Hitchens RIP

Hitchens once jokingly explained that terrorism, in American Govspeak, is an incoherent term that means anything from combatant to “swarthy opponent of American foreign policy.”

That was in the eighties, when Hitchens had a grasp of the linguistic cunning that makes for the politics of reaction. In the 00s, when Hitchens became famous, that grasp had slipped. It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that Hitchens ruined his prose when he, too, decided that terrorism is defined by “swarthy opponent of American foreign policy,” for in that decision he both rubbished his own ability to understand the nexus of power and definition that makes for propaganda, and he became one of the fruitier of the right’s propagandists, an atheist Bob Novak. Slate, at the moment, is in official mourning for Hitchens, who was a columnist there after he jumped ship from the Nation. This is rather like John Wilkes Booth donning mourning for Abe Lincoln. Slate’s infinitely meretricious reporting-plus-punditry presented just the sort of gaseous, inside the Beltway conventional wisdom (which, in an audacious P.R. move, the editors dubbed contrarianism) that killed Hitchens’ prose. His “Fighting Words” column was written in the same style that an owl digests its prey – everything is quickly swallowed, and then the bones are spit out. Thus, Hitchens would survey some vast subject that he was manifestly uninformed about – Iraq, for instance – and he would then emit a number of parenthesis long bellows, vaguely connected by his personal experience, which was all Lawrence of Arabia without Arabia, the man of action without the action. The symbol of the contradiction was  Hitchens being waterboarded for the celebrity mag, Vanity Fair. As a young writer, Hitchens would surely have enjoyed the reduction of the issue of torture to a photo op next to the story about Angelinia Jolie's wonderful bosom; but of course, in the D.C. where Hitchens was most at home, the sensibility that understands the difference between photo op and action has long vanished.

That D.C. found its voice in Hitchens.  Some of his most stirring columns were, in fact, in defense of chicken hawkery among those who, with great sacrifice, guide the foreign policy of the great American empire. One of them, Paul Wolfowitz, who, after being wheeled from one job he was incompetent at – in the State Department – to another job he was incompetent at – at the World Bank – was removed from his sinecure after insisting the institution pay for his mistress too, was lamented in truly pitiful tones by Hitchens, who by this time had imbibed the views of Doctor Strangelove about the need for elite males to have on had a steady supply of nubile females. But Wolfowitz was only one of the indefensibles that Hitchens buddied up to in his last years, a roll call that includes Kurdish gangsters, lowbrowed Cheneyites from the Hoover institute, and, of course, Ahmed Chalabi, the perfect 00s freedom fighter, with a biography that combined instances of Enron-like fraud with instances of peculating U.S. Government funds to an extent that would have been considered bold by Halliburtan.

Perhaps it was the contradiction between holding himself up as a moral entrepreneur – for Hitchens’ later political columns were rank with his own virtues – and keeping such evidently immoral company that did in the writer in Hitchens. There were traces of that writer even in the book on Clinton: but the writer definitely died after 9/11. Hitchens survived him and flourished in the moronic inferno of Bush’s America. He succumbs on the day that America withdraws its troops from Iraq. Surely he would have endorsed his hero, John McCain’s description of that withdrawal as a dark day for American foreign policy – it will make it that much harder to march to Teheran.

Merit and dreams

(from here)

I looked, last night, for a passage in Cioran where, as he discusses what he sees as the decline of Europe into bourgeois comfort (he is writing in the fifties), he makes a passing remark that we are all equal in our dreams. I couldn’t find the exact words, but as I remember the passage, he is speaking literally: while our waking lives may be structured by numerous and overwhelming inequalities, there is neither wealth, fame, nor competition in dreaming: we dream alone. And in this sense, radical egalitarianism is not a political credo so much as a natural historical fact about human beings. A good third of our lives, our lives when asleep, are equal.

Cioran does not go any further with this idea; but it seems to me that it deserves more than to die in that undiscoverable passage, another philosophical “crack” that one forgets. Rather, I think it gives us an angle on the strange career of egalitarianism in our time.

I would develop the idea by matching it with a passage from another great essayist, Roberto Calasso. In an essay on Karl Kraus’ war on public opinion, Calasso puts  his finger on another radically equalizing moment in modernity: that of public opinion.

Calasso links the rise of public opinion to the Enlightenment, in line with a recent trend among historians who have found a use for the notion of the public sphere to explain certain traits about the 18^th and 19^th century in Europe and the U.S. Calasso, however, is after a tension between the Enlightenment utopia of the tabula rasa, able to “endure the total abrasion of meaning produced by an all consuming nominalism”, and the emergence of public opinion. If the Republic of the tabula rasa led to a constant reign of virtuous terror, the epistemological search for the tabula rasa led to a contradiction. For in fact, Calasso claims, the public mind is neither blank nor inhabited by Descartes innate ideas – rather it is inhabited by opinions. And of opinions, the opinion is: “One opinion is as good as another: The abyss yawns in this commonplace as in every other.”

That particular abyss has been plumbed extensively by the great pessimists – Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Leon Bloy, Kraus - and Calasso himself, who all share the theme first announced in Plato’s dialogues, which is that opinion is a bad epistemological object. However, I have never been convinced by this argument and its arriere pensée, which is a contempt for the people. My impulse, on the contrary, is to take hold of another piece of the great Platonic whale – the idea that doxa, in the chain of being, is halfway between the real – the ideas – and the unreal – their images, or the physical world. That doxa exist only halfway puts them on the same plane as dreams. In this way, public opinions are part of the great public dreamlife. Now, one might object that opinions aren’t the same as dreams, and I’d agree to an extent. The difference is made by waking. However, one should not overestimate waking. In a formal sense, waking is a break with dreaming, but it is so only to the extent that consciousness succeeds in substituting its strong sense of externality for the insulation of dreams. In fact, of course, we carry that insulation about with us in our ordinary life, a depthless pocket that we become uneasily aware of when we drop something in it – the typo, the address we forgot, bad luck and fuckups, a whole day’s worth of silent muttering and inattentions.

It is against this psychological and existential background that one should examine the last instantiation of the Enlightenment utopia, meritocracy. The version current in America is tht disparities of wealth and income should correspond to disparities in merit. Some students did the homework and got As, some didn’t and got Fs.

This, it should be said, is a curiously childish way of seeing the world, and could only have been developed in that Asperger’s paradise of a discipline, economics. To return to Plato again, what this idea does is shift the focus entirely from the thing done to the external reward for doing it. In so doing, the thing done is curiously emptied of all merit on its own, all glory. The perfect meritocracy would be one in which the thing done requires a highly developed amount of skill, and is absolutely pointless. Thus, it should be correspondingly awarded with showers of external reward. This is an exact representation of the current financial services sector, at least in its higher reaches.

But if we reverse the values and forces in play, here, we might find room for both merit and egalitarianism. Or at least that was the dream entertained by the most solitary of men in the forest of Saint Germane in 1753. 

water pistol Juntas

When looking at the story of capitalism and the rise of the European powers, it is striking to see forms of organization appear on the periphery before they migrate to the center. For instance, the work discipline of the factory in 19th century England seems to replicate forms of work discipline created for the sugar 'factories' in the West Indies of the 17th century. In 19th century England, the work discipline was imposed on 'free labor', and in Jamaica, it was imposed on slaves. Yet, if we look away from the changes implied by this transformation of the working agent, we see a continuity of form, or at least the production of an organizational form that can be transposed.  And, unlike serf labor in Central Europe, for instance, this slave labor is relatively free of the codes that define its rights and hedge in the transmission of property and title by the owners.

A similar movement from the periphery to the center seems to be happening in the counter-revolution that is now occuring in all developed countries. What happened to the LDCs in the 80s - the less developed countries - is now being served up to the Developed Countries. It is an interesting mix of fiction and terror.

The eighties are the 'lost decade' in Latin America because they are the decade in which the program of the Washington Consensus, as it came to be know, were imposed on Latin American counties. The weapon by which they were lashed into this madness was debt - combined of course with the military regimes that had been put in place in the sixties and seventies as part of the U.S.'s cold war strategy. And the result of the WC was a major drop in the living standards of the majority of the population, and an end, almost, to growth. While the 50s and the 60s saw tremendous growth in Latin America, and an uneven but perceptible distribution of more wealth to the wage and working class, in the 80s this stopped dead. What emerged in the nineties were 'good countries', like Mexico, that devoted the government to obeying the banks, notably IMF. The IMF model, however, suffered a severe blow when Argentina refused to go along with the usual medicine in 2000, and the U.S. grip on the region began to loosen.

Well, the Washington consensus has migrated, at last, to the developed world. The whole world is now being held up by bankers holding waterpistols to our head. And this threat without a real weapon - for no developed state really needs to obey the bankers, who after all have no police force to arrest it (unlike the Latin American states, where the U.S. could whip up a junta in a heartbeat) - is, to the general amazement of the non-numb among us, being obeyed to the last tittle and jot. 

In the 80s, the police were, in effect, the developed nations. However, beginning, perhaps, with Bush in 2000, the Developed Nations have given birth to the smokeless coup. This coup does not involved armed might - it involves merely taken unelected institutions, such as a court of a central bank, and making them the center of a completely undemocratic seizure of political power, on behalf of the wealthiest people on earth. There aren't, we should remind ourselves, too many wealthy people. And yet the police of every Developed country on earth have been toiling away for wealthy people and locking up demonstrators, cracking down on any demonstration of discontent, and raiding any leaks of information inconvenient to the establishment. The resistence to all of this has been tame beyond reckoning. The self-policing extends all the way up through the discourse - nobody who writes for a major paper or magazine, or who broadcasts, ever couches the new Washington Consensus junta society in terms that would offend your average civics class teacher. 

What would such terms be? Well, for instance, we would start saying: who is all this money owed to? And: can't we simply upset those bankers by taking away their money, one two three, without a by your leave. If sovereign debt is such a problem, we could easily raise the money to pay it by slapping, say, one hundred percent taxes on all bond transactions, and we can use that money to buy the bonds. And absurd solution to an absurd political situation - not an economic one. The question of debt is a question of class. The political class and the financial elite are one, united, and they drive our politics in ways that advantage the financial elite, who use money loaned them, by the governments, to loan money back to the governments. Oh, not directly - rather, by propping up the financial service sector's enterprises, we prop up the places where the bodn dealers work and trade.  

The debt issue is, then, one of those fictions that bear such weight because they serve the interest of a certain power. It isn't that the establishment doesn't believe in its fiction - much as the Aztec priest definitely believed that it was necessary to cut out the heart of a prisoner to appease the gods and continue the course of the world, the elite believe it is necessary to cut out the heart of the middle class to appease the abstract God of Debt, to whom we owe so much. My solution is the radical one of the Lord's prayer - in which we have prettified and made metaphoric the common sense suggestion that we forgive debt every day. Debt. Which is as material as the feeling of the edge of a coin. Forgiving debt is the heart of civilization. And - in this age of the internet, where all that is money has become bytes - it is divinely easy to do it. It is always the sovereign who actually enforces laws to force debters to pay creditors. When the power of the sovereign is calmly and cooly taken from the hands of the people and invested in the hands of ex employees of Goldman Sachs, they switch sides - from being the borrowers for the people, they become the creditors for the banks. 

This is, obviously, going to be a lost decade for the Developed countries. But I'm hopeful that the new Junta order will be, at best, short lived. The arithmatic that counts is not how much debt is owed, but the ratio of the creditor population to the debtor population. I'd keep my eye on the latter, for, given the logic of the counterrevolution we are seeing, the time is approaching when the the banker's water pistol will be jerked out of his hand and turned upon him. And, magically, in that moment it will become a real pistol, with a heft and insistance that will change the power relationship all, all at once.

Jamie Dimon actually thinks he is successful

James Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase, said in a speech to stockholders yesterday, "Acting like everyone who's been successful is badand that everyone who is rich is bad,” he said. “I just don't get it."  

It is hard to know what to respond to first: the fact that he is clueless, or the fact that he thinks he is successful.

Rich, yes he is rich. But rich is not the same as successful. Often, rich is the opposite of successful. Rich is the symptom of a system that has allocated its resources illogically, responding to the kind of power differentials that are at the heart of rentseeking and monopoly. On Dimon's scale, Idi Amin was successful. Even in the narrow field of bank management, Dimon has been anything but successful. As the head of JP Morgan Chase in 2008, Dimon's leadership essentially led the bank to the brink of bankruptcy, and it would have gone over if  if the Fed hadn't thoughtfully chosen to 'loan' it emergency money to the amount of 391 billion dollars - at 1 percent interest or below. Here's a nugget from Business Week:

"JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon told shareholders in March 2010 that his bank used the Fed's Term Auction Facility “at the request of the Federal Reserve to help motivate others to use the system.” He didn't say that the New York-based bank's total TAF borrowings were almost twice its cash holdings or that its peak borrowing of $48 billion came more than a year after the program's creation." 

In other words, if we judge success by an ability to operate as an insider and a parasite on a national scale, he's successful. If we judge success as, well, running a bank that contributes to the wellbeing of society and the creation of wealth, he is the very opposite of successful. He is rust. He is mold. He is the element that creeps and crawls, bores and bites, and turns wealth into dust. As Jeremiah, who had an eye for the Dimon type, put it:  "As the partridge sitteth on eggs, and hatcheth them not; so he that getteth riches, and not by right, shall leave them in the midst of his days, and at his end shall be a fool."

Anyway, let's look into the bones of his comments. He then announced that, according to his calculations – made no doubt with his fingers crossed behind his back -  he is paying 50 percent of his income in income taxes, state and federal. But one has only to look at his Business week profile – which is different from his Forbes profile, such are the 75 ways to see a CEO’s compensation package -- to see that his real income is in stock options. According to Forbes, he has a cool 58,968,234.00 that are currently exercisable. According to Businessweek, he has 31,089,284. The Forbes profile doesn’t include the happy little bonus he got of 5 million dollars, but both sources agree he did make a million dollars in salary. What does this mean? Well, remember that it means, firstly, a tax writeoff for JP Morgan – sweetly enough, Congress has decided that companies can write off the expense of stock options they grant to their execs against their corporate taxes. How convenient! And then it means that when Dimon wants to exercise his options, and he does it after waiting the approved period, 2 years,  he will pay an astonishingly low 15 percent on the amount.  But will he really pay that amount? Or will he exercise his options in such a way that they are run through the increasingly popular tax haven system, so as to avoid hits to the millions and millions for running a bank that exists simply because Lord Bernanke the Lesser looked upon it and decided lo, it was good - and created some money ex nihilo and loaned that money to it.

So mark it down: Dimon, after being bailed out by the government,  is complaining that 3 million dollars (an improbable sum, but lets pretend that his casual remarks correspond to his  accountant’s results) is going to be taken from his six million dollars, and at some date the government will even take 15 percent from his 20 million in stock options, leaving the poor man with a mere 21 million + dollars for 2011. 

One can not call this phenomenon successful, save in the way that freaks and frauds that beguile a gullible audience are successful. Mark the man for what he is: like a partridge that sits on eggs that will not hatch, he is a fool, a deadbeat, a loser with a bonus, another plutocratic mediocrity.

Here's another observation from Jeremiah about the end of systems in which creatures like Dimon experience success:

Because my people hath forgotten me, they have burned incense to vanity, and they have caused them to stumble in their ways from the ancient paths, to walk in paths, in a way not cast up;

16 To make their land desolate, and a perpetual hissing; every one that passeth thereby shall be astonished, and wag his head.

17 I will scatter them as with an east wind before the enemy; I will shew them the back, and not the face, in the day of their calamity.

  

The Forest Books

“All European culture – intellectual not less than material – came out of the woods.” Werner Sombart, Moderne Kapitalismus, Vol. 2


The symbolic key to Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of inequality is found in the circumstances of its writing, as Rousseau described them in the Confessions:

“In order to meditate at my ease on this great subject, I made a trip of seven or eight days to Saint-Germain with Therese, and our hostess, who was a good woman, and one of her friends. I count this excursion among the most agreeable ones of my life. The weather was beautiful. The good women took upon themselves the trip’s expenses and organization. Thérèse enjoyed herself with them, and I, without a care, I spent happy hours at mealtime, and for the rest of the day, plunged into the forest, I searched, I discovered there images of the first time, of which I proudly traced the history. I put my hands on the little lies of men, I dared to strip their nature naked, follow the progress of time and things which defigured them, and comparing man with natural man, show them, the true source of their miseries in their so called perfections. My soul, exalted by these sublime contemplations, was elevated to the side of the Divinity; and seeing from there my likenesses, followed, in the blind route of their prejudices, that of their errors, of their sorrows, of their crimes, I cried aloud to them in a feeble voice that they could not hear. Foolish men, who ceaselessly complain about nature, learn that all your woes come from you yourselves!”

The return to the forest makes the Discourse one of the great European forest books. In the vastness of its scale – that of universal history - Rousseau’s book resembles another book that also begins in a forest: “Midway through the journey of life/I found myself in a dark wood/for the straight way had been lost”. Dante’s story encompasses universal history as well, but it is not seen as such – rather, it is seen as a cosmological story, unfolding the great Biblical, classical and Christian events in the afterlife. In Dante’s beginning, the sign that the straight way had been lost is the dark wood; in Rousseau’s, of course, the sign that the straight way had been lost is outside of the forest of Saint German.

In Charles Olson’s reckoning with Moby Dick, he begins by highlighting the material importance of whale hunting to the economy of the United States in Melville’s time. An exhaustively materialist reading of Rousseau’s Discourse could, perhaps, begin by meditating on the importance of forests to the economies of France and other countries in Europe in the 18th century. As Jean Nicolas’ sweeping history of peasant rebellions in that century makes clear, forest rights were no longer the central issue in village jacqueries – but in the 17th century, they clearly had been. Even so, wood, along with clothing and food, stood at the center of European life in Rousseau’s time. Nor was Rousseau the last of the writer’s of forest books. We think of certain classic American writers as creatures of the wood – Cooper, for instance, and, supremely, Thoreau. But as I have pointed out before, Marx, too, begins his real career by entering a forest – or at least entering into the issues that swirled around forest property rights, as he saw them being reshaped in Köln.

Wood theft, according to the two scholars who have studied it in the German context (Blasius and Mooser) was one of the central crimes against property in the 19th century, from the 1830s to the 1860s – over about a generation. Marx’s five articles about the laws concerning wood theft are not, then, about an eccentric issue. And, as much as wood “theft” is an issue in the history of crime, it is also an issue in the creation of property –which is how it opened Marx’s eyes, as much as they were opened in his classes in property law at the University of Berlin. It is here that we find Marx dealing with the kind of enclosures that were central to Polanyi theory of the Great Transformation. Private property was not, on this account, merely guarded by the state – the still reigning liberal myth. Rather, it was through the state that private property was defined. To separate the state from the private sphere is to move from historic fact to ideological myth. Why that myth is important is another matter. What Marx saw happening was important in the way he came to see understand class, rather than remaining with Stand – a word that is hard to translate. Status, station, estate – those are the English equivalents.

In 1858, in the preface to the Contribution to a Critique of Political Economics, Marx wrote: “My major was jurisprudence, that I nonetheless only took up as a subordinate discipline near philosophy and history. In 1842-1843, as the editor of the "Rheinischen Zeitung", I was embarrassed for the first time to have to discuss so called material interests. The Rheinische Landtag’s treatment of Wood theft and the parceling out of land properties, which opened up an official polemic between Herr von Schaper, at that time the president of Rhein province, and the Rheinischen Zeitung over the situation of the grapegrowers, debates finally about free trade and tarrifs, gave me a first occasion to deal with economic questions. On the other hand the good will to go further into this further made up for a lot of special expertise, and a weak philosophically colored echo of French socialism and communism could be heard in the Rheinischen Zeitung.”

I find it significant that these three European writers, setting out to write, on the broadest of scales, the history of human civilization, begin in the forest. Surely this must be an intersigne, an exchange happening in the basement below universal history, where all the dealers in codexes are busy cutting them up and mashing them back together. One way to look at Capital – a bleak way, granted – is that it is the first European book to envision a world completely out of the woods, a human world which has put the woods behind it.

a note on perfection - Foigny, Rousseau

Foigny’s Terre Austral is a utopian Robinsinade before Robinson was conceived. Like Cyrano de Bergerac’s Voyage to the Moon, it mixes satire with libertine philosophy – of a kind – in such a way that text continually questions its own register. The narrator, Sadeur, who has the bad fortune to have been born a hermaphrodite in Europe, saves himself from shipwreck and lands in Australia – the land that is the polar opposite of Europe – only to discover a society of hermaphrodites who strangle those children that are born abnormally – that is, with one sex only. Somehow, these hermaphrodites have also perfected a form of parthenogenesis, which has the effect that every member of the society can enjoy a perfect solitude, save for the love they bestow upon their children. All, in this society, are equal. All are also naked.

The narrator is, of course, shocked at these things, and in turn shocks the Australians by wearing clothes. All of which leads to threat to put him to do, and a series of dialogues between him and one of the wisest Australians about society, sexuality, and … perfection.

The perfect has long been meditated in Europe, and assimilated into the Christian religion. As Foigny was writing in Geneva, Leibniz was publishing philosophical texts that used the idea of perfection to explain the order among all possible worlds. Foigny’s text is, in one register, a similar exploration of perfection, and in another register, a satire of it.

Thus, the wise Australian at one point explains the emotional customs of the Australians with reference to their sexual autarky as follows:

“As for us, we are total human beings, and there is none among us who does not show all the parties of our nature with all its perfections: this is the reason we live without these animal ardors one for the other, and we cannot even listen to talk about it. This is the reason, again, that we can live alone, as though having need of nothing. Ultimately, this is the reason that we are happy [contents] and that our loves have nothing charnel about them.”

The two semantic extremes at work here are the animal and the perfect. Human perfection, according to the Australians, is wrapped up in distancing the human in all things from the animal. Which reminds the narrator of Western theology: “I couldn’t hear the worlds of this man without being reminded about what our theology teaches of the production of the second person of the holy trinity, and of all the effects outside of the Divine. I had ceaselessly meditated on the great principles of our philosophy, “that the more perfect a being is, the less it has need to act.” In this case, the less it had need to feel.

The perfection of the Australians is a sort of mirror of the idea of perfection in European philosophy, but what that mirror shows is a society that is the opposite of the European, and that is, for the European reader, horrifying.

I have no evidence that Rousseau read Foigny, but certainly the renegade preacher was known to Bayle. In history, the ludicrous invariably shadows the serious, so it is not really that surprising that as Leibniz built the great baroque structure of the theodyssey, in which perfection is used a kind of cosmological rule to reconcile all possibilities and realizations, in a shabbier intellectual neighborhood, the discourse of perfection was used to discuss sex and shitting among the hermaphrodite Australians.

In the Discourse on Inequality, perfection becomes a verb – to perfect – in the best enlightenment manner. It is one of Rousseau’s chief conceptual instruments for creating his own conjectural history of the foundation of society. But to take the term as a synonym for progress, or to take it as having a wholly favorable meaning, is no doubt a mistake, one that leads inevitably to much exegetical anguish.

Another day, another crisis

According to this NYT article, the OECD is playing its usual neo-liberal role in urging austerity on Europe.

This, of course, is the end game of a long history of reaction going back to the seventies, when policy elites and the generation of 68 turned their back on 'socialism' and began the long work of demoralizing populations and installing financial regimes that deflated wages, raised credit limits to cover their unpopular policies, and inflated the compensation of the investor and managerial class to a Gilded Age level.

Here's the deal: There's no such thing as an unsustainable government debt. The banks, of course, depend on the governments to enforce debt obligations, plus they depend on the governments to either give them money or loan them money at such low interest rates that it is the same (the U.S. 'capitalized" U.S. and foreign banks, hedge funds and the financial centers of corporations to the tune of 16 trillion dollars from 20008 to 2010 without anybody batting an eyelash). So, what army does Goldman have?

It is too bad that we live in a world in which bank debts are paid by practically free loans by governments, and government debts are paid by - crushing the middle class. Eventually, our debt serfs are going to look up and ask: who, exactly, do we owe this money to? The relatively paltry investment class, which includes about a million to two million people world wide? Sorry, I see no reason that countries should go down the hole just so these people can continue to enjoy their three vacation homes and the corporate jet.

If Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece were smart, they'd band together and simply say no. If the EU central bank won't print the money this group needs to fund a bank and buy their own debt - a very easy thing to do - they should do it themselves, make up a Southern Euro. It would immediately deflate, and reverse Germany's export advantage in Europe. I see no reason that they shouldn't do this - except for the fact that the neo-lib colonies among the elites in those Southern countries would be horrified.

the naked and the busy: Rousseau2

In Kleist's essay, On the Marionette Theater, Kleist presents a dialogue between himself and a marionette master concerning theater and the relation of the marionette to the human actor. The master voices the idea that even human actors display their souls not in their voices but in the bodies and their movements.

"Just look at that girl who dances Daphne", he went on. "Pursued by Apollo, she turns to look at him. At this moment her soul appears to be in the small of her back. As she bends, she look as if she's going to break, like a naiad after the school of Bernini. Or take that young fellow who dances Paris when he's standing among the three goddesses and offering the apple to Venus. His soul is in fact located (and it's a frightful thing to see) in his elbow."

These examples are not neutral - they gather and explode in his next passage:

" Misconceptions like this are unavoidable," he said, " now that we've eaten of the tree of knowledge. But Paradise is locked and bolted, and the cherubim stands behind us. We have to go on and make the journey round the world to see if it is perhaps open somewhere at the back."

That methodological circumnavigation, in search of the back door to paradise, is how I intend to pursue this investigation of Rousseau - and in fact, ultimately, all investigations. A paradisial truth that comes by way of the serpent's path, that is what is going on here.

In that spirit, let's take up one of Rousseau's predecessors in the European tradition of imagining the other.

Gabriel Foigny was an underground man of the classical age – a drunk, a lech, an ex-priest. He fled from a monastery in France, where the bonds of chastity were evidently too tight for him, to the Protestant freedom of Geneva, in the 1660s. There he found a job as a teacher – his attempt to go on preaching under the new dispensation was discouraged when he appeared in church drunk – and married a low class slut who proceeded to cheat on him. Being an educated man, he turned his hand to the market for reading matter. First, he created playing cards of a kind, on which there were prayers – or perhaps Tarot signs. Then, in 1676, he published a manuscript he had been ‘given”, La Terre Ausrale. Later on, he admitted that he wrote it himself – by this time he was on the hop again, leaving behind a pregnant maidservant and a set of angry Genevan ministers. The TA is an account of a colonial Sinbad the sailor who ends up, after various adventures in Africa and Portugal, cast up on the Australian shore. Australia, here, is not to be confused with the continent of that name – it was more like More’s Utopia than Van Dieman’s discovery. The account of the naturals of Australia is accompanied by a dialogue between the protagonist and one of their sages. Through this sage, Foigny expressed, as Geoffrey Atkinson put it, his “open and secret revolt against society and its institutions.” [39]

Such a revolt, to be radical, must go back to the very root of society. That, of course, is paradise. Society begins in the annihilation of paradise, as readers of Genesis know. Or I should say, its annihilation for humans – for it is part of the magic of the story that the Garden of Eden is not abolished by the Lord. It exists, but it exists, now, outside of human existence. It is barred. Thus, no sentence in human history has had the effect of Adam’s communication to God that he and Eve are naked. For, as God immediately replies, “who told thee that thou wast naked?” It is one of those moments for which Joyce, in Finnegan’s Wake, devised his long sentence-words, dividing one Viconian epoch from another: “The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonneronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr”.

But if we go around the world, as Kleist’s dramaturge suggests, perhaps we can get in the back way. Foigny’s sage-sauvage is, as Atkinson writes, ‘filled with horror at the idea of wearing clothes”. He cannot be persuaded that clothing is an aid to morality – comparing the Europeans to “little children who no longer know an object as soon as it is covered with a veil.” [63] As without, so within. The colonial process – or the civilizing process – puts into relief superstition as its privileged target, while its subjects, the subjected, gaze with disbelief at the superstitions of the civilizers. Ultimately, what was this, for the Europeans, but the rejection of that peculiar moment in Genesis, when God, for once, stops being a politician or a magician – when he makes clothing of skin for his creatures. As he once made Adam of clay, the act of a worldmaker, so he now clothes them, the act of a colonizer – but colonizer in the most intimate sense. There is no more intimate act ever attributed to Yahweh than this: ‘Unto Adam also and to his wife did the Lord God make coats of skin, and clothed them.” As though Adam’s announcement made the seals fall from God’s eyes, too. The intimacy in this act is in its superfluity: after all, having condemned humans to labor – and the sexes to division of labor – there’s no reason that Adam and Eve could not have made their own clothes. What kind of divine necessity is on display, here? What kind of cosmic discomfort? We know that the Gods, other Gods, can be moved by human nakedness – can be stirred to desire. Per Ganymede, per Leda, per Daphne, per every metamorphosis, ever skin that goes on and every skin that comes off.

If we are to understand the world of the primitive man of Rousseau's Discours on Inequality, we have to look through the eye of the needle of the European man that Rousseau saw all around him - a man whose chief economic industry lay in making clothes or textiles. Nudity, which is characteristic of that early man, is also characteristic of a certain kind of leisure. And it is with this symbol that we may as well start.

In which an Icelandic prole shocks a member of the 1 percent...

John Lancaster’s review of Michael Lewis’s book is as disastrous as, alas, Michael Lewis’s book. Lancaster is very impressed by nominal debt. He is very clueless about wealth inequality. And he is a classic upper class type. His first story is about an Icelandic waitress he meets in Rejkavik. Now, the first thing to notice about this meeting is that Lancaster is in Iceland. He apparently finds that harmless and decent, since he apparently finds his position in the top 1 percent worldwide just a fact of natural history. But this waitress! Why, during the boom, she tells him, she used to go and fly to Milan and shop.

Now, how often the waitress flew to Milan and shopped is anybody’s guess. After hearing from the serf, no doubt after being served his meal, Lancaster is all agog. The story is exactly worth what he paid to find out if it is true. Zero.

But given a mindset so blind to the system that puts the herring in his belly, Lancaster is all set up for Lewis’s book, which strings together stories of proles spending money they don’t have (shamefully!) and governments with the gall to, well, have the kind of social services that were agreed upon in the fifties.

Lewis’s book, of which I’ve only read the articles in Vanity Fair, is, alas, not one of Lewis’s more insightful outings. For instance, he takes his cues on California’s situation from Schwarzenegger. Not once, in the VF article, does Lewis show the least awareness that Schwarzenegger was elected against Gray Davis on a Bushian economics ticket of cutting taxes for the wealthy and businesses. Not once does Lewis show any awareness that Schwarzenegger accomplished this shabby feat by simply borrowing shitloads of money. Using Schwarzenegger as his guide to the California economic crisis is like being taught fire prevention by a pyromaniac.

As for Lancaster, the blind snobbery of his piece is equivalent to the ignorance with which it is loaded. Telling us that the world owes 195 trillion dollars is as meaningless as telling us that the world is rich because, in 2007, the world had accumulated 60 trillion dollars in derivatives.

The question that leaps to mind is: who does the world owe this money to?
And the answer is pretty simple: it is owed to a relatively small handful of investors. Worldwide, they compose perhaps 1 percent of the population – perhaps less. And guess what? They can be ripped off without any consequences. What Lancaster didn’t seem to notice in his dinner in Rekjavik is that the waitress didn’t really care. Why should she? Iceland didn’t back its banks. When the banks collapsed, according to Lancaster, they left debts the equivalent of 330,000 dollars for every Icelander. And, it turns out, those debts went to heaven. Big deal.

What is obviously needed at the moment world wide is a change in the disproportion between the wealth of the wealthiest and the rest. And this is a political question that will come when, as is likely, people wake up, like Icelanders, and realize: no, they don’t owe that money. Because they have the power simply to cancel the debt. Just as the governments have the money and have used the money to back the banks, because backing the banks was in the interest of the elites, the people can, and will, once the issue is represented, be backed by the government too. The U.S. government that loaned out 16 trillion dollars at 1 percent interest or below to hundreds of banks and hedge funds around the world could, actually, do the same thing to the people. It would be terrible, John Lancaster’s sherry would go down his throat the wrong way at just the thought of waitresses from Iceland shopping in Milan, but it is, you know, more than possible.

Solving all our problems before lunch (U.S. edition)

Okay, okay. It’s time to solve the deficit problem, in one paragraph. Here goes: restore Clinton’s tax rates, save for capital gains (raise it to 45 percent), and the marginal rate on top earners (those making 500 thousand or more), which should slide between 50 and 70 percent. Shrink defense expenditures in total to 100 billion dollars a year. Stir, wait a decade, bingo.

Of course, many would disagree with this course of action – including myself. I think EITC should be raised to 50,000 per year, thus pretty much knocking out the lower 50 percent from any income tax, and I think all corporate loopholes should be closed and the corporate income tax should remain the same. In the meantime, I think the U.S. should transform the post office into a post office bank, with which people could open up tax free savings accounts for retirement, education and health that would take the place of 401ks. And I think the money so generated could be used, for one thing, to buy U.S. T notes. In the end, we should work to take sovereign debt out of the hands of the private financial institutions.

Now that all this is clear, let’s discuss the real deficit we should be attacking. The political illuminati (as Marx called them) have created a vast hallucination, which goes like this: the social insurance system created in the developed economies in the 30s-60s are such that “we” are no longer able to afford them. The reality, however, is that “we” were much, much poorer in the 30s through the 60s. After generations of toil, after factoring in productivity gains and Solow’s residual, we find that we are infinitely richer than our grandparents or great grandparents. So how is it that we ended up poorer?

Here’s how we get to the real deficit, the equality deficit. In the last thirty years, the political illuminati have operated under the hallucination that the political structure set up to allow the social insurance system, which progressively shrank wealth inequality, could be ‘reformed’ by encouraging the kind of growth that increases wealth inequality by leaps and bounds. In fact, there is a reason that the Gilded Age and the New Deal are antithetical: in the former, ‘we’ do become relatively poorer – in relation to the national wealth – even if we become, in absolute terms, richer – although not much. Eventually, the equality deficit is going to kick in and that means it is going to kick out all the struts that have underpinned the middle class for the last sixty years. We’ve reached this point. Absurdly, “we” are told, in the country of Fortune 500 fortunes, that we are too poor to retire, to be educated, or to go to the doctor.

This is the story as told by our political illuminati, and it is a fairy tale. In reality, we are wealthy enough to work less (35 hours per week should be the legal norm), to retire well, and to luxuriate in universal health care and universal access to education up to and including college.

How do we obtain this ‘utopian’ vision? By looking at reality. Rather than contending with the mind-forged fantasies beloved by the pundits, we look at the society made by all, and we begin to repair the equality deficit. We operate, in other words, as free human beings. Marx, one hundred fifty years ago, called for the workers to break their chains. The chains, now, have long been broken. We have simply to walk out of them. And in so doing, we can start to pay attention to what is really important, such as reconstructing our technological infrastructure so it is green and Gaia friendly. And writing poetry, painting pictures, singing songs, dreaming involved dreams, making love, etc., etc.

Rousseau, the solitary: 1

Let’s jot down a highly speculative suggestion concerning the different angle of vision that separates Hume from Rousseau, and – more generally – separates the culture of Britain and its white colonies from the ‘Continent’.

The difference between Hume and Rousseau is found, textually, in the way each envisions the present in which they are writing. Hume, as we have seen, envisions that present as an endpoint along a line of intellectual and, in general, cultural progress, from which it is possible to look back and judge the past. Rousseau, on the other hand, does not see the present in terms of historical ‘success’ – and he does not see the past in terms of one unilateral progress. Famously, with Rousseau, the notion of rupture enters history. A historical region – say, the region encompassing ‘primitive man’ – can be described, outlined, and even phenomenologically analyzed – but the total social fact that counts, in that region, is not whether it tends towards the present. The present becomes a much more tricky thing, in Rousseau’s hands – much more malleable, much less describable under general terms.

The harried barbarian of Hume’s account of religion feels the steps of an invisible power through the events of his life and makes his limited speculations on what to do to manipulate that power. Hume’s middling class of man, his ideal avatar of common sense and sentiments, can look back from his present, holding Newton’s Principia in his hand, and see what the barbarian doesn’t: that the real invisible power is held by the designer of the universe, whose design has been revealed in the course of civilization to the scientist. The middling man, however, turns away from the monstrous discovery of the young Hume, which is that the invisible course of intellectual progress has not brought him any nearer to explaining cause itself.

Rousseau shares something of Hume’s idea of intellectual progress. As he makes clear in the Discourse on Inequality, human perfectability is not just a fact of history, but of natural history – it is what distinguishes the human animal. But Rousseau, much like Darwin later, tends to erase the teleological import of this idea.

Which leads us to another difference between Rousseau and Hume, and I think I can say, generalizing madly, between the cultural assumptions of their separate semiospheres: on the existential plane, where Hume sees the middling man – the individual – as the hero of the historical present, Rousseau sees the solitary.

Continuing this line of thought – the individual of individualism is necessarily heroic. And tends, necessarily, to be ‘self-made’. Even the dullest textbook of mainstream economics bears traces of the fairy dust of this mythic character. His self-madeness makes him much like Prajapati in the Golden Egg, a product of his own desire, his own father, son and mother.

The solitary of Rousseau’s more dire account of history is, on the other hand, anti-heroic, and his solitude is existentially conditioned by his break with myth. The Rousseau of the Confessions is not simply the progenitor of the anti-heros of the literature of solitude – the Raskolnikovs, Leverkuhns and Mersaults – but also marks a certain incoherence that will come to trouble all politics in that cultural semiotic. The self-made man is a political creature, whereas the solitary has a more difficult time inserting himself into the discourse of rights. The right to solitude is not founded on property. It is threatened by a society of unleashed individualism.

scandal in the U.S. and France

While America has the Kardashian divorce, which brings together so many American traditions – a little Horatio Alger, a little Daisy Miller, a little Debbie does Dallas – France, too, is hosting a scandal that brings together those two great French things: psychoanalysis and grammar. I’m talking, of course, of the wonderful libel trial going on right now that pits one of Lacan’s daughter, Judith Miller, against Elizabeth Elisabeth Roudinesco. Miller is suing over a paragraph in Roudinesco’s Lacan, envers et contre tout (Seuil, 2011) (and Roudinesco is countersuing Miller). The paragraph goes like this:

:
« Lacan mourut sous un faux nom, le 9 septembre 1981, à la clinique Hartmann des suites d’un cancer du colon qu’il n’avait jamais voulu soigner. Bien qu’il eût émis le vœu de finir ses jours en Italie, à Rome ou à Venise, et qu’il eût souhaité des funérailles catholiques, il fut enterré sans cérémonie et dans l’intimité au cimetière de Guitrancourt. »
Or: “Lacan died under a false name on September 9, 1981, at the Hartmenn clinic due to the effects of a colon cancer that he never wanted to treat. Although he had emited the wish to finish his days in Italy, in Rome or in Venise, and he would have wished for a catholic funeral, he was buried without ceremony in the intimacy of the Guitrancourt cemetery.”

My translation is to the French what a mut is to a pure breed greyhound – but such is the fate of translation. In any case, the day of the hearing was packed. All the Lacanians were there. And of course, the whole case came down to how to interpret qu’il eût souhaité… The lawyers fell into a controversy about this that must have brought all those in the courtroom back to their school days – for what kind of verb tense are we talking about here? Maitre Kierjman, in a brilliant summary of the evidence of the case, appealed to the heart and soul of all present by plunging into this issue:

« Le plus-que-parfait du subjonctif marque généralement une proposition à valeur conditionnelle. Son emploi est dicté par la conjonction « bien que » (« bien qu’il eût souhaité »), qui introduit une proposition dite « concessive » qui peut être lue comme ayant valeur indicative ou conventionnelle. Mais, ce qui doit être souligné ici, c’est la concordance des temps et le fait que le plus-que-parfait vient marquer une action révolue et antérieure à celle de la proposition principale »

Well, that settles that! However, Assoulline’s numerous commenters (his article received a Kardashianistic 325 responses) plunged as Frenchly as possible in disputing this interpretation:

“Débat grammatical qui rappelle « Le barbier de Séville » mais Me Kiejman possède moins bien sa langue que Beaumarchais. « Bien que » introduit une concession, c’est à dire une opposition, pas une condition (confusion avec le conditionnel passé 2 ?). D’autre part il s’agit dans le choix du temps, « eût souhaité » et non pas » souhaitât », de logique et non de concordance des temps : « souhaitât » eût marqué (valeur conditionnelle) une simultanéité impossible puisqu’on l’enterrait à ce moment là.”

For those who’ve fought their way through the French conditional and subjunctive, having only English – the language of servants! - as their guide, it is good news that the French themselves have a hard time understanding how they are using it.

Kierjman also told the jury that he had consulted Poe’s Purloined Letter and Lacan’s essay on it in composing her defense. Miller is of course defending herself like an Antigone who just happened to defy her brother’s wishes – or did she know those wishes better than Roudinesco? The Millerian faction is claiming that Roudinesco is suffering from the delusion that she is somehow related to Lacan – maybe the true daughter! – which, such is the work of the unconscious in the courtroom, was symbolized by Kierjman’s slip when he called his client « Mme Lacan”.

I predict that this case will be of the kind that Freud called Interminable analysis.

The nature in the Natural History of Religion: 4

Within the circles of the New Learning in the 17th century, a relatively new word was bandied about to take the place of what their ancestors would have called paganism or idolatry: polytheism. (Schmidt, 1985). When, in 1639, Edward Herbert sat down to write De Religione Gentilium, translated as ‘The antient religion of the gentiles” by a Mr. W. Lewis in 1705, he used “polytheism” to broaden the humanist notion of non-Christian religions. Herbert, who may not have been a deist himself, was certainly looked as a precursor by eighteenth century deists, who adopted his history of religion. It went like this: in the beginning, men worshipped one supreme God – the thought of whom was written on their hearts – but they had an unclear view of the difference between the universe and the creator of the universe. Over time, priests and then ‘imposters’ arose, who exploited the people’s awe before the sky, the sun, the moon and the stars to make these the objects of adoration. Always, of course, the people had a notion of the one Supreme God, but as these objects were adored, they gradually acquired the status of sub-gods, of separate intelligences.

The deists of the 18th century thus were rooted in the kind of thinking that, at least partly, John Locke tried to destroy: the kind of thinking that goes back to innate ideas. However, the deists used a rhetoric that was peculiarly suited to the 18th century views of the philosophes, with their emphasis on the adoration of one God, rather than the multiple cults to saints, the virgin, and the criminal who claimed to be God’s son in long ago Judea.

Hume was inclined to see Locke’s side of things, as far as the roots of our knowledge go; and he was also inclined to take the Presbyterian side in constructing the history of religion. Calvin, who used the word idolatry, poured scorn on the idea that the first humans were monotheists. If, as Scripture shows, they were filled with lust, disobedient, and murderers at the slightest provocation, why should we credit them with the virtue of worshipping the one true God?

Thus, in one way, Hume’s Natural History of Religion – which may seem to the modern reader to be a blow against Christianity – can as well be read a conservative counter-blow to deist nonsense, inserted into Hume’s larger project of clarifying the sources of our knowledge.

But this is a text that is definitely over-determined. Calvin’s view of history was essentially static – notwithstanding the extra-historical event of Christ’s birth and death. Hume’s was not. As he makes clear from the beginning, he fully accepts the enlightenment view of progress, and in fact, in a twist, he uses the deists language to describe it: from our current spiritual knowledge, derived from understanding that the perfect design of the universe implies a perfect designer, we can establish a footing in scientific reality, so to speak, by which to go back and survey the history that led up to us – us middling men, us common sense clerks, us the enlightened. It is with religion as it is with the other human arts and sciences: “ We may as reasonably imagine that men inhabited palaces before huts or cottages, or studied geometry before agriculture, as assert that the Deity appeared to them a pure spirit, omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent, before he was apprehended to be a powerful, though limited being, with human passions and appetites, limbs and organs.” (4)

Hume doesn’t just aim to reverse the order that the deists establish: putting polytheism before monotheism. He also wants to account for religion itself. Thus, the historical problem becomes a psychological and metaphysical one – as it was for Herbert as well. Having eliminated the idea that the barbarous, necessitous animal, man, had the innate idea of God inscribed on his heart, Hume next looks at the seemingly empirical explanation: that man looked around at the heavens, the earth, the sky, the moon and the stars, and was so overawed by their splendor that he elevated them to the status of Gods. Herbert’s argument was that the religion of the pagans could not be understood outside of the symbols that formed, as it were, a language underneath the language of the cults. The symbols were necessitated by the great fact that the supreme God was invisible: invisibility is a great motive force and determinant of religion in Herbert as well as Hume. Herbert attached himself to the ancient explanation that the sun was worshipped at first as the natural symbol of the great invisible power, and then, gradually, in a sort of eclipse of the symbolic function, as the God himself.

Hume disputes that this could possibly be the case, as it would entail a sense of metaphor and, beyond that, of generalities that the vulgar could not have had, or could not have been interested in. Their leisure and work was all, in Hume’s view, taken up by local matters, not the framing of general hypotheses. Out of this view comes, perhaps, the most interesting and influential idea in the Natural History. Instead of deist’s insistence on awe – the philosophical sensation – Hume insists on the mediation of the passions:

“We may conclude, therefore, that in all nations which have embraced polytheism, the first idea of religion arose not from a contemplation of the works of nature, but from a concern with regard to the events of life, and from the incessant hopes and fears which actuate the human mind.”

Tossing out contemplation is consistent with tossing out indolence of a certain type. For Hume, the round of little life for the mass is a total thing. And yet, outside of the Natural History, he certainly recognizes that contemplation or awe arises in ordinary life. In a letter to a friend about the time in which he is composing the Natural History, Hume promotes a now forgotten Scottish poet named Wilkie (Hume was always a great promoter of Scots literature, against the ‘criticklings’ of London) and relates the following anecdote:

“You know he is a farmer’s son, in the neighbourhood of this town, where there are a great number of pigeon-houses. The farmers are very much infested with the pigeons, and Wilkie’s father planted him often as a scarecrow (an office for which is well qualified) in the midst of his fields of wheat. It is in this situation that he confessed he first conceived the design of his epic poem, and even executed part of it. He carried out his Homer with him, together with a table, and pen and ink, and a great rusty gun. He composed and wrote two or three lines, till a flock of pigeons settled in the field, then rose up, ran towards them, and fired at them; returned again to his former station and added a rhyme or two more, till he met with a fresh interruption.”

It is a humorous image. In the movie Jude, which is taken from Jude the Obscure, Michael Winterbottom creates a harsher version of a boy being employed as a scarecrow – put out in long, lonely fields with a noisemaker. The boy is Jude, who we know will fight, in vain, against the class rigidity of Victorian England to have himself accepted as a scholar. Hume’s friend, however, is already the son of a farmer and on his way to the ministry. Still, the image and its uses are striking.

Yet in the Natural History, Hume sticks to the idea that the vulgar, its mind still mostly too blank, or two written over by the common business of life, to produce any epic concept, produces an epic concept – God – only, as it were, by accident. Out of the intersection of the local forces of nature (which give us not the serene sense of design, but a bumpy sense of chance and change, wrapped around the continuities of season, sunrise and sunset), man produces supernatural powers: “But what passion shall we here have recourse to, for explaining an effect of such mighty consequence? Not speculative curiosity surely, or the pure love of truth. That motive is too refined for such gross apprehensions; and would lead men into apprehensions of the whole frame of nature; a subject too large and comprehensive for their narrow capacities. No passions, therefore, can be supposed to work upon such barbarians but the ordinary affections of human life; the anxious concern for happiness, the dread of future misery, the terror of death, the thirst of revenge, the appetite for food and other necessities.”

Nature, then, is read through the constituents of human life. Out of feeling, we project – a magic word, not used by Hume but surely signaled, here – upon the storm anger, and upon the sunlight mercy.

John Farrell, in Freud’s Paranoid Quest: psychoanalysis and modern suspicion, has noticed that Hume’s epistemology seems to tie in very well with Freud’s notion of projection.

“Such ‘projections’ of the empirical subject onto the data of experience are, for Freud, a normal, unavoidable part of life: “For when we refer causes of certain sensations ot the external world, instead of looking for them, as in other cases, within, this normal proceeding is projection.” Or, as Hume would have it, ‘If we believe, that fire warms, or water refreshes, ‘tis only because it costs us too much pains to think otherwise.”

Interestingly, this edifice depends for its credibility upon a class distinction – between the barbarian and the man who has reached the shore of civilization. Hume’s very tone, in the Natural History, tells us that he is such a man. But he is also the man who, younger, found himself unable to reach that shore at all as he contemplated the notion of cause, and saw the world fall apart in his mind as he could not comprehend nor justify it through reason. What holds the two figures together, I think, is that common sense is returned to – and in that return, is made the subject of a certain irony that makes it hard to know, in the end, how to take Hume’s paen to the designer of a universe in which things fit so perfectly. It is more than a paen – it is our footing in the reality of the present that allows us to go back and reconstruct the past. If there is no spiritual progress, that reconstruction is epistemologically equal to the constructs of the past, and even, dare one say it, to those made up by the barbarian scarecrow in the wheatfield, the child abandoned by a class system that, to him, looks like barbarity in its final state, the parts all neatly designed to exclude thought and crush all passions that are not of use to it.

Larry Summers and Inequality

Felix Salmon wrote a very thoughtful account of the Larry Summers/Paul Krugman debate that occurred in Toronto on earlier this week. The account made me wonder, for the thousandth time, about Larry Summers – genius or cretin?

Here’s the passage that made me press my vote for the latter:

Summers also tried to defend inequality, at least in part, by saying that “suppose the United States had 30 more people like Steve Jobs” — that, he said, would be a good thing even as it increased inequality. “So we do need to recognize that a component of this inequality is the other side of successful entrepreneurship; that is surely something we want to encourage.” This might have been received better had Summers not earlier praised America, while pointing to Bremmer, as “the only country in the world where you can raise your first $100 million before you buy your first suit and tie”.
Bremmer is undoubtedly a rich and successful entrepreneur — and one who never wears a tie, to boot — but he’s making money entirely from the 0.1%, and at heart Eurasia Group’s business model is one which does better as the ultra-rich get richer. In the context of a debate about how to rescue the economy for the other 99% of us, it doesn’t much help to point to One Percenters like Jobs and Bremmer who have managed to do well for themselves in an otherwise stagnant economy.”
Salmon’s problem with Summers claim doesn’t seem, well, systematic enough, but at least it touches on the randomness of Summers’ claim. In fact, the Steve Jobs example falls squarely in the realm of pundit science, in which one uses some random example that has a sentimental hold on the audience to make a general point that is wholly lacking in other empirical support.
Summers notion that we would not have technological innovation, or at least diffusion, is really a matter that has been researched. In fact, it can be investigated in a number of ways. We can ask whether wealth inequality is really, throughout history, the only driver of innovation. We can ask if other kinds of inequality will work as well – for instance, being honored for merit. We can ask if inequality is even necessary – for instance, does a kind of non-monetary, non-honorific ideal also work to induce technological breakthrough. And we can ask, more narrowly, whether there is a metric by which we can measure business innovation and compare periods when there was less wealth inequality and periods when there were more as to groundbreaking technological breakthroughs.
If we want to have a coarse measure of the technology/inequality relation, we could look to eras where inequality was lessening and eras were it was increasing in the 20th century and ask if the eras of inequality increase correspond to technology breakthroughs. I think Summers would be disappointed: the major technology breakthroughs of the twentieth century, in chemicals, communication, medicine, computing, and agriculture all cluster in the 30s to 70s period. Well, to be fair, not all – transportation and radio were certainly transformed in the high inequality twenties. But the roots of the technologies in play were certainly due to state intervention and progressive programs in the 10s – the American car industry, for instance, was birthed by an almost prohibitive tariff congress let fall on foreign automobiles.
What you do find in the high inequality periods is a more intense diffusion of innovation. This, it must be said, seems to have come to an end, in America, in the 2000s, which was a dead zone in terms of major innovation. Whether a lesser inequality would have impeded the diffusion of technological products is an interesting question. Certainly, to an extent, the chance for profit – and hence, for some inequality – has helped inject innovations into the mainstream of so
Penicillin – its discovery, diffusion and patenting – is a classic case of the question of money vs. the social ideal. As is well known, neither Fleming, who discovered penicillin, nor Ernest Chain or Howard Florey, the Oxford chemists who re-discovered Fleming’s work in 1940, wanted to patent the drug. They couldn’t even see that it was the kind of thing that was patentable. The myth is that when penicillin was taken to America, Americans had a much different sentiment, and stole penicillin from the British. In a paper surveying this history, however, Robert Bud (2008) shows that the Americans were very hesitant about allowing private companies to patent materials or processes for which public research money had been granted.
“In the USA, similarly, the benefits of publicly-funded research were reviewed. A three
volume study of federal regulations was published in 1946 with a view to standardizing the
diverse regulations which had emerged across the public sector.56 Some agencies allowed exclusive
licenses to private contractors – essentially assigning them the patents, others permitted only
non-exclusive licenses. The report came down firmly on the side of the latter. Research funded
from federal funds was kept in the public domain. It was not as if the turbulent wartime years had
never been. The number of university owned patents increased from a handful during the 1930s
to about a 100 in 1950, but they did not keep multiplying, and did not exceed 150 until the end of
the 1960s.57 Penicillin development had disrupted the old world, rather than leading directly to
the new.
Even US pharmaceutical companies experienced the fruits of ambivalence about patenting.
In the 1950s the price of penicillin collapsed as new entrants piled into the industry, whose product
had not been patented. However there was a determination that the newer antibiotics, such as
the tetracyclines, should be much more closely controlled by US patents and their price was kept
from collapse. During the late 1950s the patent and profit mindedness of the industry was challenged
by both the Federal Trade Commission and the Senate as prewar concerns were brought
to bear on the newly booming pharmaceutical industry. Campaigners who in the 1930s had seen
patenting as a cause of the Great Depression continued their struggles through the 1950s, particularly
deploying Senate support.58 Gradually, however, the emphasis moved from a concern with
patents to anxieties about safety. Although the outcome would be the strengthening of the Food
and Drug Administration as the guardian of the public interest, the right to patent was untouched.”

This story, rather than some random reference to St. Steven Jobs, has much more relevance to the question of the benefits of inequality. And it completely fails to validate Summers idea that if a man can’t be a billionaire, well technology will grind to a halt and our skyscrapers will fall.
Like so much of what Summers utters, his argument is bogus from the get go. But he continues to wow the rubes, including the ones at 1200 Pennsylvania Ave.

A more portable occupy wall street?

Occupy Wall Street seems to have adapted the tactic of the 30s Hoovervilles, and to have evoked a response from the governing class in the U.S. that is identical, almost to the letter, to that of Hoover to the veterans in D.C. But there is another tactic that the protestors in Hoover’s time did not possess: that “real time” link that comes with the web. Watching the police beat up Berkeley students and professors in the videos (such as here) means that the lies of the media can almost immediately be found out by the interested cybernaut.
The question is, how much does the interested cybernaut count?

I have been reflecting, from this apartment in Paris, about the difficult winter that lies ahead for these American troops, these soldiers of the 99 percent. My suggestion is that the Occupy movement become temporarily portable. That is, it will switch between on-site occupations and media occupations. I don’t really believe that the movement will die because the establishment press, having failed at mockery, is now trying to tabloid the movement to death, with fake concerns about violence and drug use. The tabloiding will, however, cause the support for OWS to fall in the polls. It is at this point that ever new tactics have to be used to fight back. To my mind, the teach in and ‘hearings’ may be the best method. The OWS can and should issue ‘subpoenas’ to, say, those who received golden parachutes from Bank of America and those who were just laid off with the usual kurtness to investigate unemployment in America, and how it works. Would the golden parachuters come?Of course not. But it would be easy to represent them – any grad economics student could fill in their place. By such devises, the ows people can really take the debate out of the hands of the establishment media.

The occupation movement, so far, has been brilliant at bringing imagination back to the political process. Un autre effort, messieurs et madams, si vous voulez etre libre!

Marie Antoinette's neoliberalism

The story of the economic crisis in Europe, as in the Anglosphere, is actually simple at the root. Two pages into Maurizio Franzini’s article, Why Europe Needs a Policy on Inequality, the reader trips over this paragraph:

“The proportion of the European workforce with a labour compensation per hour (wages plus social contributions) declining in real terms was 16.5% in the years 1996-1999 and 33% in 2003-2006. Moreover, 48% of the workforce during 1996-1999 and 61% during 2003-2006 saw their labour compensation per hour growing, on average, less than their labour productivity per hour. In the latter period, 23% of the workforce faced declining compensation with increasing labour productivity in their industry.”

There is a specter haunting the developed countries – the specter of the increase of exploitation. Wages are continuing to fall below the increase in productivity, and this means (sound the trumpets, please): you get one of those garden variety shortfalls of demand, and oversupply of goods, that so puzzles your elite capitalist type. He scratches his head, and then he dreams up his solution to the problem: why not reward the rich even more money, and take away the package of compensation (in the form of public goods) from the rest of the population? Somehow, a solution in which the elites engross even more of the collective wealth goes over well with the elites. They start writing grave articles about it. And sometimes they just throw together a mishmash of contradictions and claim that it is a program for the ages – thus, the current fad for expansionary contraction, which, like virgin births and perpetual motion machines, is proof that the verbal is triumphantly infinite, while the material is sadly limited to what can actually happen.

The poetic origin of the expansionary contraction comes from that mythical phrase of Marie Antoinette’s, let them eat cake. The EU bureaucrats have iced that phrase nicely with econo-speak, but strip off the icing and it’s the same old cake.

Here’s another passage from Franzini that should poke a hole in the American myth of Europe as a land of socialist equality:

“According to one study inequality in the EU is quite high but lower than in the USA: the Gini index is (with reference to data around 2000) 0.33 in the EU25, while it
was 0.37 in USA.

A more recent estimate based on a different methodology and on more recent data (2005) concludes that inequality in Europe is significantly higher, and not uch different from that of the USA: the EU-wide Gini coefficient is 0.369, not very far from the US level of
0.372.”

When people refer to Gini coefficients, it loses the great mass of people. But it actually does give us a way of thinking back through our recent cycle of exploitation. And interesting experiment in this vein was made by Stephen Adair, a professor in Connecticut. He took the Census’s Gini coefficient, that is, the measure of inequality, and he adjusted it back to its former levels in Connecticut and played the tape of inequality, so to speak, forward.

First, some back data: “Between 1970 and 2010, every state in the U.S. experienced an increase in inequality, but non greater than Connecticut, which went from the 36th most unequal state to the 2nd most unequal.”

Adair keeps the size of the income pool the same in one scenario, but adjusts the Gini coefficient down to the 1970 level. In Scenario b, he projects a neo-liberal distribution pattern by growing the size of the income pool, and retaining current levels of inequality. This is what he gets in Scenario A:

“…. a Connecticut in which the overall size of the income pool is the same, while hundreds of thousands of people experience significant upward mobility. This upward mobility is “achieved” by lowering the average value of those making over $200,000 from $387,650 to $235,000. It is not mathematically possible to keep the average household income the same and reduce the Gini to .337 without lowering this value. Scenario A illustrates a zero-sum game in which a decline in the incomes of the richest 8 percent “pay” for upward mobility for others.”

Here’s the neo-liberal scenario:

”Scenario B … maintains the Gini coefficient of 2010, but imagines a 10 percent increase in income levels by raising the household mean income to just over $102,290. Given the current distribution nearly half of the new income went to the top 10 percent, such the average income of households making over $200,000 went from $387,650 to $440,400.

Scenario B yields small increases in the number of households in each category above $45,000 and some small decreases in the lower income categories. There are, however, significantly greater reductions in the low income categories in Scenario A than in B, and greater increases in most of the upper income categories. .

Well over ninety percent of households in Connecticut would be more likely to experience an improved economic condition by returning to the rates of inequality in 1970 with no economic growth than they would with a 10 percent overall increase in the income pool with no change in the degree of inequality.”

We are drifting towards the wreck of the plutocracy. Scenario B is not going to happen – rather, we are going to have an overall shrinkage of the income pool, and an overall increase in inequality, given current tendencies. It is over, in the EU and the U.S., in the UK and Canada, with the fiction that we can join together a gilded age economy and a New Deal social welfare system. The plutocrats are fighting for the former, and nobody is fighting for the latter.

Humean anthropology and indolence: 3

Hume’s Natural History of Religion is, as its very title shows, something different than a mere history. History and natural history differ in their object: in the former, the object is the chronicle of human action, and in the later, of the development of living forms in nature. By shifting religion to the realm of nature, Hume was following through on the logic of a division that he articulates in the very first paragraph between reason and human nature. Already this division speaks to a certain incoherence in the pretence that man is, ontologically, on an equal level with ‘nature’. In other words, an incoherence of ontological scope. This incoherence haunts social science like a Cartesian demon, casting doubt on all attempts to ground a social science on the opposition between culture and nature, while at the same time making it impossible to simply combine the two without destroying the very meaning and savor of both categories. In the twentieth century, Levy-Strauss made of that opposition one of the founding social structures, the study of which is the object of anthropology, at least insofar as the society studied lacks a system of writing. I mention Levy-Strauss to signal a certain textual destiny that can assigned to Hume’s natural history. Although the essay is not shaped by the protocols of what we would call anthropology – it evidences no fieldwork whatsoever – it is, on the other hand, an argument about a certain product of human nature, religion, that is almost – Hume is very clear about the ‘almost’ – universal. And in as much as it appears in most societies, Hume feels that we can understand it as a system of beliefs by asking what qualities of human nature are expressed in it.

However, in posing the question in this way, we already suppose that it is not a product of human reason. Reason, here, will be regarded not as an expression of human nature, but as a mechanism that transcends human nature. Reason is a machinery that allows for a two-fold operation, beginning firstly with citation – breaking a certain phenomenon out of its context or situation – and secondly with analysis, breaking it down according to the rules of either deduction or induction. Hume thinks that the operation of reason, abstraction, contemplation, etc. is so little a product of human nature that most humans do it badly, if they do it at all. In a sense, Hume’s whole essay is at the polar opposite of one of Wittgenstein’s comments about Frazer’s Golden Bough (which is itself very much a descendent of Hume’s Natural History of Religion):

“Already the idea of wanting to explain the practice – for instance, the killing of the priest king – seems to me to miss the mark. All that Frazer does is make it plausible to men who think as he does. It is very remarkable that all these practices are finally so to speak portrayed as stupidities.


But it will never be plausible that people did all this out of stupidity.

When he explains to us that the King must be killed in his blood, because after the ideas of the savages, otherwise his soul will not be fresh, one can only say: where this practice and this idea go together, the practice does not spring from the idea, but they are both simply there. “

Hume, on the other hand, thinks it will never be plausible that religion – in his survey of it – comes from anything but stupidity. The “ignorant”, the “vulgar”, and the “ignorant vulgar” play a very strong role in Hume’s account, and help us understand another of the determinations of his initial separation of human nature and reason: it is from the standpoint of reason, which deduces the truth about God, that the historian can understand the history of religion, which unfolds as a series of misperceptions of God. Importantly, for Hume, as for Frazer, God is a phenomenon of belief, molded in the form of the God that is worshipped in the Christian church. When Hume finds, not unnaturally, that this concept of God cannot really be imposed on many of the religious phenomena he finds in the past, he attributes this to a primitive intellectual equipment.

It is in explaining that primitive intellectual equipment that we come upon a certain unarticulated primal supposition in Hume, concerning primitive man. Hume, while never fully spelling this out in his essay, evidently assumes Hobbes. He assumes, that is, that the primitive state was one of man against man, or perpetual and complete war. It is characteristic of that state that people are harried – they have no time for contemplation. The temporal/material condition for reasoning – indolence – is lacking. And this original lack impedes the habit of inquiry; for inquiry, like all human phenomena in Hume, is eventually founded in habit and habit’s social cousin, custom.

“Adam rising at once in Paradise, and in the full perfection of his his faculties, would naturally, as represented by Milton, be astonished at the glorious appearances of nature, the heavens, the air, the earth, his own organs and members ; and would be led to ask, whence this wonderful scene arose: but a barbarous, necessitous animal (such as a man is on the first origin of society), pressed by such numerous wants and passions, has no leisure to admire the regular face of nature, or make inquiries concerning the cause of those objects to which, from his infancy, he has been gradually accustomed. On the contrary, the more regular and uniform, that is, the more perfect nature appears, the more is he familiarized to it, and the less inclined to scrutinize and examine it. A monstrous birth excites his curiosity, and is deemed a prodigy. It alarms him from its novelty,and immediately sets him a-trembling, and sacrificing, and praying. But an animal, complete in all its limbs and organs, is to him an ordinary spectacle, and produces no religions opinion or affection. Ask him
whence that animal arose? hewill tell you, from the copulation of its parents. And these, whence? From the copulation of theirs. A few removes satisfy his curiosity, and set the objects at such a distance, that he entirely loses sight of them. Imagine not that he will so much as start the question, whence the first animal,much less whence the whole system or united fabric of the universe arose.”

This is interestingly wrong. It was even known to be wrong in Hume’s time: there was, by 1750, two centuries of material gathered and published by Europeans that showed, contrary to Hume, a deep fascination with how the whole system of the fabric of the universe arose, and even how animals arose. Hume was probably aware of Lafitau, if not the numerous Spanish works on the belief systems of the Indios. And of course since Hume’s time we are more and more aware that, whatever else interested Paleolithic humans, they were absolutely fascinated and even obsessed by an animal complete in its limbs and organs. But Hume’s Hobbesianism disallows at least one reading of the evidence. And, interestingly, sets the stage for one of Hume’s most ingenious suppositions, which will prove to have a long life in the 19th and 20th centuries.

comment on the NYT Stephen Roach piece at Room for Debate

Stephen Roach, the well named financial analyst, was asked about the crisis in savings in Japan and the United States in the NYT’s Room for Debate the other day. His response was essentially to knock the American middle class for living beyond its means (which used to be the bright side – remember the Ownership society? Remember ‘its your money’? Ah, the Bushisms of yesteryear). Anyway, I wrote a comment which, for some reason, the NYT chose not to publish, although I can’t see that it violated any policy of theirs. So, in the interest of keeping this comment around so that I can use it later, rather than flushing it into the cybervoid, here’s a link to Roach’s article and here’s my comment.

"Nice to see Roach talk his book - let's shove more money into Wall Street via IRAs and 401Ks. - Or, lets strip them of their tax deductibility and set up government retirement and education accounts which would be tax free and offer a modest but guaranteed return of 3 percent annually, as suggested by Teresa Ghilarducci. As Jim Mosquera in ‘Escaping Oz’ puts it: “At the last major stock market bottom in 1982, American households were not that interested in owning stocks. The growth of the stock industry was aided by the creation of IRA accounts (1974) and 401(k) plans (1980). IRA accounts came during the stock market bottom of 1974 and 401k plans arrived just before the major stock market bottom of 1982. Stock ownership comprised barely 12 percent of all household financial assets in 1982, where not 2/3 of investors have half their financial assets in mutual funds. Stocks litter IRA and 401k accounts, the most precious of saving vehicles. Fifty-four percent (54%) of households own stock mutual funds and 37% own individual stocks in their IRA accounts.” In 1982, retirement was much more secure than it is now. Our experiment with stock ownership has failed. It is time to admit it, and to shrink the funds Wall Street has to play with. This will re-set Wall Street so that it becomes of use, rather than what it is now - a wasteful casino that allocates capital with maximum inefficiency - and would actually help finance the operation of the government without tax increases for the 99 percent - although of course we need to hike the 1 percent tax rate to Eisenhower levels."

Hume and Rousseau on indolence: 2

Han Joachim Voth, in his essay, Time Use in Eighteenth century London: some evidence from Old Bailey (1997) cleverly figured out a way to quantify over time use in 18th century Britain by using the accounts of witnesses at trials. The question of whether and how much time discipline intensified among urban laborers (and agricultural workers) has been much disputed, as the Marxist claim that was backed up in the E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class has been tugged at here and statistically stiffed there. Voth concluded that the evidence points not to longer working days, but instead, to longer working weeks. The sixteenth and seventeenth century holidays were being cut down. St. Monday was assassinated. Another study of the decline of Saint Monday (the day that workers would sometimes take off to have a day of drinking and music) in 18th and 19th century Birmingham found that the Saint was not martyred all at once, but bit by bit.

The evidence, then, points to an increase in the working time of the laboring class in Britain in the 18th century. And yet, at the same time, one discovers a new sense of leisure among the ‘middling men’ – the bourgeoisie – both in the later start in life by bourgeois children, who were educated for much longer than laborer’s children, and in soft work and hard leisure – a certain non-differentiation of the two spheres. Gambling could be leisure, but for many it really did pay the bills. And the question of intellectual labor was still not wholly defined at this time. Research could be a hobby from, say, preaching.

What is important is that leisure and labor carry strong class colorations. As Joan-Lluís Marfany puts it in “The invention of labour in Early Modern Europe”:

…take the question of boredom, the history of which [Peter Burke] invites us to write. This is not, as it may seem, strictly an upper- class problem, but here too there is one important distinction to be made. The leisured classes get bored because they are idle; their problem, as Burke, quoting Henry Fielding, points out, is how to kill time. For the workers, the source of boredom is work. They too devise ways of passing the time, only in their case it is working time that needs to be passed. In conservative, idealizing literature, peasants are portrayed as people who like to keep always busy, to the extent that even in the long winter evenings when they get together to while away the time by telling stories, singing songs and playing games, they still manage to combine these activities with some useful task, such as, for instance in northern Catalonia, peeling or shelling corn cobs, or sifting Yet we might just as well look at it from the opposite angle. The cobs had to be peeled and shelled; the seeds had to be sifted; the stamens to be carefully plucked for saffron; the wool or the flax had to be spun: all tedious, repetitive tasks. Doing the work together to the accompaniment of stories, songs or games was a way of alleviating the mind-numbing boredom of the chores.”

These are quick glimpses of a deep and complex historical event, but they pose a question: how could Hume have gotten it so wrong? That is, how could he, and other European intellectuals of the time, have thought that they were living in the golden age of leisure?

Hume and Rousseau on indolence: a backwards glance 1

Indolence and leisure have long been outlier themes in philosophy and the social sciences. And yet, as I hope to show, they are connected by every family tie to the grander themes of reason, progress and culture, as these were articulated among the Enlightenment intellectuals of the eighteenth century.

Let’s start this inquiry with a conference held in 1966 when Marshall Sahlins surveyed the ethnographic evidence concerning the use of time by hunter gatherers, such as the !Kung and Australian aborigines, and used it as evidence for what he called the “original affluence”. Sahlins wrote: “A fair case can be made that hunters often work much less than we do, and rather than a grind the food quest is intermittent, leisure is abundant, and there is more sleep in the daytime per capita than in any other condition of society (1968 – quoted by Winterhalder (1993). Windterhalder’s essay, which advocates a neo-classical framework to explain the “original affluence” thesis instead of Sahlins’ own Zen economics, introduces the problematic with a clever comparison to the myth of the busy bee:

“More than ninety years ago entomologist Professor C.F. Hodge marked individ- ual honey bees to study their activities. He observed that between sunrise and sunset no bee worked more than three and one-half hours (see Hubbell 1988: 78). Compare this observation with the commonly held belief captured in the phrase, 'busy as a bee'. In popular wisdom the honeybee stands for bustling productive effort, its labours those of nearly ceaseless toil. Only the beaver equals its reputation as an icon of industriousness.1 But Hodge is right. Bees spend a lot of time doing nothing or wandering through the hive appearing to do nothing in particular. Only intermittently do they work hard (Seeley 1989). Beavers too are active foragers only a small percentage of the time (Belovsky 1984).”

The bee, the leisurely hunter, and sleep will all figure in one way or another in a backward glance at Hume and Rousseau’s conjectural histories of original man. Neither Hume or Rousseau are ‘typical’ Enlightenment figures, but their different philosophical anthropologies did influence two different lines of thought in the Occident.
…

Hume’s essays on economics and social theory were written, according to James Buchan, under Hume’s strategic impulse to introduce himself a second time into the world of the learned, or at least the Edinburgh part of that world, after his first foray, A Treatise of Human Nature, fell stillborn from the press – at least in Hume’s own, retrospective account. Hume wrote the essays while living in his mother’s house, Ninewells, outside of the village of Chirnside. Although Hume’s afterlife has been more lively in metaphysics, his essays certainly gave him a fair place in the prehistory of economics and political theory.

One essay in the second volume, On refinement in the arts, takes up the defense of luxury. The Enlightenment inversion of the values of Christendom made a special case of luxury. Denounced by the Church as a vice, and subject to various taxes, luxury was not only praised by Mandeville and the French libertine school, but praised, specifically, for its social utility. Mandeville’s argument (made in The Fable of the Bees, for that insect's folkloric properties can be made to serve enlightened ends) that private vices can be public virtues, gave a radical foundation to the separation of the secular and the sacred: if we grant, as the New Philosophers held, that government exists to promote the happiness of the people, than giving the sacred secular tools to pursue private vice snuffs out the public benefit – the commerce – deriving from them.

By the time that Hume came to write the essays in 1741, Mandeville’s wicked creed had diffused itself into the circles of the advanced thinkers. Myself, I want to look at Hume’s essay not so much for the defense of luxury as for his characterization of the human happiness that is the essence of public virtue, because it is subtended by what one might call a speculative anthropology – a conjectural history – that is more abundantly expressed in the Natural History of Religion. Against one of the powerful but under-recognized themes of that anthropology – the theme of indolence – I’d like to pit Rousseau’s anthropological conjecture in the Discourse on Inequality.

Here, then, is Hume’s analysis of human happiness:

“Human happiness, according to the most received notions, seems to consist in three ingredients; action,
pleasure, and indolence : And though these ingredients ought to be mixed in different proportions, according
to the particular disposition of the person ; yet no one ingredient can be entirely wanting, without destroying,
in some measure, the relish of the whole composition. Indolence or repose, indeed, seems not of itself to contribute much to our enjoyment; but, like sleep, is requisite as an indulgence, to the weakness of human nature, which cannot support an uninterrupted course of business or pleasure. That quick march of the spirits, which takes a man from himself, and chiefly gives satisfaction, does in the end exhaust the mind, and requires some intervals of repose, which, though agreeable for a moment, yet, if prolonged, beget a languor and lethargy, that destroy all enjoyment.”

One should note that, though the structural place of this remark in his essay is directed towards building a case for further sociological observation, in fact, the natural history of the ‘quick march of the spirit’, and the exhaustion attendent upon it that requires leisure and play, has already, in Hume’s Treatise, been given a certain metaphysical, or perhaps I should say, anti-metaphysical, value in a passage highlighted by Buchan:

“But what have I here said, that reflections very refined and metaphysical have little or no influence upon us? This opinion I can scarce forbear retracting, and condemning from my present feeling and experience. The intense view of these manifold contradictions and imperfections in human reason has so wrought upon me, and heated my brain, that I am ready to reject all belief and reasoning, and can look upon no opinion even as more probable or likely than another. Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return? Whose favour shall I court, and whose anger must I dread? What beings surround me? and on whom have, I any influence, or who have any influence on me? I am confounded with all these questions, and begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, environed with the deepest darkness, and utterly deprived of the use of every member and faculty.
Most fortunately it happens that, since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours’ amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.”
Play and amusement are ‘cures’ to the tangle of reasoning that has made Hume a monster to himself and – projectively – to others. Hume’s fall into monstrosity is imagined as a sort of foundering on an island –that is, it is a fall away from sociability,into what one might call primitive state of being, a Robinson Crusoe-like solitude. I will come back to that image later.
However, if in the Treatise the relaxation of the mind is a sort of film director’s cut that ends the curious metaphysical narrative, in the Natural History of Religion, relaxation – what I will call indolence – assumes a very different historical shape.