The Humanity of Shame
One of the great surprises upon arriving at Bard College was meeting Norman Manea. Manea, who was born in Romania, spent four years as a child in a concentration camp, many more as a dissident, and finally relocated to NYC and Bard College. He is a prolific and exciting writer, the author of novels, memoirs and essays, and a generous colleague. The Hooligan's Return tells the exciting story of his return to Romania with Bard President Leon Botstein and his reconnection with his homeland.
In 2009, Manea gave the Wyliam Philips Lecture at The New School for Social Research. The lecture, "20 Years After the Berlin Wall: Monuments of Shame," which has only been published in Spanish as "Monuments de Vergonya." The lecture judges the consequences and meanings of the revolutions of 1989. It is not a moral judgment, but rather a remembering of the lands, places, and languages from which Manea was exiled. At the end of his talk, Manea also makes a fascinating proposal.
Manea begins his lecture with reflections on the revolutions of 1989. For one thing, freedom is not the simple blessing it is often thought:
As slavery has to be learned, step by step, in order to survive its terror and tricks, freedom must also to be learned, step by step, in order to face its chances and competitions, its rewards and restrictions.
In his novels, Manea is ever alert to the way that bourgeois comforts offer a false sense that the freedom to choose amongst restaurants or living accommodations can actually deflect us from the experience of freedom. As have many who lived under the evils of totalitarianism, Manea recognizes that there is a kind of freedom in brutal societies as well:
My dream throughout my postwar life was to find an inner resistance against the ubiquitous external pressure.
Living within yourself, it turned out, was for me the mode of resistance; it formed a center for the moral being, a means of separating from a corrupt and corrupting environment, a hope, however uncertain, for maintaining your conscience with integrity. Reading and writing were a shelter, even if menaced, and the best therapy against the poisonous spread of lies and hypocrisy.
Manea saw also that the outbreak of freedom in 1989 was going to bring dangers as well as hopes.
In addition to a "cheap and manipulated populism," that pervaded the public discourse of the new “democratic” politicians, there were of course the cheap freedoms of revenge, xenophobia, pornography and mass entertainment. This is to be taken in stride, and yet also not. We must always be alert to the morphing of freedom into its opposite:
One of the most outrageous examples of this sort of quick change act occurred in Romania, where a former court-poet of the Ceausescu clan, a fierce nationalist and anti-Semite, Comrade Corneliu Vadim Tudor became the leader of a new extreme right party called, no surprise, Great Romania. Changing only a bit the cosmetics of his old slogans, this noisy old-new agitator was elected a member of Romania’s Parliament, even becoming at one point a serious candidate for the Presidency. Today, comrade Corneliu is a member of the European Parliament. Nobody can say that afterlife isn’t interesting...
We don't have "a real alternative to freedom." We must make do with its defects and shortcomings, since the dangers of the "free system are as bad as the dogmatic remedies ranged against them. Indeed, in the end, the question always comes down to freedom – and it is right that it should.
In the interest of living with freedom, Manea closes his speech with an intriguing proposal, one that he argues would go a long way towards keeping the question of freedom present before our eyes. He writes:
Some ten years ago I proposed something very much non-utopian, and I would like to revisit that proposal. It was in an intervention I made to the famous Walser Debate of 1998 in Germany. As some of you may recall, the esteemed German writer Martin Walser, in his acceptance speech on receiving the Peace Prize of German Booksellers Association at the Frankfurt Book Fair warned against the “permanent representation” and the “monumentalizing of German shame.”
My response was to suggest that every country -- and I emphasize again every country and every people -- should complement its monuments of heroism with monuments of shame. This would mean recalling a nation’s wrong doings towards other countries, other people and also to its own people.
To love our neighbors as ourselves may also imply scrutinizing ourselves with the same objectivity as our neighbor and not to do to others what we don’t like to suffer ourselves. It is probably good therapy to look at ourselves with the same exigency as we look at others, to put ourselves in the shoes of others in order to understand their otherness. Aren’t modesty and humility and self questioning a desirable and sound exercise for being truly human?
There are such monuments to shame. Some that I recall vividly are the Apartheid museum in Johannesburg and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, two of the most extraordinary and provoking memorials I have ever encountered. I have no idea if it is good therapy, as Manea writes, to put ourselves in the shoes of others. But it does make for an exercise in being truly human.
For your weekend read, I recommend an excerpt from The Hooligan's Return, available here.
Even better, order The Hooligan's Return here.
-RB
Nothing is Really Free
The copyright conflict between the internet community and the entertainment industry escalated recently when some of the most visited sites on the web flexed their muscle by spearheading a campaign to kill the two bills which started the trouble. The bills have been shelved, thanks to the participation of most of the major social media websites and search engines in a twenty-four-hour blackout (including Wikipedia, Google, Reddit, Tumblr, Mozilla, among many others) – but what does such a “victory” mean?
Just days after most support had been pulled from the bills in both houses, the founder of file-sharing site Megaupload, Kim Dotcom (born Kim Schmitz, but had his name legally changed around 2005), was arrested in New Zealand and is facing extradition to the US due to alleged piracy charges, along with at least three of his closest associates. This may come as a surprise to those who argued that these bills were necessary to stop intellectual property theft. As Bill Keller explains in a recent Op-Ed piece in the Times, “The central purpose of the legislation — rather lost in the rhetorical cross fire and press coverage — was to extend the copyright laws that already protect content creators in the U.S. to offshore havens where the most egregious pirates have set up shop.” And yet, even without the new laws, Dotcom and his cohorts were arrested on US government orders.
It is helpful to go back to basics and try to understand the thinking behind the protection of intellectual property. Why, in other words, is it necessary to arrest someone like Dotcom, who merely makes content available to a wide and interested audience?
One attempt to answer that question is Mark Helprin's Digital Barbarism, an impassioned, literary, and philosophical defense of copyright on the internet. Known best for his novels, most memorably Winter's Tale, Helprin puts forth a philosophical and humanist argument in favor of copyright. At root, copyright is necessary as the “guarantor” or “coefficient” of liberty itself.
That property is at the essence of liberty is an idea that has its roots deep in liberal thinking. Property, from the root proper or propriety, is what is right and most my own. Who I am includes the character I possess, what defines me. This includes as well the way I live and the things I choose to own. Ownership, in other words, concerns what is my own, and who I am.
Our love for and defense for our property is not simply economic. It is a matter of identity and existence. Pace Helprin:
Property is to be defended proudly rather than disavowed with shame. Even if for some it is only a matter of luck or birth, for the vast majority it is the store of sacrifice, time, effort, and even, sometimes, love. It is, despite the privileged inexperience of some who do not understand, an all-too-accurate index of liberty and life. To trifle with it is to trifle with someone's existence, and as anyone who tries will find out, this is not so easy. Nor has it ever been. Nor should it ever be.
The copyright battle is less about economics, in Helprin's telling, than about freedom. Unlike some proponents of free market ideology, he does not advocate the absence of limits on freedom. In his words (which remind us of Helprin's artistry):
Nothing is entirely free, not even an electron (hardly an electron) or an atom floating in the inaccurately named vacuum of space. Everything that exists is subject to the pull or constraint of something else.
The point is not to reject all limits on property, but to insist upon a balance—one that Helprin thinks today is too far weighted toward disrespect for property.
He makes his argument in the context of taxation. Opposing both extreme positions of liberals (who find it cruel and inexplicable that someone would want to set limits before every mouth is fed and every cry comforted") and conservatives (who "find it deeply alarming that anyone can fail to recognize the danger of pressing ahead in the absence of limits"), Helprin insists that we at least honestly recognize that taxation has a non-material cost: taxation, to some extent, "extinguishes liberty."
In other words, taking someone's property is, in itself, wrong. There may be reason's do to so, and there is no absolute right to one's property. Society demands limits and some takings. But such decisions should be made with an appreciation that these takings are meaningful intrusions on individual liberty. This is Helprin's core point and it is one that I believe is rarely made and even more rarely considered.
To illustrate his claim about the imposition involved in all takings, Helprin calls on the common (and these days volatile) theme of income tax. Taxes, while necessary, are infringements on freedom (not simply on income). If the state compels Cyril “to surrender half his income” in an effort to provide for those who cannot provide for themselves, then Cyril is “laboring for the state during half his working life,” and not for himself. Helprin likens such disenfranchisement to slavery. This seems excessive. As far as I can tell, Helprin employs the analogy because he wants to shock us into seeing just how we have come to naturally accept the fact that it is normal for the majority to take property from the minority. In his account, just as the slave owner “presumes that the labor of his slaves belongs to him…that whatever they make is rightfully his,” so does the state, when it requires its citizens to pay a tax on the income generated by their own labor, operate under the assumption that it is entitled to decide the ultimate use of such labor.
The comparison of taxation to slavery is over the top, sure. But there is a point Helprin makes that is important:
Anyone who blithely recommends expropriation as a means of "economic justice" should first divest himself of most of what he has and give it to those who have less — and there are certain to be those who have less and are greatly afflicted for it. We tend to look up rather than at ourselves when surrendering to such passions of righteousness. The assault on copyright is a species of this, based on the infantile presumption that a feeling of justice and indignation gives one a right to the work, property, and time (those are very often significantly equivalent) of others, and that this, whether harbored at the ready or expressed in action, is noble and fair.
Which is why the question of Kim Dotcom’s arrest is central. According to Helprin’s explanation, Dotcom's websites and others like them blithely engage not just in economic exploitation of writers and artists, but do so without seriously considering the injustice involved in their depriving others of their sense of ownership in what they create. One can disagree. To do so, you must think that our societal right to read your essay or hear your song trumps your right to sell that song (or not) to whomever you wish.
For your weekend read, buy a copy of Helprin's Digital Barbarism, and give it a read. Or, read a chapter that Helprin has, freely, made available on the web.
-RB
“Downton Abbey”, a “Crisis in Culture”?
Everyone, so I am told, is watching and talking about "Downton Abbey." It is a TV show, for those living under a bigger rock than I am. So the other day I asked the person charged with keeping me alive to the real world why the show was so compelling.
The answer arrived in my email later that morning in the form of an article: "The Philistine's Guide to Downton Abbey: Why Everyone in the Universe Should Watch Downton Abbey."
Cast of "Downton Abbey"
A philistine, let us recall, originally named a biblical enemy, a part of a host so large and superior in numbers that it would overrun Judeo-Christian civilization. In its modern usage, a philistine is part of mass society, those who judge all things in relation to their material or utilitarian values.
So what does a philistine want from "Downton Abbey"? First and foremost, it seems, he wants to be educated. Here I quote from the article on Gawker:
The first season of the show dealt with the sinking of the Titanic, Marxism, and the burgeoning women's rights movement thanks to the Earl's progressive youngest daughter, Sybil. This season is all about the Great War, as the Brits call it. It's teaching history! There are also all those damn costumes and beautiful interiors and characters with complex motivations being penned in by a restrictive society. It's all the best parts of Middlemarch without having to lug around a thousand page novel all the damn time.
For those who aren't afraid to lug around Middlemarch as well, the New York Times offered a front-page story Wednesday with book recommendations for those following the series. According to the paper of record, Julian Fellowes, the show's creator, "has been deliberate about dropping open-ended references into the scripts" that are designed to send viewers to their libraries (or at least their IPads). The show clearly plays into the long-standing cultural demand for entertainment that doubles as education. It seems we are desperate to sugarcoat our need for distraction with the promise that we are actually making productive use of our downtime.
The New York Times article comes complete with recommendations for books of history and poetry, and even other works of historical fiction, each designed to occupy the hours between the episodes of the show. But one essay recommendation was conspicuously absent from the list.
The current mania for "Downton Abbey" calls to mind Hannah Arendt's essay "The Crisis in Culture," Arendt's most powerful explorations of the role of art and the artist in contemporary life. The essay is actually in two parts. Part One addresses the relation between culture and society. Part Two concerns the connection between culture and politics. So this week's weekend read is Part One of "The Crisis in Culture." Next week I'll discuss Part Two. I hope you enjoy it in-between episodes.
In raising the question of the crisis of culture, Arendt is not assuming the mantle of culture warrior. She explicitly refuses to condemn low-brow culture—we all need entertainment. Nor is critical of the masses. The problem she is concerned with has its origins not in mass society but in good society. She is not criticizing those who enjoy their sitcoms. No, her critical eye is focused on the elite PBS viewers of "Downton Abbey."
Arendt's essay begins with a distinction between culture and society. Simply put, artists, intellectuals, and defenders of culture accuse society of "philistinism." The philistine concerns himself only with utility while the cultural artist aims at truth and beauty.
The problem emerges when the philistines come to find that culture is useful. Then the "educated philistine" emerges, someone who seeks to advance his own social standing by monopolizing culture. The educated philistine embraces culture. He collects art, sits on the boards of universities and symphonies, and displays his "contempt for the vulgarity of sheer moneymaking." The educated philistine despises entertainment and amusement, because no "value" can be derived from it. It is the educated philistine, not the artist, who is the snobbish culture warrior committed to demeaning pure entertainment.
As Arendt tells it, culture comes increasingly to be valuable as a currency that guarantees and advances social standing. But as culture becomes valuable, it loses its distinction from the other values of society. Cultural objects lose their distinction—that they can arrest our attention and move us. Arendt offers the example of Gothic cathedrals, which were built for the glory of God. Of course the cathedrals were useful too, but their immense and extraordinary beauty cannot be explained by their usefulness. Their beauty, she writes, "transcends needs and functions."
The beauty of cathedrals lasts through the ages. The cathedrals become part of our world, as do mosques and temples, paintings and sculptures, and all the public buildings and political structures that give form and meaning to our otherwise transient mortal lives. Yes, human beings can live without a culture; many have. But when they do, they live simply to live. For Arendt, that is not a distinctly human life in a human world.
We only live in a human world when "the totality of fabricated things is so organized that it can resist the consuming life process of the people dwelling in it, and thus outlast them." Lasting works of art make our world a human world, they give the world its distinction and its humanity. It is this worldliness that makes the world human. And this worldliness and humanity are born from the work of artists (visual, poetic, and political) who create the lasting institutions and things that give the world meaning as our world. Because culture concerns the lasting and immortal architecture of our human world, it is concerned with art—things made for no other purpose than to be beautiful and true.
The challenge posed by the mania around a show like Downton Abbey is that it is part and parcel of a cultural moment when art abandons its transcendent and protected realm and appeals to the needs of overly busy "educated philistines" who want their entertainment also to be useful. Arendt's examples are rewritten versions of classics like Shakespeare that are made as entertaining as My Fair Lady. There is nothing wrong with My Fair Lady. But the demand to make Hamlet entertaining—or to make entertainment educational—means, Arendt writes, that "culture is being destroyed in order to yield entertainment." Hamlet as a great work that can stop us and make us think and re-think our lives and our world can survive neglect; but it cannot survive being repackaged into entertainment. And this raises the true specter haunting Arendt's essay: that all the cultural goods that make up our world will be repackaged as entertainment, thus loosening the immortal bonds that tie us together as members of a common world. This means, for Arendt, the threatened loss of culture and with it of the specifically human world. As she writes:
The point is that a consumer's society cannot possibly know how to take care of a world and the things which belong exclusively to the space of worldly appearances, because its central attitude toward all object, the attitude of consumption, spells ruin to everything it touches.
I hope you enjoy "Downton Abbey." But I also suggest you take the time to read "The Crisis of Culture."
-RB
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