Striking down the law to get at the devil

Robert Bolt's 'A Man for All Seasons'. Photo: Patrick Huber [CC BY-NC-SA 2.0] 

It began when the lawns atop Parliament House were fenced off. The whole point of the design of Parliament House was to enable the physical and symbolic act of the people walking over the Parliament as a reminder that our elected representatives are beneath the people. Parliamentary sovereignty in Australia means that the people are sovereign. Since, however, Australia has been on a crash course to diminish the sovereignty of the people as technocrats incrementally grab more power. And we are letting it happen.

Here is my latest article in The Spectator's Flat White, The sovereignty of technocrats and rule of lawyers. The editorial read:

Australians are getting the distinct feeling that they are no longer governed over by law – but rather by lawyers, technocrats, the media, and celebrities. It’s not only the bizarre ritual of ‘trial by mob’ making a comeback in the #MeToo era – it is everything. Our institutions have lost touch with what were once binding ideas and now society has been cast adrift, left to the mercy of headlines and hashtags.

Australians are feeling increasingly as though they are not governed by laws, but rather lawyers, technocrats, the media, and celebrity opinion.

It's not just the rise of 'trial by #MeToo' - so-called #socialjustice and mob rule is invading our system.https://t.co/xdf0TmVZ8k

— The Spectator Australia (@SpectatorOz) December 14, 2022

Buddha and the Path to Happiness

Grand Palace, Bangkok.

Buddha by Karen Armstrong
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book was given to me by a friend in Shanghai who, like me, is interested in theology and philosophy. It is a rare person who can see the value in both ways of trying to live a good life, and my return gift was Ryan Holiday's The Daily Stoic. Little did I know how similar Buddhism and Stoicism are in their sense of logic, and, most importantly, managing our impressions or perceptions. Self-reliance is achieved by "meditation, concentration, mindfulness and a disciplined detachment from the world", through which each of us (p. 175):

...must make himself his island, make himself and no one else his refuge.

The sense of peace that can be achieved in this "world of pain" is not, however, the lonely ascetic existence of the proverbial hermit on the mountaintop. Rather, it is through

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The Great Conversation, not The Great Battle...

 

Physiologie du Flaneur [CC0]

The Great Books of the Western World were the subject of political controversary within the Australian university sector recently when a bequest by the late Paul Ramsay went looking for an institutional home. Instead of selling the intellectual tradition that includes what Harold Bloom referred to as the Western Canon, conservatives talked up a paternalistic, colonising, right-wing culture war waged against, well, against everything that was not considered "Western" I suppose. But why? Here I examine the efficacy of a Great Books degree from the perspective of the political flâneur. My aim is to outline the importance of the liberal arts tradition, but without the populist sentiment of defending an elusive "way of life" that I apparently share because of the geographical and temporal accident of my birth.

When the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation's program went to the university sector, the proponents chose an ideological battleground that ensured any discussion was polarised, ultimately doing a disservice to the liberal arts tradition. By wielding Australia's first Great Books degree program as an apologia for Western thought, as if the West's intellectual history were under attack from some unsympathetic "other", the culture wars raged on. 

I refer to Harold Bloom above because he made no apology to what he regarded as the "School of Resentment". I refer to this group as an unidentifiable echo chamber of left-leaning or alt-left types who fuel and are fuelled by the echo chamber of the alt-right. In Australia, read the opinion columns in The Guardian (ideology: it is free) or the "Commentary" section in The Australian (ideology: you have to pay) and you can visit these populist ideas. (But try not to dwell there for too long or you'll lose your flâneur status.) 

Neither left nor right can agree because their identities are tied up in their approach to the "laden" idea known as "identity politics": the left tends to embrace identity politics whereas conservatives (who staunchly identify as conservative) see identity politics as the enemy. Or to put it another way, identity politics is "simply shorthand for a concept or idea that you dislike". 

This strange view of identity politics was used recently to critique the university sector for its apparent left-leaning world view in teaching history. The Institute of Public Affairs, a right-wing thinktank, recently published some "research" which:

...reveals that history has shifted away from the study of significant historical events and periods to a view of the past seen through the narrow lens of class, gender and race.

This major piece of research demonstrates what we have long known; that in general, the substance of Western Civilisation, which is essential to understanding our present and shaping our future is not being taught to Australian undergraduates studying history.

It was interesting that the "findings" were based on an assessment of university teaching against a normative list of an "essential core" of historical subjects "based on the notion of the canon of significant historical subjects devised by the British historian Professor Niall Ferguson" (d'Abrera, 2017, p. 10). To suggest that historical accounts can change or that our understanding of the past can evolve with new information doesn't rate a mention, but neither does any critique of Ferguson's list.

It is interesting that Niall Ferguson, a well-regarded historian, has been chosen as the baseline for how history ought to (normatively) be taught. Nevertheless, his book titled Civilization: The West and the Rest speaks volumes for where the IPA's version of Western thought is situated in a global context. It's not that there isn't something to learn from Ferguson's prolific works, but the IPA's take on it lacks any sense of sophistication that a liberal arts scholar would "punch full of holes" at a moment's notice (to mix some more clichés about such a clichéd understanding of history).

Tony Abbott's 2018 article in Quadrant argued that the high culture of Western Civilisation was something to be celebrated. While I agree with the idea that the Great Books ought to be celebrated, I am much more inclined to agree with Harold Bloom than I am to agree with Mr Abbott. For instance, Bloom's idea of the West was encompassing. He saw two distinct branches of the Western Canon: one stemming from William Shakespeare (see Bloom's lecture below) and the other stemming from Dante Alighieri.

It is difficult to put into this short space the extent of Harold Bloom's work, but I am his biggest fan. I emailed Harold Bloom after reading his incredible Anxiety of Influence and he replied the very next day. I was saddened when he passed away, but to put his work in ideological perspective, even The Guardian's obituary does poetic justice to this genius who lived during my lifetime. (I don't ever want to lose this email, so here is a screenshot below of my fleeting contact with the great man.)

Vale Professor Harold Bloom. Larger than life and one of my major scholarly influences.

Harold Bloom provided an approach to reconciling what I know of paternalism, colonisation, and all of the so-called culture wars as they relate to "cancel culture" with the best parts of the Great Books. For me, this is what Hutchins referred to as The Great Conversation; he made it a conversation about as opposed to a battle against ideas. It is interesting that the Ramsay program adopts the traditional Oxford/Cambridge liberal arts tutorial as its method while at the same time appearing to resist the very pedagogical approach it has adopted.

Let me digress. I subscribe to Mark Manson's Mindf*ck Monday email. Yes, I know he can be a potty mouth. This weeks' email focused on the concept of "mastery". Manson's second principle of mastery is:

[C]reate feedback loops. That means stop hiding in your basement and show your shit to the world (or a highly qualified teacher/mentor/coach/person/thing.)

It's not an easy thing to do, but my blog has been a way to put my thoughts out there for so for many years now I don't worry about it so much. If you are interested in Mark Manson's approach to mastery, watch his video below:

But let me get back to Harold Bloom and Mortimer Adler (check out this link) and then to Robert M. Hutchin's The Great Conversation, the reason I started writing this article in the first place. Bloom was able to recognise the importance of "other" civilisations without entering into a war against them. Tony Abbott didn't say as much as others claimed he said about the superiority of "The West" in his Quadrant article (see commentary on the NTEU website). But the sentiment was there.

Hutchins' Great Conversation is exactly that - it is not the Great Battle or a Crusade against an imaginary "other" civilisation. It is a collection of books that has elements of the rest of the world in it that happened to coincide with historical events. These events brought it all to the Anglo-centric world in the same way that I was born into this civilisation - by accident. It certainly isn't something to be celebrated as if it were awarded by some meritocratic god.

If we really want to get down to brass tacks then we need to know that if it were not for Islamic scholars, the writings of the ancient Greeks would have disappeared. Or if the Church had succeeded, Western philosophy would not exist. All of these things are as factual as the events described by the IPA's "research".

And the conservatives' views on how to read these books echoes the traditional church's way of reading the bible; not in a spirit of free thinking inquiry but in the way you are told to read them. Adler would never subscribe to such a view. To be sure, neither would Bloom or Calvino.

My point is that the Great Books are certainly great, but by themselves and not in opposition to some other books that might also be considered "great". Bloom argued that Islamic scholarship may rightly have a place in the "West", much like the history of Israel found a normative space in the IPA's "typical" list of historical events.

But scratch the surface and the classification of books that are great that happened to be written in the West are hardly the stuff of right wing conservatism. Karl Marx was German and is clearly a product of the West, but conservatives don't give socialism its rightful place in history, even though Hutchins and Adler certainly did.

It is a shame that the culture wars have interfered in a great idea that could have resulted in a Great Books degree in Australia that followed the liberal arts tradition. I hope it can still happen. But while the culture wars rage on, the best of the West has gone down the proverbial rabbit hole. In the meantime, the sentiments of Hutchins (as echoed by Adler and Bloom) are as relevant today as they ever were.

If I can offer any guidance to students who are attracted to the liberal arts tradition, it is this: Learn to think for yourself. Trust people but don't trust their knowledge. Be curious. Scratch the surface and challenge orthodoxy. Bloom did this; Hutchins and Alder encouraged it, the Enlightenment was about challenging orthodoxy, not about waging war against some other imagined civilisation. And remember these are "great books", not great weapons to be wielded against imagined adversaries. 

Liberal democracy is alive and well, if a little battered. The liberal arts tradition has been flogged by the alt-left and the alt-right, but it survives in the hearts of those who can see beyond the culture wars.

References

d'Abrera, B. (2017). The Rise Of Identity Politics: An Audit of History Teaching at Australian Universities in 2017. Melbourne: Institute of Public Affairs.

On the Beach: The most disturbing novel I have ever read

Remnants of Chernobyl [Photo: CC0]

On the Beach by Nevil Shute
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Spoiler Alert: This novel is about how to die. Forget the reviews that wonder how people could conduct themselves so serenely and not go off like crazed rats. If I had the knowledge that I - and everyone else - would be extinct in a matter of weeks, how would I want the end to be?

I finished reading this novel last night with a powerful rush of emotion followed by involuntary tears and a horrible feeling of powerlessness. I tried to shake this off with a start on some absurd Nabokov (Despair) but it didn't work. All night I dreamt about how I would die in this situation.

In the first dream, everyone was scrambling into a cave. I was following a loved one. Deeper and deeper into the earth we burrowed. I wanted to stop and go back but I also wanted to be with the one I love. They went on. The effects of radiation began to tell on me and I wanted to be near my loved one but not in the dark, buried under ground. We died there and I felt so disappointed that I hadn't gone my own way. I awoke in a state, realised it was the novel and a dream.

My subconscious wasn't satisfied, so back into the dream state I go and the dream runs again. And again. And again. Finally, I wake and realise that life is not so serious. Dying well is more important than running on the rollercoaster of others' ideas. Trust the process. And off into the deepest sleep I go.

No art has ever affected me so. Arriving at this novel and discovering such powerful emotions was a fortunate accident of circumstance. Dilectio Libertas et Doctrina. Love, Freedom, and Learning. Such a powerful way to live.

My choice of books is often a result of random events that open an entirely new world of thought. On a recent road trip, my girlfriend selected the podcast The Cold War Vault, and we listened to the episodes about the Net Evaluation Subcommittee and how it painted an increasingly gloomy picture of the United States' ability to win a nuclear war in the late 1950s.

Dwight D. Eisenhower was President at the time, and Nevil Shute's novel was published in 1957, followed by the 1959 film starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Anthony Perkins, Donna Anderson, and Fred Astaire. The novel and the film painted a bleak picture that almost materialised during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. By then, Robert McNamara's strategy of "mutual assured destruction" (MAD) was gearing up, and the Net Evaluation Subcommittee had made itself obsolete. 

In 1983, Carl Sagan's warnings of a nuclear winter following even a limited nuclear war would ramp up the scientific debate about the end of the world. But Nevil Shute, a Brit-turned-Aussie (and author of A Town Like Alice and Beyond the Black Stump), had set it out already in On the Beach.

I had no idea about Nevil Shute. The connection to Australia came out in the Cold War Vault podcast, which referred to the film and "Anthony Perkins' non-existent Australian accent". I was intrigued and the next thing I notice, the book is staring at me in Elizabeth's Bookshop in Newtown.

These random connections in my various readings are wonderful. Even while writing this up, I looked for a link to Nabokov's Despair and discovered that it, too, had been made into a film starring Dirk Bogarde. Much like Shute, I knew nothing of Bogarde until I read Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and watched the 1971 film. I've since read several of Bogarde's autobiographical stories, opening up another world of French gardens and country living.

Back to On the Beach. Unlike the horror of dying from radiation exposure as thousands of people did after the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Shute tells of the various approaches to death taken by the characters left in Melbourne as nuclear fallout following the short World War III in the northern hemisphere slowly engulfs the rest of the planet.

The hopelessness of it all is symbolised by a trip in a nuclear submarine to test an optimistic theory that radiation levels are decreasing closer to the north pole and to investigate the origin of random morse code transmissions from near Seattle. Yeoman Swain escapes the submarine off the coast of his hometown and is later seen in his boat with an outboard motor fishing. He refuses to die in a strange land in a few weeks' time, preferring to die in a few days at home. It's the individual choices that make this story so vividly disturbing.

One character decides to remain faithful to his dead wife (unlike Gregory Peck in the movie version!). Another buys a Ferrari race car and pushes himself to the limit in scenes where several drivers die brutally in an ad hoc Australian Grand Prix. He takes his prescribed suicide tablets (provided free by the local pharmacy) while sitting, victoriously, in his well-preserved car.

A couple and their daughter decide to just get it over with. A farmer worries about his cattle and makes sure they have enough feed. The naval officer goes down with his ship outside of territorial waters, and Ava Gardner's character gets sloshed and takes her suicide pills just as Gregory Peck's character (she doesn't shag him in the novel) sails off into the sunset and before diarrhea strikes her again. She's on the beach. Hence the name.

This novel demonstrates how stupid it all is - going through the motions because we don't know how to live, let alone die. I am still disturbed when I think about the novel, but differently than in my first nightmare last night.

Much like my literary idol Professor Harold Bloom said, as we age we read against the clock. But we might also prepare to die well. That starts now. And that, I believe, is what Nevil Shute was trying to say.

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Learning About Buddhism from Dr Sax: Jack Kerouac's Surprisingly Erudite Biography of the Buddha

 

Jack Kerouac. Photo by Tom Palumbo [CC BY-SA 2.0].

Wake Up by Jack Kerouac
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I began reading this book back in 2016 but it was out of my depth back then and is only now something I can appreciate after much reading and research. Jack Kerouac has been a bit hit-and-miss for me. I loved On the Road and I didn't like Doctor Sax so much. But this biography of Gotama Buddha was as surprising for me as it was for Robert Thurman who penned the introduction to this Penguin Modern Classic.

I didn't know what to expect and although I had it bookmarked well into the main text, it had been so long I had forgotten everything I'd read so I had to start over. I find it interesting that some books, Like Tolstoy's War and Peace, I can pick up at any time and continue on as if I hadn't put it down so long ago. (Of course, one can do this for years it is so bloody long!) But this one I had completely forgotten so I began it all over again.

I was surprised by the style of the introduction by Thurman. It is very thorough, but he also doesn't hold back on his sense of surprise and wonder at Kerouac's expertise. I, too, am in awe. (Especially after reading Doctor Sax, one of Kerouac's less than appealing attempts at stream of consciousness writing!)

I have read some works that cover the basics, such as the Dalai Lama's How to Practise, Herman Hesse's Siddhartha (yes I know it is a fictional history of one of Gotama's contemporaries), and also to some extent Osho's Empty Boat, but I did not expect to receive so much "direct knowledge" from Kerouac!

I was introduced to Taoism and Buddhism by a friend in Shanghai in early 2019. I was fascinated by the similarities with Stoicism but also with Confucius' teachings. After commencing the Shiva Sutras and Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, I have also had some discussions with a colleague about Hinduism. He refers to Buddhism as "the daughter of Hinduism". This is an appropriate description, as I am learning while reading Karen Armstrong's Buddha right now. 

What I find most interesting is the concept of "perception" which appears equally important in Stoicism. The bottom line is that our ability to perceive is based on our senses which are subjective and we perceive objects according to our pre-programming. Transcending this knowledge requires other types of knowledge if we are to be at peace with oneself.

While I am still grappling with many of these ideas, I found the following helpful from Kerouac (2008, p. 88):

Perception is our Essential Mind; the sun's brightness or the dim moon's darkness are the conditional ripples on its surface... the phenomena that the sense-organs perceive does not originate in our Essential Mind but in the senses themselves.

The senses are changeable in that we can see space or a wall, lightness or darkness. But our Essential Mind is "neither changeable nor fixed" (p. 90). And from p. 91: 

Do not be disturbed by what has been taught, but ponder upon it seriously and never give yourself up either to sadness or delight.

I am grappling with the idea of perceptions from the senses in that this empirical knowledge is an illusion, like ripples on the sea, but our Essential Mind is pure. Or (p. 92):

...it is the eyes, not the intrinsic perception of Mind, that is subject to false mistakes.

So what is this Essential Mind? It is not any one perception of our individual senses, but some kind of whole:

There is neither Truth nor Non-Truth, there is only the essence. And when we intuit the essence of all, we call it Essential Mind.

I have many more notes on this work, but it has enlightened me to much of Buddhism that I did not know. In particular, the sense of individualism was surprising (p. 137):

...prepare quietly a quiet place, be not moved by others' way of thinking, do not compromise to agree with the ignorance of others, go thou alone, make solitude thy paradise...

And to echo James Allen's idea of conquering oneself, Kerouac writes of the Buddha:

As I am a conqueror amid conquerors, so he who conquers 'self' is one with me.

If I am learning anything from my philosophical and theological studies over the last three decades, it is that I am increasingly a Transcendentalist in the fashion of Ralph Waldo Emerson and his "Self-Reliance", and also his idea of finding one's "nature". 

But all of the philosophies and religions I am familiar with have, outside of the theological questions they address and the answers they provide, a requirement for self-knowledge. Kerouac's biography of Gotama Buddha demonstrates just how difficult that can be. 

If only we could "Wake Up".

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When Philosophy is Not Enough (and other journeys of self-discovery)

Sunrise over Coogee Beach, 18th July 2020.

Reclaiming your Inner Harmony: A Practical Guide by Richard Marazita
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It's sad that it's taken me this long to read another book. But it's clear there's light at the end of the tunnel, and reading this book has been inspirational. I've been working with the author of this book for the last few weeks looking at how to get all of my "parts" to work together, instead of having a free run, an experience that hasn't worked at all before.

Some four years of working on Stoic philosophy has been useful but there have been parts that don't work for me. I suspect that Stoicism's physics, stemming from Heraclitus, has an element of sadness in its resignation to fate. Epicureanism, on the other hand, with its focus on happiness, stems from Democritus' physics. Philosophical adversaries, to be sure, but even Seneca would accept the lessons of his rivals if the lessons are useful.

Journalling is my major vehicle for practising Stoicism. I wrote about the approach I have used in the past here. While reinforcing the foundational principle of Stoicism, best captured in the first page of Epictetus' Enchiridion, I also created a chronicle of evidence that continually "stacked up" with a clear message: I wasn't happy. Even though I was much calmer and more at peace with the world, I wasn't happy. The end result was a major crisis that disrupted my otherwise disciplined journalling ritual. 

I don't regret my experience of journalling and practising Stoicism over the last four years, but after the first three years it became a struggle. Only recently have I been able to get back into my journalling practice, but it is substantially different from my previous practice. 

Now, I am learning to incorporate other aspects of Eastern philosophy and religion, especially Buddhism, and more recently, Classical Indian Philosophy in the form of the Yoga and Siva Sutras. 

After a trip to Brunei in May last year the idea of the Chakras opened up a whole new world of healing, especially for my body which has long been neglected over the last twenty years while I pursued study and an academic career. Turning to Stoicism was the first step in a much broader awakening to life outside of the mind.

My first step was to do two Rapid Transformation Therapy (RTT) sessions and then a tarot reading. I had some Bowen, Reiki, and Kinesiology sessions, too. A key theme has been the relationship of the body to the mind. As a former soldier, the only real relationship these two parts of me have had was that my mind pushed my body as far as it could go.

The therapy I have been having with Richard has been useful in recognising the different parts of me that act and react on my behalf. A key part of the technique, known as Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR), has been enlightening and brought to light a number of issues I have buried for many years. 

The approach is similar to Napoleon Hill's concept of the Cabinet of Invisible Counselors, except that the counselors are different parts of me, rather than other individuals. I am hopeful that the approach will help me develop a better sense of self and to become better at establishing and maintaining healthy boundaries.

I stumbled upon Reclaiming your Inner Harmony: A Practical Guide while checking out Richard's website. I found the book easy to read and quite practical. The basic approach is that, to achieve inner harmony, one must balance the mind, body, feelings, and gut instinct. Disharmony is caused by one of these parts dominating the others. 

For me, gut instinct is something I have buried for a long time. I think that Stoicism, which is clearly a form of ancient psychotherapy, is much easier to subscribe to for a soldier-turned-scholar. But it doesn't make any connection to the body. In fact, it tends to dissociate the body from the mind, in that it is not something that one can control. This makes sense in terms of illness or injury, but it seems to ignore the fact that my mind exists because of my body. I must admit to a feeling of dissociation which has only recently begun to retreat.

I found this short book useful despite my first attempt at using the tools leading to my gut instinct going for an off-leash run. Like the EMDR therapy, the point is to enable all parts of oneself to "check in". 

Much like Stoic philosophy (and religions, but that's another story), it takes practice to reinforce the habit, through use of the chain method, if you will. And that is where my journalling has found a new purpose.

My journey, which began with my mind before finding practical application in the form of Stoic philosophy, neglected the feelings, body, and gut instinct that I have rediscovered. It has given me a perspective that I think I initially buried, inappropriately in hindsight, and then suppressed further with Stoicism. 

The last time I felt the connection with my body was in training before going to Duntroon. I was practising Tai Chi at the time. Like Seneca, I can choose to use whatever works for me rather than trying to be a purist in everything I do. Given the obvious health and wellbeing benefits, it makes sense. 

And while many things and people have assisted me on this latest stage of my journey, this book has given me a logical framework for connecting with my different parts while also guiding me to develop my own, unadulterated, sense of self.

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Overcoming Self-Doubt: Stillness is the Key

"Sisyphus" by Pietro della Vecchia (Public domain).

I am a fan of Ryan Holiday's work. I tell my students in my leadership and politics classes, "Be like Ryan". Read, write, think about your future. Develop a philosophy - rules to live by. Establish your purpose - what a colleague calls one's ikigai.

Ryan Holiday reads books. He is well-read. He writes books. He lives on the land. He is doing in his early thirties what I am still not quite able to do in my fifties. But that's not the point. 

As Theodore Roosevelt warned, "comparison is the thief of joy". I know all about my own circumstances, not somebody else's. Better to judge myself by my own principles and standards. 

I have read many self-improvement books and I take something away from each one I have read. But I am also conscious of the marketing behind such works. I recall accompanying one of my in-laws to an event. It turned out to be Amway. I bought Dale Carnegie's famous book but I was wary of every time a colleague asked me, "I'd like to talk to you about a business opportunity".

I found myself becoming a little wary of Holiday's approach to this book about one third of the way through. I felt it was formulaic and repeating old ground from his earlier works. But I have been following his work from the early days of the simple Reading List email newsletter, so I acknowledged my concerns and pushed on.

I think it is the way the book builds. The end of each paragraph gives a few short sentences of encouragement. I was experiencing the elevation at the end of each chapter much like one does when reading Carnegie. Frowning often while reading, it wasn't until the last few pages that my faith in Holiday was restored.

In "Act Bravely", one of the final chapters, Holiday discusses Albert Camus' The Fall. I am nodding in agreement and I thought, "I know this story, I've read most of Camus". I had to check my blog and there is was, "La Chute".

It struck me again that Holiday is really well-read. My faith restored, I went back and examined what had been going on for me.

To cut a long story short, I suffer from self-doubt in the way of Steven Pressfield. It can be crippling. Writing this right now is part of my preparation to write something else that I wish would just go away. But it won't and I have a job to do.

Holiday discusses the idea of stillness in the context of looking after oneself. I noted that many of the tips and tricks he mentions for maintaining stillness in one's life, I have used since I can remember.

Albert Camus struck me the same way when he discussed suicide. (I am not advocating suicide but I went through the philosophical exercise as the Stoics do without realising it had been done by others. This is a major reason to read according to Harold Bloom and Italo Calvino.) Ryan Holiday introduced me to the Stoics and they had the same view of suicide as a legitimate philosophical option.

Reading Stillness is the Key revealed to me the extent of my self-doubt. Not only about myself and my academic work, but also about the processes I use and how I defend my inner citadel from nonsense, how I do things like writing this blog post as a hobby and how I might prioritise doing so on this long weekend holiday instead of doing other work that is always there and can take up all my time when I let it.

And there it is - Ryan Holiday has done it again. All writing follows a formula, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is formulaic. Indeed, Aristotle's formula was original once! It brings me back to a quote from Jack London's To Build a Fire on my blog post from last Sunday:

The trouble with him was that he was without imagination. He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances.

To be formulaic in writing is to lack "the significances". In these, Ryan Holiday lacks nothing.

Vonnegut: Nothing to see here, moving right along...

Folly in the Mist, Hann. Münden, Germany. Photo by Michael de Percy.

I was on my way to Germany to visit Berlin, Dresden, and Hann. Münden. Kurt Vonnegut, a second generation American of German descent seemed a good choice for the flight. I usually find it easy to knock over a Penguin paperback on a long-haul flight, but not this time. I've been struggling to read deeply since a major life event early last year shifted the focus of my spare time. 

So I didn't manage to finish the book until some months later. I found Vonnegut's work to be interesting but a little far-fetched - it smacked of a Woody Allen style of science fiction (see the trailer for "The Sleeper" below) that was somehow banal yet allegorical in a mildly interesting way.

    

Much of the social commentary was lost on me. I suppose for a conservative reader of the early 1960s the foot-touching free love may have been a bit out there, but for me it was all old hat. I had the feeling of the 'thirteen days' and the Bay of Pigs fiasco. 

Usually I am a fan of history but Vonnegut is rather economical with his contextual elements - an Animal Farm kind of focus on the sociological order rather than the 'iceberg' cerebral development approach. It was interesting today that I listened to a podcast on Jack London's literary style.

This sent me on a quest to look back at some of my previous readings of several of London's works. One thing I found was that I have been critical of London's racism (poignant in the wake of the Black Lives Matters protests beginning in the US and now happening in solidarity but focused on Indigenous deaths in custody here in Australia). 

But I was also pleased to note that I had picked up on a key theme of the overall problem (from Jack London's To Build a Fire):

The trouble with him was that he was without imagination.

That's how I felt about Vonnegut's work. Until the meaning of the title came to my attention. The cat's cradle:

It's a child's illusion. It requires one's imagination. One flick of the hands and the cradle is gone. It doesn't exist.

I am usually way off but occasionally, like with Jack London, I am on the mark. 

I found in Cat's Cradle the Stoic technique of the "bird's eye view". Once we view the world from above, we realise two things. 

First, the insignificance of our petty existence. The arguments of today, the angry idiot tailgating me on the Hume highway last night, flashing his lights and sounding his horn. All nothing. I remember noting too, with flying, that once you are above the clouds it is always a perfect day. It is all a matter of perspective.

Second, we are all in this together.  I am currently reading Ryan Holiday's Stillness is the Key. He mentions Edgar Mitchell's famous words upon viewing the world from space:

You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, 'Look at that, you son of a bitch.’

It is interesting that just this week, Mitchell's words have resurfaced in what has been called the world's first political protest in near space, but targeted at Donald Trump.

In the above musings, and almost two months after I finished reading Cat's Cradle, I realised Vonnegut's genius. It is all an illusion. There are hands, there is string, there is imagination. The cat's cradle is made up of reality and intangibles. Neither works without the other.

Fake news, The Guardian versus The Australian and all of the left versus right is more of the same nonsense. It is not imagination, it is not creative. It is dogmatic, divisive, and dodgy. Yet the people believe.

This is what I get from Vonnegut. It is not the illusion, but that we make sense out of the world through our "bounded rationality" combined with our sense of  imagination. Not fake or make-believe, but creative and expressive and from the depths of our intellect.

Regrettably, Kurt Vonnegut reminds us that without imagination (the creative as opposed to the conspiratorial kind), we are doomed to an inevitable end. Like London's "everyman" in To Build a Fire, we are not reflecting on our mortality in the face of nature, but rather imagining ourselves to be something more significant while smacking of hubris. For London:

The trouble with him was that he was without imagination. He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances.

But London, too, was a fan of eugenics. He was human and he, too, was wrong.

Vonnegut was subtler, less egotistical, more realistic. If I had to sum up Cat's Cradle, I would say that London had too much imagination, whereas Vonnegut is the Goldilocks' little bear version of "just right".

P.S. It's a shame that The Three Bears was originally written by Robert Southey and not the Grimm Brothers to fit my German theme. And the original Goldilocks was an old woman and the three bears were bachelors. But you can use your imagination! I visited the Grimm Brothers Museum in Kassel, Germany, on 3rd December 2019.

Outside the Grimm Brothers' Museum, Kassel, Germany.
Photo by Michael de Percy.

Populism and a New World Order

Viktor Jakupec, Max Kelly, Jonathan Makuwira. (Eds.) (2020). Rethinking Multilateralism in Foreign Aid: Beyond the Neoliberal Hegemony. New York: Routledge.

My latest work has just been published by Routledge. My chapter entitled "Populism and a New World Order" looks at the rise of populism and its impact on the Bretton Woods institutions, particularly the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Trade Organisation (WTO). 

I am of the view that the current challenges by the United States and the United Kingdom against the WTO and the European Union (EU) (respectively) are simply tactics that are designed to appease domestic voters while appearing to slow the ascent of China. 

Further, China is using the existing world order to develop its technical governance capabilities and is complementing (rather than supplementing) the Bretton Woods institutions in response to US isolationism.

Australia and other middle powers have been fortunate in that populism has not taken hold of domestic politics as it has in the US and the UK. I agree with Dr Waleed Aly's opinion piece from the New York Times in 2019 and more recently a Daily Mail report on what he had to say about the current leadership during the Covid-19 social distancing measures in Australia. 

Australians are fortunate not to have suffered much more than the rhetoric of what have otherwise been competent policy responses both to international trade and the current pandemic. But it is a delicate balancing act between appeasing the US and not upsetting China, and the Bretton Woods institutions, in my view, provide the best option for stability into the future.

My main argument is that:

If we accept the premise of either institutional change being brought about by the displacement of old ideas by the new, or the exhaustion of traditional institutions creating the opportunity for new ideas to be implemented, then populism provides no alternative in either case. As history suggests, the multilateral institutions established at Bretton Woods have proven their ability to adapt to new economic ideas and changing global realities. Populism does not represent either. Rather, populism represents the reaction of domestic politics to the decline in economic dominance of the Anglo-West and subsequent dissatisfaction with the existing world order while offering no alternative to it.

Click here for details of the chapter and the book.

Abstract

Institutions tend to be stable for extended periods of time, punctuated by exogenous events that can lead to institutional change. If institutions tend to reinforce their own rules and routines, it can be said that institutions cannot then change themselves. While wars and other major exogenous events can lead to institutional change, ideas are also powerful, and relatively peaceful, drivers of change. Since the establishment of an international trade regime at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, new ideas about the best way to organise the economy have influenced global trade, resulting in the establishment of the World Trade Organisation in 1995. The idea of free market economics led to a new global trading system, coinciding with the end of the Soviet Union, and this system has remained relatively stable since the end of Keynesianism on a global scale. Recently, however, the rise in populism and the re-emergence of nationalism have challenged the existing world order. This chapter examines the impact of the rise in populism and the re-emergence of nationalism on the international institutions of global trade. Using theories of institutional change, the chapter examines the extent to which populist ideas about free trade versus protectionism are leading to a new world economic order.

The book is available at all major retailers including The Book Depository.

About the book: Viktor Jakupec, Max Kelly, Jonathan Makuwira. (Eds.) (2020). Rethinking Multilateralism in Foreign Aid: Beyond the Neoliberal Hegemony. New York: Routledge.

Bukowski on Belonging and the Cost of Freedom

Louis Pasteur, oil painting by Albert Edelfelt (1885) at the Musée d'Orsay,  (Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons).

Factotum by Charles Bukowski
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It's hard not to enjoy Bukowski's writing. Like with Hemingway and others, why we find it fascinating to read about the shenanigans of people who struggle to write is beyond me. Is it because secretly anyone who reads wishes they could write? Is this part of Robert M. Hutchins' Great Conversation? I don't know.

Yet while some would suggest that Bukowski is the world's greatest misogynist, he doesn't depict anyone else in this novel any worse than he does himself. His mention of ending it all early in the novel hints at the level of self-deprecation that just didn't seem to come through in my reading of Post Office.

In this novel, I feel Bukowski's sense of dereliction of duty but from a sensitive soul who is otherwise intelligent. The constant references to Debussy and Mahler indicate someone who is far more than the alcoholic bum Bukowski portrays in this novel.

Yet it is believable (I am cutting out my adverbs as I write - Bukowski reminds me of a combination of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, hence my hesitation to add "entirely" - he's either believable or he isn't). The protagonist moves from job to job, surrounded by others who share his sense of despair at the world - a world they are part of yet cannot belong to without giving up their sense of identity.

I identify with Bukowski for this reason. Not so much the "beer-sodden" bum who wanders about aimlessly. But the soul who cannot ever belong but is stuck in present company that somehow can turn off their own bullshit meter sufficiently (damn those adverbs!) to carve out an existence of what is essentially living for somebody else.

I find Bukowski's characters admirable because they give up hope without giving up their freedom. Although Henry Chinaski is made to feel as if he doesn't belong because he is excluded from the World War II draft, he still lives as the intelligent loner who doesn't fit in but is stuck anyway.

But the struggle is admirable. Struggle is what we were put on this earth to do. We either struggle against what we do not want, or we struggle for a better life. Henry Chinaski is a drunken, no-hoper bum but he gives me hope - hope that I can live as I choose and not how others choose for me, even if the consequences are high.

And that is why I enjoy Bukowski's work!

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The More Wisdom than Wit of Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln, US President, 1861-1865. Photo: Mathew Brady Civil War Series [Public Domain] via US National Archives.

The Wit and Wisdom of Abraham Lincoln: A Book of Quotations by Abraham Lincoln

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is the third of the Dover "Wit and Wisdom" series I have read, following on from Poor Richard (Benjamin Franklin) and Mark Twain. While the latter two were certainly witty in the humorous sense of the word, its use in relation to Lincoln is one more of quick intelligence, sans humour.

There are many familiar quotes in this book, two at least from popular culture. The first from Bob Dylan's "Talkin' World War III Blues" (p. 29):

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time (29 May 1856).

The other quote is from Saving Private Ryan, a letter of condolence to a Mrs Lydia Bixby. Lincoln believed that Bixby had lost five sons in the war. The book suggests this was what Lincoln believed at the time, but it was a mistake - she had lost two (p. 78). I decided to delve into this a little more.

While there is much controversy about the actual letter, ranging from opinions that the wording of the letter is greater than the Gettysburg Address, to that it wasn't written by Lincoln but by his assistant personal secretary, John Hay.

What is even stranger is that Bixby may well have been a Confederate sympathiser and operated a house of ill repute! Still, that doesn't take away from Lincoln's eloquence.

There isn't much in the way of humour other than a mild form of self-deprecating humility. My favourite story about Lincoln is his decision to grow a beard, based on the suggestion of an 11 year-old girl, Grace Bedell, in a letter of 15 October 1860 (p. 14). My great, great grandfather, James Beasley Percy, born in 1866 near Armidale, wore the same beard.

Emily and James Percy, circa 1890s.

But there is one thing that Lincoln was famous for, not so much what he wrote but what he didn't send. On 14 July 1863, Lincoln wrote a scathing letter to General George G. Meade for letting Robert E. Lee's forces escape following the Battle of Gettysburg (p. 86). Lincoln referred to these as "hot letters" to let off steam. I suppose it is easier not to post a letter, much less so with a "flaming" email!

While quotes are easy to come by on the internet, and not all are adequately attributed, I find reading the "Wit and Wisdom" series useful in that the quotes are themed around important events or activities. Reading a person's thoughts, letters, and speeches in this way provides a richer idea of the trials and tribulations they faced, rather than the glossy bits that are seen in a simple meme or online quote.

Lincoln appears to be much more serious than Twain or Poor Richard. Indeed, responding to a cabinet minister wondering why Lincoln was reading a humorous book (p. 44), Lincoln replied:

With all the fearful strain that is upon me night and day, if I did not laugh I should die.

And he was under enormous strain. In responding to a reported death threat, Lincoln remarked on 4 April 1865 (p. 16):

I cannot bring myself to believe that any human being lives who would do me any harm.

Alas, there was, but the rest is history.

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Appreciating Ted Hughes

Hawk Roosting: Feet or foot? Photo: Summerdrought [CC BY-SA 4.0] via Wikimedia

Lupercal by Ted Hughes

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

When I sat down to write about my first reading of this collection of poetry, I drew a blank. I knew nothing of Ted Hughes until he was mentioned in a comment about my reading of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, along with Sylvia Plath. I'd heard of Plath! 

I didn't hate the poetry, nor did I like it. But it seemed strange. I knew it was about animals, but that was the extent of the experience of my first reading. So I took to some research and made some enlightening discoveries.

Hughes was the UK's Poet Laureate, just like Alfred, Lord Tennyson. There had to be something I was missing.

In an interview with The Paris Review from 1995, Hughes mentions a number of issues concerning "The Art of Poetry", such as the differences in drafting verse in handwriting versus typing. In response to the question "Is a poem ever finished?", Hughes mentions a struggle he has had with the singular or plural in the middle of the poem, "Hawk Roosting". Neither worked satisfactorily.

So I start there:

My feet are locked upon the rough bark.

It took the whole of Creation

To produce my foot, my each feather:

Now I hold Creation in my foot

And he's right. Swap feet for foot and back again, and neither works grammatically. But it works as it is in the poem.

I tried another poem, "Urn Burial". On the first reading, my mind was clouded by seeing some of the oldest remnants of human urn burials in Bahrain on a visit during my sabbatical in 2009. All I could picture were the skeletal remains curled up in the large stone urns. No animals in sight.

Then, like a 3D picture, the symbolism became clear: Oh, it's a weasel! (It even reads "weasel", but I was off in another dimension.) It started to make sense.

This was not entirely my own doing. I had to digress with Hughes' ars poetica, "The Thought Fox". Hughes basically tells me how to read his poetry. It's very clever, but maybe a little more academic than I was expecting.

Hughes' fascination with animals came from his childhood experience. His older brother, ten years his senior, loved to hunt. Hughes acted as his older brother's retriever and this continued for something like twenty years. Hughes is also famous for his children's books.

Like many readers these days, I had fallen victim to the general decline in reading poetry for fun. (Except epic and didactic poetry such as Homer, Virgil, and Hesiod.)

This year I have read Frank O'Hara, Sir Walter Ralegh, T.S. Eliot, and Alfred Lord Tennyson, and I am now a convert. I also read Nietzsche's The Gay Science and I am currently reading Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence, both works about poetry. It makes more sense to read poetry more than once, and with some study in between. (Hughes said this in his Paris Review interview, too.)

Had I not read up about Hughes, I would have been none the wiser. And I would certainly be missing out.

The icing on the cake was the name of the collection, Lupercal, is derived from an ancient Roman pastoral or fertility festival, Lupercalia, held annually on my birthday. This made more sense of the numerous classical references that had confused me in my first reading. (The birthday bit gave a surprising personal connection!)

Perhaps I am now a Ted Hughes fan.

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Tennyson: Art imitates life and proves me wrong yet again

Heavily hangs the broad sunflower. Keswick, Gunning 25th December 2018. Photo by Michael de Percy.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson by Alfred Tennyson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Stoics were happy to be proven wrong so that they might root out their own ignorance. Only recently have I begun to really enjoy poetry, and a visit to the bookstore at a time my mind was open brought me to this selection of poetry by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

Tennyson became Poet Laureate of Britain in 1850 following William Wordworth's death. He wasn't the first choice. Not knowing what the position of poet laureate even meant, my class self-consciousness went off on its usual tangent. Typical, an "appointed" artist. State-contrived creativity. What nonsense.

I once felt the same about Hemingway. Americans uber-promoting their own as the best in the world, without considering anyone else, anywhere else. And then I read Islands in the Stream. Wow. And I have since devoured all the works I could find written by Hemingway. He is my favourite author.

So when I purchased this book, I thought I'd give it a go. And then my class-self-consciousness kicked in. Until page 4:

        Earthward he boweth the heavy stalks

of the mouldering flowers:

       Heavily hangs the broad sunflower

Over its grave i' the earth so chilly; 

Before reading the book, I had been out preparing the garden for the ensuing heatwave. An enormous sunflower had opened up, the biggest I have ever seen. Then it began to droop.

I added a longer stake to keep the flower upright. But after I put the stake in, I realised that the flower was not drooping for lack of water or support. It was solid, bent over in the position shown in the photograph above.

A few hours later I read page 4 of Tennyson's Song. And in it was all the beauty and reason of my broad sunflower in its present condition. A work of God. 

My Damascene moment instantly converted me to Tennyson. Once again, my own bullshit had been called and I was wrong. 

The rest of the works are an absolute delight, and I made an interesting discovery. Tennyson used the phrase "a handful of dust" (p. 48). Evelyn Waugh had borrowed the phrase as the title for his novel, from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land.

The Waste Land is what got me into poetry in the first place, so the miracle of life continues, the circle of literary learning turns, and I live and learn.

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