Philadelphia is Hot, Still

But not AS hot.

It was an overcast day. We spent it at the Art Museum where there was a whole Japanese teahouse from 1235. The doors were very small, indicating a tiny people. We then went into medieval armor, and I was equally stunned at the tiny outfits. The enormous exploits of the medieval error seem to have been largely accomplished by midgets. One important thing: the olfactory sense of the European medieval error was much worse than in the Japanese error. The artifacts from the European medieval error stink. Not so with the Japanese error. Why is this?

We went to see the toilet by Duchamp. As errors go, this would seem to have been the greatest mistake of the 20th century. Now the toilet (it's actually a urinal sans the urine cake) is canonical. I explained to the children that art has become something for the chattering classes to talk about, and so it has to in a sense question or undermine what is art itself, since that's a fun and endlessly interesting question. It's fun to say, the toilet is beautiful, more beautiful than Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, in which it in many ways resembles... The three children who could understand this thought that this was probably an error of our era.

Then it was over to see the Mendel exhibit at the Institute of Art & Science (mostly science). This was the highlight of my trip, but there was a lot of complaining from the family that the exhibit was too dark. You had to be able to read to appreciate that exhibit. I had an equation trip off my mental provocation-maker: "Mendel plus Engels = Mengele." I wondered if readers of my blog would object, or agree, based on the Duchampian toilet model of phrases instantiated to elicit further phrases, it still seemed important to jot it down.

Better in the Franklin Institute to stare at the funny mirrors if you're a three year old I suppose, or to walk through the giant heart. I went through that giant heart when I was 6 in 1962, and the exhibit has since become a perennial favorite. The children went through it twenty times each, and then were suddenly bored.

Now back home, where I've just mowed the yard. My friend Jake's yard turned out to be enormous. I thought it was just one circle and I'd have to go around it twice. I did. I noticed hummingbirds landing on Brown Susans, which I didn't think they would do. I wondered if butterflies and hummingbirds would be able to step up and take the place of bees in terms of pollination-duties. I don't know what pollination is, exactly. It seems to be when you take the gunk from one flower's STAMEN (male or female), and transfer it to the goop from another flower's PISTIL (male or female?) and from that something happens that is good. What is it that happens? I don't know. What is grass? There was sure a lot of it. Jake's mower didn't have forward propulsion except that which initiated in my calves and shoulders.

Now I'm going to put up my feet and think about the dream I had last night that pretended to tell the difference between poetry and science.

Poetry

The gray pony is a red giraffe. (In imagism however the gray pony remains a gray pony, unless you're British, in which case it's a grey pony.)

Science

Strictly speaking there are several different kinds of pony. (An exhibit in the Franklin Institute talked about the difference between ponies and horses, which I didn't understand. There were also miniature horses, and other odd forms of equine horseplay in the scientific vocabulary.)

It seems to depend on size, but there are other qualifying factors. I understood nothing of this because I had only seconds to read, and then was pulled hither and yon by four tots, hell-bent on pushing any button they could find, and asking for cookies amid complaints that they hadn't had ice cream for hours.

We got home to our real house last night for a brief respite and I checked the cucumbers. The cucumbers had grown to seven or eight inches in the space of this sunny week. I pulled one out, and pulled off a tomato, and had a salad with Balsamic vinegar that another friend had left in the refrigerator two months back. I reflected that food is weird: all food is grown by someone either for their own benefit, or for the benefit of others.

The woodchuck who is now immensely fat looked at me from the back hill of scrub vegetation on which he subsists.

There is probably something outside the human (commercial) exploitation of nature, but I doubt if I've ever eaten anything that wasn't specifically and commercially grown outside of a few raspberries I found once in the woods. Tomorrow we will pick blueberries from the bushes of a blueberry farm.

Philadelphia is Hot

Up in the Catskills you forget how hot it is elsewhere.

It's 97 in Philadelphia, and humid.  We were supposed to have a thunder storm but it hasn't materialized.

Money we went to the zoo, and saw the squirrel monkeys!

Tuesday we went to Longwood Gardens, and saw the bonsai trees!

Today we went to the Franklin Institute, and the kids walked through the giant heart!

But I'm so tired from this heat!

We've taken bus tours and boat rides, and been in children's museums, and looked at large plants.

We will hang out at home for a while in air conditioning, and then go down to the community pool for a dip.

It's too hot to even attempt thought.  I'm drinking iced tea and iced lime-aid.

A very slight breeze would be nice.

Midgley Takes Over My Summer

I had meant to open out and read algebra and geometry and some science texts this summer. This was swimming upstream and would have been tough, and instead I went merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily down the stream with Mary Midgley. I've finished five of her books now and am half-way through two others: Wickedness, and The Owl of Minerva. This latter book is so good I find that if I have two minutes I spend time in it. She mentioned that in the thirties everyone at Oxford went Marxist. Even Iris Murdoch did. The revelations about Stalinism and the show trials of the 30s caused despair throughout Oxford as people frantically thrashed about looking for a new utopian wave. Midgley says the next big wave is planetary welfare. She herself is on that wave to some extent, but she's not about to get into fist-bumping militant actions like freeing macaques from zoos and veterinary schools. What I like about Midgely is that she keeps her wits about her and is witty, to boot.

I also read David Bentley Hart's History of Christianity, and a few other religious books. Science is very painful for me to contemplate. As is math. I did read a book called Surreal Numbers, but it went way over my head.

At any rate, I'm travelling and returning and generally on summer hiatus now for about 2.5 weeks. We plan to take the kids to the Philadelphia Zoo, my childhood Lutheran church just outside Philly, among other locations, and are swapping houses with an old friend in northwest Philadelphia to that effect. My son is hoping to take in a Phillies game. Will our budget allow it? Our friend from Philly wants to try trout fishing in local streams.

My cucumbers are growing in the back yard. I just hope that the deer and the woodchuck leave them alone, but I haven't authorized the shooting of any fauna on our property in spite of one neighborly offer, and have decided to put the woodchuck trap into the garage pending our return, as I don't want him trapped in there for two weeks. I rather like the woodchuck, although he terrifies one of my smaller children. He doesn't really mean any harm, and is civilized, for a woodchuck.

I'll probably find a few minutes to pop in here and there over the next 2.5 weeks on the net, but we'll be like a balloon let loose and any time I have online at various points will have to go toward finishing my online literature class. Have a pleasant end-of-summer. God Bless each and every American: left, right, and especially to the center.

SPOUSES MATTER MORE THAN THE CANDIDATE

Brett has been going wild in the comments box, back from a month in the brush with children. Welcome, back, comrade Brett!

Brett thinks that it's wrong to bring family into the political decisions we make.

I disagree with this. A spouse is a symbol of all that a candidate holds dear. And when you look at Hillary's choice (Bill) or when you look at Barack's choice (Michelle), you have to think about these as choices.

When I voted for Bill Clinton, I did so partially because I liked his wife. She seems to have principles. But when you turn the telescope around, and look the other way, it's pretty clear that Bill Clinton has no principles at all, which makes you wonder if Hillary has any. So, although Hillary helped Bill, Bill doesn't help Hillary. Bill molested all kinds of women for decades, and Hillary looked the other way. What kind of individual can do that?

Michelle Obama spent the vast majority of her life less than proud of America. Why should we have someone who despises America in the White House?

I liked John Edwards, mostly because I liked his wife. I thought Edwards was a pond-skater (this is a Finnish phrase that means a bit superficial), but his wife was such a substantial policy wonk (I once saw her give a two-hour talk and was riveted -- her answers were specific, well thought-out, and she had a certain gravity as well as a certain levity, and I thought, Edwards will be ok). This week The National Inquirer has broken a story about Edwards meeting some tramp who is the mother of his illegitimate baby in a motel. Shades of Eliot Spitzer! Edwards was probably not even going to be considered for vice president, but now I think he's done in national politics. The story has been backed up by several other sources at this point -- including security guards at the motel (I got this from a Finnish newspaper, so I haven't tracked it down and substantiated it yet, as I really can't take it, since I was for Edwards in the primaries).

Compare George Bush. Many on the left have said that he's WORSE than Bin Laden, because he's killed more people. But, again, you have only to look at his wife. His wife is sound, and sensible. His wife not only can READ, she's a LIBRARIAN. So in that sense she's totally unlike any woman that Bin Laden would allow into his presence. The whole notion of a female librarian in OBL's branch of radical Islam would be enough for him to start chopping in the air with his scimitar. Bush on the other hand is profoundly comfortable with an intelligent woman with nice values. Hoo-ray for Bush! Maybe the only president who had a better wife was FDR.

But unlike FDR, W. appears to be faithful to his wife. Hoo-ray for the 23rd letter of the alphabet!

I admit that I don't know much about Cindy McCain. But she hasn't bugged me at all throughout the campaign. Her outfits seem appropriate, her smile is pleasant, and on the few occasions she's spoken, she hasn't smeared America, or made any rash vulgar statements, or used inappropriate language, as Kerry's wife did.

You can find out almost anything you need to know by looking at someone's spouse. A spouse is the nearest and the clearest symbol of everything that a candidate holds dear. Spouses have a huge impact on a president's thinking, because they have the ear of the president like no one else.

I didn't vote for Reagan, but I liked his wife, and I knew he would be ok. I did like her Just Say No campaign. It showed simple common sense, and had a catchy ring to it. Those three words probably saved more young lives from drugs and promiscuity than anything else that was done in her husband's term of office.

A candidate can say all kinds of things and pose in all kinds of ways. But it's important to look at the background to determine the meaning of anything. The New Critics advised us to look at a poem as if it was not a part of the history of its time, or a part of the biography of a poet. I say you can't understand a poem in that way. You have to see the background of the poem. The kinds of poem that the poet is reacting against, and also the kinds of extra-poetic interests a poet may have, all play a part in the poem's meaning. It's absurd to think that a poem is somehow existing alone outside of any context.

You can't understand anything without looking at the larger background.

Families matter.

Spouses matter.

Pastors matter.

They all provide a crucible of meaning around a candidate.

Barack Obama has all kinds of pretty words and nice poses. But if you look at his spouse and his pastor, you get a sense of what he is really like, and where his real values lie. His crazy hippy mother and his crazy angry dad fill in the picture.

McCain's mother is still alive in her late 90s. She is a sound woman, with clear simple spartan values. McCain's dad was an admirable admiral. As was his grandfather. And his great-grandfather. His wife appears to be sound. The whole group has a sense of humor, and has served America honorably for well over a hundred years.

Don't listen to the words a candidate says. That's all stuff and nonsense heavily scripted according to demographics. Look instead at the candidate's context: who is the spouse, what kinds of things have they accomplished, what are the candidate's parents like? What church do they choose to attend? Who are their close friends? Does McCain have actual criminals for friends, people like the Ayres, who are the friends of the Obama family?

To look at the surface of a poem or a candidate will tell you nothing. Contextualize, contextualize, contextualize, and just when you think you have it, contextualize just a little more.

Does God Exist?

I was looking at Carl Sach's blog over the last couple of hours paying attention to the growing controversy surrounding whether or not to teach Creationism or ID along with evolution.

Behind this discussion is a murky discussion of whether God exists, or not.

One of his commenters hinted that it was obvious that God is an illusion.

Another said it was obvious that God exists.

I confess I've always been of the opinion that it's obvious that God exists. I remember when I was four years old standing in my driveway at 911 Pelham Ave. in Warminster, PA and it was just obvious to me that God exists.

I think it's because of a feeling I had: a very intense feeling.

It occurs to me that for those people who live on logic and Humean (Spockian) sense endings, and don't have much feeling, (squealing), that perhaps they are deprived of the one sense through which most people experience God. That is, most of us are equipped with something that gives us powerful feelings, and that this is an empirical sense, but that some people don't have this, and they are possibly the same people that don't get poetry, but really do get science.

I started to think about Mary Midgley and her feud with Richard Dawkins. Dawkins denies that God exists and he also insists that poetry is nothing unless it is scientifically accurate (he denies the value of Keats because Keats didn't write about how rainbows work according to the schismatic effect of the prism).

Midgley on the other hand has always enjoyed poetry, and says in her autobiography that she started to fall in love with boys quite early, and now still does it, in regards to men, at 88.

Midgley loves animals, and though she doesn't believe in God, she feels that she is missing out on something major, possibly something as important as laughter, or as companionship, in her lack of an ability to believe that God exists. Midgley has the mind of a poet which is one of the reasons I find her enjoyable to read, while I cannot stand to read Dawkins.

Is it a question of belief.

At least for me, it's always been a question of feeling. That is, if I'm in a church, or if a ray of light comes through the clouds, I feel the existence of God, in the same way I can feel the ground beneath my feet.

Is it possible that some of us (ten percent, according to polls) actually never feel anything like God? For me, God is an empirical finding, but one that doesn't come through the five senses. It comes through a kind of feeling that flame is around my heart, and the starry heavens above me are connected to me.

Is it possible that some people have never felt that?

It would be like blind people who insist that the visible world doesn't exist, in spite of the many. Or like deaf people who insist that nothing can be heard, in spite of the many who say that they can hear a leaf scudding down a sidewalk.

Could it be that most of us have this common sense, but that some don't have it?

I am as certain that God exists as I am that oranges exist: but the taste of God is a thousand times more satisfying.

Reinhold Niebuhr

Carl Sachs writes in that Barack Obama has said that Reinhold Niebuhr is one of his "favorite philosophers." I will overlook the silliness of the phrase, "favorite..." since it's the type of thing a teenager might say about the movies, or about colors. It's hard to know how serious Obama is, or what gravity to give to his pronouncements. However, the very fact that he mentions Niebuhr reveals that he may have more on the ball than this blaguer, at least, was willing to cotton.

Niebuhr first came to my attention when I read Robert Benne's book The Paradoxical Vision. In it, Benne (a theologian at Roanoke College in Virginia) sketched out the "paradoxical" quality of Two Kingdom's thought in the work of Reinhold Niebuhr, John Neuhaus and Glenn Tinder (all of whom have at least one foot in the Lutheran tradition).

Benne's spot-on development of Two Kingdom's paradoxicality places it in contrast to the early Calvinism, in which "America is the redeemer nation called to realize a new order for the ages" (27), and also in contrast to the mindless multiculturalism that has flowered since the 70s, as a kind of unconscious continuation of the one-kingdom Calvinist project. Benne writes, "The political pilgrims who searched for a political manifestation of God's kingdom anywhere but in America now look for it in cultural disclosures within America's adversarial movements. Salvation will come from the revolutionary cultural praxis of gender feminism, homosexualism, multiculturalism, or militant ecological movements" (35).

In contrast to this, the paradoxical vision rules out salvific politics, and even trying to be righteous leads to the worst of sins: hubris, because YOU cannot make gospel into law. The Reformed attitude expects too much, and the neo-Reformed attitude of the airhead lightweights of the 70s up until today is merely a continuation of this expectation. "By pointing to a kingdom of another quality in a dimension of another sort, the church relativizes the pretensions of the world and its politics" (200).

Niebuhr argued that we could not become the world's policeman, and the Lutheran attitude denies that God's kingdom will come through human effort. (My copy of Benne's book has been thumbed through so many times that it's falling apart. Nearly all the pages have come unglued.)

Here is something from p. 155:

"Niebuhr ... spent most of his ammunition on those who would make the gospel into a law, that is, would take the radical religious and moral norms of the gospel direct guides for action in a fallen world... This led them, erroneously, he believed, into pacifism in international relations and sentimentalism in domestic affairs, particularly in industrial relations.
In short, Niebuhr believed that one could not take the highest principle of the Christian religious and moral vision and make it into a law to guide human affairs. What is applicable in the kingdom of God, agape love, is not directly applicable in human affairs. Its transcendent character, for one thing, obviates such a strategy. The fallenness of the world, for another, makes such moralism ineffectual and finally irresponsible" (155-156).

The checks and balances of Madison, and balances of power in particular, are more likely to work in our fallen world than are "pious exhortations to love" (156).

I don't know how much of this that Barack Obama would get. He calls Niebuhr his "favorite philosopher," but as usual that's about all he says in the one interview that I've read, so I'll gloss what I understood Niebuhr to say.

Lutherans believe that people in groups are almost always acting in violent self-interest, and that only individuals can stop doing that, and usually even then, only with remarkable self-restraint.

This harping against group ideology (race, gender, class) comes out even more powerfully in the work of Glenn Tinder (q.v.).

But for Niebuhr at least this doesn't mean a turning away from the public sphere. It means that we can do what we can, but that we are almost always doing it for selfish purposes. The idea that there are going to be all these radical splinter groups groping toward perfect harmony is perhaps the laugh of a life-time in Benne's book.

However, there are many different takes on Niebuhr and on the Lutheran doctrine of Two Kingdoms. I like the online articles in First Things (more conservative), but balance them with articles from The Atlantic and other journals left right and center if you like. Niebuhr is not a monolith with one viewpoint. He is a sunken continent that appears to be rising with the force of a volcano, or series of volcanoes, and will send shockwaves and tsunamis to every side of the intellectual sphere as he re-emerges.

COMMUNISM Vs. CALVINISM

Communism doesn't actually propose an improved economy or a more efficient way of doing business.

It proposes that one class has the moral right to destroy another class and take all its goods.

It proposes that one class has the right to exterminate another class.

What Hitler did to the Jews under National Socialism, what Stalin did to the Kulaks, what Pol Pot did to the Vietnamese who lived within Cambodia's borders: these genocides were legitimated by the Communists, which in theory stipulated that they were only "expropriating their expropriators."

The organized genocide and theft of the property of others does not result in new wealth. It calls for a complete absence of law, and legitimates Cain's murder of Abel on the grounds of resentment. Fine, but does it ever work?

An economy is like an ecology. It is a process. Wealth is not money in the bank. Money in the bank is the result of wealth. Wealth is a work ethic, knowledge, respect for the law, stable marriage. Money can be seized overnight. Wealth takes centuries to develop. Wealth is an ecology that requires generations, universities, and most importantly, churches (preferably Lutheran).

Barack Obama keeps talking about "change." If he means by this an "expropriation of the expropriators" then this can't work, and I am against it. If he means change within the African-American community (he's hinted at this following Cosby's lead) such that stable marriages, respect for law, and deep investment in faith and in education become the new norms, then I'm for it.

Obama's father was the Mugabe of Kenya. He wanted to expropriate the white and Indian upper classes of Kenya, in order to seize their assets. Mugabe did this in Zimbabwe, and the result has been catastrophic. 160,000 percent inflation is the lowest estimate. Bread that costs millions in the morning costs billions in the evening. Because Mugabe seized the assets of the white farmers and businessmen of Zimbabwe, he thought he had made his homies rich, but he mistook the shadow for the reality of wealth. Wealth is not assets. It's not money. It's education, it's respect for the law. It's a deeper ecology than is understood by the crackpots of the killing fields.

Something similar happened in Haiti under the Duvaliers. The mulatto and white upper-class of Haiti was destroyed so that the darker-skinned citizens could seize their assets.

But, as the fragile economy of the law was destroyed, so was the fragile ecology of the economy. The economy of Haiti was never strong. Now it's a disaster.

Marxists still don't understand that wealth arises from WITHIN a group. It cannot be seized from another group. The leaven of the lumpenproletariat is not folding money: it is faith, and education, and a love for one's neighbor, rather than the kind of hatred fomented by Marxism. It is easy to understand the resentment that Marxism capitalizes on. My neighbor has something, I have nothing. It must be oppression. If I kill my neighbor, I will live like him. And so the logic tells me, if I kill my neighbor I will live like him. So the killing continues. Hitler planned to kill the Finns when he was finished with the Jews and the Slavs and the gypsies. Kill enough people, he reasoned, and Germany will possess their goods. This organized genocide that fattens on seizing what belongs to others, however, does not create anything. It destroys the geese with the golden eggs. You get the eggs, but the goose is cooked.

So, I'm confused by what Barack Obama means by his term "change." Does he mean what his dad meant, in Kenya? A catastrophic and sudden change where the poor seize the assets of the rich by any means necessary? Or does he mean a slow, progressive change, in values and beliefs, within poverty-stricken groups that still reside in pockets in our inner cities? There's a world of difference. Does Obama know that difference? His dad didn't know that difference. His pastor didn't understand the difference. His wife didn't understand the difference. I sense that Barack Obama is just as confused as they.

Which is why I'm for McCain.

McCain is a Baptist (Calvinist) and given a choice between the horror of Calvinism and the horror of communism, I'll take the Calvinists any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

The Fake Frank O'Hara Poem

I got over O'Hara a long time ago, but cherish the memory. Recently a book by Andrew Epstein publishes a purported new poem by O'Hara. The poem is obviously a fake from the first word, and the second clinches it. Throughout the poem it is clearly making fun of O'Hara. The last line is really funny: if O'Hara loses his shopping list he will make another. Of course O'Hara's whole point was in showing how spontaneous he could be, so there's no way he would have had to have had a list, which would have been gauche. Epstein, a professor at Florida State, apparently doesn't hear the mocking of O'Hara throughout the poem, and thinks it's a long-lost poem by O'Hara himself. It's not a particularly smooth poem. It doesn't have any of O'Hara's triple assonances, it has an awkward quality which it would be fun to enumerate. But from the first word I knew it wasn't an O'Hara. By the second word it was totally clear. O'Hara is way too self-obsessed to allow a poem to take another person's viewpoint even for two words. O'Hara's first lines always include the words I, me, my, but I can't think of any instances where he delegates the lead role to others: and so it is clear that whoever wrote the poem was conscious of this, and was making a critical remark against O'Hara, by using the word "you've" as the second word. The poem is just grotesque, but also quite funny in the way it makes a pastiche of O'Hara's work, only to send it up. But the poem isn't by any means even a good fake. It's just a send-up, without further ambition than that. Here it is, as first found on Ron Silliman's blog. Note the very funny puns at the end about LeRoi Jones needing a mouthpiece. O'Hara never once made a slapstick gag like that in any of his poems. If I had to guess, I'd say this poem was by someone with a sensibility more like that of Billy Collins or Kent Johnson. It's just riotously awful. There are a few real missteps in the poem aside from the style -- I doubt if O'Hara was ever close enough to Joel Oppenheimer to buy cigarettes for him. Oppenheimer was not part of O'Hara's inner circle. Oppenheimer was part of the Black Mountain School, and would have never felt comfortable or accepted in O'Hara's high art context. Also, imagine O'Hara taking a sip of liquor in a phone booth. It's not possible that he could have done anything so distasteful.

Fakes are fun. They rarely occur in the poetry world since nothing much can be gained from producing them (it doesn't enhance prestige and you don't make any money from producing fake poetry, unlike painting). Therefore the poem had to have been written by someone with a sense of humor. Some claim it's Kenneth Koch, and that might be so. Koch was a terrible poet compared to O'Hara (he lacked grace), but if it was by Koch, it was only a first draft. Koch had a work ethic and would have worked harder to make the poem not such an obvious mockery of the O'Hara oeuvre. O'Hara would have been offended by Koch if he had done this to him, so there's no chance Koch would have done this, as they valued one another's friendship too highly. It had to have been done by someone who knew the work of O'Hara but wasn't an insider, and isn't a particularly gifted poet, but is a clever comedian.

The thing is full of incredible problems and an astute sleuth with lots of time on their hands could go through the whole poem and find incorrect attributions. Did Jane Freilicher ever produce a poster for Raymond Roussel's Locus Solus? Did she produce posters? Usually when O'Hara introduces a note to someone he runs with that a while. O'Hara's poems are not so chaotic as they at first seem. They have a coherent theme in them which holds them together. The surface may seem full of details but underneath is a powerful emotional arc that welds them into a unity. This poem doesn't even attempt to do that. Probably the poet who put this out isn't capable of that. (Not many are.) Finally, the poem has zero lyricism to it. O'Hara often ends on a sublime note. This poem ends on an utterly trivial note. Quite clever, but clearly a fake.

Finding Leroi a Lawyer

So you’ve finished the Locus Solus poster, Jane,
and I must write to Richard Miller, thanking him
for his having done it for nothing—we could use more of that! but meanwhile
I stop in a flowershop on 8th Avenue and buy Patsy Goldberg a print by Hokusai
(they knew the meaning of snow in those days!) and also I look,
a little, into the opened cups of the flowers, don’t get fresh! and I realize that Norman is probably out of booze
by now, so I stop in Parente’s Wines Whiskey Spirits
and buy him a little schmootz, it will go well with the tomato paste
he likes so much to use in his smaller paintings. And I go to the newsstand
to get Joe his copy of Pash, Bill his Opera Guide, and Joel Oppenheimer a pack of Gauloises,
even though I have by now a lot more than I can possibly carry
since I have been shopping for people for hours, and I am beginning to feel very Machado-esque
like having little chapters instead of trotting about all day in one big museum
when suddenly I see it: LUCIA DLUGOSZEWSKI IS HAVING A CONCERT ON FRIDAY,
and I run to the nearest phonebooth
which is hot and sweaty, I think because you are not in it, Vladimir
Ussachevsky, and I pull off the mouthpiece but not the receiver, which I will give to Leroi Jones
because he is in trouble
over something the postoffice says is obscene in The Floating Bear and I know that he needs one,
although he does not need the receiver, but when I try to call him
there’s nothing but the horrible silence, which is Dietrichesque,
and when even screwing the mouthpiece back doesn’t do any good
I decide that nothing will, and I take a drink of the schmootz
which tastes like the vodka I put in Stevie River’s Koolade the night Fabian collapsed in Hoboken
and which I wrote a poem about which Ned Rorem set, but I am very sorry anyway
at how things have turned out, and I discover, besides, when I am outside the phone booth
that I have lost my shopping list. Well, if nothing happens to me in the next two minutes
I can stop here and make another.

Democrats & Me

I was a Democrat until 9/11. Something happened on that day that changed my political perspective forever.

Most of my friends and colleagues are still Democrats.

But it's as if I've drifted. Democrats believe that Republicans are morally insane. Republicans believe in family life, and the sanctity of life in general. They've tried to free several Islamofascist countries from the yoke of theocratic tyranny. Women and girls can read again in Afghanistan. In Iraq people can vote and there are many parties. Why is this a problem?

But Democrats believe that sexual license and divorce are personal matters and are not matters for public judgement. Are they? If the rest of us have to pay exorbitant prices for sexual diseases (over 50% of the CDC budget goes to sexual diseases) and take care of the children from broken families (90% of prisoners are products of divorce) who go to seed and end up in prison, aren't they communal matters in which bad personal morals actually are costing us trillions? Shouldn't there be a tax on people who eat too much and get fat and thus fill the hospitals with their problems? Isn't eating too much something that Americans should be scolded for, or put in prison for? Democrats would argue that these are personal matters since the Callipygian Venus is their idol (for Republicans it's the scrawny Jesus).

Some Democrats believe that we should let murderers go free, and that thieves are just oppressed people, and that Santa Claus should go free, instead of being put in prison for eating too much and breaking and entering. Almost everyone I know is a Democrat.

I'm saying that Democrats are bad people.

Ok, I'm saying that Democrats are not bad people, but they are deluded lunatics, who in many cases are my close personal friends. I love them, because I love to laugh. And Democratic ideals make me laugh. The only thing that makes me laugh even harder is anarchism. And I have many anarchist friends, too.

But I hope that Obama loses because although John McCain is not nearly as morally sane as Abe Lincoln, at least he's part of the same crazy party. And that crazy party now seems sane to me.

Because 9/11 knocked some sense into me, or maybe out of me.

Midgley's Half-Life

I'm concerned that Mary Midgley may not have much of a half-life. I've read four of her books this summer. I can't remember what's in them, except in the vaguest terms.

Great philosophers and writers have a long half-life. You read Kafka and it's hard to forget. You read Shakespeare and it's permanently burnt in. You read Kierkegaard or Plato and it stays in your bean and blossoms.

Midgley feels like she's planting immortal seeds when you're reading her, but then when you go to harvest those thoughts... I remember only that she said that many philosophers go too far in exaggerating.

Her work has a British reserve. She holds back, and is rarely fantastic.

Archetypes blend into fantastic mythic structures.

I will read three more books by Midgley: The Owl of Minerva, Beasts and Men, and Wickedness. Then I will see what I remember. I'm a little alarmed at Midgley's half-life.

Perhaps she should exaggerate more to make a vivid archetypal point?

FRUSTRATIONS & SATISFACTIONS

1. Last night at 1:30 in the morning my four-year-old son woke me up to inform me that there were snakes beneath his bed.

I turned on his light, and showed him that there were no snakes under the bed.

He said, "Not now there aren't. There are no snakes. You're right, Dad."

So I turned off the light, and put him back in his bed. Just as I was getting settled again, I heard him shout, "They're back!"

When I went into his room, he said, "Dad, there are FOUR snakes."

I turned the light on again.

"Dad, they're gone. These snakes only exist in the dark!"

I was surprised that he knew the word "exist."

"Julian," I said, "These snakes are in your imagination."

"What does IMAGINATION mean?" He asked.

"You're dreaming them up."

"They're there, dad. But they only come out in the dark. They LIKE the dark."

I ended up spending the entire night dealing with snakes. It was like he had the DT's. I kept thinking about how Bertrand Russell had tormented one of his children because the child was scared in the dark. I really wanted to sleep, but I didn't want to be communist Bertrand Russell. I myself was always scared of the dark as a little boy.

I wanted to turn the light on and let him sleep with it. I always had nightlights as a little boy. Finally at 5:30 in the morning, I brought Julian out to the living room and turned on Spongebob, and turned all the lights on. The sun was already up. He kept looking at the floor inspecting it for snakes.

I went back to sleep and got about three hours, thinking about a recent article in Newsweek that children are depressing, and people without them do better.

2.

Last night we played Little League baseball against the Giants. They are from a nearby small town called Bovina which spends the entire winter practicing baseball in their community hall. Therefore, they cream almost every team in the area they play against, since no one else practices. The Giants can catch, they can field, and they have a very solid sense of where to throw the ball in any instance, even though they are mostly in first grade. Their coaches bark orders at them, and one coach even yelled at a nervous kid on our team for being so nervous.

My son Tristan's team beats most teams, but the Giants are unstoppable. Still, last night going into the last inning we were tied 15-15. The Giants got six more runs in the top of the inning, based largely on errors. Our team doesn't know where to throw the ball, and often throws the ball over the heads of the first baseman and so the other team gets a couple of extra bases almost every time we throw it. We turn singles into homeruns.

Still, our little Braves are usually no worse than most, and we still had hope. We needed to make six runs to tie. We got a kid on second, and then he was batted in, and then two more boys scored, but there was a pop fly that was caught, and then another. We needed three more runs, with two outs. Then the nervous boy got up and the other coach started screaming at him to swing, and he struck out, and the game ended. The boy was sad. He had struck out four times during the game, and this time his ears burned bright red. The coach for the other team kept yelling at him that he had to swing, so he swung.

I really wanted to beat the Giants. I thought it would be good for everybody if someone beat the Giants.

NOTE: Two days later, the Mets (a team that almost never wins) beat the Giants by five runs! The worst team toppled the best team! There IS a God, Virginia!

3.

The woodchuck continues to live in the tunnels he's built beneath the back shed. I have a strange affection for him, and hope that he continues to elude the trap I have set.

All the adult neighbors with gardens hate the woodchucks, and would shoot them if it was legal.

But the neighbor children are all rooting for the woodchucks. Haley, a little girl who lives behind us, says she hopes our woodchuck doesn't get hurt. She thinks it's the woodchuck's right to live beneath the shed.

It's amazing that the woodchucks exist. They are like communists who live within the capitalist system, and are building tunnels, and trying to capture the fruit of our endeavors. I have a weird affection for them, too, but I worry about my plants. I looked out the window this morning at 4 am and there was one munching on a sunflower.

Mary Midgley is on the side of the woodchucks. I can feel it. She says she isn't, but she is. The woodchucks have a certain kind of poetry and philosophy to them that is otherwise lacking in the neighborhood.

However, there is also a bizarre poetry in my cucumber plants. It's really hard to believe that cucumber plants can come out of a seed and do all the weird things they're doing -- sprouting yellow flowers, starting to push spiky little cukes, and doing everything as nature planned.

EQUALITY

No two things are alike, so no two things can be equal.

What does it mean therefore to have the equals sign?

Is it something that's only "real" within mathematics?

Abraham Lincoln used the word in his Gettysburg Address. Here's the first 29 words:

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created EQUAL" [my emphasis].

The speech continues on for about 240 words more, but the rest of it is fluff, and filler.

It's the last word of his first sentence on which America stands.

Here are a few problems.

One, it says, "All MEN."

What about woodchucks? He doesn't mention anything about woodchucks. Gettysburg was not seemingly fought over woodchucks.

30,000 men from the north did not lay down their life so that woodchucks could be equal to men.

Lincoln was still operating on a Christian sensibility. Julia Ward Howe, when she wrote The Battle Hymn of the Republic, shared that sensibility.

"In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me:
As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on" (Julia Ward Howe, Battle-Hymn of the Republic)

Lincoln did not write in The Gettysburg Address, that America was founded on a "proposition that all SPECIES are created equal."

So far, no presidential candidate has made WOODCHUCK RIGHTS the center of their platform. (This could be our opportunity, people.)

Imagine a furious battle over woodchucks.

50,000 died at Gettysburg. Would they have died for the rights of woodchucks? Will we see a future battle in which 50,000 Lutheran Surrealists die over the rights of woodchucks?

Equality is a big problem. What does it mean that one man is equal to another? If we throw in the ERA and the notion that women are equal, with the famous sentence, "Equal pay for equal work," what does it mean, since no two people are alike, and so, no two workers alike?

How abstract is the notion of equality?

When we start to think about how abstract the notion of equality is: can we really make each person equal without making each person identical? How can there be difference, and yet still be equality?

Lincoln says that equality is a "proposition," like an axiom out of Euclid.

Let's buy it.

Does it then mean that people around the world are included?

Is someone in the Darfur equal to someone in Cincinnati?

Is the life of a little girl learning to read in Mosul worth the life of a little girl learning to read in Missouri?

How far does the equal sign extend?

Republicans claim that it's infinite. That is, that ALL MEN are created equal, and by ALL MEN, they include all children, too, (including the unborn).

Democrats have a much more limited notion. They mean, Americans. They don't want to fight outside of our borders for this abstract principle.

The Green Party wants to include animals, some of them even want to include bugs, but they are not willing to include non-Americans.

Martin Luther argued that all Christians are equal in the eyes of God, and the Pope is not ontologically greater than the lowest stinking pauper.

Jesus claimed the same thing.

St. Paul claimed that this held for the uncircumcized, while St. Peter said it held only for the Jews who believed in Christ.

Andre Breton postulated a set of beings called surrealists, who were under his command. He was their official pope. Philippe Soupault argued that surrealism was a universal, and that there were surrealists all over the world. We postulate a new movement called Lutheran Surrealism, but have yet to settle its perimeter. Will we include woodchucks or not?

It's a question of set theory. What set of beings is included under the equal sign?

VERIFIABILITY

Cars are not oval
Houses are not square

Flamingoes are not popsicles
Elephants are not rhomboids

Cereal bowls are curvilinear
Clouds spiral as DNA divides

Fish google through sand castles
& snails crawl up the glass

Mark 16:6 And he saith unto them, Be not affrighted:

Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified:

he is risen; he is not here: behold the place where they laid him.

Midgley's "Wickedness"

This book was published in 1984 (Orwell's year) and is meant to argue that there IS such a thing as WICKEDNESS (as opposed to goodness), and that we could define it.

Most of the avant-garde elements of our culture assure us that we cannot define responsibility, good and evil (Nietzsche already sent them packing as tools of the will), and if there IS responsibility, it belongs to a race, gender, and class (the students at Duke were guilty for being white athletes with money).

After Marx, Midgley writes, the notion of INDIVIDUAL responsibility seems un-scientific.

She's trying to argue that such a thing as INDIVIDUAL wickedness still exists.

I'm only on p. 56 out of 200 pages and so far she hasn't yet put Humpty Dumpty together again. But more power to you, Midgley! Go for it!

Part of her argument is that to NOT judge another person on a moral basis is to regard them as an animal, and thus as incapable of moral judgment.

Midgley's Soft Spot for Animals

Midgley has a soft spot for animals. She claims that all people do.

Nevertheless, in the west we have often separated ourselves strictly from animals. Most species do separate from other species. Even lions and tigers don't have anything much to do with one another in the wild.

But some friendly animals like animals from other species.

In the Sopranos there is the episode about a race-horse that is friendly with a goat.

Many children love animals: especially cats and dogs. We like to play with them. Even the elderly are said to live longer when they get to play with dogs and cats. Playing with animals prolongs life.

Jesus never had a pet. At least he never mentions pets. Or did he, but he forgot to mention it?

Pirates are usually seen with a parrot on their shoulder.

The Egyptians worshipped cats.

"The human baby makes a beeline for the cat. The cat, if it is a kitten, returns the compliment with particular fervor" (117).

In Sri Lanka, a single man and a single elephant form lifelong mutual dependencies.

Midgley asks, "Should a gibbon, if taken to have one-tenth of the emotional capacity of a human being, go down by one-tenth again on account of being non-human, and settle at one-hundredth of human value?"

Midgley argues that "arithmetical estimation of claims... are usually morally shocking" (102).

One thinks of the Mormon estimate of a black's soul as worth three-fifths of that of a white (overruled in the 1960s by the Mormon General Election -- I think they are called).

"The question about gibbons is specially poignant since there are tribes in Borneo who used to regard them as kin, and therefore to treat them with the same sort of respect that was given to humans -- until they discovered that Europeans thought this mistaken, on which they began to hunt them like any other creature" (102).

We do in fact come to value other animals, especially if they have the ability to communicate with us. Parrots seem to do this. Cats. Dogs. But I remember as a child one of my worst moments was when we moved and my mom threw my goldfish down a toilet and flushed it. She said it would never survive the trip from Oregon to Pennsylvania. I was four and I was devastated.

I now realize she was right. But why was I so attached to a fish? A fish has a memory of about eight seconds. It couldn't have held me dear as I held it dear, even if it had wanted to, but the fish to me had an ontological status as dear as all the gold in Fort Knox, plus all the silver in Nevada.

Of course now I realize the senseless folly of my love for the fish and it all seems funny.

Midgley still hasn't told me QUITE why animals matter, but her book ends with a promising notion.

"When some portion of the biosphere is rather unpopular with the human race -- a crocodile, a dandelion, a stony valley, a snowstorm, an odd-shaped flint -- there are three sorts of human being who are particularly likely still to see point in it and befriend it. They are poets, scientists, and children. Inside each of us, I suggest, representatives of all these groups may be found" (145).

Accustomed to value as a monetary fixing agency we may think that something like a snowfall, or the raspy lick of a cat, or the sight of a woodchuck dining on clover, may be dispensable, because it is not as tangible or mutually agreed upon as the price of gasoline, or the cost of a half-dozen eggs, or the cost of a haircut. But maybe some things outside the traditional economy are even more valuable for existing in a strange realm that math cannot reach and where only something as extravagant as the pouring of perfume on the feet of Christ is awkwardly commensurate.

INDEPENDENCE DAY

Human beings are odd. We aren't like bees or ants, which have a corporate structure dominated by a queen. Bees or ants don't ask for independence.

Grizzly bears can hardly know anything else.

But humans are like the great apes. They seem to need independence as well as cooperation.

We have never had a tomato for president.

We have never had a centipede for president.

We have never had a great ape for president.

We have never had a woodchuck for president.

All of our presidents have been human (though you sometimes have to wonder).

Humans want independence, but not necessarily for those beneath them. They want it from those above them.

The Black Panther Stokely Carmichael was asked what role women had:

"The only place for women in the SNCC is prone" (cited in Animals and Why They Matter 72).

Human beings are individuals, and want freedom, and yet they can be tyrannous.

J.J. Rousseau said of women, "They have, or ought to have, little freedom... she should learn to submit to injustice and to suffer the wrongs inflicted on her by her husband without complaint" (cited in Midgley 75).

Peter Singer wrote in his book Animal Liberation that NORMAL ADULT humans should have the same rights (my emphasis -- meant to highlight the fact that Singer believes that children and the mentally retarded should be able to be killed without qualms).

"Within these limits we could still hold that, for instance, it is worse to kill a NORMAL ADULT human, with a capacity for self-awareness, and the ability to plan for the future and have meaningful relations with others, than it is to kill a mouse, which presumably does not share all these characteristics; or we might appeal to the family and other personal ties that humans have, but mice do not have to the same degree; or we might think it is the consequences for other humans, who will be put in fear of their own lives, that makes the crucial difference..." (Singer cited in Midgley 97).

To avoid speciesism, Singer has to find a common term that allows him to say that NORMAL ADULT humans should have rights, along with lesser rights for animals (children and the retarded get no rights under Singer's philosophy).

Midgley thinks Singer's concepts are unclear.

But since we are no longer bound to Christian concepts in academic philosophy and are having to reinvent the role of rights outside of the Christian sphere (which traditionally has held nature as not having an end-in-itself quality that we do ascribe to humans), we are in a moral quandary, and to my mind Singer worsens the quandary, as there are no rights for the retarded and/or children. (I know I'm not supposed to say retarded, but if I say mentally handicapped, then I just have to say retarded to know precisely what I mean.)

Midgley is neither dog-matic, nor catty, and she is certainly no birdbrain. However, she has yet to provide a term or set of terms that resolve the quandaries about what rights animals should have, and what rights human should have. She does say that the whole notion of "rights" is confusing to say the least, but she never says it is wrong to talk about them. She leans on the notion of the Golden Rule from time to time to indicate that there is SOMETHING of this in our relations to the higher mammals (though not to insects). She never goes so far as to say that the golden rule must also pertain in our relation to cockroaches.

Does it pertain in our relation to woodchucks?

That's what I want to know. There are only 40 pages left in this book. I'm counting on Midgley to clarify the boundary of whether a woodchuck is my neighbor, and whether I am obligated to put the woodchuck (if not the centipede) on the ballot just because we have never had one for president. What I suspect is that Midgley is too sensible to allow herself to go this far out on a limb. Midgley's job is to make sense within philosophy. She argues that liberation movements have to begin with what's practical, and achievable. Liberating all animals from pain is not possible. Even to liberate all humans from pain is not possible. There is infinite pain, and even the Good Samaritan can only focus on one individual at a time. He cannot fix everybody's bank account, and cure all wounds.

So I think that woodchucks are out of luck. One big concern in contract theory is that agreement through speech must be possible. But just because a woodchuck can't say that he sees equality between himself and me doesn't mean that he doesn't feel equal, and feel oppressed by my keeping him off of "my lawn." Perhaps one day a statesman among woodchucks will arise, speaking through an interpreter, and argue for his inalienable right to be a woodchuck, and to have freedom of access to my tomatoes.

Perhaps he'll even pass a law saying that all humans must grow their gardens full, so that to each woodchuck according to his or need, from each woodchuck according to his ability, will be the new norm. Perhaps he'll even raise an army to force and defend this right.

And perhaps the insects will be right on the heels of the woodchucks.

Happy 4th.

Midgley on Animals

I've got a garden for the first time. It's just two abandoned flower beds that I've let go to seed for seven years. I ripped out all the grass, and then my kids dug out the remaining roots, and we put in some fresh dirt. Then we planted 8 cucumbers, and a tomato plant. The garden store suggested a small fence, so I put that in, too.

About 60 ft. away is a woodchuck burrow. It's not on my property, but the woodchucks (there must be six of them) occasionally visit the flowerbeds. A cabbage was eaten out of our flowerbed one night. It was supposed to win a prize at school, as it was quite big, but the woodchuck decimated it two days before the prizes.

I bought a Havaheart trap at a yard sale for ten dollars and put it near the woodchucks' main hole.

This morning I found a baby rabbit in it. My kids insisted I let the rabbit go. It was cute. I asked a neighbor and she said I should let it out. I did. It hopped away.

I don't really know what to do about the woodchucks. I've been going through the web and there's a YouTube video of some fellow dynamiting woodchucks! A commenter says he once dynamited a woodchuck den and three of them flew out and he nearly died laughing!

Have a heart, dude!

The woodchuck is closely related to the squirrel, which is closely related to the mouse and rat. Squirrels I have an affection for. Mice are cute. Rats?

I read the first fifty pages of Midgley's book Animals and Why They Matter (University of Georgia 1983) in a gorgeous little edition. She says it's very hard to think about animal rights. Some people want rights for everything including yeast. Others dismiss the whole effort and say animals exist at our pleasure, and have no independent rights. She gives a short history of the literature in philosophy. Aside from St. Francis, few Christians have concerned themselves with animal rights. Animals don't have souls, and so don't qualify for rights. They also don't have the capacity to reason, which since the Enlightenment has meant they are not eligible in contract theory. Nevertheless, Jeremy Bentham argues that they do have a capacity for feeling, and so they qualify for moral consideration. Peter Singer builds on Bentham.

But many disallow feeling as sufficient qualification, and still deny animals any rights.

Midgley says, Oh really? No sympathies outside the human race?

She quotes from a British safari hunter (perhaps the model for those in the Ace Ventura films).

R. Gordon Cummings published a book in 1850 about shooting elephants in the African bush. With his first shot Cummings incapacitated an elephant and then sat down to have coffee. Satisfied with his coffee, Cummings went to investigate the suffering elephant, and found he had to shoot it many more times before it died.

"Large tears now trickled from his eyes, which he slowly shut and opened, his colossal frame quivered convulsively, and falling on his side, he expired" (15).

Few of us today would admire ourselves for having destroyed such a magnificent creature. But that's just what Cummings did.

Midgley writes, "The self-deception of hunters like Cummings seems therefore to be of the same kind which is found in a murderer who supposes that by shooting an opponent from behind a hedge he has proved himself superior to his victim... It depends on a true belief in the consciousness, complexity and independence of the victim, accompanied by a false estimate of what is achieved by killing him" (16).

Midgley rolls her eyes at the notion of "speciesism" and argues that it derives from the kind of arguments made during the French Revolution.

And yet she insists this doesn't mean that we should be without courtesy toward other species.

Midgley chuckles about lifeboat arguments of the kind that if you had a retarded baby and a clever dog, and could only rescue one, which one would you save, and yet she thinks hypotheticals are important to understanding values.

She argues that lifeboat situations are rare, and that we ought to try to be more sensible than to choose our baby or a woodchuck. We do have to kill pests if we intend to eat crops (oops, there goes the woodchuck!), but she says it's also possible to spare animals (have a carrot, woodchuck). She instances the Good Samaritan.

"From a burning building, or even a milder disaster, we are right to rescue first our nearest and dearest. Theorists who deny this, exalting impartiality as the core of virtue, are muddled" (23).

Nevertheless, she argues that the Good Samaritan gives us an instance in which we can choose to help someone outside our nearest and dearest.

"The Good Samaritan helped the injured stranger, because he recognized a serious emergency, making a strong claim of its own whoever it belonged to. In doing this, as Christ remarked, he acted AS A NEIGHBOR to him who fell among thieves. The Samaritan is not a man brought up to be above such notions as NEIGHBORHOOD, nor one who thinks that everybody is ALWAYS his neighbor" (23) [my emphases].

The Good Samaritan can act ON OCCASION to extend succor, Midgley claims. (I thought the Good Samaritan was a parable about a kind of categorical imperative, but she argues that it is an individual moral choice.)

Midgley asks can we extend the notion of the Good Samaritan past the species barrier?

"I have suggested -- and my readers must decide the case for themselves -- that confronted with Cummings and his gun, we might consider that the elephant's life, along with the conditions of its last hour, ought to outweigh the hunter's foolish pleasure in self-glorification, even when the profit on the tusks is thrown in" (23).

I don't happen to have elephants wandering about in my garden. It's woodchucks. Woodchucks are not listed in Midgley's index. How is an elephant different from a woodchuck? (Elephants have longer memories, and a lot more charisma.) In certain parts of Africa, elephants do get into gardens, and some of them do get whacked.

From planting a couple of flowerbeds I now have a philosophical problem on my hands. Should I be a Good Samaritan toward the woodchucks, or should I relocate them? I could call the Town Supervisor and have him relocate the woodchucks. He lives two doors away. But there is also a certain fun in trying to trap the woodchucks, and it's become a philosophical drama to go out and check the trap.

I just don't know if it's right. So far they've only eaten a head of cabbage, but I'm worried about the tomatoes, and the cucumbers. What am I supposed to think?

I Finished Midgley!

I finished Midgley on Women's Choices. In the last several chapters she touches on many key points that have bothered me about the women's movement. She discusses the problems of logic, which many feminists dismissed altogether. She thinks it is a bad idea to reject logic. Logic can be lazy and stupid, and begin from the wrong premises. However, to let go of logic altogether is silly.

She blasts Bertrand Russell in her counterargument for overestimating the power of logic:

"Thus Bertrand Russell congratulated himself on having convinced his small son by argument that it was foolish to be afraid of the dark (since it contained no real dangers), and thus stopped him asking for company or a night-light. The boy gave in, because he could see no flaw in his father's reasoning. But his terror continued for years, and in his sister's opinion did him lasting harm..." (203).

She says that we don't know anything about the true nature of men & women since we've almost never seen them separately. Some men for the longest time claimed that they were superior. This was annoying. Now some women claim that they are superior. This is annoying, too. She thinks this kind of thinking is for the birds, since men and women are meant to cooperate.

Midgley's afraid that women will become Nietzscheans and think like the Romantic movement. Then women will become individualists, and orient primarily toward fame. She blasts Simone de Beauvoir, because she "declares that there is something not just frightening, but metaphysically degrading, about pregnancy and childbirth. A pregnant woman is, she says, 'alienated'; in her, the species is taking over the individual; she is 'in the iron grip of the species'. Both the father and the child are violating her sacred individuality" (214).

Midgley comments that again the premises of this particularly argument are spotty.

"The premiss [sic] needed to make sense of this amazing piece of nonsense is the existentialist one that no act has value unless it is an entirely solitary choice and achievement. Since most human enterprises are in fact communal, it is hard, by these rules, to find anything at all which is worth doing. Everybody (including, of course, the artist) relies deeply on tradition. Everybody wants their achievements to be received and valued by others. The romantic idea of a dignity which could be sustained in solitude is grotesque" (214).

Midgley believes that to think one is all alone or ought to do something all alone is a mistake.
Of course there are crazy families in which one or both parents don't have much of a parental instinct or much concern for others. Children are a lot like their parents whether they like it or not, and a sort of lassitude in regards to others' comforts may run in some families, as do other traits. "Other examples, comparable to parental interest, are curiosity, hunting, cleanliness or fear" (204).

Some mothers, even within bird species, don't have much on the ball in terms of caring for children. It may not be a strong part of their makeup, as it was not for Simone de Beauvoir, or Val Solanas. But most primate mothers (we are primates) "commonly do show, just those qualities of devotion, patience and intelligent affection for which human mothers are justly celebrated" (212).

One sees this in classical stories. In Homer it is Odysseus who wishes to stay behind with his newborn son Telemachus rather than go off to the war that makes him immortal. Agamemnon is more than willing to sacrifice his own daughter Iphigenia in order to get wind from Minerva to sail his thousand ships toward Troy. But Agamemnon is a scumbag, and Odysseus is a likable hero. Achilles, too, is more than willing to die for fame. But when Odysseus returns to Ithaca his central motivation is to be with his wife & son.

In ancient Greece women who had children out of wedlock or under a curse fought like fiends for their children. Agamemnon's wife Clytemnestra waits ten years to kill her husband for what he did to her baby Iphigenia. Mothers become extraordinarily devoted. This is the norm. The comparative few who gave this up such as Medea strike us as ghastly. (Medea offs her children to hurt her philandering husband.) Women should be family-oriented if they want anything out of life.

She thinks there are going to be a few extreme feminists who reject men and reject children. They won't replicate, she says, and that's a good thing.

My next book by Mary Midgley is Animals and Why They Matter (1983).