Bastions of wealth

The Murder of Agamemnon, painting by Pierre-Narcisse Guérin. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

Bastions of wealth
are no defence for the man
who treads the grand altar of Justice
down and out of sight.--Spoken by the chorus in Aeschylus' Agamemnon.

Goat Rope’s ongoing series on Greek tragedy continues. You’ll also find links and comments about current events below. Right now we’re on Aeschylus Orestes trilogy. If you like this kind of thing, please click on earlier posts.

According to Paul Roche,

“The Oresteia is the story of an aristocratic house in the process of destroying itself under a hereditary curse, which is both a destiny and a free expression of love and hate. The blood feud can end only by total self-destruction, or by giving way to a divinely established justice which is itself evolving—evolving from primitive concepts of retribution into a higher order of compassion, enlightenment, and peace."

Agamemnon, leader of the Greek expedition to Troy, gives the title to the first part of the trilogy. He was a prominent character in Homer’s Iliad (where he always seemed like a jerk to me) and his ghost appears in the Odyssey.

In the Odyssey, an epic of homecoming, Agamemnon’s return contrasts with that of Odysseus. Like all the Greeks who committed outrages and excesses in their sack of Troy, they are destined to suffer. But while Odysseus lives and is reconciled with the virtuous Penelope after many sorrows and a long and dangerous journey, Agamemnon is murdered by his wife Clytemnestra in revenge for sacrificing their daughter Iphigenia for fair winds to Troy ten years earlier at the command of the goddess Artemis.

In Homer, Penelope is the archetypal good wife while Clytemnestra is the archetypal bad wife (although I always thought Agamemnon had it coming).

While Greek tragic writers almost always used mythic themes, they were free to adapt them to current circumstances. Aeschylus went way beyond Homer in his version of the story, even carving out a special place for his hometown of Athens in its resolution.

More tomorrow.

SPEAKING OF BASTIONS OF WEALTH BEING NO DEFENSE, here's a NY Times editorial about the recent US Supreme Court decision regarding hijinks on the WV Supreme Court.

A PLUG FOR PAINE. This item suggests that Thomas Paine is a founder worth another look today.

PLAIN ENGLISH. The language is projected to add its millionth word today. I recommend "glarnox." No definition yet, though some of our best people are working on it.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A history of violence

The punishment of Tantalus.

"I know this house's ancestry--
it's pedigree of sin."

Violence seems to run through families, generations, countries and even entire regions of the world, with outrage breeding outrage. Sadly, sometimes those who were its victims become its perpetrators.

Ending that seemingly endless cycle and establishing a higher social order is the theme of the Oresteia by Aeschylus. Although its message is profoundly political, the dramatic trilogy focuses on how violence played out in one family...and what a family it was.

Here's a short summary of the backstory of the drama:

1. Tantalus served up his son Pelops (literally) at a banquet for the gods. They were not amused and he was one of the few ancients to qualify for personalized eternal damnation by being "tantalized" with food and drink but forever unable to get it. The gods reconstructed Pelops physically but not morally.

2. Pelops sabotaged the chariot of his father-in-law to be, which led to his death. Then he double crossed and murdered they guy who helped him do it. The guy not surprisingly cursed the house with his last breath.

3. Pelops sons Atreus and Thyestes set a new standard for nastiness. First, they contested for power. Then Thyestes seduced the wife of Atreus. Then, after a family meeting for "reconciliation," Atreus kills Thyestes children and serves them for dinner to their unknowing father. One, Aegisthus, got away.

Nice guys, huh?

In the play proper, the merry dance goes on:

4. Agamemnon, son of Atreus, sacrifices his own daughter Iphigenia in order to get fair winds to sail for Troy at the beginning of that war.

5. On his return, Clytemnestra with the help of her lover Aegisthus (remember him?) kills Agamemnon.

6. Orestes, son of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, kills his own mother at the order of Apollo.

Then it really gets messy.

While all that sounds like an incredible downer, the plays are actually optimistic about the possibility of people, with the help of divine wisdom, to rise above all that and break the endless cycle.

More to come.

GO, SUPREMES! The big news around here is the US Supreme Court's decision regarding Massey Energy and whether a state justice elected with money from CEO Don Blankenship should recuse himself form cases involving the company. The court said he should. Here's the NY Times on it. Here's the Washington Post. And here's the Charleston Gazette.

A "WARRIOR GENE?" Some scientists think they've found one that is associated with violence. Hmmm...maybe that explains the whole Atreus thing.

ON THAT NOTE, global spending on weapons is through the roof.

BULLY FOR YOU. The research is in, and some strategies seem to work in confronting bullying.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A reasonable creature

They do eat other fish, after all.

There are plenty of amusing interludes in Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, but one of my favorites has to do with his resolution as a young man to become a vegetarian.

He kept to his resolve pretty well for a good stretch, until he was on a boat journey from Boston when people began catching cod.

...Hitherto I had stuck to my resolution of not eating animal food, and on this occasion I consider'd...the taking every fish as a kind of unprovoked murder, since none of them had, or ever could do us any injury that might justify the slaughter.

The problem was, those cod looked and smelled pretty good as they were being cooked. While he considered his vegetarianism as reasonable, there was this little issue:

...I had formerly been a great lover of fish, and, when this came hot out of the frying-pan, it smelt admirably well. I balanc'd some time between principle and inclination, till I recollected that, when the fish were opened, I saw smaller fish taken out of their stomachs; then thought I, "If you eat one another, I don't see why we mayn't eat you." So I din'd upon cod very heartily, and continued to eat with other people, returning only now and then occasionally to a vegetable diet.

Here's the punchline:

So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.

Roger that.

HEALTH CARE NOW? Bring it on.

GREEN JOBS, good jobs.

MORE FUN WITH THE SUPREMES. Here's the Washington Post on the Massey Energy/Don Blankenship/Brent Benjamin/WV Supreme Court saga now before the US Supreme Court.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Paradigms

The philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn hit a home run in 1962 when he published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Part of his theory was that in any given period, people make us of dominant models or paradigms to explain the world.

When problems grow with the older paradigm, some innovators develop alternate paradigms to better account for observations. From time to time, the new model triumphs and the old paradigm is put on the shelf--often after a bitter fights and with some people still clinging to the old.

In American economic history, we've seen three paradigms rise and fall (and maybe rise again). One was the classic idea of lassez faire or unregulated capitalism, in which there was little government interference with the economy--although, as I argued in yesterday's post, in reality the government often intervened on behalf of the wealthy.

It wasn't that bad a model in an age of small, independent producers and a truly competitive economy. But as economic power centralized and as economic crises became more and more serious--and even threatened the survival of capitalism itself--another paradigm emerged.

The new model is associated with the great English economist John Maynard Keynes and it recognized that sometimes markets could totally melt down. Keynes advocated a role for regulation, public investments, and transfer payments to promote economic stability and a rising standard of living for all.

This model was dominant from the New Deal era to the Reagan era and it enjoyed considerable success until the oil-related stagflation of the late 1970s. Meanwhile, there were those who were hostile to the Keynesian paradigm from the beginning, even though it may have saved capitalism from an even more serious crisis in the 1930s.

A coalition of right wing politicians and "free market" economists mounted a political and economic assault, promoting a model that is sometimes called "neo-classical." It called for deregulation, tax cuts, reduction or elimination of the social safety net, etc. and has been the dominant model from around 1980 until the latest economic meltdown.

For the life of me, though, I'm amazed that it lasted this long or took so long to crash. At this moment that paradigm is pretty much dead and it's not clear whether the next one will be a revived and updated Keynesianism or something else. Our situation is like that of the old Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times."

SPEAKING OF KEYNES, here's New Republic writer John B. Judis on the continuing relevance of his ideas.

DEAD ENDERS. Opponents of a the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the economic stimulus package developed by the House and supported by President Obama, are pulling out the stops and plugging the failed policies of the past.

COUNTRY MATTERS. Here's an interview with writer Wendell Berry on rural life, community and such.

HERE WE GO AGAIN. WV Supreme Court Justice Brent Benjamin is planning on hearing another case involving Massey Energy. Benjamin, then a political unknown, was elected in 2004 after Massey CEO Don Blankenship spent over $3 million to elect him. The US Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case that questions the propriety of Benjamin participating in cases involving Massey.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, some Mingo County residents are going to sue Massey for polluting their water with coal sludge.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The barbarian from the west

Bodhidharma, the monk who brought Zen Buddhism to China, from an 1887 woodblock by Yoshitoshi. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

Although I'm not a card-carrying Buddhist, I've been a student of it for many years. As I mentioned in earlier posts this week, I was aware of the Buddha from early childhood, thanks to the artifacts of wandering grandparents. But it was another major figure from Buddhist history who had the most immediate impact on my life.

When I was a kid, like many boys, I was interesting in fighting--especially in exotic fighting arts from Asia. This was just before the big kung fu boom in the early 1970s. At the time, I could find no affordable place to study so I read everything I could get my hands on.

Many books about karate and kung fu (aka gung-fu, wushu, kuoshu, etc.) then and now relate a legend that says these arts were founded by a wandering monk who made the hazardous journey from India to China to promote a new Buddhist teaching (Zen in Japanese, Chan in Chinese, and dhyana in Sanskrit).

It was said that this monk (Bodhidharma in Sanskrit, Tamo in Chinese, Daruma in Japanese) arrived at the now famous Shaolin Temple and found the monks there to be too weak to progress in meditation. He was said to have taught them a series of exercises for health and self defense that would eventually become the basis for Shaolin kung fu and the many arts it influenced.

Now this story is more a matter of legend than fact but I did get something out of it at the time which was worth keeping: the idea that mind and body were essentially one and the same and that one can't develop one without the other.

Later, I went on to investigate the other, older legends about Bodhidharma which were entertaining and colorful in their own right. About which more tomorrow.

WEST VIRGINIA SUPREME JOKE. The ripples just keep getting wider and wider over the scandal involving WV Supreme Court Justice Brent Benjamin, Massey Energy, and its CEO Don Blankenship. All kinds of groups, including (Wal-Mart!) have weighed in saying that it looks tacky for a justice whose seat was purchased by a corporate pal to rule in favor of that corporation.

FEAR OF SUCCESS may be driving the anti-stimulus crowd, economist Dean Baker argues.

MYTHS OF DE-REGULATION. Regulation of some kind is going to happen--it's a question of who benefits.

IN PRAISE OF MELANCHOLY. Happiness is fine, but the blues have their place.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A GOD INTOXICATED MAN

Welcome to Spinoza Week at Goat Rope. You'll find links and comments about current events here, but the guiding thread this week is the thought of that great 17th century philosopher. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier entries.

As mentioned previously, Spinoza's unorthodox religious views got him excommunicated from the Jewish community and aroused the ire of many Christians. But those who called him an atheist were sadly mistaken. If anything, the German writer Novalis was right when he called him "a God-intoxicated man." In fact, Spinoza's universe was so full of God that there wasn't room for anything else.

The most complete elaboration of Spinoza's theory of God, the universe, and everything (which were all pretty much of the same in his view) is in his 1677 masterpiece The Ethics.

The thing that hits you right away about the Ethics is its format, which is right out of Euclidean geometry. The book consists of definitions, axioms, corollaries and proofs. One of the first things you run into is his definition of God:

By God I understand a being absolutely infinite, i.e., a substance consisting of an infinity of attributes, of which each one expresses an eternal and infinite essence.

He conceives God as essentially the same as the substance or nature of the universe, both material and mental:

Whatever is, is in God, and nothing can be or be conceived without God.

However, there is nothing anthropomorphic about his view of God:

those who confuse divine with human nature readily attribute human passions to God, more especially if they do not know how passions are produced in the mind.

Rather than being like a person with whims and changeable moods, much less like a granter of wishes or punisher of sinners, God acts eternally from the necessity of "his" nature and "does not act from freedom of the will."

In the universe there exists nothing contingent, but all things are determined by the necessity of the divine nature to exist and operate in a certain way.

This is the God of Spinoza's admirer Albert Einstein, who "doesn't play dice with the world." This is the source of the uniformity of nature's (God's) laws, which could not have been other than they are:

Things could not have been produced by God in any other way or order than that in which they were produced.

In such a world, there is no chaos or chance, but rather

all things were predetermined by God, not through his free will or absolute pleasure, but through his absolute nature or infinite power.

In such a system where even God acts from necessity (even if it is his own), it's not surprising that there's no room for free will for people, although he believed we can become freer by understanding the necessity of things. Surprisingly, however, he wasn't a bad psychologist, but that will--of necessity--have to wait until tomorrow.

PUTTING IT TOGETHER is the Economic Policy Institute with their latest snapshot, which is all about manufacturing.

OWNING TO RENT. Here's progressive economist Dean Baker with a really interesting idea of helping the most vulnerable homeowners through the recession and housing meltdown.

WV ON NPR. This just keeps getting better and better. Here's NPR on John Grisham's latest novel, which was inspired Supreme Court Justice Massey--I mean Blankenship--I mean Benjamin.

HOPE FOR THE CHRONICALLY MARRIED may be found here.

VIRTUALLY NOTHING. This item from Business Weeks suggests that current border policy is a flop.

DOH! According to The Week Magazine, a British retail chain had to withdraw a bed targeted for young girls that it called "Lolita." Apparently people at the company were unfamiliar with Vladimir Nabokov's book of the same title. According to a company source, "We had to look it up on Wikipedia."

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

SOMETIMES A TRAIN IS JUST A TRAIN

Image courtesy of the Library of Congress.

The theme for this week's Goat Rope is dreams and what they may or may not mean. You will also find links and comments about current events. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

No discussion of dreams would be complete without spending a little time with Old Man Sig. Freud's Interpretation of Dreams made a huge splash in 1900 and is still worth a look all these years later. He also wrote a shorter, more accessible book titled On Dreams in 1901.

Freud's basic idea here is that dreams are more or less disguised wish fulfillment's usually originating from unconscious desires. Sometimes this is all too obvious and the desires are too, as when hungry people dream of food or lonely people dream of company (take that any way you want it).

In other cases this isn't so obvious. Some dreams seem scary or just senseless. He believed that dreams have both a manifest and a latent content which together make up what he called the dream work. The manifest content of a dream might involve say a house. The latent or hidden idea behind this image could mean something else entirely, for example the body.

The process of interpreting dreams for him involved breaking down the manifest or obvious content into its component parts and analyzing the things the dreamer associates with them. Dreams are tricky critters and employ a number of ruses, including metaphors and similes, condensation, substitution and other ways of disguising their meaning:

The dream thoughts which we first come across as we proceed with our analysis often strike us by the unusual form in which they are expressed; they are not clothed in the prosaic language usually employed by our thoughts, but are on the contrary represented symbolically by means of similes and metaphors, images resembling those of poetic speech. (On Dreams, ch. 6.)

Why bother with all the imagery? For Freud, people have unconscious desires, often of a sexual nature, which are repressed most of the time. When we sleep, the repression eases up enough for the varmints to get out, but they pass through what he called a "dream censor" which disguises them so as not to disturb sleep or the sleeper. A nightmare is a really disguised wish in which one part of us wants something the other parts would be creeped out by.

For Freud, dreams aren't the only way the unconscious pokes out, if you'll pardon the expression. Slips of the tongue, mistaken actions, and symptoms are other ways.

Later in life, after studying the nightmares of many World War I veterans suffering from what we might now call post-traumatic stress disorder, he came to partially modify his theory in the book Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In that 1920 book, he developed his theory of the death instinct.

Even if we can't go all the way with Sig, he does deserve great credit for getting the study of dreams on the agenda of psychology. The problems with his theory is its reductionism. Some dreams really are Freudian, but others not so much.

I remember once waking up after a classic Freudian dream--flying, trains, tunnels, all that--and wanting to write a nasty letter to my unconscious saying "How trite! How cliched! Couldn't you come up with something a little more original?"

THE MISSING PIECE. Washington Post columnist Marie Cocco states the obvious about the need to expand unemployment benefits in a recession. Stating the obvious is necessary in these 2+2=5 days.

SMIRK OF THE UNION. More comments and links about the recession and the receding state of the union can be found here.

ANOTHER BAD IDEA would be extending the arms race into space.

YOUNG VOTERS, already saddled with debt and worried about health care and a declining middle class, are the subject of this Business Week article.

LEGISLATIVE PARADOX. Any time someone proposes that the WV legislature proposes some action benefiting working folks, they can expect to be asked "How are we going to pay for it?" Fair enough. But not too many of them seem to be saying the same thing about proposed cuts to corporate taxes.

WV INSPIRES GRISHAM. Popular courtroom novelist John Grisham's latest novel--about a rich businessman who buys a judge's election--was inspired in part by WV's 2004 Supreme Court election when Massey CEO Don Blankenship spent millions of his own dollars to elect the politically unknown Brent Benjamin.

On a similar front, Benjamin has consistently refused to recuse himself from cases involving Massey (he's usually on their side), including a pending lawsuit for $220 million. Chief justice Spike Maynard, who was photographed vacationing with Blankenship did recuse himself from the case in the wake of recent publicity.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A NATURALIST'S TALE AND (WHY NOT?) AN ITEM ABOUT THE LOCH NESS MONSTER ((and the WV Supreme Court))

Caption: Can you find the ants in this picture? E. O. Wilson could.

This has inadvertently turned into Darwin week at Goat Rope so I may as well stay the course and recommend a good but not terribly recent book, Edward O. Wilson's 1995 autobiography Naturalist.

While El Cabrero was never a huge fan of sociobiology, one of Wilson's many brainchildren, it's hard not to like Wilson himself (no known relation). Before and after he moved into evolutionary grand theory, he was--and remains--a naturalist's naturalist, turning over rocks and logs in search of nature's wonders.

And he has become a real leader among scientists in defending the environment, recently calling for Christians to join the fight to preserve the natural world.

Wilson ignited quite a controversy in the 1970s with his suggestions that genes influence human society to a degree largely unimagined. He was attacked--sometimes unfairly--for promoting an ideology which some said could justify inequality, male dominance, xenophobia, war, etc.

In fact, he didn't believe biology was destiny and was not much of a political animal, describing himself as a "Roosevelt liberal turned pragmatic centrist." One could do worse--much worse.

The debate over the role of biology in social life is destined to go on for a long time, but his other contributions both to natural science and protecting the environment are beyond question.

Here's sample from Naturalist about his beloved ants:

They are everywhere, dark and ruddy specks that zigzag across the ground and down holes, milligram-weight inhabitants of an alien civilization who hide their daily rounds from our eyes. For over 50 million years ants have been the overwhelmingly dominant insect everywhere on land outside the polar and arctic ice fields. By my estimate, between 1 and 10 million billion individuals are alive at any moment, all of them together weighing, to the nearest order of magnitude, as much as the totality of human beings.

He left out the part about them getting in your pants and making you dance, but otherwise the book is a keeper.

DROPPING ALL PRETENCE OF SOCIAL RELEVANCE, Goat Rope is sticking to the theme of weirdness this week. In case you missed it, here's a recent item on a possible sighting of the Loch Ness monster, complete with a video clip. After more than 6 years of the Bush administration, nothing seems weird to me anymore...

WHATEVER... This is inside baseball for West Virginians. The masterful "just-the-facts" blog of all things pertaining to El Cabrero's beloved state is Lincoln Walks at Midnight, which has this item about state Supreme Court justice Brent Benjamin in which he claims that he won in 2004 not because of coal baron and Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship's money but rather due to the mistakes of his opponent, Warren McGraw.

Far be it from El Cabrero to deny that his opponent made a mistake or two, but I find the whole Loch Ness thing MUCH easier to believe.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: UNDER THE WATER