Category Archives: Reading List – Books

Aeschylus and Athens – Thomson (Part 1 of 2)

1941, 4th Edition 1973, Lawrence & Wishart, 374 pages (continued in part 2)

Introduction

Summary: Greek tragedy was an organ of Athenian democracy. Aeschylus was a democrat as well as a member of the old Attic nobility. The fundamental question which engrossed him all his life was how tribal society evolved into the democratic city-state (polis). Thomson will investigate origins of tragedy in this work. His method will involve comparing material culture (food production, technology, leisure, etc.,) with tragedy, which he considers to be a social institution as well as an art.

Comments: It’s very interesting that in the preface to the third edition (1966) Thomson writes that Aeschylus and Athens has been translated into seven languages and is used in several countries as a textbook for the training of actors.

Part One – Tribal Society, Chapter 1: Totemism

Summary: In the beginning, each clan in a tribal society would be associated with a ‘totem’ or a sacred object which they could not eat. The clan’s job would be to multiply the totem (for the other clans). For example, some Australian clans have as their totem the wallaby, a marsupial one size smaller than a kangaroo. As tribal societies advanced and evolved, their totem would become more of a figurehead. At some point, for example, the taboo of eating the totem animal would be removed. Discussion of lack of division of labour in the very beginning of social organization. Men and women in those days would forage. Hunting introduced the division of labour.

Reaction: Just as philosophers and historians begin their investigations with the idea of the ‘first man’ (e.g. the ‘man in the state of nature’ of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Hegel) to trace out why humankind developed as it did, Thomson lays out in this chapter the story of the ‘totemic man’, who, I guess, will develop into the tragic hero. Just a guess. Further speculation: although Athenian civilization would grow out of its tribal roots, it nevertheless would remember its totems and tribal roots when it staged tragedy.

Part One – Tribal Society, Chapter 2: Exogamy

Summary: In primitive languages, a man applies to his wife’s sisters the same term he applies to his wife, and a woman applies to her husband’s brothers the same term she applies to her husband. The nomenclature does not correspond to reality. Morgan inferred that the language reflects an ‘original promiscuity’ or ‘primitive promiscuity’ where it did correspond to reality, e.g. at some point in early society, humans lived in a state of hetaerism where women were the common property of their tribe and children never knew their fathers. At the time of writing (1941), Morgan has been rejected in the West (because of incompatibility with bourgeois marriage) and accepted in the Soviet Union. Thomson writes on barter: ‘When Glaukos exchanged shields with Diomedes, gold for bronze, Homer can only explain it by saying that Glaukos lost his head; but it is more likely that Glaukos was expecting a return such as Mentes promised Telemachos after being presented with an heirloom. It is easy to see how these hospitable exchanges might develop into barter’.

Reaction: It’s too good to pass up the chance to see who won the ‘primitive promiscuity’ debate. Was Morgan (who influenced Marx and Engels) right? Were the anthropologists in the West or East right? Well now we know! According to the Wikipedia article on ‘Promiscuity’, Morgan’s idea of primitive promiscuity has been discredited. There must be a whole dynasty of scholarship looking at what happened during the gift exchange between Glaucus and Diomedes where Glaucus gives Diomedes gold armour worth 100 oxen and receives in return bronze amor worth 9 oxen. Following Horace, I argue in my book Tragedy is Risk Theatre that the difference in value between the armour (i.e. 9 oxen) is the inferred value of Glaucus’ life, since they meet as foes on the battlefield and it is clear that Diomedes would have brained Glaucus. I’m not sure how this chapter on matrilineal and patrilineal descent will tie into the discussion of Aeschylus’ tragedies. Maybe Thomson will argue the tension between them plays out in Aeschylus’ dramas?

Part One – Tribal Society, Chapter 3: Property

Summary: When the Homeric chieftain counts his possessions, he enumerates his household good, slaves, and livestock, but does not mention the pastures on which his cattle graze. No mention of private property. Discussion of the Fates. Moira originally denotes a ‘share’ or ‘portion’. One of the three Fates bore the name of Lachesis, the goddess of Allotment, synonymous with kleros, a lot of land or a piece of wood used for casting lots. Thomson cites the seventh Olympian by Pindar where Rhodes was divided into three moirai by the sons of Helios, who cast lots to determine ownership. Because use of lot was integral element in administration of the Athenian democracy, the ancient democracy was the reassertion by the common people of their lost equality (from the tribal days). The use of lot was a guarantee of equality.

Reaction: No mention of private property? When the Homeric chieftain Agamemnon bribes Achilles to return, he offers him seven citadels, complete with lands, people, meadows, and a seaview to boot. If Agamemnon can give away the land, is this not considered ‘private property’? Was the use of the lot a guarantee of equality? I’m skeptical. In Tragedy Is Risk Theatre, I argue that the lot is anything but equal. In the Iliad, for example, the Achaeans cast lots to see who fights Hector because the casting of lots would reveal heaven’s intent, which is anything but equal. Because we have probability theory, we know that casting lots can guarantee equality. But probability theory did not emerge until the 1600s at the earliest, and, if you ask Ian Hacking, not until later. The Athenian democracy predated probability theory by over two millennia. Would they have known that the lot guarantees equality, or was, rather a sign from heaven?

Part Two – From Tribe to State, Chapter 4: Monarchy

Summary: After Dorian conquest, new social structure emerged: those who produced wealth and those who enjoyed it. An analysis of Achaean social organization, which was social, and not tribal. Conflict between the Achaeans in the Iliad is conflict between tribal and personal allegiances. Greek epic matured as monarchy declined. When royal courts broke up, the royal minstrels went out among the people and started singing about work and farming to ordinary folks. So Homer transformed into Hesiod. Tribal culture before the monarchy is organized as a type of primitive communism: this is backed the use of the lot, according to Thomson.

Reaction: Not surprising that the monarchy declined with epic. During the Trojan War, the soldiers and the kings , or, as Homer says, ‘the best of the Achaeans’ left their homes undefended for 10, and in some cases, over 20 years. No wonder the Dorians invaded. If Homer transformed into Hesiod, who transmitted the Iliad and the Odyssey from when they took place (~1200 BC) to when they were written down in the sixth century? And weren’t Homer and Hesiod around at the same time (according to the tradition, that is), in the 8th century BC?

Part Two – From Tribe to State, Chapter 5: Aristocracy

Summary: Achaean society was structured like feudal system of western Europe with king – vassal relationships. Dorian settlement of Sparta created disruptive inequalities from the growth of private property. Aristocracy responds to challenge by maintaining tribal principle of common ownerships. Spartan aristocracy rejects trade, refuses to codify laws, and frowns on commerce. Tribal structure which was originally based on equality now instrument of class domination. New social system in Attica and Ionia even more oppressive than Peloponnese. Moira as metron or ‘measure’ begins appearing in Hesiod, who is like Chaucer’s Parson in that he echoes risk averse folk wisdom, ‘nothing in excess, everything in due measure and you will be happy’. Ionian science product of mercantile aristocracy: see Thales, for example, who was a merchant who cornered the oil [olive, that is] market. Class struggle broke old mold of tribe and clan, look to what happened on the Asiatic seaboard of Aeolis. Ionian philosophers described world in term of kosmos of tribal order. Anaximander’s theory of physical universe based on tribal interactions projected onto matter: the assimilation or encroachment of one substance on another which destroys the universe by returning matter to its original state is based on idea of feud or vendetta between clans where one clan assimilates or encroaches the other.

Reaction: Okay, I get it. In Part One Thomson’s providing the social background leading up to Aeschylus. Funny, Thomson mentions Agamemnon’s bribe to Achilles and says that, in fact, the sovereign does own the land. See the notes above to ‘Chapter 3: Property’. I thought in that chapter he said that Homeric chieftains do not own private property? In Thomson’s reconstruction of the ‘first man’ or the ‘original community’ where everything is in a golden age of equality without the division of labour did human beings have the will to power? Nietzsche contra Marx: that would be a good showdown. Has anyone done that? The part about Ionian science (one of the great leaps forward that Wilson writes about in Consilience) being couched in terms of tribes and clans is fascinating, part of the history if ideas, itself a fascinating subject. The history of ideas, or history of science, traces out how ideas emerge out of the cultural and historical soil. For example, the theory of thermodynamics began, surprise surprise, during the Industrial Revolution.

Part Two – From Tribe to State, Chapter 6: Tyranny

Summary: Midas, the Phrygian king who turned all to gold and Gyges of Lydia, who with his gold ring of invisibility, usurped the crown, were tyrants, tyrants being defined as money-made kings. Tyrants were possible because of the growth of trade, the rise of a merchant class, and the building of towns. Benefit of coins over iron spits and gold and silver utensils is that coins were light, standardized, and state-guaranteed. Sappho and Alkaios write of merchants turned into tyrants. Ambition tempts merchants to overreach themselves, write aristocratic poets. Gods also jealous of those who marry above station (Pindar on Ixion). Solon entrusted with dictatorial powers in 593 BC to avert peasant revolt. Peasant could only retain 1/6 of produce and victimized by 50% interest rates on loans. They had to sell land, children, and themselves. Peisistratos supported commercial policy (which weakened aristocrats and strengthened the middle class) and developed coinage. Peisistratos instituted City Dionysia to give the common people a festival and a god. Nice Theognis quote on how ‘The mass of the people knows one virtue, wealth; nothing else avails’.

Reaction: What does the graven token of coinage represent? Some say money is an IOU. Others say the value of money represents the labor of mining gold and silver out of the ground. What I argue in Tragedy is Risk Theatre is that money represent desire itself. Unlike barter, where there is upkeep, hassle, and spoilage in the objects of exchange (animals must be fed, tools wear out, freight is a factor with heavier items), money is hassle free, doesn’t go bad, and is easily transported. And what is more, because it can be converted into practically anything, it stands in men’s eyes as desire itself…except in tragedy, where it has no value at all. In tragedy, only blood, sweat, and tears are legal tender. I wonder where Thomson’s Marxist perspective will take him here. My book says that tragedy shows us that the real things worth having can’t be bought by cash: they can only be bought by blood, sweat, and tears. My guess is that Thomson will argue that tragedy, and specifically, the festivals such as the City Dionysia redistribute capital back to the people. Just a guess.

Part Three – Origin of Drama, Chapter 7: Initiation

Summary: In primitive tribes, when boys and girls reached puberty, they underwent an initiation ceremony in which they ritually die and are reborn as an ancestor who has returned in a sort of reincarnation process. Actor guilds were mystic societies who renewed life by dramatizing the dance of the totemic clan when the clan system falls into decay. In the Mysteries, a ritual which had been designed as a preparation for life has been transformed into a preparation for death.

Reaction: One striking feature that Thomson writes about from the Eleusinian Mysteries is the ‘sudden blaze of torchlight which illuminated the darkness and transformed the sorrow of the onlookers into joy’. Recent scholarship is beginning to question just how much Greek tragedy was about pain and suffering. Lots of ‘happy ending’ Greek tragedies exist. And the tragic trilogy itself was capped off with a light-hearted satyr play. Wise writes in an Arethusa article that tragedy had changed from the fifth to the fourth centuries. In the fifth century, tragedy was a happy, auspicious affair. In the fourth century, star actors corrupted tragedy into tear jerking events so that they could use their stage presence to elicit fear and pity from the audience. Aristotle, being from the fourth century, wrote about the tragedy he saw, not the original tragedy of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Maybe there is something of the ‘sudden blaze of torchlight’ in fifth century tragedy?

Part Three – Origin of Drama, Chapter 8: Dionysus

Summary: Greek gods in constant evolution, ritual remembers distant original functions of gods. Before the gods, there was ritual: Thomson quotes Goethe Faust, ‘In the beginning there was the deed’. In the beginning, nature and human society operated in unison. Thomson to focus on two festivals called ‘Carrying out Death’ and ‘Bringing in the Summer’. Death and Summer are identical, different aspects of vegetation spirit which annually dies and is reborn. Dionysus celebrated by secret societies and associated with agriculture. Tragedy of Bacchants by Euripides founded on actual ritual, the ritual of ‘Carrying out Death’ and ‘Bringing in Summer’. Pentheus torn to pieces by Bacchants is embodiment of Dionysus, who was torn to pieces by the Titans. In Attica, worship of Dionysus modified in consequence of changes in relations of the sexes.

Reaction: I don’t doubt that part of Thomson’s argument is correct linking Dionysus to agricultural rituals. But my difficulty with understanding the whole connection between ritual, Dionysus, and tragedy is a sign of how far we moderns are from Bronze and Classical Greek civilization. As classicists, we think we comprehend Greek civilization, but perhaps the ones who best understand the Greeks are the modern day goatherds and farmers, the ones who are still in tune with nature?

Part Three – Origin of Drama, Chapter 9: Orphism

Summary: Sixth century cult of Dionysus Orphic in character. Parallels in myths of Arion, Dionysus, and Orpheus. Dionysus welcomed by tyrants as peasant god to supplant aristocratic gods. Relationship between Peisistratidai and mining industry. Orphism entered Attica through mining connections from Thrace. Orphism associated with mining areas from mixed populations and originated in Thrace. Up until sixth century, demand for slave labour small because of agricultural economy. Mining, however, has more demands on slaves. That Orphic writings borrowed from the rustic Hesiod and not the aristocratic Homer tells you of its allegiances. One new development of Orphic thought is the conception of soul as different than body: one is pure, the other corrupt. Moira becomes Ananke in Orphism and later. While Moira originally represents the principle of an equal share for all members of society, when tribal society died off, moira became ananke, the opposite. Ananke represents the yoke of slavery and keeping slaves at a subsistence level. Diodorus quotes on conditions of mines in Egypt and Spain from first century. Very poor conditions.

Reaction: Sixth and fifth century BC Orphism resembles first and second century AD Christianity in that it inverted the reigning aristocratic values and gave the dejected, many of whom were slaves, hope.

Part Three – Origin of Drama, Chapter 10: Dithyramb

Summary: City Dionysia founded or refunded by Peisistratos. Chapter on the first day of the City Dionysia, which lasted six days in March. Tripartite structure of tribal initiation: ‘send off’, ‘contest’, and ‘return’. Theatre is also a ‘contest’ within the Dionysia. Dithyramb from Corinth. On the origins of the dithyramb Dionysian ritual.

Reaction: Thomson recollects an interesting folktale concerning Archilochus, who in his youth was sent by his father to fetch an ox from the countryside. He left in the moonlight, and on the way back et peasant women, who offered to buy the ox from him, and then vanished, leaving at his feet a lyre. The women were the Muses. Thomson understands the myth to show that the poet’s art was derived from an ox cult maintained by a female thiasos led by a male priest. Wow that’s a deep read. The tale reminded me of how Demodocus (the bard in Homer’s Odyssey) and even, according to legend, Homer himself was blind. For the gift of song the Muses took their sight. Archilochus got off easy, who traded an ox. Homer gave his sight, Robert Johnson and Adrian Leverkuhn sold their souls, and Archilochus sold an ox.

Part Three – Origin of Drama, Chapter 11: Tragedy

Summary: Thomson to investigate the actor, then the chorus, then Aristotle’s analysis of the tragic climax, and conclude with some remarks on the stage. This chapter looks at the half-century before Aeschylus, a period in which little is known. Traces development of third actor in Aeschylus: traces of development can be seen in how the actors respond to chorus, but not to one another: e.g. in final trial in Oresteia Athena talks to Apollo, Orestes talks to Apollo, but nothing between Orestes and Athena until the end. Set speeches of Seven show ritual origin of drama. Limited stock of characters: king, queen, prophet, herald, and messenger. With exception of Corinthian messenger in Oedipus, messenger never individualized. Pre-Aeschylean tragedy consisted of prologue, entry of chorus, stasimon, entrance of hero who relayed situation, hero disappears, another stasimon, messenger announces hero’s death, and lament. Examination of terminology: hypocrites (actor, answerer, interpreter), prohetes (interpreters), exarchon (poet-leader of dithyrambic chorus), thiasos (secret society). Tragedy derived from leaders of dithyramb: the hypocrites (actor) ‘interprets’ the significance of the action, e.g. if the chorus performs a choral dance, the leader must explain that the dance signifies the wanderings of the daughters of Eleuther after they have been driven mad by Dionysus. Connects Aristotle’s anagnorisis (recognition) with self-revelation of the god Dionysus after his rebirth. Unrealistic structure of stichomythia (rapid-fire exchanges between characters) inherited from cult. Sphinx riddle given to sphinx from Laius, who got it from his father, who got it from the oracle at Delphi. Those who wanted a claim on the succession line of Thebes were sent up to the Sphinx to see if they could answer her riddle. The riddle had something to do with initiation into the secrets of the royal clan. Dionysian drama, between when it had ceased to be thiasos secret society ritual and when it became established by Peisistratus, was the property of guilds of actors, who toured country villages (from Horace). 13th and 14th century liturgical plays transferred from clergy to bourgeois guilds, which rapidly secularized them against the opposition of the ecclesiastical authorities. Difference between Tudor and Greek drama is that Greek drama retained its religious roots. So, from the original ‘totemic rite’ of tribal society, one branch becomes ‘epic’, which flowers in Homer and Hesiod during the monarchy, Homeric hymn, didactic poetry, and elegiac during the aristocracy, and epigram during the democracy. Another branch becomes ‘clan cult’ and flourishes as choral ode, skolion, and monody during the aristocracy and democracy. The final branch ’secret society’, ‘primitive dithyramb’, ‘passion play’, and ‘peasant ritual’ becomes dithyramb, satyr play, tragedy, and comedy during the democracy.

Reaction: After the Greek and Roman heyday of tragedy on the stage, it seems tragedy reverts back into its ritual beginnings as spoken affairs between a variety of actors. Some of what Thomson says sounds dubious to our ears today, but undoubtedly, much of what he says on the cultic origins of drama must be correct. If that is the case, and I believe it is, we must consider how foreign tragedy really is to our modern sensibilities, much more foreign than we have thought. We know one or two of the tragedies, which form the basis of western thought and western civilization and we think the Greeks were an earlier form of ourselves. But, looking at the origin of Greek tragedy, is this necessarily true? Perhaps we thought we had grasped the Greeks, but in reality, grasp what we believe to be the Greeks. Troubling.

…review to be continued and concluded in part two, stay tuned! Until next time, I’m Edwin Wong and I’ll be doing Melpomene’s work.

The End of History and the Last Man – Fukuyama

1992, 2006 Free Press, 432 pages

Back Blurb

Ever since its first publication in 1992, The End of History and the Last Man has provoked controversy and debate. Francis Fukuyama’s prescient analysis of religious fundamentalism, politics, scientific progress, ethical codes, and war is an essential for a world fighting fundamentalist terrorists as it was for the end of the Cold War. Now updated with a new afterword, The End of History and the Last Man is a modern classic.

Author Blurb

Francis Fukuyama is a Bernard L. Schwarz professor of international political economy at Johns Hopkins University and a member of the President’s Council for Bioethics. He has twice served on the Policy Planning Staff of the U.S. Department of State. In 1981-82 he was also a member of the U.S. delegation to the Egyptian-Israeli talks on Palestinian autonomy. His past boos include Trust, The Great Disruption, Our Posthuman Future, and State-Building.

This one has been sitting on the reading list for a long time. Funny, the Greater Victoria Public Library didn’t have it. But they were able to provide it through their wonderful interlibrary loan service. It ended up coming from Kaslo Public Library. ‘Kaslo?’ you say? Kaslo is a village in the West Kootenay region of British Columbia. Population according to the 2011 census stands at 1026. Ya, 1026. And they have Fukuyama’s The End of History. How do these buying decisions work at public libraries? Okay, The End of History is an academic book. Well sort of. But it’s pretty famous (or infamous) as well. One would think the GVPL, which serves 370,000 people, would have it?

Well, who’s the last man? In historicist approaches (approaches that look at social and cultural phenomena as determined by the laws of history rather than by human nature, chance, individuals, and religion), the last man is the last man standing after history reaches it teleological end goal. The last man stands opposite to the first man of some theories, such as Rousseau’s ‘noble savage’. The last man, according to Fukuyama, is the enfranchised citizen of a capitalist liberal democracy.

What a great formula! Take the current state of the political world and say that the laws of history have made is so. Other historicists didn’t have it so easy. For both Hegel and Marx, the end of history occurs in the future (for Hegel it is a polity where citizens enjoy recognition and for Marx history ends with the triumph of the proletariat and the end of class struggle). For Fukuyama, history has already ended (in 1992). Some people criticized his book because they thought he was saying history had literally ended. Wow. The thing that suspect about his book is that his thesis isn’t falsifiable. At least not today. We’ll have to wait a century or more to see whether he’s right. And what more, his thesis is based on inductive logic, which, in the long run, stands on very shaky ground. Fukuyama provides a thousand particular instances that back up his claim. But remember, inductive logic (where a law is derived from observing many particular instances) can be overthrown by a single contrary observation. Say someone sees a thousand swans. Or even a million swans. And says that: ‘There are no black swans’. Well, that’s inductive logic. Just by seeing one black swan, a thousand years of inductive logic can go out the window. By the way, this actually happened when they saw a black swan in Australia.

It’s risky to declare that history has ended. The centuries and millenia still to come stand against you. The strongest case against The End of History was, and continues to be, the rise of political Islam, which tends away from capitalist liberal democracies. I’ll withhold judgment on this book until the end of my life. I’m 42 today. If in another fifty years, the world completes the shift to liberal democracies, I’ll say Fukuyama is a genius. Time will tell. But even after I’m dead, things can go the other way too.

But for now, here’s a great quote from the book that’s too good not to pass up. Fukuyama quote Vaclav Havel. I’m going to have to learn some more about this guy, he seems fascinating, a political dissident and writer who became the first president of the Czech Republic. Here Havel tells the story of a greengrocer:

The manager of a fruit and vegetable shop places in his window, among the onions and carrots, the slogan: “Workers of the World, Unite!” Why does he do it? What is he trying to communicate to the world? Is he genuinely enthusiastic about the idea of unity among the workers of the world? Is his enthusiasm so great that he feels an irrepressible impulse to acquaint the public with his ideals? Has he really given more than a moment’s thought to how such a unification might occur and what it would mean? …

Obviously, the greengrocer is indifferent to the semantic content of the slogan on exhibit; he does not put the slogan in this window from any personal desire to acquaint the public with the ideal it expresses. This, of course, does not mean that his action has no motive or significance at all, or that the slogan communicates nothing to anyone. The slogan is really a sign, and as such it contains a subliminal but very definite message. Verbally, it might be expressed this way: “I, the greeengrocer XY, live here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace.” This message, of course, has an addressee: it is directed above, to the greengrocer’s superior, and at the same time it is a shield that protect the greengrocer from potential informers. The slogan’s real meaning, therefore, is rooted firmly in the greengrocer’s existence. It reflects his vital interests. But what are those vital interests?

Let us take note: if the greengrocer had been instructed to display the slogan, “I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient,” he would not be nearly as indifferent to its semantics, even thought the statement would reflect the truth. The greengrocer would be embarrassed and ashamed to put such an unequivocal statement of his own degradation in the shop window, and quite naturally so, for he is a human being and thus has a sense of his own dignity. To overcome this complication, his expression of loyalty must take the form of a sign which, at least on its textual surface, indicates a level of disinterested conviction. It must allow the greengrocer to say, “What’s wrong with the workers of the world uniting?” Thus the sign helps the greengrocer to conceal from himself the low foundations of his obedience, at the same time concealing the low foundations of power. It hides them behind the facade of something high. And that something is ideology.

Wow, a lot of weight falls on the end of the quote. What a splendid writer!

Until next time, I’m Edwin Wong and I’m doing Clio’s work.

Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic – Eagleton (Part 3 of 3)

2003 Blackwell Publishers, 328 pages (continued from part 2)

Chapter 7: Tragedy and the Novel

Summary: Tragic novels began with Hardy, James, and Conrad. Some near misses in Dickens’ late works. Of course there is also Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther. Mention of Moby-Dick. This must be one of Eagleton’s faves, as there have been a consistent string of Moby-Dick quotes (and good ones) through the whole book. Fewer precipices and hairpin turns in novels compared with drama. Aldous Huxley argues that novel, in contrast to tragedy, tries to ‘tell the whole truth’ and dilutes the elemental drive of tragedy. Quotes John Orr saying that late nineteenth-century tragedy springs from peripheries: Scandinavia, Russia, Ireland, and Spain: ‘Tragic art could not have sprung from the major epicentres of European capitalism at the time, nor chosen its tragic protagonists from the urban bourgeoisie of the major nations’. To see the novel as an antidote to tragedy is to view it as an intrinsically liberal form, decentred, dialogical, and open-ended, a champion of growth, change and provisionality as anti-tragic modes. The wisdom of the folk is resolutely anti-tragic. The stage does indeed generally demand more swashbuckling moments. Goethe comments in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship that things in drama hurry on apace and the active hero carries all before him, whereas the typical hero of the novel is more passive. Indeed, the relations between the two genres can be seen as an allegory of the relations between the middle class and aristocracy—the middle class needing to hijack for its own political ends something of the grandiloquence and ceremonial forms of its superiors, while feeling these forms to be too shackling and simplistic for its own psychologically intricate life-world. Wilhelm Meister begins by elevating the Muse of Tragedy over the figure of Commerce, but by the end of the novel, having met with no particular success on stage, he will acknowledge commerce as the true form of nobility.

Reaction: I think tragedy is more like a polar bear swim: that’s the New Years ritual where swimmers jump into the icy water and then back out again just as quickly. Tragedy is like a 100 metre dash. Novels, on the other hand, are like a 10k run, others are like a marathon. So there’s the one difference in, what shall we call it, ‘pace’ perhaps. And the other big difference is that you read a novel at home while you go out to see a tragedy. Or at least, tragedy was meant to be performed rather than read from the armchair: public vs. private. The difference between the two is like going out to see Bruckner’s Ninth at the symphony hall or listening to it at home on a hi-fi system.

It would be interesting to do a study of tragic novels made into movies, i.e. Moby-Dick. You can see how the movie makes everything more direct: the introspective chapters on different types of whales, whale anatomy, the history of the whaling trade, the examination of the harpoon and the towing mechanism, etc., have all been excised. Even the Fedallah character (Ahab’s mysterious double) and his prophecies have been removed. It’s cut bare bones to the ‘man vs. whale’ theme. And it’s a good movie.

Eagleton’s comment on folk wisdom being resolutely anti-tragic resonated with me. Folk wisdom, being from the school of hard knocks, instinctively avoids big risks. Places like Wall Street rewards big risks: a well placed bet can double or triple what is staked. My personal best was Apple. Bought at $27 (Cdn) a share. Taking into account the 2-for-1 stock split in 2005 and the 7-for-1 split in 2014, it’s worth, $2734 (Cdn) today. Of course, I only bought one share. What happened was it was Christmas, and I found this neat site called oneshare.com. They would send you a framed stock certificate of your favourite stock . I got mom and dad a share of Coke, my son a share of Walt-Disney, and my sister a share of Apple. This was pre-iPhone or iPod Apple. Steve Jobs had just come back and he’d introduced the candy coloured iMacs. Well, after getting the family framed stock certificates, I thought I would get myself, for old times’ sakes, a share as well. Anyway, I digress. But folk wisdom doesn’t originate from Wall Street. Folk wisdom is tied to the land, agricultural in its origins. You can bet on growing this crop or that crop, but whatever crop you bet on, the price per bushel isn’t going to go from $27/bushel to $2734/bushel in any time soon. And if you bet too big and bet wrong, you and your family are going to starve. So yeah, risk theatre would agree with Eagleton here: folk wisdom is anti-tragic. But the reason risk theatre finds folk wisdom anti-tragic differs from Eagleton. Risk theatre finds that folk wisdom is anti-tragic because folk wisdom preaches a low risk approach. Risk theatre demands high risk to make the show exciting.

Chapter 8: Tragedy and Modernity

Summary: Spinoza foreign to the spirit of tragedy: according to Spinoza, all things, including nature, proceed from the mind of God and the human mind can grasp this procession, since it too is part of God’s intellect. In Spinoza’s universe, nothing happens by chance. Spinoza’s rationalistic, scientistic, totalizing approach disliked by modernity. Eagleton finds that there is irony in the proposal that the idea of tragedy is a full-blooded critique of modernity. As usual, he quotes Steiner, who is, surprise surprise, mistaken: ‘Tragic drama tells us that the sphere of reason, order, and justice are terribly limited and that no progress in our science or technical resources will enlarge their relevance’. Eagleton finds that there are more real-life tragedies now than any other point in history. Eagleton believes that tragedy does not so much die in the twentieth century so much as it mutates into modernity. In modernity, according to Eagleton, Eros is sublimated into building banks and opera halls, depleting Eros’ internal reserves and leaving it open to Thanatos. In this view, the more civilized we are, the more we open ourselves to guilt and self-aggression. So there is something tragic at the heart of civilization: the irony of idealism. Nice Lukacs quote: ‘In tragedy God must leave the stage but must remain a spectator’. Eagleton writes: ‘The human has replaced the divine as the locus of absolute value; yet if God is dead, then as Nietzsche saw there is not vantage-point outside the human from which a judgement of its value could logically be made. The death of God, whatever Feuerbach may have thought, thus threatens to drag humanism down in its wake’.

‘For this current of late modernity’, writes Eagleton, ‘from Strindberg onwards, relationship is now tragic in itself. To exercise your freedom is to damage someone else … The price of freedom, then, is an incompatibility of persons or goods; and to this extent tragedy would seem built into a pluralist or individualist culture … Max Weber maintains that there are some fundamental, intractable conflicts of value that simply must be confronted .. Rosalind Hursthouse argues likewise, that virtue ethics accepts that there are situations in which you may act well but can still emerge with dirty hands … set exponent of this quasi-tragic moral theory is Isaiah Berlin, who maintains that the world that we encounter in ordinary experience is one in which we are faced by choices equally absolute, the realization of some of which must inevitably mean the sacrifice of others … Nussbaum sees that any good worth pursuing is because it is bounded off from other things and potentially at odds with them’. Hey, this sounds like opportunity cost! And what is at the bottom of risk theatre: it’s the idea of opportunity cost.

Reaction: It seems like it is in this chapter that Eagleton finally starts revealing his own stand on tragedy. Why didn’t the book begin here? For all this talk about ‘God knows everything’ or ‘Because God knows all there cannot be tragedy’ or ‘If the world were deterministic tragedy is not possible’ what if I presented you another case? Why would it matter if the world was random or deterministic? Let’s say, a spectator believed—with Spinoza (for whom tragedy is not possible)—that the universe is deterministic. What would prevent this spectator, however, from enjoying a tragedy that portrayed a random world, you know, a world such as the one in O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra? In that play, things happen quite by chance. For example, Lavinia walks into Christine’s bedroom to witness her father’s murder quite by happenstance. I can see Eagleton’s point with ever greater clarity: he wants to unify real-life tragedy and theatrical tragedy under one term: the ‘tragic’. Theatrical tragedy and real-life tragedy should be interchangeable, according to Eagleton. But why is art beholden to represent actual reality? And if tragedy is not possible in real life (because the universe if deterministic) why wouldn’t it be possible in art (where the universe can be deterministic, free, up, down, yellow, blue, or whatever you please)? My beef with Eagleton is that actual tragedy and theatrical tragedy are two different beasts. The ancient Greek did not call a real life tragedy a tragedy, they called a real life tragedy a sumphora. The ancient Romans were the same. To them, a real life tragedy was never a tragedy, it was a clades. It has only been since the sixteenth century that the term tragedy in English usage could denote either actual disaster or the art form of tragedy; it is a relatively new usage. In my book Risk Theatre, I talk about how theatre is an ex ante art: the stream of action proceeds on forecasts, projections, and best guesses. When we see tragedy or disaster in real life, we see it ex post, or after the fact. To me, the sense of the tragic from theatre revolves around the emotions of anticipation and apprehension over what will happen. Because we understand real life tragedy ex post, the feelings real life tragedy evokes are entirely different. First of all, there is no anticipation and apprehension because the event has already happened. I’m going to think about this some more, the question Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic raises in my mind more and more is: why does Eagleton want to unify real life tragedy and the art form of tragedy? What does he have to gain from this bold move? After all, for thousands of years (until the 1500s according to the Oxford English Dictionary), there were separate words for real life tragedy and the art form of tragedy. That is to say, the art form of tragedy existed a long time without having had anything to do at all with actual tragedy.

Eagleton’s argument (following Nietzsche) that the death of God robs humanity of a vantage-point outside the human form from which a judgement of its value could be made only appears half true. Nietzsche, it will be remembered, also argued that human existence could and must be judged as an aesthetic phenomenon. That is to say, art justifies and gives value to life. And, I think it could be argued that the inspiration of art comes to us—like prophecy and revelation—from beyond us; art can stand as a (somewhat) external judge of human value. Take my idea of risk theatre, which is built around the idea that heroes are gamblers who wager human beliefs and values. They wager these human ideals in the aesthetic realm of theatre; risk theatre is tragedy and tragedy is art. Now, when these hero-gamblers wager the soul for world dominion (e.g. Faust), they assign value to the all-too-human. Faust, after all, could have wagered his soul for some pork chops instead. Or, like Richard Rich in Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, he could have wagered his soul to become attorney-general for Wales. From this perspective, art acts as an arbiter of human values. Human value is not absolute, but elastic, bound only the hero-gambler’s imagination when concocting the hero’s wager. Art, I believe, stands outside of man. Oedipus at Colonus, Hamlet, Macbeth, The Master Builder: they are made by human hands, but as works of art, stand outside of humanity, forever judging its makers. Hmmm. This is an interesting argument: will artificial intelligence or AI someday rise to judge human value?—we just watched 2010 A Space Odyssey the other night. What a fantastic flick. Unbelievable that it was put together in 1968.

Chapter 9: Demons

Summary: Chapter gets to a good start; I feel Eagleton is starting to construct his theory of tragedy in earnest now. Discussion of tragedy as an inherent contradiction of situation. His example is capitalism, which rounds up and exploits the previously scattered proles, thereby enabling them to rise up, destroy capitalism, and create a society free from class warfare. According to Eagleton, only Marxism, of modern theories, holds that civilization has advanced in the scale of its comforts and its brutalities [ed. couldn’t someone argue capitalism holds the same?]. Capitalist modernity is a fall; it is like Faust, says Eagleton. The pact with Mephistopheles is the price we pay for progress. The doctrine of the Fall is thus a tragic one—not because its outcome may not prove to be benign but because even if it does, it will have involved unimaginable waste and suffering. Some good passages on the pros and cons of colonialism and imperialism. Associates hamartia or ‘missing the mark’ with desire. Desire for Eagleton sets off the tragic fall. Defines ‘demonic’ as the annihilating desire, the desire that ‘hollows out the sensuous and surges onto the next’. The ‘demonic’ drive can only be fulfilled in the ‘death drive’, which Eagleton refers to as Thanatos. The opposite of the Thanatos drive is Eros, which attempts to put the death drive to use for its own purposes, but in vain. The Eros and Thanatos drives can be combined by contracting syphilis (the case of Leverkuhn in Mann’s Doctor Faustus) where proximity to death heightens the creative potential. Mann’s Doctor Faustus is allegory of greatest modern tragedy. But Eagleton believes it misses a solution to its tragedy: socialism [ed. but what about the character Naphta, Mann’s caricature of Lukacs]. Eagleton points out that socialism/communism had a hand in ridding the world of ‘Dionysian dementia’ (i.e. Nazi Germany). Tragic for Eagleton is ‘hope beyond hopelessness’ exemplified by the last note of Leverkuhn’s cello cantata. The ultimate example of the ‘demonic’ is the Holocaust. The demonic is associated with waste and motiveless malignity. Demonic is a kind of cosmic sulking. Those who planned the death camps were demonic. Cites three works which illustrate the quarrel between Eros and Thanatos: The Magic Mountain, Women in Love (Lawrence) and Salome (Wilde). ‘In his great epiphany in the snow, Hans Castorp encounters a form of sublimity from which he learns the fearful pleasure of playing with forces so great that to approach them nearly is destruction. One could find worse accounts of the disposition of the audience of a tragedy’.

Reaction: If modern capitalism, is a Fall, what is it a fall from?—the medieval trade guilds that Marx and Engels write of, ancient Sparta, Renaissance England, or? In the biblical Fall, they fell from the Garden of Eden. Modern capitalism seems to me less of a Fall than an advance, and a sustainable one at that. When I was growing up, you know, most mass market items were made in Japan and Taiwan. Taiwan we used to call ‘the shoe factory of the world’. Wages were cheap, and the sweat shops of these countries powered capitalism. This was the dark side of capitalism. But, in time, the people there saved, tooled up, and became first world countries. Case in point: they don’t make sneakers in Taiwan anymore. They make world class electronics. And in the 90s and the early 2000s, China took over the role of providing sweat labour. But look on your tags for mass market items. As China emerges from a third world country to a first world country, less and less stuff is made there now. More and more I see things are made in Vietnam, Bangladesh, India, and so on. So it’s not immediately clear to me that capitalism is unsustainable. I would say, yeah, for sure, if 99% of people are proles who don’t own property, than yeah, you can get revolution. But the landed middle class probably doesn’t want revolution. So long as there’s a large middle class, I’d bet things stay stable. It’d be interesting to get stats on Marxist supporters. Are there more Marxists in the top 5% of wage earners or the bottom 5%? I’d be willing to bet that there’s more Marxists in the top 5%. Maybe Marx’ observation that capitalism sows its own destruction is especially applicable to the intellectual classes?

It almost seems like Eagleton is arguing (and perhaps he is) that the spirit of tragedy in the twentieth century found a new home, not one in drama, but one in the novel. Mann’s The Magic Mountain and Doctor Faustus exemplify contradiction, spiritual waste, and this conflict between Eros and Thanatos better than any modern drama. I’ll agree with Eagleton that The Magic Mountain and Doctor Faustus are damn fine novels. It hit me like a freight train when I read it in the winter of 2005. Wow. But for me, Doctor Faustus illustrates how the horrors of fascist Germany arose, quite naturally, from German culture. Fascist Germany, in my reading of The Magic Mountain, is the logical culmination of centuries of German culture, beginning in the fifteenth century with Albrecht Durer. The critical point that Mann makes is that the death camps and the madness is not the product of one or two sick individuals, but rather represents the madness of an entire nation. And, the scary thing is, it could happen again. Eagleton’s view that the death camps and the Holocaust are an aberration, illogical, and an example of the demonic sounds stalwart and proper, but to me seems the more dangerous view. If we believe that the perpetrators of those heinous crimes are demonic and so far removed from us, it would not occur to us that we are capable of doing the same thing. Mann’s view, in my reading of The Magic Mountain, seems the safer view: by looking at the enemy as a human being, and a cultured human being backed by centuries of high culture and art raises our awareness that we must be careful of what we do, lest we fall into the same madness. You know, it’s a similar situation with drugs and alcohol. You can look at addicts and alcoholics as ‘dope fiends’. Not human anymore. ’That’s not me’, you say. But I wonder how many of us are a prescription away from wandering around as a junky on the street? It’s actually pretty easy, one of my friends was a high school teacher. Doing really well. One day she fell and broke her jaw. The doctor gave her an opioid for the pain. You know what happens next.

Chapter 10: Thomas Mann’s Hedgehog

Summary: With some notable exceptions such as George Thomson (Aeschylus and Athens) and Eva Figes (Tragedy and Social Evolution), left wing critics suspect the association between cult and tragedy. Sacrifice leaves a bad taste in the mouth of radical critics. Eagleton believes that the political left should not, however, surrender a notion to its opponents. While sacrifice may be repugnant, sometimes, says Eagleton, something must be dismembered to be renewed. Walter Benjamin sees double use in sacrifice: 1) atonement of expiation, and 2) new contents of the life of a people announce themselves. Most theory of tragedy is a hangover from the old days of cult, a version of antique ritual updated for modern consumption. Rather than finding the value of tragic sacrifice in ethical terms, it sees such destruction as valuable in itself, thus regressing to notions of the fertilizing power released by the mutilated god. In this sense, it undoes the ethical reinterpretation of the natural which is central to the Judaic tradition. Discussion of pharmakos, an unclean prisoner who would be ritually expelled from the city to ward off the anger of the gods. The scapegoat would elicit both pity and fear, Tragedy breaks down the barrier between gods, humans and beasts. The great pharmakos of ancient tragedy are Oedipus, Antigone, and Philoctetes. These pharmakos type figures from Oedipus to Lear inaugurate an revolutionary ethics by championing a truth the system has to suppress in order to function [was that the thesis statement for the ‘radical and controversial case’ the back book blurb promised?]. The pharmakos is revolutionary because it sees value in non-being. Tragedy shows both value and futility of life (look at Oedipus), the purpose and purposelessness of existence. Modern day left-historicists deaf to humanity’s roots in an ancient otherness: tragedies like those of Oedipus and Lear remind of the archaic aspects of humanity we drag as a kind of ballast through the modern world. No postmodern tragedy because postmodernism believes culture goes all the way down, repressing the duality of civilization and barbarism. Thomas Mann’s hedgehog is the holy sinner Gregorius, who filled with shame for doing the things Oedipus did and then some more, withdraws from society as a pharmakos and chains himself to a rock for 17 years. In that time, he grows to resemble a hedgehog. At the end, he becomes Pope Gregory the Great.

‘Art itself’, writes Eagleton, ‘is a for of sacrifice [like tragedy], a priestly self-abnegation, as the writer pays out with his paucity of life for the prodigal fullness of his art. Modern day pharmakos include Melville’s Ahab and Billy Budd. Such pharmakos disquiet historicists because, in a way, Ahab and Budd form a transhistorical bridge linking the distant past to the present day. Eagleton finds the discussion usually focusses on negative side of the pharmakos. He points out the pharmakos can initiate change. For example, in the old day, when the pharmakos is expelled, he could found a new settlement. So, for Eagleton, there is something revolutionary about the pharmakos and, for this reason, the left should embrace the pharmakos, as the pharmakos can smash apart evil and greedy transnational corporations and create political revolution and a better, more just world for everyone.

Reaction: Wow, the back blurb got it bang on. That the tragic holds the key to political revolution is indeed ‘a radical and controversial case’. Capitalism has created a majority class of pharmakos type outcasts, who will rise up in revolt. Very good. I would have liked Eagleton to say some more about what he would replace capitalism with. If its socialism, would a revolution be necessary? And who are the pharmakos? Are they North American plumbers? Are they the hands and fingers assembling iPhones in China? Are they coffee farmers in Ethiopia? Is this world revolution? Presumably the revolution will smash the evil and greedy transnational corporations. What then happens to public pension plans, such as the Canada Pension Plan, who fund future payouts by investing in transnational corporations? What happens to the mom and pop investors who have invested in the transnational corporations? What will tragedy give us to replace the economic, social, and political power structures that are in place? I guess the final questions for Eagleton are: 1) how many pharmakos are there in the real world, 2) can they achieve critical mass to ignite the revolution, and 3) do they perceive no means of advancing beyond the class of pharmakos or is the current world system a caste system with no hope of betterment?

Until next time, I’m Edwin Wong and I do Melpomene’s work.

Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic – Eagleton (Part 2 of 3)

2003 Blackwell Publishers, 328 pages (continued from part 1)

Chapter 4: Heroes

Summary: Eagleton deconstruct Dorothea Krook’s traditionalist interpretation of tragedy as presented in Elements of Tragedy. To Krook and other traditionalists, tragedy involves a strong-willed, active hero who represents humanity. He atones for guilt or sin through conscious suffering. Though he suffers, his sufferings reaffirms the supremacy of the moral order and the dignity of the human spirit. Through courage and endurance the hero converts the mystery of suffering into something intelligible. Eagleton finds this view unpleasant and sadistic. First criticism: Aristotle, John Jones say that tragedy is about an action, not a hero. Krook’s term ‘tragic hero’ is unknown to the ancients, who said ‘tragic protagonist’. Second criticism: not all tragic heroes have tragic flaws: Oedipus, Agamemnon, Orestes, Antigone, Iphigenia, Hieronimo, Tamburlaine, Desdemona, and Macbeth don’t. Also, not all tragic heroes are attractive: Faust and Hedda Gabler are not likeable. Fourth criticism: many tragedies end well, proving that tragic practice is more of a mixed affair than the gloom of tragic theory. Fifth criticism: not all heroes are of patrician stature. Raymond Williams says he, as an ordinary man, has seen tragedy in a dead father, a divided city, and world war. Schopenhauer ‘thinks even so that the powerful make the best protagonists—not because they are necessarily noble-spirited, but because their more extravagant plunges from grace render the tragedy more grippingly terrible for the spectators’. The duke out between Aeschylus and Euripides in Aristophanes’ Frogs shows that bourgeois tragedy was already possible long ago. Arden of Feversham shows bourgeois roots of tragedy in Renaissance.

Reaction: Risk theatre would say that patricians star in tragedies because they make the drama exciting. Now, if you were going to the casino to watch gamblers, would you watch them gamble at the nickel and dimes tables or would you watch the action at the no-limit table? I agree with Schopenhauer here: sure bourgeois tragedy is possible. But would it be entertaining?

You know, a long time ago in Homeric scholarship, they had this thing called the ‘Homeric question’: was the Iliad and the Odyssey written by one or many hands? The analysts said ‘many hands’: these epics were the product of an oral tradition going back hundreds of years. The unitarians said ‘one hand’: ‘Homer’ was a real poet who composed the Iliad and the Odyssey. Well, I think, in truth, the analysts won out. Maybe ‘Homer’ sang a version of these epics, but the epics themselves are a product of an oral tradition. But despite this, you know, I always liked the Unitarians. There is something beautiful in the image of the blind bard Homer composing these two cornerstones of literature. The unitarians defended the tradition, the beautiful tradition. I appreciated them for that. So here’s my point. Yeah, of course Eagleton is right in deconstructing Krook’s traditionalist approach. But what does he offer us to take its place? That’s the difference between a good and a great theorist. Good theorists can deconstruct. But great theorists deconstruct and build something in its place. That’s one thing I liked about Nietzsche. He tore down conventional morality (which is difficult, but not super difficult). But what he did was he built back an alternative morality based on the ‘superman’, the ‘eternal recurrence’, and the ‘will to power’. Six more chapters to go, ball’s in your court, Eagleton! I know these other theories don’t work, but you gotta have skin in the game if you’re going to bash these other folks: throw your ‘better’ theory out there!

Chapter 5: Freedom, Fate and Justice

Summary: There is no discussion of fate or the determining sway of the gods in Aristotle’s Poetics (nor of Dionysus, I might add). Friedrich Holderlin writes to a friend that tragedy is the strictest of all poetic forms, starkly unornamented and denying all accident. Chorus in Anouihl’s Antigone: ‘The machine is in perfect order, it has been oiled since time began, and it runs without friction [ed. then why would it need oil?] … Tragedy is clean, it is restful, it is flawless .. Death, in a melodrama is really horrible because it is never inevitable. In a tragedy, nothing is in doubt and everyone’s destiny is known. That makes for tranquillity … Tragedy is restful; and the reason is that hope, that foul deceitful thing, has no part in it. There isn’t any hope. You’re trapped’. Tragedy is not supposed to be a matter of luck; but is it not more tragic to be struck down by an illness which afflicts only one in a million than to die of old age? On how tragedy and irony (end state completely contrary to what was expected) are bound together: ‘if life-forms are intricately but not organically bound up with each another you can never calculate exact outcomes, any more than you can in the market-place. Action taken at one spot in this great web will resonate throughout the whole tangled skein, breeding noxious effects where one least expects them. Extended discussion of nature of freedom and fate. As is Eagleton’s custom, he quotes a one-liner from all the usual suspects (Lacan, Nietzsche, Kant, Hegel, etc.,). For example: ‘As Fredric Jameson puts it, historiography shows us why what happened had to happen the way it did. Freedom, once narrativized, reads like necessity. Writes also on didactic function of tragedy. But takes an anti-didactic view: if tragedy is predestined, how can it warn? And if tragedy lacks justice, how can it teach integrity?

Reaction: Aristotle is still the benchmark and starting point of the discussion. I find this surprising. How often do you pick up a modern book on mathematics and find the discussion centred around Euclid and Pythagoras? Or when was the last time you picked up a modern book on astronomy to find the discussions revolving around Ptolemy’s theories? Or a book on physics to find extended discussion on Democritus’ atomic model? You could argue, and with success, that art doesn’t progress with cumulative achievements like science. But I’d argue differently: maybe Pheidias and Rodin are on the same level, but do we venerate the Stone Age equivalent of Pheidias and Rodin? Art (and criticism) does advance. Once day, Bach and Beethoven will be forgotten. Heresy? Well, name a musician prior to Bach?–you know, they had great musicians before Bach. Maybe you would say Buxtehude, or Frescobaldi. Maybe you can go back to Hildegard von Bingen or Pope Gregory of Gregorian chant fame. But you see what I mean: nothing lasts forever. Why is Aristotle the last word on tragedy today? Someone help me here.

It strikes me in this massive (this is a long chapter) discussion on fate and freedom that Eagleton wants all tragedy to demonstrate either fate or free will. If a critic says that tragedy is about fate, Eagleton cites tragedies where the hero is free; if another critic says that tragedy demonstrates freedom, he cites tragedies of fate in rebuttal. Couldn’t there be some tragedies of fate and other tragedies of free will? The more I read this book, the more it seems like it’s open season on ‘traditionalist’ and ‘conservative’ critics such as Krooks and Steiner. They do evil in the sight of Eagleton. On the other hand, Williams only does good in the sight of Eagleton, only gentle rebukes here, and those are rare. Eagleton is of two minds on Nietzsche. He doesn’t like the aristocrat in him but values his contributions. His relationship with Kaufmann is peculiar. When Kaufmann expresses divergent opinions, he seems genuinely surprised. His little body blows to religion get tiring: e.g. Christ, provided that he wasn’t insane, and we have no reason to think he was crazy … Geez, was that necessary? Of course he doesn’t question Nietzsche’s sanity…

With regard to tragedy’s didactic function, risk theatre dissents from Eagleton. Risk theatre argues that audiences’ awareness of risk increases when they see how low-probability, high-consequence events cast heroes down, heroes who had every expectation of success. In today’s age of technological and manufactured risks (nuclear power, GMOs, mutual assured destruction ideologies, and AI), it befits us to be aware of what risk is and of what happens when our expectations go awry: ‘the best-laid plans of mice and men oft go awry’ runs the old saw, and it is true today more than ever. Scientists, engineers, and Wall Street tycoons are today’s masters of the universe, they are the modern day Macbeths and Oedipuses, playing with fire.

Chapter 6: Pity, Fear, and Pleasure

Summary: Philosophy is the antidote to the tragic, writes Plato. Aristotle introduces his catharsis doctrine to rehabilitate tragedy from Plato. Summary of Mandel, Lessing, Milton, and others on tragedy’s effects on our emotions. Pity is a spectator sport. Discussion of incest in tragedy, of how alterity is (in the normal world) grounds for intimacy. Why does tragedy give pleasure is among the hoariest of philosophical questions. Answers: 1) purges excess emotions, 2) pleasure in mimesis, 3) shapes suffering into pattern, 4) puts petty troubles in chastening perspective, 5) enjoy watching others suffer, 6) enjoy pitying others, 7) enjoy seeing balance of cosmic justice restored, 8) always pleasant to witness an evil from which you yourself are exempt, 9) fulfilment of poetic justice, and 10) sado-masochistic pleasure. Chapter concludes with Eagleton’s eagerly awaited conclusions: ‘Few artistic forms display such impressive erotic economy, and perhaps none caters so cunningly to our sadism, masochism and moral conscience all at the same time. Few, also, reveal such a close mirroring between the transactions on stage and the transactions between stage and spectators.

Reaction: I like Eagleton’s different strokes for different folks approach: soft-hearts, hard-noses, and psychopaths will react differently to the same show. How does my theory of risk theatre explain the pleasure of tragedy? It’s simple! Since heroes are gamblers, theatre is a casino, and the stage is like a high limit room, theatregoers, according to the risk theatre model of tragedy, experience the same pleasure spectators watching high stakes poker tournaments. There is the hubbub of the event, the ‘Oh hey there’s so and so’. Or ‘Who’s all here?’. Then there’s the wagers: ‘Oh! Should Mary really bet her kid’s college fund on this hand’, ‘Oh! Should Bob really be lay down his diamond wedding ring?—Sue looks pretty confident!’, or ‘Oh man, Macbeth is putting down the milk of human kindness for the crown? What if he loses it?’. So there’s adrenalin going through the audience first of all. And second of all, the audience feels apprehension, apprehension over the priceless human values and beliefs the heroes are wagering in risk theatre. Then there’s the thrill of suspense. You see enough tragedies, and you know something unexpected is going to happen—for good or bad. I just read Jennifer Wise’s article on the prevalence of ‘happy ending’ tragedies in 5th century Athens and yeah it’s true: there’s lots of ‘happy ending’ tragedies in Attic tragedy and after. Well, when these heroes ante up everything and leverage themselves up 100:1, there’s a certain thrill because you know something unexpected and out of left field is going to happen. Maybe we’ll call the pleasure of tragedy ‘apprehension and anticipation’.

Okay, that’s it for today. I’m Edwin Wong and I’m doing Melpomene’s work by reading tragic theory. Stay tuned for a writeup on chapters 7-10 of Eagleton’s book, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic.

Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic – Eagleton (Part 1 of 3)

2003 Blackwell Publishers, 328 pages

Back Blurb:

In this dazzling book, Terry Eagleton provides a comprehensive study of tragedy, all the way from Aeschylus to Edward Albee, dealing with both theory and practice, and moving between ideas of tragedy and analyses of particular works and authors. This amazing tour de force steps out beyond the stage to reflect not only on tragic art but also on real-life tragedy. It explores the idea of the tragic in the novel, examining such writers as Melville, Hawthorne, Stendhal, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Manzoni, Goethe and Mann, as well as English novelists.

With his characteristic brilliance and inventiveness of mind, Eagleton weaves together literature, philosophy, ethics, theology, and political theory. In so doing he makes a major political—philosophical statement drawn from a startling range of Western thought, in the writings of Plato, St Paul, St Augustine, Descartes, Pascal, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Sartre and others.

This book takes serious issue with the idea of ‘the death of tragedy’, and gives a comprehensive survey of definitions of tragedy itself, arguing a radical and controversial case.

An ambitious all-encompassing political-philosophical approach. It covers under the umbrella of tragedy all the way from the dramatic form of tragedy, real life tragedy, tragedy in novels, and the philosophy of tragedy, otherwise called the tragic. First question: why doesn’t the back blurb say one or two words on Eagleton’s ‘radical and controversial case’? Will Sweet Violence be similar to Raymond Williams’ 1966 Modern Tragedy, which was also a rebuke of George Steiner’s 1961 title The Death of Tragedy?

My Reaction to the Back Blurb

My title, Risk Theatre: Gambling, Drama, and the Unexpected maintains a narrower scope: the art form of tragedy and the philosophy of tragedy. It leaves out real life tragedy (except for a brief discussion at the end) and tragic novels. It never occurred to me to include studies of real life tragedies such as AIDS, Chernobyl, the Challenger explosion, and others. If I had talked about the Challenger or the Fukushima tragedies, from my risk theatre model, I’d have to say that they could be similar to the art form of tragedy if they could be framed in such a way: the planner or engineer entrusted with the design and build of the space shuttle or nuclear power plant does his best to make it safe. He plans for the contingencies that he thinks will be likely to happen. He does his best to make it safe. He plans enough safeties so that the project can withstand a one in a hundred year event. He knows that, should a one in a thousand year event happen, lives will be endangered. He also knows if the project doesn’t go ahead bad things will happen. Maybe the Soviets will get ahead in the space race. Maybe people won’t have power. He weighs the opportunity costs of building the project, and decides to go ahead. After the project is built, a one in a thousand year event happens and all is ruined. So my idea of risk theatre could be extended to real life. But it’s hard. One of the things I talk about in my book is that tragedy is an ex-ante art: heroes base their decisions on forecasts. They don’t know what’s going to happen. In real life, you don’t know about the disaster until after it’s happened and you see the disaster from an ex-post, after the fact perspective. When that happens, people will usually form a committee to examine the accident and point fingers. That’s when tragedy gets ruined. I think that’s what Nietzsche was getting at when he said that Euripides and Socrates wrecked tragedy: their rationalist and enlightened interpretations of reality chase out that last little vestige of uncertainty in reality. To the rationalists, everything can be known in advance. And if it could have been foreseen, then it’s not tragedy, as it could have been avoided. The point of tragedy is that it couldn’t have been avoided. Each time Othello will strangle Desdemona. Each time Polyneices will be waiting for Eteocles at the seventh gate. Over and over.

Introduction

Summary of Eagleton’s arguments: tragedy’s too serious for postmodernists, too fatalistic for leftists, and too macho for feminists. Sweet Violence is not a historical study. Historicist and culturalist approaches to suffering place suffering in a historical or cultural setting. Historicist and culturalist approaches avoid tragedy because tragedy places suffering in a transhistorical context: remember historicism by definition states that social and cultural phenomena are determined by history. The ‘state of suffering’ that tragedy believes in, or seems to dramatize, is anathema to the historicist and culturalist purview. But this is wrong: ‘tragic art highlights what is perishable, contracted, fragile and slow-moving about us, as a rebuke to culturalist or historicist hubris’. The political left is silent about religion. Next thesis statement: ‘there are also theological ideas which can be politically illuminating, and this book is among other things and exploration of them’. Sweet Violence is Eagleton’s attempt to reconcile tragedy with the political left. It is a political study of tragedy.

My Reaction to the Introduction:

I buy his argument that tragedy is too full of fate and macho heroes for modern sensibilities. But aren’t some of our modern sensibilities shaped by the political left? I’m thinking of the Marxist playwright Arthur Miller. Or the anticapitalist Henrik Ibsen. So leftist critics don’t like tragedy but leftist dramatists do? And I would have thought tragedy would have been a happy hunting ground from feminists: from the beginning up to the present day, from Clytemnestra to Hedda Gabler, tragedy presents a veritable roll call of powerful female leads. In fact, I can only think of one tragedy that has no woman: and that would be Seneca’s over-the-top Thyestes. How does my title Risk Theatre fit in ? Well, the idea of heroes as high stakes gamblers gambling with values, beliefs, emotions should be politically agnostic. So risk theatre is not leftist, rightist, or feminist. You could say its postmodern in that it rejects modern theatre, e.g. epic theatre, metatheatre, theatre of the absurd, and the like. But risk theatre isn’t going back to Aristotle’s Poetics either. The argument that theatre dramatizes risk, the impact of the unexpected, and that heroes are high stakes gamblers isn’t going back to any specific theory. You could say it touches on Boethius’ conception of tragedy as involving fortune, but he didn’t include all the ludic aspects. Maybe risk theatre is a ludic theory of tragedy?—though ludic sounds too innocuous. I called risk theatre a neoclassical model in the book not because it was going back to classical models but because, from the beginning to the present day I find images of gambling in tragedy.

Chapter 1 A Theory in Ruins

Summary of Eagleton’s arguments: An overview of different definitions of tragedy from Aristotle to the present day. Why they are all wrong. The best ‘comprehensive’ definition of tragedy is ‘very sad’. But some sad events, such as Auschwitz, although it is ‘very sad’, is not understood to be tragedy. Plus, why are we enthralled by its sadness? Difference between term ‘tragic’ and similar, almost interchangeable terms such as ’misfortune’, ‘sad’, ‘shocking’. Formulaic rebuttals. Eagleton quotes the critic, and offers a riposte. For example: ‘As FL Lucas puts it: tragedy for the ancients means serious drama, for the middle ages a story with an unhappy ending, and for moderns a drama with an unhappy ending. It is hard to get more imprecise than that’. Or ‘Kenneth Burke’s definition of tragedy involves an essential moment of tragic recognition or anagnorisis, but while this may be true of Oedipus, it hold only doubtfully for Othello and hardly at all for Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman. In the case of Phaedra, no such recognition is needed. Tragic art for conservative theorists is a supremely affirmative affair. Conservative theorists such as Franco Moretti therefore deny the tragic exists in real life, saving themselves from wishing for a cataclysmic affair to happen in actual life to justify life. Eagleton provides the following example: ‘all-out nuclear warfare would not be tragic, but a certain way of representing it in art might well be. Behind this apparently lunatic notion, which only the remarkably well-educated could conceivably have hatched, lie [sic] a series of false assumptions: that real life is shapeless, and art alone is orderly; that only in art can the value released by destruction be revealed; that real-life suffering is passive, ugly and undignified, whereas affliction in art has a heroic splendour of resistance; that art has a gratifying inevitability lacking in life’. If tragedy matters to modernity, it is as much as a theodicy, a metaphysical humanism, a critique of Enlightenment. The left rejects tragedy and the right endorses it.

My Response to Chapter 1

How profitable is this division between left and right? Didn’t both the left (freedom fighters) and the right (Nazis guards) applaud Anouihl’s Antigone in 1944 occupied Paris? I like the idea of tragedy as an antidote for Enlightenment. Enlightenment philosophy taught us that we could know everything (e.g. Laplace’s demon who could work out the infinite past and future by studying the present and working causality forwards and backwards); tragedy teaches us that we know less that what we think. Some of Eagleton’s criticisms of other’s definitions don’t seem all that fair. For example, he calls out FL Lucas, but how far out is Lucas’ definition of tragedy from Henry Ansgar Kelly’s conclusions in Ideas and Forms of Tragedy whom Eagleton gives kudos to in his footnotes? As to Burke’s definition involving recognition, Eagleton cites Othello, Loman, and Phaedra as counterexamples. But doesn’t Othello have a recognition scene: he recognizes after he kills Desdemona that he’s been played by ‘honest’ Iago. Doesn’t Loman have a big recognition scene: the moment that he realizes that, because he has insurance, he’s worth more dead than alive? Doesn’t Phaedra have a recognition scene: the moment that she realizes the Nurse has let her down? As for Auschwitz, I don’t think someone could make a tragic play out of that (does anyone consider Hochhuth’s The Deputy to be a tragedy?). Auschwitz is a tragedy in the sense that it’s a horrible event, but it’d be hard to dramatize. Risk theatre understands that tragedy involves a wager that’s gone awry. And the hero has to put up at stake something that belongs to himself that he considers valuable. Maybe a play could be made about a hero who wagers life and livelihood in order to put a stop to Auschwitz? As for an all-out nuclear war: I guess risk theatre could make that into a play if the all-out war involved some kind of miscalculation in the game of brinkmanship between the generals that neither of them originally wanted. Eagleton puts me on hard ground by saying theories of tragedy have to be valid for what is tragic in life and what is tragic on the stage. To me, they’re different things, different perspectives. Sometimes they overlap, sometimes they don’t.

I would like to know how Eagleton knows that it is a false assumption that real life is shapeless and art alone is orderly. Lots of things in real life are shapeless: Brownian motion, the day to day movement of the stock market is a random walk (Fama won the 2013 Nobel for this discovery), Meursault’s life in Camus’ The Outsider. Risk theatre would find that ‘only in art can the value released by destruction be revealed’ because it is only when we see the hero’s reaction to loss that we can understand that the loss of what the hero staked is real. For example, I would argue that in his ‘Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow’ soliloquy, Macbeth makes it absolutely clear the worth of what he has lost because of how much it hurts. You don’t know what you got till it’s gone, runs the old saw. And that saw applies to tragedy: heroes have to lose because you don’t know the value of what you have until it’s irrevocably wrenched away.

Chapter 2 The Value of Agony

Summary of Eagleton’s arguments: Hegel, Racine, Milton and others think tragic art is best thing since sliced bread. But their opinion is not shared by publishers and publicity agents. Public does not like tragic plays and novels where all hope is lost. Yeats and other writes, however, find that tragedy is more about ecstasy than agony. Tragedy, according to the artists (D. D. Raphael, Nietzsche, Eugene O’Neill, Richard Wagner), is just the thing that lifts one spirits after bankruptcy or bereavement. For Murray Gilbert, tragedy attests the triumph of the human soul over triumph and disaster. Eagleton agrees tragedy needs meaning and value if only to violate them. Franco Moretti quote: ‘It is as though it were argued that by strangling Desdemona, Othello paid tribute to her importance’. F. L. Lucas quote: ‘Tragedy portrays life so that its tears become a joy forever’. Eagleton says this is sadism. Kaufmann quote: “Kaufmann, rather extraordinarily, seems to think that there is solace in the thought that suffering is general, not just peculiar to oneself. It might be the thought os someone else being decapitated is usually comforting, but this is not much consolation when one is trying to come to terms with bereavement’. Disagrees with Steiner that tragedy is incompatible with Christian and Marxist worldviews. T. R. Henn quote with Eagleton’s reaction: “‘there is implicit, not only the possibility of redemption, but the spiritual assertion that man is splendid in his ashes, and can transcend his nature’. It is hard to see that the victims of Bosnia or Cambodia are particularly splendid in their ashes; and if Henn is reserving the triumph for art rather than life, then it is difficult to see its relevance to the latter.”

My Response to Chapter 2

Tragedy’s popularity among writers and its lack of popularity among the public reminds me of certain music bands who are more popular with other music bands than with the general public, bands like Velvet Underground, Rush (though Rush are pretty big), and Robert Johnson. Leonard Cohen probably falls into this category: for decades I had heard his covers (e.g. Everybody Knows covered by Concrete Blonde) thinking that they were original songs by the covering bands. Sometimes I would think, ‘Wow, all of a sudden their lyrics have become more profound!’ It wasn’t until hearing the song that concluded the movie Winterschlafer that I found out about Cohen. And then when I looked up with discography, I recognized about half the songs through covers! Obviously the bands had been listening to him more than the radio has been playing him. To me, tragedy is like the Velvets or Cohen, who sing about unhappy things. But wouldn’t you say their songs elevate the worth of life by portraying hurt?

Speaking of music, they did a recent study of what music people grew up listening to, and how successful they were later in life. And the winner?—heavy metal, believe it or not. And the loser, or least successful?—those who listened to pop music. The researchers came to the conclusion that heavy metal, by depicting the world as a hard, dog-eat-dog place, instilled the values of endurance and perseverance in young listeners. Conversely, pop music, by depicting an easy go lucky world, disillusioned listeners, who as they grew up and moved out into the real world, found that things aren’t that easy. There is a value to agony. And it is art’s job to inculcate its audiences with the right values. What are the right values? Well, that depends on what sort of world it is out there!

One thing my risk theatre model does is it asserts that there is solace in that suffering is general, and not specific. In ancient times, a commonplace of consolation was to say to the sufferer, ‘this is not to you alone, many others have suffered what you suffer’. This commonplace of consolation appears frequently in ancient tragedy, where it is voiced by the chorus. So when Theseus loses his wife in Hippolytus, the chorus, to assuage him, says ‘you are not the first to lose a wife, many others have as well’. It may sound grating on modern ears, but writers such as Cicero, Plutarch, and pseudo-Seneca have all written about the commonplace of consolation as being effective. Now, as to how victims of political injustice probably don’t take comfort in being splendid in their ashes, well it is true…in real life. Tragedy furnishes examples that can defend Henn’s position: consider Goethe’s Egmont. In that play, Freedom personified comes to visit Egmont, who is glumly awaiting execution. Learning that his death will kickstart the revolts that will eventually restore liberty to the Low Countries, he dies in an exalted state. Now it’s true that the victims of Bosnia and Cambodia are hardly splendid in their ashes, as Eagleton says. But what about those who died at Tianamen Square? Are they ‘splendid’ or ‘wasted’ ashes? On Eagleton’s comments that art transforming sorrow into joy, I recall Homer’s lines in the Iliad where Helen says to Priam that Zeus has given them sorrows so that their stories can be a story for the future singers to sing.

I take it that Eagleton wants to draw a sort of equal sign between actual tragedy and tragedy in drama. He wants them to be the same. Risk theatre differentiates itself from Eagleton’s views in that it posits that art and life are not the same. Risk theatre says that tragedy in drama is a high-stakes gambling act gone awry. Real life tragedies can be material for tragic drama only if they are presented as a gambling act gone awry.

Chapter 3 From Hegel to Beckett

Summary of Eagleton’s arguments: this chapter is on various tragic theories from Hegel to Beckett. For instance: ‘Far from being a catastrophe, tragic art for Hegel is supremely affirmative. It is the finest working model we have of how Spirit, once pitched into contention with itself, restores its own unity through negation … The world is rational, even if, curiously, it is through violent destruction that we come to appreciate the fact’. Eagleton comments on commentator’s favourite tragedies: ‘As far as Marlowe goes, it is true that Hegel has in mind ancient rather than modern tragedy. But even here his reflections are far too conditioned by Antigone, as Aristotle’s are by King Oedipus. It is remarkable how many general theories of tragedy have been spun out of a mere two or three texts. Eagleton on how for modern thinkers tragedy has become an ersatz religion. Nice purple passage from Jean-Francois Lyotard: ‘a narrow complicity is established between the sinner and the confessor, the witch and the exorcist, sex and sainthood’. Eagleton fills in Lyotard’s quote with Dostoyevsky’s Ivan Karamazov, an atheist who writes articles on theology. Nice analysis of T. S. Eliot’s Family Reunion and Murder in the Cathedral: ‘What matters in Eliot is not action, and not even the consciousness of it, which is invariably false consciousness, but those meanings which act themselves out on a different stage altogether, that of the spirit or the unconscious’. Kierkegaard also covered, for whom ‘the tragic is the finite that comes into conflict with the infinite’. Nietzsche the counter-Enlightenment philosopher is contrasted with Hegel, the Enlightenment philosopher who tried to incorporate reason with tragedy. Some lines from Eagleton that have the klang of risk theatre: ‘Tragedy can be an index of the outrageous price we have sometimes to pay for truth and justice, not of their illusoriness … suffering is a measure of how catastrophic things are with us that change must be bought at so steep a cost’. Eagleton sees tragedy as revolution with Williams. ‘In ancient cults of sacrifice, value stemmed from the expiatory potential of death’. Nice Melville Moby Dick quote (which I recently read): even the highest earthly felicities ever have a certain unsignifying pettiness lurking in them’. It goes well with the Lyotard quote, above.

My Response to Chapter 3

With the brilliant Melville and Lyotard quotes, I wonder if Eagleton is a closet gnostic?–you know, those who believe that God contain in himself both good and evil. Of course, from Eagleton’s comments on religion, I would have to guess that, if he is a closet gnostic, he would be a closet atheist-gnostic, if such a thing were possible. I think he uses the Lyotard quote is perfect since, for someone who spends so much time remonstrating Christianity, he is very well versed in its workings. The book has lots and lots of quotes, which Eagleton sometimes hides his true beliefs behind. His technique goes something like this: writers x, y, and z are wrong. But it’s hard to see what he himself actually believes. So far I gather that he likes Williams and doesn’t like Steiner and Krook. He grudgingly accepts Hegel and Nietzsche, or at least refrains from showering them with invective. He also enjoys Kaufmann, a writer I also enjoy. I presume in the later chapters his political theory of tragedy as a sweet, violent, and revolution inducing art will become clearer. Nice to see some lines that look at tragedy as an index of the cost of the price the hero pays. This jives well with risk theatre, my economic study of tragedy based on the principle of opportunity cost. There is a fundamental difference between our interpretations of cost, however. For Eagleton, what the hero sacrifices is lesser in value than what he hopes to gain (he uses the example of Abraham sacrificing Isaac). According to risk theatre, the value of what is staked is exactly equal to the value of what is at stake.

to be continued…

Until next time, I’m Edwin Wong and I’ve been doing Melpomene’s work by reading Eagleton’s Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic.

The Communist Manifesto – Marx and Engels

Hands up, all of you who have talked about Marx, Engels, Marxism, and communism. And hands up, all of you who have read Marx and Engel’s works. Betcha lot of hands went up the first time around. Now, Marx’ masterpiece Capital, volumes 1-3 clocks in at 2500 or so pages of dense nineteenth century prose. No thanks. But then there is Marx and Engel’s The Communist Manifesto. There’s a nice little Penguin edition at the library with an introduction and notes by Gareth Stedman Jones. The Penguin edition reprints the Samuel Moore translation of 1888 (The Communist Manifesto was first published in 1848). Moore was a Manchester barrister and manufacturer. The translation plays fast and loose in some parts. But the Moore translation is seen as being canonical in some quarters, as Moore was Engel’s friend and Engels had approved the translation. If you strip away Jones’ 276 page introduction, Engel’s 7 prefaces, you are left with the final 53 page distillation known as The Communist Manifesto. 53 vs. 2500 pages. You know which one I’ll be reading.

And it’s a good thing it’s a short work. I’ve been borrowing books from the Greater Victoria Public Library for decades. I’ve borrowed literally thousands of books. All 21 day loan period. Except this book. It’s a 14 day loan period. If there’s such a high demand, why not get another copy?

Well, what did I learn?

Marx and Engels Anticipate the American Century

The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonization of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development … Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacure no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionized industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry, the place of the industrial middle class,by industrial millionaires, the leaders of whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.

There is a powerful dynamism in their writing. You can see why this communism thing caught on. Very charismatic

Marx and Engels Anticipate Free Trade

The bourgeoisie are on fire, nothing can stop them now that they have their ultimate weapon called Free Trade, which converts physician, lawyer, priest, poet, and scientist into wage-labourers:

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors,” and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment.” It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom–Free Trade.

Today, we have NAFTA, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the EU and these larger and larger supranational trading blocks. The rise of free trade even calls into question the sovereign nation as the final arbiter, as by joining up with a free trade block, a sovereign nation in effect gives up some of its rights to levy taxes and raise tariffs. Funny thing, Marx and Engels foresaw the rise of free trade as well. Pretty prescient. Remember, they were writing The Communist Manifesto just before 1850, around the same time Melville was writing Moby-Dick and talking about the whaling trade.

Marx and Engels Anticipate the Increasing Division of Labour

In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed–a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.

Owing to the extensive use of machinery and to division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for his maintenance, and for the propagation of his race. But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labour, is equal to its cost of production.

Sounds like they also anticipated the impact on the division of labour on entry-level or less skilled workers. Minimum wage is an ongoing debate. In the last provincial election, the NDP proposed raising minimum wage from $11.35 to $15 per hour. They eventually won the election after teaming up with the Green Party and scrapped the “living wage” platform. The proletariat class today, however, is smaller than what Marx and Engels envisioned. In the province of BC, Canada, under 5% of the workforce makes minimum wage. They don’t give exact numbers in The Communist Manifesto, but from the argument, it sounds like they were expecting most people to be in the proletariat, or the subsistence or minimum wage class, i.e. >50%, maybe closer to 80 or 90%.

Capitalism is a Snake that Eats Its Own Tail

Here’s the famous paragraph that closes the first section. In this passage, Marx and Engels describe how capitalism dooms itself:

The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage labour. Wage labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.

The argument is that capitalism, because it needs labour, unites the previously desultory proletariat class. After uniting the proles, it squashes them so bad that the only way they can survive is by rising up and declaring private property void: without private property, the bourgeoisie have no reason to exist. So, the communist revolution is really a late stage of capitalism. Capitalism has to stick to its first principles to such a degree that it destroys the labour on which it depends for communism to become practical. Where are the trade unions? Where are the leaders of the proletariat. Why would the trade unions and the leaders of the proletariat allow things to reach such a stage–that part is not entirely clear to me.

Would Canada and the USA be Considered Capitalist Countries?

Or for that matter, have there been any capitalist countries, if we use Marx and Engels’ understanding of the condition of the proletariat versus the bourgeoisie?–

It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property all work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us.

According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything, do not work. The whole of this objection is but another expression of the tautology: that there can no loner be any wage labour when there is no longer any capital.

In this passage, they’re saying that in bourgeois society, it’s impossible for proles to save anything to claw their way up the food chain and those who have capital mooch off of the proles labour instead of putting in an honest day of work. Pretty black and white.

Final Thoughts

Marx and Engels write with conviction. That’s because they had skin in the game: they were more than armchair communists, they were out there blazing the campaign. For a small book written 170 years ago, it’s still very prescient today. One interesting stat: Marx and Engels writes that one in ten or 10% of the people hold private property. I take it that that means they own their own homes. According to the 2011 census, about 69% of Canadian households (9.2 of 13.3 million) owned their own dwelling. Times have changed. Perhaps for the better?

One last thing: for people who are so anti-capital, they sure spend a lot of time thinking about capital. There is a strange understanding between a hero and his nemesis.

Moby-Dick – Herman Melville

Ahab, the Monomaniac Captain of the Pequod

Everyone knows Ahab and the hunt for Moby Dick, the white whale. You know the one that begins with: “Call me Ishmael.” I had heard of Moby-Dick, but didn’t have any plans to read it. There’s a lot of good books out there and the opportunity cost of reading one book is the book that doesn’t get read. But, after watching the Star Trek movie First Contact, I knew I had to read it.

In First Contact, Captain Jean-Luc Picard (played by all-star Patrick Stewart) fights the Borg. The Borg are an enemy cyborg race that is perhaps most famous for their cubic spaceship (which is pure genius–why are spaceships aerodynamic when there’s no air in space?). Now Picard has a personal beef with the Borg, who had, in a prior encounter, kidnapped him, violated him by implanting cybernetic devices throughout his body, and destroyed his individuality. In his dreams he is still haunted by the voices of the Borg hive communicating. In this way, he’s like Captain Ahab, who lost his leg in an earlier encounter with the white whale and wants revenge at all costs. In this dramatic scene–one of my faves–Lily (played by Alfre Woodard) remonstrates Picard for his maniacal pursuit of the Borg. Here it is, or, better yet, watch it on YouTube:

LILY. It’s so simple. The Borg hurt you and now you’re going to hurt them back.

PICARD: In my century, we don’t succumb to revenge. We have a more evolved sensibility. [note time travel: Lily is from the 21st century and Picard is from the 24th century]

LILY: Bullshit. I saw the look on your face when you shot those Borg on the holodeck. You were almost enjoying it!

PICARD: How dare you!

LILY: Oh c’mon captain, you’re not the first man to get a thrill from murdering someone, I see it all the time.

PICARD: GET OUT!

LILY: Of what? You’ll kill me like you killed Ensign Lynch?

PICARD. There was no way to save him.

LILY. You didn’t even try! Where was your evolved sensibility then?!?

PICARD. I don’t have time for this.

LILY. Oh, hey, sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt your little quest! Captain Ahab has to go hunt his whale.

PICARD. What?

LILY. You have books in the twenty-fourth century?

PICARD. This is not about revenge.

LILY. Liar!

PICARD. This is about saving the future of humanity!

LILY. Jean-Luc, BLOW UP THE DAMN SHIP!

PICARD. NO! … NOOOOO! [smashes display case with his phaser rifle] I will not sacrifice the Enterprise. We made too many compromises already, too many retreats. The invade our space, and we fall back. They assimilate entire worlds, and we fall back. Not again. The line must be drawn HERE. This far, NO further! And I will make them pay for what they’ve done.

LILY. [going over to display case] You broke your little ships. See you around, Ahab.

PICARD. [quoting Moby-Dick] …and he piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the rage and hate felt by his whole race. If his chest had been a cannon, he would have shot his heart upon it.

LILY. What?

PICARD. Moby Dick.

LILY. Actually, I never read it.

PICARD. [trace of a smile] Ahab spent years hunting the white whale that crippled him in the quest for vengeance. But in the end, it destroyed him and his ship.

LILY. I guess he didn’t know when to quit.

PICARD. [looks thoughtful, lays down phaser rifle and walks onto the bridge where all eyes await his command] Prepare to evacuate the Enterprise.

To me, the Melville quote doesn’t entirely work in a logical sense. Why would Ahab’s chest be a cannon? And if his chest is the cannon, why is the heart firing? Wouldn’t the chest be shooting itself? But in a greater sense, the line completely works. Like that song that sticks in your head, this line has haunted me for the last twenty years. It’s the sort of line I wish I could write, but never could. It was at that moment I thought: “I will read Moby Dick!”

Well flash forward twenty plus years. I recently finished Moby-Dick. But I never saw that quote. The closest line is: “He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.” They must have modernized the line a little bit, but at the sake of logic. The image of a chest as a mortar (an artillery piece with a large bore) and the heart as shell makes sense. But perhaps a lot of us have forgotten how these weapons work?–I had to look it up.

Tip for Readers Who Use Public Libraries

And by the way, a tip to assiduous readers who use the library. Often the library has a one measly copy of a classic title, such as Moby-Dick. The problem is, unless you can read at warp speed, you have to bring the book back before you’re done. Then you can’t get it back for months because other assiduous readers have also put holds on it. Well, often the library has two copies of a classic book: one regular edition and a second, large print edition. Everyone will put a hold on the regular edition, but hardly anyone ever puts a hold on the large print edition. And the large print edition is quite a bit friendlier on the eyes to boot!

Not All About Ahab

The book contains many wonderful “digressionary” chapters. There’s a chapter on the whaling industry. There’s a chapter on how passing ships hail one another. There’s multiple chapters on the whale’s anatomy. There’s a chapter on the whale’s diet. It’s amazing how important the whaling industry was in 1851 when Moby-Dick was published. From the spermaceti (the wax found in a whale’s head), they could manufacture candles, creams, and lamp oils. It also powered the Industrial Revolution by serving as a lubricant. In the 1800s, whaling was as important as the olive was to ancient Greek society (olives were also used for light/heat, consumption, and to make creams). The modern equivalent of the whaling industry today is the oil and gas industry. Maybe in a hundred years they will look back on the oil and gas industry like how we look back on the whaling industry? Who knows, it could happen in even less than a hundred years the way technology is advancing!

Because of all the digressionary chapters, I got a good history lesson in the whaling industry, whale anatomy, and also life in the 1800s. Did you know that the whaling ship was one place where race wasn’t an issue? Moby-Dick, remember, is set before the Civil War (1861-5). Everyone on the boat did their job and their value was in how well they did their job, not skin colour. I’m sure it’s out there, it would be interesting to read a book fact checking all of Melville’s theories on the whale’s anatomy, diet, how it swims, how old whales die, and so on.

I use to live in Providence, Rhode Island. From there it’s a 3-1/2 hour trip to Nantucket, the former whaling capital of the USA, and perhaps the world. Now Nantucket is a resort town. The permanent population of 10,000 is not all that different from what it was two hundred years ago. But mind you, it seems smaller because the population of the rest of the world has jumped from one billion in 1804 to about seven billion today. Living there, I got a sense that the communities there are a shadow of what they once were, though some of the more dilapidated parts have become inexpensive enough to spark reinvestment and renaissance.

Misquoting Moby Dick

Captain Picard isn’t the only one who misquotes Moby Dick. The Nobel Prize winning singer-songwriter Bob Dylan recently ran afoul of the quote police in, of all things, his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. What tipped off the quote police was the line: “Some men who receive injuries are led to God, others to bitterness.” It’s close to the actual lines in Moby Dick, but not quite close enough. It’s actually closer to the SparkNotes summary of the novel, you know that website that provides synopses to students writing last second essays!

But, if you have half an hour (I had one hour and watched it twice), watch Dylan’s Nobel acceptance speech on YouTube. He talks about how his songwriting is literature in the sense that three of his favourites–Moby-Dick, The Odyssey, and All Quiet on the Western Front–are literature. To him, literature is like a collage. It doesn’t have to “mean anything.” But, as life on the road has taught him, it has to be able to entertain.

The takeaway: maybe only critics need literature to “mean something.” Funny how people will interpret things when their job depends on it! You know, I’ve been thinking about the art form of tragedy for a long time, thinking about Aeschylus’ plays, O’Neill’s plays, and Shakespeare’s plays. Trying to make them mean something. I came up with this idea of tragedy as “risk theatre.” But, is there something monomaniacal, something Ahab-like in what theorists and writers do as they try to chase after their white whale?

Until next time, I’m Edwin Wong, and I will sail the seven seas to do Melpomene’s Work.

World Order – Henry Kissinger

Kissinger World Order

Henry Kissinger, the legend! Secretary of State and National Security Advisor during perilous times. Went on the covert trip to China in the 1972. Playboy diplomat. Now (2017) 93 years old. He’s one person I had heard about, but did not know much about. His life has been so storied that it seemed decent to learn more about him. So when I heard about his latest book World Order (2014), I picked it up at the library. Thanks to Sally French and Josh Brown for an article mentioning this great book (and others–also reading Barking Up the Wrong Tree by Eric Barker, a book exposing commonplace fallacies on what it takes to be successful).

Kissinger – Author Blurb

Henry Kissinger served as National Security Advisor and then Secretary of State under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford and has advised many other American presidents on foreign policy. He received the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Medal of Liberty, among other awards. He is the author of numerous books on foreign policy and diplomacy and is currently the chairman of Kissinger Associates, Inc., an international consulting firm.

World Order – Back Blurb

Henry Kissinger offers in World Order a deep meditation on the roots of international harmony and global disorder. Drawing on his experience as one of the foremost statesmen of the modern era–advising presidents, traveling the world, observing and shaping the central foreign policy events of recent decades–Kissinger now reveals his analysis of the ultimate challenge for the twenty-first century: how to build a shared international order in a world of divergent historical perspectives, violent conflict, proliferating technology, and ideological extremism.

There has never been a true “world order,” Kissinger observes. For most of history, civilizations defined their own concepts of order. Each considered itself the center of the world and envisioned its distinct principles as universally relevant. China conceived of a global cultural hierarchy with the Emperor at its pinnacle. In Europe, Rome imagined itself surrounded by barbarians; when Rome fragmented, European peoples refined a concept of an equilibrium of sovereign states and sought to export it across the world. Islam, in its early centuries, considered itself the world’s sole legitimate political unit, destined to expand indefinitely until the world was brought into harmony by religious principles. The United States was born of a conviction about the universal applicability of democracy–a conviction that has guided its policies ever since.

Now international affairs take place on a global basis, and these historical concepts of world order are meeting. Every region participates in questions of high policy in every other, often instantaneously. Yet there is no consensus among the major actors about the rules and limits guiding this process, or its ultimate destination. The result is mounting tension.

Grounded in Kissinger’s deep study of history and his experience as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, World Order guides readers through crucial episodes in recent world history. Kissinger offers a unique glimpse into the inner deliberations of the Nixon administration’s negotiations with Hanoi over the end of the Vietnam War, as well as Ronald Reagan’s tense debates with Soviet Premier Gorbachev in Reykjavik. He offers compelling insights into the future of U.S.-China relations and the evolution of the European Union, and examines lessons of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Taking readers from his analysis of nuclear negotiations with Iran through the West’s response to the Arab Spring and tensions with Russia over Ukraine, World Order anchors Kissinger’s historical analysis in the decisive events of our time.

Provocative and articulate, blending historical insight with geopolitical prognostication, World Order is a unique work that could come only from a lifelong policymaker and diplomat.

What I Learned

I learned that the modern concept of world order originated from the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. There, the European nations, decimated by the Thirty Years’ War and plague (decimated is too light a word, the toll of ‘total war’ was over a quarter of the population) came up with a framework for a modern world order. The sovereign state, respect for boundaries, respect for sovereign nations to make their own laws, and respect for sovereign states to their own religion were some of the tenets of the Treaty of Westphalia. The concept of ‘balance of power’ was also on the minds of the negotiators who divided Europe into a host of smaller states, none of which was large enough to conquer all the others.

From the Treaty of Westphalia, Kissinger looks at how Napoleon changed the game, and then goes beyond Europe, looking at conceptions of world order in Asia, the Middle East, and America. It turns out that this idea of democracy as the be all and end all is one of many approaches to world order.

Not only is Kissinger’s book a good history lesson, but it’s worth reading just for his little anecdotes which occur at the rate of one every forty pages or so. They’re like little ‘behind the scenes’ peeks at what goes on with our power brokers. Here’s a memorable one:

In 1981, during his last visit to Washington, President Sadat invited me to come to Egypt the following spring for the celebration when the Sinai Peninsula would be returned to Egypt by Israel. Then he paused for a moment and said, “Don’t come for the celebration–it would be too hurtful to Israel. Come six months later, and you and I will drive to the top of Mount Sinai together, where I plan to build a mosque, a church, and a synagogue, to symbolize the need for peace.

Until next time, I’m Edwin Wong and I’m Doing Melpomene’s Work.

Fearful Symmetry – Zee

Fearful Symmetry – Author Blurb

The concept of symmetry has widespread manifestations and many diverse applications–from architecture to mathematics to science. Yet, as twentieth-century physics has revealed, symmetry has a special, central role in nature, one that is occasionally and enigmatically violated. Fearful Symmetry brings the incredible discoveries of the juxtaposition of symmetry and asymmetry in contemporary physics within everyone’s grasp. A. Zee, a distinguished physicist and skillful expositor, tells the exciting story of how contemporary theoretical physicists are following Einstein in their search for the beauty and simplicity of Nature. Animated by a sense of reverence and whimsy, Fearful Symmetry describes the majestic sweep and accomplishments of twentieth-century physics–one of the greatest chapters in the intellectual history of humankind.

Fearful Symmetry: The Search for Beauty in Modern Physics

This is a review of the 1986 Macmillan pressing. Believe it or not, it has been sitting on my bookshelf for 30 years! In fact, while putting together this review, it seems that Princeton University Press released the 2nd edition last month (September 2016). Time flies.

The premise of the book is that simplicity is built into nature’s design. Beautiful equations have a running chance at being true. Ugly equations have no chance. That was Einstein’s acid test when reviewing equations. Zee follows Einstein’s school of though on beauty and reality. One form of beauty is symmetry:

On one side stand Einstein and his intellectual descendants. To them, symmetry is beauty incarnate, wedded to the geometry of spacetime. The symmetries known to Einstein–parity, rotation, Lorentz invariance, and general covariance–are exact and absolute, frozen in their perfection. On the other side stands Heisenberg with his isospin, shattering the aesthetic imperative of exact symmetry. Heisenberg’s child is approximate and plays apart from spacetime. Unlike spacetime symmetries, isospin is respected only by the strong interaction.

Lorentz Invariance, Parity, General Covariance: It’s Greek to Me!

Perhaps one reason the book sat on the bookshelf for 30 years is because it is hard to understand. Although Zee writes for the layperson, it is a tough go: cutting edge physics in multiple dimensions is hard to understand. But I’m glad I read it. It solved a long standing mystery in my mind concerning philosophy.

A long time ago, I got some pretty good advice from Professor Keith Bradley. Actually, it wasn’t directly from him, but through one of his students, Professor Leslie Shumka, who had heard it from him. This was at the University of Victoria. Incidentally, I always found it ironic that the University of Notre Dame poached Professor Bradley (who is the world authority on Roman slavery) away from us. The irony is that he is anything but Catholic and far from being religious. The University of Notre Dame, of course, is a Catholic university. Oh yes, the advice: the advice was to read widely in subjects that are not in your field of specialty. This way, you pick up novel insights: it encourages you to think outside of the box. And this is what happened when I read Fearful Symmetry.

Eureka!

Have you heard of the ancient quarrel between the rationalists and the empiricists? The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy sums it up as follows:

The dispute between rationalism and empiricism concerns the extent to which we are dependent upon sense experience in our effort to gain knowledge. Rationalists claim that there are significant ways in which our concepts and knowledge are gained independently of sense experience. Empiricists claim that sense experience is the ultimate source of all our concepts and knowledge.

Rationalists like to point out that the mind can grasp things independently from sense experience. The most quoted example is that of the interior angles of a triangle. That the angles equal 180 degrees can be comprehended by pure thought. Empiricism argues the opposite, that knowledge comes from sense perception. The scientific method of coming up with a hypothesis and testing the hypothesis by observation is an empirical method.

Zee points out that the 19th century, ‘a large collection of experimental facts were summarized into equations which in turn revealed a symmetry in Nature’s design’. In other words, 19th century physicists were empiricists: they made many observations. Their knowledge came from observing the world. They modelled their equations after what they saw. But this all changed in the 20th century.

In the 20th century, equations were driven by the idea of symmetry. Einstein’s theory of gravity is not the result of carefully measuring planetary orbits (i.e. making the equation fit empirical observations), but rather, his theory of gravity is the result of applying an understanding of Lorentz invariant symmetry on space-time. Regardless of whether or not I understand what Lorentz invariant symmetry is (I don’t), I do understand that his theory of gravity is a rationalist theory.

Yang-Mills Theory and Rationalism

Zee describes how, in 1954, two physicists, Chen-ning Yang and Robert Mills, invented a theory based on a symmetry of dazzling mathematical beauty. Their theory was based on aesthetics rather than any experimental observation. Although physicists recognized its beauty, they had no idea what to do with it, or, for that matter, what could be done with it. That changed in the 1970s when physicists started to believe that the electromagnetic and weak interactions could be unified into a Yang-Mills theory.

If you want to find out how the Yang-Mills theory rolled together the electromagnetic and the weak interaction, you’ll have to read the book. What is important to me was that know I can see the ancient quarrel between the empiricists and the rationalists breaking out in my own lifetime. What I had thought was an academic debate (the priority or thought or sense/experience) was a real debate in the physics community. If nature is ugly, then empiricism is the way to go: make many observations and sum them together in an equation. But if nature is beautiful (and symmetry is a form of beauty), then nature can be comprehended by thought alone.

When the Yang-Mills theory came out, it was a mathematical model that predicted the existence of particles that had not been discovered yet. Furthermore, the measured masses of known particles did not square with what the Yang-Mills theory predicted (it required gauge bosons, which are massive, to be massless). But it turned out that Yang-Mills was right. Particle accelerators eventually found the particles predicted by Yang-Mills theory. And it turned out that at higher energy levels (i.e. moments after the Big Bang), gauge bosons become massless.

The implication of all this is that there is something to rationalism. The mind is the most complicated machine in the universe and it can make some crazy predictions about what the world is like prior to observation. The only caveat is that it must be guided by beauty, in this case, the beauty of symmetry.

The moral of the story: read lots and read widely. Until next time, I’m Edwin Wong and I’m Doing Melpomene’s Work by reading books on physics.

Enough – Bogle

Enough Author Blurb

John C. Bogle is founder of the Vanguard Mutual Fund Group and President of its Bogle Financial Markets Research Center. He created Vanguard in 1974 and served as chairman and chief executive officer until 1996 and senior chairman until 2000. In 1999, Fortune magazine named Mr. Bogle as one of the four “Investment Giants” of the twentieth century; in 2004, Time named him one of the world’s 100 most powerful and influential people; and Institutional Investor presented him with its Lifetime Achievement Award. Enough., Bogle’s seventh book, follows his 2007 bestseller The Little Book of Common Sense Investing.

Enough: True Measures of Money, Business, and Life

Bogle, Enough Cover Illustration

I like Bogle. I like him for starting the index fund revolution in the 1970s. He created the first mutual fund that mirrored an index: the S&P500. It held whatever was in the S&P 500 and its holding were weighed by market capitalization. No active manager, no stock picking, no speculation. The result was rock bottom fees. Back then, they called it “Bogle’s Folly.” The big investment firms derided him. Bogle had to start up his own investment company in 1974 (the year I was born) to sell the product. Today, that company–The Vanguard Group–is one of the largest money managers in the world with 20 million + investors and 3 trillion of assets under management. Yes, I am proud to invest my money with them.

The original fund is still going strong today and trades under the ticker VOO. It’s expense ratio is a negligible 5 basis points. What’s 5 basis points? Well, 5 basis points is 5% of 1%. Expressed as a percentage, 5 basis points is 0.05%. For every $1000 invested in VOO, an investor would pay 50 cents each year for Vanguard to rebalance the holdings to track changes in the S&P500. Considering that the average mutual fund in Canada charges 2.35%, 0.05% is a steal. The difference is 4600% In dollar terms, on $1000, the average mutual fund would charge $23.50 and VOO would charge $0.50.

If, as they say, in the long run you can safely draw down 4% of an investment portfolio each year, if you’re paying 2.35% in fees, the investment firm is leaching over half of your returns from you each year. Think about it in those terms: 2.35% is over half of 4%! In effect, you’ve handed over over half of your money to the investment company. When Bogle says that the most important thing is to keep costs low, he’s right!

Think of assets not in terms of net worth, but in terms of the income stream that it generates. If you think of assets in terms of net worth, it’s easy to be careless with money: “2.35% of $1000? That’s only $23.50 a year, that’s not much at all,” someone might say. But if $1000 produces a $40 income stream each year and you have to pay $23.50 of that $40 in expenses, well, all of a sudden, whoa, that seems like a lot of money!

To think of money in terms of an income stream instead of net worth is to go back to an 19th century perspective. Back then, the question wasn’t: “How much is your farm worth?” but rather “How much income does your farm generate?” Think of Jane Eyre or Magic Mountain. To characters in those novels, net worth means nothing. Income is everything. You can’t buy bread or pay rent with net worth. You can, however, purchase shelter and food with income.

How can Vanguard keep fees so low? Most investment firms are there to make money from the people that buy its products. Not Vanguard. Vanguard is structured as a coop. Coops are structured so that profits are returned to its shareholders, who are also its customers. With a traditional company like Fidelity or State Street, they are there to make money for their shareholders. As much money as they can. With Vanguard, all the profits are returned to its customers. How does it return the profits to its customers?–by lowering the management expenses. So that’s how Vanguard works: it creates value for its customers, who are also its owners. Their interests are aligned.

Creating Value For Society

Bogle is all about creating value for society. By structuring Vanguard as a coop, he aligned shareholder and client interests and created value for investors by returning profits to the clients. To Bogle, 21st century America has lost its way: there is too much cost and not enough value, there is too much speculation and not enough investment, there is too much complexity and not enough simplicity, there is too much counting and not enough trust, there is too much managemen, and not enough leadership, there is too much salesmanship and not enough stewardship, there is too much focus on things and not enough focus on commitment, there is too many success and not enough character. In short, with Enough, Bogle thinks that America has lost its way because it has too many 21st century values and not enough 18th century values.

What Is Enough?

Bogle begins and ends Enough with this true story, printed in the 2005 New Yorker written by the writer Kurt Vonnegut:

True story, Word of Honor:

Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer

now dead,

and I were at a party given by a billionaire

on Shelter Island.

I said, “joe, how does it make you feel

to know that our host only yesterday

may have made more money

than your novel ‘Catch-22’

has earned in its entire history?”

And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.”

And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?”

And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”

Not bad! Rest in Peace!

What is enough? If you talk to the fellow on the street, enough might be a thousand dollars more than he earned last year. Enough is funny. Money is also funny. Its like productivity at work: whatever tasks workers are given, they will make it fit their 8hr shift. So too with money: if you make more, you will spend more. You will never have enough.

One of the statistics in the book stuck in my head. America has 4% of the world’s population. If you ask the average American, they’ll say they want more. They don’t have enough. Well, Americans already consume 25% of the world’s output. How much is enough?

America–and Canada–are probably the best place to be born in the world right now. There is universal medicare. Universal pensions. They are the lands with the greatest social and economic mobility. They have safety nets in EI and welfare. There is religious freedom. If you could be born as an average person in any other time or place, do you think you’d have a better chance somewhere else? How much is enough?

I’m Edwin Wong and enough for me is the opportunity to be Doing Melpomene’s Work.