Choices

January 27 2011
     A recent piece in The Economist ("You Choose": December 18, 2010) considers the question, "Does the modern world offer too much choice?"  It alludes to an episode of” The Simpsons," in which "Marge takes Apu shopping in a new supermarket, Monstromart, whose cheery advertising slogan is 'where shopping is a baffling ordeal.'"  The article's cites social science research evidence, and here are three that illustrate shortfalls of having too much choice:

          "Choice no longer liberates, but debilitates.  It might even be said to tyrannise."

          "How is it, that in the developed world this increase in choice, through which we can supposedly customise our lives and make them perfect, leads not to more satisfaction but to greater anxiety, and greater feelings of inadequacy and guilt."

          "A 2010 study by researchers at the University of Bristol found that 47% of respondents thought life was more confusing than it was ten years ago, and 42% reported lying awake at night trying to resolve problems."

      The last quotation does not made explicit the connection between life being "more confusing" today and the multitude of choices consumers face when shopping, but it safe to assume that is the effect and cause the writer is suggesting.   It is true that too much choice, especially when buying expensive products - automobiles, homes, or complicated investment plans — 401k pension plans, makes it tough to decide what to purchase, but does variety really induce anxiety, inadequacy and guilt? Or is something else at work?   It seems to me the fault lies not in our economic variety but in ourselves that we are anxious and confused.
     The modern world can exhaust one with its deluge of products.  Which of the hundreds of soaps, shampoos, deodorants, breads, pastas, shoes, coats, trousers, computers, televisions, should we buy?  A more essential question, perhaps, is why are there multitudes of products that exceeds by far what people want or need?  Cheap manufacturing costs explain in part the mushrooming of those super-sized stores teeming with merchandise.  The frenetic production of goods, however, also reflects the calculated attempt of business to stimulate more consumer demand by creating an endless bounty of products consumers can select from the moment the novelty of what they have recently purchased wears off.  This has been a successful scheme of business for a very long time and with advertising’s help has enticed or induced almost all of us to buy things that were neither wanted nor needed.
          Considering the vast number of choices shoppers are given and the seductive power of advertising, one might think that people would be delighted rather than distressed (as reported in The Economist) by the cornucopia of products laid before them.  Perhaps many are delighted by all the choices available, considering less than half (47%) found “modern life more confusing than it was ten years ago.”  Still, there is something to be said about being sometimes unsettled by too many choices; however, it seems to me that there is something deeper in our psychology that unleashes the disquiet in mind The Economist is alluding to.  That disquiet in the mind is reflected in the way we live our lives: Each day we travel to work, and then back home to a hurried dinner before an hour or two of flipping channels or searching websites.  Then it's off to bed for too little sleep to gather a proper rest for the next day.  When the next day arrives, we rise to only repeat the day before.  Like the mass production of goods, we too seem to live in a flurry of activities each day. Such a life puts me in mind of George Herbert’s "The Pulley."  In the poem's mythology and metaphor Herbert envisions what we know too well:

           THE PULLEY.

WHEN God at first made man,
Having a glasse of blessings standing by ;
Let us (said he) poure on him all we can :
Let the worlds riches, which dispersed lie,
            Contract into a span.

            So strength first made a way ;
Then beautie flow’d, then wisdome, honour, pleasure :
When almost all was out, God made a stay,
Perceiving that alone, of all his treasure,
            Rest in the bottome lay.

            For if I should (said he)
Bestow this jewell also on my creature,
He would adore my gifts in stead of me,
And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature :
            So both should losers be.

            Yet let him keep the rest,
But keep them with repining restlesnesse :
Let him be rich and wearie, that at least,
If goodnesse leade him not, yet wearinesse
            May tosse him to my breast.

          In the poem, Herbert ascribes human anxiety ("Repining restlesnesse") to the one treasure withheld from the human race – “Rest.”  Like his God, this world of ours provides us with every conceivable material product.  And we are told over and over through all manner of advertising that all these goods and products will fashion a fulfilling life for us. Like the process of choosing what to buy from the variety of what we are sold, we bustle to each activity of the day.  It is neither the number of choices nor the events of the days that “leads...to greater anxiety and greater feelings of inadequacy and guilt” but the control we permit these to have over us. We falsely believe we choose to buy the countless redundant products, and we then accept the illusion that these products will somehow make life “perfect.” Meanwhile, the days get lost in multiple little events that accentuate how we have no control over the transitory reality of life.

Snow Buddha

     The photo below was taken of a  Buddha sitting in my backyard. Right now I can turn and see him from where I sit. The snow from last Tuesday still covers most of him.

    

    








    






As a counter to the horrific shooting in Arizona and all the media frenzy that followed, we might do well to read four of The Noble Eightfold Path of the Buddha: right view, right intention, right speech, right action.  Aside from this crime, let's consider also the odious attacks by conservatives and Republicans on Democrats over the past two years.  It is the kind of despicable behavior that should infuriate all who respect the rights of those with whom they disagree politically.  
     Even though the sick murderer in Arizona has been shown to have no ties to the political right, the Tea Party, or Sara Palin, Frank Rich demonstrates in his Op-Ed essay "Listened to Gabrielle Giffords," (New York Times, Sunday, January 16, 2011) that too few on the right have had the courage to rebuke their fellow pundits and politicians who continue to debase political discourse by portraying Democrats as anti-American and even enemies of the country.  Moreover, he cites examples of leading Republicans and conservatives who have downplayed the increasing "vitriol" ("Second amendment remedies"; "armed and dangerous") that has been spreading during the past two years (See Rich's essay noted above.)  Fortunately, there is John McCain who continues to reject the vile calumny circulated by some of his colleagues on the right. (See Washing Post Op-ed, Sunday, January 16 2011)
     What should anger us too are the insanely permissive gun laws in this country.  One would think that Americans could find a common ground on which to base sensible gun control laws.  Yet in spite of the astounding number of gun related deaths, pro-gun politicians and citizens remain unpersuaded that the sale of guns needs to be tightly regulated and restricted. So thick is the intransigence of pro-gun advocates and the N.R.A. that any law regulating guns is unacceptable to them.  One might think that the bloodshed in Arizona would open gun supporters' mind to reasonable gun control, but the response from gun advocates has been universally hardhearted.   What hope is there for civilized progress if it is opposed by such a remorseless mentality?
     Some have hoped that the crime in Arizona would be the inspiration for reasonable gun control.  But the brutality of how they died in Arizona will fade from the American psyche and the inspiration for gun control will dissipate as the ravenous media fill the coming days with "up to the minute" news, sports, and entertainment.

Winter Lament

1/10/11

        At work today, I walked by two colleagues who, like so many, were discussing the forecasted snowstorm.  Already sick of winter myself I expected them to complain about the cold and snow.  Instead, both men descried the timidity of those lamenting the onslaught of snow.  I shouldn’t have been surprised; when nasty winter weather seizes our attention, we can predict at least two reactions.  One is how intolerable the conditions are.  The second, mentioned above, features stoicism, real or posed, acknowledging and accepting the obdurate facts of winter. There is a third, infrequently observed possibility, that comes from those who love the snow and cold; for now, I’ll leave that inexplicable group for another time.
        As for myself, I find it harder each winter to muster the stoicism I thought innate to my character and difficult not to bemoan winter weather the way I do (loudly) summer mugginess and heat.  I venture outside each frigid morning and tighten my jaw and stomach as the freezing air stings my nose and cheeks.  No one could believe such an early blast could be bracing and energizing, but there are some who actually claim this. In the afternoons I like to walk for exercise; a brisk twenty-five minutes in the cold, fresh air arouses me from the torpor that fills the mind and eyes in those initial post-meridian hours.  Despite being refreshed, I am relieved always to get back inside the warm house. 
        When I was young, I loved to watch snow falling through the dark night blanketing the tree boughs in white shrouds.  Something mystical or sublime seem to gesture to me with each lilting flake; something mellifluous like the rhythm and rhyme of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”  Though a beauty still descends with each night snowfall, the numinous is absent.  To illustrate my point, here’s Wallace Stevens’ poem, “The Snow Man”:


                                           
         

         One must have a mind of winter       
         To regard the frost and the boughs            
         Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
         

         And have been cold a long time
         To behold the junipers shagged with ice,           

        The spruces rough in the distant glitter
         

         Of the January sun; and not to think          
         Of any misery in the sound of the wind,       
         In the sound of a few leaves,
         

         Which is the sound of the land         
         Full of the same wind          
         That is blowing in the same bare place
         

         For the listener, who listens in the snow,         

         And, nothing himself, beholds          
         Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

          The “misery” evoked by the sound of wind chaffs any who expect to find the comfort or certainty of an Emersonian sublime in the poem.  Stevens offers is a state of “mind” that might ignore (“not to think”) the “misery” that sweeps with the wind across the landscape.  But however stoically one withstands winter, nothing can negate the ubiquitous cruelty of this season.  That would require some transcendent power the twenty-first century imagination can no longer conjure.  The best we can do is collect whatever peace can be found in the dark and cold.

Nihilism: Not in America

           At the end of the nineteenth century, there were intellectuals who, in concert with Nietzsche, wanted religion to dissipate as modern concepts from science spread; meanwhile, theologians and the religious railed against the scientific and secular ideas that threatened Christianity’s dominance over life and society.

          A hundred years later, those who believe in God can observe much that has changed.  Today, there are public atheists such as Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins who work tirelessly through their books and lectures to depict the world’s religions as persistent myths that have perpetrated far too many crimes against humanity to permit them to go unchallenged publicly.  Hitchens, in particular, has crisscrossed the United States debating ministers and people of faith as he strives to advance the legitimacy of atheism and dispel the “fantasy” of religion.

          There are a few undeniable points that can be made about Americans and their religious beliefs: first, religious belief in God thrives as much as ever in America.  A two-thousand and eight Pew Poll revealed that ninety-two percent of Americans believe in God or some universal spirit and seventy percent of Americans believe that religions other than their own can lead to God and salvation.  Second, atheism, though increasing, poses little threat to religion or belief in God.  In light of these facts, it is exasperating to read Harvard Philosophy Professor Sean Kelly’s blog purporting that a state of nihilism permeates American society, and, at the same time, a silent dogmatism infects Americans’ religious beliefs.  (“Navigating Past Nihilism,” http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/05/)

          According to Kelly, nihilism has come about because religious tolerance has had the effect of nullifying meaning for people. Now, one might think that religious tolerance would foster religious diversity and enable different faiths to grow stronger.  Instead, Kelly argues that tolerance has denied God “his traditional social role of organizing us around a commitment to a single right way to live,” and created a “state” where the “culture...no longer has a unique and agreed upon social ground.”  Thus, Kelly concludes, “God is dead,” (again; Nietzsche’s pronouncement didn’t take.) and nihilism has spread beyond the subject of university seminars in philosophy.

          If tolerance can really engender nihilism in the way Kelly indicates, then how can he account for the rejection of atheism denoted by the remarkably high percentage of Americans who believe in God?  After all, atheism is the necessary precursor for nihilism.  But never mind the burden of overcoming facts.  A little later in his blog, Kelly suggests that for a person to experience faith as valid, he has to believe his faith is “universal and absolute.”  It is necessary, in other words, for a person to believe that only his specific faith can lead him and the rest of humanity to God.

         As Prof. Kelly’s argument unfolds, his reasoning becomes more distorted by his unsupported conjectures.  He offers no evidence (to counter the overwhelming data indicating otherwise) to show that Americans do indeed suffer in a state of nihilism because they are tolerant of different religions or that they are in fact dogmatic regarding their religious beliefs.  He does postulate that Americans deceive themselves into thinking that their religious beliefs are held universally by one and all (Where does this leave nihilism?), but again provides no evidence to support his perception of this mass self-deception.  On this point, his strategy is simply to season his perception with the philosopher's bromide: the philosopher (he) can see their self-deception, but they, of course, cannot.  Convenient and clever though this point may be, it is not at all convincing.

         Prof. Kelly’s final section claims to have discovered in Melville’s Moby Dick a text that can inspire the spirituality he sees missing in America.  He imagines an America in which “there are nevertheless many different lives of worth, and there is no single principle or source or meaning in virtue of which one properly admires them all.”   The problem with Kelly’s point is it describes American attitudes as they already exist (See the Pew Poll cited above).

        In part, Kelly’s essay could be read as another attempt to engraft onto American society and culture the pronouncements of a nineteenth-century's philosophical giant (Nietzsche) whose status outside the academy continues its slide into irrelevance.  At best, his analysis of religion and nihilism offers merely conjecture about rather than a realistic assessment of religious belief in American today.  But then the conclusions of philosophy have always been much more imaginary than real.

Keats and Milton

          When reading the poems of Shakespeare or Milton, Wordsworth or Keats, I am often struck by the graceful lines of verse that belie what arduous exertion poetry writing demands.  As W. B. Yeats famously said:

            “A line will take us hours maybe;

           Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,

           Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.”

          Though Yeats possessed the unusual mind that combines an extraordinary lyrical gift with an uncanny perception, to write poetry for him was to work harder than “all these” who labor physically in order to earn their livelihood.  Such hyperbole might raise our incredulity, but the burden of composition requires poets to summon the patience to wade through weary hours for the right words and phrases to arrive.  And if time draws from them a poem that is less than their ideas conceived, their disappointment must be more than ours.  John Keats wrote while struggling against the illness (tuberculosis) that he knew would kill him before he reached thirty years of age.  His sonnet "When I have fears that I may cease to be" offers an eloquent and touching portrait of his fear that death would preempt his success as a poet. Milton, who lived long and wrote abundantly in prose and poetry, had to endure the blindness that threatened his aspirations for poetic achievement.  His sought solace in God through his sonnet: “When I considered how my light is spent.”

            In the poem Keats anguishes over thought that death will eclipse his life before he fully realizes his poetic gifts and achieves “Fame”:

       When I have fears that I may cease to be

       Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,

       Before high piled books, in charact’ry,

       Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain;

       When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,

       Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,

       And think that I may never live to trace

       Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;

       And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!

       That I shall never look upon thee more,

       Never have relish in the faery power

       Of unreflecting love!—then on the shore

       Of the wide world I stand alone, and think

       Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

  

Lines 2-12 enumerate the opportunities death would deny him.  Though death did cut short his life, this early demise did not diminish Keats’ reputation as a great Romantic poet.  Some wonder if Keats would have ascended to even loftier poetic heights had he lived longer.  But who knows?  I would argue that the imminent threat of illness and death sharpened Keats’ poetic power and hastened his pace of composition.  Seeing clearly how soon he to “nothingness [might] sink,” Keats imagined what death would have taken from him, and seized it for himself to write his sonnet. 

          In Milton’s sonnet he laments his increasing loss of sight and how that loss will deprive him of his talent to write poetry:

       When I consider how my light is spent

      Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,

      And that one talent which is death to hide

      Lodg'd with me useless, though my soul more bent

      To serve therewith my Maker, and present

      My true account, lest he returning chide,

      "Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?"

       I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent

      That murmur, soon replies: "God doth not need

      Either man's work or his own gifts: who best

      Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best.  His state

      Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed

      And post o'er land and ocean without rest:

      They also serve who only stand and wait."

 I can’t help but feel sympathy and frustration when reading this sonnet.  Milton questions the divine logic of his affliction, even though he submits to God’s Will.  Could it be that he, like Job, accepts without doubt the tenet: “The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.  Blessed be the name of the Lord?”  Or does Milton challenge that tenet in the octave of the poem? 

          While reading Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus” this week, I thought of Milton’s response to his blindness as presented in his sonnet.  In the story, Sisyphus’ punishment is to roll a stone forever up a hill and accomplish “nothing.”  Yet, he has a victory over his punishers (gods): he “knows himself to be the master of his days”…and that his fate is “created by him” alone.  Though it is impossible to know whether Milton’s belief that they “who best/Bear his mild yoke” reveals his Christian humility or exposes his craven supplication for the deity’s help, he should be admired for foiling his blindness in composing this sonnet.  It seems without realizing it Milton already possessed the means (his daughters as amanuenses) to produce what would become the greatest epic in the English language.  He could not foresee that the politics of the time would continue to divert for a time his attention from his grand scheme of writing his epic.  Would he have laughed or even smile had he known what he would eventually accomplish?  It is hard to imagine the grim Puritan Milton smiling, and unlike Sisyphus, who “One must imagine …happy,” impossible to imagine him happy.

Shakespeare Illimitable

A number of Shakespeare’s sonnets assert that they will transcend the poet’s death and become a record for all eternity(15,18,19, 55, 60, 63, 81,101). The speakers in these sonnets denote graphically the destructive force of Time, but always subordinate it to the eternity of a language cast in terse dramas about life, love, aging, death. Sonnet number 55, “Not marble, nor the gilded monuments” best illustrates the poet’s triumph over Time’s various powers that efface marble monuments and grind men and women along with their most exalted deeds into dust:  


SONNET 55  

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents 
Than unswept stone besmear'd with sluttish time. 
When wasteful war shall statues overturn, 
And broils root out the work of masonry, 
Nor Mars his sword nor war's quick fire shall burn 
The living record of your memory. 
'Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity 
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room 
Even in the eyes of all posterity 
That wear this world out to the ending doom. 
So, till the judgment that yourself arise, 
You live in this, and dwell in lovers' eyes.


Not to be outdone by marbled monuments that preserve the memory and record of men and women, Shakespeare parades his words against and beyond “death” and “all-oblivious enmity.” However, like those monuments to great men and woman, the stately grandeur of this poem might be said to elevate it to an impersonal aesthetic that sacrifices emotion to monumental nobility and fortitude. Such an elevation, befitting in say, Milton’s sonnet “To the Lord General Cromwell,” would be incompatible with a love poem. However, the diction (and thus tone) of the last line softens the imagery of time’s violence and the resolute momentum of the poem as a “living record” that marches stalwartly forward. It seems, that by line fourteen, the speaker has won his battle. Now he can breathe more comfortably, relent in his attack on Time and embrace the future readers who will “dwell” with him and his lover in the illimitable world the those fourteen lines create

Samuel Johnson

Beginnings

            The purpose of this blog will be to discuss topics, quotations, literature, and politics, history, and just about anything that comes to mind.  As is the case with so many of us on this planet, I often have thoughts that I would like to share with an audience.  Not being a professional writer and, obviously, not having a venue (publication) through which to express ideas, maintaining a blog excites me with this possibility.  If my thoughts stimulate little interest, then at least the passages I cite should provide some diversion from the daily routines of work and home.  

The first quotation that I cite was suggested to me by my stepson Matthew and comes from Dr. Johnson's Idler essay # 31:

"But Idleness predominates in many lives where it is not suspected; for being a vice which terminates in itself, it may be enjoyed without injury to others; and is therefore not watched like Fraud, which endangers property, or like Pride, which naturally seeks its gratifications in another's inferiority. Idleness is a silent and peaceful quality, that neither raises envy by ostentation, nor hatred by opposition; and therefore no body is busy to censure or detect it."
-from 'The Idler' no. 31, (Saturday, 18^th November 1758), Samuel Johnson

     Here Dr. Johnson exposes the subtlety with which "Idleness" eases us into inaction.  Its attractiveness is specious; it's seemingly harmless as it too much resembles rest.   It dulls the vigilance of those twin sentinels of responsibility, duty and diligence. 

    

     In his day, Johnson could not have foreseen how Idleness has discovered even more subtle means to lure us into profitless uses of time.  To sit for hours and surf the web, nibbling now and then on some newsworthy story, keeps us busy while the accompany eyestrain kids us into thinking that something more productive has taken place.  Though there is no way to predict how Johnson would react to this technology that offers infinite riches of literary sources, his understanding of its abuse is adumbrated in his essay:

            There are others to whom Idleness dictates another expedient, by which life may be passed  unprofitably away without the tediousness of many vacant hours. The art is, to fill the day with petty business, to have always something in hand which may raise curiosity, but not solicitude, and keep the mind in a state of action, but not of labour.


Cheers.




The Works of Samuel Johnson – Google Books
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