WIFE DIED
My wife Ruth died at 5:05 in the morning on Tuesday, August 29, 2006 of respiratory failure. She had terrible cancer at the end but had had heart failure for almost four years, and I believe it was the heart failure that finally filled her lungs with water. My son Joe was with her at the end. She called out twice, he held her hand, and that was it.
She was 90% of my reason for living, so it's going to be tough to continue; I have so little will to live left. But I shall take it a day at a time, believing that it will gradually get better.It has been a full year since my wife Ruth died, and suddenly I have begun working on my writing again.
The grieving must be physiological as well as mental and emotional, for why would it be exactly a year, as many cultures predict? For example, the Jews wait until after a full year of mourning before erecting a headstone; in many societies the woman is required to wear black for a year; and it is recommended that the bereaved one does not remarry until a year has passed.
I had faith that I would write again, and just waited patiently for the time to come. I was willing to accept the fact that I might never write again; for every time I tried, the will, the motivation, and the ability were not there. Thank God I feel whole again.
The above statement proved to be false. It wasn't until the weekend of Feb. 24, 2008, that I finally was able to add four pages to my mss. of John Adams. I hope, this time, it was not a hoax. I expect this weekend following to be able to write. We'll see.
One thing I'd like to mention in connection with Ruth's death: the absolute absence of fear. In fact, she almost embraced death. And she, like myself, had no expectation of an after-life (in facts that is one of the sillier aspects of many religions, and an obvious reason, or one of the reasons, for their invention).
In pondering her fearless dying, over four years of heart failure, with the addition of cancer of the tongue and jaw her last 6 months, I have come to the conclusion that it is the ego that is afraid to die. Ruth had low ego and high self-esteem. We made a good match because I was just the reverse. Fortunately, as my ego came down and my self-esteem rose (not too much in both cases), her ego rose and her self-esteem dipped a little (but not too much).
Socrates said, "If you would discourse with me, define your terms." So let me define mine. As I have used them, ego is what we think of ourselves; self-esteem is how we feel about ourselves. To put it in more vulgar terminology, what I sometimes tell others is that, when younger, "I thought I was hot shit, but I felt like plain shit."
Socrates also said something about death before he drank the hemlock. There were a number of his friends in his cell that night. All had wanted him to escape; in fact, everyone wanted him to escape, even most of those who had condemned him to death for corrupting the youth (i.e., teaching them about false gods. I, by the way, believe in the same God). When his friends asked him if he weren’t afraid to die, his response was: If there is life after death, what’s to fear? If there’s no life after death, what’s to fear. Who can argue with that? What the ego fears, of course, is oblivion.
There were three death scenes before Ruth finally died. The first occurred three weeks before her death. It was one o’clock in the morning, and the children had all gone to bed. She was sitting in her chair and I was sitting beside her. Suddenly she said she thought this was it. She closed her eyes and we held hands tightly. It lasted about five minutes. Suddenly, whatever it was, it was gone. She looked at me and smiled.
The second time it happened was about eleven at night, and there children were all standing about her. The same thing happened, only this time it must have lasted for about ten minutes while we all stood there in silence, watching. Suddenly she opened her eyes, smiled, and said, “I have to pee.” It was over.
The third time, in the hospital, I have already described. She did, however, have a brief stroke at some point during the last few months of her dying. Again it was late at night and she was in her chair. I was at the kitchen sink, when suddenly she said, “I can’t move my arm. I’m telling it to move, but it doesn’t move.” It was a curious sensation to her, not something frightening. It lasted less than a minute, and by the time I got to her it was gone.
Ruth, by the way, donated her body to the Medical School at Stony Brook University, and I have done the same. Her ashes were returned in April of 2007,, and they now sit on a low bookcase outside what was her bedroom. I am thinking of buying an urn for them.
Actually, I bought two small urns. One I filled with her ashes and gave to daughter Barbara. The other I put in a small urn which I have on the bookshelf where I sit and read.I now would like to add a postscript to the events so far related.
First, I was in heat until the grieving ended, and from the 10th to 12th month of that first year it was quite intense, like an animal in rut. I’ve heard about this sort of thing happening, and believe it is nature’s way of bringing us back to living, and also finding comfort.
Other than that, I was emotionally numb for the 2 years and 2-3 months I grieved. I was also depressed, which I didn’t really notice until I came out of it and started writing again. I believe her death aged me about six months, plus another 3 months in the second year from the middle of June to the middle of September, when I was aware of a rapid aging.
The doctor, by the way, put me on sertraline at her death, and has continued it, at my request, for the reason that aging itself can have its moments of depression. Gradually, after the grieving ended, my feelings began to come back. For the first I felt loneliness. Just a touch at the start, it has been growing. The truth is, I need the intimacy of a woman, and, finally, this third year after her death, I have begun to feel the need love a woman again. But at my age that is not likely to happen.
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Thursday, July 16, 2009
TIME/ENERGY
I've concluded that we live in an energy/time continuum, similar to the space/time continuum of relativity. The more energy you have, the more time you have. One of the reasons for this is that we measure time by movement, and the more energy the more movement.
Children, for example, have boundless energy, and time, therefore, moves slowly. Do you remember how, as a child, time seemed to be endless? Those two hours or so after school seemed like endless playtime; and when you were called in to supper, you had been playing forever.
Old folks like myself, on the other hand, have boundless fatigue. Because there is so little energy, and therefore so little movement, time speeds up. It speeds up as we get older, passing faster and faster as our energy gradually depletes. There is, of course, also the psychological factor:
With more time behind us, we take the longer view, so that the present seems less and less by comparison to the lengthening past. It is interesting how time and space shrink. To look back to the time of Christ, for instance, and be able to vizualize how few generations ago that was. I read in estimate recently that all of human history is only 5,000 generations. We, who have lived 50 or more years (in my case, 85) gain more and more perspective.
Everything seems so much smaller (the earth especially), and we (I am) are amazed at how far we have developed as a species. Is it any wonder that we are still savages, with all their traits? Only social development (which depends upon individual development) will unltimately make wars less probable, initially through a world federation of some kind.
To control violence, the savage in us, it will be many eons beyond that before it will have lost any possible evolutionary value it might have had. One of the problems with the Middle East is that they are still so tribal, and haven't yet evolved beyond that. Anyhow, that's just a few thoughts on this matter.The awful thing about death is its finality; the awful thing about aging is its inexorability.
Children, for example, have boundless energy, and time, therefore, moves slowly. Do you remember how, as a child, time seemed to be endless? Those two hours or so after school seemed like endless playtime; and when you were called in to supper, you had been playing forever.
Old folks like myself, on the other hand, have boundless fatigue. Because there is so little energy, and therefore so little movement, time speeds up. It speeds up as we get older, passing faster and faster as our energy gradually depletes. There is, of course, also the psychological factor:
With more time behind us, we take the longer view, so that the present seems less and less by comparison to the lengthening past. It is interesting how time and space shrink. To look back to the time of Christ, for instance, and be able to vizualize how few generations ago that was. I read in estimate recently that all of human history is only 5,000 generations. We, who have lived 50 or more years (in my case, 85) gain more and more perspective.
Everything seems so much smaller (the earth especially), and we (I am) are amazed at how far we have developed as a species. Is it any wonder that we are still savages, with all their traits? Only social development (which depends upon individual development) will unltimately make wars less probable, initially through a world federation of some kind.
To control violence, the savage in us, it will be many eons beyond that before it will have lost any possible evolutionary value it might have had. One of the problems with the Middle East is that they are still so tribal, and haven't yet evolved beyond that. Anyhow, that's just a few thoughts on this matter.The awful thing about death is its finality; the awful thing about aging is its inexorability.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
RANDOM THOUGHTS
ABOUT THE JEWS
I find it interesting that the three men who had the greatest ideological impact on the 20th century were Jews. Sigmund Freud caused a profound shift in the way we view our inner world; Albert Einstein caused a profound shift in the way we view the universe; Karl Marx caused a profound shift in the way we view our governmental structures.
I very much admire the way the Jews stress education, learning, thinking, and communication skills. If only the rest of us did the same, we would be living in a much better world. It's interesting, too, I think, that all three of these men were Germans who were forced to leave their own country to fully develop their ideas and, of course, their lives.
Also, and this is very important, they were all apostate Jews, freethinkers, who none of them believed in God. Religion has tried to claim Einstein as a believer because of his use of the word God. Though his view of God would hardly pass muster in any of the world's key religions.
I find it interesting that the three men who had the greatest ideological impact on the 20th century were Jews. Sigmund Freud caused a profound shift in the way we view our inner world; Albert Einstein caused a profound shift in the way we view the universe; Karl Marx caused a profound shift in the way we view our governmental structures.
I very much admire the way the Jews stress education, learning, thinking, and communication skills. If only the rest of us did the same, we would be living in a much better world. It's interesting, too, I think, that all three of these men were Germans who were forced to leave their own country to fully develop their ideas and, of course, their lives.
Also, and this is very important, they were all apostate Jews, freethinkers, who none of them believed in God. Religion has tried to claim Einstein as a believer because of his use of the word God. Though his view of God would hardly pass muster in any of the world's key religions.
Friday, July 10, 2009
RELIGION
RELIGION
Most of us are familiar, I'm sure, with the quotation of Karl Marx that religion "is the opium of the people," which I think is true enough; but the sentence that follows it is, perhaps, even more significant: "The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness." Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Introduction
Most of us are familiar, I'm sure, with the quotation of Karl Marx that religion "is the opium of the people," which I think is true enough; but the sentence that follows it is, perhaps, even more significant: "The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness." Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Introduction
Monday, July 6, 2009
MORALITY
"The recognition of the identity of our own nature with that of others is the beginning and foundation of all true morality." - Arthur Schopenhauer, The Wisdom of Life (from the translater's preface)
COURAGE
"There is always a parenthesis of fear in courage." Grapevine, April 1977
COURAGE
"There is always a parenthesis of fear in courage." Grapevine, April 1977
Sunday, June 28, 2009
GOD
Man invents God in the image of what he wants to be, then proceeds to imitate that image, vie with it, and strive to overcome it. - Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition
In all my readings on this subject, I have yet to read someone who points out that we are the sum of all living creation on Earth perhap's because it's too obvious). I early read, and was taken by, the sentence that "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." Which, of course, basically means that the development of the individual from its beginning as a fertilized egg to its birth as an individual capable of living outside the womb or egg, repeats the development of that species as a whole. I'd like to suggest that we carry within us, in the structure of our genes especially, the whole development of the human race. Religion, I believe, is an attempt to retain that early awe of the universe and the need to make sense of it that, I think, is endemic to the human condition.
Of course, it is obvious that Man created God out of need, primarily to answer the question of meaning and morals; and, of course, out of fear of death. The truth, however, is that there are no meaning or morals in the universe (or God, if you will); they are needs of man, which we invented as we invented God, to get out of what is essentially an existential dilemna, namely what I have asserted. Meaning and morals have been of great evolutionary assistance to us, and have, indeed, not only helped us to survive, but to dominate, at least on the Earth. Which, of course, we are now also rapidly destroying.
To put it another way, the left-brain activity of science and its emphasis developed so strongly from its initiation (if we overlook the ancient Greeks and some of he medievalists like Roger Bacon) by Galeleo and Kepler (that is, the measuring of hypotheses against reality) that we have indeed conquered the world with our thinking; until, today (and beginning, actually, 100 and some years ago) there is an uneasiness with that exclusive dominion. As a result, there began the efforts to rely more on right-brain activity.
A book could be written on all the activies, such as Zen Buddhism (but not exclusive to religion; consider Woodstock, for example, and the proliferations of people on TV and video who are quite prepared to tell us how to live more fulfilling lives and achieve happiness and success), and attempts to get "in touch with" the irrational or creative side of life (i.e., the right brain). Of course, they're right. It's pretty obvious that to believe in complete rationality is in itself pretty irrational. I try to keep in mind what Hamlet said to Horatio: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in all your philosophies."
And in those days, keep in mind, natural philosophy meant science. I'm a very rational person myself, or so I consider myself, but I've had at least a half dozen experiences that one could call "supernatural." That is to say, strange, or unexplained. Though even there the left brain sets to work in an attempt to explain them. I have theories of my own. But Hamlet is stll right.
In all my readings on this subject, I have yet to read someone who points out that we are the sum of all living creation on Earth perhap's because it's too obvious). I early read, and was taken by, the sentence that "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." Which, of course, basically means that the development of the individual from its beginning as a fertilized egg to its birth as an individual capable of living outside the womb or egg, repeats the development of that species as a whole. I'd like to suggest that we carry within us, in the structure of our genes especially, the whole development of the human race. Religion, I believe, is an attempt to retain that early awe of the universe and the need to make sense of it that, I think, is endemic to the human condition.
Of course, it is obvious that Man created God out of need, primarily to answer the question of meaning and morals; and, of course, out of fear of death. The truth, however, is that there are no meaning or morals in the universe (or God, if you will); they are needs of man, which we invented as we invented God, to get out of what is essentially an existential dilemna, namely what I have asserted. Meaning and morals have been of great evolutionary assistance to us, and have, indeed, not only helped us to survive, but to dominate, at least on the Earth. Which, of course, we are now also rapidly destroying.
To put it another way, the left-brain activity of science and its emphasis developed so strongly from its initiation (if we overlook the ancient Greeks and some of he medievalists like Roger Bacon) by Galeleo and Kepler (that is, the measuring of hypotheses against reality) that we have indeed conquered the world with our thinking; until, today (and beginning, actually, 100 and some years ago) there is an uneasiness with that exclusive dominion. As a result, there began the efforts to rely more on right-brain activity.
A book could be written on all the activies, such as Zen Buddhism (but not exclusive to religion; consider Woodstock, for example, and the proliferations of people on TV and video who are quite prepared to tell us how to live more fulfilling lives and achieve happiness and success), and attempts to get "in touch with" the irrational or creative side of life (i.e., the right brain). Of course, they're right. It's pretty obvious that to believe in complete rationality is in itself pretty irrational. I try to keep in mind what Hamlet said to Horatio: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in all your philosophies."
And in those days, keep in mind, natural philosophy meant science. I'm a very rational person myself, or so I consider myself, but I've had at least a half dozen experiences that one could call "supernatural." That is to say, strange, or unexplained. Though even there the left brain sets to work in an attempt to explain them. I have theories of my own. But Hamlet is stll right.
Thursday, June 4, 2009
OPINION
ANOTHER FINE MESS
As regards the crisis in this country, not only the mess the financial institutions have gotten us into, due to their greed and growing largeness and interdependence, and the constant pressure on the mass of people (us) to over-consume, and in light of the growing spread between the rich and the rest of us, who like to think we’re the middle class but are actually included in the bulk of the people who are poorer than they have ever been and working harder than ever to keep it that way, these words from Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station: The Revolutionary Tradition in Europe and the Rise of Socialism explicating some of Karl Marx’s statements on an unregulated capitalist system, seem to me quite revealing. He may have been wrong about a lot of things, but not economics. Marx believed that the capitalist system involved fundamental contradictions which ensured its eventual destruction. His theory of these contradictions – which he thought of in terms of Hegelian opposites*[– may be stated with much simplification as follows:The capitalist system was based on private property and so was inevitably competitive. The aim of every manufacturer was always to undersell the rest, so that there would be a continual stimulus to more efficient methods of production. But the more efficient an industry became – the faster the machines were able to do the work and the fewer people were needed to tend them – the more people would be thrown out of jobs and the more would wages be reduced. That is, the more the commodities produced, the fewer the people who would be able to buy them. In order to get rid of his goods under these continually tightening conditions, the manufacturer would have to undercut his competitors, and that would mean further reduction of wages and still more efficient machinery, and, consequently, again in the long run, fewer people would be able to buy what he was making. This situation has already produced a jam and a depression about every ten years; and the only way for the manufacturer to get a reprieve from the vicious cycle was to find new foreign markets for his products – an escape which would not in the long run save him.
The more efficiently goods were manufactured, the more money would be needed for the plant; and it would seem to pay the manufacturer to build the plant bigger and bigger. Thus the industries would keep growing and the companies keep merging till each industry would be well on its way becoming one great unified organization, and the money which kept them going would have been concentrated in a very few hands. But actually the bigger big business grew, the larger the sums of money it dealt in, the smaller its rate of profit became. At last the contradictions involved in this process would jam the whole system so badly – there being no more fresh markets available – that it would become intolerable, impossible, for society to function at all unless the money and the great centralized plants were taken away from the people who claimed to own them and who were incapable of conceiving them as a means to any more beneficent end than that of making themselves rich out of the profits, and were run for the public good. The working [read “middle”] class would be able to accomplish this, because it would have increased to enormous proportions and have grown conscious of its interests as a class as incompatible with the interests of its employers; and it would now find itself so hard-pressed by privation that no alternative would be possible for it. All its scruples would be overcome by the realization that this privation coincided with an era when the production of what they needed had become possible with an ease and on a scale which had never been imagined in history.
Now we may reject the Hegelian-Marxist Dialectic as a genuine law of nature, but we cannot deny that Marx has here made effective use of it to demonstrate the necessity for socialism. Nothing else had so brought home the paradoxes of destitution imposed by abundance, of great public utilities rendered useless by the property rights of those who controlled them. Nor was it necessary to accept the metaphysics of the Labor Theory of Value and to argue from it a priori, as Mr. Strachey does, in order to be convinced by Marx that this process must land capitalism in an impasse. The great thing was that Marx had been able, as the bourgeois economists had not, to see the capitalist economy in the perspective of the centuries as something which, like other economies, had had a beginning and must have an end. Mathematician, historian and prophet, he had grasped the laws of its precipitate progress and foreseen the disasters of its slumps as nobody else had done. * This is not important to this quote; it involves what is called thesis, antithesis, then synthesis. In other words, to simplify it pretty badly, pressure in society to grow and change, counter-pressure to keep things as they are, and a compromise that resolves the contrary pressures so that growth can take place.
My comments: This is remarkable in as much as Marx pondered and wrote these ideas back in the 1860s or 70s. Wilson’s book, which is one of the best histories of an ideology that I know of (i.e. an intellectual history), was published in 1940. Unbridled capitalism has lasted as long as it has only because two brave U.S. Presidents did something about it: Theodore Roosevelt when he trust-busted (took action) against the powerful financiers of his day; and Franklin D. Roosevelt, who steered this country toward socialistic solutions to the great Depression of his day. Otherwise politicians, both Democrat and Republican, but especially Republican, have been financed by the powerful rich with their lobbies and bribes, and have not tried very hard to regulate or control the enormous greed of those who seek power and money as their only goals in life. Reagan began the deregulation, at the same time running up a trillion dollar debt whose only good was to bankrupt the Soviet Union and bring an end to the Cold War. The death blow has been given by George W. Bush, who started his first administration by giving a trillion dollars to the wealthy few, and starting a foolish war that has already been the longest this country has ever fought and is still costing us ten billion dollars a month (one billion of which, naturally, goes to Dick Cheney’s company, and which means, of course, that they will see he gets his cut once he is out of office for a while). Always, those in power scare us with words like “socialism” and “nationalized,” words left over from the Red-scare to keep us from looking at the truth about our society. The chief function of a government is, to me, to secure our liberties and keep us free from attack, both without and within. But capitalism must be regulated to keep us from attack within; otherwise you are turning society over to the predators and thieves. And certain things are essential to socialize: education and health, for starters. These are just two of the things that should not be run by the profit motive, indeed, cannot be so run. There are other requirements of living the good life that do not lend themselves, or should not be, to satisfaction by profit-seeking people. There is a Biblical saying that the poor will always be with us; so, too, will the rich. But they have to be regulated. We cannot expect people whose only aim is their own wealth and power to do what is right, or even best, for the people as a whole.
Now, for the financial crisis: The government will probably bail out the wealthy people who got us into this mess because of their greed. A basic tenet of behavioral science is, reward the behavior you want, don’t reward behavior you don’t want. I don’t think we ought to reward the behavior of the financial institutions, and their executives, who got us into the mess. I know not doing so will have enormous consequences to society as a whole (or so they tell us, and they’re probably right). My personal view is that we should spend the 700 billion by pumping it into the economy where it will do some good, and help the people who will be, and are, most hurt by this huge failure of our leaders. For starters, we could double the FDIC account protection to $200,000; help the hapless home owner caught up in this terrible housing mess; strengthen Social Security so the benefits will be there for all poor baby boomers who have been deluded into thinking 401ks are truly a safe way to provide for your old age; put more money into schools and spend money on public projects to provide work for the unemployed; and lengthen the term for unemployment benefits. And, for God’s sake, really regulate the foxes that are in charge of our chicken coops.
It’s a bad, bad sign that the gap between the rich and poor has continued to widen in this country, as if we’re a banana republic. It is not true that what’s good for General Motors is good for the country, not when the worker making the cars cannot afford to by one (and, by the way, look at the mess General Motors is in; another case of greed running a corporation. Remember when they made cars built to obsolesce in three years. Thank God for the Japanese, who taught them, though they really haven’t learned the lesson, to make cars that are economical and that last more than a half dozen years). And while I’m on it, we’ve got to stop being so totally a society of consumers; there are other things in life than just material goods.
The trouble with consumerism is that enough is never enough; let’s start appreciating some of the more important things in life, our families, culture, personal growth, and, yes, even a more spiritual life.
As regards the crisis in this country, not only the mess the financial institutions have gotten us into, due to their greed and growing largeness and interdependence, and the constant pressure on the mass of people (us) to over-consume, and in light of the growing spread between the rich and the rest of us, who like to think we’re the middle class but are actually included in the bulk of the people who are poorer than they have ever been and working harder than ever to keep it that way, these words from Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station: The Revolutionary Tradition in Europe and the Rise of Socialism explicating some of Karl Marx’s statements on an unregulated capitalist system, seem to me quite revealing. He may have been wrong about a lot of things, but not economics. Marx believed that the capitalist system involved fundamental contradictions which ensured its eventual destruction. His theory of these contradictions – which he thought of in terms of Hegelian opposites*[– may be stated with much simplification as follows:The capitalist system was based on private property and so was inevitably competitive. The aim of every manufacturer was always to undersell the rest, so that there would be a continual stimulus to more efficient methods of production. But the more efficient an industry became – the faster the machines were able to do the work and the fewer people were needed to tend them – the more people would be thrown out of jobs and the more would wages be reduced. That is, the more the commodities produced, the fewer the people who would be able to buy them. In order to get rid of his goods under these continually tightening conditions, the manufacturer would have to undercut his competitors, and that would mean further reduction of wages and still more efficient machinery, and, consequently, again in the long run, fewer people would be able to buy what he was making. This situation has already produced a jam and a depression about every ten years; and the only way for the manufacturer to get a reprieve from the vicious cycle was to find new foreign markets for his products – an escape which would not in the long run save him.
The more efficiently goods were manufactured, the more money would be needed for the plant; and it would seem to pay the manufacturer to build the plant bigger and bigger. Thus the industries would keep growing and the companies keep merging till each industry would be well on its way becoming one great unified organization, and the money which kept them going would have been concentrated in a very few hands. But actually the bigger big business grew, the larger the sums of money it dealt in, the smaller its rate of profit became. At last the contradictions involved in this process would jam the whole system so badly – there being no more fresh markets available – that it would become intolerable, impossible, for society to function at all unless the money and the great centralized plants were taken away from the people who claimed to own them and who were incapable of conceiving them as a means to any more beneficent end than that of making themselves rich out of the profits, and were run for the public good. The working [read “middle”] class would be able to accomplish this, because it would have increased to enormous proportions and have grown conscious of its interests as a class as incompatible with the interests of its employers; and it would now find itself so hard-pressed by privation that no alternative would be possible for it. All its scruples would be overcome by the realization that this privation coincided with an era when the production of what they needed had become possible with an ease and on a scale which had never been imagined in history.
Now we may reject the Hegelian-Marxist Dialectic as a genuine law of nature, but we cannot deny that Marx has here made effective use of it to demonstrate the necessity for socialism. Nothing else had so brought home the paradoxes of destitution imposed by abundance, of great public utilities rendered useless by the property rights of those who controlled them. Nor was it necessary to accept the metaphysics of the Labor Theory of Value and to argue from it a priori, as Mr. Strachey does, in order to be convinced by Marx that this process must land capitalism in an impasse. The great thing was that Marx had been able, as the bourgeois economists had not, to see the capitalist economy in the perspective of the centuries as something which, like other economies, had had a beginning and must have an end. Mathematician, historian and prophet, he had grasped the laws of its precipitate progress and foreseen the disasters of its slumps as nobody else had done. * This is not important to this quote; it involves what is called thesis, antithesis, then synthesis. In other words, to simplify it pretty badly, pressure in society to grow and change, counter-pressure to keep things as they are, and a compromise that resolves the contrary pressures so that growth can take place.
My comments: This is remarkable in as much as Marx pondered and wrote these ideas back in the 1860s or 70s. Wilson’s book, which is one of the best histories of an ideology that I know of (i.e. an intellectual history), was published in 1940. Unbridled capitalism has lasted as long as it has only because two brave U.S. Presidents did something about it: Theodore Roosevelt when he trust-busted (took action) against the powerful financiers of his day; and Franklin D. Roosevelt, who steered this country toward socialistic solutions to the great Depression of his day. Otherwise politicians, both Democrat and Republican, but especially Republican, have been financed by the powerful rich with their lobbies and bribes, and have not tried very hard to regulate or control the enormous greed of those who seek power and money as their only goals in life. Reagan began the deregulation, at the same time running up a trillion dollar debt whose only good was to bankrupt the Soviet Union and bring an end to the Cold War. The death blow has been given by George W. Bush, who started his first administration by giving a trillion dollars to the wealthy few, and starting a foolish war that has already been the longest this country has ever fought and is still costing us ten billion dollars a month (one billion of which, naturally, goes to Dick Cheney’s company, and which means, of course, that they will see he gets his cut once he is out of office for a while). Always, those in power scare us with words like “socialism” and “nationalized,” words left over from the Red-scare to keep us from looking at the truth about our society. The chief function of a government is, to me, to secure our liberties and keep us free from attack, both without and within. But capitalism must be regulated to keep us from attack within; otherwise you are turning society over to the predators and thieves. And certain things are essential to socialize: education and health, for starters. These are just two of the things that should not be run by the profit motive, indeed, cannot be so run. There are other requirements of living the good life that do not lend themselves, or should not be, to satisfaction by profit-seeking people. There is a Biblical saying that the poor will always be with us; so, too, will the rich. But they have to be regulated. We cannot expect people whose only aim is their own wealth and power to do what is right, or even best, for the people as a whole.
Now, for the financial crisis: The government will probably bail out the wealthy people who got us into this mess because of their greed. A basic tenet of behavioral science is, reward the behavior you want, don’t reward behavior you don’t want. I don’t think we ought to reward the behavior of the financial institutions, and their executives, who got us into the mess. I know not doing so will have enormous consequences to society as a whole (or so they tell us, and they’re probably right). My personal view is that we should spend the 700 billion by pumping it into the economy where it will do some good, and help the people who will be, and are, most hurt by this huge failure of our leaders. For starters, we could double the FDIC account protection to $200,000; help the hapless home owner caught up in this terrible housing mess; strengthen Social Security so the benefits will be there for all poor baby boomers who have been deluded into thinking 401ks are truly a safe way to provide for your old age; put more money into schools and spend money on public projects to provide work for the unemployed; and lengthen the term for unemployment benefits. And, for God’s sake, really regulate the foxes that are in charge of our chicken coops.
It’s a bad, bad sign that the gap between the rich and poor has continued to widen in this country, as if we’re a banana republic. It is not true that what’s good for General Motors is good for the country, not when the worker making the cars cannot afford to by one (and, by the way, look at the mess General Motors is in; another case of greed running a corporation. Remember when they made cars built to obsolesce in three years. Thank God for the Japanese, who taught them, though they really haven’t learned the lesson, to make cars that are economical and that last more than a half dozen years). And while I’m on it, we’ve got to stop being so totally a society of consumers; there are other things in life than just material goods.
The trouble with consumerism is that enough is never enough; let’s start appreciating some of the more important things in life, our families, culture, personal growth, and, yes, even a more spiritual life.
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