Whether happiness may be found in political change

Dalrymple's essay in the current City Journal is unlocked now. It is a little wandering, but as always it is rewarding to read him. He quotes John Stuart Mill's self-reflection on happiness and political change:

Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?” And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, “No!” At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for.

It is humbling to compare my own experience, not all that different in nature, with Mill's. In 2000, when it briefly looked as though Gore would win on the day of the election, it was as though my own hope for the future was dying. For an hour I was inconsolable, though strangely I was not a great supporter of Bush himself. The sudden access of grief and despair, so manifestly out of proportion to a mere election, shocked me into a thorough examination of not just my beliefs but the place they had in my life; my political maturity began that day. Yet Mill was able to ask himself this question of his own genius, without the rough impetus of a noisy campaign and political defeat.

Like Mill, I was young, though at 25, not so very young. Unlike Mill, whose remarkable genius had been paired from early childhood with an astonishing education, I had been happy only to try to make sense of the world through comparatively scanty reading; he, of course, had already constructed a philosophical view of considerable power. Yet the same falsehood had gripped us both, the belief that a rightly ordered world would bring happiness, not just to a greater number of men, but personally; that the work of increasing happiness in the world is at one with working towards one's own happiness. Escaping that falsehood means abandoning the hope that all the struggle to learn about man (for ethics, economics, and politics are only branches of the study of man) has any meaning beyond the pleasure of learning itself.

Minds of great power, like Mill's, may alter the world a little, but then again they may not, and the changes worked often bear little resemblance to the intention. I doubt Mill would approve of the excesses of libertarianism, despite its closest resemblance to his thought; he did not mean to include the exuberant hedonism libertarians so often present as their highest good. Nor again would the use of cold utilitarian calculus to justify great cruelty to a few suit his character, yet it might well be that such abuses in the 20th century by totalitarians would have been harder to dress in a presentable rhetoric without Mill's work. Thoughts die as well; we scarcely know if Pythagoras really existed or what Heraclitus meant, even in the little of his writing that survives. If great minds can little expect to know the consequences of their thoughts, or even to see effects at all, lesser minds must expect no return on their efforts.

Thus the happiness in the study of man can be nothing more than the happiness in learning itself. Imlac describes the pleasure of knowledge (I think it is safe to take this as Johnson's own opinion) in Rasselas:

Knowledge is certainly one of the means of pleasure, as is confessed by the natural desire which every mind feels of increasing its ideas. Ignorance is mere privation, by which nothing can be produced; it is a vacuity in which the soul sits motionless and torpid for want of attraction, and, without knowing why, we always rejoice when we learn, and grieve when we forget. I am therefore inclined to conclude that if nothing counteracts the natural consequence of learning, we grow more happy as our minds take a wider range.

That man is so various, so utterly resistant to reduction to a system, makes his nature a study that can bring happiness for a lifetime. And yet it is so painful to learn about man and see it bear so little fruit! Imlac himself faults ignorance because it produces nothing, yet how much does the study of man produce? I have learned a little better to preserve an aequus animus; that is an increase in my happiness, at the cost of some intense pleasures; I have learned, a little, to hear the underlying sense in men's incoherence; that is an increase in happiness, though at the cost of alienation of words from sense; I have learned at last and greatest cost how tenuous are the threads that tie reason to the self; a slight understanding, that forgives much and costs more. Little enough; and when I die it will pass away with me. Surely happiness, though the emotion of it may fade, ought in its essence to partake of eternity?

I can easily believe that my mind is simply too weak to learn enough to win an unambiguous increase in personal happiness above the happiness of learning itself, but it does not seem that anyone has ever had a strong enough mind. There is, then, no happiness to be found either in contributing to the right formation of society or in the understanding of man that must precede a correct theory of society. In the end, I can only believe that in good or bad thought, in well or badly ordered societies, in knowledge or ignorance, there can be more or less happiness in the world, but only the pleasure of the learning falls to the learner, and to whom the excess or deficiency of happiness falls is the work of chance alone.

Inaugural poem

Elizabeth Alexander's poem could hardly have been worse, except by being longer. The response to it explains how poetry has become a personal hobby, like knitting. In Samuel Johnson's day, a poem that bad would be mocked savagely; today, the expected response is to ignore the poem itself in favor of congratulating the poet for the sincerity of her emotion. It is like complimenting the knitter on the color of the yarn. Well, poetry used to aspire to more than keeping you warm. It is not just the lack of any meter or rhyme, though that loss hurts, but the wandering diction and vague thoughts that make it such a bad poem.

Alexander is deaf to all sense of words; how else can this highly unfortunate evocation of the chicken crossing the road be explained?

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark
the will of some one and then others, who said
I need to see what's on the other side.

Yes, others did say that: they were chickens.

John Derbyshire and the Asia Times complained about these lines especially:

Love beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light,
love with no need to pre-empt grievance.

I might have an explanation for the wretched confusion in the last line. One of the difficulties for racial activists in the U.S. is that nearly everyone wants to help and to see disadvantaged people get on, which I think is what she means by love here, but most people expect that in return the people who are helped will stop feeling so aggrieved. Since in African-American studies existential grievance exceeds honest affection for black American and African history, Alexander as a professor of African-American Studies would intuitively feel that grievance is not a negative term and that love might threaten it.

It is of course also a mistake to think that someone with a grievance will be happier and less aggrieved after being helped. Charity itself is a grievance.

Politicians

Dalrymple on politicians.

A political conversation

Overheard at work:

[A sentence or two I missed, except for the word campaign.]
A: I'm so glad it's almost done and it's going to be ok.
B: Oh I know, it's such a relief.
A: I can't believe how bad McCain has been.
B: Yeah I used to think he had a brain but now...
A: Yeah he just doesn't have a brain.
B: [trying to be fair] Well, he hasn't been using his brain.
I: [turn headphones way up]

A and B are both quite nice. A is a MoveOn/AirAmerica fan but from having been forced to hear her frequently I don't think she actually knows what she's listening to. Very much a politics-as-identity-and-lifestyle sort of person. B is very sweet and it's a credit to her commonsense that she spends, as far as I can tell, no time thinking about politics except when it shows up in funny videos. Or in the case of Saturday Night Live, "funny" videos. It's just barely conceivable that B would have voted for McCain, if the press coverage of him had remained as adulatory as it was in 2000 or 2004.

McCain will almost certainly never be president, but by betraying his party and his own former principles for cheap popularity with journalists, he convinced two people that he had a brain at one point but then later lost it or did not use it. That is radiant political genius even a thistle has to love.

Joie de vive

I had not read Dalrymple's review of La stratégie des antilopes before posting my definition of politics, but it is very much on point and as always with him well worth reading. In talking only of the irritation of community, I failed to include the positive joy that man has in destroying other men. It is hardly news to me but still a natural omission, since I tend much, much more to irritation than joy in destruction. However alien it seems to me, history and the daily newspaper show that some large part of mankind rejoices in violence for its own sake. Politics has to constrain that impulse as well, and while it does not explain the genocide, it is still noteworthy that politics had completely broken down long before the genocide. There is no polity when some men think other men are lower than roaches.

The idea that other men do wrong by existing shows up here:

Rwandan Prime Minister Jean Kambanda revealed, in his testimony before the International Criminal Tribunal, that the genocide was openly discussed in cabinet meetings and that "one cabinet minister said she was personally in favor of getting rid of all Tutsi; without the Tutsi, she told ministers, all of Rwanda's problems would be over."

Had the Hutu succeeded and been left without any foreign interference afterward, that minister would have discovered soon enough, as Stalin and Hitler did, that no matter how many groups you kill there is always another group of people who are the source of all problems.

Politics is not ethics

Adam Kirsch, who is reliably good and interesting, has an article about a Cambridge neo-Leninist's attack on Nozick and that dreary fraud Rawls. Nozick is, and probably always will be, a blank to me, since I decided quite a while ago that ethics is the most worthless subject known to man, but Rawls was inflicted on me before that decision. Rawls is in fact largely responsible for it, because a cruel satirist could not contrive a more self-satisfied, woolly-headed, base-stealing cloudcuckoolander yet ethicists have made him their king. My dislike for ethics is too long for this post, see the next one.

Kirsch's essay needs no comment in itself, but he quotes the neo-Leninist saying something commonplace that struck me for the first time with its utter strangeness: he rejected the idea that "politics is applied ethics." The neo-Leninist wants to say that politics is power inflicting its will, blah blah rampant reification blah, but the really startling thing is the idea that politics should ever have been considered ethics, applied or otherwise. Politics is the art of living in a city, beginning, middle, and end. Polis for city of course, though "in a city" is more simply put "together." Though man's purest misery is isolation, other people are intolerable to him. What each of us really, most sincerely desires is that there be many people about us, but that their wills, tastes, and actions not interfere with ours. That is, each man wants to be with other men but for all that makes them other men to be removed. Since those other men rudely persist in being what they are (this by the way is the genius of A Confederacy of Dunces), we are each of us continually abraded, forestalled, confined, in a word crossed in everything.

The first instinct of man is to fix that by making the most egregious obstacles vanish, and magic being lacking, murder is the preferred solution and politics the faute de mieux. Politics works pretty well for quite a few reasons. For instance, it lets interests combine and separate in ways that are more subtle than warlords changing sides on the battlefield, which permits interests to be more slender and more numerous than they would be if each had to field an army. The more interests there are, each convinced that politics will work best for it, the less likely any one interest, and the men who make it up, will either run away with the whole boodle or give up on the process and start stabbing.

So much, so Federalist Papers. I think the most effective parts of politics are much simpler. Bodies moving through space and words in our ears feel freighted with significance. Politics turns those wellsprings of meaning to the purpose of soothing irritated wills. Parades, elections, the pomp and formality of Congress, every arbitrary and ridiculous rite, all build up a sense of meaningfulness that encourages each to grant to the others some trust and sufferance. All that meaning must derive from some real thing, right? There must really be a State, if it the rites of the state feel so very important and real. For the sake of something so important and real, it is not asking much to listen a little, and so persuasion can begin. Politicians sing their songs, and the singing makes the wills of other men less irksome, by clarifying my will, dissembling your will, tarting up his will. Looking for rational, connected thought in a politician's speech is as silly as looking for sustained rationality in any song. Songs carry their sense in their sound. By singing and dancing together, crossgrained man becomes one of a tribe, a city, a nation, when by his cold and silent will alone he can only endure the role of tyrant. It is merely refinement wrought by time that the songs are long-winded speeches and the dances called parades and parliamentary procedure.

Politics is living together without wholesale murder. Look what happens to countries that try to get beyond politics, Germany Russia China Cambodia Korea.... 1 party, 100% victories in elections, and up to 20% murdered. How I wish St. Barry, St. Joe, and St. John would think, before puffing up with hot air, "They only prefer me to a skull heap."