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.