The Fellowship of the Ring

Image courtesy of wikipedia.

The theme at Goat Rope lately is Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and some practical insights it offers about working for social justice. As I've argued here before, one mark of a good story is that it is one you can find as well as lose yourself in.

I remember reading somewhere that at least some leaders and participants in the Civil Rights movement--including the great Robert Moses--drew inspiration from Tolkien's trilogy for their work in the Deep South.

It makes perfect sense to me. Whatever Tolkien's shortcomings might or might not be, The Lord of the Rings makes perfect sense when you're engaged in a struggle against the odds for social justice. Over the next few days, I'm going to talk about some examples of this.

The first on is all too obvious. If you're going up against the latest version of the Dark Lord or Saruman, you need some strong and diverse coalitions.

Getting there isn't easy. In the trilogy, the good guys don't have much use for each other in the beginning. The humans from Gondor and Rohan, once allies, mistrust each other. Elves and dwarves have issues from way back. And nobody important cared about hobbits. It makes getting coal miners and environmentalists to work together on issues seem pretty simple. But it can be done, at least sometimes.

Sometimes things get so bad you have to either form coalitions or just give up. But coalitions, which tend to be at the organizational level, are only held together by relationships at the personal level, as exemplified in the story by the small band that sets out to try to destroy the ring.

In a small place like El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia, where nothing is ever forgotten, relationships are everything. One state politician once quipped "In West Virginia, everything's political except politics and that's personal."

If I had to choose between winning a big one and damaging coalitions and relationships versus losing a big one and maintaining them (and I have been there), I'd probably prefer the latter. Struggles come and go, and victory or defeat often depends on conditions you don't completely control. Relationships take a long time to build and are hard to repair when damaged.

Winning and keeping them would be my first choice though.

AFTER THE FALL. This NY Times article discusses Obama's post-recession (assuming we get there) vision for capitalism.

LOCAL FOOD makes sense in lots of ways, but it can be a pretty complex issue.

TAXES. Here's economist Dean Baker's contribution to a debate on the merits of progressive taxation.

WASTED. Bill McKibben discusses our wasteful habits and the possibility of changing them.

DOWN TO THE WIRE. For addicts of the late lamented HBO series The Wire, here's a lengthy interview between Bill Moyers and Wire creator David Simon.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

THE GEOMETRY OF EMOTION

Image of woman teaching geometry courtesy of wikipedia.

Welcome to the fourth installment of Spinoza Week at Goat Rope. Aside from the usual links and comments about current events, the theme this week is the life and work of that great 17th century philosopher. If this is your first visit, please click on the earlier entries.

As mentioned before, Spinoza developed his pantheistc and deterministic views of the universe at length in his magnum opus The Ethics. In his view, all the universe is in God and in a sense is God. His God is not humanlike in any way and all things follow from the necessity of his nature.

There's no free will to be found anywhere in this system, including ourselves and our emotions, which are only a tiny part of the whole.

As he wrote at the beginning of Part III,

Most who have written on the emotions and on the manner of human life, seem to have dealt not with natural things which follow the universal laws of nature, but with things which are outside the sphere of nature: they seem to have conceived man in nature as a kingdom within a kingdom. For they believe that man disturbs rather than follows the order of nature, and that he has absolute power over his actions, and is not determined by anything else than himself.

He wasn't buying it. Why should be be any different than anything else?

...an infant thinks that it freely seeks milk, an angry child thinks that it freely desires vengeance, or a timid child thinks it freely chooses flight

when in fact all are driven by causes and passions of which they are not fully aware.

He treats of human emotions the same way he does everything else: like propositions in a geometry book:

...I shall regard human actions and appetites exactly as if I were dealing with lines, planes, and bodies.

The weird thing is that he does a pretty good job of it. He has come up with some amazingly succinct definitions of common human emotions and passions, breaking them down to their most basic level. Here are a few examples :

LOVE "is nothing else but pleasure accompanied by the idea of an external cause"

HATE is "pain accompanied by the idea of an external cause."

REPENTANCE "is pain accompanied by the idea of oneself as a cause"

SELF-CONTENTMENT "is pleasure accompanied by the idea of oneself as cause."

HOPE "is an inconstant pleasure arisen from the idea of a thing past or future, the outcome of which we still doubt to some extent."

FEAR "is an inconstant pain arisen from the idea of something past or future of whose outcome we doubt somewhat."

COMPASSION "is love in so far as it affects a man so that he rejoices at the happiness of another and is saddened at the harm he suffers."

PRIDE "is over-estimation of oneself by reason of self-love."

And so on.

The heart and paradox of The Ethics is the idea that by understanding the nature of the universe and of human emotions, we can gain a degree of freedom.

About which more tomorrow.



MORE ON THE CREDIT MELTDOWN from Business Week. Factoids: only 31% of American consumers pay off credit card debt each month, while 61$ don't and only 7% do without cards. Mean household credit card balance is around $7,000 (although I've seen higher figures).

R-E-S-P-E-C-T and how the US can regain it after the disastrous Bush years is the subject of this item from Alternet.

A 20,000 YEAR LAYOVER. Here's an interesting item on the latest scientific evidence about the peopling of America.

LESSONS FROM KILLER WHALES. Here's a review of what an animal trainer learned that works at home as well.

ARACOMA CASE. A worker from Massey Energy's Aracoma Mine has received immunity from federal prosecutors in exchange for testimony.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED