Review of Clockwork Angels: The Novel by Kevin J. Anderson

As a long-time fan of Rush, I was excited when I heard that the progressive rock group’s new album, Clockwork Angels, would be a concept album. Then came word that fantasy and science-fiction author Kevin J. Anderson was writing a novel based on the album’s lyrics, which spin a steampunk odyssey conceived by Rush lyricist and drummer Neil Peart. I pre-ordered a copy and when it arrived, quickly read it from cover to cover.

Clockwork Angels: The Novel, tells the story of Owen Hardy, an apprentice apple farmer in the land of Albion. A ruler called the Watchmaker organizes every aspect of life in Albion with mechanical order and regularity, so that each citizen need merely follow the path laid out before him or her. This is the Stability, according to which “Everything has its place, and every place has its thing.”  Owen Hardy fully expects to settle into his predetermined course, but he also dreams of life outside his village, and upon an invitation from a mysterious stranger, he runs away, runs afoul of the Watchmaker’s law, and travels to other lands, encountering carnies, thieves, wreckers and the Watchmaker’s antithesis, the Anarchist.

Anderson’s prose is uninspired but possesses a simple elegance perfect for a story that is essentially a long parable. He puts just the right amount of flesh on the lyrics to highlight the concept of free will steering a course between Order and Chaos. Summaries of the novel make it sound like the typical Bildungsroman of which the fantasy genre has way too many, but despite my low tolerance for dreamy-boy-goes-out-into-a-world-of-adventure stories, this one never struck me as cliché and I was never bored. 

In part, the conceptual work of Peart is to thank for that. More than once as I read, I caught myself thinking that I was grateful that a musician (and a drummer, no less), rather than a novelist, had created this story and its setting. Rush’s music and Peart’s lyrics have always had their own distinct taste, and that comes across in the novel. Fans of the music will recognize the philosophical motifs Peart has woven into Rush’s lyrics over the years--and many of those lyrics are sprinkled throughout the text. (On first reading, I caught quotes from as far back as 1975’s Fly by Night.)

I can’t help but relate the novel to my other recent reading. The Watchmaker’s Stability can be described as a “totally administered society,” a phrase that appears often in Critical Theory: A Very Short Introduction. The Frankfurt School of philosophers believed that in a totally administered society, whether that of Stalinist Russia or capitalist America, there is little room for true individuality. The totally administered society has ways of keeping us in our place. 

The Anarchist of Clockwork Angels represents the exact opposite--total lawlessness--although with his wild appetite for destruction, he is more of a nihilist of the negative sort portrayed in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed (The Devils). While he possesses a certain evil charm at first, in the end he is no more likeable than Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky, the slimy catalyst for ill deeds in The Possessed. In their crusade against the strictures of society, both are perfectly willing to destroy lives, but they have nothing positive to offer in place of what they tear down.

The beauty of Clockwork Angels is that Owen Hardy chooses neither the Watchmaker nor the Anarchist. In the words of the old Rush song “Freewill,” he chooses not to decide. He chooses to make his own way through life, with all the uncertainty, mistakes, suffering, and joy, that such a messy pilgrim’s progress entails. Owen's life with the Magnusson Carnival Extravaganza is one apart from the ideologies of the Watchmaker and Anarchist, who would impose themselves upon him and use him for their own purposes.

A final word about the book itself apart from the story. Clockwork Angels: The Novel is full of perks for the bibliophile. It has numerous full-color illustrations by long-time Rush album artist Hugh Syme, and they are among the most impressive I have encountered since I was in the sixth grade poring over the illustrations by the Brothers Hildebrandt in The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks. The back of the book includes the lyrics to Clockwork Angels: The Album and an afterword by Neil Peart, with photos from a hiking trip on which he and Anderson, friends even before this collaboration, brainstormed for the novel. 

I have actually never been much of a fan of Kevin J. Anderson, but this book has made me reconsider. On his website, AnderZone, he says that Neil Peart’s favorite work of his is The Saga of Seven Suns series, so I have placed the first book, Hidden Empire, on my Long List of Books to Read.

Final Comments on Slavoj Žižek's In Defense of Lost Causes

A year after starting it, I have finally finished reading Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s In Defense of Lost Causes, which looks for something of value in revolutionary terror. The book held much more than I could grasp, so rather than attempt an in-depth analysis of it, I will merely post a third, and perhaps final, note (first one, second one) by commenting on Žižek’s program for reinventing “the ‘eternal Idea’ of egalitarian terror.”

In Defense of Lost Causes is a long and involved philosophical, psychoanalytical, political and cultural critique of the ideologies, methods, successes and failures of revolutionary movements from the French Revolution up through today’s Leftist thought. As such, it touches on a wide range of issues, but in its final pages it comes to focus on “the threat of ecological catastrophe.” The last page of the first edition lists four points with regard to addressing this challenge, with the suggestion that they may be of use in other areas as well.

The first of the four points is egalitarian justice. Žižek gives as an example of this all nations, whether developed or developing, being made to obey the same rules with regard to environmental regulations (carbon emissions, etc.). I agree. Developing nations are sometimes allowed laxer standards and some developed nations like the U.S. simply do as they please without regard for international protocols while other nations vigorously tackle environmental challenges.

The second point is terror, which Žižek describes as “ruthless punishment of all who violate the imposed protective measures.” This is the most problematic of the four points. For many, the whole premise of the book--finding what is good about some of the worst scenes in human history--is disturbing. For Žižek openly to recommend terror would seem to confirm their worst suspicions, especially when he includes in his recommended terror “severe limitations on liberal ‘freedoms.’” 

While it is clear, however, from examples throughout the book that for Žižek not all terror must be violent, he does speak almost approvingly of an execution committed by Che Guevara for the cause of revolution. It is hard to pin Žižek down on exactly what specific actions he recommends as defensible terror, and it occurs to me as I write this that this is a flaw of the book. Its analysis is endless, but precise prescriptions are fleeting and vague.

The third point is voluntarism:

“(the only way to confront the ecological catastrophe is by means of large-scale collective decisions which run counter to the ‘spontaneous’ immanent logic of capitalist development.”

This returns to a theme that Žižek and others like French philosopher Alain Badiou, to whom In Defense of Lost Causes is dedicated, develop fascinatingly and convincingly. Capitalism is the enemy and we have, to our detriment, all accepted its logic. Some of Žižek’s passages explain how even capitalism’s opponents must speak its language, thereby acknowledging its victory.

Is capitalism the enemy? This is not something I have made up my mind about. The evils of capitalism are plain to see, but there are forms other than the no-holds-barred capitalism that holds sway in the U.S. and is quickly claiming souls the globe over. There is French economist Michel Albert’s Rhine capitalism, Bill Gates’s creative capitalism and China’s state capitalism. Žižek expresses skepticism about such halfway measures, and perhaps he is right. Perhaps only a radically new order has any real emancipatory potential.

The fourth and final point is trust in the people: “the wager that a large majority of the people supports these severe measures, sees them as its own, and is ready to participate in their enforcement.” He even goes so far as to say we should welcome the reinstitution of informers. The language is inflammatory, but his example is the corporate whistle-blower, indeed an informer of sorts. 

The world does not need a citizens’ thought police such as neighbors turning on neighbors and children reporting their parents as in George Orwell’s 1984, but it does need more gutsy vigilance committed to obedience to just law. The BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 would not have happened if more government watchdogs had taken their jobs seriously and more employees of BP had been willing to turn on their employer and coworkers.

In Defense of Lost Causes is a cornucopia of ideas that encouraged me to review Heidegger, learn about the Cultural Revolution, rewatch Casablanca, listen more to Shostakovich and Prokofiev, and start reading about Critical Theory. It’s a book I will be thinking about for some time, and while I should reread it, I am more likely to dig into Žižek's other books first.

Julian Assange Is President Obama's Pussy Riot

“There is unity in the oppression. There must be absolute unity and determination in the response.”
--Julian Assange, Sunday, August 19, 2012

Two days after three members of the Russian feminist collective known as Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years in jail for hooliganism, Wikileaks founder and editor-in-chief Julian Assange appeared on the steps of the Ecuadorian embassy in London to make a speech drawing attention to the United States and Britain’s political persecution of him. While following these events in the news, it occurred to me that Julian Assange is in some ways President Obama’s Pussy Riot.

Of course, the main difference between the situations is that we have good reason to believe that the persecution of Pussy Riot is the result of personal vindictiveness on the part of Russian president Vladimir Putin, or at least of the corrupt system of his making, whereas the persecution of Julian Assange is one of vast governmental tradition of long standing and has little to do with the whims or personal malice of President Obama or Prime Minister David Cameron.

The two persecutions, however, are similar in that of government cracking down on individuals who have embarrassed it by bringing before the public what the government would prefer remain unsaid. Pussy Riot, by shouting anti-Putin messages in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow drew attention to the church’s collusion with a political leader. Julian Assange, through documents released by Wikileaks, has made the dirty deeds and dishonesty of Washington available for anyone with a computer to see.

It seems that my blogs often come around to Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, and again I am reminded of something I heard him say in a YouTube video in which he appeared on stage with Assange. We all know that our governments are involved in shady schemes and lying about it. Nobody doubts this. But when someone presents that in an undeniable manner, it’s a scandal. Our governments, as well as many who know their governments are guilty, would prefer that the crimes stay covered up, albeit openly.

What a joke that soon after Assange’s speech, the White House issues a warning to us not to allow Assange to divert us from the charges of sexual assault against him. I cannot speak to these charges against Assange--they should be addressed--but is there anyone who seriously doubts he would not be the center of an international brouhaha if it were not for the political implications of his journalism?

At the end of his speech, Assange raised three problems that need addressed: the ongoing incarceration without trial of Army Private Bradley Manning, the sentencing of the Bahrain Human Rights Centre president Nabeel Rajab for a Tweet, and the sentencing of Pussy Riot for their performance. To these, we should add the political persecution of Julian Assange. We must not allow the government to silence voices of truth.

Virginia Lee Burton's The Little House and the Fall of Being

At the bookstore the other night, my wife picked up a children's book by Virginia Lee Burton titled The Little House. Later that night, while my son bounced around me and did everything but pay attention, I read it aloud to him and found it to be a work of surprising depth.

The Little House is about a little house in the country. She lives a happy life watching the seasons come and go, the heavenly bodies pass overhead, and the people go about simple, quaint lives. But over time, the Little House is swallowed by a city. Massive buildings rise all around, cars and trains pollute the air with fumes and noise, and the people are busy and stressed. The Little House falls into disrepair and is no longer happy. At the end, however, the Little House gets a new owner, who moves her back into the country where she is happy once more.

For children, the book no doubt has a happy ending, but I found it to be a sad one. The whole premise of the book is that cities swallow and destroy the countryside. The Little House is sure to once more find herself swallowed by an urban jungle. "Progress" is a one-way affair. She may not be able to run next time, or may have no place to run to.

I was surprised recently upon reading a description of the Luddites of 19th-Century England to find that I understood why they broke into factories and smashed the equipment. They were seeing their jobs taken away, and jobs mean food, housing, education, health and self-esteem. Their entire way of life, with its pleasures, was being taken away. The best they could hope for in the years to come was to become a cog in the machine, performing some miniscule task in the division of labor that anyone else could perform just as well.

The Little House, however, hit me most instinctively on a different, broader level, a level that goes beyond the bad effects of urbanization and increasing dominance of technology. I felt as if it represented how change over time results in the loss of something dreadfully important, the passing of a Golden Age, whether that Golden Age is a past time in one’s own life (summers as a child, hanging with friends in high school, dating in college, etc.) or a historical period before one was born (the Roaring Twenties, La Belle Époque--to take examples from Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris). We each carry around the idea that there once was a time when life was, so it seems to us now, so much simpler, happier or meaningful. So much richer.

The city--in the broader sense of a total Fall in the quality of being--comes for all of us, just as it will my son. After finishing the book, I wished, not for the first time, that I could somehow spare him all the indignities time has in store for him. I will have to console myself that there are joys as well, and like the Little House at the end of the book, one sometimes finds a respite.

Once again she was lived in and taken care of.
The stars twinkled above her. . . .
A new moon was coming up. . . .
It was Spring . . . .
and all was quiet and peaceful in the country.
--The Little House

Forgotten Calls for Equality for All

I stumbled across a gem from Dover Publications the other day that is a collection of revolutionary writings from such diverse thinkers as Thomas Jefferson, Lenin, Gandhi and Mao. Reading these primary texts on revolution, I was struck by the concern they all express for equality--a concern that has largely disappeared from American discourse.

We might expect such concern from the orators of the French Revolution, which began the process of raising the Third Estate (the commons) to a modern representative legislature and which ended with the beheading of the Bourbon dynasty, and they deliver. Point 10 of the “Analysis of the Doctrine of Babeuf” declares that “The end of the French Revolution is to destroy inequality, and to reestablish general prosperity.” 

The preface to the "Analysis" identifies Francois Noel Babeuf as one of the founders of French socialism. His manifesto was accepted by his group the Society of Equals, but he was one of many to be executed by the government later.

Leave it to the anarchists, however, to go even further. Pierre-Sylvain Marechal’s “Manifesto of the Equals” was so radical in its call for equality that, according to the same preface, even Babeuf’s Society of Equals would not endorse it:

“Let there be no difference now between human beings but in age and sex! Since all have the same needs and the same faculties, let there be for all one education and one standard of life! They are content with one sun and the same air for all, why should not the same portion and quality of food suffice for each? . . . Open your eyes and hearts to the fullness of joy. Recognize and proclaim with us THE REPUBLIC OF EQUALS.”

Another anarchist included in the collection goes so far as to blame God for inequality-- and for Mikhail Bakunin, God and State often go hand in hand, to Man’s detriment:

“For, if God is, he is necessarily the eternal, supreme, absolute master, and, if such a master exists, man is a slave; now, if he is a slave, neither justice, nor equality, nor fraternity, nor prosperity are possible for him . . . if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.” (from God and State)

Even Lenin, a figure much feared in the popular politics of the West, displays a moving concern with equality, and is ready with specific measures. One such measure in “The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution” is equal wages for all--bureaucratic officials and the average worker alike. 

In “Declaration of Rights of the Working and Exploited People,” Lenin and the Provisional Government declare that the fundamental aim of the Republic of Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies is “to abolish all exploitation of man by man, to completely eliminate the division of society into classes.”

I am reminded of one of my favorite quotes from George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, which describes his experience fighting with the communist P.O.U.M. in the Spanish Civil War: “Socialism means a classless society, or it means nothing at all.” 

Homage to Catalonia contains alluring descriptions of the egalitarian society that actually existed in the early months of the revolution:

“Many of the normal motives of civilized life--snobbishness, money-grubbing, fear of the boss, etc.--had simply ceased to exist. . . ‘Smart’ clothes were an abnormality, nobody cringed or took tips, waiters and flower-women and bootblacks looked you in the eye and called you ‘comrade.’”

Yet in America today--a nation generally believed by its citizens to be founded on equality--passionate calls for equality are largely absent from the narrow left-right spectrum embodied by Democrats and Republicans. The far left is reduced to making grand pleas for equality that it knows the media, politicians, big business and the populace will ignore.

In mainstream debate, you may hear about equality with regard to specific civil rights issues--equality before the law, say for gays and lesbians in marriage; equality between the sexes, say in executive pay; equality between races, say when a public figure makes a gaff touching upon race; and so on ad infinitum--and you may even hear about economic inequality and the need to help those in need through charity and welfare, but calls are lacking for positive preventive action, for significant reform of the system, to establish equality across the board.

As a culture, I think we don’t even want equality anymore. We have accepted the capitalist assertions that the playing field is level and that people rise or fall according to their merits, even though we all know that the system plays favorites and the rise to success is often inversely proportional to competence.

Besides, we like our hierarchies. They're flattering. We can always point to someone beneath us to whom we are superior, while believing that we deserve and may indeed someday attain a higher spot in the order of things.

We certainly want to avoid the mistakes of the past in creating a new social reality, but I am coming to agree with Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek's assertion, in In Defense of Lost Causes, that there are parts of revolutions past that are worth reviving. The crises of capitalism are many, and in addressing them, we should remember to call for, to insist on, greater equality for all.

The Limiting of the Libido in Post-Production Code Hollywood

About a year ago, just after I started this blog, I posted a note on Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek’s book In Defense of Lost Causes (blog). Soon after, I put the book aside unfinished and embarked on a series of books in philosophy and revolutionary history to help give me the background knowledge I needed for understanding Zizek’s book. Now I have returned to it and have been inspired with another note.

One characteristic of Zizek’s thought is how quickly he turns to analysis of movies to illustrate his points. In the section titled “Stalinism Revisited,” when discussing censorship and artistic expression, he takes an example from Casablanca, which I reviewed for this blog.

Ilsa (played by Ingrid Bergman) goes to visit Rick (Humphrey Bogart). She knows that he hates her for abandoning their romance years before but begs him to give her papers of transit so that at least her husband Victor Laszlo, an important member of the resistance against the Nazis, may escape the city. When Rick refuses to budge, Ilsa breaks down in tears and reveals that she still loves him. They embrace. Fadeout to airport tower. Fade back to Rick, who says, “And then?” Then Ilsa explains why she left him.

Zizek says that this scene is striking because of what he calls “inherent transgression.” The film breaks its own rules, so to speak. It tells us clearly that during the fadeout to the tower, Rick and Ilsa definitely did it. All the signs are there: they embrace before the fadeout, we all know what such fadeouts mean, Bogart is smoking a cigarette afterwards, etc. The film also sends very clear signals that they did not do it: the conversation picks up right where it left off, both characters are fully clothed, Bogey still sounds hostile, etc. This allows the film to satisfy the Motion Picture Production Code of the 1940s and at the same time tell us a story that encourages our imagination to insert screwing.

The prudishness of the Production Code and the movie-makers’ skirting of it may strike us as quaint and amusing today, when so many movies contain overtly sexual content, but it occurred to me that our movies are in some ways actually more restrained.

Movies today can show more than they used to, but the current ratings system and cultural mores result in movies that are surprisingly tame for all that they proclaim themselves to be sexy. Tasteful montages of unidentifiable swathes of skin moving slowly are the norm for sex scenes, but since they are showing the act, usually missionary, little is left to the imagination. The libido must enjoy its movies in the narrow space between what isn’t allowed and what is explicitly shown. The old movies, in showing little, were able to suggest much.

One of Zizek’s claims is that despite the horrible repression of the Stalinist years, they also “saved what we understand as the humanity of man,” because rather than insist on the total destruction of dissidence, dissidence was often allowed as long as it was internalized. You could hate Stalinism as much as you wanted, you just couldn’t say so.

In the same way, we might say that the Production Code, despite the restrictions it must have put on artists, kept sexy infinitely alive by keeping some things secret. We will never know exactly what Rick and Ilsa did that night in Casablanca, but it can be as hot as we want.

Coriolanus Versus Hamlet Redux

When the film version of William Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, directed by and starring Ralph Fiennes, came out last year, an old controversy rose to the surface. In 1920, T.S. Eliot declared, much to his contemporaries’ disbelief, that Coriolanus and Anthony and Cleopatra, as opposed to Hamlet, constituted the Bard’s greatest work.

Coriolanus, one of Shakespeare’s lesser known works, is about Caius Martius, a Roman general whose acts of valor in suppressing the Volscians win him a consulship and the new name Coriolanus. His impolitic manners inflame the tribunes and the people to immediately withhold the title from him. In exile, he joins his old Volscian foe Aufidius and sets about conquering Rome, his former home. Victorious in  battle once more, his fortunes change yet again, leading to the bloody end we expect from a Shakespearean tragedy.

In “Hamlet and His Problems,” Eliot lists what he believes are Hamlet’s shortcomings, proclaiming the drama an “artistic failure.” He starts with “superfluous and inconsistent scenes,” says “the versification is variable,” and then moves on to his biggest criticism:

“The intense feeling, ecstatic or terrible, without an object or exceeding its object, is something which every person of sensibility has known; it is doubtless a study to pathologists. It often occurs in adolescence . . . The Hamlet of [Franco-Uruguayan poet] Laforgue is an adolescent; the Hamlet of Shakespeare is not, he has not that explanation and excuse. We must simply admit that here Shakespeare tackled a problem which proved too much for him.”

Upon the release of Coriolanus last year, Slovenian philosopher and irrepressible movie buff Slavoj Zizek took Eliot’s side in the argument. In "Sing of the New Invasion," Zizek says that while interpretations of Coriolanus have tended to favor right-wing militarism, Fiennes breaks the play out of this box by making the titular character a left-wing radical. I would agree that this extra space for Coriolanus helps, but perhaps it is too little to stand against Hamlet.

Coriolanus has plenty of virtues. It is a fast-paced, action-packed drama that cries out for Hollywood treatment, yet it is also character-driven, raising it a notch above most of what we can expect from cinema today. Every reversal of Caius Martius’s fate is the result of an action unfolding from within his twisted psyche. His mother Volumnia raised a raging soldier with a whimpering little boy inside. Despite the manipulators around him, Caius Martius’s fate is one he largely chooses.

Yet the play, while powerful at times, never soars. It remains firmly fixed to politicians and soldiers, none of whom are particularly sympathetic. Even Volumnia is just another unlikable power-player. The dramatis personae of Coriolanus, while sometimes powerful, present a narrow array of ambitions. Like the politicians and generals of our own day, they are not very likable, so it should come as no surprise if Coriolanus often fails to move its viewers.

Hamlet, on the other hand, never fails to move. The drama tears off in all directions, covering a myriad of human experiences--thirst for revenge, lost love, existential angst--and presenting a staggering array of spectacles--ghostly apparitions, plays within plays, and even a mother-son bedroom scene. Hamlet himself is such a bewildering patchwork of qualities that critics can never pin him down. His play moves us because it contains great space within which the viewer may move, and its loose ends merely serve to heighten the sense that the dramatic action is open rather than closed.

The debate over Coriolanus and Hamlet reminds me of aging rockers. When fans criticize their newer work, the rockers usually defend themselves by saying that time has made them more proficient in their instruments and more skilled in song-writing--all of which is probably true, but the older albums are often still better, because of the untamed inspiration fueling them. Perhaps--and this is mere speculation--Shakespeare’s craft had waxed in the years between Hamlet and Coriolanus while his Hamlet-like frenzy waned.

Yet I hesitate to take the side of consensus in this obscure controversy, for Coriolanus is indeed strong, and Fiennes’s film adaptation shows it off. It seems a bit silly, anyway, to seriously ask which of Shakespeare’s plays is the greatest, much less to argue over it, when they are all so good. In the end, I can only say that Coriolanus and Hamlet are each the better in their own ways, and we might very well expect that in other ways, other plays would prove the victor--Romeo and Juliet in romantic passion, for example, or A Midsummer Night’s Dream in imaginative creativity.

Make Gun Laws So Strict That Guns Are Practically Illegal

In the wake of the movie-theater shooting in Colorado, many pundits were quick to declare that it was too soon to use the tragedy for political gain in our country’s ongoing debate about gun control. The same pundits usually then went on to fiercely debate gun issues, but personally, I never agreed with the original injunction. Times like these--how sad that we have so many--are precisely when we need to have the debate if we are ever going to cut down on gun-related deaths.

It has been surreal the last few days to watch conservatives raise reason after reason why tighter gun controls are unnecessary. Former Arizona State Sen. Russell Pearce’s comments struck me as the wildest:

“All I did was lament that so many people should be left disarmed and vulnerable by anti-gun rules that try to create a sense of safety by posting a sign that says "No Guns", when the only real effect is to disarm everyone who could have saved lives . . . Had they been prepared . . . and been able to fire on their attacker, lives could have been saved.”

According to Pearce, more guns is the solution to gun deaths. And apparently many in Colorado feel the same way. Petitions for gun permits have spiked since the shooting. We will soon have a more heavily armed populace so more people can continue shooting each other.

The rest of the affluent world looks at us with disbelief. In more civilized nations around the world, guns are illegal and--guess what?--no one gets shot. Here in America, people are dying all around us and the most we can work up is a lukewarm debate over the rules for buying an assault rifle.

For eight years, I lived in Japan, where guns are for the most part illegal, and I do not remember a single shooting incident. Japan does indeed have its crazies, but they do not get their hands on firearms. They grab a kitchen knife and plunge into a crowd of people, stabbing a few people before someone wrestles them to the ground. Gruesome enough, but the damage is limited compared to what we see in the U.S. 

Deciding to see if my memories paint an accurate picture of the gun violence in Japan, I looked up some statistics on the internet--after all, somebody, seedy members of the yakuza, for example, must get their hands on guns and use them. Depending on source and year, statistics differ, but the U.S. is always way at the top of gun-related deaths and injuries, while Japan is near the bottom. The tightest comparison I could find without spending all day working through the details comes from PolitiFact, which has said there were 10,224 homicides by firearm in the U.S. in 2009, compared to 7 in Japan. Similar comparisons can be made with other industrialized nations with strict gun laws.

As in Japan, handgun and fully automatic firearms possession by citizens should be illegal in the U.S. Possession of rifles for hunting and sports should only be possible with the strictest regulations, also as in Japan. Disarming a population as armed as ours--as uncivilized and barbaric as ours is in this respect--would indeed prove difficult, but people without guns do not kill other people. Over time, fewer guns would mean many fewer deaths.

That’s something I would like to see, whether saying so is political or not.

Death of a Salesman and Myths of American Capitalism

Several years ago, I created a list of ten books sitting unread on my shelves, plus four I was in the middle of reading, that I would make a special effort to read. I don’t restrict my reading to the list, sometimes I remove a book from it and replace it with another waiting to be read, and whenever I finish one, I try to say a few words about it in a blog--as I will now for Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller.

Death of a Salesman is about aging salesman Willy Loman, who for most of his life has run himself into the ground for his company, only to see it take away his salary, reducing him to commissions, just when he is coming up on his final house payment. When his son Biff returns home after years drifting out West and tries to get a job in town, the family is forced to confront its history of failure.

This book was one of the most depressing I have ever read. Not only is Willy Loman unable to get ahead in life, but neither of his sons is able to either, even as others around them move on to success. The Lomans are no doubt victims of changing times and an economic system that leaves some behind, but they share the blame themselves. Willy refuses to swallow his pride and take a job from his neighbor Charley, his oldest son Biff steals himself out of jobs, and his youngest son Happy is only interested in womanizing. The title of the play tells you how the novel ends--and Willy’s funeral isn’t the grand affair he always imagined the death of a salesman’s would be.

The issues that Death of a Salesman addresses are relevant today as the gap between the haves and have nots continues its now decades-long trend of widening. The working class takes two jobs, cuts corners, and gives up its dreams only to find its financial situation more precarious with each passing year. They are experiencing the American dream in reverse, while others, inexplicably, move forward but never out of sight.

As I read Act Two, I made a note in the bottom margin about the myths of American capitalism. There are many, but inspired by Miller’s drama, I had three in mind. One is really a collection of myths: stories of amazing, almost miraculous, success. Another myth is that one’s own amazing success is just around the corner. The third is that in America, anyone who works hard will be successful. These myths are all around us today. They keep the have nots silent and are used by the haves to that end. But in a country where over 40% of the population is living in or near poverty, the myths have begun to fray. Witness the 1% and its newfound voice in opposition to the 99%.

I have also read The Crucible and watched The Misfits, and both were as powerful as Death of a Salesman, so I will definitely be reading more of Arthur Miller’s work in the future.

Nihilism in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons

Ivan Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons is about many things--parents and children, a fading social order and an emerging new one, romantic love--but the heart of the novel around which all else is arranged is the nihilism of the young medical student Yevgeny Bazarov. Indeed, in his book Modernism and Nihilism, Shane Weller writes that it was Fathers and Sons more than any other work that gave the term nihilism currency.

Nihilism is generally defined as the belief that nothing has any meaning. The Oxford Guide to Philosophy says, “By definition, the nihilist believes in nothing and disdains all values.” As Weller points out, however, nihilism can take many forms. There are nihilisms--philosophical, political, social, Nietzschean, Heideggerian and so forth--and various “deployments” throughout history.

Bazarov’s nihilism in Fathers and Sons is of the destructive sort. Seeing all norms and institutions as empty, he disregards them and wishes to see them cleared away without himself desiring to replace them with anything. He doesn’t believe in social hierarchy, superstition or art. Soon after Bazarov comes to stay at Arkady Petrovitch’s house, he gets into a philosophical discussion with his friend’s family. Here is a brief exchange with Arkady’s father:

“Allow me, though,” began Nikolai Petrovitch. “You deny everything; or, speaking more precisely, you destroy everything… But one must construct, too, you know.”

“That’s not our business now… The ground wants clearing first.”

     --(Fathers and Children, translated by Constance Garnett)

Bazarov’s philosophy is different from what Weller calls programmatic nihilism, which seeks to remake the world. In fact, for all his contempt of the status quo, he has no belief in progress either.

For Friedrich Nietzsche, nihilism as the sense that nothing has any meaning is the result of that which we considered the highest value turning out to be of no value at all. The central crisis of modernity, one which society as a whole became unable to deny in the 19th Century, is the death of God, and it poses a question we are all familiar with today: If there is no God, what gives life meaning?

Western civilization’s highest good, the monotheistic God, turned out to be nothing more than the product of the smoke and mirrors of our own consciousness. In the modern world, we are all faced with this nihilism, the absence of what was for so long taken to be the objective ground of all values, but nonetheless some, unable or unwilling to face it, turn away to veneration of the smoke and mirrors in their head.

Nietzsche, unlike Bazarov, saw nihilism as a force to aid as well as overcome. If nihilism is destruction, then the solution is creation. If what we have valued has passed away, then we need new values. The artist, through his work, brings forth new values, his or her values, and imposes them on the world through force of will, places them against the nothingness, like a painter portraying his subject against negative space, or a musician invoking music out of silence.

My own beliefs have traced the path of nihilism outlined by Nietzsche. In the years after my infatuation with religion, I realized that I could no longer maintain my intellectual integrity and still believe in God, whether that of the mild Methodism of my upbringing, that of the fundamentalist Baptists who courted me, or that of the sophisticated Christianity of my professors in college and the theologians we studied. As a seeker for truth, I could hardly accept the notion of a being for which there is not only no proof, but for which not even a single compelling argument that can withstand scrutiny or even a single piece of solid evidence exists.

At that point, my highest value had been devalued. This was never a cause of utter despair for me, for I was convinced that anything that wasn’t true shouldn’t be believed, but nonetheless, as the years passed, my thoughts sometimes strayed into nihilistic territory. If there is no God, no moral order imposed on the universe, then on the grand scale of the universe, what do the worst atrocities matter?

It has taken some time to find new values and bases for them, but I have and continue to do so. There may not be a divinity to impose order on the world, but I do, through the force of my will, even determined as it may be by natural causes. My values are those of secular humanism and they can do much good in the world--some would say more good than those of fantastical superstitious systems.

I was never in any danger of falling into the blackest, most destructive of nihilisms anyway, because such nihilism is, for basically decent and mentally sound folks, impossible to uphold. Along our mental journeys, we may rationally reach a point where we declare that nothing has any meaning, but we cannot stop life from having meaning for us--it just does whether or not we like it, understand it, or think it should.

Nihilism is the impossible philosophy, and this is something the characters in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons demonstrate.

Like many great novels, Fathers and Sons is populated with a wide variety characters and we see that for each of them, life has meaning in different ways. For the fathers and mothers, the meaning lies principally in the well-being of their children, although they do have other values as well, like Nikolai Petrovitch with his music, reading and desire to modernize his farm, and Pavel Petrovich with his aristocratic dignity and foppish Anglophilia.

Life has meaning for the novel’s nihilists as well. It is plain from the earliest pages that Arkady’s heart isn’t into it--that he harbors sympathy for the backwards ways of his family, their stuffy customs and foolish superstitions--and he eventually falls madly in love with Katya, marries, and presumably settles down to a conventional existence with kids and all the rest.

Bazarov mocks Arkady for becoming a “jackdaw” (“a most respectable family bird”), but even he, the novel’s most strident nihilist, falls prey to love, becoming infatuated with Anna Odintsova. It comes to nothing, and even on his deathbed, he remains defiant, declaring:

“I said I should rebel,” he shrieked hoarsely, with his face inflamed and distorted, shaking his fist in the air, as though threatening someone; “and I rebel, I rebel!”

While his spirit is admirable, we have seen its limits in more than love. He participated in his father’s medical practice, with care, almost as if...it meant something to him. And this should come as no surprise, for throughout the book his passion for learning about the natural world was evident, and in the end, it was this passion that led to his contracting typhus.

The experiences of the characters in Fathers and Sons are much like our own. We construct personae for ourselves, worry over things, dedicate ourselves to causes, and fall in various kinds of love. We might ask as Bazarov does on occasion, “What good is it?”, and in the long run, on a cosmological scale, perhaps none of it is any good at all. The universe will someday undergo heat death or some other demise, long before then the sun will turn into a red giant and scorch the earth, and in not so long at all, each one of us will die, but until then, we cannot help life having meaning. It simply does.

What Christopher Hitchens Understood About Religion but His Critics Persist in Saying He Didn’t

A couple years ago, I took an interest in writer, intellectual and renowned atheist Christopher Hitchens about the time he was touring for the release of his book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. On December 15, 2011, Hitchens died of esophageal cancer, and the world has lost a singular commentator on religion, politics, history and literature.

Hitchens’s death makes it easier for his critics to attack him. An example is “Having Faith: What Both Hitchens and Fundamentalists Don't Get About Religion” by Tim Padgett on Time.com. The piece claims that Hitchens, in his efforts to vilify religion, focused on the actions of religious fanatics and fundamentalists and ignored “the silent majority of Christians who aren't hatemongering zealots but who derive hope and humane inspiration from our beliefs.”

This is a tired defense of religion--one I used to employ myself--that draws a distinction between the conception of a perfect God and his imperfect believers and between the horrible things done in the name of religion and the true message of faith. In other words, sure there are Christians like those from Westboro Baptist Church who picket funerals with signs reading “God Hates Fags”, but there are also little old ladies in the local church’s knitting circle who have never harmed a fly. 

Hitchens showed that this evasion is unsatisfactory. In fact, religion’s problems run throughout its history, involve everyday believers as well as clergy, and extend even to official church doctrine and the very basics of faith that no believer would disavow. The Ten Commandments are revealed as forbidding thought crime (“Thou shalt not covet.”), the New Testament exalts human sacrifice (vicarious redemption--the very core of the Jesus myth), and the clergy at the highest levels condone beliefs such as, to use one of Hitchens’s favorite lines, “AIDS is bad but condoms are worse.”

This last is one of the many reasons Hitchens so strongly disliked Mother Theresa--beatified and under consideration for sainthood. She started AIDS care centers and fed the destitute, but preached against measures, like condoms, that would cut down on AIDS incidence and, indirectly but no less surely, poverty. Giving women control over their rate of reproduction, Hitchens said, is the one thing proven to improve living conditions, but religion removes this solution from the table.

The poison runs deep and wide in religion. It even seems to drive otherwise good people to do horrible things, like mutilate the genitalia of children, or to hold ridiculous or repugnant beliefs. The nice old lady in the knitting circle, while of sterling character in many areas of her life, must, if she is to be a member of her religious community in any meaningful sense, hold some beliefs against her better nature. She may believe, for example, that anyone goes to Hell who is non-Christian, which includes a good percentage of the world’s population and some who have never even heard of Christianity.

Hitchens could go on about this at great length. For Padgett to suggest that Hitchens didn’t “get” that religion is a good barrel of apples into which a few rotten ones have slipped suggests only that Padgett has paid little attention to Hitchens’s statements about religion. Hitchens understood that claim all too well and disagreed. For him, religions are the bad apples that are spoiling the rest.

In the post-Hitchens world, the shrugging off of religion’s crimes as the acts or beliefs of a fringe minority of wackos is inexcusable, for those crimes have been clearly delineated as embedded in religion itself and as perpetrated by its highest proponents. In the post-Hitchens world, however, there is one less voice to continue raising those crimes to scrutiny. As Hitchens himself noted on occasion, the fight of free minds against religious tyranny is one that biological evolution does not win for us--each new generation must fight it anew.