The Ground of Existence – 2: Elaboration

1.      Hegel arrives at the ground of existence in Part II of The Science of Logic under the Doctrine of Essence.

Hegel’s philosophy is an evolutionary, integrated whole, in which the order of appearance of categories corresponds to their logical place in the system. So saying that the ground of existence is a category under the Doctrine of Essence is more than a random citation from Logic’s table of contents. It is also a reference to the coordinates of the ground of existence in the Hegelian dialectic. We need that information to determine how best to go about explaining the category.

2.      The Logic – as the The Science of Logic is known to the students of Hegel – has three divisions:

I. Doctrine of Being

II. Doctrine of Essence

III. Doctrine of Notion

The Doctrine of Being is concerned with what a thing is.

The Doctrine of Essence is concerned with how it has come to be.

The Doctrine of Notion is concerned with why it has come to be.

If we know what a thing is, how it has come to be, and to what end it is designed (and capable of progressing), we would know everything there is to know about the thing.

3.      The main categories of the Doctrine of Being are quantity, quality and measure. Every being is defined by these three main attributes.

Quality and quantity are well known: they are the two, famously mutually-exclusive attributes of a thing.

The measure is the third leg of the triad in which the chasm between quality and quantity is overcome. Hegel shows that the opposition between quality and quantity – that one always excludes the other – is not absolute and that accumulation of quantitative changes in a being results in a qualitative change. If we heat water beyond 100 degrees Celsius, for example, its quality changes from water into steam. That point of quantum leap is what he calls measure.

4.      The being cannot explain itself. It just is, so we accept it as a fact. But how it came about to be is impossible to determine by studying it. A being must come from something more profound than itself. That something is the “opposite” of being in the sense that while the being is, and so it directly appeals to our senses, what explains it is not perceptible by senses and must be deduced logically. This process of logical deduction is called mediation.

“Being comes into mediation with itself through the negation of itself,” Hegel wrote. What he is saying is that being “negates” itself, meaning that the mind cannot accept it as the source of its own existence, so the mind is forced into contemplation – or mediation.

The mediation of the being – where it has come from – is the realm of the Doctrine of Essence.

5.      I know of no other western book that surprises and at times even startles like Logic. There are many great books and some true masterpieces which have shaped our lives. Reading them, we are humbled, enlightened and awed by the reach of the human mind.

Hegel alone startles. That is because his philosophy proceeds along overcoming and going beyond Understanding. Understanding is that crude stage of comprehension where the mind only sees the differences.

Beyond Understanding there is the more advanced stage of cognition called Reason where the differences perceived by Understanding are found to be illusory. As Hegel’s dialectic continually aims towards Reason, it constantly lays bare the shortcomings of Understanding. That surprises and startles us. We are surprised how “self evident truths” turn out to be partial and thus, false. You saw that with the idea of measure. Upon first reading it, the mind receives a jolt from the idea of a qualitative quantity, which is what the measure is.

Now, take appearance. How many times you have been told to ignore the appearance and focus on the essence of things, and that the appearance is illusory and the essence is the permanent and the one that counts.

Hegel laughs at the idea. Essence and appearance are the one and same thing, he tells us. “Essence must appear”, he writes tersely, meaning that it’s the essence that appears. The conduct is the man. This president could have done so and so but was prevented by circumstances and detractors, or that general was a great strategist and tactician but was beaten by some folks in bed sheets and flip flops because he was distracted by bimbos – these are all drivel. In both cases – in all cases – we have the essence of the men in full display in their conduct. The same is true of the phenomena.

It is the essence that appears. Of course! What else could appear? How could one not see this obvious point – or lose the sight of it?

6.      Essence and appearance are the categories of the Doctrine of Essence, where the categories come in pairs: form and content, cause and effect and identity and difference. By way of explaining the “coming in pairs”, note that in our thought we can separate the idea of quantify from that of quality; the thought of one does not involve the thought of the other. Not so with the categories of the Doctrine of Essence. We cannot think form without thinking content. Or think cause without thinking effect. Or positive without negative. The thought of these correlative categories involves one another; each one defines, and is simultaneously defined by, the other.

7.      Let us develop this point of dependence of one thing on another further through the categories of identity and difference.

Suppose you are asked to compare New York to Tokyo. Even if you have not been to either city you can probably write a page on the subject.

Now, compare a camel and a pencil.

Here, you can’t really say much except that a camel is a camel and a pencil is a pencil.

In doing so, you would be repeating the famous laws of the identity and contradiction in the classical logic which hold that A is A and A is never B.

These laws are not so much wrong but “silly,” according to Hegel. They express abstract conditions which have no significance. There is nothing in common between a pencil and a camel, so the act of comparison is absurd.

We can meaningfully compare two entities if they have similarities and differences. The differences shed light on similarities. Similarities shed light on the difference. That is why using an analogy from optics, Hegel called them the categories of reflection. Like an object and its image in a glass, they shed light on one another, which is also why they come in pairs. There is a being that supports and a being that is supported.

Returning to our example of the two cities, precisely because New York and Tokyo are both large cities that we can say Tokyo is safer than New York. And precisely because they are in two different countries that we can say taxi fare in New York is cheaper than in Tokyo. It would be absurd to compare taxi fare in New York with taxi fare in New York, which is what A = A is.

7A.(To establish his concept of “utility”, Paul Samuelson began by equating the U.S. navy and an apple. He was in earnest. Of course, what he really proved was that his “theory” was viable to the extent that there are similarities between an apple and the U.S. navy. No matter. He made a fortune as an economist, won the Nobel Prize and was hailed a “titan”. Read Nasser’s devastating indictment of this charlatan here and here . It is telling that even now many think that he was a philosopher. Truly, only in America.)

8.      New York and Tokyo are merely different. Tokyo is different from New York, but so are Taipei and Istanbul and Dakar. From the difference, Hegel develops the concept of opposite, where each entity has only one opposite on which it depends: day and night, hot and cold, positive and negative.

9.      The development proceeds along the following lines. Likeness, we saw, depends on unlikeness. Unlikeness, in a similar way, depends on likeness. Each of these two categories depends on the other. One could not exist without the other. That is the category of opposite. Positive and negative are opposites. They are defined by one another and could not exist independent of each other.

10.  At this point we arrive at the ground of existence which is identity in difference. In the same way that measure was the third leg of triad (with quantity and quality) and reconciled their differences in itself , the ground of existence is the third leg of the triad that begins with identity and difference and, in a like manner, reconciles and resolves their opposition in itself. Measure was quantitative quality. Ground of existence is identity in difference.

11.  Identity in difference might sound paradoxical and confusing to Understanding. But we are beyond that and in the realm of Reason! We know what it means. When we speak of essence and appearance, we are speaking of identity in difference. Essence and appearance are two different things. But they are the same. It is the essence that appears! If there were no appearance, there would be no essence. In a like manner, if there were no essence, nothing could appear. Essence and appearance, form and content and force and its manifestation all express the idea of identity in difference.

12.  When there is a ground of existence, there must be something that is grounded. If positive is the ground, then negative is grounded – and vice versa. The ground of existence of a thing is thus part of the thing itself. Otherwise, it would be external to it and thus, incidental and contingent.

13.  Understanding only sees the external relations which are incidental and contingent. So it sees the phenomenal world as a congeries of objects which stand independently by themselves and at times come into contact with one another, influencing and impacting one another. It is the partial and one-sided view of It’s Wonderful Life where the protagonist’s life “touches” many people’s lives.

14.  In such as world, there could be no law, no organization and no planning. Capra's movie admits that much. Witness that its central story is an accident of birth which determines whether a community will be sinful and corrupt or beautiful and peaceful.

That is another variation of the hero worship theme, the stuff of going back in time to kill Hitler to prevent WWII! It is vulgarity through and through with Hollywood its ground of existence.

15.  Returning to variety which pervades the world, note that its correlative category is constancy. Variable would have no significance if they were no constant.

Constancy and identity fully reveal themselves in the ground of existence, as follows.

16.  The phenomena are what they are by virtue of the working of their inner organizing principle. More concisely, they reflect their ground of existence, that permanent entity that preserves and manifests itself in the midst of infinite variety. Hegel uses the example of the Ego to illuminate this point. All the variety of a person’s actions and conduct under various circumstances find a common ground in the centrality of his “personality”, which remains unchanged.

17.  The ground of existence is the constant in the midst of variable. But it is constant up to a point. Like a man’s personality, it has the potential to change over time under the influence of an even greater force. That force is the subject of the final stage of the Logic in the Doctrine of Notion. There, Hegel shows that the Idea, the supreme logic of the world, is the true constant because in changing, it changes into itself.

Ground of existence, however, is sufficiently constant that its changes, while at times barely perceptible, are noteworthy events. Such are the changes currently taking place in the US

18.  The system of checks and balances is the leitmotif of democracies. Everyone is taught that the separation of the branches is the foundation of a democratic government and that the legislative and the judicial branches exist to ensure that executive branch could not usurp undue power, which is what happens in the “authoritarian regimes.” The mantra is repeated often enough that it become an article of faith to the citizenry, the most obvious of the self-evident truths.

19.  Hegel laughs at the idea! In the Doctrine of Notion, he deduces the three factors of notion as universal, particular and individual. These categories follow the ground of existence, so contain the idea of unity in difference – but they contain more. Each factor is distinct from the other two but at the same time contain them. I am a unique individual, while at the same time belonging to a particular group (male species, for example) and the wider universal human race. No individual can exists without belonging to a universal. In a like manner, no universal can exist without having produced an individual sample.

20.  The three branches of the US government, like the three factors of the Notion, are aspects of the one and the same whole which is the state. Each one of them stands separate from the other two, but at the same time individually contains them; each branch individually reflects and represents the state. If that were not the case – if they were independent, opposing entities – the state could not function. It would dissolve into dysfunction and chaos.

21.  The full proof that the ground of existence of the state is giving way is too long for this blog. Nor is it necessary; a few examples from the judiciary will suffice. I will return with them in the concluding part.

The Ground of Existence – 1: Introduction

A few weeks ago I read a noteworthy article, noteworthy not because of what it said but because of how its author reacted to what he was describing.

He had been watching a ‘news analysis’ program where the guests were “discussing” the Iranian “nuclear bomb.” It was the usual obscene show of a pack of baying dogs delivering a pack of lies about the existential threat of Iran to this and that and the need for more sanctions and military options. Then one of the regulars, Patrick Buchanan, had pointed out that Iran had consistently denied developing nuclear weapons; the country’s supreme leader has declared more than once that building nuclear weapons is against Islam. Sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies concur: Iran is not developing nuclear weapons. The IAEA, too, which is closely monitoring Iranian nuclear facilities, found no evidence of nuclear weapon program. In short, there is no evidence that Iran is working on a nuclear weapon. Nothing. Nada. Zilch.

After Buchanan’s ‘input’, the author wrote, he was expecting a shift in the discussion or at least a change in the tone. After all, the premise of what was being said had been preempted. To his surprise, nothing happened. The guests totally ignored what they had heard and continued with their rants until the end. The writer was wondering what gives. What could explain such conduct?

Such “conduct” is more common than many think. In fact, it is de rigueur in high places these days. But precisely because it is so prevalent, people notice it only when it takes a particularly offensive in-your-face form.

This year’s Nobel Prize in economics, for example, went to two guys who are not economists and one of them is even aware of that fact. Lloyd Shipley, one of the two winners, told the Associated Press: “I consider myself a mathematician and the award is for economics. I never, never in my life took a course in economics.”

The new laureates’ area of research is “matching”: men and women (through speed dating), students to schools, and recipients to organs.

Why, you might ask, in the midst of a protracted economic/financial crisis in the West is the Nobel Prize in economics given to lighthearted folks investigating match making? Was there no research on the causes of the crisis and the way out of it?

The answer is that the official economics cannot explain the crisis, and those works that can, are outside the accepted theories, which the Nobel Committee cannot recognize. Hence, the only option left, which is looking the other way. That’s how it comes to pass that a glaring reality that has ravaged the lives of tens of millions is ignored.

Or take the Treasury secretary Tim Geithner. According to the Financial Times, he and Larry Fink, the head of BlackRock, spoke no less than 49 times in the past 6 months over the phone. How many times in person, no one knows.

Part of the conversation was no doubt job related. Geithner is leaving at the year end and he will need a multi-million dollar salary to support his family after the penurious Treasury years. It could also be that Larry Fink is auditioning for the Treasury job – or both. But the official story, that the secretary needs to be in touch with “market participants”, is also true, only you have to understand what that means.

In the same period, Geithner called Vikram Pandit, the recently ousted Citi CEO once and Bill Gross of Pimco zero times. Bill Gross is a trader and not particularly strong in matters of theory and abstract thinking; he recently likened the U.S. government’s borrowings money to an addict who “pleasures itself with budgetary crystal meth,” clearly not realizing that the analogy would make him a drug kingpin. Still, if you are the Treasury secretary and want to get the pulse of the market – which was ostensibly the reason for the calls – wouldn’t you want to talk to the manager of the largest debt fund in the country?

But that reasoning would be missing the point, which is that reasoning and logic have got nothing to do with it. Geithner does not want to learn about policy options and alternatives. He wants input and direction, and Larry Fink provides both because Larry and Co. are the ones who give guidance to the Treasury. Call them the “in” crowd. The likes of Gross and Pandit are outsiders. They could get rich and famous thanks to the Treasury policy but they will have no say in setting that policy which has facets beyond matters of money and finance. For that reason, it does not matter what they think. So they might as well be ignored, which they are.

Like gold, which Shakespeare said makes black, white, foul, fair and wrong, right, being “in” makes meek bold. Witness the meek Bernanke whom everyone hailed as bold after he announced his QE3 program. In this 3rd phase of the so-called quantitative easing, the Fed chairman is resolved to buy $40 billion worth of mortgages every month pretty much until his term is up in 2014. He says he is doing it to tackle joblessness. That no one can explain how buying mortgages creates jobs matters not. He just says so, the way James Baker, Bush Sr.’s Secretary of State, said that invading Iraq was about jobs.

Meanwhile the Chairman rejects the criticism that mortgage buying artificially lowers the dollar’s value against the rival currencies (because the dollars that pay for the mortgages he creates from the thin air). He said:

The Fed isn’t responsible for artificially boosting rival currencies — and that other nations should let market forces determine exchange rates anyway.

The man who interferes in the markets to the tune of half a trillion dollars a year advises others to let market forces determine exchange rates.

Finally, the Supreme Court and the way it has been upholding the law of the land of late. A single example should suffice. No, not the much maligned Citizens United but the seemingly progressive Boumediene.

In Boumediene v. Bush, the Court decided 5-4 that the Muslim prisoners held indefinitely in Guantanamo Bay military camp had the right to habeas corpus – essentially the right to have their cases heard in the US courts – and part of the Military Commission Act under which they were imprisoned and which denied them that right was unconstitutional.

Linda Greenhouse, who won a Pulitzer Prize “for her consistently illuminating coverage of the United States Supreme Court” takes it from there:

To a startling degree, the conservative judges on the D.C. Circuit have been openly at war with the Boumediene decision [of the Supreme Court]. Judge Brown referred in her opinion to the “airy suppositions” of the Supreme Court’s majority. Judge A. Raymond Randolph ... in a 2010 speech to the Heritage Foundation, pointedly analogized the justices in the Boumediene majority to Tom and Daisy Buchanan in “The Great Gatsby”: “careless people, who smashed things up” and who “let other people clean up the mess they made.” ... Judge Laurence H. Silberman, in a concurring opinion a year ago, described the Boumediene decision as “the Supreme Court’s defiant – if only theoretical – assertion of judicial supremacy.”

Only theoretical? I can’t remember such open and sustained rudeness toward the Supreme Court by a group of lower court judges ... [A] court that had so much institutional pride just a few years ago ought to care enough now not to let itself be dissed by lower court judges who, in the system as I understand it, owe the Supreme Court obedience rather than on- and off-the-bench sniping.

The Supreme Court judges are appointed for life. They are practically untouchable. They have no reason to fear anyone. Their say is the last word in law. So why do they tolerate being openly dismissed and ridiculed by the lower court judges? Where, you might ask, is the loudmouth Antonin [broccoli] Scalia to put the errant circuit court judges in their place and remind them that in dissing the Court, they wreck the institutional judiciary for which the U.S was once renowned?

That question, too, would be missing the point. It would be akin to an uninitiated outsider wondering why the person being whipped in an S&M session accepts the pain and humiliation without complaint.

Scalia and Roberts like the contempt of lower courts towards Boumediene because they share that contempt, so strongly in fact, that they are willing to let it destroy the authority of the Supreme Court.

As Nasser observed, at the age of speculative capital, speculative capital is not the only self-destructive entity around.

And that is the commonality among all these cases; do not misread them as people in the position of power doing what they please. That sort of masters’ liberty about which Thucydides perhaps said the last word – the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must – has existed from time immemorial. But the strong of our examples are not imposing their will on the weak – not directly, anyway. They are, rather, pushing against the boundaries of a system that sustains them. In doing so, they are destroying their ground of existence.

It is a fascinating concept, this ground of existence. I must tell you about it.

I will return shortly to do so.

A Percipient Observer

You have surely heard the long words about the wonders of science this and wonders of technology that, and how they were supposed to improve the quality of life and leave more time for leisure, etc. etc.

Here is Nasser in Vol. of Speculative Capital, circa 1999:

Linear programming epitomized the “objective” science. It seemed to be the embodiment of Friedman’s assertion that “positive economics is in principle independent of any particular ethical position.” The solutions it offered were arrived at mathematically and were indisputable. There was only one best way of scheduling oil tankers between a given number of ports if the profits were to be maximized or costs minimized. Democrats and Republicans, capitalists and communists, oil producers and tanker owners, all had to agree on it.

But while mathematics is abstract, it is always applied in the context of given social conditions. And precisely because mathematics is abstract, upon application it assumes the characteristics of the context to which it is applied. If the context is the Battle of Britain, the mathematics of linear programming shows the best way of organizing fighter planes. If the context is the profitability of commercial airlines, it still shows the best arrangement, which is now establishing “hubs” and cutting service to low traffic destinations. Both solutions are mathematically correct. In the latter case, because the purpose behind the application of the method has changed–and that purpose is determine by social conditions–the solution leads to a different kind of consequences: medium-sized and small communities become further isolated. If the Nazis had learned of linear programming, they could have used it for improving the flow of traffic in the concentration camps.

Now, this from today’s New York Times, under the heading: A Part-Time Life, as Hours Shrink and Shift. Note the role of “sophisticated software”:

While there have always been part-time workers, especially at restaurants and retailers, employers today rely on them far more than before as they seek to cut costs and align staffing to customer traffic. This trend has frustrated millions of Americans who want to work full-time, reducing their pay and benefits.

“Over the past two decades, many major retailers went from a quotient of 70 to 80 percent full-time to at least 70 percent part-time across the industry,” said [a consultant].

Technology is speeding this transformation. In the past, part-timers might work the same schedule of four- or five-hour shifts every week. But workers’ schedules have become far less predictable and stable. Many retailers now use sophisticated software that tracks the flow of customers, allowing managers to assign just enough employees to handle the anticipated demand.

“Many employers now schedule shifts as short as two or three hours, while historically they may have scheduled eight-hour shifts,” said [the producer of a scheduling software].

Some employers even ask workers to come in at the last minute, and the workers risk losing their jobs or being assigned fewer hours in the future if they are unavailable.

The widening use of part-timers has been a bane to many workers, pushing many into poverty and forcing some onto food stamps and Medicaid. And with work schedules that change week to week, workers can find it hard to arrange child care, attend college or hold a second job, according to interviews with more than 40 part-time workers.

Enough said.

The Fate of Man

Nasser’s forthcoming book is about the common destiny of men currently being shaped by speculative capital.

Much has been said about how globalization eliminates the local differences and turns the areas it touches into a bland sameness. Walk into any upscale mall in Taipei, Istanbul, Los Angeles or Dubai, and you will not be able to tell one city from another, not with the “location-neutral” Gucci, Hermes, Cartier and Prada stores surrounding you. Walk to Downtown and it is dotted with the familiar junk food outlets and Gaps and Starbuckses, 7-11’s and now, the Apple stores.

But it is not only the retail business that has been made standard. The symphony orchestras also sound the same, as I discussed in No Country. More pernicious, though, is the sameness of politics, as in setting policies. That, too, has been pushed into the single, there-is-no-alternative track dictated by speculative capital.

In the U.S., the shift began with Regan and gained speed under Bill Clinton; credit Sleek Willy with divorcing policies from the politicians. Since then, presidential elections in the U.S. have been reduced to choosing the ‘lesser evil’. The idea seems sensible; only Lucifer would vote for the greater evil. The trick is that the semi-illiterate electorate is programmed to see evil in terms of surface issues: abortion, gay marriage, gun control, “family values” – the usual election hot buttons. No one ponders why evil, no matter what its degree, should be prerequisite for the presidency. That evil is the policy direction about which the rabble has no say and on which both parties are in full agreement. No matter who wins, the ship of state maintains its per-arranged course.

Post-War Europe prior to Tony Blair and the EU was different. The political parties offered alternative visions of government and, once in power, put them into action. Even with the military dictatorships in Spain, Portugal and Greece, one knew where he stood.

Globalization changed that. The rule of finance capital which operates under the nom de guerre globalization does not permit any deviation from the path most profitable to it. It punishes dissent with the pincer strategy of financing the competition and choking off the funding sources. Incessantly pressured by that force, out went the goals, principles, ideas and platforms of the political parties in Europe. Sure, they could still differentiate themselves on local matters – we will encourage women’s participation in workforce – and their candidates could talk to their hearts’ content – remember Hollande describing finance capital as “faceless enemy”? – but upon assuming power they had to govern as per finance capital’s diktat. Absolutely and all times. Observe:

Portugal: Social Democrat Passos Coelho replaced Socialist Socrates. The result?

The prime minister, announced a 7 per cent increase in the social security contributions to be deducted from workers’ pay next year while employers’ contributions are to be cut by a similar amount ... Mr Passos Coelho said unemployment, currently above 15 per cent, could reach 17 per cent next year if the social security changes were nor implemented. (FT, September 17, 2012)

Spain: Center-right Rajoy replaced Socialist Zapatero. The result?

Mariano Rajoy, the new prime minister, warned this week that the economic outlook “could not be more somber”, and laid out another round of deep spending cuts on top of existing austerity measures. (FT, December 21, 2011)

Greece: Center-right Samars replaced Socialist Papandreou. The result?

On July 6, Mr. Samaras laid out the coalition’s plans, a bold program of selling government assets and reducing state spending. (NYT, July 10, 2012)

Notice the word bold.

France: Socialist Hollande replaced center right Sarkozy. The result?

The French prime minister has appealed for a “massive vote” in favor of the EU’s new fiscal discipline pact by his ruling Socialist party despite criticism that President François Hollande failed to deliver on his election promise to renegotiate the accord. (FT, September 20, 2012)

Hollande had campaigned on opposing the EU mandated austerity measures, so much so that after he was elected, some (fools) saw his presidency as the harbinger of a weakened EU. Daily Telegrph wrote:  François Hollande victory sets EU on course for turmoil. Fat chance.

UK: Conservative Cameron (in coalition with the Liberal Democrats) replaced Unprincipled Blair. The result?

George Osborne, chancellor of the exchequer, will map out spending cuts and tax rises that analysts believe could amount to £85bn ($126bn, €102bn). Treasury officials say it will be the most brutal budget for almost 30 years. (FT, June 22, 2010)

You get the idea. Democrat, Social Democrat, Liberal, Labour, Conservative, right, left, center-right or center left – they all act in the same way. They must, else they will not be allowed to assume power.

With the main policy direction prefixed and untouchable, governing is no longer about the public service, the term properly understood. It’s reduced to the petty stuff, of the kind that has always been practiced at the local level but was not the main thing in conducting national policy: influencing laws to benefit benefactors, installing the backers as judges and administrators, putting relatives on the government payroll, and, of course, securing one’s own future by being in good terms with the powers that be, as in here and here.

And yet – and this is the central point of this post – none of this should be taken to mean that anything is preordained. Or that the die is cast. Or the conclusion is foregone.

Yesterday, a strong public reaction in Portugal forced a volte-face on the part of the prime minister. He had to rescind the order reducing workers’ wages by 7% as part of his “fiscal devaluation”. He will instead increase taxes, which means that the populace has to pay through a different venue.

So the force that is speculative capital keeps doing what forces always do: exert pressure. But in the social realm, as in the realm of nature, any force can be counteracted, neutralized by even a greater force that lies dormant in society.

The Ship of Fools [in control]: Diagnosis of a Social Unease

The unease of the citizenry about the “conditions” in the U.S. strongly comes through in every poll. The malaise is usually expressed in economic terms – lack of jobs, underwater mortgages, unaffordable insurance – but it transcends economics. It is a broader and deeper despair about what has gone before and what looms on the horizon. I wrote about the sentiment which Cormack McCarthy had touched upon in No Country for Old Men.

In the concluding part of the series we arrived at infantilism, a condition where grown men and women speak – because they think – like children.

Socially, being a child is defined by the absence of experience, more specifically, the absence of the opportunity to come into contact with the real world. So a toddler who has never seen a tiger will approach the beast without fear, as nothing in his mind associates a tiger with danger.

A developmentally retarded adult who has seen tigers before will also approach the beast without fear but only because he does not understand the danger. In this case, it is the inability to conceptualize and thus, comprehend the already experienced, that amounts to the absence of experience.

There is a difference between the two which language captures and coveys. One is innocence. The other, to use a very common word in the U.S., is stupidity. Innocent children; stupid adults: that’s how we frame our references.

All this by way of saying that when I say Nicholas Sambanis is a stupid man I am not hurling insults at him. All I am saying is that he is incapable of comprehending the world. See what he wrote this past Sunday in the New York Times about the EU crisis, beginning with an explanation of its causes:

There are many reasons behind the crisis, from corruption and collective irresponsibility in Greece to European institutional rigidities … But this is not just a story about profligate spending and rigid monetary policy… It is an escalating identity conflict – and ethnic conflict.

Greeks are corrupt. They are collectively irresponsible. Profligate spenders, too, especially when it is other people’s money, as we all know. Europeans institutions are rigid.

After this display of stupidity, he gets into the history:

The European Union was a political concept, designed to tame a bellicose Germany … Elites could sell that concept to their publics as long as Europe prospered and had high international status.

Vulgarity, thy name is Sambanis! Even reading this crap is embarrassing, an adult saying something like “international status of Europe”.

Nasser dissected the EU crisis in a 6-part series last year. Read it for an adult perspective. See how intelligently he defines Europe there.

Then note Sambani’s reference to the “elites”. It is telling. Who are the elites? What is he talking about?

Nasser explained that the EU was created in response to capital's falling rate of profit. To reverse the unacceptable fall, there had to be an EU through which labor costs would be reduced; that was the only way under the circumstances to raise the rate of profit. That the European people opposed the “initiative” – because however dimly, they understood it – mattered not a bit. In a democratic process, capital rules and overrules people, as we repeatedly saw.

Sambanis would not know that. But he has noticed that the idea of the EU came from high places; German butchers, Italian tailors and French bakers could not have conceived it, much less rammed it through the various governmental and legislatives labyrinths. So, who could have done it? The only answer he can imagine is “elites”. The “elites” did it.

We continue.

As Europe’s status declines, the already shaky European identity will weaken further … The result is a vicious circle: as ethnic identities return, ethnic differences become more pronounced, and all sides fall back on stereotypes and the stigmatization of the adversary through language or actions intended to dehumanize, thereby justifying hostile actions.

He is concerned that corrupt and irresponsible Greeks will stereotype bellicose Germans and vice versa and the ground will be set for hostilities.

Is there no hope, then? Happily, there is.

Germans must have a frank public discussion about what it means to be European, how good European citizens should behave toward other Europeans and why a strong Europe is good for German interests… Without such a discussion, and real concessions to Greece, a Greek exit is inevitable — and with it the triumph of parochialism in Europe.

Albert, Herbert, Heinz, Willy! Call up your friends and siblings and let's all sit down and talk about what it means to be good European citizens. Why? Because the fool across the Atlantic says so.

Alice in Wonderland characters would shake their heads in disbelief.

But the writer of this drivel is in earnest. He cannot not be earnest, being a “professor of political science and the director of Program in Ethics, Politics and Economics at Yale”. In that capacity, he trains the next generation of American leaders in the New Haven morgue.

His position also makes him a member of the establishment and the intellectual elite in the U.S. Together with the Rachmans, Friedmans and Krugmans, he influences and, at times shapes, the policies of the United States in Europe, the Middle East and South Pacific.

Imagine.

Of course, the drivel is not neutral. It is constructed in support of a certain worldview which supports certain conduct. But it is drivel nonetheless and must bend to the realities of the world.

The populace dimly recognizes that fact. The realization is dim, hence its vagueness. But it is realization nonetheless, hence the unease.

Epilogue: ‘No Country For Old Men’

“I can’t go on. I’ll go on” are the famous lines of Beckett’s absurdist characters who are at the end of their wit thanks to the relentless punishment they have taken.

The epitome of classical punishment in the West is the myth of Sisyphus, a king condemned by the gods to push a rock to the top of the mountain only to see it roll back, after which he had to start again.

That punishment is easy to understand. It was meted out through the exertion of intense labor without purpose and end. But labor somehow dignified the condemned. The story is a somber one and Sisyphus is no clown.

Modern Beckettian characters suffer a punishment of an altogether different kind. In terms of setting, they have complete freedom. They could come and go as they please. But they are idle, with whatever little movement there is being spontaneous and without purpose.

We do not know why they are in that situation. Nor do the characters themselves. Not that they seek answers or suspect that the situation demands an explanation. Apathy is all there is. (In Waiting for Godot, Vladimir and Estragon do not bother to hang themselves).

In the continual idleness, words fail. They lose their connection with the material world. They become absurd. The characters uttering absurdities become the subject of ridicule. They appear as fools, crazies, clowns and tramps.

That is the nature of the modern man’s punishment, being ‘free’, yet unable to act with purpose, acting with purpose being what separates him from the beast. (Beckett said that his Endgame was “more inhuman than Godot”.)

Even relating this situation is punishing, as Beckett no doubt knew. At the end, his style which had been evolving, hit a wall. Becket was describing situations that could not get worse; any further deterioration would dissolve their “plot” into nothingness. The language describing those situations likewise could not improve. Any “improvement” would sink it into incoherence. The critic Richard Seaver observed:

Is it possible for Mr.Beckett to progress further without succumbing to the complete incoherence of inarticulate sound, or to ... silence?"

Indeed Beckett produced little prose afterwards.

Replace the “situation” in Becket with “old age” and you will have the condition of old writers, composers, painters and directors in the West generally and the U.S. particularly. They can’t go on because they have nothing of value to say. “The talent has run out”. But they must go on because they need money. The result, when artistic works of no value must be commoditized and sold for money, is the absurdities, farce, drivel and incoherence that we see. But unlike Becket’s characters, the old artists in the West know, or at least feel, how much they have diminished, the way a senile ex-Olympian on a wheelchair would feel and know. Hence, the angst and the depression.

Life, you see, is dialectical. So is the evolution of thought which comprehends it. The driver of dialectics is progression from falsehood to truth: the mind perceives the worldly object, notices its contradiction (falsehood) and proceeds to resolve it at a higher plane of reason, higher in the sense that the previous contradiction is explained in the new phase and absorbed into it. The dialectical process is the process of evolution in which every advancing state is the necessary other of that which preceded it. This process reveals the universal truths.

Philosophers and artists both follow this process. Both groups search for truth, only philosophers describe their search; artists portray it.

Logically, the process does not depend on time. That is why the “classical” works of art and literature are said to stand the “test of time”. The universal truths they reveal are acknowledged by all men at all times.

But physically, because the mind resides in the body in the material world, the evolution from lower to higher phases of reasoning corresponds to the passage of time, i.e., aging. So, the work of a true philosopher or artist – the one who follows a constantly evolving dialectical path – improves with age. Think Picasso. Think Beethoven. John Berger. Chekhov. Hegel. Newton. Sartre. Godard. The list is legion. And I am only mentioning the Western names.

And if the dialectical path is not followed? Then one will have personal observations, reminiscences and the life’s tidbits, but not universal truth which is expressly not personal. Personal is contingent, accidental, transient and forgettable. It is the stuff of sitcoms. It is inherently limited.

The limit impedes the progress of literary/artistic work. As the writer/artist gets old, he runs out of things to say.

Some perceptive and intelligent artists like Jackson Pollock recognize the problem and build their works around it. In Keeping a Rendez Vous, John Berger explained Pollock’s style:

Painting throughout its history has served many purposes, has been flat and has used perspective, has been framed and has been left borderless, has been explicit and has been mysterious. But one act of faith has remained a constant.... The act of faith consisted in believing that the visible contained hidden secrets, that to study the visible was to learn something more than could be seen in a glance.... Jackson Pollock was driven by a despair which was partly his and partly that of the times which nourished him, to refuse this act of faith: to insist, with all his brilliance as a painter, that there was nothing behind, that there was only that which was done to the canvas on the side facing us.

(Berger is mistaken in attributing the urge to go beyond the visible to an “act of faith”. What drives the going beyond the immediately visible is the compulsion of the mind that follows a dialectical path. Noting that Hegel uses immediate to mean mere fact (without contemplation), he begins his Doctrine of Essence thus:

Since the goal of knowledge is the truth ... knowledge does not stop at the immediate and its determinations, but penetrates beyond it on the presupposition that behind this being there is still something other than being itself and that this background constitutes the truth of being. This cognition is mediated knowledge.)

Pollack was a Beckettian tramp if there ever was one.

And he was an exceptional. He saw the limit and made it the centerpiece of his work.

The great majority of old artists and writers are clueless. Of course, they, too, suffer from inability to produce but they think it is something in the air – or in old age. Recall Sondheim from Par I: “It’s age ... I have checked with other people."

So they go about trying to write and produce as before but what comes out, thanks to the peculiarity of art and literature, is a precise reflection of their lot. Art and literature are powerful stuff!

In What is Literature, Sartre explained the reason:

It is always unintentional contribution of the writer which has the chief importance … A work is never beautiful unless it in some way escapes its author. If he paints himself without planning to, if his characters escape his control and impose their whims upon him, if the words maintain a certain independence under his pen, then he does his best work.

This applies with equal force to artists.

Take a filmmaker like Woody Allen. They gave him an Oscar in 2011 for the screenplay of the Midnight in Paris. He called it a “personal view” of Paris. See now what his personal view reveals to two film critics of the Financial Times:

Peter Aspden:

Allen had form, once. But he lost it a long time ago. About 20 years ago, if you want to press me. Since then he has made films prolifically – but badly … Some of them are so bad – anyone out there seen Scoop? – that the next film cannot help but constitute some kind of return to form. If you constantly lower your bar, occasionally you will drag yourself over it. It is a novel form of creative evolution.

Antonia Quirke:

Midnight in Paris is essentially shallow, a nostalgia trip … [It]has grossed more than $107.6m worldwide and counting. In terms of box office revenue for Allen, this is easily a record … And yet the film is always crashingly sad too: All those brilliant, beautiful people in the past, it simply says, all dead after years of being drunk, made crazy and broke and increasingly careless of the company they kept, many of them ultimately sad, abandoned bores. And we are stuck with this god-awful present. A present that seems to Allen to be mantled in some massive, ineluctable disgrace – a hub of numbness.

Exactly.

The qualitative difference between old age and youth is experience. But merely being exposed to events and conditions does not by itself create a qualitative edge. The mind must process the experienced event and place it in the context of its proper universal.

Pursuit of money interferes with that ability. It deflects, however subtly and imperceptibly, the focus of the mind away from the search for truth and towards more money. The mind so affected produces “truths” which are not authentic but synthetic. Like the search results of Google, they are produced in response not to the subject of the search but the social factors which influence it. That is the destruction of artistic talent, artistic talent being nothing more or less than the ability to show and tell the truth in ways never before seen or heard.

Obstructing the mind's ability to process the events is the destruction of experience; we say exposure to events without the ability to process them does not count as experience. Since experience is the qualitative edge of old age over youth, its destruction turns the old men to children. Hence, the well-known child-like talk of the adults in the U.S., peppered with “gee” and “gosh” and the corresponding conduct to go with it. From Bill Gates to the State Department to Mitt Romney no one escapes its hold.

Agamben, as I pointed out earlier, noticed this phenomenon but could not elaborate on it. Nasser satisfactorily explained it.

Returning to old artists, can you think of a better specimen of a man-child than Woody Allen, a man passed the social security age who talks like an adolescent?

I can.

David Mamet was no Tolstoy. The stories and plays he wrote were always light and idealized but you could see the gem of a talent in them. Some of them like The Untouchables, The Verdict and The Postman Always Rings Twice were turned into memorable movies.

His latest book? Why I Am No Longer a Brain-Dead Liberal?

Last year, John Gapper of Financial Times had a revealing lunch interview with him:

[Mamet's latest book] has had some hostile reviews, including one from John Lloyd in the FT, and Mamet stands accused of turning conservative as he has grown older and richer. When I mention this, he bristles. “People say, Oh, Dave just wrote this book because he made a couple of bucks or because he believes in the state of Israel and he cast his liberal beliefs aside, but what about the arguments?” Mamet who attends synagogue regularly, cites the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah.

I ask whether anything in particular prompted his change of heart and he cites the 2007-2008 film and television writers’ strike and The Unit, a TV show that Mamet created and produced. “All of a sudden, the show was off the air and everyone was thrown out of work – the stagehands, the grips, the custom designers, all the people who worked 16 hours a day … I realized I had been screwed by unions as much as I’d been helped by them.”

This peroration, delivered in a husky voice with traces of his native Chicago, is interrupted by the waitress. Mamet switches seamlessly to ordering his food in Hollywood manner – he now lives in the Brentwood district of Los Angeles... “Filet mignon rare, and no mashed potatoes please, and no sauce please. I’ll start off with the green salad with the balsamic vinegar on the side.”

As the waitress brings Mamet’s steak and a hamburger for me, he exclaims with relish: “Yum, yum, yum”.

The culture that produces child-like lottery winners who go bankrupt within a few years also produces talented young artists who become child-like old men within a few decades. As with money, so with the talent: both are wasted.

At a younger age, Cormac McCarthy would have realized these things.

The Man Who Knew All Along What the Shot in the EU Was

Of God knows how many thousands of articles written about the crisis in the EU, nothing approaches the sharpness and clarity of Nasser’s 6-part series on the subject. It is impossible to understand the goings on in the continent without reading it. In the very first post, he nailed the issue:

• The problem was the falling rate of profit in the advanced European countries. Profit generates the “wealth”. So, the problem was the decline of relative wealth in industrial Germany, France and Italy.

• (The overall wealth might fall but share of a particular group could rise if through socio-political means such as taxes, they could raid other groups' shares. So there is no contradiction in saying that the overall level of wealth has fallen but the absolute number of millionaires and billionaires has risen)

• The rate of profit could increase: i) if the labor produces more with the given level of wages; or ii) the wages are cut for the same level of production.

• The EU was created to lower the wages in all Europe by bringing the workers from the “periphery” low-wage countries such as Greece, Hungary, Portugal and Ireland into the pool.

• That was the main reason for the creation of the EU. All else is secondary.

• The plan is now unfolding, only that the crisis is used to lower the wages even in the industrial countries.

Financial Times, July 9, 2012, under the heading Call for French business boost

French business urgently requires shock treatment to cut labour costs and boost its flagging ability to compete on international markets, top economists and business leaders have warned François Hollande.

The “Economic Circle”, a non-partisan group whose members include those working in institutions such as the European Central Bank as well as advising the government itself, said France required a “supply shock”.

“The immediate difficulty is above all the weak profitability of the great majority of businesses which inhibits their capacity to innovate, to export, to invest and to create jobs,” the Economists’ Circle said. “[We must] improve this profitability by a massive transfer of social charges on to [tax].”

Pierre Moscovici, finance minister, told the weekend conference that tackling labour costs by reducing social charges was “not a taboo” and suggested that if a consensus was reached in the social partners’ discussions, some action might be taken.

You note that:

1. The “immediate difficulty is above all the weak profitability of the great majority of businesses”. The geniuses do not know it, but the root of that “difficulty” is the fall in the rate of profit.

2. Look at the agenda of the conference that the newly elected socialist president has set. It includes “the economic and social issue”, including labour costs, employment terms and pensions. This one tops the “heads I win, tails you lose” proposition by one. “Labor costs” means cutting the wages. “Employment terms” means throwing the workers out at will and without much of a severance. “Pensions” means cutting their retirement benefits and making them work longer.

3. The finance minister is being a tad disingenuous, not to say outright coy, when he says that “tackling the labour costs [is not] a taboo”. It is more than a not-a-taboo. It is the agenda.

That’s what’s coming in France, the path set by the donkey that is speculative capital. Whether its palan is called Sarkozy or Hollande matters not a bit.

‘No Country For Old Men’ - 5: The Secret of the Beauty of Music and Expendibility of Old Conductors

Conducting is the most vivid manifestation of leadership.

Canetti got the vivid part right, but he thought it pertained to power.  Consequently, he got everything wrong; chalk up another one for the victim of the cult of personality. In talking about leadership and power, you see, we are not talking about leaders and powerful men. We are talking about their followers.

Take a group of men who follow a man. They could do so on their own free will or under compulsion. The first case pertains to leadership; the second, to power.

Force comes in when men refuse to follow voluntarily. That happens when they recognize that the “leader” does not represent their collective interests or even opposes them.

With the rare exceptions, that is what we see in our daily lives: men pressured into submission, a condition that reaches its most degrading and inhuman form in the prison and military systems. That’s quality wise. Quantitatively, the sky is the limit for how many people could be compelled to act against their own interests. It could be in hundreds of millions, as Nasser showed here and in analyzing the EU crisis.

Leadership is a different category. It is about voluntary submission of men that comes from their respect for the leader. Respect is imbued from within. It cannot be imposed from without.

The West has only elected officials but no leaders.

Respect excludes fear. The idea of respecting someone and fearing him – say, a husband who is a “good provider” but becomes violent only when children act up, or the drill sergeant whose sadistic toughness will “save” you in war, or a brute in the executive suite who is the only one who can make the corporation succeed – is a lie spread by the ones with the whip and believed by the downtrodden who must cling to such beliefs so they can go on. Stanley Kubrick unraveled the myth in Full Metal Jacket. Like the three witches in the opening scene of Macbeth, this introductory scene from the movie sets the stage for what is to come:

The critical point is this. For the group to be subjugated, its members must exist in the condition of seriality. Yup, I bet that is an unfamiliar word. Jean Paul Sartre defined it in his famous example of people waiting in line for the bus: 

This man is isolated not only by his body as such, but also by the fact that he turns his back on his neighbor – who, moreover, has not even noticed him.

The unity of the collection of the commuters lies in bus they are waiting for; in fact it is the bus, as a simple possibility of transport (not for transporting all of us, for we do not act together, but for transporting each of us). However, their acts of waiting are not a communal fact, but are lived separately as identical instances of the same act.

The unity of the collection of the city commuters is the bus. The unity of the collection of the air travelers is the plane – and the body-scanning machines.  Each specific group, likewise, has its own unity of collection. But the common bond of all groups in the position of seriality is impotence. Such a group is the natural target of coercion and in fact invites it – from the boss, from the drill sergeant or from the agents of the transit authorities.

Against seriality, Sartre defines the fused group, “in which everyone, as a third party, becomes incapable of distinguishing his own interest from that of the Others”.

A fused group acts as one. It is incapable of being the subject of forced submission. But I want to draw your attention to the “everyone as a third party” phrase which Sartre explains thus:

“It is a common error of many sociologists ... to treat the group as a binary relation [between] individual and community, whereas, in reality, it is a ternary relation ... in that, the individual, as a third party, is connected with the [unity of the group], and with each of them as a third party, that is to say, through the mediation of the group.”

Whether knowingly or unknowingly, Sartre here reproduces one of the most critical conclusions of Hegel in his Logic, namely, that thought is necessarily related to the thing, the things are necessarily related to thought, and the manifold things, through their common relation to a combining thought, are themselves necessarily related to one another.

Did you get it? If not, then watch Karjan from 4:10 to 5:20 in the clip you have already seen. Only this time make sure to read the subtitles.

“Now it’s all one piece,” he says, having fused the flute and violins in the most convincing demonstration of the interplay between the “one” and “many”.

The function of the conductor is finally clear. He has to make his orchestra a fused group. He has to use the commonality of music that binds the players together to obliterate the qualitative distinction of members and turn them into one. If successful, he would have unlocked the mystery of appeal of the music to man, as one of the means – together with other branches of art and science – for searching for the truth. The harmony in music – all being one – is the proof of the righteousness of the path which is itself dialectical. Hence, the secret of the beauty of the music and its appeal to man. But to get there, a conductor must have the submission of his players. And for that, he must have their respect. There was a reason I compared conductors to ayatollahs.

Conducting is the most vivid example of leadership because an orchestra is the most lyrical example of a man having found his way.

One earns respect gradually, i.e., through the passage of time. Of course the technical skills must be there. So, too, a vision of music and conducting. Then, as a conductor ages, he sees more clearly. His “angle of vision” to life changes. He sees further and deeper. When such an inertia is present, the self-improvement is, like the dialectical evolution of thought, inevitable. The aging conductor becomes dignified.

It is precisely that aging with dignity, like so much workers’ pension, that is denied to the modern conductors.  Even if these conductors did have vision and interpretive skills originally – I can think of Maazel here – the conditions of the performance, defined by illiterate audiences and detached musicians, overtime undermine them. So by the time they are old, nothing is left of the old vision. They can offer nothing new. So they become expandable and redundant. The old age ceases to be the unwritten job requirement. In the perfect replay of what is taking place in the corporate world, a job exclusively reserved for old men is eliminated to make room for more “efficient” young conductors. Andrew Clark, the music critic Financial Times writing this past June:

The arrival of 26-year old Simon Rattle at the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in 1990 – when it was still widely believed that “conductors begin at 60” – was the first sign that youth was pushing aside experience, a trend that culminated five years ago in Dudamel’s Los Angeles appointment, also at the age of 26.

A member of the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House ... says: “The conductors coming through [the door] haven’t had the time and space to develop in the way their predecessors did. They want to be everywhere and quickly. 

You see the trade off: the conductors coming through the door haven’t had the time and space to develop. Heck, they cannot even articulate their own function, as you saw in the case of Gilbert. Thus, the vicious circle continues and classical music is destroyed.

But what is, ultimately, driving this dynamic? The answer is the province of Nasser. But the FT music critic provided us with the critical clue:

“A music director must identify with the whole endeavour, and work with the management towards a common goal,” says [an orchestra manager]. “It is to be a team effort. If the conductor wants to dominate the organisation, you have problems.” 

Note this modern orchestra manager’s idea of a “team effort” as it pertains to conductors: they must work with the management. Nary a word about the musicians. The “common goal” is of course increasing revenues, i.e., money, awkwardly hidden under the tortured word “endeavour”. Chalk up one more for another aspect of culture having fallen victim to capital.

Does an old timer like Lorin Maazel know all this? I think he does. He might not be able to articulate every point here, but he certainly feels every point. You  can almost hear his thoughts while at work:

Good, Lorin. Play another scene of excellent dissembling and let it look like perfect honor. Lord, what have I become, dispensing fake pearls before real swines. To think that I could have been a Karjan. A Furtwangler.

I can’t go on. 

I will go on.

And the music plays on.

Infantilism and Economic Analysis

In Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben takes on the subject of the infantilism of adults which he links to the absence of experience in the modern world. Experience is the knowledge of the outside world. Experience is what separates adults from children. Without experience, adults seem childlike.

Agamben does not convincingly explain why the modern man cannot have experience. Those “eternal moments of dumb promiscuity among strangers in lifts and buses” are not the only exposure of the modern man to the outside world. His thesis of defining adulthood with experience, at any rate, is incomplete. Nasser offers a more profound view in the upcoming Vol. 4 of Speculative Capital. He stays that ability to think abstractly is the true measure of adulthood and development. Abstract thinking is placing the individual in the context of its proper universal. That is the stuff judgments are made of: individual is universal -- this man is guilty, that rose is red -- is the general form of judgment.

Experience facilitates that ability but does not guarantee it. One can be a successful businessman and still look childlike precisely because of his inability to think abstractly. The flip side of this relation is the the deep-seated suspicion of intellectuals in the famously “pragmatic” and businessman oriented U.S. In yesterday’s Financial Times, the paper’s Lucy Kellaway was unknowingly hitting on the very same point:

It means I can chuck out half of my business books. Farewell Jack Welch. Farewell Sir Terry Leahy. Goodbye Lord Browne and Sir Richard Branson. I won’t miss you. I can’t think of a single thing I learnt from all you megastars, except a bit of shockingly poor counsel from Steve Jobs. One of his most trusty principles was “don’t settle” – possibly the worst tip ever. Just now I popped out for an egg sandwich, only to find that the shop had run out so I settled for ham and cheese instead. As a result, I didn’t starve and the sandwich turned out to be rather tasty.

In saying “don’t settle”, the late Apple CEO was no doubt remembering a particular situation in which not settling had helped him. But unable or unwilling to think the matter further through, he did not recognize that out of context his advice would look banal and even idiotic.

I remembered all this reading the latest column of Paul Krugman in the New York Times. The subject was economic/financial crisis in the EU zone.

Advisers warned politicians not to re-enact 1937 — the year F.D.R. shifted, far too soon, from fiscal stimulus to austerity, plunging the recovering economy back into recession.

[The crisis in Europe in 1931] started with a banking crisis in a small European country (Austria). Austria tried to step in with a bank rescue — but the spiraling cost of the rescue put the government’s own solvency in doubt.

The really crucial lesson of 1931, however, was about the dangers of policy abdication. Stronger European governments could have helped Austria manage its problems. But nobody with the power to contain the crisis stepped up to the plate.

It seems obvious that European creditor nations need ... to assume some of the financial risks facing Spanish banks. [Instead, their] “solution” was to lend money to the Spanish government, and tell that government to bail out its own banks. [So] the European crisis is now deeper than ever.

You see what I mean by the childish form and content: There was this guy, FDR, who shifted too soon to austerity and then there was this small country in Europe which could not pay its debt which created a panic that spread around the world because nobody with the power stepped up to the plate. And now it is obvious that European creditor nations must assume some of the financial risks facing Spanish banks. And then there was this dog walking down the street …

The 50-something economist explains the crisis in Europe in the same spirit that a 5-year old would tell a story she had just made up. He thinks Angela Merkel’s advisers do not know what is at stake; if only they had read Paul Krugman. Such are the fools who toss around expressions like “the international community”.

You want an adult writing on the crisis in Europe? Check out Nasser’s 6-part series on the subject starting here. His definition of ”Europe” is one the most original pieces on the Continent that I have seen anywhere. And look the Epilogue which explains what drives the decisions in Europe and why things are the way they are.

‘No Country For Old Men’ - 4: Music, Ideas and Leadership

In a comment on an earlier post of this series, a reader asked if I knew of Elias Canetti’s writing on conductors and the role of power.

I did not. I googled the name and found the writing in question. Below is an excerpt. Read it. There is no better example of a pretentious ignoramus making an ass of himself:

There is no more obvious expression of power than the performance of a conductor. Every detail of his public behavior throws light on the nature of power. Someone who knew nothing about power could discover all its attributes, one after another, by careful observation of a conductor.

The conductor stands: ancient memories of what it meant when man first stood upright still play an important part in any representations of power. Then, he is the only person who stands. In front of him sits the orchestra and behind him the audience. He stands on a dais and can be seen both from in front and from behind. In front his movements act on the orchestra and behind on the audience. In giving his actual directions he uses only his hands, or his hands and a baton. Quite small movements are all he needs to wake this or that instrument to life or to silence it at will. He has the power of life and death over the voices of the instruments; one long silent will speak again at his command. Their diversity stands for the diversity of mankind; an orchestra is like an assemblage of different types of men. The willingness of its members to obey him makes it possible for the conductor to transform them into a unit, which he then embodies.

His eyes hold the whole orchestra. Every player feels that the conductor sees him personally, and still more, hears him ... At any given moment he knows precisely what each player should be doing.

And on and on.

Knaves and fools of Canetti’s ilk have long been a fixture of human societies by virtue of their symbiotic relation with the illiterate public. They appeal to the public’s immediate sense perceptions and, in doing so, confirm its prejudices; recall the folk story of the impostor who asked the illiterate villagers to “judge” whether the picture of the snake which he had drawn or the letters S-N-A-K-E represented the “true snake”?

Nasser is merciless with these characters and demolishes them whenever they drift into his ken, as he memorably did here and here. I want to do the same, now that Elias Canetti has drifted to my ken!

Look at what the man says:

The conductor stands!

He stands on a dais!

He looks!

He listens!

He knows!

He faces the orchestra!

His back is to the audience!

He moves his hand – sometimes his baton!

The players sit!

And my favorite:

He can be seen from in front and from behind!

After these observations, our man turns to pontification. But there, too, he stays in the comfort zone of readers’ expectations; he has to, as those ‘expectations’ – knowledge from daily experience or some dimly remembered factoid – are the commonalities that bind him to his social environment.

So, he implausibly links the fact of conductor standing to ancient memories of when “man first stood upright”, ignoring that in the past several thousand years, standing has everywhere been associated with the position of servitude. Slaves stand. Servants stand. Waiters stand.

As for the conductors’ power, he is reading into it the power structure in the business world where the boss has full control over his employees. To the extent that such relations apply to the modern orchestra, they pertain to the conductors’ administrative authorities, say, salary raises and hiring and firing.

But none of that has anything to do with music, which means that everything we are told so far is incidental.

By way of proof, let me introduce you to a conductor who does not stand, but sit;

who faces the audience;

who sits with his orchestra members and alongside them;

who has no baton;

who moves his hands, but only spontaneously and as part of his body’s reaction to music;

and who is not feared but respected.

The conductor is the legendary Pakistani singer, the late Nusrat Fatih Ali Khan, here leading his troupe in a memorable qawwali. There is no video and one can hardly speak of picture quality. But those are incidentals. Even with blurry pictures (and a junk text or two which appear in the beginning), you will have no trouble recognizing his leadership, which is what conducting is all about.

Listen:

The Orientalist will object:

This is Eastern music – spontaneous, improvised. The lead singer certainly sets the tone and leads. But the idea of conducting, as the word is understood, does not apply to him. A classical conductor controls the precision of the tightly structured form of the music which, coming from more than 10 different instruments and a hundred musicians, is infinitely more complex than the one-instrument music we just heard. The tight structure leaves little room for the discretion. The conductor might play a piece slower or faster or a passage more or less empathetically, but that is extent of his liberties. So, interpreting and leading does not even apply to what he does.

The shortest and most decisive answer to this make-believe critic is: Wilhelm Furtwängler. But to proceed, we first have to look back.

1942 was a pivotal year in the WWII. The Allied victories in 3 major battles in that year – in Al Alamein in Africa, Stalingrad in Europe and the Midway in Pacific – had turned the tide of war against Germany. By June 1943, it had become clear that the German defeat was a matter of time.

The music you are about to hear was performed by the Berlin Philharmonic on June 30, 1943 in Berlin’s Symphony Hall . (Here is a picture of the place 5 months after the event, in November 1943.)

The conductor is Wilhelm Furtwängler, the orchestra’s music director from 1923 until his death in 1954. (Herbert von Karajan succeeded him that year.)

The music is Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture. Beethoven tells the saga of the Roman general who is expelled from Rome and returns with an army to revenge the insult. Romans send his wife and mother to plead with him to turn back. He realizes that the initial insult cannot justify the bloodshed about to take place. But how could he withdraw? His army is already at the gates of the Rome. As a way out, he submits himself to the “judgment” of the Romans, thus committing suicide.

Listen to the unforgettable opening: (0 – 1:25);

to crescendo leading to the conflict: (1:25–2:20);

to the fury with which Furtwängler unleashes the timpanist. IT’S WAR! (2:20–2:45).

Then the incredible stretch from 2:45– 4:00, when Coriolan is at war with himself: Shall I do it? Should I? No! But I must. The army, all ready. It is set then. YES, WE WILL.

Should I?

People are not interested in classical music, they say? Because they do not hear classical music.

No one questions the importance of the technical skills in any field. Art is comprised of content and form: what you are saying and how you are saying it. The how part requires technical skills to bring out the beautiful. But technical skill must not overwhelm the content or the “message” of the art. Else we will have art for the art’s sake on one hand, and circus performance on the other.

Look at Furtwängler’s time management: 1:25, 2:20, 2:45, 4:00.

Controlling the speed of a philharmonic orchestra with this precision is like touching down the landing gear of a 747 on a newspaper. That’s virtuosity. But we are not conscious of it because the beauty of the music and the sense of tension and tragedy that it conveys absorbs us. Technical mastery is there to bring out that beauty. Conducting is creating that synergy without which music will degenerate to empty sound, of the kind one these days hears in the concert halls.

To elaborate this point further, let us go back from the finish product to the way it is prepared. We are going to see two conductors. One is Alan Gilbert, the current music director of the New York Philharmonic. He recently spoke to the New York Times about the role of conducting. This is how he began:

“There is no way to really put your finger on what makes conducting great, even what makes conducting work. Essentially what conducting is about is getting the players to play their best and to be able to use their energy and to access their point of view about the music.”

Mr. Canetti, meet Mr. Gilbert.

I could not upload the interactive program. Click here to watch it on the Times site . But before you proceed, you have a task. You must listen to the interview carefully and at the end sum up what you learned or heard. The 8 minute interview is in English.

Now, watch this 10-minute segment of Herbert von Karajan rehearing Schumann’s 4th Symphony with the Berlin Philharmonic. The entire program is over 90 minutes and because of its length cannot be uploaded here, which is a pity, because it is in German and without English subtitles.

The segmented pieces, the first part of which I have produced here, are subtitled. Make sure to ignore them. The screen is visibly divided into top and bottom halves by a small print. Focus on the top half and on Von Karajan’s face and you will not see the subtitles.

Afterwards, you are to judge which one of the two men is a conductor, the one whose words you understand or the one whose words you do not. (Apologies to readers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.)

See what I mean?

(Here is the complete rehearsal in German with a subsequent performance.)

Gilbert is a music expert. He comes from a family of musicians. Except for the opening drivel about conducting being a mystery, everything he says is accurate. But precisely because he does not know what conducting is all about, everything he says is irrelevant. He dispenses bits of technical knowledge without any coherence. He describes conducting the way an auction house would describe a Rembrandt, focusing on brush strokes instead of what the paintings signify. (Critics say they reflect the pillage of the West Indies.) Gilbert knows music the way Mitt Romney knows finance. He can talk about it, make money from it, teach it and even become famous from it. But he knows nothing about it as a social and communal activity, just like Romney whose idea of finance is studying cash flows for the purpose of buyout and takeover but cannot read past the first page of Speculative Capital.

The result of a Romneyesque understanding of finance is the progressively worsening economic conditions in much of the West in the past 4 years whose severity and persistence has the most powerful central bankers, the most pretentious economists and the most loquacious commentators at their wit’s end.

The result of a Gilbertesque understanding of music is seemingly more contained. Those immediately affected are the conductors themselves who lose their sense of value (but only if they know what is taking place), the musicians who are turned into human synthesizers with the Damocles Sword of layoffs always hanging over their heads because they can in fact be replaced by synthesizers, and finally the audiences who, however subconsciously or unconsciously, are turned off and so drop out.

But these inauspicious developments are far from local. They are the local manifestation of a much larger menace which has the Western societies in its grip, turning them into no places for old men.

I will return to elaborate.