bring about reconciliation?

"I follow the religion of Love: whatever way Love's camels take."

The Essence of Sufism by John Baldock

Sufi: Sufism or taṣawwuf (Arabic: تصوّف‎) is defined by its adherents as the inner, mystical dimension of Islam. A practitioner of this tradition is generally known as a ṣūfī (صُوفِيّ). Another name for a Sufi is Dervish.

Classical Sufi scholars have defined Sufism as "a science whose objective is the reparation of the heart and turning it away from all else but God." Alternatively, in the words of the Dargawi Sufi teacher Ahmad ibn Ajiba, "a science through which one can know how to travel into the presence of the Divine, purify one's inner self from filth, and beautify it with a variety of praiseworthy traits." Wikipedia on Sufism

John Baldock highlights a crucial divide within the Sufi community. Can a person be a Sufi without being a Muslim? Or does Sufiism transcend religion? Would Rumi have seen a Christian mystic as a “brother”? It is an interesting question and I suspect that the answer is best summed up by Baldock when he asks “Is it possible to be a Sufi without Islam? In this, as in everything else, Allah knows best.”

Suffice it to say that this book on Sufiism (Baldock calls it Sufismn but I prefer the former) provides an excellent introduction to Islam as a religion as well. Its focus is on the Islamic expression of something that we see on the fringes or in the center of most religions; the notion that spirituality is not something that happens in the logic centers of the human mind.

The Sufi, Al-Halaj, who died a martyrs death in 922, asserted that the idea of God’s unity was so uncompromising that the assertion that there was both a being that we call God and a separate being that testifies to that assertion was in itself polytheism. Sufiism is often identified as a radical break with Islam because it tends to drift towards the deification of the believer in a somewhat pantheistic expansion of Allah into the creation. It was for this reason that it was often persecuted. It seems that the majority in monotheistic traditions prefers to keep God as “an other” that forgives them rather than to have to live up to some ideal like “What! I am God?!” “Glory be to Me!” said the Sufi mystic, Bayazid (d. 875), “How great is my majesty!” “I saw my Lord with the eye of the heart and I said “Who art Thou?” another Sufi shaykh explains, “He answered “Thou.”

“What I thought of before as God,” said Jalaadin Rumi when he met Shams of Tabriz, “I met today in a person.”

Its not difficult what it was that got people like himself martyred. The Quakers would be similarly persecuted in Christian countries for simply claiming to have an inner light. Along with this claim of divinity, the Sufis also made few friends among the Islamic rulers when they blurred the line between belief and unbelief by suggesting that a more important distinction between people has to do with those who have experienced God (be they from any religion) and those who haven’t (be they from any religion).

The Sufi, Ibn Arabi writes:

“My heart has become capable of every form:
it is a pasture for gazelles and a convent for Christian monks,
and a temple for idols and the pilgrim's Ka'bah,
and the tables of the Torah and the book of the Qur'an.
I follow the religion of Love: whatever way Love's camels take,
that is my religion and my faith.”

“When I and you do not exist, what is mosque?” asks Shabistari, “What is synagogue? What is the temple of fire (Hindu temple)?” Along the frontiers of Islam, warriors were dying for the content of their faith in Islam and the Sufis were hinting that beliefs were secondary to experiences anyway. “If God guides you not into the road, it will not be disclosed by logic” Shabistari says. The “logic” of Sufism would be and probably should be a threat to any organized expression of Islam I suppose because if the most important knowledge can be accessed without doctrinal teaching, then maybe the mystics of other people’s religions are meeting with a common being. Take the following two passages for an example. The first is from a selection of Sufi literature:

“A hermit said to Dhu Inun “Oh my son, who is intimate with God has received four gifts. And honor which need be known to none, a knowledge without study, a richness without money, a joyful company without companion.”

The second comes from the Hebrew book of Jeremiah

“Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, let not the mighty man boast in his might, let not the rich man boast in his riches, but let the one who boasts boast about this: that they have the understanding to know me, that I am the LORD, who exercises kindness, justice and righteousness on earth, for in these I delight,” declares the LORD.”

“None has attained to the Degree of Truth until a thousand honest people have testified that he is a heretic” says the Sufi, Ju-nayd. If you read the story of Jeremiah’s life, you will find the same assertion being illustrated. There is a sense of interchangeability here that is hard to miss. “The period which one has been veiled from God does not belong to one’s life” says the Sufi Junayd. We can sense David saying similar things in the Psalms.

Perhaps my second favorite Sufi (and lets assume that Rumi is everyone’s favorite) is Al Ghazzali. I found myself enjoying his story of the path by which he made his way to Sufiism. I will only quote it in part but I would suggest that the reader look up the rest.

“From my early youth, since I attained the age of puberty before I was twenty, until the present time when I am over fifty, I have ever recklessly launched out into the midst of these ocean depths, I have ever bravely embarked on this open sea, throwing aside all craven caution; I have poked into every dark recess, I have made an assault on every problem, I have plunged into every abyss, I have scrutinized the creed of every sect, I have tried to lay bare the inmost doctrines of every community. All this have I done that I might distinguish between true and false, between sound tradition and heretical innovation. Whenever I meet one of the Batiniyah, I like to study his creed; whenever I meet one of the Zahiriyah, I want to know the essentials of his belief. If it is a philosopher, I try to become acquainted with the essence of his philosophy; if a scholastic theologian I busy myself in examining his theological reasoning; if a Sufi, I yearn to fathom the secret of his mysticism; if an ascetic (muta’abbid), I investigate the basis of his ascetic practices; if one of the Zanadiqah or Mu’attilah, I look beneath the surface to discover the reasons for his bold adoption of such a creed.

To thirst after comprehension of things as they really are was my habit and custom from a very early age. It was instinctive with me, a part of my God-given nature, a matter of temperament and not of my choice or contriving. Consequently as I drew near the age of adolescence the bonds of mere authority (taqlid) ceased to hold me and inherited beliefs lost their grip upon me, for I saw that Christian youths always grew up to be Christians, Jewish youths to be Jews and Muslim youths to be Muslims. I heard, too, the Tradition related of the Prophet of God according to which he said: `Everyone who is born is born with a sound nature; it is his parents who make him a Jew or a Christian or a Magian. My inmost being was moved to discover what this original nature really was and what the beliefs derived from the authority of parents and teachers really were. The attempt to distinguish between these authority-based opinions and their principles developed the mind, for in distinguishing the true in them from the false differences appeared.

I therefore said within myself: `To begin with, what, I am looking for is knowledge of what things really are, so I must undoubtedly try to find what knowledge really is’. It was plain to me that sure and certain knowledge is that knowledge in which the object is disclosed in such a fashion that no doubt remains along with it, that no possibility of error or illusion accompanies it, and that the mind cannot even entertain such a supposition. Certain knowledge must also be infallibly; and this infallibility or security from error is such that no attempt to show the falsity of the knowledge can occasion doubt or denial, even though the attempt is made by someone who turns stones into gold or a rod into a serpent. Thus, I know that ten is more than three.

Let us suppose that someone says to me: `No, three is more than ten, and in proof of that I shall change this rod into a serpent’; and let us suppose that he actually changes the rod into a serpent and that I witness him doing so. No doubts about what I know are raised in me because of this. The only result is that I wonder precisely how he is able to produce this change. Of doubt about my knowledge there is no trace.

After these reflections I knew that whatever I do not know in this fashion and with this mode of certainty is not reliable and infallible knowledge; and knowledge that is not infallible is not certain knowledge.”

http://sufiteachings.com/writings/imam-ghazzali

Question for Comment: What place does mysticism have in your own spirituality?

“When I get through with you, There won’t be anything left.”

 “What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight.” James chapter 4, New Testament

The opening lines to the theme song of the TV series Damages begins with the difficult to understand words, “Little lamb, smile.” Soon, the lyrics keep repeating over and over “When I get through with you, There won’t be anything left.” It pretty much describes the arch of all the show’s primary plot lines. Everyone on the show, with precious few exceptions, seems to be on a hell-bent quest for something, be it power, revenge, money, sex, status, a legacy, security, or any one of a number of other things that humans get addicted to. The high finance, high stakes litigation world of Damage’s New York City is a Machiavellian fun-house of double crossing and deception. Every character, almost without exception pursues their goals under the watchful eye of that Italian renaissance patron saint of chaos. “Every one admits how praiseworthy it is in a prince to keep faith,” Machiavelli wrote in The Prince

“and to live with integrity and not with craft. Nevertheless our experience has been that those princes who have done great things have held good faith of little account, and have known how to circumvent the intellect of men by craft, and in the end have overcome those who have relied on their word. . . .

A wise lord cannot, nor ought he to, keep faith when such observance may be turned against him, and when the reasons that caused him to pledge it exist no longer. If men were entirely good this precept would not hold, but because they are bad, and will not keep faith with you, you too are not bound to observe it with them. Nor will there ever be wanting to a prince legitimate reasons to excuse this nonobservance. Of this endless modern examples could be given, showing how many treaties and engagements have been made void and of no effect through the faithlessness of princes; and he who has known best how to employ the fox has succeeded best. . . .

But it is necessary to know well how to disguise this characteristic, and to be a great pretender and dissembler; . . . Therefore it is unnecessary for a prince to have all the good qualities I have enumerated, but it is very necessary to appear to have them. And I shall dare to say this also, that to have them and always to observe them is injurious, and that to appear to have them is useful; to appear merciful, faithful, humane, religious, upright, and to be so, but with a mind so framed that should you require not to be so, you may be able and know how to change to the opposite.”

And you have to understand this, that a prince, especially a new one, cannot observe all those things for which men are esteemed, being often forced, in order to maintain the state, to act contrary to faith, friendship, humanity, and religion. Therefore it is necessary for him to have a mind ready to turn itself accordingly as the winds and variations of fortune force it, yet, as I have said above, not to diverge from the good if he can avoid doing so, but, if compelled, then to know how to set about it.”

Damages reveals a corroded and corrosive world of moral decay that reaches from top to bottom of society. Every one of its characters is infected; its police officers, its FBI agents, its elected officials, its bureaucrats and cabinet members, its business leaders, its judges, its scientists, its philanthropists, its bankers, its Wall Street traders, its lawyers, its paralegals, its old people, its young people, its husbands and wives, parents and children, fiancés, hookers, janitors, drug users, and prostitutes live without scruple. And the great irony is that each one demands that everyone else anti-up and be honest with them.

Trace the arch of each character’s journey and you will find that they are prepared to exact a brutal price from anyone who betrays them while they themselves wallow ever deeper in the slime of their own lack of integrity. This is a world where there is no god but Narcissus and Machiavelli is Her prophet. “Trust no one” says Patty Hewes to her protégé’, Ellen Parsons, not knowing that the recipient of the advice is hatching a plot against her. And the for the most part, the characters don’t. They spy on each other. They video tape each other, they secretly tape their conversations. They set traps for one another. They expose each other when appropriate. They turn each other’s friends and confidants into secret allies. They steal from one another. They break into each other’s files. They violate each other’s rights to privacy. They hire private investigators. They murder each other’s eye witnesses, destroy evidence in each other’s cases, perjure themselves, and seek out and exploit each other’s vulnerabilities.

And when this assortment of egos has finished its work, most of the actual “good people” are dead or ruined and one can honestly say with the theme song, there isn’t a whole lot worth saving left. You can pick through the flotsam of their wrecked lives and find the remains – knife wounds, gunshot wounds, widows, estranged children, divorced spouses, ruined careers, life sentences, orphaned children, and an entire society bleeding anger, hatred, distrust, and cynicism at every pore.

I suspect that it was just such a society that the ancient Hebrew prophet Habakuk came to and hurled the following challenge:

“Will not all of them taunt him with ridicule and scorn, saying,

   “‘Woe to him who piles up stolen goods
   and makes himself wealthy by extortion!
   How long must this go on?’
 Will not your creditors suddenly arise?
   Will they not wake up and make you tremble?
   Then you will become their prey.
 Because you have plundered many nations,
   the peoples who are left will plunder you.
For you have shed human blood;
   you have destroyed lands and cities and everyone in them.

  “Woe to him who builds his house by unjust gain,
   setting his nest on high
   to escape the clutches of ruin!
 You have plotted the ruin of many peoples,
   shaming your own house and forfeiting your life.
 The stones of the wall will cry out,
   and the beams of the woodwork will echo it.

  “Woe to him who builds a city with bloodshed
   and establishes a town by injustice!
 Has not the LORD Almighty determined
   that the people’s labor is only fuel for the fire,
   that the nations exhaust themselves for nothing?

In Habakuk’s view of the world, justice and truth and integrity are eventually re-established by means of a divine intervention, manifested through the karmic vengeance of the victims.

In Damages, the people themselves begin to redeem themselves but only as they each hit rock bottom. It is only when they begin to say “I cannot go any lower and still live with myself and I must either go lower or repent for what I have done and redirect my life” that they actually make change possible.

Which of these two possibilities, the external intervention or the internal is required of us, I cannot definitely say. My jury is still out.  

Question for Comment: Are the ends you value more important than the values you insist on living by while achieving them?

“I thought for myself almost from the first"

“No matter what side of the argument you are on,” said the great violinist, Jascha Heifetz, “you always find people on your side that you wish were on the other.”

And sometimes it works the other way around as well. Sometimes, you find people on the other side of your arguments that you would prefer as friends to people on your own. I found myself liking John Stewart Mill.

He begins his autobiography by saying that he has no illusions about why someone might care to read it. For the most part, he regards it as beneficial to one argument in particular and that is that children are capable of learning far more than grown-ups give them credit for – insisting that placed in a learning environment where learning and the development of the intellect is simply expected, children can accomplish far more than they do when placed in circumstances that expect them not to care. “My father, in all his teaching, demanded of me not only the utmost that I could do, but much that I could by no possibility have done.” He says, later adding that “a pupil from whom nothing is ever demanded which he cannot do, never does all he can.”

John’s father James made it his principle objective, not to stuff his son’s head with knowledge (though there was a lot of stuffing going on) but rather to teach him to do useful things with knowledge and to perfect his powers of critical thought. “It was his invariable practice, whatever studies he exacted from me,” Mill writes,” to make me as far as possible understand and feel the utility of them”

 “The first intellectual operation in which I arrived at any proficiency was dissecting a bad argument, and finding in what part the fallacy lay: and though whatever capacity of this sort I attained was due to the fact that it was an intellectual exercise in which I was most perseveringly drilled by my father”

Of this skill of assembling and analyzing logical arguments, Mill argues that most people never learn to do more than make assertions as though that were as good as the ability to make arguments. “It is also a study peculiarly adapted to an early stage in the education of philosophical students,” he says of the study of logic,  

“since it does not presuppose the slow process of acquiring, by experience and reflection, valuable thoughts of their own. They may become capable of disentangling the intricacies of confused and self-contradictory thought, before their own thinking faculties are much advanced; a power which, for want of some such discipline, many otherwise able men altogether lack; and when they have to answer opponent, only endeavour, by such argument as they can command, to support the opposite conclusion, scarcely even attempting to confute the reasonings of their antagonists; and, therefore, at the utmost, leaving the question, as far as it depends on argument, a balanced one.”

“I thought for myself almost from the first, and occasionally thought differently from him,” says the author of his father. A high compliment indeed and one that I hope my sons can say of me. James Mill was determined that his son should have the skills he needed to create his own intellectual self (reminds me of Tiger Woods’ father’s drive to make his son a golf prodigy). “Most boys or youths who have had much knowledge drilled into them,” writes Mill,

“have their mental capacities not strengthened, but over-laid by it. They are crammed with mere facts, and with the opinions or phrases of other people, and these are accepted as a substitute for the power to form opinions of their own: and thus the sons of eminent fathers, who have spared no pains in their education, so often grow up mere parroters of what they have learnt, incapable of using their minds except in the furrows traced for them. Mine, however, was not an education of cram. My father never permitted anything which I learnt to degenerate into a mere exercise of memory. He strove to make the understanding not only go along with every step of the teaching, but, if possible, precede it.”

Later, John Mill suggests that the tyranny of an older method of education has been replaced with an equally or even more injurious lazes faire approach. “As regards my own education, I hesitate to pronounce whether I was more a loser or gainer by [my father’s] severity it was not such as to prevent me from having a happy childhood, says Mill.

“And I do not believe that boys can be induced to apply themselves with vigour, and what is so much more difficult, perseverance, to dry and irksome studies, by the sole force of persuasion and soft words. Much must be done, and much must be learnt, by children, for which rigid discipline, and known liability to punishment, are indispensable as means. It is, no doubt, a very laudable effort, in modern teaching, to render as much as possible of what the young are required to learn, easy and interesting to them. But when this principle is pushed to the length of not requiring them to learn anything but what has been made easy and interesting, one of the chief objects of education is sacrificed. I rejoice in the decline of the old brutal and tyrannical system of teaching, which, however, did succeed in enforcing habits of application; but the new, as it seems to me, is training up a race of men who will be incapable of doing anything which is disagreeable to them.”

Mill would later argue for schools that provided more education than students or their parents actually demanded (Good luck doing that today). “On the contrary,” he would argue,

“I urged strenuously the importance of having a provision for education, not dependent on the mere demand of the market, that is, on the knowledge and discernment of average parents, but calculated to establish and keep up a higher standard of instruction than is likely to be spontaneously demanded by the buyers of the article.”

James Mill was what might regarded an agnostic and he raised his son to follow his line of reasoning on matters of religion (despite the contradiction with what has been said above). For the most part, his son seems to have largely adopted his father’s perspective on Christianity. For Mill, most Christians remain “Christian” by being inconsistent rather than syncopated with the doctrines they espouse. “The same slovenliness of thought,” he writes of Christians,

“and subjection of the reason to fears, wishes, and affections, which enable them to accept a theory involving a contradiction in terms, prevents them from perceiving the logical consequences of the theory. Such is the facility with which mankind believe at one and the same time things inconsistent with one another, and so few are those who draw from what they receive as truths, any consequences but those recommended to them by their feelings . . .”

Mill saw the dominant religious beliefs of his own culture as though they were as foreign to his thinking as the polytheistic ideas of the ancients. “I am thus one of the very few examples, in this country of one who has, not thrown off religious belief, but never had it: I grew up in a negative state with regard to it.” he writes,

“I looked upon the modern exactly as I did upon the ancient religion, as something which in no way concerned me. It did not seem to me more strange that English people should believe what I did not, than that the men I read of in Herodotus should have done so. History had made the variety of opinions among mankind a fact familiar to me, and this was but a prolongation of that fact.”

And yet it seems from his autobiography that if we do not have religion in our lives, we must have something very much like it. If not beer, imperialism, or sports, then philosophy. For John Stewart Mill his self-confessed “conversion moment” came when he read the philosophy of his father’s friend, Jeremy Betham. “When I laid down the last volume of the Traité,” he says of Betham’s publication by that title, “I had become a different being” (dare we say, “born again”?)

“The "principle of utility" understood as Bentham understood it, and applied in the manner in which he applied it through these three volumes, fell exactly into its place as the keystone which held together the detached and fragmentary component parts of my knowledge and beliefs. It gave unity to my conceptions of things. I now had opinions; a creed, a doctrine, a philosophy; in one among the best senses of the word, a religion; the inculcation and diffusion of which could be made the principal outward purpose of a life. And I had a grand conception laid before me of changes to be effected in the condition of mankind through that doctrine.”

John Stewart Mill was convinced that there was no direct correlation between one’s religiosity and one’s morality. “Of unbelievers (so called) as well as of believers,” he says, “there are many species, including almost every variety of moral type.” His memories of his father are of a man who’s ethics were based on utility and not upon any “artificial” moral code that might compete with that objective. “In ethics, his moral feelings were energetic and rigid on all points which he deemed important to human well-being,” says Mill,

“while he was supremely indifferent in opinion (though his indifference did not show itself in personal conduct) to all those doctrines of the common morality, which he thought had no foundation but in asceticism and priest-craft. He looked forward, for example, to a considerable increase of freedom in the relations between the sexes, though without pretending to define exactly what would be, or ought to be, the precise conditions of that freedom. This opinion was connected in him with no sensuality either of a theoretical or of a practical kind.”

Utilitarianism is often accused of trying to make a calculating machine out of a complex human system of decision making. Mill confesses that for a few years of his life, this was not a criticism far from the truth. I had to laugh when Mill (my “brothuh from anothuh mothah”) confesses that he had to be reformed from his commitment to objectivity. “My father's teachings tended to the under-valuing of feeling,” he says, though “it was not that he was himself cold-hearted or insensible.”

 “In addition to the influence which this characteristic in him had on me and others, we found all the opinions to which we attached most importance, constantly attacked on the ground of feeling.  . . . Although we were generally in the right, as against those who were opposed to us, the effect was that the cultivation of feeling (except the feelings of public and private duty), was not in much esteem among us, and had very little place in the thoughts of most of us, myself in particular. What we principally thought of, was to alter people's opinions; to make them believe according to evidence, and know what was their real interest, which when they once knew, they would, we thought, by the instrument of opinion, enforce a regard to it upon one another.”

“I do not believe that any one of the survivors of the Benthamites or Utilitarians of that day, now relies mainly upon it for the general amendment of human conduct.”

“From this neglect both in theory and in practice of the cultivation of feeling,” he continues,  “naturally resulted, among other things, an under-valuing of poetry, and of Imagination generally, as an element of human nature.” Thus Mill was raised to look at religion with a jaundiced eye, and to look at emotions with similar distrust. His father was what might be regarded an “arch enemy” of Romanticism.

“For passionate emotions of all sorts, and for everything which has been said or written in exaltation of them, he professed the greatest contempt. He regarded them as a form of madness. "The intense" was with him a bye-word of scornful disapprobation. He regarded as an aberration of the moral standard of modern times, compared with that of the ancients, the great stress laid upon feeling. Feelings, as such, he considered to be no proper subjects of praise or blame. Right and wrong, good and bad, he regarded as qualities solely of conduct-of acts and omissions; there being no feeling which may not lead, and does not frequently lead, either to good or to bad actions: conscience itself, the very desire to act right, often leading people to act wrong."

I found it interesting how John Stewart Mill describes the writing of his mentor Jeremy Bentham, a man so opposed to “flowery” poetic, or even rhetorical language that he refused to write anything but the densest of arguments. “Bentham's later style,” confesses Mill,

“as the world knows, was heavy and cumbersome, from the excess of a good quality, the love of precision, which made him introduce clause within clause into the heart of every sentence, that the reader might receive into his mind all the modifications and qualifications simultaneously with the main proposition: and the habit grew on him until his sentences became, to those not accustomed to them, most laborious reading.”

I suspect that there are many intellects trained without the aid of poetry who fall into similar traps (this blog may well be evidence).

At the risk of adding the burden of reading to anyone who may have gotten this far in this review, I think it worth noting that John Stewart Mill met the love of his life when he was twenty five (Harriet Taylor was twenty three and had been married since she was eighteen). For some twenty years, John Mill and Harriet Taylor maintained an active and lively discourse about many of the ideas that he wrote about. Two years after her husband died, they were married. I quote Mill at length here.

“It was the period of my mental progress which I have now reached that I formed the friendship which has been the honour and chief blessing of my existence, as well as the source of a great part of all that I have attempted to do, or hope to effect hereafter, for human improvement. My first introduction to the lady who, after a friendship of twenty years, consented to become my wife, was in 1830, when I was in my twenty-fifth and she in her twenty-third year.”

“Although it was years after my introduction to Mrs. Taylor before my acquaintance with her became at all intimate or confidential, I very soon felt her to be the most admirable person I had ever known. It is not to be supposed that she was, or that any one, at the age at which I first saw her, could be, all that she afterwards became.”

“To her outer circle she was a beauty and a wit, with an air of natural distinction, felt by all who approached her: to the inner, a woman of deep and strong feeling, of penetrating and intuitive intelligence, and of an eminently meditative and poetic nature. Married at a very early age, to a most upright, brave, and honourable man, of liberal opinions and good education, but without the intellectual or artistic tastes which would have made him a companion for her, though a steady and affectionate friend, for whom she had true esteem and the strongest affection through life, and whom she most deeply lamented when dead; shut out by the social disabilities of women from any adequate exercise of her highest faculties in action on the world without; her life was one of inward meditation, varied by familiar intercourse with a small circle of friends, of whom one only (long since deceased) was a person of genius, or of capacities of feeling or intellect kindred with her own, but all had more or less of alliance with her in sentiments and opinions. Into this circle I had the good fortune to be admitted, and I soon perceived that she possessed in combination, the qualities which in all other persons whom I had known I had been only too happy to find singly.”

“Alike in the highest regions of speculation and in the smaller practical concerns of daily life, her mind was the same perfect instrument, piercing to the very heart and marrow of the matter; always seizing the essential idea or principle. The same exactness and rapidity of operation, pervading as it did her sensitive as well as her mental faculties, would, with her gifts of feeling and imagination, have fitted her to be a consummate artist, as her fiery and tender soul and her vigorous eloquence would certainly have made her a great orator, and her profound knowledge of human nature and discernment and sagacity in practical life, would, in the times when such a carrière was open to women, have made her eminent among the rulers of mankind. Her intellectual gifts did but minister to a moral character at once the noblest and the best balanced which I have ever met with in life. Her unselfishness was not that of a taught system of duties, but of a heart which thoroughly identified itself with the feelings of others, and often went to excess in consideration for them by imaginatively investing their feelings with the intensity of its own. The passion of justice might have been thought to be her strongest feeling, but for her boundless generosity, and a lovingness ever ready to pour itself forth upon any or all human beings who were capable of giving the smallest feeling in return. The rest of her moral characteristics were such as naturally accompany these qualities of mind and heart: the most genuine modesty combined with the loftiest pride; a simplicity and sincerity which were absolute, towards all who were fit to receive them; the utmost scorn of whatever was mean and cowardly, and a burning indignation at everything brutal or tyrannical, faithless or dishonourable in conduct and character, while making the broadest distinction between mala in se and mere mala prohibita -- between acts giving evidence of intrinsic badness in feeling and character, and those which are only violations of conventions either good or bad, violations which whether in themselves right or wrong, are capable of being committed by persons in every other respect lovable or admirable.”

“To be admitted into any degree of mental intercourse with a being of these qualities, could not but have a most beneficial influence on my development; though the effect was only gradual, and many years elapsed before her mental progress and mine went forward in the complete companionship they at last attained. The benefit I received was far greater than any which I could hope to give; though to her, who had at first reached her opinions by the moral intuition of a character of strong feeling, there was doubtless help as well as encouragement to be derived from one who had arrived at many of the same results by study and reasoning: and in the rapidity of her intellectual growth, her mental activity, which converted everything into knowledge, doubtless drew from me, as it did from other sources, many of its materials.”

  At times, John Stewart Mill and Harriet Taylor would even travel together though Mill insists that this should give no cause for slander. He walks the delicate line on tiptoe.

“At this period she lived mostly with one young daughter, in a quiet part of the country, and only occasionally in town, with her first husband, Mr Taylor. I visited her equally in both places; and was greatly indebted to the strength of character which enabled her to disregard the false interpretations liable to be put on the frequency of my visits to her while living generally apart from Mr Taylor, and on our occasionally travelling together, though in all other respects our conduct during those years gave not the slightest ground for any other supposition than the true one, that our relation to each other at that time was one of strong affection and confidential intimacy only. For though we did not consider the ordinances of society binding on a subject so entirely personal, we did feel bound that our conduct should be such as in no degree to bring discredit on her husband, nor therefore on herself.”

Mill describes his seven year marriage to Harriet in the following words.

“Between the time of which I have now spoken, and the present, took place the most important events of my private life. The first of these was my marriage, in April, 1851, to the lady whose incomparable worth had made her friendship the greatest source to me both of happiness and of improvement, during many years in which we never expected to be in any closer relation to one another. Ardently as I should have aspired to this complete union of our lives at any time in the course of my existence at which it had been practicable, I, as much as my wife, would far rather have foregone that privilege forever, than have owed it to the premature death of one for whom I had the sincerest respect, and she the strongest affection. That event, however, having taken place in July, 1849, it was granted to me to derive from that evil my own greatest good, by adding to the partnership of thought, feeling, and writing which had long existed, a partnership of our entire existence. For seven and a half years that blessing was mine; for seven and a half only! I can say nothing which could describe, even in the faintest manner, what that loss was and is. But because I know that she would have wished it, I endeavour to make the best of what life I have left, and to work on for her purposes with such diminished strength as can be derived from thoughts of her, and communion with her memory.”

I will leave it to the reader, if interested to look further into the autobiography for John Mill’s great love, respect, and admiration for Harriet Taylor. It makes him hard to dislike even if you disagree with him. A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startles us,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson. And I think that captures the essence of John Stewart Mill and through his memory of her, Harriett Taylor.

Question for Comment: If you were to write an autobiography, what would the chapter titles be?