A theory of courage

Then the Awful Fight Began (1908) by George Wright, by way of wikipedia.

British writer and scholar J.R.R. Tolkien, in addition to being the author of whole Ring cycle, was one of the 20th century's greatest scholars of Anglo-Saxon language and literature. He was also the author of a famous and influential essay (originally a lecture) on Beowulf, which was called, appropriately enough, "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics."

I find it interesting not just for what it has to say about the medieval poem but for his suggestion of "a theory of courage" even in the face of final defeat, something that I think has practical applications for people who care about social justice. We don't appear to be heading for a happy ending, after all.

Like his good friend C.S. Lewis, Tolkien was a pious Christian with a soft spot for paganism, especially the Northern European variety. According to some major strands of that tradition, things are not going to end well. The gods and good men are destined to fight against monsters at the end of the world--and lose. But they are willing to fight on any way with no hope of victory in time or even salvation beyond the grave.

As Tolkien put it in the Beowulf essay,

One of the most potent elements in that fusion is the Northern courage: the theory of courage, which is the great contribution of early Northern literature….I refer rather to the central position the creed of unyielding will holds in the North…..’The Northern Gods’, Ker said, ’have an exultant extravagance in their warfare which makes them more like Titans than Olympians; only they are on the right side, though it is not the side that wins. The winning side is Chaos and Unreason ‘- mythologically, the monsters –‘but the gods, who are defeated, think that defeat no refutation.’ And in their war men are their chosen allies, able when heroic to share in this ‘absolute resistance, perfect because without hope’.

In other words, Tolkien suggests that it is not only possible to carry on the struggle with no hope of final vindication, but that in some ways it is more admirable.

I think I'm with him on this one.

SLASH AND BURN. A new campaign tries to put a human face on proposed federal budget cuts.

SLASH SUBSIDIES, NOT BUDGETS. A new report from Good Jobs First argues that states can help close budget gaps by ending costly but ineffective corporate subsidies.

STALKING THE WIND. Here's a new development in the clean energy field: wind power without blades. The idea is for power to be generated by the vibration of wind stalks.

URGENT ANCIENT GIANT RABBIT UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Much throwing about of brains

I'm still strolling through Hamlet, although if you've had enough of that you can scroll down to the links and comments section.

Towards the end of Act 2 scene 2, our melancholy Dane, brightens up considerably when a troupe of players arrive at Elsinore. He is quite stage-struck and listens eagerly to gossip about the changing theatrical fashion. Apparently these controversies have been intense to the point of getting physical, as Guildenstern reports that "there has been much throwing about of brains."

Even the twit Polonius is jazzed by the new arrivals. He tells Hamlet that these are

The best actors in the world, either for tragedy,
comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical,
historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-
comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or
poem unlimited: Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor
Plautus too light. For the law of writ and the
liberty, these are the only men.

(Harold Bloom borrowed from that speech and subtitled his little book on the play "Poem Unlimited.")

One little exchange sums up my theology. It occurs when Hamlet tells Polonius to make ready accommodations for the actors and the latter replies that he will "use them according to their desert."

Hamlet replies:

God's bodykins, man, much better: use every man
after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping?

(It is my prayer that none of us get what we deserve...)

He continues,

Use them after your own honour and dignity: the less
they deserve, the more merit is in your bounty.
Take them in.

HEALTH CARE. President Obama unveiled his plan for reform yesterday.

THE PICK OF THE LITTER. Here's an op-ed busting health care whackadoodleism by one of my favorite WV state senators.

PROBABLY BETTER THAN NOTHING. A scaled down jobs bill is moving in the US Senate with bipartisan support.

ONE PARTIAL SOLUTION TO THE JOBS PROBLEM. Here's another op-ed from the same place by my friend Rev. Matthew Watts about how adhering to HUD guidelines could create jobs for low income people.

DEJA VU ALL OVER AGAIN. Economist Jeffrey Sachs calls out the climate change denial industry here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES

The theme this week at Goat Rope is the bystander effect and how and when people decide to intervene--or not. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier entries. You'll also find links and comments about current events.

Psychological experiments as well as unfortunate events have suggested that there's something about being part of a larger group of people that makes us less likely to personally take action to help other people in a bad situation.

But it doesn't stop there--sometimes being part of a group makes us less likely to take action to help ourselves.

Researchers Darley and Latane (see yesterday's post) tested this in another ingenious experiment in which naive subjects were given a routine task in a room where smoke poured from the vents. When they were the only people in the room, most people (around 75 percent) reported the smoke.

But when they were in the room with two other people who expressed no concern about it (and were instructed as part of the experiment to ignore it), only ten percent reported it--even when the room was full of smoke at the end of the six minute experiment.

When they tried the experiment with three naive subjects in the room, i.e. nobody who was "in on it," people only reported the smoke 38 percent of the time.

It seems in general that we take their cues about the nature of a given situation from other people and if others don't seem to think it's a big deal, we're not likely to either--even if it could be a matter of our own life and death.

Time seems to be a factor in the decision to act as well. It seems that the longer people wait to take action, the less likely they are to do so.

Some days, El Cabrero is reminded of one of Dylan's darker lines: "We're idiots, babe. It's a wonder we can even feed ourselves."

THE RECESSION AND THE WAR are the subjects of this op-ed by economist Dean Baker. Short version: it made things worse, but so did bad domestic policies and priorities.

EVANGELICALS ON THE MOVE. Here's an interesting article from The Nation about changing attitudes among evangelical voters. The religious right's lock on the group has been broken or at least challenged.

NEW BLOG FROM GOOD JOBS FIRST. GJF has long taken the lead in the fight for job quality standards, smart growth and accountability in economic development policies. The new blog, Clawback, is a welcome addition.

QUICK, ROBIN, GET THE SHARK REPELLENT! I did not make this up. According to a brief item in The Week Magazine, designers of the Shark Shield, a devise intended to keep sharks away by emitting electronic waves, may have to go back to the drawing board after a shark ate one of their units.

MORE ON CLIMATE CHANGE IN WV. Here's WV Public Radio on local responses to climate change (or the lack thereof).

RETIRING BABY BOOMERS might not signify the end of the world after all, this Foreign Policy article suggests.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

FIGHTING MONSTERS AND GAZING INTO ABYSSES

Caption: Don't look into this one very long.

El Cabrero has been hanging out with Nietzsche again. This time, it's his 1886 work, Beyond Good and Evil.

It's been a while since I've cracked that one open and this time around it kinda seems all over the place. If I was forced to say what it was about at gunpoint, I'd have to say it had something to do with morality, knowledge and psychology.

The great thing about reading Nietzsche, however disturbed and disturbing he was, is that he has some awesome one liners. I'll be serving up a few on this week's Goat Rope.

One of my all time favorites from that book has been widely quoted but should be known more widely still. Here goes:

He who fights monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into the abyss the abyss also gazes into you.

That one (especially the first part) should be posted pretty much everywhere to remind us of the danger of becoming like what we hate. It happens over and over in so many different ways.

In the post 9/11 U.S., some defenders of "freedom" led the country into a prolonged flirtation with authoritarianism. Many an anti-war activist develops a stridency and militarism of spirit. Many social movements that began with a desire for justice have committed horrible injustices. Opponents of bigotry can become intolerant, just as opponents of despotism can become despotic.

I'm not sure what the antidote is other than awareness of that danger.

CRACKPOT ECONOMICS. Here's a good review of Jonathan Chait's The Big Con by Tom White that appeared in the Sunday Gazette-Mail

JOBS AND DEPRESSION. Some jobs carry greater risks of depression for workers than others, according to this AP article.

Here's some excerpts:

People who tend to the elderly, change diapers and serve up food and drinks have the highest rates of depression among U.S. workers.

Overall, 7 percent of full-time workers battled depression in the past year, according to a government report available Saturday.

Women were more likely than men to have had a major bout of depression, and younger workers had higher rates of depression than their older colleagues.

Specifically around 11 percent of personal care workers "which includes child care and helping the elderly and severely disabled with their daily needs" had bouts of depression lasting two weeks or longer. Next came at 10.3 percent came people who prepare and serve food. Social workers and health care workers tied for third at 9.6 percent.

Interestingly, engineers, architects and surveyors had the least depression, with a rate of 4.3 percent. Have you taken your trigonometry pill today?

I notice they didn't bother to survey goatherds...

NEW WV PEACE RESOURCE. The West Virginia Peace News Net just launched on the web and is worth checking out with lots of news, information and links. On the masthead is a quote by Gandhi:

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?

ABORTION is a controversial issue which has often been cynically exploited for political gain. According to the AP, a new international study found that

Women are just as likely to get an abortion in countries where it is outlawed as they are in countries where it is legal, according to research published Friday.

It's another reminder that there's a big difference between making something illegal and making it go away.

IRAQ. Here's an interesting article from the NY Times about current debates and soul searching on the Iraq war among U.S. officers. And I couldn't pass up this article on the effect of the war on the native cat population--a group occupying the land where cats first domesticated people.

Y'all be careful out there today.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

KANT STOP IT, AND LOTS MORE

Caption: Cats have very few social problems (as long as there's a feather to play with.

Welcome to Immanual Kant Week at Goat Rope. All posts this week are devoted to the ideas of that very influential 18th century Prussian philosopher.

In particular, the focus is on Kant's philosophy of history and on the question of whether there's any hope of humanity getting its act together before it's too late. As mentioned previously, this was the subject of his essay Idea For A Universal History With A Cosmopolitan Purpose.

As mentioned yesterday, Kant believed that humanity's nasty and antagonistic traits were necessary for us to develop our potentialities:

The greatest problem for the human race, to the solution of which Nature drives man, is the achievement of a free universal civic society which administers law fairly for all.

The highest purpose of Nature, which is the development of all the capacities which can be achieved by mankind, is attainable only in society, and more specifically in the society with the greatest freedom. Such a society is one in which there is mutual opposition among the members, together with the most exact definition of freedom and fixing of its limits so that it may be consistent with the freedom of others. Nature demands that humankind should itself achieve this goal like all its other destined goals.

That is to say, over time, we are driven by our "unsocial sociability" to develop a social order based on both freedom and rule of law. It's our homework assignment from Mother Nature:

Thus a society in which freedom under external laws is associated in the highest degree with irresistible power, i.e., a perfectly just civic constitution, is the highest problem Nature assigns to the human race; for Nature can achieve her other purposes for mankind only upon the solution and completion of this assignment. Need forces men, so enamored otherwise of their boundless freedom, into this state of constraint. They are forced to it by the greatest of all needs, a need they themselves occasion inasmuch as their passions keep them from living long together in wild freedom. Once in such a preserve as a civic union, these same passions subsequently do the most good.

And we owe it all to our nastiness:

All culture, art which adorns mankind, and the finest social order are fruits of unsociableness, which forces itself to discipline itself and so, by a contrived art, to develop the natural seeds to perfection.

The major remaining problem is that once people in a given country arrive at a rational social order that balances freedom and justice, the law of the jungle prevails between countries.

SPEAKING OF LAW AND JUSTICE, Massey Energy took another hit yesterday:

CHARLESTON, W.Va. - Failing to perform a pre-shift examination at a West Virginia coal mine is going to cost a Massey Energy Co. subsidiary $50,000.

U.S. District Judge John T. Copenhaver Jr. fined Richmond, Va.-based Massey's White Buck Coal Co. that amount Wednesday for a misdemeanor charge of willfully violating a mandatory safety standard. White Buck had pleaded guilty to the charge, which involved failing to perform a pre-shift examination at the Grassy Creek No. 1 mine in Nicholas County five years ago.

According to the report, two employees who agreed to testify were fined for misdemeanors.

The company also faces a shareholder lawsuit, potentially $2.4 billion in fines for alleged violations of the Clean Water Act, and an ongoing criminal probe of a fatal fire at a Logan County mine in January 2006.

CRIMES AGAINST NATURE? On a related note, here's a Gazette item by Ken Ward about Robert Kennedy Jr.'s visit to WV, where he discussed mountaintop removal mining as a "crime against nature."

GROWING PAINS. Those who think economic growth is all you need should check out Business Week's special report on China, which for years has been the fastest growing economy in the world. The article cites the growing ecological crisis, product safety problems, and other social stresses and recommends, among other things, more and better regulation and investments in the social safety net.

SHAME ON GOOGLE. El Cabrero is a big fan/addict of Google products so it was really disappointing to see that this hugely successful company take advantage of an Appalachian part of North Carolina with high unemployment by sucking up subsidies. Business Week reports that the town of Lenoir, Caldwell County, and the state of North Carolina coughed up $211.7 million to land a computer center. This low road approach has highly profitable companies pitting different locations against each other in a bidding war to see which will pay the most to impoverish the public at private expense.

Uhhh...whatever happened to the market? This is another case of socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the poor. And, for the record, this is one area where El Cabrero is with the Unleashing Capitalism crew.

One group that has done a great job at exposing the subsidies racket is GoodJobsFirst.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

FREUD AND DOSTOEVSKY (AND WAL-MART, IRAQ AND GLOBAL WARMING)

Caption: This man is now portraying the devil that appeared to Ivan Karamazov while the latter was a little unhinged. Is it Ivan himself, a real devil, or just his fevered imagination?

El Cabrero begs the reader's forbearance while he attempts to get Dostoevsky out of his system. The last two posts didn't quite do it...

Sigmund Freud once called The Brothers Karamazov "the most magnificent novel ever written."

This is no doubt because the theme of the book is the murder of a father by a son and Sig never met a story about parricide he didn't like. After all, according to his theory of the Oedipus complex, that was something all sons unconsciously wanted to do.

I'm not sure how Dostoevsky would feel about that. He didn't have much use for what passed for psychology in his day, once saying "I am not a psychologist. I am a realist." His version of "realism," however is pretty out there, given his menagerie of characters, which includes intellectual axe murderers, saintly prostitutes, brooding nihilists, and holy fools and elders.

As William Hubben wrote,

All of Dostoevsky's stories belong to the literature of extreme situations. An ominous restlessness broods over the men and women in his novels. Frequently their reaction to seemingly small incidents is excessive, and events take a most unexpected turn.

The author would probably agree with that anyway. He once wrote "Always and in everything I go to the extreme limit." In his view, part of the human condition is the fact that we don't know our limits:

The ant knows the formula of its anthill; the bee the formula of its beehive...but man does not.

Ironically, it is said that in his later years, Freud couldn't abide reading Dostoevsky's novels in the evening because the characters were too much like the patients he dealt with during the day.

(OK, one more thought--how come nobody gets brain fevers any more like his characters got?)

TAX SUBSIDIES FOR WAL-MART. Good Jobs First is a policy resource center that promotes accountability for corporations and governments in economic development. They recently updated their Wal-Mart subsidy report. If you go to the site, you can click on your state to see how much the giant has gotten in corporate welfare. In El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia, that number is around $9.7 million. Greg LeRoy, Good Jobs First executive director sums it up pretty well:

That a company with a predatory business model and a poverty-wage labor policy can even qualify for job subsidies suggests many public officials still don’t get it.

DISPLACED IRAQIS. This is from AP:

More than 4 million Iraqis have now been displaced by violence in the country, the U.N. refugee agency said Tuesday, warning that the figure will continue to rise.

The number of Iraqis who have fled the country as refugees has risen to 2.2 million, said Jennifer Pagonis, spokeswoman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. A further 2 million have been driven from their homes but remain within the country, increasingly in "impoverished shanty towns," she said.

THIS IS JUST GREAT. Remember the part about the Bush administration getting serious on global warming? Nevermind...

The Bush administration is drastically scaling back efforts to measure global warming from space, just as the president tries to convince the world the U.S. is ready to take the lead in reducing greenhouse gases.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED