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.

Chrysler’s Sorry Super Bowl Commercial Featuring Clint Eastwood

One commercial during Super Bowl XLVI that gained quite a few positive reviews was the Chrysler ad featuring Clint Eastwood, but my reaction was “What a dumb commercial.”

The commercial shows standard images of what we are told America consists of--flags, factories and determined folks--with a voiceover by Eastwood that begins with a brief statement of the problems America faces (“People are out of work and they’re hurting.”), then builds dramatically with swells of horns, and ends with Eastwood grimacing into the camera and delivering the following:

“This country can't be knocked out with one punch. We get right back up again and when we do the world is going to hear the roar of our engines. Yeah, it's halftime America. And, our second half is about to begin."

This message is one I am sick of hearing. Even President Obama, who used to show a natural resistance to American exceptionalism, has taken to throwing it around. Here is an example from last month’s State of the Union address: 

“This nation is great because we built it together. This nation is great because we worked as a team. This nation is great because we get each other’s backs. And if we hold fast to that truth, in this moment of trial, there is no challenge too great; no mission too hard. As long as we are joined in common purpose, as long as we maintain our common resolve, our journey moves forward, and our future is hopeful, and the state of our Union will always be strong.”

If there is anything that all this bluster shows, however, it is not how strong America is but how weak it is. The national obsession with America's resilience is a sure symptom of its debilitation. 

And debilitated America is indeed. Aside from GDP and military spending, there are few areas left in which we are at or even near the top in world rankings. For decades, we have been falling lower and lower in upward mobility, quality of education and affordable healthcare, even as we rise higher and higher in the number of bankruptcies related to healthcare costs, the cost of education, and the percentage of the population behind bars. Those are but a few examples. Nearly every new statistic I hear echoes this trend, and I invite the reader to begin paying attention to the statistics. They are not good.

More than tough talk is necessary if America would be strong again. If our politicians and corporations would like to show there is some substance in their swagger, then they would spend less time talking and more time actually fixing problems. And we the American people, if we would show our supposedly admirable character, would do the same--starting by electing representatives who live up to their word.

The Greasy Equivocations of Bands of Christians Who Don’t Want to Be Called Christian Bands

A couple years ago I ran across the music video for “I’m So Sick” by Flyleaf and immediately downloaded their first, self-titled album. I liked the heavy sound, dark lyrics and heartfelt vocals. Later, I began to enjoy the band less and less as the Christian message in the lyrics became clearer.

When asked whether they are a Christian band, they refuse to commit. Lead vocalist Lacey Sturm said in an interview with Atlantic City Weekly:

“Well, you know what? I don’t know what you mean by a ‘Christian rock band.’ It’s hard to say that because people all have a different definition of what that means. If it means that we’re Christians, then yeah, we’re Christians, but if a plumber’s a Christian, does that make him a ‘Christian plumber?’ I mean we’re not playing for Christians. We’re just playing honestly and that’s going to come out.”

As I Lay Dying vocalist Tim Lambesis says practically the same thing in his band’s FAQ on their website:

“I’m not sure what the difference is between five Christians playing in a band and a Christian band. If you truly believe something, then it should affect every area of your life. All five of us are Christians.”

I always find such comments to be greasy. We are given to believe that the question revolves around subtle but unimportant plays of meaning, but I suspect that these bands attempt to evade classification as Christian bands largely for unflattering reasons they don’t want to admit, perhaps even to themselves: fear of coming across uncool to the broader rock-and-roll community and its love of sacrilege and anarchy, of limiting sales to the sort of devout Christians who pick up Petra CDs at the local Christian bookstore, and of having to reveal their half-covert agenda of spreading what they consider to be the Good News, but which others view as less inspirational given its message of Original Sin and eternal damnation.

I’m not sure which is worse, a band of Christians that doesn’t want to call itself a Christian band, or a Christian band that abandons their cause and simply goes secular, all the while claiming they’re still a band of Christians. They’re both composed of Christians but obfuscate their status and have an irrepressible hankering for worldly rewards, especially mammon.

Of course, some bands can have Christian members and sing about faith but do it with a questing and questioning heart, that is, the heart of fully thinking and feeling human beings. U2’s lyrics frequently draw upon Christian themes, but they are as likely to praise as question what they consider to be the works of a divinity, sometimes in a manner of expression likely to be upsetting to church-goers. Take the verses from “Wake Up Dead Man”:

Jesus, Jesus help me
I'm alone in this world
And a fucked up world it is too
Tell me, tell me the story
The one about eternity
And the way it's all gonna be

Jesus, I'm waiting here boss
I know you're looking out for us
But maybe your hands aren't free
Your father, He made the world in seven
He's in charge of heaven
Will you put in a word for me

Jesus, were you just around the corner
Did You think to try and warn her
Or are you working on something new
If there's an order in all of this disorder
Is it like a tape recorder
Can we rewind it just once more

But many of the lyrics on Flyleaf’s Memento Mori seem lifted straight out of the types of songs I used to play at church on Sunday morning or at Christian retreats when I was into those things. Take the chorus to “Beautiful Bride”:

Beautiful bride

Body of Christ

One flesh abiding

Strong and unifying

Fighting ends in forgiveness

Unite and fight all division

Beautiful bride

And from “Swept Away”:

Time for surrender

Spread out your open hands

And He will raise you up

Confessing all that's broken

And watch the healing come

Spread out your open hands

Admit you've held them shut

Be swept away by this

To answer the equivocating frontpersons’ question, the difference between a band of Christians and a Christian band is that one displays free-ranging skepticism, the other focused devotion. I would feel much better about bands like Flyleaf and As I Lay Dying if their music came across less like the latter and more like the former--and if they were less deceptive about their motives.

Evanescence by Evanescence and Theseus' Paradox

Before buying Evanescence’s new self-titled album, I decided to check out the early customer reviews on Amazon. One reviewer raised the question of whether the album can really be considered an Evanescence album since the only original member of the band who appears on it is Amy Lee. I found the reviewer’s question, rhetorical and casual as it was, to be an interesting, if not difficult, one and immediately thought of Theseus’ paradox.

The ship of the Greek hero Theseus, Plutarch tells us in The Life of Theseus, was preserved by the Athenians for generations. Over time, the planks were replaced as they aged and decayed. The question then arose among philosophers whether it was really the same ship anymore. Suppose every last bit of it were replaced at some time or another. If not a single piece of the original ship remains, is it still Theseus’ ship?

Most of us today would say no, it is a replica of the ship of Theseus. However, let us reimagine the paradox. Suppose Theseus is still alive to sail his ship with those under his command. As the years pass and the adventures stack up, parts of the ship grow old or are damaged and must be replaced until no original piece of the ship remains. Is this still Theseus’ ship? 

Obviously, yes. In the same way, Evanescence is still Evanescence by virtue of Amy Lee, who as founding member, constant presence, guiding force and frontwoman, defines the band.

Other music groups have been able to weather massive shakeups because one or more members remain at the helm, preserving the group’s name despite changing members and musical styles. Whitesnake is still going strong under David Coverdale’s leadership--and ownership, of the band’s name--despite regular lineup changes. Billy Corgan reformed The Smashing Pumpkins for 2007’s Zeitgeist with all-new bandmates, and there have been more changes since.

“But,” you may say, “that isn’t really The Smashing Pumpkins,” which raises an interesting point: Sometimes we aren’t prepared to accept the new entity under the same name. 

Personally, as much as I admire Jimmy Chamberlain’s drumming and saw D’arcy and James Iha has important elements of the image of The Smashing Pumpkins during its rise to fame and zenith, I don’t mind recognizing anything Billy Corgan wants to call The Smashing Pumpkins as The Smashing Pumpkins. But something in me refuses to accept the band now calling itself Dream Theater as truly deserving the name. I accepted the earlier changes in keyboardists, but drummer Mike Portnoy was one of Dream Theater’s Amy Lees, the others being John Petrucci and James LaBrie. Without him, something of the essence of the band has been lost. Others may feel differently.

Evanescence is, in my opinion, the solidest of the group’s three studio albums. Whereas the previous two established a new sound and had amazing standout tracks, the other tracks tended to be stiff and just fill in space. The new album has fewer filler tracks and demonstrates a liveliness and groove that the previous albums lacked. For this reason, some of the other reviewers on Amazon feel that the band has drifted away from its alternative and Goth roots toward commercial pop, but many others, like me, hear something slightly different from what is the same band.