Books: My objections to objectivism - on Ayn Rand's the Virtue of Selfishness

this is an essay in response to the book The Virtue of Selfishness by Ayn Rand, Originally I wrote this essay as a book response paper for a graduate school class. Later I posted it to the Metaphoratorium in 1997 where it was indexed by an Objectivist website. It existed at several incarnations of my website, and on the my blogs Puzzled Dragon and ArtsAttic.  Though I admire Rand's novels, and her atheist philosophy, there are a few major points I find problematic.

The foundation of Objectivism as argued in The Virtue of Selfishness, is Ayn Rand’s assessment of “Human” nature. She argues that the essential human quality is logic and that it is this ability which separates us from “the brutes.” Further she argues that human beings must fly solo as individuals and to blend one’s self-interest with that of a group is a self-destructive enterprise tantamount to the abnegation of the self and to death.These foundation premises seem to me to be the most vulnerable part of Ayn Rand's philosophy. If the essence of man is not logic, if for instance, man is a essentially a part of nature, a complicated social animal who reasons when it's convenient, then the parapets of Objectivism tumble. If overlapping our self-interest with that of a group is a part of our essential nature as human beings - then it is the isolated existence which is akin to death - no matter how logical. Can it be coincidental that some researchers cite isolation as a risk factor for heart disease and other ailments?

Altruism - illogical and anti-life?

Rand says ethics must be based on rational self-interest. Values must be chosen by logic alone. Human exchange should not involve self-sacrifice but logic-based value-for-value trading. As a general rule of thumb in life, few would argue with the idea of value-to-value exchange. But Rand decrees it - all or nothing! Any degree self-sacrifice or altruism is condemned repeatedly as anti-life. After waving this red flag and handily setting up her philosophy as uncompromisingly controversial - she later argues that some sacrifice is okay if it is a logical choice. It’s permitted for a man to risk his life to save his wife for she is important to his happiness. It’s okay to give money to a friend for food instead of buying some inconsequential gadget for one’s self. But a man is not permitted an instinctive response nor the luxury of sloppy compassion - this must be a logical decision arrived at by weighing relative values.When it’s suits her, Rand borrows analogies from nature - saying that in nature individuals must provide for themselves as a condition of life. She uses this as an argument why altruism is anti-life. She conveniently fails to note that in nature, groups of individuals sometimes work together and in some species a single breeding pair is tended by the entire group. Such behavior isn’t necessarily in their individual self-interest - but it is in their genes.

Rand steps carefully around the topic of parenthood - particularly motherhood. She makes no reference to the effort necessary to nurture and raise human offspring - an activity that generates lots of self-sacrifice. Judging by this book, a society ruled circumspectly by Rand’s logic would die out in a single generation. Why not just skip kids so nobody’s rational self-interest will be interrupted? In practice, biology and logic wrestle. Just try putting a lonely, logical, Objectivist guy-scientist into a room of desirable, intelligent girl-scientists. “Say, have you read David King’s writings on Objectivism?’’ he might say awkwardly wiping clammy palms on twill. Quite often biology finds in logic a handy tool for its own purposes.

Mysticism - a sign of mental illness? Maybe....

Rand regards the mystic as a most dangerous individual. Mystics act on faith and commit themselves to beliefs for which they have no sensory evidence nor rational proof  I have to admit she has a point here. The danger she finds in mysticism is as an implicit threat to the overall function of the consciousness as the preceptor and integrator of an individual’s reality. Since human consciousness processes sense impressions and integrates them with past experience - inserting a non-sequitor on mere faith might upset the apple cart, Rand says.  This assumes though, that scientists and skeptics are universally logical and operate 100% of the time,in a logical way.  However all human beings have unconscious motives, and inconvenient emotions from  the slippery rat brain.  It's what you do with your brain states, mystical and otherwise, that counts, not just having the odd fit of diffuse warm fuzzes.

Perhaps physicists  felt a little queasy when one of their number announced the existence of the photon == and light’s contradictory existence as both a wave of energy and as a particle of matter. In the long run, tolerating the ambiguity meant a new understanding of matter’s existence as energy. By the same token, religion sheds light on society (not a god light, just a human light). What ever we think of a particular religion, its structure can usually provide a valuable metaphor for understanding its adherents' society - even if ultimately the entire construction is  just another incredible act of human imagination.

Mysticism and altruism seem to have a wide variety of interpretations and applications in the general understanding, but it struck me in reading this book just how much of an “ism” Objectivism is. According to Rand, Objectivism and egoism are not subject to partial practice - it’s all or nothing. She views altruism and mysticism as all-or-nothing propositions as well. However, individual Objectivists do seem to put a high value on freedom, so naturally the on-line content available on the subject seems to indicate there is an orthodox version and several heretical strains. It’s also interesting to note that Rand or her admirers capitalize “Objectivism” much as one might capitalize Catholicism or Buddhism.

The Individual: Man’s Rights

In advocating a free society “its indispensable foundation is the principle of individual rights,” and Capitalism (also capitalized), is the only system that can uphold Individual rights Rand says. The source of these rights she finds not in god or society but in man’s nature - which she sees as specifically as rational rather than emotional, hedonistic, altruistic or mystical. Rights are the link between the moral code of man and the legal code of society. “Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law,” Rand says. In her world, moral law is to be deduced according to “human” AKA “logical” values.

The foremost rights that Rand ascribes to man are: the right to his own life, the right to own property, (if he earns it ), and the right to free trade. She see no “right” to a job, a roof, a fair wage, a fair price, an education, milk , shoes, etc., and no special rights for the old the young or the unborn. “Those who favor laissez-faire capitalism are the only advocates of man’s rights.” “Without property rights, no other rights are possible.”

Rand also argues that the rights of rational men would never clash, never incite conflict insoluble by rational means. This of course presupposes that men in general are essentially rational and function rationally in a conflict. This implies that logic always arrives at the same conclusion given the same set of facts. However, as Rand notes, facts are perceived and integrated with past experiences by the consciousness which ascribes connotative weight to each scrap of knowledge based on its past relevance to that individual. This integrative function is a personal spin-doctor for incoming sense impressions and information - a pattern -matching survival routine which checks current conditions against past conditions of danger or benefit.

Varied public reaction to the possibility of a racist police conspiracy during the O.J.Simpson trial is a perfect example of conflict that can not be resolved with logic. Because the facts were integrated with experience, the conclusions differed. Even without the connotative properties of language, the integrative functions of consciousness and the linear presentation of facts within a time context insure that no set of facts is ever communicated or percieved in an entirely objective manner.

Society: Collectivized Rights and the Role of Government
“A government is an institution that holds the exclusive power to enforce certain rules of social conduct in a given geographical area,’’ Rand says. Coercion is the sole province of the state and is reserved for criminals. In an ideal world government would be financed by voluntary contributions. (Of course in an ideal world, where all men were rational men and never had conflict they couldn’t reason out, government wouldn’t be needed at all.) Rand concedes that isn’t workable now.

“The use of physical force - even its retaliatory use - can not be left to individual citizens,” she writes. However according to Rand the doctrine of collective rights rests on mysticism and harks back to “the divine right of kings.” The rights of the group in a free society must be derived by contractual agreement, she says. Just as men can evade reality so can society, Rand says. She views any requirements of society as a whole as a “switch of the concept of the rights from the individual to the collective - which means: the replacement of the Rights of Man by the Rights of the Mob.” She feels that any notion of collectivized rights implies “that some men have the right to dispose of others in any manner please., and that the criterion for such privileged condition consists of numerical superiority.”

One notion, (which sounds quite palatable to me), is that individual rights must be placed outside the reach of public authorities so that “the lives and property of minorities or dissenters are not at stake, are not subject to vote and are not endangered by any majority decision; no man or group holds a blank check on power over others .” I hope that means that Objectivists can’t round up practitioners of illogic and force them to read Rand’s rants.

Violence, logic and the violence of logic
Though she repeatedly decrys violence, Rand holds that dictatorships and totalitarian regimes are outlaw nations which free nations have every right to invade! She says liberals stand in the way of this by conveniently advocating the idea of national sovereignty or national self determination when just as often they want to dissolve national boundaries and make “one world.” By advocating “national rights,” Rand rants that liberals are helping to spread dictatorships “like a skin disease, over the whole surface of the globe.” “Observe the double standard: while, in the civilized countries of the West the Liberals are still advocating internationalism and global self-sacrifice - the savage tribes of Asia and Africa are granted the sovereign ‘right’ to slaughter one another in racial warfare,” she says.

In the future of nations, as thronging numbers and faster communication shrink the globe until it pinches - I wonder, to what degree will groups be free to do violence to each other on principle? Or will violence be encouraged as population control by default?

Now, if two neighbors each had a Doberman and bloody conflicts ensued along the property line, separating the dogs would be an option - but allowing them to fight to the death would not. We’d consider it cruel. We’d consider the dogs too valuable to waste. Yet if the animals were not owned, if they were free and wild no one would step in to separate them. So are we domestic or wild animals when we fight? What if each side believes it is acting it its own rational self-interest, responding to the previous use of force by the other side?

Since Rand thinks it’s okay to invade - maybe we could just slip something into the water instead. Should it be a logic supplement or a just extra seratonin?

Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time

Although I've always thought of Marge Piercy, the author of Woman on the Edge of Time,  as a poet -  she is also a novelist.  This particular book is an odd and interesting novel which came out in 1976, one of a half dozen novels she wrote. According to Wikipedia it's "considered a classic of utopian "speculative" science fiction as well as a feminist classic."  (I picked this up this classic at Newtown's annual blow-out used book sale. It's a great sale!)

Woman on the Edge of Time is sort of a sci-fi tapestry woven with intricate anthropological/futurist twists, inner-landscape psychological-chatmeup, environmental philosophy and humanity.  It's not a quick read but I liked the heroine Consuelo, and felt compelled to keep reading.

Much of the plot occurs in some bleak present time in an insane asylum where regard for human rights is not in evidence and the abuse of the powerless by those with sometimes only a crumb more power, is rampant.  The other half  unfolds in fits and starts in a egalitarian argraian New England village in the far future where men and women are equals and balance in all things is important.

And it is a book that requires thinking as some aspects of the plot are not particularly obvious until you ponder them in retrospect. It's ending was not was I supposed.

And in the end it's hard to tell what really happened.  Did Consuelo save the future with her violent eposode in the present?  Was she railroaded by the power structure of patriarchy or was she really crazy?  I was also left wondering if Piercy meant to say that the end justifies the means.  Was it the 60s declaring war on what came before and perhaps what came after?

 Each reader must decide for themselves.
Woman on the Edige of Time at Google Books
Woman on the Edge of Time - Wikipedia
Woman on the Edge of Time - Amazon

Inverse Origami (1998) now on Google

My very first chapbook (from 1998),  Inverse Origami - the art of unfolding is now available for reading though Google Books....   If you visit its page on books.google.com/  you can download a pdf file of the book via a dropdown menu on the upper right. Or you can view a full text preview on this page by either scrolling down, or clicking the arrows, or jumping to the table of contents and clicking on each poem title. Very cool, Google!!!

I started this process around Xmas of last year - sent off the package and documentation, and never heard anymore about it. Just this week, it came online!  I sent the physical book in to be scanned as the publication's original MS Publisher file predated Windows XP, and was so antiquated as to be unopenable.  Though I have second thoughts about the 2012 cover and front matter, the rest is reasonably presentable for something captured in an automated scan.

  I also have also discovered I can make a ebook pdf on Google docs. So more books are coming.  Hurray!

BOOKS: The Last Place on Earth - a historical study in character

Need an amazing nature adventure? A character-driven drama?  Roland Huntford's mesmerizing "The Last Place on Earth." is for you. I know the genre on the back cover says history. Nonetheless  it kept me up late into the night several times. It's not a cliff hanger. But it is a fascinating dissection.

In 1910-11 Roald Amundsen, a Norwegian,  and Robert Scott, a Brit, each led an extended expedition across Antarctica hoping to be the first to reach the South Pole and return. This book is a gripping, meticulously-researched  narrative that contrasts the two men, their characters, methods, values, preparation and leadership styles, and finally their relation to their country's differing cultures.

Amundsen got to the pole weeks ahead of Scott and lost not a man. Scott's poor planing and failure to learn. listen and prepare cost five lives including his own.  Instead of an investigation into how such a lackadaisical administrator, poor planner, vain publicity hound could have been entrusted with so many lives as they entered a dangerous environment - he was venerated as a national hero whose victory was "stolen" by Amundsen.  Talk about spin. Read this book. You might never again trust what you think is a cultural given. You might never trust a "hero" again.

This past December marked 100 years since Amundsen arrived at the South Pole.

There is apparently a whole six hour  epic mini-series  based on this book. It takes up 3 DVDs and has Martin Shaw as Scott and Sverre Anker Ousdal as Amundsen. Might have to see that now....

Coming home - for some it's not easy or simple

 from the archives of the Puzzled Dragon:

 

Tim O'Brien's book, The Things They Carried 

A few years ago in October was a series of  local events on the book, as a part of  the "One Book, One Community" series including a visit by Tim O'Brien.  That's why I've reposted this bit - I have changed my blog name several times since posting it originally.

DEATH AND THE FUNHOUSE MIRROR

To clearly see ourselves whole, stripped of the polite social mask, is at once privilege and nightmare. Tim O'Brien's self-reflexive novel The Things They Carried offers a soldier's view of the Vietnam War, but also a view of how a man's socially sanitized vision of himself can break down during war.  More than this, O'Brien takes readers on side trips, where they can feel a portion of what he felt, where they can envision their own disintegration.

After describing in a dozen different categories the things they carried with them, O'Brien the author tells us this:

"For the most part they carried themselves with poise, a kind of dignity. Now and then however, there were times of panic..... when they twitched and made moaning sounds and covered their heads and said Dear Jesus and flopped around on the earth and fired their weapons blindly..... In different ways it happened to them all."

It is a rare thing for me to fall speechless after reading a novel. Some of this novel is like Lock-tight and stays around when it is no longer convenient to remember. For instance the passage where the medic in grief and rage shoots a baby water buffalo to death one small divot of flesh at a time making sure that it is alive and suffering.  Or the repeated references to the Lemon tree, the light and the explosion, the clean-up.... Despite the amazingly different content, this book bears a great structural resemblance to Gertrude Stein's Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Like Stein's book, it discusses itself to death, one chapter discussing how the previous chapter was written, discussing if any of it is really true.  The book also uses Stein's device of the endlessly repeating iterations of cubism. Many scenes first appear in a slice, then in part, reveal just a little more, then the full version then recede, but never completely.... This cycling structure, Stein's "little waves"  lapping, lends itself to the material in that it mimics the soldier's inability to let go of the experience of combat in Vietnam, just as O'Brien the writer could never let go of it.  It also mimics the reoccurring nightmares of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome and the mind's inability to let go of this self-disintegrating experience. This whole structure is  echoed in the chapter "Speaking of Courage" where Norman Bowler drives around and around the lake after returning from the war, unable to stop driving or thinking about the shit field by the river and Kiowa drowning and Bowler's failure to rescue him. Then in the next chapter we discover maybe it was O'Brien the writer who let Kiowa disappear in the muck. Maybe it was true, maybe it was a story. How Steinian. One of the oddest chapters is "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong." In this chapter O'Brien the writer effectively shows an aspect of war rarely discussed with non-combat veterans: that for some soldiers nothing in life will ever be as physically thrilling and challenging (nor as traumatizing) as survival, will never involve as much of their instincts, not as civilized beings but as cunning animals, tribe members, ritualistic hunters.  This is usually only hinted at in much war literature. By couching it in a double fiction, showing the transformation as a fable that supposedly happened to a women in a pink sweater, O'Brien both externalizes this transformation and at the same time, frames how easily, how steadily civilizations slips away from even the most innocent and loving.

--- M.M. (Mar) Walker author of Inverse Origami - the art of unfolding, editor and writer at the  Puzzled Dragon and former editor of Bent Pin Quarterly originally written in November of 2003 .
Previously  posted on all my variously named blogs, puzzleddragon, MMW113, etc etc etc

Books: A Moveable Feast by Earnest Hemmingway

Seared carp with butter and brandy

If Earnest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast is about surface, then the surface in question would surely be a well-appointed dinner table. While obsessing in detail over the delights of Parisian food and liquor, Hemingway casually carves up both friends and acquaintances. They are just another course, really, in this buffet view of life in Paris.  However, like the smooth surface of soup in a tureen, this work's pleasant reflectivity conceals a few lumps. Hemingway uses careful manipulation to make readers think well of Hemingway even while he is poking at other writers. He skillfully brags about his own character in the manner of a good novelist, by showing rather than telling. He shows us, by his own example that what writers say is not to be trusted, nor taken at face value, that surface does not equal truth.

Hemingway spends some 16 pages openly skewering Gertrude Stein. He says her companion was frightening, that Stein was badly dressed, that she craved public recognition for her work but couldn't be bothered revising it, that she was repetitious and lazy, that she prattled endlessly, that she badmouthed any writer who had not already spoken well of her work, that she was so competitive she should couldn't bear to hear about acclaimed writers, that she was an egoist, that she resorted to “dirty easy labels” for others.  After thus dispatching “Miss Stein” handily, Hemingway tries to leave the reader with a good impression of himself. The chapter ends as he spends a part of a very long sentence recalling a speech she had made defending one of the painters. After trashing her for 16 pages, he vows to “serve her and see she gets justice for the good work she has done." Then Hemingway quotes himself in a conversation with his wife: “You know, Gertude is nice, anyway,” he says.  Gee, what a magnanimous, forgiving, always-fair kinda guy.

In the chapter “Shakespeare and Company” Hemingway presents himself as someone who craves books, yet who has enough integrity that he would worry about getting right back that afternoon to pay. In the chapter “Hunger was Good Discipline” he shows us Hemingway, a  man who never complains and who would rather learn the benefits of hunger than borrow money, even to eat. Of course  later on, we see  that in truth he is a betting man, one who would take money he'd collected for charity purposes to help a fellow writer, and lose it betting on crooked races.

He uses the same strategy with regard to marital fidelity. He presents himself as Hemingway the loving husband in several stories. In one, the painter Pacin offers him one of his beautiful models. “Do you want to bang her?” he asks, “She needs it” but dear good Hemingway goes home to his “legitime." Yet, towards the end of the book he offhandedly talks for a page about how complicated it is to have a mistress and a wife.

He implies that he is a trusting man and a gentleman in the chapter on “Ford Madox Ford and the Devil's Disciple.”  Hemingway shows himself inwardly irritated and disgusted with Ford, yet outwardly polite through Ford's “cutting” of Hilaire Belloc, and the long discussion of who is a gentleman. Though Ford insists Hemingway would only possibly be considered a gentleman in Italy, in the end we see he is a propagator of falsities, and has passed off the devil's disciple as a poet.  Hemingway humbly apologizes for passing on this misinformation to someone else. Maybe he is a gentleman after, all a reader might conclude.

Hemingway's Paris memoir was his lush answer to Stein's oddly stark and chatty book, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas which tells everything and shows little.  While his work is ostensibly a memoir, it is interesting to note that the following disclaimer appears on the copyright page of the Touchstone edition of A Moveable Feast “This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.”  Both works skip across the surface of life in Paris like stones across the Seine.  Both feature multiple episodes of dining, of leaving and returning to Paris, of things not said.

However, any writer almost always has a reason for including a vignette about the main character. Hemingway is a clever man and a skilled storyteller who is essentially telling his story his way. He knows very well that things stated plainly are not nearly as memorable things deduced from stories and dialog. This is the pattern in A Moveable Feast. He openly makes unfriendly judgments about other writers, but stays the likable protagonist by imbuing himself with noble qualities implied through action and dialog. When joining Hemingway's moveable feast, - let “Tatie” pick the restaurant; you can trust him to order something delicious, but be sure - with Tatie and every writer - to examine the subtext with a skeptical eye.

- Mar Walker

written 12 October 2003

Healthcare thoughts and a book: The Treatment Trap

Sometimes an office visit for a medical complaint seems more like a marriage than a date.  You not only get  your doctor, but all the relatives - a flock of specialists to look after each body part separately.

I have watched strange goings on as a patient advocate for an elder relative for the last ten years. A kidney is atrophied, for instance, according to some test or other by one kidney doctor, then a stent is put in by a sub-specialist kidney doc who does stents, then immediattely there is a question as to which kidney was damaged, as both appear to be fine....

Or when in the hospital for a fall, the hospitalist says they are going to send a neurologist to evaluate her, and also a specialist to look at her sinuses since the scans of her head revealeved a tiny polyp that might be causing post nasal drip. BUT THE PATIENT HAS ALREADY BEEN FULLY EVALUATED and is under treatment by a NEUROLOGIST associated with that hospital.  She doesn't  care about her perennial post nasal drip and wants to go home. She is stable,  and IS SHARING A ROOM WITH SOMEONE INFECTIOUS.  So MRS X -  How about another CAT Scan or maybe we need another MRI, or five more specialists to consult on your case - If you have good insurance - they have some tests they would like to run..... Never mind that post nasal drip isn't exactly something to make you check into a hospital.

Did I mention that these days seniors go to a doctor for each part of their bodies? Besides her primary Doc, my relative has a doctor for her heart, one for her arteries, one for her kidneys, one for the colon, one for her nerves and another for her thyroid. Then several of them want to see her four times a year which always involves looking at the papers and having a chat. No hands on at all. SO Why not do the blood work and let the primary care guy decide if she needs to see them? No fee in that....

For more of the same foolishness and some outright larceny from all across the country - read the The Treatment Trap -  a book by Rosemary Gibson and Janardan Prasad Singh. It's available at the Danbury Library.  It's a sobering read.

BOOKS: The Road To Wellville by T.C. Boyle

don't rock the boat, fish quietly while it sinks

fanatics, followers & blind  belief

Pompous quacks, big business chicanery, na'r-do-well sons, accidental electrocution, nudist picnics, infidelity, arson and the unrepentant human willingness to believe, no matter what - The Road To Wellville T.C. Boyle's hysterical historical fiction work has it all.

On The Road To Wellville, it is not only the characters but also the reader who must sustain a “suspension of disbelief,”  in order to continue page to page, enjoying this wild and crazy saga - all the more unbelievable because it is based in a true story.  Major characters and a number of minor ones are all being duped by someone. And they are complicit in the deception. Ask any con man, the mark wants to believe. And when someone offers us a path to good health - we want to believe that too - to hell with the evidence. (Otherwise no one would be selling homeopathic remedies these days.)

In fact, -- the road to human well-being is most certainly not found on the road to “The San”  the Sanatorium in Battle Creek.  – it's the Kalamazoo  Road that the emergent and unlikely hero Will Lightbody impatiently traverses to finally take action, to stand up for himself, his wants and his wife - that is the road to heath and sanity.

As his name would suggest Mr. Will Lightbody, Eleanor's “gawk” of a husband, is a lightweight in the will department, choosing repeatedly to ignore things that would send most sane folks running for safety or at least for to the phone to call a good litigator.  Mr. Lightbody allows himself to be ignored and put off by his wife, literally starved and cowed by Dr. Kellog and his variously persuasive nurses, despite the mounting list of mishaps.  After a truely bizarre electrocution scene in the sinusoidal baths, Lightbody immediately forgets his own courageous action in saving Alfred Woodbine the attendant.  His own quick thinking and courage are set aside, and the whole event  frightens him enough to inspire a drinking bout and a meat-eating rebellion.  Yet, even after pointedly rubbing Dr. Kellogg's nose in the messy fact of Praetz's death, Lightbody still, unbelievably, allows this self-righteous socialite quack to send him for an indefinite punitive mechanical enema:

"A blister, swelling and swelling till it bursts – that was Dr. Kellogg. He was blind, he was deaf, he was a god on a cloud: the name of Homer Praetz had never been uttered. Such impudence didn't merit  responses.[...] “put him [Will Lightbody] on the enema machine until further notice.” 

A little later Lightbody lets Kellogg send him under the knife - intestinal surgery to remove an imaginary “Kellogg's Kink” !

Yet no one, including the great doctor Kellogg is immune to the need to believe the improbable. He never once suspects that his son George burned the  first Sanatorium building years earlier, and he immediately has faith in glowing scientific reports of radium, (never mind if a patient or two keels over), and he believes his own overblown public reputation. He is also duped by fellow vegetarian fanatic Badger and The Manipulative Therapy doctor as are quite a number of satisfied women, including Eleanor Lightbody.

Besides The Manipulative Therapy nudist picnic, one of the most interesting sideshows is George Kellogg, the filthy, drunken adopted son, the “err”' apparent. He is the salient inconvenient consequence of “Dr. Vegetable's” actions and philosophy. George, the ugly underside of the “Dr. Anus” is the potential terminus of some rather lucrative illusions.  Supposedly the bad seed, his need for, and to torment the Doctor is acute; the essential quality of their relation is blame rather than deception.

George's opposite is the aspiring Charlie Ossining, son of the gatekeeper, taken in by the wealthy Mrs. Hookstratten.  He wants so desperately to be an entrepreneur that he is duped endlessly by Bender despite  an incredible array of evidence that the man is a shark. Bender dupes Ossining into duping Mrs. Hookstratten and Will Lightbody.

Yet in the end, Ossining persists and eventually succeeds in business. His wealthy Auntie Amaelia Hookstratten was after all, a reality “hook” for straitening out the young Ossining. Her prodigy, though estranged, finally succeeds and makes the perfect tonic. George, (Kellog Jr.) the perfect ingrown hair does not.

The last meeting between Dr. Kellogg and G. Kellogg Jr - with fire, white wolf, chimp, torn clothing, insults and  bottled excrement unleashed - is pure slapstick melodrama. No wonder they made a movie out of it. George's death is also the perfect METAPHOR for what the Dr. is doing to his patients: drowning them in stinking, slippery fanatic unfounded so-called-truth. They, like George could have escaped, but they prefer  blind belief  to figuring it all out for themselves.

--- M.M. (Mar) Walker
author of Inverse Origami - the art of unfolding,
editor and writer at The Metaphor.atorium
and former editor of Bent Pin Quarterly.
originally written in November of 2003

Books: The Adderall Diaries, Stephen Elliott in Bethel, CT

Friday the 13th, 2009.
   Stephen Elliott, author of The Adderall Diaries, is reserved, a compact man with interesting tattoos and a slightly tenorish voice - a man easy to picture as a masochist. He read his clean, brisk prose last night in puffy suburban Bethel CT (at Molten Java at 102  Greenwood), with a quiet voice as  even as the surface of his narrative.
questions:

   He read three sections in all, fairly conservative sections of the book, and took questions after each. The audience seemed very interested in the memory aspect of "memoir."  Elliott said his some of it was taken from writing done as journalling at the time the events were occurring, so the details were not drawn from distant memory nor imagined after the fact,  but were written down fresh from the experience itself. He said he'd done of lot of editing and that the writing in its present form was many steps away from the first writing.
   The audience also asked how difficult it was to do the the kind of extensive self-revelation that The Adderall Diaries contain. Elliott said that getting used to revealing your secrets was a gradual thing, and that he'd previously written several novels where he used material from his life. He compared the process  to a transvestite's coming out. First, Elliott said, the man puts on a dress when he's home alone. Then, after a while, he puts it on and wears it out for a quick trip to the store.  A few months latter, he's out dancing in it, and can hardly remember when just putting it on was a big deal.

odd fly buzzes in the ointment:

     Elliott's  reading was interrupted in the middle by the owner of the neighboring bookstore (at 104 Greenwood Ave). (The bookstore folks own the building where the coffeehouse and the bookstore are located.) She'd been sitting in the back, waiting for him to mention books for sale.
   She interrupted to announce officiously that there would be no book sales, as Molten Java's lease had a non-competition clause with the bookstore.  Of course Molten wasn't selling the books, the author was.  For her part, she had no copies of his book to sell in her store.  So it seems her only object was to thwart the income of one author selling directly to his public, and to piss off people who had formerly been her customers.
    After a final section of prose was read, the company left the coffeeshop and went to the pizza parlor across the street where we ordered pizza, and drinks, talked and many of us bought a book directly from the author. Art will out, landlords notwithstanding.

-- Mar Walker

Gertrude Stein: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

A Cubist Memoir

 A response to Gertrude Stein's book "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas"

Gertrude Stein is a cubist name dropper! After introducing herself to readers as one of only three true geniuses in her acquaintance, she, as Alice B. Toklas, drops the name Gertrude Stein one to fives times on nearly all of the 252 pages in the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. While it is autobiographical, it is most certainly not about Alice B. Toklas, who 'sits with the wives of geniuses.' Instead it is Stein's own extremely self-reflexive cubist memoir which comments on itself, calls attention to its own materials and production processes, is obsessed with surface, is cyclic rather than linear and offers simultaneous views over time of both its own structure and its autobiographical vignettes. A genus? Yes, indeed.

As Stein clearly states, she is interested in surface versus interior, the outside of things as differing from the inside.  "She always was, she always is, tormented by the problem of the external and the internal," she says of herself on page 119. So with a wink, she writes, with the name and voice of her companion, her own story, dotes on herself as her lover and companion would and tabulates her own talent's progress in the voice of her mate.

Besides surfaces of name, there is also the narrative's surface - what was done and what was said, told with "the refusal of the use of the subconscious," and without emotiveness.  In this way she allows readers to make intellectual conclusions about the emotional nature of the narrative rather than offering a directed vicarious experience of it, so that experience of her life in print is essentially intellectual and analytical rather than emotional. Of writing this way she says "...that listening to the rhythm of his (the dog's) water-drinking made her recognize the difference between sentences and paragraphs, that paragraphs are emotional and the sentences are not."  --- In order for this to be so, one must detach from immediately experienceable emotion in any one sentence, so that the emotion becomes apparent only after the whole of the paragraph is perceived in the mind.

Stein's narrative is not linear but cyclic and gives one the feeling of moving ahead and at the same time going back. Stein was a friend of Picasso and Juan Gris and notes Marcel Ducamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase: on page 113.  It was not surprising to see it mentioned, as it had already come to mind by the second or third time the dinner where the painters sat opposite their paintings was described. This odd familiarity caused a hasty look back to see if I'd lost my place and was rereading the same paragraphs. The same thing happened in other places: the incident where Maitisse gets fried eggs rather than an omelet, the description of William Cook driving a taxi and of Gertrude Stein driving a car for the American Fund for the French Wounded, and the many returns to Paris. Each mention seemed familiar, out just a little off from the last time, with sometimes more and sometimes less of the incident visible, like one of the iterations of the figure's limbs as it descends the stars and seems to move, in Ducamp's painting.

Stein hints at her fascination with lulling repetition and the glint of surface: "It was this summer that Gertrude Stein, delighting int he movement of the  tiny waves on the Antibes shore, wrote the Completed Portrait of Picasso."  In the end, the tide of surfaces recedes and leaves a bit of truth dry on the shore. Stein admits many had badgered her to write an autobiography. In turn she badgered Alice B. Toklas to write one instead.

"About six weeks ago Gertrude Stein said, it does not look to me as if you were ever going to write that autobiography. You know what I am going to do. I am going to write it for you. I am going to write it as simply as Defoe did the autobiography of Robinson Crusoe. And she has and this is it." (pg. 252)

 Of course, like Defoe's work, it is about a stranded traveler and his companion. Yet it is about quite another thing than it purports to be and it glides along tongue in cheek, a surface cleverly concealing and revealing simultaneously.

--- Mad Mar Walker

Original date: Sept. 2003

James Moffett: The Universal SchoolHouse

What is the role of education in society? James Moffett addresses this question in his controversial book  The Universal SchoolHouse in which he proposes the abolition of compulsory education in the United States. This book created a stir when it came out back in 1994 and is now out of print.  You can still get a copy on bay, alibis, at amazon etc.

Mr. Moffett's proposals are innovative and represent the kind of "out-of-the-box" thinking he hopes would be engendered by an ideal education; but there are many pragmatic and philosophical matters that will prevent any widespread embrace of his proposals.

In the opening paragraphs he begins his assault on the status quo with a handful of assertions and assumptions:

• 1) Compulsory education is the antithesis of the democratic ideal of freedom and should be abolished.
• 2) Education is currently delivered via "agents of the state" and is somehow sinister and repressive.
• 3) The production of an educated workforce for the maintenance of commercial venture is a less than lofty goal.
• 4) Standardization through a common curriculum is in no way to be desired in public education because it will have a detrimental effect on future citizens by stamping out the capacity for diverse thinking, which might be considered a survival contingency for that society as a whole.   
• 5) Current educational practices will in only a few decade, be considered primitive, obsolete.

Compulsory education verses freedom for minors

    If compulsory education were suddenly abolished in the United States as is advocated by Mr. Moffett, its chief result would be not be freedom from restriction and standardization.  Its end would be freedom from knowledge for a large portion of the next generation. Without compulsory education, future citizens would be free indeed - free to be as blissfully ignorant as their parents would allow.

    In fact his proposal would result in completely disenfranchising those who are already least likely to get a good education from the current system. For parents with resources and a commitment to educate their children, home schooling or private schooling would be options. For their children, little would change. But children of parents without either time, concern or finances would have six or seven extra hours a day to soak in all the rebellious angst they could get from a peer culture largely created by inherently avaricious corporate enterprise in the media of television, movies, music, and music videos. This diet of sexuality and spleen could be supplemented with intellectual excursions into the whinny politics of victimhood, via "talk radio," and a certain strain of performance oriented poetry where being a victim is rewarded by a higher score - and also by the undocumented web sites of various Internet pundits (like me) whose notion of the term "credentials" stops with a photo ID drivers license.

Agents of the state or flotsam on the tide?

    Really, I cannot see teachers as agents of the state as Mr. Moffett implies. I could easily see them as a too-willing professional in-group committed to the current prevailing fashion in "educational" thought and further influenced by the goals of local parent-teacher organization. Sometimes teachers seem to inadvertently indoctrinate students with the prevailing popular "ism" of the day as if it were a verifiable scientific fact or a moral imperative. The approach sometimes seems to be one of "mission" rather than inquiry.

    The possibility of diverse thinking and originally on the part of teachers is hampered, partly by curriculum but also by the need for a sanitized "political correctness" in the face of bullying, lawyer-brandishing parents and school boards.  If teachers are agents of the state they are somewhat hogged-tied lot.  They do remarkable work despite impossible demands for documenting paperwork and endless blame heaped on them by parents - some of whom regard the public school system as a convenient baby-sitting service, and an demands for homework as an imposition. While I agree that this arrangement is repressive and perhaps sinister, the "state" is not the only culprit.


Goal - the educated worker or the well-read lay-about?

    What exactly is wrong with educating with an eye to the needs of business as long as that is not the only consideration?  Everyone needs to earn a living or generate capital in some way or other. After all, if we all planned to spend our welfare money on Heidinger and Prost - who'd pay taxes to support us?

    The ideal of a free democracy and of an informed, involved citizenry originated in the Greek city-states. There, the well-rounded citizen was quite free indeed to develop his intellectual capacities as a sort of intellectual parasite - supported as he was by an enormous population of slaves.

    We do not however, live in a pure direct democracy like a  Greek polis. We live in a representative democracy with a capitalist economic system.  Is an educational system to serve the development of individual alone?  Does it not serve the society as a whole?  When teachers are in demand, do universities rally to produce them? When engineers are scarce - is it wrong to find that programs to encourage an interest in science and math pop up suddenly at the elementary school level?

    I expect that somewhere later in Mr. Moffett's book, I will find more references to the spiritual development of the individual in order to provide the most contingent value to the society as a whole. And that society's economy does not run on educated sincerity alone. Avaricious enterprise loathed and maligned by many, (including me), has an important place. Without it economies fail.  If it need s workers who can read and write good English, perform basic math and who actually show up for work when they say they will - are these capacities so at odds with freedom or "spiritual" development? Freedom from what? Self-discipline?

In this economic climate - it's a lot easier to see that those sometimes onerous jobs, now notable by their absence, do contribute something. But a versatile, self-empowered individual educated for change rather than a magic disappearing career at Bear Sterns, (may it rest in peace)  might weather the economic storm and find meaning in something other than a job. Hmmm.


Melting pot or soup pot...

    Mr. Moffett seems to feel that standardization through a common curriculum is in no way to be desired in a public education. He asserts that it has a detrimental effect on future citizens by stamping out the capacity for diverse thinking, which might be considered a survival contingency for that society as a whole.

    Yet common instruction in no way guarantees a common outcome. One assignment generates as many odd lines of thinking as there are students. Common material does not guarantee common conclusions.

    It is true that a healthy, viable capitalist democracy requires both structure and freedom. It wants order and knowledge as vital underpinnings to generative chaos. Where does a society's general, common knowledge come from?  Where do we get our ideas about what behavior is acceptable when we are not at home? In this era of fragmenting demographics, where there will be no majority only substantial, multiple minorities where commonalties of culture, language, ethnicity, religion, deportment, attitude, intention and assumption can not be assumed; where do we learn how to act? School? Church? Music Videos?

What exactly will hold us together as a society if a common core of learning and experience is no longer provided by the public school system?  In reality media sources in television and video games now provide part of that core. Watch cartoons with a child. There is a lot of moralizing and moral framework set out in cartoons. Yet without schools we'd have an over abundance of superhero myth and too little of practical day to day life experience inherent in the daily discipline of homework.

    When considering the merits of compulsory education for such a society, in fact for any society; a balance must be sought between the need for an educational core that lends itself to societal cohesion on the one hand and freedom for individuals on the other. Both are needed.


A note on the likelihood of systemic change

    Unlike Mr. Moffett, I doubt that much will have changed in structure of our public educational system in the next couple of decades. In fact it has been two decades since his book first came out. It's more of the same in public education. Our system features a multi-layered structure of authority which is  incredibly resistant to the kind of sweeping changes Mr. Moffett envisions. 

    On a unit by unit basis, each of thousands of school systems across the country is a purely local phenomenon governed by a locally elected school board. Naturally local boards are steeped in prevailing local politics. These boards are held in check by squabbling voters. Just try changing your school's sex education policy to see this effect in action.  School boards are also notoriously jealous of their power, and are quite unlikely to vote themselves out of existence

    In addition to local forces of inertia, there are state and federal mandates and funding incentives, all of which require reams of documenting paperwork. These are beyond the per-view of local boards to repeal. Indeed, these sometimes overbearing demands for local spending were not crafted by a single mind for a single purpose. They represent a haphazard crazy-quilt of educational policy, sewn together item by item, by congressmen and senators in a series of unwieldy political deals. Undoing any of these mandates is an equally arduous process.

    Finally, besides the local governance, the state and federal regulations and funding incentives - there are the national teachers unions, which are well financed and armed with attorneys.  Often it seems that the positions taken by large unions have more to do with the union's need to maintain its power, than with the philosophical visons of its more forward-thinking reformers.

-- Mar Walker

15 Books that stayed with me over the years

• The Greek Way (Hamilton) I read this in high school, and it gave me the crazy idea that I should try different things. (Try reading my resume...) The ancient Greeks believed in the well-rounded man who could recite a poem, play the lyre, make a speech, etc etc etc according to Hamilton. Jack of all trades master of none, oh well....
• The True Believer (Eric HOFFER) I read this book right after I dropped out of born-againism around 1972. I think it made me wary of other fanatical things I might have fallen into....
• Utopia Minus X (Rex Gordon) Science Fiction, and now out of print - people are codified and some people are classed X because they don't fit. Hmmm . Classifiable folks get to live in Utopia, the oddballs get launched out into space....
• The Adogmatic State (Apostolos N Depastas) This one also reenforced the dangers of dogmatsm in a cultural sense rather than a personal one.
• Working (Terkel) I didn't read this until later in my job-hopping life. Too bad. What a great project.
• Times Arrow (Martin Amis) In this book, time runs backwards which is the only way the life of a Dr. Mengela makes any sense - he takes the dead, broken or tortured and turns them back into whole human beings.
• The Road to Wellville (TC Boyle) OMG. This is the funniest book and makes you not want to take any claim at face value. Oh for a good colonic... haha
• Does Poetry Matter? (edited by ?) This book is a series of essays by different people on the meaning and function of poetry. And yes it does too matter!
• Leaves of Grass (Walt Whitman) Whitman goes with Turkel's Working somehow. Leaves of Grass is a celebration of the everyman...
• Why I am not a Christian (Russell) Two other books on this line that influenced me were The American Religion, (Harold Bloom) and the Lucifer Principal (Howard Bloom)
• Mount Annalouge (by Rene Dumal) Hmm. Holding the incongruous and eccentric, striving for metaphorical heights, but helping on the way up and down.
• Owning Your Own Shadow (by somebody johnson) At some point in your life, you might find that this slim volume is worth a library of self help books. A novel I read around that time was The Man Who Would be Thursday by Chesterton? which featured the idea of a doppleganger
• Pale Fire (by Nabakov) This is the first book I had read where the narrator cannot be trusted to tell you the truth. But you don't realize this at first. Slowly it dawns on you that the narrator is fabricating.
• Einstein's Dreams (by Alan Lightman) ...a series of vignettes portraying different imagined mechanisms of time and their effect on a town or a few individuals -- written in a clean yet lyrical way.
• Labinrynth (by Louis Borges) A collection of his short odd works. The Garden of Many Paths. etc My dog orginally chewed up seven of my hats, then abruptlly switched and pulled this book out of the book shelf and chewed it to shreds. I was so upset I bought a crate and crate trained her....)
• On Writing Well (Zinsser) This guy's advice can enable you to trim Doughboy prose into a jaguar..... Other than the inestimable Jack Sanders, I can't think of anything that has changed my writing more. Hmm - a reread may be in order.

-- Mar Walker

The Beinecke Library: treasure under glass

This past week, on Thursday and Friday (3/14-15/08) I attended a conference "Metaphor Taking Shape," which was arranged by The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale in New Haven .

The library building itself was one of the high points for me. (I have addressed the conference itself in another post....) The Beinecke features an interior core of books many floors high behind an inner glass cube. In the right hand photo, you can see one of several inviting leather couches on the library's mezzanine. Behind it is the glass cube with rows of bookcases and books with spines facing out, creating a stunning visual. There is a walkway on each tier so the books on the exterior shelves can be accessed. The large photo  above has an oddly tipsy view and it features the lovely repetition of squares in the building design. You can also see the building's luminous marble side panels, the square forms on the ceiling as well as the glassed book cube. The angle is odd, even dis-orienting I admit, but it's still somehow pleasing to my eye.

To the right is a better view of the luminous marble which on a cloudy day is as grey as the sky. From the exterior, the building is beautiful in its symmetry, but the interior is still the most spectacular view. The design specifically shelters and protects the Beinecke's book collection from damaging sun.

I snapped these shots on Saturday - the ides of March (haha) when a few of the Shijin took a little tour of the library's exhibits and some other New Haven spots. While my friends were pondering the book-show for the conference, I got out my camera. (It's surprising the many delicate places you can take photos as long as no flash is used. I also took a few in the Yale Museum of Art. I asked in both places.) I should note that I use a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ7 . It takes six meg pics and is obsolete according to Circuit City. However, it has a Leica glass lens which takes marvelously readable pictures in low light conditions -- perhaps not the kind of photos a real photographer takes - but adequate for my purposes.

-- Mar Walker

Metaphor taking shape - images for poetry and text

On March 13 & 14th, The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale in New Haven put on a conference called "Metaphor Taking Shape. Incredibly this conference was offered free to participants. The topic was the marriage of image and text, particularly poetic texts. Now here was a true bargain, one I was not able to resist!

The conference gave as fair a glimpse as a day and a half would allow into the way images and text have been married over the years. Various theoretic aspects of combining word and image were discussed. Current practice was touched on through a roster of panelists (imported from California to Ireland) who make/publish (or critique) artist books or art in collaboration with poets. The Beinecke Library fleshed out the subject with a simultaneous exhibit of rare books that fit the bill, both current and historic. Most of the exhibits were on the mezzanine floor of the library - but earlier books were on display in a case on the main floor. I noticed these on a return trip the day after the conference. Some of these early books were truly spectacular both for their artistic merit and weight of the literary history represented. Nearby at the Sterling Library, books by the conference "Round Table" publishers were available for examination and their answers to pertinent questions were available on a conference blog. Also - many of the wonderful images featured in the exhibit, and podcasts of some of the panelists talking about the conference can be viewed or heard on an entry the Beinecke's poetry website

rolling out the program:
The conference began on Thursday afternoon with an address by Johanna Drucker called "The Poetics of Book Space." She viewed each book as an artifact for metaphoric decoding and examined the various design and material decisions that produced it with a theoretical approach. Then poet and McArthur fellow, CD Wright read her work, including some poems from One Big Self her collaboration with photographer Deborah Luster who took hundreds of shots of inmates at three Louisiana prisons. Ms. Wright answered questions afterwards about the process and the poems.

On Friday, a panel of critics and book and art makers also discussed the tricky aspects of collaboration between artists and poets. Panelists said in some cases the poet and the artist knew each other and worked together on a project. Sometimes the artist was in fact the publisher. In other cases, the team was selected by the publisher and never even met nor discussed the work. Some so-called collaborations where broached where one party is dead.... (This seems rather too one-sided to be called a collaboration, though the method has produced some really interesting work... ) There were several presentations, and I am leaving out quite a few interesting and funny items here in the interests of brevity.

Friday afternoon, publishers on the conference round table spoke and answered questions from the audience . The focus at the round table was on some rather expensive books loosely classed as "art books" largely printed with labor intensive, crafted-by-hand technologies of past eras. One of the best features of the roundtable was a blog discussion in which these folks answered questions from their various view points and explained some of their processes.

omissions:
The conference lacked only two things:

• - an address to the thousands of small and micro press and self-published desktop chapbooks which might be found at the Poets House collection. Many of these contain images produced by the poet or an artist friend of the poet
• - and a theoretical address to electronic publication methods -- online chapbooks, poet's personal websites, and web-based literary magazines which offer artwork rendered with light - in luminous electronic page display.
  

Audience members brought up some of these questions during the many opportunities to address the panelists. It was strange to see that many of the publishers on the panel seemed to actually recoil at the mention of laser printers or websites. It was not so much that they seemed to regard these as "tainted" or suspect methodologies, though some did. It was more that they were utterly in love with the laborious process their hand-made artifacts required.

the varied bookmakers:
Publishers styles and prices differed. Ugly Duckling seems to occasionally use more mechanized methods depending on the poet's wishes for a less expensive book. One of the book makers - Ninjia Press (artist Carolee Cambell)- created an incredible series of books where the artwork was barely contained on the page but seemed to extend it's reach into the room by its vivacity and movement. (As an artist, I really adored this expansive approach.) Another publisher's work featured trim, succinct artwork contained in small square of space opposite the text. Another's featured colorful painted pages, with text printed right on top of the artwork. Though there were obviously some over-arching design principals at work, none of the panelists stated a particular philosophy underpinning their singular layout styles. Several are artists and approach the texts and the book in an intuitive and "investigative" way, with all the many detail decisions an artists makes shaping the result. Some approached their philosophy (or publishing model) in their blog entries so reading the blog was an essential part of the discussion. How odd in a group that seems to distrust electronic methods.

Nonetheless - all of the publisher participants make beautiful books. Expensive as well - ranging from $35 to $1,500 a pop, most in between but $200 and up. There seemed to be a general agreement that if the public could not afford such books, they could always visit library collections to view them. Some in the audience felt this was a less than democratic view. (I have to add that art making is rarely democratic and is never by committee. The artist is a dictator driven by inner visions. )

exhibit samples:
Below are two of the book exhibits for the conference in exhibit cases at the Beinecke which show some of the range of work addressed:

The left hand picture features a book with multiple hands that pop out at the reader, each containing a line of text, and a book in a wood frame where the order of the text can be changed by altering the pull tabs on the right side. The display on the right is CD Wright's book, One Big Self. My photo does not do justice to the depth and beauty of these sepia images which were originally printed on metal plates echoing the tin-type photos of an earlier time. I must note that my photos (above) were taken entirely without a flash on a older Panasonic Lumix, a DMC-FZ7 which has a Leica glass lens and takes marvelously readable pictures in low light conditions..

summing it up:
The event was well-attended. So many people signed up for the conference - that the Library moved the lectures and panel discussions to larger venues nearby at the Whitney Humanities Center and at the Yale Center for British Art.. At the end of each day, reception took place at the Beinecke so conference-goers couldn't miss the exhibits. (The food was incredible too...)

All in all, "Metahor Taking Shape" was time well spent, and gave participants lots to consider as they approach their own work. I haven't done the layout on the April issue of Bent Pin Quarterly and may view BPQ and my other projects with a slightly altered eye. Hmmmm. Thanks to Nancy Kuhl, the Beinecke, Yale and varous sponsors who underwrote the program.

- Mar Walker

Books: Amitai Etzioni: The Spirit of Community

Etzioni’s Communitarianism Cookbook
(add morality to taste then stir until social movement rises)
by Mar Walker
an essay in response to the book The Spirit of Community by Amitai Etzioni
this was originally written for a grad class in 1997, has been posted on my website for years
and I also posted it to Amazon.com as a book review

A Morality “Play”

Picture the scene. On the lawn, beneath your bedroom window a crowd is gathering in the dark. They know your spouse’s car and that red coupe that pulled in at 2 a.m. isn’t it. Mrs. Abernathy, a strict communitarian who lives across the street was up taking an aspirin when she spotted this car and saw the shadowy form of some home-wreaker sneaking through the side door. Duty bound, she called out a few neighbors to help you keep your morals in line. Your spouse, who had just fallen asleep, makes an appearance in the window to disperse them. (It was inconvenient enough when the car broke down on the way home from a seminar. The red coupe is a loaner.) You’re mad, so you open the window muttering and fling tennis shoes into the retreating crowd of busybodies. In the morning, this ungrateful behavior will get its own round of censure by telephone.

Communitarianism - as proposed in Amitai Etzioni’s “The Spirit of Community” assumes the moral legitimacy and truth of your community’s assumptions about your life. It offers an external morality without epistemology, theology or logic, without any messy philosophic notions of essence or virtue, without judge or jury. It offers a slap-dash recipe for suffocating Stepford communities where neighbors are encouraged to interfere in each others lives. And this call to action is not grounded firmly in a basis of friendship, common humanity or agape caring as in Scott Peck’s work on community building.

Mr. Etzioni himself should not be pointing any fingers. His communitarian morality represents either an ineptly presented or a cleverly muddled patchwork of positions with a little something for everyone. His occasionally tempting construct was designed to attract supporters for an underlying agenda of campaign reform in Washington, which he openly states must be leveraged from a position outside of politics through the political energy of a new social movement tied to morality.

As I began reading this book, I wanted to like it. But I kept getting an uneasy feeling - that same odd feeling one gets when reading certain literature. For instance, Vladimir Nabakov’s Pale Fire - where the narrator’s voice is unreliable in ways that are not obvious at first. Although Etzioni’s awkwardly worded tome is not a novel, I believe it contains some fictions.

The self-declared “single core thesis” on which Etzioni states Communitarianism is based is that “Americans .... can now act without fear. We can act with out fear that attempts to shore up our values... will cause us to charge into a dark tunnel of moralist and authoritarianism that leads to a church-dominated state or a right-wing world.”

Besides the obvious difficulty in the notion of “shoring up” values, this statement is not a premise. "Trust me you liberals and libertarians, there is nothing to fear in supporting my as yet unstated proposals to curtail your self-centered freedoms," Etzioni seems to coo with the butterfly net carefully hidden behind his back. His self-declared premise does not undergird any of the recommendations he subsequently proposes - but it is the basis on which he selected them. He throws enough bones to both extremes so the unwary and the battle-weary might buy in hoping for consensus at last.

Americans today have an attitude of entitlement, Mr. Etzioni says. They demand rights without responsibilities. Large numbers don’t even bother to vote. Yes, I thought, it’s true. So let’s call a moratorium on new rights. Sure, I said I can buy that. The ones we have constitutionally are pretty substantial. While pointing to “rights” that have no legal foundation, Etzioni claims quite a few of our constitutional rights need to be “notched” just a tad. Like Ayn Rand, he dismisses “rights” to housing and heath care saying, “who will pay for them?” But when it comes to children of nice middle class families - never mind the bill, we are too money-centered. After all, children with two normal parents are important, unless they need housing or health care.

Individual conscience is not enough to inspire virtue, Etzioni states. Communities should marshal focused social pressure to force people to do right. Of course he admits that he personally didn’t have the backbone to say what he really thought about Japan’s “dirty tricks.” I guess it’s easier to wag a finger at a neighbor than risk censure from your intellectual peers at work. He later expresses dismay that the public pays so much attention to the private scandals of politicians. Hey - attack Washington about something that really matters and save the moral nit-picking for the neighbors.

The family should be strengthened, he says. Somebody should be home with the children. Etzioni repeatedly says it doesn’t have to be the wife. The wife can work at home or the husband can - a suggestion designed to resonate with liberals and still not offended the conservatives. It is a suggestion already among the compromises couples routinely work out without this communitarian guidance. And when he talks about the farm boys raised in moral homes and working for other farmers in moral family-like settings, it’s interesting to note how ineffective his externally imposed morality really is. The minute these farm boys head to the city they turn into reprobates according to Etzioni.

Just as an aside, he notes we are all born half a human and must find wholeness in marriage. He declares flatly that thousands of productive single and divorced people are “damaged” goods, “in every sense of the word.” This is common knowledge according to Etzioni, as he sees no need for argument or supporting evidence for this outrageous dehumanization of significant portion of the population. (Does this attitude foster community?) Let’s just turn up the social pressure to marry and make divorce more difficult at the same time, as he proposes. That way those who really didn’t want to marry in the first place can suffer long-term damage if they cave in to social pressure and tie the knot! Perhaps we can resurrect Joe McCarthy and get those damaged singles off the streets and free up their jobs for married folk who really count.

Where’s the beef?

With no real premise stated, the first two sections of the book set the communitarian table with a smorgasbord of many flexible cheerleading-type phrases and many contradictory statements. Even the books opening bit - the pathetic flag-waving “We hold these truths” says very little in specific terms. Yes - -”We can do “A” (fill in some appealing but vague proposal) without offending you by causing “B” (fill in some authoritarian horror.) Still, he suggests people get the word out, talk up what ever you think communitarianism means with your neighbors over the back fence.

No where in this patchwork of moralizing and reassurance do we find Etzioni’s motivations for stitching this crazy quilt together. It’s not until the third section “The Public Interest.” that we come to a clear sequence of cogent reasoning - which I propose is the underlying motive for the entire unwieldy structure in first two chapters. In this section he targets big-monied special interests in Washington. “What is missing is a wide recognition that special interests are at the core of our systemic problems, a consensus powerful enough to unlock their grip on our legislature,” (Page 221). Again “The ultimate goal is to replace a government by and for deep pockets with a political system that is based on the principle of one person one vote, one that is responsive to all members of the community.” (Except the damaged ones who are obviously only half human.)

What does Etzioni really want? What he calls a “neoprogressive, communitarian,” legislative solution:

Finance congressional elections with public funds.” (Starting on page 234)
“Curb the flow of private money into the coffers of members of congress.
Impose a ban on PACS.”
Reduce the cost of running for office by offering free TV and radio ads.
Promote disclosure of the political process by lobbyists sign into a registration book each time they visit a congressional office. (Then the power lunch might become even more powerful)
Enhance the enforcement of all rules, old and new
Enhance the role of political parties - Channel campaign contributions through political parties rather than directly to individual candidates. (Isn’t that the so-called “soft money” that is so hard to track.? I guess it might increase public confidence if we didn’t know our who was bought or who did the buying.)
To get these reforms Etzioni has a plan: “There must be a new source of political energy sufficiently powerful to over come strong opposition and to propel far reaching changes...” (Page 226) “For reform to succeed, reformers, like Archimedes, must find a point of leverage outside the political world in order to be able to change it...... the challenge is to find ways to mobilize the great underrepresented majorities.” (Page 227) “Historical experience suggest that social movements are the source of the needed political energy... They command cadres that mobilize the rank and file to what ever social action is called for...” (Page 230)

After bemoaning the failure of groups like Common Cause to create widespread change he says “....as I see it, what is missing is a broader agenda, one that goes beyond legislative reform and encompasses the deep moral issues at stake.... (Page 244) “Without a major social movement, the reforms required to render public policy responsive to the public at large will not take place.” (Page 245)

From the text of “The Spirit of Community” it’s hard to avoid concluding that entire moral construct of Etzioni’s communitarianism has been built to sign people up so later they can be called out to vote for his legislative reforms.

“It is sociologically naive to sit back and wait for new communities to spring up,” Etzioni says. Or social movements for that matter - why not build your own? ”It is often necessary, and there is nothing artificial or otherwise improper, in recruiting or training organizers and facilitators of we-ness,” he says. (Page 125)

However, as Etzioni’s brand of communitarianism attempts to cut a swath through the middle to pick up as much support as possible - it gets attacked from both edges. In a 1995 newsgroup post on the Progressive Sociology Network, Morton G. Wenger a professor of Sociology at the University of Louisville called Etzioni's ideas “a form of fascist ideology for the squeamish petit bourgeois.” Etzioni apparently responded by implied there were “reds under the bed” at the progressive network. On the other hand the libertarians cast glances across the middle from the other shoulder of the road: In a Sept. 1996 article published on the web by the libertarian Cato Institute, Tom G. Palmer calls Karl Marx, “an early and especially brilliant and biting communitarian critic of libertarianism.”

Greg Smith, Research Officer writing for Aston Charities’ Community Involvement Unit in London cited Etzioni's background. “Etzioni is a keen publicist writing in popular as well as academic journals, speaking in public and on the mass media....”

Could it be that the ideologic patchwork found in the first two chapters of The Spirit of Community and in the far less specific Communitarian Manifesto is not accidental and represents an attempt to lure as many people as possible into the fold?

In Chapter 1 of Smith’s on-line book “Community-arianism” Smith wondered how marginal groups or groups with divergent value systems could find a place in an America run by Communitarians.

“Although Etzioni denies that he is majoritarian and claims to accept pluralism there is an obvious problem in a diverse and plural society..... With a normative view of mainstream values and harmonious and homogenous local communities it is hard to see how groups with marginal or divergent values systems can be given space to participate in the community of communities which is national life. Can "fundamentalist" Islamic or Christian groups or other religious sectarian groups, New Age travelers or homeless street dwellers be give equal human dignity let alone equal economic, political and social rights?”

Despite his misgivings Smith's book undertakes a detailed consideration of communitarianism and community. By Chapter 9, he concludes that in a pluralistic society, the hope for a common core of shared values maybe untenable. He offers an alternative communitarianism with a more tolerant framework, after questioning the movement's moral tone.

"This is not so much because it expresses a preference for marriage and stable two parent families over libertarian sexual attitudes, but because it opens the way to stereotyping, blaming and stigmatising..."

As an American citizen who prizes my constitutional rights, I see no need to pursue any worthwhile ideas about community under some nebulous umbrella of communitarianism. (Not unless you're trying to drum up a social movement as Etzioni obviously is.) Frankly I’m not satisfied with the “extensively edited, rewritten and modified” and far-more palatable Communitarian Manifesto sanitized by Mary Ann Geldon and William Glaston (who no doubt removed the offensive specifics in Etzioni’s original draft.)

As a member of an about-to-be-oppressed minority, I’m taking my damaged goods over the to American Civil Liberties Union. My wallet suddenly seems one ID card too light.

Copyright 1997 Marjorie M. Walker