The uses of history: reflections on Nietzsche and Martin Luther King Jr.

I've been running around too much lately to come up with a fresh post, but here's one from MLK Day six years ago. Parts of it are fortunately dated (ending the Iraq war), but most holds up.


El Cabrero has been thinking about the uses of history lately. This seems like a fitting topic on the occasion of Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday.

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche had some interesting things to say on this topic in his essay "On the uses and disadvantages of history for life" in his Untimely Meditations.

As the title of the essay suggests, Nietzsche wasn't interested in history as a social science or academic discipline but rather in how people can make use of history for their own purposes, and specifically to enhance human vitality.

The essay begins with a quote from Goethe:

"In any case, I hate everything that merely instructs me without augmenting or directly invigorating my activity."

Thinking about history has some risk since life requires both remembering and forgetting and we can suffer from both a scarcity and a surplus of historical awareness. We can get lost in the past to the detriment of the present.

Nietzsche identified three ways in which history could serve to enhance human life:

*There is a need to revere, conserve and treasure those things of the past that give people a sense of identity. He called this the antiquarian approach.

*For oppressed people, there is at times a need to "break up and dissolve a part of the past...bringing it before a tribunal, scrupulously examining it and finally condemning it..." He called this the critical approach.

*For those who aspire to making their own mark on history, the past can contain inspiring examples of the deeds of others. From these, we learn "that the greatness that once existed was in any event once possible and may thus be possible again..." He calls this the monumentalistic conception of history.

In the context of remembering the life and work of Dr. King and the tens of thousands of others who made huge gains for civil rights and social justice, the latter approach can be most useful to our life today. It would be tragic to allow this huge struggle to simply become a pious memory instead of a goad to action.

Here is one way to think about the legacy of Dr. King and others in Nietzsche's monumentalistic manner:

Once upon a time not too long ago, a relatively small number of people, in spite of all their human limitations, made a huge difference to the nation and the world against all odds. The fact that it was done is proof that it can be done.

That's the awareness we need to bring to the struggle for a living wage for working people. As Dr. King wrote in Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?,

There is nothing but a lack of social vision to prevent us from paying an adequate wage to every American citizen whether he be a hospital worker, laundry worker, maid, or day laborer.

That's the awareness we need to bring to the struggle to restore the rights of workers to organize, a struggle for which King literally gave his life in Memphis.

That's the awareness that we need to bring to the struggle to end the unnecessary war in Iraq and reshape America's domestic and foreign agenda. As King said,

There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war.

In other words, don't just remember the past, use it as an inspiration. Other people, who were just as screwed up as we are, did pretty damn good. It's our turn.

Stuck with ourselves

The theme at Goat Rope lately is the work of 19th century American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson. At the moment, the focus is on his signature essay Self Reliance, which is a kind of spiritual declaration of independence.

Today I want to highlight one passage of the essay that reminded me of a tough time when I was in high school. My situation at the time seemed untenable, but somehow I knew deep down that it was better to be miserable as myself than happy as someone else. Here's how Emerson put it:

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried...God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise, shall give him no peace.

 

His advice seems to be this: become yourselves. No wonder Nietzsche loved him.

WAY COOL. The Roman Catholic bishop of WV urged Gov. Tomblin to expand Medicaid coverage to low wage working people.

SOCIAL ANIMALS are we. If we want to live long, anyway.

NOTE: busy days and travel ahead so posts may be irregular.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Just say yes

I wouldn't recommend carrying a copy of Nietzsche whilst deer hunting to everyone, but it works for me. The deer weren't in the neighborhood at the time anyway so the book was good company.

Nietzsche is sometimes called a nihilist, but that is far from the truth. His main quarrel with many kinds of religion and philosophical idealism was that they were nihilistic to his way of thinking in that they sought for some other reality beyond the one we live in.

One theme of his that shows up again and again is the challenge to say "yes" to life in spite of all its nastiness, or, to put it another way, to try to live in such a way that we can and want to say yes to the whole package. Here's how he expresses it in terms of a New Year's resolution:

I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati [love of fate]: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole, some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.

DENIED. A move to extend emergency unemployment insurance failed in the Senate. But the banks are doing fine.

HIGHLIGHTING HISTORY. A new map and poster highlight black history in West Virginia and the many ways events here have shaped the nation.

THE MEANING OF LIFE. Some people do just fine without worrying about it.

ANIMAL EXTINCTIONS are bad for your health.

AT LEAST THERE'S NO SHORTAGE of stars.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Deer hunting with Nietzsche

Teddy Roosevelt on the hunt. He probably didn't read Nietzsche.

I am not one to seek adversity other than on a recreational basis. Given a choice, I'd prefer to avoid it or at least minimize it. Of course, we don't always have a choice.

Sometimes though, it seems like we need a bit of it to bring out some good qualities that may otherwise have never surfaced. I came across this little nugget on that subject by Nietzsche whilst unsuccessfully hunting deer last week (everybody reads Nietzsche when deer hunting, right?):

Evil.-Examine the lives of the best and most fruitful people and peoples and ask yourselves whether a tree that is supposed to grow to a proud height can dispense with bad weather and storms; whether misfortune and external resistance, some kinds of hatred, jealousy, stubbornness, mistrust, hardness, avarice, and violence do not belong among the favorable conditions without which any great growth even of virtue is scarcely possible. The poison of which weaker natures perish strengthens the strong--nor do they call it poison.

NOT ON THE COVER OF THE ROLLING STONE, but in the middle of the latest issue of the magazine is a profile of Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship. The whole thing isn't available online, but here's a start from Ken Ward's Coal Tattoo. I ran out and bought one yesterday. You heard the Tolkien analogy first here though.

TAXING ISSUES. When it comes to promoting a healthy state economy, things like education, health and infrastructure matter more than tax cuts, according to one expert who has studied the evidence.

MEANWHILE, BACK IN CONGRESS, Robert Reich argues here that the time is now to end Bush era tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.

DON'T GET MAD, get lemonade.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Nothing or interesting

Deer season in West Virginia came in last week. While I'm not exactly on the hunting varsity team, I did spend a bit of time in the woods.

Even though no deer came my way, I find there's a lot to be said for sitting quietly in the woods and just watching and listening. In my case, there were plenty of squirrels raising hell and lots of woodpecker action.

I also used the time on the hill to re-read another book of my old pal Nietzsche, The Gay Science, sometimes also known as The Joyful Wisdom. If someone asked what the book was about, I'd be hard pressed to answer except to say "all kinds of things."

Nietzsche is the master of the one liner or short epigram. Here are a few that caught my eye this time around:

After a great victory.--What is best about a great victory is that it liberates the victor from the fear of defeat. "Why not be defeated some time, too?" he says to himself; "Now I am rich enough for that.

Always in our company.--Whatever in nature and in history is of my own kind, speaks to me, spurs me on, and comforts me; the rest I do not hear or forget right away. We are always only in our own company.

Against many a defense.--The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.

Against embarassment.--If you are always profoundly occupied, you are beyond all embarassment.

I especially like this one:

Dreams.--Either we have no dreams or our dreams are interesting. We should learn to arrange our waking life in the same way: nothing or interesting.

A BETTER WAY. The Economic Policy Institute, Demos, and The Century Foundation have come up with an alternative for dealing with deficits and the recession.

GOT SPINE? Here's a call for progressive backbone in the deficit debate.

CHILD POVERTY. Also from EPI, this snapshot shows that the Great Recession pushed more children into poverty.

MAGICAL THINKING, revisited.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Nugget for the day

"Man, the bravest animal and the one most inured to suffering, does not repudiate suffering in itself; he wills it, he even seeks it out, provided that he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering."--Friedrich Nietzsche

Useful errors

I was in an interesting conversation this weekend about the root causes of social problems, which caused me to start thinking about the slippery issue of causality. Or maybe not.

The human tendency to think in terms of cause and effect is deeply ingrained and probably has roots in evolutionary biology. Being able to infer causal patterns was no doubt adaptive in relatively the simple environments in which early humans lived.

The problem comes when we all too readily assume that causal explanations we find satisfying are true. Natural selection, that "blind watchmaker", doesn't really care about truth; it just cares about what is useful.

My old pal Friedrich Nietzsche put it this way:

Throughout immense stretches of time the intellect produced nothing but errors; some of them proved to be useful and preservative of the species: he who fell in with them, or inherited them, waged the battle for himself and his offspring with better success.

Thought for the day: would you prefer truth without utility or utility without truth?

UNUSEFUL UNTRUTHS. Paul Krugman takes aim at the prevailing narrative on the economy and the recession.

CORRUPTION. Big money, sleazy politics.

SOCIAL ANIMALS. Research on twins suggests that people are socially oriented even before birth.

DEATH BY BREAKFAST. Here's a look at some unhealthy menu items.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Marching on--updated

Note to email subscribers: I apologize for flooding your mailbox, but a reader pointed out that some of the phrasing in the original needed some work.

Also, I like to encourage readers to contact their senators to support the health care vote scheduled for tomorrow which would bring the bill to the Senate floor. The bill itself is far from perfect, but there will be time to improve it later and doing nothing would be worse.

For contact information, click here. If you can't get through on the DC number, please consider calling their local office.)

Here's the original and edited post:

"Against an enemy. How good bad music and bad reasons sound when one marches against an enemy!"--Friedrich Nietzsche, The Dawn

SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE. Health care reform faces a crucial vote in the Senate this weekend.

SQUANDERED TRUST. Being too nice to bad banks may have more than financial costs.

THIS COULD BE AMUSING. Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship is set to debate Robert Kennedy Jr. in January. My guess is that this won't be the only entertainment that night.

URGENT INDONESIAN HOBBIT UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Man is a bridge

El Cabrero is on furlough until the beginning of next week, so the posts lately don't have any links or comments about current events. Regular posts will resume on Monday, August 24.

In the meantime, these have been prepared in advance. The theme is books, specifically the 10 that had the biggest impact on me growing up. What would make it to your list?

Recap: 1. Bible 2. Book of Common Prayer 3. Poe's stories and poems 4. Lord of the Rings 5. Tao Te Ching 6. Karate-Do Kyohan 7. a tie between Freud and Jung, which led me to #8....

Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra. I ran into this one sometime around age 18 and was totally blown away. It left a permanent scar, one of the good kind. I still love Nietzsche, even though I freely admit he was a little bit whacked. From Zarathustra, I've ranged over much of his work again and again over the years.

The part that hit me hardest at the time was the early part of the book, where Zarathustra returns to the world after 10 years on a solitary mountaintop. He gave a great speech about how we shouldn't be content with ourselves as we are now but should strive to give birth to something better.

Sample quote (from memory) "One must have chaos in one's soul to give birth to a dancing star."

I've got that one covered anyhow.



(Note: regular posts will resume August 24.)

Anyone for a goat song?

El Cabrero has gone for a pretty long time at this blog without a big jag on Greek mythology. I think it's been since last autumn.

Having said that, I feel my self control starting to wane. Maybe it's because I've recently resolved to read or re-read all existing Greek tragedies. Some of them I revisit fairly regularly, like Sophocles' Oedipus plays or the Orestia of Aeschylus. But there are a bunch that I've either missed altogether or haven't looked at in a long time.

My first stop was Euripides' Bacchae, which I always thought would make a good movie or at least an extended old-school Twilight Zone episode. It's about the less-than-friendly welcome the god Dionysus received on visiting his mother's home town of Thebes. Take home message: if a god comes, roll out the red carpet--or else.

But first, here's a little cheery nugget from my old pal Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy. One of his main ideas in the book is that the ancient Greeks had a deep pessimistic streak but managed to say yes to life in spite of it, thanks in part to the help of art. Here goes:

"There is an ancient story that King Midas hunted in the forest a long time for the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus, without capturing him. When Silenus at last fell into his hands, the king asked what was best and most desirable of all things for man. Fixed and immovable, the demigod said not a word, till at last, urged by the king, he gave a shrill laugh and broke out into these words: 'Oh, wretched ephemeral race, children of chance and misery, why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. Bet the second best for you is--to die soon."

Gee, I feel better already.

MOUNTAINTOP REMOVAL. The Obama administration indicated it wants to reverse some Bush-era policies but it's not clear what that means.

ANTS AND SUCH. We know they're social animals, but what about the individuals?

ANCIENT INDONESIAN HOBBIT UPDATE here.

ABANDONED PETS are on the rise in the wake of foreclosures and a tanking economy.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Time and chance

Venus the goat is pretty random.

In his book Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche argued that a person's view of the world is more a matter of biography than of logic and conscious reasoning. He wrote

It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy has hitherto been: a confession on the part of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir...

Today, some people might go even farther in arguing that worldview is shaped by temperament which itself is to a significant degree the result of genes.

Sorting through that question is beyond El Cabrero at the moment, but for whatever reason I've always tended to see the world as a place ruled in large part by chance, luck and randomness. There is a part of me that is kind of surprised that the same math problems yield the same results on different days. As far as the "laws" of nature are concerned, I tend to view these more as habits or recurring patterns.

Of course, this leads to all kinds of disagreements with my deterministically-inclined friends who tend to follow Einstein in saying that God doesn't play dice with the world. For me, cosmic dice playing might be another name for God.

At any rate, I'm with the author of the biblical book of Ecclesiastes, who said

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

SPEAKING OF A CHANGE OF FORTUNE, the economic crisis has many people rethinking Reaganomics. Here's a similar item from Newsweek as well.

THE MORTGAGE MESS and how to fix it is the subject of this item.

SPEAKING OF MESSES, here's a book review discussing the cost of the Iraq war.

YOU MUST CHECK OUT THIS PICTURE of the world's longest insect. We're talking over one foot.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A SCARY QUESTION

"What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.'" --Friedrich Nietzsche

SUPERIORITY AND SOCIAL INTEREST

Caption: There they are. Superiority is on the left.

Aside from news and links about current events, the theme for this week's Goat Rope is old school psychology and in particular about Freud's one time ally and later "rival," Alfred Adler. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier entries.

Adler may be best know for his concept of the inferiority complex, but ideas of inferiority and superiority are central to his work. Everyone comes into the world weak, helpless, and ignorant. Later life experiences, illnesses, and other struggles amplify this.

In Adler's view, a basic drive in human life is the attempt to move from a perceived "minus" or feeling of inferiority towards a superior, more positive, or more complete state. As he put it,

To be a human being means to possess a feeling of inferiority which constantly presses towards its own conquest...The greater the feeling of inferiority that has been experienced, the more powerful is the urge for conquest and the more violent the emotional agitation.

But that striving for superiority is or should be balanced by what he called "social interest." In Adler's view, humans are inherently social:

Fiercely besieged by nature and suffering from considerable physical weakness, man's intellect points him to that communal living. This process of association, itself the result of personal weakness and insecurity, indicates a precondition that must be met in every way just as does the will to live, as life itself, must tacitly be accepted: Man is a social being. Expressed differently: The human being and all his capabilities and forms of expression are inseparably linked to the existence of others, just as he is linked to cosmic facts and to the demands of this earth.

Adler, who was politically a Social Democrat, disagreed with Freud's view that there was an inherent conflict between individual and society. When it happened, this was a sign of neurosis or a misguided style of life.

Speaking of which, "style of life" is another major Adlerian term. He believed that everyone, more or less consciously (usually less) has a guiding goal or narrative (sometimes he called it a "fiction") that is followed throughout life, based on their own vision of superiority. People are not so much pushed by instincts and drives, as in Freud's view, as pulled by their final goal (Greek: telos):

Every individual acts and suffers in accordance with his peculiar teleology, which has all the inevitability of fate, so long as he does not understand it.

Treatment for him involved helping people rethink mistaken goals. This aspect of his teaching has led many to regard him as a grandfather of sorts to the current cognitive-behavioral approach to therapy which seems to have the best track record of bringing good results in a relatively short time.

O CANADA. El Cabrero finally got around to watching SiCKO, with its amusing contrasts between the US, French, Canadian, and British health care system. The latest snapshot from the Economic Policy Institute shows the Canadian system costs much less than ours and has better outcomes in terms of infant mortality and longevity.

IRAN. Here's Robert Scheer on Bush's latest Iran contortions.

UNLEASHING CAPITALISM? Perry Mann says "No, thanks" in this op-ed.

THINK KIDS GROW UP FAST THESE DAYS? The Neanderthals were probably quicker.

OH POO--it could be the key to the diversity of life. No #($*.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

PARTHIAN SHOTS

Caption: Seamus McGoogle is a Nietzschean Uber-Cat.

This week's Goat Rope has featured nuggets from Nietzsche along with link and comments about current events. Even though he was way out there sometimes, he had his moments.

If memory serves, the English phrase "parting shots" is derived from the term "Parthian shots." This refers to the tactic of ancient Persian cavalry to turn and shoot unexpectedly when appearing to flee.

El Cabrero had trouble coming up with a single parting shot from Beyond Good and Evil to close out the week, so here are a few to ponder:

One is punished most for one's virtues.

The belly is the reason man does not so easily take himself for a god.

Who has not for the sake of his reputation- sacrificed himself?

Under conditions of peace the warlike man attacks himself.

Mature manhood: that means to have rediscovered the seriousness one had as a child at play.

One ought to depart from life as Odysseus departed from Nausicaa--blessing rather than in love with it.

CHIP GAINS VOTES BUT NOT ENOUGH to override Bush's veto. Here's how they voted. I guess the president wanted to save the money for a worthier cause such as his unnecessary war in...

IRAQ. This neat video against the war was reportedly produced by a 16 year old.

MAKING SENSE. This op-ed on the global economy by WV delegate Nancy Guthrie is worth a look.

HEARTBREAKING...NOT. From AP's Lawrence Messina's recent story about Massey CEO Don Blankenship:

Don Blankenship believes he cannot remain chairman, CEO and president of Massey Energy Co. and stay involved in West Virginia politics ---- unless he prevails in his federal lawsuit against Gov. Joe Manchin, his lawyers contend in the pending case.

The mere contemplation of such a loss causes El Cabrero to grow faint. Excuse me whilst I revive myself with smelling salts...

OK, I'm back.

IT'S EASY BEING NOT GREEN. El Cabrero is not usually a big fan of state rankings by business magazines like Forbes. But I believe this one...

EVERYBODY CAN RELAX:

The Internal Revenue Service recently released its fun-filled report on 2005 individual income taxes. The headline is that the super-rich were even more super than in any year since 1986 when the IRS first had comparable data. The news pages of The Wall Street Journal duly took note, but not many others did.

The top 1 percent of all taxpayers earned 21.2 percent of all the money that individuals in the country earned in 2005. So one-hundredth of the taxpayers earned one-fifth of all income. (The data are available here.)

That's a relief, huh? The rest of the story is here.

MORE ON CENSORSHIP from John Milton:

As good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's Image: but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself, kills the Image of God, as it were, in the eye.

That one goes out to WV's domestic Taliban for its latest book banning stunt (see yesterday's post).

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ALTISSIMA

CHICKENS COMING HOME TO ROOST

Caption: The consequences of our actions are sometimes distinctly uncool.

This week, in addition to links and comments about current events, Goat Rope is offering its readers a daily Nietzschean nugget from his book Beyond Good and Evil.

Admittedly, Nietzsche was kind of whacked at times, but when he was good, he was very, very good.

Today's selection highlights one of the irritating things about life:

The consequences of our actions take us by the scruff of the neck, altogether indifferent to the fact that we have 'improved' in the meantime.

I hate it when that happens. Don't you?

PEOPLE SUPPORT CHIP. A new survey shows overwhelming support for expanding the Children's Health Insurance Program (70 percent) and most (64 percent) support overriding the Bush veto.

HEALTH CARE and growing inequality is the subject of this column by WVU-Tech's John David.

YOU WOULDN'T KNOW IT given all the bashing of public education these days, but African-American students have made significant progress in closing the achievement gap according to this EPI snapshot.

OH GOOD. In yesterday's Gazette, no less than two leaders of the religious right have issued fatwas against the infidel.

One called for the banning of Pat Conroy's novels from AP English classes. Now I haven't read Conroy and no doubt would have picked something different since I'm an unapologetic member of the let-them-eat-classics school of literature. I've even tortured more than one GED class by making them read Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" aloud.

But that's not the point. It does not appear to have occurred to the people in question that vastly more harm has been done by people not reading than by reading, not to mention the harm done by censorship itself. Congratulations to the students who attended a school board meeting last night to assert their opposition to censorship.

The other one was mostly about the the "radical homosexual agenda to force their decadent lifestyle upon the citizenry at large." It also castigated some members of Congress for "normalizing and recognizing sodomy as a civil rights entitlement..." (Note to self: look up some legal definitions).

Another target was the recent action of the Charleston City Council to pass a measure opposing discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. The piece also managed to come out in favor of the death penalty.

It occurs to me that there are certain regimes around the world which share the priorities of these groups and which they might perhaps find more congenial to their felicity.

ON A RELATED NOTE. There are groups in WV, such as Create West Virginia, which have argued that if WV is going to attract creative people and investments and build a high road economy, we need to be open to diversity.

Let's imagine how the actions of the domestic Taliban might look to someone from outside considering West Virginia. They might say "Hmmmm. They like to ban books there. Maybe they'll get around to burning them soon. And they seem to hate x group there, but tomorrow it might be y or z. Thanks but no thanks."

TO CLEAR THE PALATE, it looks like the humble sea cucumber could teach us a lot about tissue regeneration. And it looks like going to the beach and eating seafood is an older tradition than we thought.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ENCIMA DEL MUNDO

THE FLEXIBILITY OF MEMORY

Caption: This guy can't remember where he was going but won't admit it.

In addition to comments and links about current events, this week's Goat Rope provides a daily dose of Nietzschean nuggets for your dining and dancing pleasure from his odd little book Beyond Good and Evil.

Even though Nietzsche had a mental breakdown in his later years and was arguably unsteady all along, he had some occasional great psychological insights which have been appreciated by Freud, Jung and many others.

Today's selection highlights the pliability of our memory. It's long been known that autobiographies are anything but objective accounts of past events and that two or more people who experienced the same events will have widely differing memories of them.

How does that happen?

'I have done that,' says my memory. 'I cannot have done that'--says my pride, and remains adamant. At last--memory yields.

CALLING CONGRESS. If you haven't already, please consider calling your representatives today using AFSC’s toll free number: 1-800-965-4701 and urge them to override President Bush's CHIP veto. All WV's delegation is on board but congresspeople from other states need a push.

THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR ECONOMICS went to members of the reality-based community this year. Winners included Eric Maskin, Leonid Hurwicz, and Roger Myerson who studied the limits of the market for delivering public goods (like education and health care). Here's an excerpt from Reuters:

Societies should not rely on market forces to protect the environment or provide quality health care for all citizens, a winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize for economics said on Monday.

Professor Eric Maskin, one of three American economists to receive the award, said that he "to some extent" takes issue with free-market orthodoxy championed by U.S President George W. Bush and some other western leaders.

"The market doesn't work very well when it comes to public goods," said Maskin, a slight, soft-spoken 57-year-old who lives in a house once occupied by Albert Einstein.

Adam Smith said pretty much the same thing in his 1776 Wealth of Nations, but this empirical work is welcome and needed these days.

WOMEN STILL LAG behind men in earnings despite gains in educational attainment. One equalizer seems to be a union card.

CORPORATE WELFARE DEPARTMENT. According to the AP,

Seniors and other taxpayers could have saved nearly $15 billion this year if the government slashed administrative costs in the Medicare drug program and negotiated the same kind of discounts it does for poor people under Medicaid...

BONUS VAMPIRE FEATURE. If you're wired for sound, here's an amusing NPR story on the many faces of Dracula.

DINOSAUR UPDATE. We interrupt previously scheduled programming to report on the discovery of a new dinosaur that

was as tall as a four-story building. From nose to tail it was longer than a pair of tractor trailer trucks laid end-to-end -- or, if you're a dinosaur junkie, half again the length of a small brontosaurus.

The beast was unearthed in Patagonia and is believed to have lived around 80 million years ago.

UNEMPLOYMENT AT RECORD LOW IN WV. WV's Chicken Littles keep trying to create a climate of panic in the hope that this will give them the opening to unleash their version of economic shock and awe. Alas for them, the news isn't all bad all the time.

SINCE YOU GUYS HAVE BEEN PRETTY GOOD TODAY, here's a special treat via YouTube: Jesse Jackson reading from Green Eggs and Ham.

YOU TELL ME where else you can find a blog with Nietzsche, dinosaurs, Dracula, and Dr. Seuss all in the same post...

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: MUY ALTO

COLLECTIVE MADNESS

Caption: This is a mad crowd.

This week, in addition to news and links on current events, El Cabrero is passing out nuggets from the less whacked out portions of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil for your entertainment and edification.

Is this a full service blog or what?

I may have used today's selection before but it's another one that should be widely posted in public places to remind us of the dangers of group behavior:

Madness is something rare in individuals--but in groups, parties, peoples, ages it is the rule.

Although we are social animals and not all groups are nasty, it is the official Goat Rope verdict that the dude wasn't too far off the mark. Aside from the occasional sociopath, people tend to be fairly harmless taken one at a time. Put a bunch of us together at the same time and place, add a few other choice ingredients, and all bets are off.

(Note: the positive and negative sides of group behavior are frequent Goat Rope themes. If you're interested, search the blog for tags such as group psychology, group behavior, conflict, conformity, obedience.)

GAPS. According to a new study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, millions of low wage Americans struggle to make ends meet due to the gap between employer-provided wages and benefits and public work support programs. Here's a shorter article on the subject by CEPR's Heather Boushey.

ON TOP OF ALL THAT, workplace stress can be lethal.

PUBLIC SCHOOLS HOLD THEIR OWN. According to a Washington Post article on study released last week,

Low-income students who attend urban public high schools generally do just as well as private-school students with similar backgrounds, according to a study being released Wednesday.

Students at independent private schools and most parochial schools scored the same on 12th-grade achievement tests in core academic subjects as those in traditional public high schools when income and other family characteristics were taken into account, according to the study by the nonpartisan Center on Education Policy.

There's been a lot of public school bashing in the last few years, but the study found that when one controls for factors such as parental involvement, the difference in achievement between public and private schools tends to evaporate.

CHURCHES WEIGH IN. The West Virginia Council of Churches issued a statement on mountaintop removal mining last week. It stopped short of calling for abolition but urged strict enforcement of existing laws and opposed their weakening. Here's AP coverage and here's the statement.

AMERICA IN A FUNK? Some public opinion surveys would indicate one. This is a good follow-up to last week's series on optimism and pessimism.

IT'S ALL GOOD. Here's one on Reaganomics from The Onion.

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

THE PROPER MEASURE

Caption: This man is overcome with pessimism.

Aside from comments and links about current events, the theme for this week's Goat Rope is optimism and pessimism. If this is your first visit, please click on the earlier posts.

While a little philosophical pessimism is probably a good antidote to naivete, some people run it into the ground.

A case in point is the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860). He was the pessimist's pessimist. Here's a sample from his essay "On the Suffering of the World"...

Unless suffering is the direct and immediate object of life, our existence must entirely fail of its aim. It is absurd to look upon the enormous amount of pain that abounds everywhere in the world, and originates in needs and necessities inseparable from life itself, as serving no purpose at all and the result of mere chance. Each separate misfortune, as it comes, seems, no doubt, to be something exceptional; but misfortune in general is the rule.

In another essay charmingly titled "The Vanity of Existence," he says

Human life must be some kind of mistake. The truth of this will be sufficiently obvious if we only remember that man is a compound of needs and necessities hard to satisfy; and that even when they are satisfied all he obtains is a state of painlessness, where nothing remains to him but abandonment to boredom. This is direct proof that existence has no real value in itself; for what is boredom by the feeling of the emptiness of life?

I bet that dude knew how to party...

Maybe the attitude that is most useful to life is one that combines some elements of pessimism and optimism. A dash of pessimism could be a check on hubris and even a spur to gratitude. When you realize how bad things could be, it makes you appreciate it when they're not. I make it a practice to try to notice and be glad when I don't have a toothache or a catheter. And since I don't expect to get everything I want, I'm grateful for little victories.

Believe it or not, things could be a LOT worse...

Nietzsche once talked about "a pessimism of strength." What we need is a view of the world that fully acknowledges its dark side, dangers and difficulties but which is willing to take action to change things.

The French writer Romaine Rolland came up with an elegant expression of that approach (later popularized by Antonio Gramsci):

Pessimism of the intellect; optimism of the will.

WHAT HE SAID. Jonathan Chait is one of my favorite New Republic writers. Here's his op-ed on the loopiness of supply side economics from yesterday's NY Times.

PLANET JUPITER UPDATE. OK, so this doesn't' have an immediate connection with economic justice--but it's cool.

MAGICAL THINKING. We're officially against torture. So if we do it it's not torture. Any questions?

"FRIENDLY FIRE." El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia, aka the Energy Sacrifice Zone, is the subject of this item from alternet.

PRISONS. A new study by the WV Council of Churches argues that a small investment on community-based corrections could save the state a lot of money and prevent other problems.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

BAD CROWD, GOOD CROWD

This is a very bad crowd.

As noted in yesterday's post, crowds have a generally bad reputation--one that is not altogether undeserved. But two fairly recent books talk about the good side of groups.

Let's start with the most recent. Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed, recently came out with Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy.

Her main thesis is that for most of human history, until the lamentable rise of the Protestant work ethic (from which El Cabrero is striving manfully to free himself) and the subsequent bureaucratization and commodification of the world, people used to get together and get down in group celebrations that often strike modern observers as "savage."

Relics of this tradition still survive in some sports situations, in carnival (as in Mardi Gras) celebrations, and occasionally in other settings. She argues that "we need much more of this on our crowded planet, to acknowledge the miracle of our simultaneous existence with some sort of celebration."

Our old friend Nietzsche, Goat Rope's mascot of the week, pointed out long ago the two poles of human existence and culture: the Apollonian, based on individuation, reason, and moderation (named for the Greek god of music, prophecy, and measure); and the Dionysian (named for the god of the vine), in which people loose their sense of separateness through group revelry.

(While totally appreciative of the gift of the vine, I lean towards the Apollonian.)

The other book on the good side of group behavior is a little older: James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economics, Societies, and Nations, which came out in 2004.

Surowiecki writes the financial column for the "New Yorker" and this book deserves the same wide circulation as those of his fellow writer Malcolm Gladwell, who wrote Blink and The Tipping Point.

I was shocked by the title, since "wisdom" and "crowd" are two words that I rarely associate. His main thesis is that large groups of people--including people who aren't necessarily the "smartest guys in the room"--often arrive at better decisions than experts:

If you put together a big enough and diverse enough group of people and ask them to "make decisions affecting matters of general interest," that group's decisions will, over time, be "intellectually [superior] to the isolated individual," no matter how smart or well-informed he is.

And again:

The argument of this book is that chasing the expert is a mistake, and a costly one at that. We should stop hunting and ask the crowd (which of course, includes geniuses as well as everyone else)instead. Chances are it knows.

But there's a catch: it doesn't work in herds. It seems to work better if you have a diverse group of people (by almost any measure) who arrive at their decisions independently, with the results compiled and aggregated. I'd say that' s aggregated Apollonianism (with no disrespect for Dionysus). There's lots of interesting data from experiments and experience in the book that make it worth a look.

SUSPICIOUS MIDDLE EASTERN CHARACTERS. I'm talking, of course, about cats. This from the NY Times:

Some 10,000 years ago, somewhere in the Near East, an audacious wildcat crept into one of the crude villages of early human settlers, the first to domesticate wheat and barley. There she felt safe from her many predators in the region, such as hyenas and larger cats.

The rodents that infested the settlers’ homes and granaries were sufficient prey. Seeing that she was earning her keep, the settlers tolerated her, and their children greeted her kittens with delight.

That's just how it starts, however. After a few thousand years, they start horfing up hairballs on your rug and waking you up in the middle of the night. It's a conspiracy....

(If you check the picture of the Middle Eastern cat on the link and check the gratuitous animal picture in yesterday's post, you will notice a strong similarity between that cat and Goat Rope Farm's Seamus McGoogle. I'm gonna call Homeland Security...)

WHY IS IT that I'm writing more about animals than economic justice issues these days? I don't even like them all that much. I'm kind of tired of them--they're a pain in the @$$. Maybe it's because justice is elusive but animals are inescapable...at least around here.

MSHA CITES ITS OWN SHORTCOMINGS. This from Ken Ward at the Charleston Gazette:

Federal inspectors and their supervisors displayed an "unacceptable lack of accountability and oversight" prior to three major coal-mining accidents last year, the nation's top mine safety regulator said Thursday.

Inspectors missed or ignored obvious violations, agency managers failed to ensure inspectors did their jobs, and repeated safety problems were not hit with escalating enforcement actions, according to three lengthy internal reviews issued Thursday by the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration.

Richard Stickler, assistant labor secretary for MSHA, said such oversights will "not be tolerated" and announced an improvement plan the agency said "ushers in [a] new era of accountability."

Comment: fair is fair. Lots of people, including myself, criticized Stickler when he was nominated for this post by the Bush administration. I apologize: he seems to take safety very seriously and is a welcome change from the past.

Question: do you believe that things like coal mine safety should be left to the "market" or the whim of corporations? Some people do...

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED