Traditions that might not deserve reverence

A few more notes on reverence and I’ll move on. If you’ve been following, this line of thought is entirely the fault of Paul Woodruff, whose book Reverence, published in 2001, seems profoundly relevant today.

One of the difficult points about reverence is that it’s not reverent to show respect for something that doesn’t deserve it. That is not showing reverence for the truth.

A lot of the social upheaval in this country involves questions about what deserves our respect. An easy example is the Confederate monument on the courthouse lawn. But what about other traditions that were once showed respect and now are controversial.

What to do about beliefs that once were used by religious leaders to justify slavery and then segregation, for example? Or traditions that involve the subjection of women to male authority? Or the treatment of gay people as some sort of lower caste?

Woodruff contends that reverence is not a feeling but the capacity to feel certain feelings and emotions at the right time — when those feelings tend to lead toward right action. Those feelings start with a sense of human limits. Since we feel that a human being is a weak, error-prone creature, we stand in awe of things that beyond us: the wonders of nature and ideals such as beauty and justice. We feel respect for our fellow creatures that suffer along with us, and we feel shame when we measure ourselves against our ideals, particularly in cases of bad behavior.

But what do we do with the traditions we’ve inherited? Woodruff says we have a couple of options. The first is we can treat them like a Greek temple, the Parthenon, say. We can preserve them and honor them as an achievement from a different time without actually wanting to live in those spaces. But if we do choose to live in a tradition, we need to renovate it and maintain it, just as you’d renovate an old house. The world changes, buildings (and traditions) decay, and if we are going to live in a traditional edifice we need to make arrangements, at least, to spare the neighbors from having to cope with fire hazards and sewage.

Woodruff is an interesting thinker. He points out that, long before we had religions, at least religions as we know them today, we had reverence.

He’s convinced me that this virtue needs more attention.

• Source: Paul Woodruff, Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue; Oxford University Press, 2001. 

Learning from a comedy of errors

When I was a student, philosophers usually pooh-poohed any notion that ethics could be based on emotions.

Since the time of Plato, most philosopher had held that feelings were untrustworthy and needed to be firmly governed by reason. But I never was sold on any system of ethics based on rules.

One night 45 years ago, in the old student slums west of the University of Texas, I woke to hear a woman shrieking in the apartment next door. I thought she was being killed.

I pulled on a pair of jeans and had trouble getting my right foot through. I hopped on my left foot down a second-floor balcony to the neighbor’s door. I was just out of the Navy, and I always carried a pocketknife in the right hip pocket.

A man staggered out of the apartment. I recognized him as the neighbor. He ducked as a lamp flew by and smashed on the lawn below. 

I looked inside the apartment. The woman who was screaming had just moved in with the neighbor. She was smashing his stereo system with the fury of Medea. She’d just found out that her new love had already strayed.

The point of the story is that I acted without any ethical rule or principle in my head. In fact, I didn’t think at all.

It’s probably not a good idea to go into a place where you think a person is being murdered armed with a pocketknife. It was not courage because I was not aware of the risks. I simply didn’t think. I was half asleep.

And so I did not, as John Stuart Mill would have advised, consider whether the greater good would have been served by injecting myself into the fracas. I didn’t think of Kant’s famous Categorical Imperative.

I didn’t think. I acted on feeling. Someone needed help. When I did think, I could see that I had it all wrong. If anyone needed help, it was not the stereo-smashing Medea.

Yesterday’s note was about Paul Woodruff’s view of reverence.

Here’s his suggestion for a way to look at it: “Reverence is the well developed capacity to have the feelings of awe, respect and shame when they are the right feelings to have.”

As Woodruff says, if you feel awe at the sight of an ancient tree, you are probably experiencing reverence. If you feel awe at your own wisdom, you are probably not.

This way of looking at reverence fits Woodruff’s way of looking at virtue. In his view, virtue is a capacity for feeling the right emotion at the right time. 

Woodruff contends that emotions are what move us. Feelings, not reasons and arguments, make us act.

I think Woodruff is right about that. Feelings move us, even when our thinking is nonexistent— or comically bad.

One thing that's missing from the midterms

 The midterm elections are coming up and at least some of the rhetoric seems to anticipate civil war. Before you invest in a new survivalist shelter, consider this: The turnout in Texas’s primary elections soared to almost 18 percent.

“Soared” is not facetious. The 2022 turnout was the best in the last six midterms.

Why, in a state where we’re so wound up we’re talking about drilling militias on the courthouse square, do 80-plus percent of the registered voters stay home?

The problem, oddly enough, involves reverence.

Paul Woodruff, a philosopher at the University of Texas, pointed that out in his book Reverence more than 20 years ago.

Woodruff noticed that a lot of people who argue about politics don’t vote. These people are interested in the bottom line. They understand that one vote is highly unlikely to make a difference. So they advocate and donate — but spare themselves the wait at the polls.

What’s missing, in Woodruff’s view, is the cardinal virtue of reverence. 

Voting is a ceremony. It is an expression of reverence — not for our government or our laws, not for anything manmade, but for the very idea that ordinary people are more important than the juggernauts who seem to rule them.

If you’re just worried about the bottom line, you skip the lines. If you have a sense that the democracy is about something larger, you commit yourself to the ceremonies, great and small, that honor it. You have reverence for that mysterious, hard-to-define, beautiful thing — and you show it.

As the campaign heats up, I’d like to see people talking a little less about civil war and little more about reverence. Obviously, the people who are shouting and threatening care about something. Reverence is a way of thinking about that care to see how it stacks up.

• Source: Paul Woodruff, Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue; Oxford University Press, 2001.

818

 When the word “genre” came up in a conversation about books, I thought of 818.

It’s a place in the Dewey Decimal System: “Literature: American Miscellany.”

I love all kinds of books. Any talk about a favorite genre wouldn’t help in my case. I read the ancient Greeks. I love the natural sciences, philosophy and history, which are in other parts of the library. If you’re in section 818, the essayists are nearby. So are the short story writers.

But time and again, I check section 818, just to see what’s there.

I’ve found Thoreau’s Walden and Mark Twain’s Letters from the Earth. Also Steinbeck’s Travels with Charlie, H.L. Mencken’s Minority Report, Paul Auster’s Winter Journal, Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life and Helene Hanff’s 84, Charing Cross, which seems like a novel to me and so seemed misfiled.

Maybe these notes on 818 ought to come with a couple of caveats.

First, “Misc.” is a place where librarians stash books that they don’t know what to do with. And so 818 will tell you a bit about the psychology of your librarians.

Second, 828 is British Miscellany, similar stuff with an English accent, and there are good translations of other languages in 838 (German and Germanic), 848 (French), etc.

In these 8*8 sections, there are diaries, journals, notebooks and a fair number of essays, which should be in 814 (for Americans), 824 (British) and so forth.

But these things I’d call essays — Walden, for example — are puzzling essays. Some poor librarian just didn’t know what else to do with them.

I’m not big on genres. The books I like the most seem not to fit the usual structures and so end up in the section for misfits and curiosities.

In my mind, I’ve done you a favor. I’ve told you about one of my best fishing holes.

If you don’t believe me, go to your library and see what’s there. If you find something good, please drop me a line.

• For another find in 818, see "A bit more on noticing and collecting notes," Sept. 15, 2021.

Why it's hard to explain Texas politics to outsiders

 Some companies have environmental, social and governance policies. Some banks, for example, have anti-discrimination policies. They won’t do business with companies and individuals that have bad records on human rights.

The Texas Legislature got into a fit that some big financial institutions on Wall Street were discriminating against the industries that produce guns and gas. And so legislators passed a law that said financial institutions that had such policies couldn’t do business in Texas.

The problem is that Texas has thousands of cities, school districts and other local governments that issue bonds for capital improvements. The more customers you have bidding on those bonds, the better interest rate you’re likely to get. If you’re selling bonds and you chase one-third of the bidders away, you’re likely to have to pay a higher rate.

A couple of researchers got curious and estimated how much Texans are paying in higher costs: $303 million to $532 million.

It would be understandable if Texas’ leaders had got in a fit with big banks on the East Coast and punished them. Instead, Texas’ leaders got in a fit with banks of the East Coast and punished us. They got angry and took it out on the taxpayers they represent.

It’s hard to explain to outsiders the ideologies of Texas politics, which are zany enough. But it’s harder to explain the prevalence of bad thinking. You can find inexplicable cases at every level of government. It’s been that way since I started watching 50 years ago.

• Source:  The study was done by Daniel G. Garrett, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and Ivan Ivanov, an economist with the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. A good summary is here: 

https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/texas-fought-against-esg-heres-what-it-cost/

Carruth's wonderful anthology

 A recurring theme of these notes: the forces that shaped me. And I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to mention The Voice That is Great Within Us.

The anthology of 20^th century American poetry was edited by Hayden Carruth, a World War II veteran who got a master’s degree from the University of Chicago on the G.I. Bill and survived electroshock treatments when his delightfully encyclopedic mind broke down. For a while, he cobbled together a living as a farm hand, reviewer and typist. He gradually regained his health, writing poetry.

I never call the book by its title. To me, it’s Carruth’s anthology. I don’t think anyone else could have compiled it.

I started to list the poets that Carruth had introduced me to. Instead, let me just mention one, Hy Sobiloff, who had, like Carruth, had a strange and wonderful mind.

Hyman Jordan Sobiloff, 1912-1970, was an industrialist who ran several companies. For a while, he took poetry lessons from Delmore Schwartz, who lived in Greenwich Village. Sobiloff would have the chauffeur park around the corner as a matter of manners.

I love Sobiloff's poem “The Child’s Sight.” The poet is delighted to be in the company of children. “They have included me” is a recurring line.

The poet stops with the children to look, touch, taste and notice.

            The child’s wisdom is in saying.

            They say what they see when they see it.

            I am beginning to remember how

            When I don’t say it when I see it

            I remember it differently.

My memory works like that. And, when I read the poem, I was surprised that people whose lives are so different — an eccentric poet and an ordinary reader — should have minds that work in similar ways. Being reminded of how much human beings have in common is a good reason to read poetry. 

• Source: The Voice That is Great Within Us: American Poetry of the Twentieth Century, edited by Hayden Carruth; New York: Bantam Classics, 1983.

Paul Woodruff's idea of justice

 I’ve been thinking about the notion of justice outlined by Paul Woodruff in The Ajax Dilemma. At least one friend is interested in a conversation about it. So I thought I’d give an account of it, in case others want to join in.

Professor Woodruff says we confuse justice with fairness. Fairness is based on rules and principles and is measurable. Justice, a broader concept, is not.

A classic case of fairness is equal pay for equal work. The pay is either measurably fair or it isn’t. The problem is that the concept of fairness gets fuzzy at the edges, when we try to decide what’s fair pay for unequal work (the work of a doctor, a nurse, a records technician and janitor in a clinic, for example). All the work is necessary, but the achievements are different, and the rewards should be too.

Woodruff says justice is giving everyone in a community her due. A community is a circle of respect. So it’s essential to honor (i.e. give respect to) each member for his contribution. But since each contribution is different, what’s just can’t be derived by rules.

Justice depends on leadership — a kind of wisdom among all members of the community, those at the bottom as well as those in authority. Leadership recognizes the unlike contributions that each individual makes and honors them.

The whole thing goes awry when people don’t feel they are being respected or honored. When we are dishonored, we feel excluded from the community. We usually react badly.

In Woodruff’s account, good leaders are the same as good followers. Good leaders don’t really care if they are in charge. They are seeking the common good — the best for the community, not what’s best for themselves. What they really care about is an environment in which everyone can flourish.

Justice is the social glue that keeps a community together when there is a dispute. It builds a sense of trust. It’s never perfect, but in a just community almost everyone is looking out for the common good. There’s a sense that everyone is going to get his due. People are going to be respected and honored for what they do, even though everyone’s contribution is a bit different. 

In an unjust society, everyone is out for himself. Instead of an atmosphere of trust, we have an atmosphere of suspicion. Conspiracy theories abound. Those in authority are not leaders. They are not concerned about the common good. They’re just in it for themselves.

I should have said this an account of my understanding of Professor Woodruff’s idea. My understanding is evolving. The best advice is to read the book, which is excellent. 

In the meantime, I’m curious about how this hits you. Is this what you mean when you’re talking about justice?

• Source: Paul Woodruff, The Ajax Dilemma: Justice, Fairness and Rewards; Oxford University Press, 2011. For other notes on the book, see July 22 and July 24, 2022. 

Leader or tyrant?

    It seems to me that Donald Trump was more of a tyrant than a president. But I also see how people can see things in a different light.

 How do you see Oedipus, the guy Sophocles wrote about?

The Romans called the play Oedipus Rex, the king.

The Greeks called it Oedipus Tyrranus, the tyrant.

Oedipus was legit by Roman standards, which tended toward bare knuckles. But the Greeks noticed that Oedipus was terrified of losing his authority as ruler, suggesting he knew that it was not his by right. That obsessive fear of losing power was one of the telltale signs of a tyrant.

That was the way people saw things in the Athenian democracy 2,500 years ago. 

Paul Woodruff, whose mind is suited for the subtleties of Greek thinkers like Plato and Sophocles, lists some of the distinctions between leaders and tyrants in his book The Ajax Dilemma. Here are a few:

• A leader aims and works for the common good of the community. A tyrant is in it for himself.

• A leader leads by commanding respect. A tyrant rules by instilling fear — bullying.

• A leader creates a community of mutual respect. With a tyrant, it’s always about the tyrant. Everyone else is run down.

• A leader cultivates trust, trying to create an environment where everyone is united by it. A tyrant destroys trust. He creates a climate of suspicion, conspiracy and fear.

Here’s Woodruff, summing up what the Greeks knew in their bones:

Leadership is the form of power that is compatible with freedom. Tyranny destroys freedom … 

It might seem to you, as it does to me, that all this fits Trump like a tailor-made suit. Trump, of course, would reply as he always does: Everything, including Woodruff’s book, is about Trump and everything critical of Trump is unfair.

But Woodruff’s book was obviously not about Trump. It was in print five years before Trump was elected.

The book is about justice and leadership. And it happens to include a remarkable section on ways that some people who claim to be leaders aren’t leaders at all.

• Paul Woodruff, The Ajax Dilemma: Justice, Fairness and Rewards; Oxford University Press, 2011.

 

Do you know Lorine Niedecker?

Lorine Niedecker was a wonderful poet. She was associated with the Imagist poets of the 1930s. It was an aesthetic that held that the heart of a poem is its image. She was better at it than the theorists of the movement.

Niedecker, 1903-1970, was born in Fort Atkinson, Wis., where her father was a commercial fisherman. Her poems are built around sharp images from nature.

Niedecker was in contact with Louis Zukofsky and other Imagist poets. But her neighbors didn’t know she was a poet.

The first work I saw by her was “Seven Poems.” It’s series of short poems linking the natural world to a person, an individual life. We are changed by the woods as well as by the town, and she could have pointed that out. Instead, she focused on an image: a child who brings green toads inside “so grandmother can see.” Such small, simple things change child and grandmother.

This short cycle includes:

• a bit of autobiography: Her father seined fish;

• a bit of observation: Birds in midlife are too busy to talk but, like humans in old age, have a “gabbling gathering” before flying off on migration;

• a bit of advice:

For best work

you ought to put forth

some effort

to stand

in north woods

among birch.

I’m far from the north woods, but I follow her advice in spirit, if not in geography. Yesterday, I was in the oak thickets along the Medina River.

Thinking like the ancient Greeks

 I like to think that I think like some of the ancient Greeks. Paul Woodruff, a scholar at the University of Texas, has written some things that bring me back to earth.

The differences in cultures are vast. For example, consider the ancient consensus on the gods:

The ancient Greeks held that only human beings were capable of compassion. Their gods lacked a moral compass, and, to make matters more frightening for us humans, the gods of Greek myth had no capacity to put themselves in the shoes of a suffering, erring human being.

The gods murdered, raped, seduced and lied, but they found human weakness incomprehensible. They were usually bored by the subject, rather than struck by the tragedy of it. Only humans feel compassion.

Another example is the consensus toward what the folks I grew up with called scripture. Even today, most religious people don’t tamper with it. The Christian tradition has some severe injunctions against that sort of thing. By contrast:

The ancient Greeks used their myths. Myths were not treasures to keep sacred. Anyone could put fingerprints on a myth, tell it in his or her own way.

Homer would tell a story one way to make a point. Sophocles would tell the same story in another way to make a different, sometimes contradictory, point.

You might think these observations are about religion. But the Greeks thought about ideals, such as wisdom, leadership, courage, compassion, reverence and justice. As Woodruff points out, these things are transcendent, rather than religious. They are things we aim at, rather than achieve.

I spent my working life among people who believed in measurable goals — and thought that goals that couldn’t be measured were useless. Ancient Greek thinkers thought that aiming at anything measurable was aiming too low.

You can measure the acquisition of knowledge, for example, and that’s what American educators now do. The old Greeks would have wondered why you would want to acquire knowledge, when wisdom calls.

To think as the Greeks once did takes some adjustment, more than you’d guess at first glance.

• Paul Woodruff, The Ajax Dilemma: Justice, Fairness and Rewards; Oxford University Press, 2011, pp. 107, 66.

Acknowledgments: A better way

 The acknowledgments section of a book is something we skip. But then we seek and devour interviews with authors. We wonder what they were thinking when they started work and how that latest project took such an interesting turn. We really want to know.

Of course, the writer could tell us. And so it turns out there is a better way to write acknowledgments. Two good examples come from Scot Newstok’s How to Think like Shakespeare and Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste.

Newstok lists books that he found helpful — and even lists one famous work that fell flat for him. He also lists conversations that he found helpful. I think conversations are one of life’s great delights. I like this development.

Wilkerson provided some biographical details on how her thinking on caste evolved. She also got down to some of the inspirations that kept her working. Many writers listen to music while they work. Wilkerson listed tunes, including Philip Glass’s String Quartet No. 5.

Ben Franklin's creed

 When he was 85, Ben Franklin received a letter from Ezra Stiles, president of Yale, saying that the college was planning to honor him. Stiles asked Franklin about his religious beliefs.

Franklin replied:

Here is my Creed. I believe in one God, Creator of the Universe. That he governs it by his Providence. That he ought to be worshipped. That the most acceptable Service we render to him is doing good to his other Children. That the soul of Man is immortal, and will be treated with Justice in another Life respecting its Conduct in this. These I take to be the fundamental Principles of all sound Religion, and I regard them as you do in whatever Sect I meet with them.

Five beliefs — that’s it.

Stiles asked specifically what Franklin thought of Jesus. Franklin replied that he admired the teachings but doubted the divinity. He said he hadn’t studied the matter though, and, in old age and in failing health … well, the matter would presumably become clear soon enough.

Franklin also asked Stiles to keep his views confidential. Franklin didn’t want to quarrel about religion. It was his policy to contribute to all houses of worship. He didn’t care to discuss one person’s preference for one sect over another.

I think the letter is interesting for two reasons:

First, Franklin thought that religion, on balance, is a good thing. That assertion, almost universal in his day, is controversial today.

Second, Franklin’s account of his own religion fits one of my biases: That if one is going to have a religion, a little is better than a lot.

• American Heritage Magazine published the letter in December 1955 (Vol. 7, Issue 1) and posted it here:

https://www.americanheritage.com/benjamin-franklin-his-religious-faith

A sense of place

 Yesterday’s note on Gilbert White might need some explanation. He helped me understand a sense of place.

Scott Russell Sanders said this: “Children who can identify a brand of sneakers from fifty yards away can learn to identify trees and bushes, flowers and mushrooms.”

Follow his train of thought: We can identify pop tunes after the first three notes and we can recite dialog from movies. Do we know the names of the plants and animals that make up the place we call home? Can we identify the stars overhead?

There’s a difference between knowing something casually and being familiar with it, almost intimate. We are familiar with movies, TV shows and tunes but we often walk past natural wonders without seeing anything.

We are a people who read memes. We connect with them, but not with nature.

Sanders’s point is that anyone can learn. Children learn.

But there’s a pace to this kind of learning. You can learn some things quickly, but places are complicated, and seeing the complex connections between geography, climate, plants and animals takes time.

The first time I got on the trail along Zarzamora Creek north of Commerce Street Bridge, almost everything I did and thought was wrong. The map told me, erroneously, that I was on Apache Creek. Worse, I was caught up in the usual kind fog — pleased to be outdoors, but not really focused on what I was seeing. It was just a trail. I was going up a creek.

Later, it hit me how much I missed. I was aware that I had crossed some footbridges. But how many? Three or four? Actually six.

The first, going north from Commerce Street Bridge, is about 80 yards away. The second is about 80 yards farther. They drain the parking lots of Lago Vista, an apartment complex of five, three-story buildings. The creek, which runs north-south at that point, bends westward before you get to the third footbridge, which is at the edge of the complex. It’s at the complex’s boundary with KIPP School. The bend continues along the school property until you get to the fourth footbridge, which marks the edge of the school and the end of the bend. The creek runs west from there.

Because of the bend, you can’t see Bridge 3 from 5, though they are only 135 yards apart. The fourth bridge is on Matyear Street. A short walk used to take you to the Jerk Shack, a cinderblock kitchen with wonderful Jamaican food.

It’s another 200 yards to the fifth bridge, on Hulz Street, and another 200 to the 6th. Then another 200 or so to The Circle, a turnaround near the trailhead on General McMullen Boulevard. When I first walked the trail, that was its end.

Gradually, that sense of place formed in my mind. The form of the place gradually became clearer, more specific, more concrete.

So now, the beautiful stand of tall grass with the 2-foot-long seed heads is not just along a trail through a pretty park. It’s a stand of giant reeds, and it’s about 20 yards northeast of Footbridge No. 2.

The waterway branches between the third and fourth bridge. The main channel, which is Zarzamora Creek although it’s mismarked on some maps, continues west. Apache Creek, which was erroneously thought to be the greater body of water and so gives its name to the waterway below the forks, joins it from the northwest.

Just southeast of the forks is the Bandera Channel, once a little feeder creek, now sadly a ditch for flood control. It joins the watershed from the east.

Slowly, this stretch of Zarzamora Creek has become a place for me. I’ve come to think that a place becomes a place if you’re familiar with it. 

• Sources: The book I was discussing is Gilbert White’s The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne; Penguin Group USA, 1977. The quotation from Scott Russell Sanders is from Writing from the Center; Indiana University Press, 1997.

Marking the day: Gilbert White

 I have an uneven education. I love the works of some minor writers, and don’t have a word to say about some great ones.

While I wish I had a better understanding of some of the greats, I continue to read the lesser-known works because I love them. I am happy I found them, despite their lack of fame.

The Rev. Gilbert White, who was born on this date in 1720, wrote such a book, The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne. He was born and buried in the same village in southern England.

He was a clergyman by trade but a naturalist at heart. His idea was that if people would pay attention to the things around them and record their observations the world would have complete histories at the county level. We would all know what plants bloomed where and when. We’d know which animals and birds migrated through each county and which stayed year-round.

White’s book is a collection of essays disguised as letters. No. 3 describes the fossil shells you see in various soils around Selborne. No. 5 includes a description of the sunken lanes that run out of town, the result of “the traffic of the ages and the fretting of water.” He saw different things in the different layers of soil — kind of like archeological digs.

Selborne, which had a population of 676 in White’s day, was a great place for ducks.

In the drought of 1740-41, the ponds almost dried up. One farmer found hordes of Roman coins. He sold some, but the smaller coins just passed into circulation as shillings.

Something similar happens in small communities today: ancient things and ways are absorbed into the fabric of life. These local histories are a way of catching some of those small things that tend to go unnoticed, unremarked. I love essays that catch those kinds of things.

White wrote a kind of book that I wish almost everyone would write. If you love a place, write about it.

• Sources: Gilbert White, The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne; Penguin Group USA, 1977. I’m marking White’s birthday as a way to honor a writer who influenced me. For more on “Marking the day” see “An activity in lieu of making resolutions,” Dec. 31, 2021.

When law does magic on reality

 Isabel Wilkerson says that, as part of its caste system, Texas had an “association clause” tied to its marriages.

Those were the days when it was illegal for Blacks and whites to marry. Race is not a scientific concept, but in the primitive days of the law it was treated as if it were. A person was either one race or another.

A concept that has no scientific basis must have imaginative “tests,” and one of the tests of race was association. You were Black if you associated with Black people, and white if you associated with white people.

I ran across this idea years ago when reading about history of The Settlement in Texas City. The community was established by Black cowboys who earned their stakes on the cattle drives. They bought homesteads, and two of the men married immigrant women from Europe. The women were imprisoned. When they were released, they were, through the magic of the association clause, Black. 

Some people, Associate Justice Samuel Alito, for example, seem to think there is something magic — in the sense of being magically “correct” or “right” — about legal concepts that date from more primitive times. In this case, the better adjectives are “tragic” and “idiotic.”

• Source: Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents; New York: Random House, 2020.

The memo on how to treat Black soldiers

 Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste presents evidence that it’s more helpful to think of America’s problem in terms of caste, rather than racism.

I found it overwhelmingly persuasive. The single most persuasive bit of evidence for me was a memo written during World War I on how Black soldiers were to be treated.

Some American troops were under French command. The French were treating Black American soldiers as human beings, and that was causing unrest among white Americans.

French officers were commending Black troops and were socializing with them. They seemed oblivious to the fact that the United States had a caste system that forbade that kind of thing in strongest terms.

And so Col. J.L.A. Linard, a French colonel attached to American army headquarters, was told to write a memo explaining how things stood.

W.E.B. Dubois got a got a copy of the memo and published it in The Crisis.

If you can read it without thinking we have a caste system in the United States, your mind does not like mine.

Col. Linard was clear that Black people had to be treated badly not because they needed to be treated badly, but because American society demanded it. 

• Sources: ”A French Directive,” The Crisis, XVIII (May, 1919), p. 16-18. The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition put it online:

https://glc.yale.edu/french-directive

Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents; New York: Random House, 2020.

Isabel Wilkerson's thesis on caste

 The thesis of Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste is that racism is an inadequate concept to explain Americans society. If you are baffled the by state of the country, put aside notions of race for a minute and think about the problem in terms of caste.

Caste is a bigger concept. It assumes there exist classes of people that all the rest of us have the right to exploit. Cheap labor. Uncomplaining obedience. Complete subservience. That’s what the lower castes are for.

The system is preserved by calling the lower castes into place with every tactic imaginable. If you believe in the system, you put down people you perceive as beneath you with catty little social slights and with policing policies that kill unarmed citizens. You vehemently oppose laws that improve life for all — because that would mean improving the lives of those in the lower castes.

If you think you might be interested in the book but are on the fence, consider this paragraph:

Exclusion costs lives, up and down the hierarchy. The physician Jonathan M. Metzl, who has conducted research into the health of disaffected whites in middle America, has measured the life-and-death consequences of state decisions to withhold benefits seen as helping presumably undeserving minority groups. In the state of Tennessee, for example, he found that restrictive health policies may have cost the lives of as many as 4,599 African-Americans between 2011 and 2015, but also cost the lives of as many as 12,013 white Tennesseans, more than double the loss sustained by black residents.

Wilkerson quotes Metzl’s story of a 41-year-old Tennessee cab driver who was dying of a treatable condition. Help was available just across the state line in Kentucky, which had made access to care more available through the Affordable Care Act and the expansion of Medicaid. But the cab driver did not want his tax dollars being spent on “Mexicans or welfare queens.” He said he’d rather die, and he did.

All my life, I have known people like that cab driver. I have spent decades trying to understand them.

This book might not help you. It helped me.

• Source: Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents; New York: Random House, 2020.

Theseus and Peirithous in hell

 My friend Joe Murray, who was editor of The Lufkin Daily News when it won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, used to say that every crime story in East Texas begins like this: “Earl and Joe Bob was down at the icehouse drinking when one of them got an idea.”

Such are the origins of crime in East Texas.

In a note on the first demagogue (July 11, 2022), I mentioned that the democracy in Athens fell while Theseus was in hell for four years. The note said Theseus’s stay in hell was a story for a later day, and a reader wanted to hear it.

It’s an Earl and Joe Bob story. Theseus’s accomplice was a character named Peirithous the Lapith. The Lapiths and Centaurs were, in the eyes of civilized Greeks, primitive mountain folk. They were the butts of jokes. Centaurs were the subjects of scurrilous rumors about being overly fond of horses.

Peirithous was rustling cattle in Attica when Theseus intervened. Neither had seen such a fine specimen of manhood. They realized they were equals and became lifelong friends.

When both lost their wives, they got to thinking, probably at an ancient icehouse. Peirithos proposed that they go to Sparta and abduct Helen, the dazzling daughter of Zeus. Once they had her, they’d flip for her. Then they’d find another daughter of Zeus, a consolation prize.

Theseus won the flip, but Helen was only 12 so he had to hide her away. Peirithos was as low as a snake, as they say in East Texas, and so the two friends went to consult the Oracle of Zeus. The Oracle replied: “Why don’t ya’ll go down to Tartarus and just steal Persephone, the wife of Hades?” 

Failure to recognize sarcasm is sometimes a problem among the criminal class.

So the ancient Joe Bob and Earl snuck into hell by the back way.To their surprise, Hades, god of the underworld, welcomed them warmly. He sat them in a seat of honor, the Chair of Forgetfulness. The chair immediately fuses with human flesh so that a person can’t get up without ripping himself apart.

For four years, the ancient versions of Joe Bob and Earl were tortured by snakes and Furies and were gnawed on by Kerberos, the hound of hell.

Theseus languished until Herakles rescued him. Herakles had the strength to separate Theseus from the chair, although most of Theseus’s butt was left behind. Just as the Hapsburgs, through intermarriage, had a distinctive jaw, the families that claimed descent from Theseus all had miniscule, underdeveloped glutes. Or so the ancient Greeks said. Inventive mythmakers solve all kinds of mysteries, great and small.

Ancient sources disagree about whether Peirithous got out. Theseus was never the same. While he was locked up, Helen’s brothers rescued her and a demagogue ended democracy in Athens.

The stories they told about democracy

 The note about Menestheus, the first demagogue (July 11, 2022), had some background about Theseus and the origins of Athenian democracy.

Theseus was a legend, rather than a historical character. Some of the things Theseus did — free the doomed Athenian youths and maidens from the minotaur in Crete, for example — referred to events when Athens was breaking free of the Minoan rulers in Knossos. That would have been before 1370 BCE.

The tales about how Theseus set up the democracy were much later. They were told by 5^th century democrats to justify the democracy against its enemies. Sadly, there are always enemies of democracy. These mythmakers told stories of the “founding father” of the democracy to persuade doubters that democracy was an ancient and honorable idea.

The stories were about how Theseus had set up a kind of federal system in Attica, the region that included the city of Athens, by breaking down the petty, warring tribes. Tribal interests were at odds with those of the democracy, and some people wanted to Make Athens Great Again by going back to the old tribal ways.

One of the points of contention was immigration: the democrats claimed that Theseus opened the doors to immigrants. A rough translation of Theseus’s slogan would be “Ya'll come.” Athens became a power when it welcomed immigrants — craftsman, traders, artisans and even philosophers — attracted by the climate of freedom. Athens’s population exploded. So did its economic production and naval power.

Lovers of democracy thought this was evidence that democracy was the way to go. But all this social change rubbed against the old tribal interests, the old tribal ways. Hence the legendary story about first demagogue.

Marking the day: Thoreau

 The Great Awakening happened to everyone else in the early 19^th century. But for me, it happened in 11^th grade English class. I read Henry David Thoreau, James Baldwin and Richard Wright before I dropped out.

Dropping out was a declaration of independence. Those writers convinced me that I must form an independent mind and live by my own decisions. Going along with the crowd doesn’t work in this country. Thoreau railed against slavery. Baldwin and Wright railed against Jim Crow. All three railed against the peculiar kind of communal thoughtlessness that runs like a mountain range through the landscape of our shared intellectual history.

Part of an active intellectual life is conversation and correspondence. I check in with friends often, asking what they’ve been thinking. I like thinking their thoughts, trying to make them mine. Here’s Thoreau with a caution:

In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post-office. You may depend on it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive correspondence, has not heard from himself this long while.

So I’ll spend a little time with Henry today but not the whole day. I’m marking his birthday, July 12, 1817, as a way to honor someone who influenced my thinking.

• Sources: The quotation comes from “Life Without Principle.”For more on “Marking the day,” see “An activity in lieu of making resolutions,” Dec. 31, 2021.

Menestheus, the first demagogue

 The ancient Greeks said that the first demagogue was a fellow named Menestheus.

He came to power during the four years that Theseus, the Athenian hero, was locked up in Tartarus. It was a romantic misadventure — Theseus and his drinking buddy Peirithous the Lapith raided hell, hoping to steal a wife for Peirithous. It went badly, but that’s a story for another day.

Theseus had given the Athenians democracy. He resigned as king and taught that a sovereign people must learn to govern themselves.

But while he was locked up in hell for four years, Menestheus talked the talk. He said two things:

First, he told the rich people how much they’d lost by contributing to the common good.

Second, he told the poor people they were being robbed of their country and religion. He claimed the country could be great only by making it what it used to be.

Such are the tales of demagogues. When the people listen to them, they lose their democracy, their sovereignty, their ability to rule themselves.

I think all democracies ought to have a monument to Menestheus and a holiday in his memory. He’s not one to forget.

Hospitality — the place to start

 I think, but am not sure, that hospitality is the first virtue.

Of course we admire others more. We Americans don’t go long without pinning a medal on someone in recognition of courage.

But some poets have suggested that humanity begins with hospitality. I think philosophers should listen to them.

Psychologists have shown that we humans, as infants, distinguish between people within our group and those outside. It’s a matter of survival.

Margaret Mead, doing anthropological research among people with stone and bone tools, remarked that when a person comes across of a member of another group, the usual thing to do is to kill him.

The natural thing to do, in other words, is to be hostile, rather than hospitable, to the unfamiliar.

But we become more human — that is, we live better lives — by going against the grain.

Instead of killing the stranger, we benefit if we bring him in, feed him, and learn how he cooks, makes art and thinks. Instead of killing the lost pup we find in the woods, we enrich our lives by making a new friend.

Rumi’s famous poem “The Guest House,” begins with these lines:

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

​

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

We shouldn’t just let strange people into our lives; we should welcome strange ideas, thoughts and feelings. We should learn to think things through, without all that fear of anything that’s strange.

Being hospitable is the first step to better thinking. And, if you’re like me and think with a pen, being hospitable is the first step to better writing.

When Roman civilization was collapsing, St. Benedict withdrew with a group of companions to keep the fires burning. He wrote a rule for communal living. The first chapter is on how to answer the door.

• Sources: Rumi’s “The Guest House” is at The Poetry Exchange:

https://www.thepoetryexchange.co.uk/the-guest-house-by-rumi.

The business of smuggling people

 Some readers have asked about the tragedy: 53 people, migrants from Central America and Mexico, died in a truck that was abandoned in San Antonio. The truck was found about six miles from our house.

Elizabeth Trovall’s reporting for the Houston Chronicle has helped me understand the problem. The San Antonio Express-News, a sister paper, has carried some of her stories. Here's the gist of how the smuggling works:

• Routes: There are many. The two main two are:

—   The I-35 corridor, running from Nuevo Laredo to Laredo and on to San Antonio. It has sophisticated infrastructure, with 18-wheelers, including “clones,” rigs that are made to look like legitimate trucks, down to the paint jobs, company logos, forged license plates and registration numbers. There are also stash houses along the way, places where migrants can stay between rides. The route is busy with international trade. There are just too many trucks to check.

—   The Rio Grande, with crossings at Matamoros-Brownsville, Reynosa-McAllen and smaller cities. These routes tend to funnel into Falfurrias and then on to San Antonio and Houston, with stash houses along the way.

The days when immigrants crossed the river alone are mostly in the past.

• Costs: Migrants pay smugglers $4,000 to $20,000. Obviously, it’s an unregulated business, and the smugglers take whatever they can get. Some migrants are told that the trailers are air-conditioned, and the air-conditioning will be turned on right after the rigs get past the checkpoints.

• Where are the people coming from? The Northern Triangle of Central America Central America — El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras — accounts for most of the migrants. More than 2 million people have left the area since 2014, The Council on Foreign Relations estimates. Recently, people have been coming from much further, including Africa. They come through Mexico, hoping to cross a porous border.

• Motivation: Desperation. It’s a mixture of hopeless poverty, political terror and unrealistic dreams. I talked to one Honduran who said, “My children need shoes.” Most have no hope of immigrating legally. And, despite all the rhetoric on this side of the border, there are plenty of jobs for migrants. And of course the smugglers spread misinformation, making promises they don’t keep and fueling unrealistic expectations.

It’s a humanitarian crisis, and we’re not handling it well.

Wisdom Literature, aphorisms and advice

 Wisdom Literature is a collection of best guesses about what a reasonable life would look like. That’s the way it seems to me.

Scott Newstok’s book about thinking has made me think about aphorisms. It seems to me that almost everything we humans do is moral — the way we treat people in the waiting room or in traffic on the freeway.

The problems start when we start moralizing — making statements about what we think is the moral thing to do. There’s a world of difference between a harsh, judgmental voice and an inquiring voice that says: “Life is complicated and puzzling, but in my experience, one way to live it reasonably is to …”

I have a good friend who challenges me every time I use the word “advice.” He contends that advice is seldom wanted and never taken. It’s a perfect waste of breath.

But when I’m in a strange place, I always ask the locals where I can find a good place to eat. I know there are plenty of bad places to eat. The kind of advice I’m talking about is like that, the sharing of experience by someone who knows the lay of the land with someone who does not. In my book, it’s priceless.

• Sources: I think this is what H.L. Mencken would say about Wisdom Literature. But I’m not sure. For more on his Minority Report: H.L. Mencken’s Notebooks, see the notes on July 4 and 5. For more on Scott Newstok’s How to Think like Shakespeare, see the notes on June 24, 28 and 29.

The remarks that make up 'Wisdom Literature'

 I’m interested in “Wisdom Literature.”

The name is unfortunate. The subject is less pretentious than it sounds.

If you are looking for an example and have a family Bible, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes will give you a sense of the subject. If you have a Catholic Bible, Ecclesiasticus is even better.

The reading gets better outside the Bible. It’s hard to beat Diogenes.

These notes recently have been about aphorisms or remarks. A lot of Wisdom Literature is made up of individual remarks that are only loosely related to each other. The biblical book of Proverbs is a good example. Outlining the book probably wouldn’t reveal much underlying structure.

I’m spectacularly unqualified to sort the literature for you.

But it’s largely a mixture of adages, apothegms, axioms, bromides, dictums, epigrams, maxims, mottos, proverbs and platitudes. 

That list of different forms comes from James Geary, who groups most of them together as aphorisms. 

I like the word remark.

• Sources: James Geary has a couple of fine books on aphorisms, The World in a Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism; New York: Bloomsbury, 2005, and Geary’s Guide to the World’s Great Aphorisms; London: Bloomsbury USA, 2007.

How an aphorism works

 The aphorist’s impulse is to read, discuss, study and reflect — and then distill the product of those reflections into a few words. The writer assumes that the reader will go through a reverse process, that the aphorism will be the start of reflection for someone else.

I never let school interfere with my education.

Mark Twain said that. But I can unpack that remark as my biography. I didn’t finish high school. But I love to learn. I don’t need an excuse to try.

An aphorism or remark is like a suitcase. Someone uses skill and experience to pack it carefully. Someone else finds the case and unpacks it, marveling at how many useful things he’s come across.

Mencken on notebooks and remarks

 In yesterday's note, H.L. Mencken was talking about remarks or aphorisms. He offered an apology for making a collection of them.

Much better men have done the same to public edification and applause, for example, Blaise Pascal, Francois de la Rochefoucauld and F.W. Nietzsche, and also some who were perhaps definitely worse, for example, Bronson Alcott and Henry Ward Beecher. 

Mencken pointed out that the form is not common in the “incomparable republic.” That’s a point that puzzles me, and I wonder whether it’s true. The people I grew up with told stories, rather than wrote them. When they drew lessons from experience, they tended to hone the expression until it was sharp, clear and brief. Scholars would call those sayings aphorisms. It could be that others, especially the Europeans, have done a better job of collecting, rather than making, remarks. 

And of course Mencken says what most of us are too polite to say. Among the thinkers who write remarks, some are better than others.

• Source: H.L. Mencken, Minority Report: H.L. Mencken’s Notebooks; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956,

The remark as a literary form

 Here is H.L. Mencken describing what he’s up to in Minority Report:

This is not a book, but a notebook. It is made up of selections chosen more or less at random from the memoranda of long years devoted to the pursuit, the anatomizing and embalming of ideas.

He’s been thinking, which is what writers do. And so Mencken is doing what writers do, throwing … notes into a bin, planning to reflect on them later.

He complained that one life is a bad scheme. We need two: one in which to observe and study and a second to set down conclusions.

Forced, as he is by the present irrational arrangement to undertake the second function before he has made substantial progress with the first, he limps along like an athlete only half trained.

The book is in the form of remarks or aphorisms. Mencken noticed things he found remarkable and made notes. 

We all notice things as we go about the business of living. But each of us notices different things. A certain kind of reader — I’m an example — likes to read books of remarks or aphorisms just to see what the other guy saw that I might have missed.

It’s odd to me that schools teach students how to write sentences, paragraphs and essays, but don’t have much to say about the remark as a literary form. Some writers — Wittgenstein, for example — wrote remarks, rather than essays or book-length narratives or arguments. An illuminating remark is its own reward. Why do we have to assume that it must fit into a system?

• Source: H.L. Mencken, Minority Report: H.L. Mencken’s Notebooks; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956,

Trevor: ‘The Piano Tuner’s Wives’

 William Trevor’s short story is about perception — about how we see the world. Owen, the piano tuner, is blind. We are told: “Violet married the piano tuner when he was a young man. Belle married him when he was old.”

Belle had been rejected and had never married. “Well, she got the ruins of him anyway,” a farmer of the neighborhood remarked, speaking without vindictiveness, stating a fact as he saw it.

Violet had taken Owen everywhere in an old Vauxhall. She described everything: the Esso station where they bought fuel, the gloomy religious art at a customer’s house. Owen saw himself as a man who knew the neighborhood.

When Belle began to take him around, Owen would describe the neighborhood for her.

Belle cut him off: What Esso station? It had become a Texaco. And what pictures on the customer’s wall? He must have taken them down.

Belle remade his world.

It’s a story about husbands and wives. But it always makes me think about how other people shape our perceptions of the world. The people we love, for course. We notice their influence. But there are those powerful social forces. We are hardly aware of the almost gravitational strength of the force of society as a whole. Our perceptions are shaped by countless people we don’t know or care much about.

• Source: William Trevor, Selected Stories; New York: Viking, 2010. For a related note, see “Marking the day: Trevor,” May 24, 2022.

A Tennessean tells about a revelation

 A fellow I know in Tennessee retired. He said he’d missed my call because he was out in the field helping a friend lay pipe. 

He said he’d piddled around the house a bit after he retired and had been struck by a revelation.

“Two things will kill you in retirement: a recliner and a fork. You sit around in the recliner, realize you ain’t doing nothing and so you decide maybe you’ll just get a little something to eat.”

He said the revelation came when he went over to see a friend who’d retired a couple of years earlier. The Tennessean's friend was in a recliner. There was more to his friend than the Tennessean remembered, and more was not necessarily better.

This Tennessean has an interesting way of putting things, but  I think he’s right.

When I was young, the preachers were pretty sure that two things — alcohol and tobacco — would ruin my crowd. It was a warning about two things. But, for a lot of us, it was the wrong two.

How do you stop an expanding 'news desert'?

 As an old newspaperman, I couldn’t help but notice the study on the growing “news deserts.”

The study, by the Medill School at Northwestern University, has a map showing areas that are served by newspapers. More than one newspaper, in my mind, should be the norm. No matter how hard a news organization tries to be objective, it will fail at times. I read more than one paper and make up my one mind when accounts differ.

But 70 million Americans live in places served by only one newspaper — or none at all.

The map of the so-called news deserts — the places where the infrastructure for local news is shaky or has collapsed — looks a lot like Trump country.

In my mind, it’s a mistake to fret over the demise of newspapers in these rural areas when the communities that once supported them are suffering. When I was young, it was possible to go to small towns and find work at a weekly newspaper. Those papers are dying — about two a week, according to the study. But they are dying because those small towns are dying.

If these “deserts” can be reclaimed, if the communities can be given new life, newspapers will play a role. Biologists know that the way to stop an expanding desert is to plant drought-resistant trees. If small towns are going to flourish, they’ll need ways to spread accurate, responsible information.

I’m trying to imagine what a hardy, small-town newspaper would look like in the coming generation.

If you, too, are thinking about what a solution might look like, and are looking for a place to start, consider this: Of the 5,147 weekly newspapers in the United States, fewer than a third are locally owned and operated.

Source: Medill’s news release on its study is at https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2022/06/new-deserts-presskit/?fj=1