Carnevale

Sunday morning from our apartment

Saturday was the first day of Carnevale.  We took a vaporetto to St. Marks to see what was happening and found a number of people braving the cold, some of them in costumes, and several announcers on the stage keeping up a steady patter.  But there wasn’t enough going on to hold us so we hopped another boat back to Rialto and Osteria alla Ciurma for bacala mantecato and spritzes, and then went to Do Spade for lunch.  Afterward we tried to walk around a bit, but it was just too arctic.  For a week now I had been hoping the weather would break and we would get at least a couple of nice days out of the 10 we were there, but we were running out of time and it wasn’t happening.  So we stayed in again in the evening, even though we were starting to go a bit stir crazy because there was nothing much to do there (the TV didn’t work and our internet connection was intermittent) and we were wasting our time in Venice, but it was just too damn cold to go out. 

A chilly night on Strada Nuova

In the morning we woke up to snow and an almost solid coat of slushy ice on the canal in front of our apartment.  When I looked out the window, my heart sank.  Our time in Venice was almost gone and we just could not get a break from the relentless cold.  Nonetheless we sucked it up and went out anyway, catching a boat to St. Marks for the ceremony of the Descent of the Angel.  A lot more people turned out for this and the square was almost packed, despite the snow and cold.  Many people had on costumes, most of them the traditional 18^th century style (the 18^th century was the height of Carnevale, when it went on for months, and entailed a lot of anonymous sex, which led to an epidemic of syphilis).  Without really understanding the background of the event, we nevertheless caught the excitement of the occasion as they shoved some poor girl out of the Campanile and she dangled there with her skirt blowing over her head in the frigid breeze some 300 feet above the pavement on a steel cable.  There was a lot of screaming and cheering as she slowly slid down the cable to the big stage.  But it was still extremely cold, so after the ceremony we took a boat back to Cannaregio and had lunch at a place across the canal from the entrance to our neighborhood.  Afterward we walked up the Rio de Spagna and actually had some gelato.  Given the cold, it was hard to get in the mood for it, but our departure date was approaching and I couldn’t leave without having had some.  Later, after dark, because it was our next to last night and we were sick of being cooped up in the apartment every night, we braved the frigid conditions and took a stroll down the Strada Nuova.  Maybe I was starting to get used to it but it actually didn’t seem that bad.  At least there was no wind.  We went into a shop and I bought Frieda a dress and a scarf.  Then we found a bar and had a couple of spritzes (a couple apiece, that is) and watched the people (some in costumes) come and go while Gotye and Avicii played on the sound system. 

The next day, Monday, was the best weather of the trip. It was the break we had been hoping for, the beginning of a warming trend that, sadly, came too late for us.   The sun was out, there was no wind, and it was so warm that I actually didn’t wear a hat.  It might have gotten close to 40 degrees.  We went back to the square, and this time the costumes were unbelievable, fantastic.  We had seen the crude, corny costumes on a par with Halloween in the States on Saturday, and the traditional 18^th century-style costumes on Sunday, but now we saw conceptual costumes that were dazzlingly creative, elaborate, and intricate, costumes that were thematic and some of which looked as though they had required many, many hours to conceive and execute, and maybe hours to don.  We stayed in the square all day and shot about 300 photos in an attempt to capture the magnificence and splendor of the masquerade, as well as the magic of the occasion layered onto the ubiquitous, everyday magic of Venice.  Frieda was so blown away by the artistry of the costumes she actually suggested that, despite all the discomfort and frustration we had been through on this trip and our vow to make the next winter trip to warmer climes, we return next year for the entire duration of Carnevale.  I looked at her like she’d lost her mind, yet I understood.  The color and grandiosity of the costumes evoked and amplified the unique enchantment of Venice, and brought us back under its spell.  

For more photos of the costumes of Carnevale, visit my Flickr page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/75896250@N06/sets/72157629536035111/

Venice in Winter 2

Idle gondolas

In the morning we bought a 7-day vaporetto (water bus) pass to give ourselves more mobility (50 euro but worth it, and cheaper if you buy in advance online) and headed to Giudecca, an island on the south side of the city that has an industrial history but is now a sedate residential area.  We got off at Palanca and started walking down the fondamenta.  We’d never been there and Frieda was curious about it but it turned out to be quite dull, New Jersey to Venice’s New York.  There was little to see or do (which is maybe why Rick Steves doesn’t even mention it in his book on Venice); plus a blustery, frigid wind was sweeping in from the lagoon, so at Zitelle we hopped a boat across to St. Marks, where a massive stage had been set up at the west end (opposite the basilica) for the Carnevale festivities.  After making the circuit and saying hello again to this wonderful quadrangle we caught another boat across to Academia to look for a lunch spot (places around St. Marks tend to be expensive and not so good).  A couple of places lured but didn’t grab us, and then we stumbled upon one called Osteria Enoteca Ai Artisti, not in the guidebooks, with just a handful of tables.  No tourists, only Venetians, but the friendly waiter spoke a little English.  He sat us at a table in back; essentially a little private room with a groined brick ceiling.  I ordered mezzi bombardoni with anglerfish, Frieda got tagliatella with prawns and we asked him to select a wine for us.  He chose an excellent white, so fine, in fact, that I was a little nervous about what it was going to cost, but it turned out to be only 20 euro.  The meal, the wine, the setting, the whole deal was exquisite: the best of the trip.  My dish had caper berries as big as olives in it, along with cherry tomatoes and actual olives.  Each bite had a slightly different flavor.  I was suffused with bliss, delighted to be alive in Venice, and sent the chef my compliments.  Afterward we walked down to the Salute Church and ducked inside to momentarily escape a brutal, icy wind off the lagoon that cut right through us.  But it was still there waiting for us when we emerged so we caught a boat home and stayed in again.  I was beginning to feel like a prisoner shut into the apartment every night by the cold, which was so harsh and hostile that it was seriously interfering with our enjoyment of the city.  Venice, after all, is a walking town, the most superb walking town in the world, and most of the enjoyment of it comes from getting lost in its maze-like streets and coming across beautiful vistas you’ve never seen before, by day or by night.  A lot of that was being spoiled for us by the weather. 



Vaporetto passing beneath the Rialto bridge



Wednesday we went to Ca’ Pesaro, but I wouldn’t recommend it.  The only painting I was interested in, Klimt’s Salome, was nowhere in evidence.  They did have a couple de Chiricos, but not particularly good ones.  We returned to Do Spade for lunch, but this time instead of having cicchetti we sat at a table in the rear and ordered pasta.  When we emerged it was still frigid, but the sun was out and the terrible wind had subsided, so we were able to walk around a little near Campo San Margherita and the Frari Church.  For dinner we went to a pizza place near our apartment, in the old Jewish ghetto.  This was the first Jewish ghetto, named after the copper foundry that was once located here (“geto” in Venetian).  In the 16^th century the Jews were confined here by the canals and gates manned by armed guards and were only allowed out during the day. 

From Ca' Pesaro

The morning dawned sunny so we decided to take a cruise to Murano where we warmed up watching the glass blowers work.  After the display of their skill the owner tried to persuade us to buy a set of 6 different-colored champagne glasses for 180 euro.  We said we’d think about it over lunch but actually considered that it would be next to impossible to get those fragile-looking flutes back to California intact, should we be so rash as to shell out $240 for 6 glasses, which we gave no more than a fleeting thought of doing.  Instead we settled for some colorful shot glasses.  They were both sturdier and a lot cheaper.  Back out in the sunlight it felt so mild I actually unbuttoned the top button of my coat.  It was the best weather we’d had, so far:  maybe 35 degrees.  We took a boat back to Fundamente Nova and walked from there to Campo de Miracoli where we had spritzes, then doubled back to La Perla for pizza.  La Perla makes big claims for its pizza but we found it merely adequate.  But Venice, after all, is not the center of pizza culture, so you can’t expect the quality you get in the south. 

Friday was overcast, windier, and even colder, and Frieda was starting to display cold symptoms so we walked over to Billa to try to get her some Tylenol.  We couldn’t find any, so we asked the checker, who said they didn’t carry it, we would have to go to a pharmacy.  When we asked if she knew of one nearby, she looked puzzled.  A smiling nun who was checking out offered to take us, so we waited for her and then the 3 of us set off.  But it soon became evident, after listening to her ask every passerby where the pharmacy was, that she didn’t know where she was going.  Finally someone said there was one over by the Guglie vaporetto stop, which was our stop, and we realized we would have walked right by it had we just headed for the vaporetto in the first place, instead of going to Billa.  The nun had been trying to do a good deed but, alas, had led us on a wild goose chase.  We left her and headed over to Guglie, picked up the drug, and then took the boat to Arsenale to visit the naval museum, because it seemed a good idea to be inside on such an arctic day.  It turned out there wasn’t much heat inside the museum, but at least we were out of the wind and it was inexpensive and mildly interesting, with models showing a detailed history of shipbuilding, including the galleys built at the height of Venice’s sea power.    

Murano

Afterward we wandered west and north, looking for Brunetti’s Questura (see my post on the Donna Leon novels).  It was intensely cold and our noses were both running so we ducked into a little restaurant to warm up and fortify ourselves.  It turned out to be tasty and warm, if expensive.  Then we soldiered on, found the Questura, stuck our heads inside to eye the cops behind the desk, and then scurried off to a café for some hot chocolate and fritelli.  When we emerged from that café at about 4 in the afternoon, it was absolutely freezing outside.  It was just god-awful, unbelievable cold. You really felt the environment was trying to kill you.  Waiting for the vaporetto I thought my bare face was being torn off by the wind, which was like a hail of razor blades.  My jaw was aching from the cold. 

When we got back to the apartment we vowed to each other that if we take a trip next winter it will be to Hawaii or the Caribbean: someplace warm. 

Venice in Winter 1

My first visit to Venice was in the spring.  Since then Frieda and I have visited 4 times, twice in the spring and twice in the fall, and in all of them the weather was pretty good, except for the first time, in the fall, when it was pouring and we had a taste of acqua alta (but that didn’t dampen her enthusiasm for the city).  So our recent visit was the first in winter, and it just happened to coincide with the worst cold snap in Venice in nearly 30 years, with ice in the canals, snow, and temps well below freezing. 

The concept of the trip was to spend a week in Venice during the lowest season, when it would be as empty of tourists as it ever is, and then get a 3-day taste of Carnevale at the end.  When Frieda first suggested it, I was skeptical, but I checked the average temps and they were only about 20 degrees below what we were used to in California, so I thought it wouldn’t be too bad.  Boy, was I wrong.  Instead we got temps 40 degrees below our norm.  At the airport the regular Alilaguna boat to the city couldn’t get up to the dock because of the ice, so we had to take a bigger boat over to the Colonna stop on Murano and catch another from there into the city.  The cold was numbing.  It seemed we had landed in Iceland instead of Venice.  (Americans, myself included, tend to underestimate just how far north Europe is.  Venice is at the approximate latitude of Portland, Oregon.) 

From our apartment

We’d rented an apartment in Cannaregio, a quiet, middle-class residential area on the northeast side of town, away from the maddening crowds, the same one we’d had on an earlier visit.  We got there around 5:30 Saturday evening, dropped off our luggage, took a quick inventory of the kitchen supplies, and then headed north across 3 bridges, 2 of wood, 1 of metal, over ice-clogged canals to the Billa supermarket.  Unlike the more permanent stone bridges, the wood and metal ones have gaps between the steps through which you can look down at the swirling water below.  In films shot in Venice, falling into a canal usually has a comic note.  Of course, we know the water isn’t the cleanest and if you were to swallow any it could have ill effects.  We also know that if you were to drop anything into a canal—your sunglasses, digital camera, wallet—you can count on it being gone forever.  But in this season the canals took on a more sinister aspect.  If your heart didn’t stop immediately from the shock of hitting that freezing water, you would certainly be quickly dragged down by the weight of the sodden layers of clothing you were swaddled in.  In other words, in this season, falling into a canal meant almost certain death.  And I thought about that whilst crossing those bridges and looking down at the dark, icy water through the gaps between the steps. 

Back at the apartment we closed the shutters and cranked the heater.  Fortunately it had a good one, so we thawed out, made some dinner and polished off a bottle of Sangiovese.  Unpacking, Frieda realized she’d forgotten her skinny jeans, so that set the agenda for the morning: we would have to head over to Campo San Lucas where there was an H&M (sort of like Ross in California) so she could buy another pair. 

Free food & wine

On the way, along the Fondamenta de Cannaregio, we found ourselves in a crowd of people eating off plastic plates and sipping wine from plastic cups.  It turned out the largesse was a preview of Carnevale.  We’d already had breakfast at the apartment, but sampled some of the wine at least, and it and the bonhomie of the crowd cheered us up, despite the frigid temps. 

After scoring a pair of  black jeans for Frieda we crossed the Rialto bridge into the neighborhood of some of our favorite little eateries, among them Do Spade, a place found by accident on a previous visit, where we had a couple glasses of the house white (each) and some cicchetti: sardines, calamari, prawns, croquettes, and octopus.  On the way back to the apartment along the Strada Nuova, a walking thoroughfare created in the 19^th century by filling in a canal, we stopped at a café for espressos and fritelli, pastries like cream puffs made for Carnevale.  Back at the apartment we checked the 10-day forecast on the iPad, but there was no good news for us.  The last time we stayed in Cannaregio we’d had a romantic dinner at a place nearby called Al Bacco where we’d had a table on the edge of the canal and my spaghetti al vongole (with clams) had been delicious.  Obviously, there was no question of dining al fresco this time, but we still wanted to go back there, and it turned out the vongole was still excellent.  But after dinner Frieda needed to use the rest room and discovered she had to go outside to get to it, and it was unheated, which was a thrill; nothing like getting bare-assed in sub-20 degree weather to make you appreciate central heating.  We began to get the impression the Venetians themselves weren’t prepared for this cold. 

From Ca' d'Oro

The next day, having learned our lesson, we bundled up.  I put on underwear, long thermal underwear, sweat pants, and jeans on the bottom.  On the top, a tee shirt, a long-sleeved thermal undershirt, a long-sleeved tee-shirt, a crew-neck wool sweater, a turtle-neck zip-up wool sweater, and my heaviest winter coat.  On my feet, two pairs of socks, one cotton, one wool, and boots.  Plus my Russian hat with ear flaps.  Then we set off for Ca d’Oro, a beautiful Venetian-Gothic palace on the Grand Canal that is now an art museum.  It was a short walk down the Strada Nuova, which provides relatively easy access from northern Canneregio to the Rialto area.  We had little interest in the art on display, but the view of the Grand Canal from the terrace is superb.  Then we went on to Rialto and crossed to our usual stomping grounds in San Polo.  We first went to Do Mori.  I love the house white there, but Frieda thought the cicchetti looked stale and picked over, so we moved on down the street to another place we’d visited before called Osteria alla Ciurma where, on our last visit, we’d had excellent bacala mantecato (a paste made of cod and garlic, served on bread) and it didn’t disappoint this time.  To wash it down we had a couple of spritzes, a popular Venetian drink made of prosecco and either Campari or Aperol.  We prefer Aperol, it’s not as bitter as Campari.  Then we trotted back to Do Spade for sardines and scampi.  We’d intended to visit Ca’ Pessaro, a little modern art museum (we’d been to the excellent Peggy Guggenheim museum on an earlier visit), and Palazzo Mocenigo, the costume museum, but it turned out they were both closed on Mondays, so we wandered northwest through areas new to us in Santa Croce, crossed the bridge to the train station and then strolled down Rio de Spagna, picking up pastries and pasta sauce along the way.  A wine seller on the Fondamenta de Cannaregio, who filled a plastic bottle with red for us, said he hadn’t seen so much ice in the canals since 1985.  We stayed in for the evening, not up for braving the cold after dark which even our many layers could not fend off. 

Fat Hill

A recent article in The New Yorker got me thinking about the Neolithic Revolution.  The article was about an archeological dig in southeastern Turkey known as Gobekli Tepe (“Fat Hill” in Turkish).  The site contains more than 60 multi-ton limestone pillars.  It’s estimated it would require at least 500 men working in a directed, organized way to quarry, move, and erect these pillars.  The pillars are engraved with high and low reliefs of predatory animals.  Because, unlike the cave paintings of the Upper Paleolithic, the reliefs offer no portrayal of daily life, they are thought to be symbolic, or perhaps guardians.  The pillars themselves are T-shaped and give evidence of representing stylized human beings.  Gobekli Tepe was designed and built by hunter-gatherers as a centralized meeting place, a sanctuary if you like, for people from a 100-mile radius.  You could think of it as party-central, a Stone Age Studio 54, a place where unknown ceremonies were performed along with great feasts, perhaps including fermented beverages and/or psychotropic plants.  The oldest sections of Gobekli Tepe were built around 12,000 years ago (as compared to 4500 years ago for Stonehenge), and thus predate by millennia the conditions which were thought to be prerequisite for monumental architecture to occur.  Gobekli Tepe turns previous thinking about the Neolithic Revolution on its head. 

Hominids have been on earth for approximately 2.6 million years.  Our particular species has been around for about 200,000.  95% of that time we made our living as foragers.  Women scoured the countryside for nuts, berries, roots, fruits, wild grains, anything edible.  Men hunted for meat.  And they were pretty successful.  Studies have shown that in most cases our nomadic hunter-gatherer ancestors were able to support themselves on an investment of only about 20 hours a week.  Nevertheless, over a 3-thousand-year period, independently in several different locations, they transformed themselves into sedentary farmers.  This event, the domestication of plants and animals (i.e., sheep, goats, cattle—dogs were domesticated much earlier, at least 33,000 years ago), marks the transition from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic era and is known as the Neolithic Revolution.  Gobekli Tepe, it now appears, is where this transformation began.  DNA analysis of modern wheat shows that it is genetically most closely related to the wild wheat found near this site.

Contrary to what you might assume, this change did not result in an improved standard of living.  The physical record shows that subsequently people were more anemic, had worse teeth, more spinal deformities, more infectious diseases, worked harder and died younger.  They actually shrank in size, from an average 5’10” for men and 5’6” for women during the Paleolithic to an average 5’6” for men and 5’1” for women.  Socially, they went from egalitarianism to a hierarchical structure with a ruling class.  Some say that the legends of a past Golden Age, a Garden of Eden, represent racial memories of the old hunter-gatherer days.  Our ancestors had it pretty good as hunter-gatherers and could have gone on indefinitely that way.  Instead, they took the path that led to where we are now.  So why did they make the fateful change?

There have been a number of theories.  To me, the one that makes the most sense is that they were victims of their own success.  Population growth led to increasing conflicts between competing groups, forcing the groups into more confined territories, which then had to be more thoroughly exploited.  One can imagine some wild wheat being accidentally left behind, and when the group returned the next season it found a new crop, so it got the notion to enlarge on the practice.  Then, agriculture produced a surplus, and the surplus needed to be stored for future use.  A surplus allows for further growth in population.  Jared Diamond, in Guns, Germs, and Steel, says that the hunter-gatherers were seduced by the temporary abundance produced by agriculture, but then population caught up and they found themselves trapped in a vicious cycle of increasing production and increasing population, the cycle we are still caught in today.

It has long been the assumption that agriculture came first.  The agricultural surplus required storage and that plus the presence of domesticated animals led people to stay in one place and build permanent structures.  In particular, monumental architecture required the organization and division of labor and thus it is only after the Neolithic Revolution that monumental architecture appears. 

Gobekli Tepe tells a different story.  It shows that the temple preceded the city.  It suggests that, instead of agriculture creating the need to stay in one place, the need for division of labor, social hierarchies, and complex symbol systems, rather it was the desire to come together in one place to celebrate their existence that required all these things.  Perhaps the need to protect wild grain from marauding herds of gazelles and donkeys fired cooperation among the local human groups, and this required social organization and a means of cementing and celebrating that cooperation.  It may be that the Neolithic Revolution was not so much a choice as something bumbled into.  Our ancestors were trying to make their lives even easier and in the process made them a lot more complicated. 

Only 5% of Gobekli Tepe has been excavated, so it’s possible that more discoveries there will enhance our insight into this crucial transition in the developmental history of our species. 

1Q84



Yukio Mishima



My first exposure to Japanese literature was in January, 1973, when I picked up Yukio Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask at a bookstore in College Park, Maryland.  Subsequently I read a half-dozen more of his works, plus at least 3 of Yasunari Kawabata, and a handful of others.  In 1976, after landing in California, I decided to audit a course in Japanese lit at UC.  It was taught by a Japanese grad student on a Fulbright.  We became friends and, for a couple of years, housemates.  After post-doctoral work at Cambridge, he returned to Japan and assumed a professorship at Waseda University in Tokyo, his alma mater.  We continued to correspond and in 1989 he asked me if I had read a Japanese novelist who had attended Waseda with him as an undergraduate, and whose book had just been translated into English.  The author’s name was Haruki Murakami and the novel was A Wild Sheep Chase.  The book turned out to have little in common with any of the Japanese literature I’d read before.  A free-wheeling romp, it reminded me more of Tom Robbins than anything from Japan. 

That’s because Murakami is not really a Japanese writer in the sense that Mishima and Kawabata were, which is why the Japanese literary establishment has been less than welcoming to him.  Instead, he is a First World writer, a writer whose works are set not in traditional Japan, but rather on the western frontier of the American Empire, a place where people listen to European classical or American jazz or British pop music, watch American movies, read European and American literature, and have sensibilities more conditioned by those experiences than by the old traditions of Japanese culture.  Contextually, writers like Mishima and Kawabata were backward looking; Murakami accepts the present and looks forward.    



Haruki Murakami



A couple of years later a second novel was released in English, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.  This book was composed of two parallel narratives.  One takes place in a sci-fi version of Tokyo where a narrator (none of the characters have names) works at encrypting data in a laboratory hidden in the sewer system.  The other describes a self-contained world where a narrator reads dreams from the skulls of unicorns.  The two narratives gradually converge.  This book was darker and more dreamlike than the first, and even more bizarre and intriguing. 

When I told my friend how fascinating I’d found it, he mailed me Norwegian Wood, which was available in English in Japan at the time, but not yet in the US.  This was the book that made Murakami’s reputation in Japan, where it sold millions of copies (the film version is due out tomorrow in New York).  It turned out to be a realistic, straightforward, nostalgic story of romantic loss and regret, quite different from what I’d read before.  One could easily imagine it to be a semi-autobiographical novel based on his undergraduate days at Waseda. 

Since then I’ve read each of Murakami’s books as they’ve appeared in English, so it wasn’t surprising when his latest, 1Q84, showed up in my Christmas stocking.  At 925 pages, this is his most massive novel to date.  Like Hard-Boiled Wonderland, it is comprised of dueling narratives and alternate worlds, and like Norwegian Wood, it is a love story.  The lovers met when they were 10 years old.  At the time of the story, they are both 30, and haven’t seen each other in the 20 intervening years.  Nevertheless, they think of each other constantly, and the twin narratives, one of her path, one of his, describe the circuitous routes by which they gradually wend their ways toward one another.  Like Hard-Boiled Wonderland it has elements of a detective story, and like Norwegian Wood it is a nostalgic and sentimental love story.  These are the two sides of Murakami. 

1Q84, in homage to George Orwell, is set in 1984 or, rather, in an alternative to 1984, the “Q” being a phonetic play on the Japanese word for “nine.”  Alienation and loneliness have always been prominent themes in Murakami and 1Q84 is no exception, with both protagonists being, for the most part, socially isolated.  Conversely, social consciousness has never played a big role in Murakami’s fiction, but 1Q84 breaks with that by giving considerable attention to the issue of the abuse of women.  The real charm of 1Q84 though is that it’s an elaborate adult fairy tale.  It even has fairies, called “the Little People.”  By virtue of this it transports us back to our own childhoods, and the stories we heard as children.  In the process it returns to the basics of storytelling: spinning a good yarn.  Looked at in retrospect, there are some problems with the plot and, despite all the surprises along the way (and there are plenty of those), the ending is predictable.  It’s the only possible ending, of course, for a fairy tale.  Nonetheless the book is captivating.  Murakami sets up resonances between the characters, their words and their actions, that keep you both bemused and amused in a world where, as in a child’s world, anything seems possible. In a way, the book is a celebration of the playful creativity of childhood.  And though a couple of them may seem a little too easy, the echoing of actions, characters, and, ultimately, of worlds, feels full of imports that are just out of reach. 

The Evolution of Thought

For countless millennia humankind lived in a mythological world.  We thought about the origins of things with a mixture of dream and fantasy.  Shamanism, the most primitive religion, was invented as a means of gaining some influence over the forces of a mysterious and frightening world.  When different shamans or, later, different religions came into conflict, the winner was the one whose advocates won the physical battle, because that victory supposedly demonstrated their power to influence real events.  That’s how Christianity came to rule the Roman Empire. 



Copernicus



Afterward, the European Mind languished in the Christian torpor for over twelve hundred years.  Then, suddenly, the roof fell in.  Less than half a millennium ago, in 1548, arguably the most important year in human history so far, an amazing thing happened.  A couple of men somehow gained the courage to think about the nature of themselves and the world in a more disciplined way.  Without preconception, they tried to look at the physical evidence and draw rational conclusions from it.  These men were Nicolaus Copernicus and Andreas Vesalius.  Their books, respectively, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres and On the Fabric of the Human Body, kicked off the Scientific Revolution.  They were followed by other fearless warriors of truth like Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), and Isaac Newton (1642-1727), who all carried forward the torch of empiricism against Christian opposition.  Descartes (1596-1650), the first philosopher since ancient times to not be a theologian, established skepticism as the intellectual starting point, and the scientific method in his Discourse on the Method (1637).

This thought revolution was epochal and continues to be a traumatic psychological event as the successive blast waves from it have shaken the Western Mind to its foundations.  It undermined and challenged everything that had been held true to that point. 



Diderot



The Enlightenment is the name we give to the period in the 18^th century when this change in perspective began to percolate through the non-scientific intellectual community in Europe.  By then science had already displayed far more success at predicting the future than religion ever had, and had begun the relentless process of technological innovation that would enable us to manipulate the physical world to an unprecedented degree, and consequently there arose an eagerness to apply it to every aspect of life, including the social, the moral, and the political.  That was largely Denis Diderot’s (1713-1764) project in his Encyclopedia. 

I’ve been reading about the best minds of the Enlightenment.  The more radical members of this movement, those at the cutting edge (Diderot, Baron d’Holbach, Claude Adrien Helvetius, David Hume, Julien Offray de La Mettrie), drew out the scientific approach to its logical conclusions.  Even though they didn’t have the greatest immediate impact, because they were too far ahead of their time, they are the ones who now seem most akin to us.  Better known figures like Rousseau or Voltaire, who had the bigger initial impact, now seem dated, even antiquated.  The radicals saw human beings as basically hedonistic: pursuing pleasure, avoiding pain.  Dismissing metaphysics, they were empirical and utilitarian, and believed in applying reason to the evidence of their senses.  They were pragmatic materialists, proto-evolutionists.  They viewed mind and body as two aspects of the same entity, and death as the end of consciousness.  They were atheists, even though in their day its open profession was a capital offence.  



Holbach



Patterns of thought are parts of culture that take a long time to percolate through the population.  An idea starts with an individual and slowly spreads.  Given the tremendous intervening success of science, one might have expected that in the 250 years since these intrepid thinkers blazed the trail, the ideas they pioneered would have permeated society and become the dominant way of thinking.  But that hasn’t happened, at least not in the United States, not yet, because against this progressive line of thought a powerful regressive pressure has arisen.  In the Enlightenment these people were excited about the triumphs of science and rushed to apply the scientific method to all aspects of life.  Now it is the reverse.  Many people are shell-shocked and frightened by the pace of technological change and seek to limit the scope of science as much as possible, and pull the wool of antique mythologies and superstitions over their heads.  We might call this the Benightenment, the flight from the light that illumines too much. 

Technology has advanced by leaps and bounds since the time of the philosophes, but opposed to it we have the blowback of fundamentalism, the resentment of its relentless pressure on the solace of the superstitious.  Many people are still having great difficulty making the transition to the new way of thinking, even though the process of waking up from the old way began 463 years ago, because in terms of the grand tides of culture, this is a relatively short time, less than 7 lifetimes.  Most people are still living in a pre-Cartesian, mythological mental world.  Ordinary people accept the boons of science as if they were magically generated, rejecting the materialist worldview that makes them possible.  The most likely to be atheists are the highly educated, who have studied the intellectual history of the past few centuries and, of course, scientists, who have had their whole lives to get used to the idea.  Meanwhile most people (some polls say as many as 90% in the US) still have their heads buried in the sand, their fingers in their ears, and are singing “La la la la la la!” as loudly as they can.  How curious that people can drive cars, fly in planes, talk on phones, watch TV, surf the internet, get their MRIs or CT scans, accept all these fruits of a materialist world view, and yet continue to profess belief in a preposterous, primitive mythology without a shred of evidence to support it.  But it just goes to show how slowly some things change, and how reluctant people are to give up old sources of comfort.



Mettrie



A kindly grandfather running the show, the survival of the ego after death, these are comforts people desperately wish to be true.  But as my mother used to say, “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.”  Wishing doesn’t make it so and, indeed, our longing for the truth of any proposition ought to make us extra-suspicious of it.  The afterlife is a bill of goods the church has sold to buy worldly power, a power it doesn’t deserve.  This snake oil is not going to cure our mortality.  Science tells us that nothing lasts forever.  Stars (including our own sun), galaxies, even the universe itself all have finite life spans, are all mortal.  Chances are our little bodily egos are no exception.  Isn’t it better to accommodate ourselves to the truth, rather than shut our eyes and live in the darkness of a lie?  The sooner we forsake rhis fictitious immortality, the sooner we can fully focus on the practical matter of trying to lengthen our life spans as much as possible.  We're not going back to the dark dream of the Middle Ages, so the regressives' foot-dragging is just wasting time. 

 





 

Econ 101

John Maynard Keynes

When I took my undergraduate degree in Economics (at a very conservative, private, Midwestern college, let it be said), John Maynard Keynes held a place in the economic canon comparable to the place held in physics by Einstein. His General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money ruled political policymaking after WWII and provided 3 decades of prosperity until the late 70s, when something called stagflation came along, a period of high unemployment combined with inflation.  This was a situation Keynes had not addressed in his masterwork, so it was decided that he was not perfectly omniscient after all, and therefore must be passé and irrelevant.  We would have to go back to Adam Smith and the perfectly self-correcting free market.  There had always been a group of people who longed to do this, because it is so much more comforting to believe that the economy is self-correcting and you don’t need to do anything at all.  Besides, lurking within the General Theory was the troublesome element of uncertainty, and it was such a relief to do away with that.  Thus was the mantle of economic deity handed to Milton Friedman, who provided an explanation of stagflation.  I can recall having a job interview in the early 90s wherein I was asked how it felt to have the Keynesian economics I learned in school invalidated.  I laughed and replied that tales of Keynes demise were highly exaggerated.   I didn’t get the job. 

In the wake of the global financial meltdown of 2007-09, Bush, Obama, Sarkozy, and Brown abruptly decided that maybe markets weren’t perfectly self-correcting after all, and perhaps we shouldn’t just let events take their natural course and see what happened.  Keynes might still have some shred of relevance.  Tax-relief and spending initiatives were launched to stimulate growth.  They weren’t really adequate (less that 2% of GDP a year for 3 years), but they did pull the economy out of a nosedive.  Yet, much as happened in 1931, these measures led to a panic about deficits that produced calls for debt reduction and austerity.  In 1931 Keynes warned that these spending cuts would turn the economy downward again, and, indeed, the depression deepened.  Yet here we are 80 years later making the same mistake all over again.  A couple of months ago Rick Perry said that “Keynesian theory is now done.”  That’s like Rick Perry announcing the end of General Relativity.  I suspect his knowledge of the one is equivalent to his knowledge of the other.

Keynes mission during the Great Depression was to save capitalism from itself, and it requires his services again.  Events of the past 5 years have demonstrated yet again the accuracy of his models, and discredited free market theories.  One has to suspect that even congressional Republicans see this, and are only determined to block Obama’s attempt at a second stimulus because they see it as in their political interest to insure that the economy is as bad as possible for the 2012 election.  Whether they are doing it out of ignorance, stupidity, or selfish political motives, if they are successful in blocking any stimulus, the United States will be condemned to a decade of stagnation, joblessness, and declining living standards.  And the Republicans will have performed a great service for all those who wish our country ill.