These are the times

These are really stressful times for West Virginia's education workers, all of whom want to get back to work when a decent settlement has been reached. At such times, it might be good to remember that those who came before us faced much worse challenges and came through. For the last year or so, I've gone back over and over to these lines by Thomas Paine, America's most rebellious founder:

"THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated."-- The Crisis, 1776.

A blast from the past

"THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated."-Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, Dec. 23, 1776.

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

CAN WRITING MAKE A DIFFERENCE?

Thomas Paine, courtesy of wikipedia.

Lately El Cabrero has been blogging about writing for social change, a jag that is likely to continue this week.

But first a comment on the idea of social change. If that's your goal, don't sweat it--it's going to happen anyway, what with the whole impermanence thing and all. The question is, will it be good or bad?

Sometimes, the fight to improve or protect conditions for working people is more about conserving things rather than changing them. Defending what's left of the Constitution or the New Deal legacy is a case in point. A few years ago, we had to fight pretty hard to protect Social Security from privatization and that one probably isn't over yet.

Having said that, a look at history convinces me that writing can play a necessary if not sufficient part in making things better or less bad.

In American history, good writing at the right time has made a difference over and over. In the days when independence was being debated, Thomas Paine's Common Sense, published in early 1776, had a big impact on public opinion, as did a certain Declaration published that summer.

If you haven't read the Declaration in a while, dust it off. It's pretty damn good, even if some of the things George III was accused of weren't quite fair in retrospect.

And, when the revolution was going south, Paine struck again with The Crisis, which even George Washington credited with helping to steel American resolve. Take a look at the first few lines:

THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.

Not too shabby! I wish I would have written something like that when it would have done some good.

Slave narratives, such as those of Frederick Douglass, helped influence opinion against that system, as did Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, about which more tomorrow.

HUNGRY PLANET. While millions of people around the world face a food crisis, the UK Independent reports that multinationals are cashing in.

MISSING A CHANCE. The housing and credit meltdown shows the need for reform, but will we miss the boat?

HAD ENOUGH? In our new Gilded Age, we're moving from the Ownership Society to the Foreclosure Society. It might be time to rock the boat.

HEALTH CARE. This Saturday, a few hundred people in El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia rallied for health care. While many people are rightly concerned about covering the uninsured, even people with health insurance are finding it less affordable.

VIOLENCE. Here's an interesting article from the NY Times Magazine about a public health approach to reducing violence.

HABIT FORMING. Aristotle referred to habits as "second nature." Here's what the research says on how to change yours.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

EDMUND BURKE: THE BEST CONSERVATIVE but first some WV items

Caption: This amphibian considers reptiles to be reckless innovators.

FIRST THE GOOD NEWS: The Employee Free Choice Act passed the U.S. House by a margin of 241-185. Among WV's delegation, only Congresswoman Shelley Moore Capito voted against it. There's a good post about that at West Virginia Blue. See the item "Capito spins anti-union vote as pro-union."

WHAT THE? While you're at WV Blue, scroll on down to the post "Tax Breaks for the Rich" for info on the WV Senate's proposal to drastically cut corporate taxes. This would mean drastic cuts in education, services, and infrastructure. At this moment, the Gazette reports that it doesn't seem likely to pass the house, which is a good feature.

THE HORSE'S MOUTH. Check out Jim Lewis's new Notes from Under the Fig Tree for an account of his arrest at Congresswoman Capito's office over her Iraq position, his hearing, and other interesting items.

NOW BACK TO THE SERIES ON CONSERVATISM:

If there is an Achilles' heel of conservatism, it is it's historic tendency to side with with politically and economically dominant groups. When this happens, there are pretty simple reasons for it: nearly any society consists of winners and losers. The winners want to keep their winnings, whether they were gained by fair means or foul.

(In fairness, it could also be said that the Achilles' heel of radicals is the belief that a major transformation of society by peaceful or violent means would bring about an improvement for the majority of people outside the ruling elites. To put it mildly that's not always the case and often such changes make things worse for everyone.)

But I'd say the best conservatives can transcend this weakness. The British statesman Edmund Burke (1729-1797) is a case in point.

Born in Ireland, Burke served for many years in Parliament where he was spoke eloquently and effectively against abuses of power. He defended the American colonists and recommended a conciliatory policy in the 1770s and later exposed English crimes against the people of India.

He was, in other words, a progressive conservative, i.e. one who recognized that society should be prudently reformed and that abuses should be corrected, but he was realistic enough to know that most human actions have unintended consequences.

He parted company with some of his former radical allies, including his former friend the Anglo-American revolutionary Thomas Paine, over the French Revolution. His 1790 Reflections on the Revolution in France is one of the best books of political theory ever written.

Burke had no doubts that the excesses of the French monarchy needed to be corrected. But he was convinced that one should seek to reform past abuses in a way that respected a people's history and tradition and that trying to start again with a blank slate would lead to violence, chaos, war, and tyranny...which is pretty much what happened. While El Cabrero intends no disrespect to the French Revolution, it was, well, a goat rope.

Here's are some sample quotes:

The science on constructing a commonwealth...is not to be taught a priori... The nature of man is intricate; the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity; and therefore no simple disposition or direction of power can be suitable either to man's nature, or to the quality of his affairs...The rights of men in governments are...often in balances between differences of good; in compromises sometimes between good and evil, and sometimes between evil and evil...

So when and how should good people deal with abuses of political power and when should patience give way to resistance?

The speculative line of demarcation where obedience ought to end and resistance must begin is faint, obscure, and not easily definable. It is not a single act, or a single event, which determines it. Governments must be abused and deranged, indeed, before it can be thought of; and the prospect of the future must be as bad as the experience of the past. When things are in that lamentable condition, the nature of the disease is to indicate the remedy to those whom nature has qualified to administer in extremities this critical, ambiguous, bitter potion to a distempered state. Times and occasions and provocations will teach their own lessons. The wise will determine from the gravity of the case; the irritable, from sensibility to oppression; the high-minded, from disdain and indignation at abusive power in unworthy hands; the brave and bold, from the love of honorable danger in a generous cause; but, with or without right, a revolution will be the very last resource of the thinking and the good.

He also had a long-term view of society as a partnership "between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born." That's an insight we could use today given the disastrous impact of this generation on the earth's resources.

Sometimes he could go too far, as for example, when he referred to the mass of lower class English subjects as "the swinish multitude."

Thomas Paine responded to his former ally's Reflections with Parts I and II of The Rights of Man, where he accused Burke, with some justification, of pitying the aristocracy and ignoring the sufferings of the lower classes: "He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird."

Actually, the world needs both its Paines and Burkes in proper measure. In the end, both were right. As Craig Nelson wrote of British political history in his recent Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern Nations,

In the end, Burke's Reflections accurately predicted that the French Revolution would finish in bloodshed and tyranny, while Paine's Rights just as brilliantly anticipated, two hundred years ahead of its time, the style of government for close to half the world's nations today. The great irony of this epic struggle in British political history is that, when it came to dear old Albion, both would be right. The English polity over the coming decades would glacially reform itself, just as Burke proposed, but into a structure not all that different from the one envisioned by Rights of Man.

It would be nice to think they are somewhere now arguing about who was right...

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED