Archive | October, 2007

Recycled Disinfo

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

I just saw Lynne Cheney interviewed on the Daily Show, and she made the same argument as the one that Lindsey Graham made in January – that the lack of progress in Iraq is no big deal, since it also took the United States a fair while after the revolution to get a constitution.

What I said then still applies:

Sorry, no. The United States’ first constitution was adopted provisionally in 1777, and formally ratified in 1781. What is conventionally called “the” U.S. Constitution was the second one. … And if [Cheney] is suggesting that the level of civil chaos in Iraq today is comparable to that of the United States in the 1780s, I think the historians among us might venture a dissent.


No Cliffhangers Here

One of the reasons given for not filming Atlas Shrugged as a trilogy, Lord of the Rings style, is that, by contrast with Lord of the Rings, the middle book of Atlas ends with a cliffhanger (as Dagny’s plane, its engine failing, hurtles downward toward the crags of the Colorado Rockies).

That’s so true; there’s no way you could make a trilogy of movies out of a work whose middle part ends with a cliffhanger. Thank goodness, then, that the middle book of Lord of the Rings doesn’t end like this:

Samwise in Mordor The great doors slammed to. Boom. The bars of iron fell into place inside. Clang. The gate was shut. Sam hurled himself against the bolted brazen plates and fell senseless to the ground. He was out in the darkness. Frodo was alive but taken by the Enemy.

And ditto for the upcoming Barsoom saga, likewise being filmed as a trilogy – which they’d never be able to do if the second book had ended like this:

fun on Barsoom And as she finished speaking I saw her raise a dagger on high, and then I saw another figure. It was Thuvia’s. As the dagger fell toward the unprotected breast of my love, Thuvia was almost between them. A blinding gust of smoke blotted out the tragedy within that fearsome cell – a shriek rang out, a single shriek, as the dagger fell.

The smoke cleared away, but we stood gazing upon a blank wall. The last crevice had closed, and for a long year that hideous chamber would retain its secret from the eyes of men. …

Ah! If I could but know one thing, what a burden of suspense would be lifted from my shoulders! But whether the assassin’s dagger reached one fair bosom or another, only time will divulge.

The story also mentions the Matrix and Star Wars trilogies. The second acts of those trilogies certainly didn’t end on cliffhangers either, did they?


Tarkas Is Willing

Not only is Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars series finally headed toward the big screen after spending nearly eight decades in development hell, but it looks like they’re planning a trilogy – presumably of the first three books (Princess, Gods, and Warlord), which form a natural unit in the series. Story here.


Burke’s Semi-serious Anarchism

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

It wasn’t solely to make a mean joke at Wagner’s expense that I praised Bizet as the superior composer.

– Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner

In 1756, Edmund Burke published an anarchist tract titled A Vindication of Natural Society. Debate over the intention of the work has continued ever since.

Edmund Burke Burke himself claimed that his defense of anarchism was meant satirically, as a reductio ad absurdum of “natural religion” (meaning, in this context, the deistic attempt to base religion purely on reason, without reliance on revelation, tradition, or ecclesiastical authority). According to Burke, the point of the book was to show that the principles by which natural religion was defended by deists such as Bolingbroke would lead, if transferred to the political sphere, to the abolition of the state. The overwhelming majority of Burke scholars have accepted Burke’s statement and interpreted the Vindication as a satire. After all, how could the great conservative, the upholder of tradition and hierarchy, the opponent of the French Revolution, have seriously endorsed such radical sentiments?

On the other hand, anarchists from William Godwin and the followers of Josiah Warren to Murray Rothbard have found Burke’s case for anarchism inspiring and persuasive; and Rothbard, at least, was convinced that Burke’s arguments were simply too good to have been intended satirically. On Rothbard’s interpretation, the Vindication represents the youthful Burke’s sincere opinions, and was subsequently presented as satire only for the sake of Burke’s political ambitions.

In his fascinating 1977 biography The Rage of Edmund Burke, Isaac Kramnick makes what seems to me a strong case for thinking the truth lies somewhere in between. On the one hand, the ironic reading of the Vindication as conservative satire coheres too well with Burke’s early writings to be entirely wrong; the mainstream Burke scholars are right about that. On the other hand, the Rothbardian interpretation of the Vindication as sincere likewise coheres too well with Burke’s early writings to be entirely wrong either. Kramnick reads Burke as a conflicted Irish upstart both resentful of and awed by the English establishment, torn between the urge to defy the ruling class and the urge to glamourise it and win its approval; in the Vindication, Kramnick suggests, Burke was giving free rein to the radical strand of his ideas without either attacking or endorsing it, and without worrying about reconciling it with the more conservative strand.

Some excerpts from Kramnick’s analysis:

During these years Burke was wrestling with his own ambivalent social views. A part of him did detest the established order, as we have seen. He had displayed it in The Reformer. … To be sure, another part of him sought to crawl the low path of his assigned place, to embrace the secure warmth of tradition. How better to express this anguished dilemma than via his Vindication. It was at one and the same time a radical manifesto and a conservative apologia. By claiming irony he could have his cake and eat it, too. …

Weston and Stanlis make the case for Burke not holding to the ideas as literally set forth in the Vindication by citing passages from Burke’s other writings during those years which in their conservatism and skepticism seem utterly at odds with the apparent radical and rationalist views of the Vindication. The problem with this method is that it can cut both ways. An equally strong case can be made for Burke quite literally and seriously holding certain of the views dismissed here as ironic by finding them repeated in his other writings, writings not usually regarded as satiric.

Isaac Kramnick Take, for example, what seems to be the most un-Burkean aspect of his Vindication, and thus surely of no serious intent, its moving description of the grinding poverty of the poor and its radical assault on the oppression by the great and powerful who are responsible for the wretchedness of nine-tenths of humanity who “drudge through life” … But have we not, in fact, met this Burke before? It is, of course, the Burke of The Reformer, his Dublin journal of 1748. The passion is the same, the themes the same, the language very often the same. In number seven of The Reformer he had written of the poor in their wretched filth, living like swine and cattle and eating their miserable food. He had written there of “the natural equality of mankind,” and its degeneration into the rich in their gilded coaches and their velvet couches, “followed by the miserable wretches, whose labour supports them.” … Is The Reformer to be written off, then, as mere irony, too? Some of these social themes in the Vindication are also found in Burke’s early correspondence and in his private poetry and prose ….

Moving on to other themes in the Vindication one is forcefully struck by Burke’s “ironic” attack on the law and lawyers. … This, too, must be irony, Burke scholarship tells us … Unfortunately, the evidence is quite the contrary. Burke happens to have repeated these views in a large number of “serious” contexts. Leaving aside the anonymous reviews in the Annual Register which Copeland attributes to Burke and which ridicule lawyers, there are numerous cases of such easily attributable criticism. In the very serious Abridgment of English History, published after Burke’s death in 1811 but conventionally dated as having been written in 1757, Burke offered an assessment of law and lawyers strikingly similar to that of the Vindication. …

One final piece of evidence exists crucial to the claim that its interpretation as pure satire must be revised and that it must be seen if not necessarily as a radical tract at least as an important indication of Burke’s ideological ambivalence. In his Tracts Relative to the Laws Against Popery in Ireland, written, it is customarily assumed, around 1765, Burke would return to many of the themes and radical arguments that were found in the Vindication. The tracts, significantly enough, like his Abridgement [spelling variation sic] of English History were not published till after his death, but their “seriousness” has never been questioned. What is striking about The Tracts is its radical tone which, while it may seem surprising in Burke, is in fact quite consistent with the Burke of the Vindication. These anti-Catholic laws, Burke insists, are unjust and in terms of natural law doctrine not binding. … The laws are “null and void” because there is no right to make laws which violate God’s higher laws. Burke insist here in The Tracts in good Lockean language that “a conservative and secure enjoyment of our natural rights is the great and ultimate purpose of civil society.” It follows, he adds, that government is justified only to the extent that it achieves that purpose. At the foundation of society, he writes, is “the great rule of equality,” and what these laws do in Ireland is to “create an artificial inequality between men.” … This is a radicalism quite akin to that of the Vindication, which may well explain why Burke never published The Tracts in his lifetime. He is saying that men set up artificial institutions of government and law to protect the cherished rights of natural society. What happens, instead, at least in Ireland, is that the tendency of these artificial institutions is to demolish natural law and obliterate natural rights. This is a far cry from the Burke we are used to. … It is Burke the radical theorist of natural law, using the theory just as Locke and the bourgeois radicals did.

Burke’s Vindication reveals the basic ideological ambivalence which is at the core of his politics and his being. … He is fighting with himself in its pages and in its preface, as much as he is with “the philosophical works of Lord Bolingbroke.”

To Kramnick’s citations I would add just one more. In his 1775 speech on Conciliation With the Colonies, Burke commented (as Paine and Emerson would later) on the maintenance of social order without government during the American Revolution:

american anarchy Pursuing the same plan of punishing by the denial of the exercise of government to still greater lengths, we [= the British parliament] wholly abrogated the ancient government of Massachusetts. We were confident that the first feeling, if not the very prospect, of anarchy would instantly enforce a complete submission. The experiment was tried. A new, strange, unexpected face of things appeared. Anarchy is found tolerable. A vast province has now subsisted, and subsisted in a considerable degree of health and vigor for near a twelvemonth, without Governor, without public Council, without judges, without executive magistrates. How long it will continue in this state, or what may arise out of this unheard-of situation, how can the wisest of us conjecture? Our late experience has taught us that many of those fundamental principles, formerly believed infallible, are either not of the importance they were imagined to be; or that we have not at all adverted to some other far more important and far more powerful principles, which entirely overrule those we had considered as omnipotent. I am much against any further experiments, which tend to put to the proof any more of these allowed opinions, which contribute so much to the public tranquillity.

In short, nearly two decades after writing the Vindication, Burke was still convinced of the viability, though evidently no longer of the desirability, of society without government.


Pequod Erat Demonstratum

It’s widely believed that a) the Starbucks coffee chain was named after the first mate in Melville’s Moby-Dick, because b) Melville’s Starbuck loved coffee. It turns out that (b) is false – Melville’s Burt Lancaster as StarbuckStarbuck has no particular affinity (caffeinity?) for the bean – but that (a) is nevertheless true: the founder was a Moby-Dick fan who wanted to name the store Pequod (the name of Captain Ahab’s ship) but was persuaded to switch to a different Moby-Dick reference because a place that sells stuff to drink shouldn’t have something that sounds like “pee” in the title. (I guess they never heard of Pinot noir?)

I will simply add that although (b) is indeed false, the text of Moby-Dick does contain the line “it’s a coffee-pot, Mr. Starbuck.”

I wonder whether Galactica’s Starbuck (the 1970s one) was named after Melville’s? He might be (they’re both ship’s officers), but I suspect at least as strong an influence came from the charming con man named Starbuck played by Burt Lancaster in the popular 1956 film The Rainmaker. The fact that the name contains the word “Star” probably helped too.


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