The Virtual Stoa

Nick Barlow begins the necessary work of stringing together various fifth sentences on twenty-third pages. Here’s a snippet:

Now, the King’s foreign minister, the Marquis de Torcy, had informed him that not only was Law back without a passport but that ‘his intentions are not good’ and that ‘he is serving our enemies as a spy.”Look,” Rich Armitage responded, “we told the Taliban in no uncertain terms that if this happened it’s their ass.”

“All right, I tried,” I said, and fingered it out and forked it over. Aristotle’s political philosophy isn’t exactly startling, but it avoids the utopianism of Plato’s Republic.

This wise work also tells me something I didn’t know before, which is the precise difference between a zeppelin and a blimp.

Haven’t had this one before:

Become a legally ordained minister within 48 hoursAs a minister, you will be authorized to perform the rites and ceremonies of the church!

Perform Weddings, Funerals, Perform Baptisms, Forgiveness of Sins
Visit Correctional Facilities

Want to start your own church?

Press here to find out how.

I’m sure there are ways of visiting correctional facilities without paying $29.95 (plus $11 for out-of-U.S. shipping). Anyway, clicking on the link asks me whether I want to marry my brother, but I don’t think this is one of those twisted incest porn sites. Could be, though. I didn’t peer too closely.

José Carlos Mariategui, Peruvian socialist; born 1894, died 16 April 1930.

So within minutes of posting the final instalment of “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”, “Nyet to Barbie” Sarah pops up in the comments and asks what I’m going to do next, and suggests Debord’s Society of the Spectacle. (Quite a good choice: we could have one paragraph a day for the next 212 days or so: they’re all numbered.)

I’ve quite enjoyed preparing Wilde-by-instalment: the work of picking where the episode breaks come, cleaning up the rather fuzzy electronic text on which I based the serial and thinking a bit about some of the less well-known parts of the essay has had its own rewards. Some of the work has just been rather mechanical proof-reading, but I think that on balance the interesting work has outweighed the tedious stuff here.

But what I’d like to know more about is whether VS-readers have been paying attention. A couple of you have emailed to say you’ve been enjoying the Wilde in bite-sized chunks. I guess that others have scrolled rapidly past instalments to see if there’s anything original underneath. How (if at all) did you engage with the Wilde text? If I did another text, would you prefer more by way of editorial commentary, or just let whatever text it was speak for itself? Another essay in segments, or something longer but filleted? Any opinions — and further thoughts about what else, if anything, to post in this space — would be particularly welcome, either in the comments below or by private email.

Thanks.

Back in 1997 when I was teaching City of God for the first time to a bunch of American undergraduates, I remember trying to elucidate aspects of Augustine’s idea of the peregrinus by telling them that for them, as good citizens of the republic, 15 April should be the happiest day of the year, the day on which they make a significant sacrifice on behalf of the republic (res publica debet esse carissima, etc.), and, in so doing, strengthen the foundations of their lives as free citizens; whereas I, as a non-resident alien, or peregrinus, could justifiably resent having to pay taxes to the Feds.

I don’t think I persuaded them.

Marston’s Pedigree beer not very nice. Don’t buy again.

De Beauvoir yesterday, Jean-Paul Sartre today: existentialist philosopher, et cetera; born 21 June 1905, died 15 April 1980.

The Finale.

Earlier Episodes: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV, XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII, XIX, XX, XXI.

“The Soul of Man Under Socialism” by Oscar Wilde, Part Twenty-Two

The evolution of man is slow. The injustice of men is great. It was necessary that pain should be put forward as a mode of self-realization. Even now, in some places in the world, the message of Christ is necessary. No one who lived in modern Russia could possibly realize his perfection except by pain. A few Russian artists have realized themselves in Art, in a fiction that is medieval in character, because its dominant note is the realization of men through suffering. But for those who are not artists, and to whom there is no mode of life but the actual life of fact, pain is the only door to perfection. A Russian who lives happily under the present system of government in Russia must either believe that man has no soul, or that, if he has, it is not worth while developing. A Nihilist who rejects all authority because he knows authority to be evil, and welcomes all pain, because through that he realizes his personality, is a real Christian. To him the Christian ideal is a true thing.

And yet, Christ did not revolt against authority. He accepted the imperial authority of the Roman Empire and paid tribute. He endured the ecclesiastical authority of the Jewish Church, and would not repel its violence by any violence of his own. He had, as I said before, no scheme for the reconstruction of society. But the modern world has schemes. It proposes to do away with poverty, and the suffering that it entails. It desires to get rid of pain, and the suffering that pain entails. It trusts to Socialism and to Science as its methods. What it aims at is an Individualism expressing itself through joy. This Individualism will be larger, fuller, lovelier than any Individualism has ever been. Pain is not the ultimate mode of perfection. It is merely provisional and a protest. It has reference to wrong, unhealthy, unjust surroundings. When the wrong, and the disease, and the injustice are removed, it will have no further place. It was a great work, but it is almost over. Its sphere lessens every day.

Nor will man miss it. For what man has sought for is, indeed, neither pain nor pleasure, but simply Life. Man has sought to live intensely, fully, perfectly. When he can do so without exercising restraint on others, or suffering it ever, and his activities are all pleasurable to him, he will be saner, healthier, more civilized, more himself. Pleasure is Nature’s test, her sign of approval. When man is happy, he is in harmony with himself and his environment. The new Individualism, for whose service Socialism, whether it wills it or not, is working, will be perfect harmony. It will be what the Greeks sought for, but could not, except in Thought, realize completely, because they had slaves, and fed them; it will be what the Renaissance sought for, but could not realize completely except in Art, because they had slaves, and starved them. It will be complete, and through it each man will attain to his perfection. The new Individualism is the new Hellenism.

What it says, over at The Poor Man (and make sure you read the comments).

[via Adam Kotsko.]

British Spin suggested that I might comment on this piece on Isaiah Berlin by Hywel Williams in today’s Guardian. I was going to stick this response in Spin’s comments box, but have a memory of his comments box being one of those that chews up long comments or otherwise makes them vanish without trace. So here goes.

Spin: Yes: it’s a stupid article about Berlin. It’s not entirely stupid — I’ll come back to that in a moment — but it contains some ridiculous assertions:

(1) To say of his formulation of the distinction between -ve and +ve liberty, for example, that “On this slender and obvious insight a major self-serving academic industry was built” isn’t really good enough. It’s true that Berlin’s essay has inspired a lot of commentary, but to describe this literature as commentary on a “slender and obvious insight” is foolish, and to dismiss it in a sentence like this is philistine. (I think Williams is also wrong to characterise this distinction as the “core” to Berlin’s teaching, which I — and John Gray, a more reliable guide to Berlin’s thought than Williams — would argue is his teaching of value pluralism.)

(2) To accuse Berlin of erecting “a kind of Classic FM version of the history of ideas” is silly. Berlin’s historiography often has problems, but they aren’t Classic FM-like problems.

(3) It’s slack to refer to his “highly selective anti-totalitarianism” without saying a bit more about just what you mean by this vague claim.

I haven’t seen the new collection of letters, so can’t see how much of his critique Williams is digging out of them. But this article to me reads like a bastardised summary of a much better, much longer article, which is the piece Christopher Hitchens published on Berlin after he died, first in the pages of the London Review of Books as “Moderation or Death” (26.11.1998), then reprinted as “Goodbye to Berlin” in Unacknowledged Legislation, pp.138-164.

And that’s a classic Hitchens hit-piece. In fact, I’ll go out on a limb here: I think it’s quite the best thing he’s written, with his 1989 review of Noel Annan’s Our Age in second place. Hitchens covers a great deal of ground, is fiercely, repeatedly, entertainingly critical, and he seems to me to get quite a lot of things right. (But then I never belonged to the Berlin fan club, so perhaps I would say that, wouldn’t I?) But that’s the place to go if you want to read the full charge sheet.

And yes, Berlin was quite the Cold Warrior — if not “just another Cold Warrior”, as Williams suggests. In Hitchens’s words: “In every instance given by Ignatieff [Berlin’s biographer], or known to me, from the Cold War through Algeria to Suez to Vietnam, Berlin strove to find a high ‘liberal’ justification either for the status quo or for the immediate needs of the conservative authorities…” That seems to me to be about right.

But if you want Isaiah Berlin bloggerage, you don’t go to me or to the Timberites, but straight to Josh Cherniss. He’s the Berliniac of the blogosphere, and he’s your man.

P.S. Spin: I don’t much like Vico and Herder at all, at least, not the Vico sections: if memory serves, Berlin spins a story about a Counter-Enlightenment figure, an anachronistic lone genius who’s into relativism and value pluralism, all of which which seems to me to get Vico radically, decisively, implausibly wrong. But what do I know?

I’ve been rereading C. L. R. James’s Beyond A Boundary, and it’s just as good second time around.

It has a couple of good blurbs on the back of my paperback, which I’ll just spit out here for fun:

[1] “Great claims have been made for Beyond a Boundary since its first appearance in 1963: that it is the greatest sports book ever written; that it brings the outsider a privileged insight into West Indian culture; that it is a severe examination of the colonial condition. All are true.” [Sunday Times][2] And, my favourite: “A mental landscape triangulated by literature, socialism and cricket represents an ideal we should all aspire to, and this ennobling and beautifully written book should be read by anyone with the slightest interest in any one of the above.” [The Guardian (Matthew Engel? Or someone else?)]

But the question is a straightforward one: are there any other sports books that are remotely as good, interesting and intelligent as this one?(Note to avoid misunderstanding: the question isn’t asked because I think sportswriting tends to be bad, uninteresting and unintelligent. There are lots of good sports books. At least, I think so. The question is, whether there’s anything else quite this good among the ranks of the better ones. And if anyone has any candidates, I’d like to know what they might be. I suppose they’re most likely to turn out to be about baseball or boxing.)

Does W. always use the phrase “bring to justice” as a straightforward synonym for “kill”, or is it just my overheated imagination at work again?

[Question prompted by the most inarticulate part of his press conference last night, which led me to this 2002 interview, which prompted various memories of his use of the phrase in the past.]

[via Norm via various others]

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

The closest book to me right now is Butler & Butler’s British Political Facts 1900-2000. But p.23 doesn’t really have sentences, just a lot of data about the ministerial composition of the 1945-51 Labour Government. So I’m going to reach for the second nearest book, Ralph Miliband’s The State in Capitalist Society, and I’m pleased to report that the fifth sentence on p.23 is both short and enigmatic on its own: “It is rather to determine whether such a class exists at all.”

Ernest Bevin, trade unionist and Foreign Secretary; born 9 March 1881, died 14 April 1951.

Vladimir Mayakovksy, the greatest of all the Russian futurist poets; born 19 July 1893, died 14 April 1930.

Comrade life, let us march faster,
March faster through what’s left of the five-year plan.

UPDATE [1pm]: Sarah has a bit more.

Simone de Beauvoir, born 9 January 1908, died 14 April 1986. Socialist, feminist and existentialist philosopher.UPDATE [15.4.2004]: SIAW has more.

The Penultimate Part.

For clarification of what follows, I’ll just say that a cenobite (or coenobite) is the opposite of an anchorite (or anchoret). Hope that helps.

(Notice also the comment on medievalism below, which could almost count as an intervention in the commentary surrounding Gibson’s Passion of the Christ…)

Earlier instalments: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV, XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII, XIX, XX.

“The Soul of Man Under Socialism” by Oscar Wilde, Part Twenty-One

Sympathy with pain there will, of course, always be. It is one of the first instincts of man. The animals which are individual, the higher animals, that is to say, share it with us. But it must he remembered that while sympathy with joy intensifies the sum of joy in the world, sympathy with pain does not really diminish the amount of pain. It may make man better able to endure evil, but the evil remains. Sympathy with consumption does not cure consumption; that is what science does. And when Socialism has solved the problem of poverty, and Science solved the problem of disease, the area of the sentimentalists will be lessened, and the sympathy of man will be large, healthy, and spontaneous. Man will have joy in the contemplation of the joyous lives of others.

For it is through joy that the Individualism of the future will develop itself. Christ made no attempt to reconstruct society, and consequently the Individualism that He preached to man could be realised only through pain or in solitude. The ideals that we owe to Christ are the ideals of the man who abandons society entirely, or of the man who resists society absolutely. But man is naturally social. Even the Thebaid became peopled at last. And though the cenobite realizes his personality, it is often an impoverished personality that he so realizes. Upon the other hand, the terrible truth that pain is a mode through which man may realize himself exercizes a wonderful fascination over the world. Shallow speakers and shallow thinkers in pulpits and on platforms often talk about the world’s worship of pleasure, and whine against it. But it is rarely in the world’s history that its ideal has been one of joy and beauty. The worship of pain has far more often dominated the world. Medievalism, with its saints and martyrs, its love of self-torture, its wild passion for wounding itself, its gashing with knives, and its whipping with rods — Medievalism is real Christianity, and the mediaeval Christ is the real Christ. When the Renaissance dawned upon the world, and brought with it the new ideals of the beauty of life and the joy of living, men could not understand Christ. Even Art shows us that. The painters of the Renaissance drew Christ as a little boy playing with another boy, in a palace or a garden, or lying back in his mother’s arms, smiling at her, or at a flower, or at a bright bird; or as a noble, stately figure moving nobly through the world; or as a wonderful figure rising in a sort of ecstasy from death to life. Even when they drew him crucified, they drew Him as a beautiful God on whom evil men had inflicted suffering. But he did not preoccupy them much. What delighted them was to paint the men and women whom they admired, and to show the loveliness of this lovely earth. They painted many religious pictures — in fact, they painted far too many; and the monotony of type and motive is wearisome and was bad for art. It was the result of the authority of the public in art-matters, and it is to be deplored. But their soul was not in the subject. Raphael was a great artist when he painted his portrait of the Pope. When he painted his Madonnas and infant Christs, he was not a great artist at all. Christ had no message for the Renaissance, which was wonderful because it brought an ideal at variance with his, and to find the presentation of the real Christ we must go to medieval art. There he is one maimed and marred; one who is not comely to look on, because Beauty is a joy; one who is not in fair raiment, because that may be a joy also: he is a beggar who has a marvellous soul; he is a leper whose soul is divine; he needs neither property nor health; he is a God realising his perfection through pain.

[Final instalment coming soon… Be patient.]

You should go and hang your head in shame
The way you tried to ruin my name;
You even tried to put the blame
On me when all along ’twas you…
You was breakin’ every sacred vow,
You didn’t worry where or how;
I hope that you are payin’ for
The way you left me cryin’ here alone and blue.With your fast talk and your smile so sweet
I let you sweep me off my feet;
I thought my life would be complete
To have you for my very own…
Like a sailboat with no wind around
I had no power to to turn you down;
You had your way with me till you
Retired and went your way and left me here alone.

What a shame the way you made me fall,
I gave my heart, my soul, my all
And answered to your lovesick call
And hoped some day I’d be your wife…
But the only thing you gave to me
Was bitter tears and misery;
I may be wrong but - seems to me - that
You should pay for what you’ve done ‘cos you have ruined my life.

The only recording I have by Wilma Lee Cooper is of her singing “You Tried To Ruin My Name”, which is on O Sister: The Women’s Bluegrass Collection, a compilation disc that was released to cash in on the popularity of bluegrass, roots, etc. music in the wake of the excellent film O Brother Where Art Thou. And it’s a fantastic recording. Now I know next to nothing else about her — not even what year this recording was made — apart from what it says on this page here. So if any readers of this page turn out to be Wilma Lee afficionados, please tell me in the Comments what it is that I need to know about her and her music, and which records (if any) are worth trying to acquire.UPDATE [12.20pm]: Not quite true. I see that my iPod also contains a recording of “Are You Walking And A-Talking For The Lord?” by Wilma Lee & Stanley Cooper and the Clinch Mountain Clan, which came off the Columbia Country Classics (The Golden Age) Volume 1 disc.

I’ve never watched it myself, but I’m told that Magdalen College won University Challenge last night, which means that I’ll have even more undergraduate application files to wade through than usual at the end of the year…

Less well observed than Magdalen’s unprecedented domination of the modern [i.e., Paxman] incarnation of University Challenge (three wins in the last half dozen years or so) is this College’s almost comparable domination of the world of politics commentary. In addition to providing just about the entire senior editorial staff of The Economist, there’s a surprising number of Magdalen people running politics blogs out there, including current undergraduates (Uninformed Jason and at least one other), former undergraduates (Matthew Turner, Andrew Sullivan), current postgraduates (David Adesnik of the Oxblog), former political theory tutors (Chris Bertram of Crooked Timber), current political theory tutors (well, me), and other assorted hangers-on (Mike Smithson of Political Betting). There may be many more…