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I was saddened to learn the other day that my friend and mentor Michelle Marder Kamhi has passed away. Chris Sciabarra has written a more complete remembrance of our mutual friend, so I will add only a few personal notes.
During my college years at Columbia University, I spent quite a bit of time with Michelle and her husband Lou Torres (whom I'd met even earlier when he gave a talk on art appreciation at the American Renaissance School). It was my good fortune to assist them with Aristos, the independent arts journal they published for many years. Michelle was ever gracious and considerate, interested in hearing my thoughts on a wide variety of topics, curious about my studies in philosophy and ancient Greek, and extremely kind to someone who was so young and inexperienced. Her knowledge of art history was immense, but even greater was her passion about the arts. Visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art with Michelle and Lou was an education unto itself! We also liked to walk from their brownstone on West 94th Street toward the Hudson River, where at Riverside Drive we would soak in the inspiring equine sculpture of Joan of Arc by Anna Hyatt Huntington. From Michelle and Lou I learned about so many artists I never would have encountered otherwise, and about the deep meaning and importance of art in human existence.
More recently, I helped Michelle and Lou to archive the Aristos website so that it will be available in perpetuity on the Internet. Even though at the time Michelle was struggling with the serious illness that would eventually take her life, she was characteristically and unfailingly gentle and patient. Michelle was a beautiful person and I will miss her very much.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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While collectively we slouch towards tyranny, individually I continue to ponder some of the many methods people have proposed for counteracting that trend. Amidst all the particular suggestions, one thing I have not seen mentioned is adopting the attitude of a free person. This strikes me as seemingly simple but in fact both difficult and fundamental.
Because I'm deep into Aristotle research these days, I'll point out a dozen of his relevant observations, but rephrase them as actionable advice:
The basic idea is this: those who stand straight and tall don't slouch in the first place, whether towards tyranny or any other form of human languishing, injustice, and corruption.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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Democracy ends in tyranny. ~ Aristotle
Legend has it that after the Constitutional Convention finished its work in September 1787, Elizabeth Willing Powel, one of the most powerful and highly educated women in Philadelphia, asked Benjamin Franklin whether we now had a monarchy or a republic. Great question, Elizabeth! We're still trying to figure out the answer.
But first, some ancient history. In his Politics, Aristotle distinguished among rule by one person (monarchy), rule by a few people (oligarchy), and rule by many or, in fact, all the people (which should be polyarchy or pantarchy, but even back then they called it democracy - "people power"). Because Aristotle loved to draw distinctions, within monarchical governments he also distinguished between kingship on the one hand and tyranny of various kinds on the other. The difference was that a king deserved to rule alone because of his pre-eminent excellence of character and dedication to the common good, whereas a tyrant was an unethical demagogue who cared only about himself and his cronies.
Because nowadays we conflate kingship and monarchy, it strikes us as odd that Elizabeth Powel asked if the result of the Convention was monarchy, because the whole point of the revolution was to separate from King George, right? Well, not quite, because the colonists objected to various forms of Parliamentary oversight and before the war went over the heads of Parliament by appealing directly to the king. She was probably worried not about setting up a new king George (last name Washington) but establishing one-man rule, however legally sanctioned.
We might also be surprised that she didn't ask about democracy. My knowledge of early American history is not deep enough to say why precisely, but my sense is that perhaps the primary if unstated goal of the Convention was to put a lid on what the "better sort" perceived as the excessive people power of the individual states under the Articles of Confederation (for more on this, see Gordon S. Wood's book The Creation of the American Republic). Pure democracy of the kind experienced in ancient Athens was never on offer, because having read Thucydides the Founders were well aware of how that experiment ended.
Following the lead of ancient and early modern republics like Rome and Venice, the Founders wished to balance Aristotle's forms of government: roughly speaking, the intent was that the President (not an executive council as in many republics) would be the monarchic element, the Senate would be the oligarchic element, and the House would be the democratic element. Plus, by setting up a federal structure, the Founders planned for most power to reside at the local level (townships, counties, militias, schools, etc.), for some power to be exercised at the state level, and for very few powers to be delegated to the national government.
Well, it hasn't worked out that way, has it? Most power is now centralized, the House is just as oligarchic as the Senate (and not exactly filled with the sorts of individuals we'd call natural aristocrats), Congresspeople don't want to stick their necks out by crafting legislation, most of the regulations we live under are generated by special-interest lobbyists and unelected experts, and increasingly our Presidents use their pens to issue executive orders instead of working with Congress to make laws that serve the common good. It's this last phenomenon that makes me wonder if we're slouching towards monarchy - more specifically, the tyranny of an elected ruler whose whims (or those who have his ear) are the only law. It's an ugly fate to contemplate for a country that started out with George Washington as its model of a President...
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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Because of the long-running inversion of political power in America from the local level to the national level, these days we hear all about the decline of democracy in Washington, D.C. but very little about the decline of local democracy. This got me to thinking about representation where I live in Douglas County, Colorado.
Governance in Douglas County is overseen by three county commissioners. Because about 360,000 people live in Douglas County, that means we have one commissioner for every 120,000 people. Let's compare this degree of representation to what Americans experienced in the early years of the Republic. At the time of the 1790 census, the state with the closest population to present-day Douglas County was Massachusetts with 340,000 people. Yet consider that the lower house in Massachusetts had (I believe) 240 representatives! This works out to one representative for every 1400 people. Given Dunbar numbers, most citizens had a decent chance of being acquainted with their representative. By comparison, very few people in Douglas County know one of the commissioners - and those people are probably Republican party insiders, not ordinary citizens. These days we'd think it crazy to have a legislature of 250 representatives in someplace like Douglas County, but maybe that's because we've grown accustomed to such paltry degrees of representation.
Although I don't want to sound cynical, I must say that if we look at the situation not from the bottom up but from the top down then the decline in local democracy makes sense: if you're a "public-spirited" (or power-hungry) person who wants to "have an impact" (or feel important), you'd much prefer to "represent" (or dictate to) 120,000 people than 1400 people. Dispersed costs, concentrated benefits.
Speaking of local democracy, at our annual meeting a few weeks ago I was elected president of the civic association in my neighborhood of ~200 homes; although I don't know everyone in the neighborhood, it's something I could accomplish - unlike those county commissioners with 120,000 constituents. I'll certainly try to do a better job of representing the interests of the folks in my neighborhood than the commissioners do in our county.
To be clear, our civic association has no real power - it's not even a homeowners' association and thus can't enforce covenants or set architectural standards or anything like that. This is in contrast to, say, the townships in New England, where especially in olden days every year the citizens in their distinctive town meetings would debate and vote on taxes, roads, schools, and other matters of local importance. It was the example of New England townships that inspired Thomas Jefferson to declare the need to "divide the counties into wards" because he foresaw that with the growth in population even county governments would stray too far from the people. Boy, was he right!
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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To follow up on last month's post "Romanticism or Renaissance?", I decided to read two books by scholars for whom I have a great deal of respect: Classic, Romantic, and Modern by cultural historian Jacques Barzun and The Roots of Romanticism by intellectual historian Isaiah Berlin. Although I'm far from sagely on these matters now, I do feel somewhat better informed.
Barzun states at one point that "Romantic striving may therefore be summed up as the effort to create order out of experience individually acquired." This "implies that the primary reality is the individual"and that order is not merely theoretical or handed to one from on high but must be created by the individual to serve the individual (or, on some interpretations, a group or nation). This "in turn suggests that the first law of the universe is not thought but action" - which "means effort, energy, possibly strife and certainly risk." The Romantics felt that the old world had run its course and that the challenge was now "to create a new world on the ruins of the old" - a world not of absolute aesthetic rules and moral codes followed to the letter, but of novel values invented and pursued. In the arts, the result was unrestrained observation and imagination, spurring a diversity of creations that were "simultaneously idealistic, realistic, and symbolic" (Barzun argues - paradoxically to our modern ears - that Romanticism was not opposed to "Realism, Symbolism, Impressionism, Naturalism, and Post-Impressionism" but contained within itself the seeds of these later movements). Indeed, because of its respect for facts, experience, activity, and the passions of life, Barzun boldly claims that "romanticism is realism", for the Romanticists "sought and found ... not a dream world into which to escape, but a real world in which to live."
Berlin finds similarly idealistic values in the Romantic movement: "integrity, sincerity, readiness to sacrifice one's life to some inner light, dedication to some ideal for which it is worth sacrificing all that one is, for which it is worth both living and dying." Yet taken too far this leads to "the Nietzschean figure who wishes to raze to the ground a society whose system of values is such that a superior person who truly understands what it is to be free cannot operate in terms of it, and therefore prefers to destroy it." Berlin traces such ideas not to England around 1805 or France around 1825, but to Germany around 1775, specifically in the persons of Johann Herder and his "master" Johann Hamann, the "Magus of the North" as he was known. The view and practice of art that resulted from these currents put a premium on the living expression and unique voice of an original personality and creative genius: "to stop expressing is to stop living", "to live is to do something", "to do is to express your nature" - an "infinite nature to soar to greater and greater heights and become wider, deeper, freer, more vital, more like the divinity towards which it strives." Yet Berlin uncovers a more pessimistic strain as well, according to which one's nature is inexpressible, one's ideals are unattainable, dark forces prevent us from finding true freedom, and so on.
My initial foray into cultural and intellectual history leaves me with two questions.
First, what led to the birth and development of Romanticism? If Berlin is right, its roots were planted before the French Revolution in reaction to the overbearing rationalism of the Enlightenment, which imposed a simplistic account of human experience, a superficial universalism that stifled individuality, and an over-emphasis on rules and manners - all the while refusing to criticize in any fundamental way a hollowed-out social system overseen by corrupt monarchs and aristocrats.
Second, are we ripe for a Romantic resurgence? Here I'm not so sure that history is about to rhyme. I suppose one could argue that our tottering system of rule by the experts (who often are merely the credentialed) is overly rationalistic and universalistic, and furthermore that the emerging technopoly is becoming literally inhuman through the expectation that people will conform to the outputs of so-called "artificial intelligence" programs. Yet it seems to me that our world is also characterized by a witches' brew of atomistic self-indulgence, anything-goes irrationalism, and a nihilistic pursuit of fame, riches, power, and prestige that would make Machiavelli blush. The antidotes to that aren't fully clear to me, but I suggest they will involve leaving behind the artificial for the human, the political for the personal, the fake for the real - even, if you will, the art of the deal for the art of the ideal.
If this be Romanticism, make the most of it.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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In Song of Myself, Walt Whitman declared himself to be "one of the great nation, the nation of many nations" - claiming identity as a northerner and a southerner, a Yankee, a Kentuckian, a Hoosier, a Badger, a Buckeye, and a habitan of numerous other places in North America. (Whitman contained multitudes, after all!)
Aside from its 50 states and many larger and smaller regions, there is another, greater sense in which America is the nation of many nations: it has become a home for people from all over the world. First of these, of course, were the Native Americans, who were here before everyone else and whose tragedies and triumphs are ongoing. Long millennia later the British showed up, but the British were themselves a people of many cultures, with ancestral streams from the Celts, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Vikings, Norman French, etc. In his magisterial history Albion's Seed, David Hackett Fischer described the nature of America's founding cultures in great detail: dissenting Puritans who came from East Anglia to New England; low-church Anglican cavaliers and indentured servants who came from Wessex and Sussex to Virginia and the Carolinas; Quakers who came from the North Midlands to the Delaware Valley; and Presbyterians who came from Ulster and the Scottish-English Borderland to the Appalachian backcountry.
But that was merely the beginning. Fischer has since written a book about America's African founders (which I've not yet read). Russell Shorto has written several books about the influence of the Dutch upon New Amsterdam, which became our greatest city. These early migrations to mainland America have been followed over the centuries by significant influxes from Germany, Sweden, Finland, France, Ireland, Italy, French Canada (both Québec and Acadia), China, Poland, Japan, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines, the many islands of the Caribbean, Vietnam, Mexico, India, Nigeria - the list goes on. No doubt books have been written about each one of these, and it would be fascinating to explore them all.
This gives me the idea of writing a long, Whitmanesque poem - perhaps entitled "Song of the Nations" - celebrating the contributions of people from all over the world to American history and culture. Yet another of my many projects...
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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