Can You Imagine A Politician Anywhere in the English Speaking World Saying This Within The Last Two Years?

MEETING WITH WORKERS

ADDRESS OF HOLY FATHER FRANCIS

Largo Carlo Felice, Cagliari
Sunday, 22 September 2013

Dear Brothers and Sisters, Good morning!

I greet you all cordially: workers, business people, authorities, the families present and, in particular, Archbishop Arrigo Miglio, and the three of you who have told us about your problems, about your expectations and also about your inspirations. With this visit — as I said — I am starting with you, who make up the world of work. With this meeting I want above all to express my closeness to you, especially to the situations of suffering: to the many young people out of work, to people on unemployment benefits, or on a temporary basis, to business and tradespeople who find it hard to keep going. I am very familiar with this situation because of my experience in Argentina. I myself was spared it but my family wasn’t. My father went to Argentina as a young man full of illusions “of making it in America”. And he suffered in the dreadful recession of the 1930s. They lost everything! There was no work! And in my childhood I heard talk of this period at home.... I never saw it, I had not yet been born, but I heard about this suffering at home, I heard talk of it. I know it well! However, I must say to you: “Courage!”. Nevertheless I am also aware that for own my part I must do everything to ensure that this term “courage” is not a beautiful word spoken in passing! May it not be merely the smile of a courteous employee, a Church employee who comes and says “be brave!” No! I don’t want this! I want courage to come from within me and to impel me to do everything as a pastor, as a man. We must all face this challenge with solidarity, among you — also among us — we must all face with solidarity and intelligence this historic struggle.

This is the second city in Italy that I have visited. It is curious: both of them, the first one and this one, are on islands. In the first I saw the suffering of so many people on a quest, risking their life, their dignity, their livelihood, their health: the world of refugees. And I saw the response of that city which — as an island — did not want to isolate itself and receives them, makes them its own. It gives us an example of hospitality: suffering meets with a positive response. In this second city, an island that I am visiting, I here too find suffering. Suffering which, as one of you has said, “weakens you and ends by robbing you of hope”. It is a form of suffering, the shortage of work — that leads you — excuse me if I am coming over a little strong but I am telling the truth — to feel that you are deprived of dignity! Where there is no work there is no dignity! And this is not only a problem in Sardinia — but it is serious here! — it is not only a problem in Italy or in certain European countries, it is the result of a global decision, of an economic system which leads to this tragedy; an economic system centred on an idol called “money”.

God did not want an idol to be at the centre of the world but man, men and women who would keep the world going with their work. Yet now, in this system devoid of ethics, at the centre there is an idol and the world has become an idolater of this “god-money”.

Money is in command! Money lays down the law! It orders all these things that are useful to it, this idol. And what happens? To defend this idol all crowd to the centre and those on the margins are done down, the elderly fall away, because there is no room for them in this world! Some call this habit “hidden euthanasia”, not caring for them, not taking them into account.... “No, let’s not bother about them...”. And the young who do not find a job collapse, and their dignity with them. Do you realize that in a world where youth — two generations of young people — have no work that this world has no future Why? Because they have no dignity! Is is hard to have dignity without work. This is your difficulty here. This is the prayer you were crying out from this place: “work”, “work”, “work”. It is a necessary prayer. Work means dignity, work means taking food home, work means loving! To defend this idolatrous economic system the “culture of waste” has become established; grandparents are thrown away and young people are thrown away. And we must say “no” to this “culture of waste”. We must say “we want a just system! A system that enables everyone to get on”. We must say: “we don’t want this globalized economic system which does us so much harm!”. Men and women must be at the centre as God desires, and not money!

I have written a few things down for you, but on seeing you these words came to me. I shall give the bishop this written text as if they had been spoken; but I preferred to tell you what welled up from my heart, as I look at you now! You know, it is is easy to say don’t lose hope. But to all, to you all, those who have work and those who don’t, I say “do not let yourself be robbed of hope! Do not let yourselves be robbed of hope!”. Perhaps hope is like embers under the ashes; let us help each other with solidarity, blowing on the ashes to rekindle the flame. But hope carries us onwards. That is not optimism, it is something else. However hope does not belong to any one person, we all create hope! We must sustain hope in everyone, among all of you and among all of us who are far away. Hope is both yours and ours. It is something that belongs to everyone! This is why I am saying to you: “do not let yourselves be robbed of hope!”. But let us be cunning, for the Lord tells us that idols are more clever than we are. The Lord asks us to have the wisdom of serpents and the innocence of doves. Let us acquire this cunning and call things by their proper name. At this time, in our economic system, in our proposed globalized system of life there is an idol at the centre and this is unacceptable! Let us all fight so that there may be men and women, families, all of us at the centre — at least of our own life — so that hope can make headway.... “Do not let yourselves be robbed of hope!”.

I would now like to finish by praying with you all in silence, in silence, praying with all of you. I shall say to you whatever wells up in my heart and please pray with me in silence.

“Lord God look down upon us! Look at this city, this island. Look upon our families.
Lord, you were not without a job, you were a carpenter, you were happy.
Lord, we have no work.
The idols want to rob us of our dignity. The unjust systems want to rob us of hope.
Lord, do not leave us on our own. Help us to help each other; so that we forget our selfishness a little and feel in our heart the “we”, the we of a people who want to keep on going.
Lord Jesus, you were never out of work, give us work and teach us to fight for work and bless us all. In the name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”.

Thank you very much and pray for me!

* * *

[The following are the words Pope Francis had prepared for the occasion and gave to the Archbishop of Cagliari for publication.]

I should like to share with you three simple but crucial points.

The first: put the person and work back at the centre. The economic crisis has a European and a global dimension; however the crisis is not only economic, it is also ethical, spiritual and human. At its root is a betrayal of the common good, both on the part of individuals and of power groups. It is therefore necessary to remove centrality from the law of profit and gain, and to put the person and the common good back at the centre. One very important factor for the dignity of the person is, precisely, work; work must be guaranteed if there is to be an authentic promotion of the person. This task is incumbent on the society as a whole. For this reason we should acknowledge the great merit of those business people who have never stopped working hard in spite of all, investing and taking risks in order to guarantee employment. The culture of work together with that of social assistance, entails an education in work from a young age, guidance in work, dignity for any work activity, sharing work, and the elimination of all illegal work. In this phase the whole of society, every one of its members, should make every possible effort to ensure that work, which is the source of dignity, be the main concern! Moreover your condition in living on an island makes this common engagement even more important on everyone’s part, and especially for the political and economic institutions.

The second element: The Gospel of hope. Sardinia is a land blessed by God with a range of human and environmental resources. However, as in the rest of Italy, it needs a new impetus for a fresh start. And Christians can and must do their part, making their specific contribution: the Gospel vision of life. I recall Pope Benedict XVI’s words on his visit to Cagliari in 2008: we must be capable of “evangelizing the world of work, the economy and politics which need a new generation of committed lay Christians who can seek competently and with moral rigour sustainable solutions of development” (Homily, 7 September 2008) at the Shrine of Our Lady of Bonaria. The Bishops of Sardinia are particularly sensitive to these situations, especially to that of work. Dear bishops you point to the need for a serious and realistic discernment, but which is also directed to a journey of hope, as you wrote in your message for this visit. This is important, it is the right response! Look reality in the face, know it well, understand it and seek roads to take together, using the method of collaboration and dialogue, living closeness in order to bring hope. Never cloud hope! Do not confuse it with optimism — which merely implies a psychological attitude — or with other things. Hope is creative, it can create a future.

Thirdly: dignified work for all. A society open to hope is not closed in on itself, in the defence of the interests of the few. Rather it looks ahead from the viewpoint of the common good. And this requires on the part of all a strong sense of responsibility. There is no social hope without dignified employment for all. For this reason we must “continue to prioritise the goal of access to steady employment for everyone” or its maintenance for everyone (Benedict XVI, Encyclical Caritas in Veritate, n. 32).

I said “dignified” work, and I emphasize it because unfortunately, especially when there is a crisis and the need is pressing, inhumane work increases, slave-labour, work without the proper security or respect for creation, or without respect for rest, celebrations and the family and work on Sundays when it isn’t necessary. Work must be combined with the preservation of creation so that this may be responsibly safeguarded for future generations. Creation is not a good to be exploited but a gift to look after. Ecological commitment itself affords an opportunity for new concern in the sectors linked to it, such as energy, and the prevention and removal of different forms of pollution, being alert to forest fires in the wooded land that is your patrimony, and so forth. May caring for creation, and looking after man through dignified work be a common task! Ecology... and also “human ecology”!

Dear friends, I am particularly close to you as I place all your worries and anxieties in the hands of Our Lord and of Our Lady of Bonaria. Blessed John Paul II emphasized that Jesus “worked with his hands. In fact, his work, which was real physical work, occupied most of his life on this earth, and in this way entered the work of the redemption of man and of the world” (Address to the Workers of Terni, 19 March 1981; L’Osservatore Romano English edition, 30 March 1981, n. 4, p. 6). It is important to devote oneself to one’s own work with diligence, dedication and competence, and it is important to be accustomed to working.

I hope that in the logic of giving freely and of solidarity, it is possible to emerge from this negative phase together, so that secure, dignified and steady employment may be guaranteed.

Please convey my greeting to your families, to the children, the young people and the elderly, I too am taking you with me, especially in my prayers. And I warmly impart the blessing to you for your work and for your social commitment.

-------------------------

The Gospel is radical, even in the hands of conservatives like Pope Benedict XVI and John Paul II, on economic issues the Gospel requires a more radical vision than current politics allows.  And, remember, those were arch conservative popes who tried to destroy liberation theology. 

The radicalism in this is far more radical than anything I've seen in any recent officially leftist declarations on labor and economics.  It's more radical than Marx ever was, it is more of an elevation of humans than "Humanism" ever was, that philosophical pose that makes "man the measure of all things".   The Humanists' yardstick for measurement, ironically, can't help but devalue human beings because it is limited within narrow definitions, that happens whenever you attempt an naive and silly application of the reductionist methods of science where the subject matter is too big to be contained in those.  The use of a more inclusive and larger system of measure can see that people are more than their identity within economic theory or the accounting of assets, though you can't pretend the results are science, something they never can fit into so the attempt to turn that into science always ends up with people ending up short changed, according to their power to resist that.  Which is why we have Labor Day, after all. 

An Attitude Problem A Confusion of Terms And The Triumph of Fiction Over Reality

Considering the power of merely conventional passed down as an attitude to be held and maintained and not to be contradicted by any number of facts on the allegedly liberal mind it is remarkable that a word denoting freedom of thought could still be used to name it.   And in that we can see both the fragility of ideals in the face of habit and a desire to fit in to one's comfort and profit and, also, the power of conventional attitudes to control careless thought.  The "liberalism" of that phrase isn't the liberalism that gave rise to the great reform movements of the past four centuries which bettered lives.  As has been pointed out that liberalism was based in the liberal giving of sustenance to those who lacked the material, social and spiritual means to live at all in many cases and in still far too many to live a decent and morally edifying life.

No, the "liberalism" that replaced that in the usurpation of the word was the late 18th century notion of liberalism which was a mere freeing from restraints, morality among those, which was supposed to release some natural force which would set things aright.  But that was always a daffy notion.  It resulted in anything but the equality that the older liberalism founded on verses in the First and Second testament but, rather, in laissez faire economics and other boons to the rich freed of government oversight, Social Darwinisn and eugenics for the poor.

I have come, in the past dozen or so years, to see the failure to make that distinction as one of the crucial aspects of the failure of liberal politics in the past fifty years, most easily seen in the last years of the life of The Reverend Martin Luther King jr and in the period after his death when his goals of the Blessed Community abandoned for something that had more sciency veneer on it.  What had been built up by those who promoted the earlier, egalitarian liberalism was burdened with the second thing called liberalism but which it had little in common with.*

It was, though, a problem for a lot longer than that.  Yesterday's go round on whether or not "Shakespeare in Love" was a "bio-pic" reminded me of a post I did on one of the most remarkable cases of liberal confusion that hinged exactly on that point, which I'm posting here, today.  That was the identification of Oliver Wendell Holmes jr. as a liberal icon when he was a particularly brutal and savage Social Darwinist, the author of one of the worst legal decisions violating the most basic rights of people on the basis of science and social economics.   The part Broadway and Hollywood played in creating that confusion is, to an extent, unknowable but I would guess the idiotic "bio-pic" The Magnificant Yankee might have played in that is a lot greater than any familiarity with his actual thinking was.  I would guess many more thousands of college degree holding liberals saw that than ever read the Buck v Bell decision and his other thoughts impinging on actual liberal law, social policy and understood its effect in the real world.   Here is what I said on that matter in the post form several years back.

Compared to the "right" of private businesses to do things that could have enormously effects, good or bad, on countless people, including deaths,  Holmes saw the danger of individual people asserted to be "imbeciles"  having a child as more deserving of the most extreme state intervention, even into their bodies with surgery, on the mere prediction that any child they had was of an increased potential to be intellectually or physically deficient.  

Yet Holmes is seen as some kind of great progressive force in the law, primarily, I'd guess, due to his free speech dissents and his usefulness to Franklin Roosevelt at the very end of his life.  There was the movie of the play "The Magnificent Yankee" which only adds weight to the case that historical fiction in the hands of the theater and Hollywood, is best considered to be fiction.  Liberals seem to be suckers for that kind of "history".

As compared to the silly movie  that used a few names from late Elizabethan and Jacobean England to spin a totally fictitious yarn the misunderstanding of Holmes as a liberal hero is really dangerous in political and so real terms.  So the triumph of the conventional thinking that can grow out of that mistaking of fiction for reality, to be passed on as a de rigueur attitude to be held to be a good liberal, is damaging to the very identity of liberals as those who fight for the poor, the destitute, the oppressed the other among us, the least among us.  I understood in my early years of college, when I'd never read a single word of Holmes that I was to think of him as some kind of liberal hero, just as I was to hold any number of other mere attitudes based on nothing but assertions and even the merest implications of what other people said about people and ideas.  In a way the past dozen years has been about finally getting past that junk as so much more of the primary source material that I should have read, that we all should have read has become available for free in its entirety.

In these years of blogging on how the left went wrong, lost its ability to elect people to office who would change the law to improve the real lives of real people whose lives, physically and spiritually, depended on those changes, I've come to see that in a lot of cases the problem lay entirely on those attitudes and seldom on the facts.  One of the most damning was, in fact, one that had been identified a long time ago by our political opponents, that was the charge of snobbery, of believing that the college educated liberal elite loved to believe it was superior to people who had not been to college and who had not absorbed the requisite attitudes of that class of people.  I think that snobbery has been the sword that liberalism fell on, something anyone who was there for the political campaign of 1968 was stupid to not see.   Nixon used the resentment against that trait of so many of the conventional liberals, magnifying it and hanging it around the necks of even the most egalitarian of real liberals.  It took reading the unedited thinking of many thousands of those who considered themselves liberals online to make me see that in that case, we gave them the rope to do that with.  As I've also pointed out, the response of heaping more of that kind of ridicule on those who had supported Nixon in the form of Archie Bunker notably didn't prevent Nixon winning a second term or Reagan and two Bushes interspersed with conservative, laissez-faire style Democrats instead of someone who would revive and extend The New Deal or The Great Society.

It would seem to me that the first thing liberals need to understand to turn that around is what the difference between a real, traditional American liberal is and the laissez-faire substitute is.  The first is butter, the second is trans-fat margarine.  But liberals also need to understand the motives of those who led us down that path, those in the media whose interests always lay more in being able to lie for their profit than to promote a decent, egalitarian society, paying the merest lip-service to that as required in their social milieu of writers who like to be called liberal.   As the conservatives learned, all they needed to do was to give up the purity campaigners to get the media to drop the pretenses. And in allowing the porn industry - whose practices are and always have been an expression of laissez faire economics - the freedom it wanted it gained a lot more than it lost.   Rupert Murdoch, who previously may have been excluded as a soft-core pornographer being allowed to take out American citizenship and to buy a major American media company is the real life proof of what taking that "liberal" position benefited the worst of the far right enormously.  And try pointing out that "liberals" consuming his coarse, degrading, and even fascistic junk are enriching him online to see how discerning a bunch they are.   I've run that experiment on Eschaton, on Hullaballoo  on other blogs, including a couple of blogs I discontinued earlier this year.

I have certainly been guilty of most of what I'm talking about here.  The laziness and self-congratulations that led the left astray are easy and seductive, especially when sold with the full range of PR tactics and appeals to the lowest in us that are characteristic of a successful con job.  It certainly isn't pleasant to realize you have been had and it's your own fault.  But it's necessary for the future success of the program of real liberalism that those things be faced, including the defrocking and defenestration of some of our plaster saints. A lot more than the altered, phonied up bust of Shakespeare will have to go, a lot more.  The great "authorship question" is only really important as a model of how a required conventional attitude can triumph over the factual content of available evidence, the question of whether or not you really believe all people are created equal and endowed by their creator with equal rights and the right to sustenance and respect, that's the real thing.

* I'm coming to wonder if it isn't possible to analyze all of American history to be a struggle between those two "liberalisms" the second one being, actually, a mere variation on conservatism, what I've come to see as more accurately called "liberalish libertarianism".  The 18th century "liberals" who wrote the Constitution set up the necessity of the anti-slavery struggle, the struggle for women's rights and for the rights of workers as opposed to their employers, and universal justice.  We, today, struggle with those who want to reimpose that 18th century liberalism on us through their occult divination of the "original intent" of those liberals and, as I've also pointed out many times, even real liberals are suckers for it when they intone the phrase, "The First Amendment".

The Darwinist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. made what might be the most infamous declaration on eugenics made in the United States, it may be his most well known quote.

Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

The fuller reading of the paragraph, near the end of his decision in the Buck v Bell case, is even worse:

The attack is not upon the procedure, but upon the substantive law. It seems to be contended that in no circumstances could such an order be justified. It certainly is contended that the order cannot be justified upon the existing grounds. The judgment finds the facts that have been recited, and that Carrie Buck

"is the probable potential parent of socially inadequate offspring, likewise afflicted, that she may be sexually sterilized without detriment to her general health, and that her welfare and that of society will be promoted by her sterilization,"

and thereupon makes the order. In view of the general declarations of the legislature and the specific findings of the Court, obviously we cannot say as matter of law that the grounds do not exist, and, if they exist, they justify the result. We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U. S. 11. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

If I had the time, I'd go through Holmes' famous dissents in matters of prior restraint in printed matter, even, as in the Gitlow case, against the restraint of publishing incitements to violent insurrection and revolution, even as Holmes contemplated that sufficiently eloquent incitements might succeed in that incitement.  I see his approval of the forced sterilization of Carrie Buck was a "prior restraint" on her ability to have another child.  Leaving aside Stephen Jay Gould's essay on the case, in which he quite conclusively shows that neither Carrie Buck nor her daughter were, actually, of below normal intelligence,  Holmes clearly saw the danger of her having another child as being a greater danger to "the state" than a possibly successful insurrection overturning the government.   In the Gitlow case, when it was merely the mode of expression and its contents that were at stake, he said:

Every idea is an incitement. It offers itself for belief and if believed it is acted on unless some other belief outweighs it or some failure of energy stifles the movement at its birth. The only difference between the expression of an opinion and an incitement in the narrower sense is the speaker's enthusiasm for the result. Eloquence may set fire to reason. But whatever may be thought of the redundant discourse before us it had no chance of starting a present conflagration. If in the long run the beliefs expressed in proletarian dictatorship are destined to be accepted by the dominant forces of the community, the only meaning of free speech is that they should be given their chance and have their way.

However, clearly, in Buck v Bell, Holmes considered that people, their right to have children, the right to the ownership of their own body, was less important compared to the right of words.  

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It would be possible to go through the decision and make point by point comparisons with what the great Holmes said and what such infamous figures as Galton, Haeckel, and their colleagues now considered less disreputable said and find who Holmes was very likely paraphrasing.  In fact, on the other end of the history of the first eugenics era, the defense of Nazi doctors at Nuremberg cited Holmes' decision as well as other American documents in their defense.  You have to wonder what that felt like for Francis Biddle, the chief judge at those trials, given that he had been Holmes' private secretary.   

His familiarity with Holmes gives Biddle's analysis of the effect that Holmes' thinking and reading a particular credibility that could stand alone as evidence of how he came to decide what he did.  In a series of lectures Biddle gave, which were published in 1960 he said.  

All society rested on the death of men or on the prevention of the lives of a good many. So that when the Chief Justice assigned him the task of writing an opinion upholding the constitutionality 

of a Virginia law for sterilizing imbeciles he felt that he was getting near the first principle of real reform— although of course he didn't mean that the surgeon's knife was the ultimate symbol. 

... He was amused at some of the rhetorical changes in his opinion suggested by his associates, and purposely used "short and rather brutal words for an antithesis," that made them mad. In most cases the difficulty was rather with the writing than with the thinking. To put the case well and from time to time to hint at a vista was the job. . . . 

The vista of which Biddle spoke was provided by Holmes' reading of Charles Darwin.  Biddle continued:

This approach is characteristic of Holmes, and constantly reflected in his opinions— to keep the law fluid and the doors of the mind open. For pedestrian lawyers it was often unsatisfactory— they wanted everything defined and settled and turned into everlasting precedents. 

Darwin's influence was strong on Holmes, and his theory of the survival of those who were fit to survive must have been constantly and passionately discussed in Dr. Holmes's house when 

Wendell was a growing lad and young man. On the Origin of Species had appeared when he was eighteen, and The Descent of Man in 1871, when he was thirty. Darwin led to Herbert Spencer, 

whom Holmes thought dull, with the ideals of a lower middle-class British Philistine, but who, with Darwin, he believed had done more than any other English writer to affect our whole way of thinking about the universe. All his life Holmes held to the survival of the strong, and did not disguise his view that the Sherman Act was a humbug, based on economic ignorance and incompetence, and that the Interstate Commerce Commission was not a fit body to be entrusted with rate making. However, as he said to Pollock, he was so skeptical about our knowledge of the goodness or badness of laws that he had no practical criticism except what the crowd wants. Personally he would bet that the crowd if it knew more wouldn't want what it does. 

Compared to the "right" of private businesses to do things that could have enormously effects, good or bad, on countless people, including deaths,  Holmes saw the danger of individual people asserted to be "imbeciles"  having a child as more deserving of the most extreme state intervention, even into their bodies with surgery, on the mere prediction that any child they had was of an increased potential to be intellectually or physically deficient.  

Yet Holmes is seen as some kind of great progressive force in the law, primarily, I'd guess, due to his free speech dissents and his usefulness to Franklin Roosevelt at the very end of his life.  There was the movie of the play "The Magnificent Yankee" which only adds weight to the case that historical fiction in the hands of the theater and Hollywood, is best considered to be fiction.  Liberals seem to be suckers for that kind of "history".

Since he lived until 1935, Holmes saw eugenics activity in the United States increase enormously after his decision, responsible for the forced and involuntary sterilization of scores of thousands of people.  He also lived to see the rise of fascists in Europe, the Nazis, he lived long enough and could have been quite aware of the Nazis eugenic laws, the first in Germany, in July of 1933, laws which were justified by the Nazis and their supporters by citing the eugenics laws in the United States, both at the beginning and, as mentioned before, after the fall of the Third Reich.  I don't know if he is recorded as ever having said anything about that,  other than his declaration that he felt he was getting at "the first principle of real reform" in his decision, I haven't yet found anything he said in its wake.  I would suspect there is something, I just haven't found it yet.

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David A. Hollinger, in an interesting essay, "The Tough-Minded Justice Holmes" gives more insight into what almost certainly influenced Holmes to write his most famous decision.  He notes the influence of Charles Darwin and his circle and how William James tried to broaden his friend, Holmes' views and lead him to be less unquestioningly accepting of them. 

This is not to claim that James developed his categories with Holmes in mind, but there is no doubt that this particular map of intellectual alternatives was suggested to James by a circle of mid-nineteenth-century British secular intellectuals with whom Holmes strongly identified himself and against whom Jame's own career as a philosopher was directed.  The members of this circle were often called “scientific naturalists” or, less helpfully, “positivists”;  they included Herbet Spencer, G. H. Lewes, T. H. Huxley, John Tyndall, W.K. Clifford, Henry Buckle and – although his reticence in philosophical and religious matters made his position in this movement ambiguous – the great Charles Darwin Himself.  To James, these “knights of the razor,” as he called them sardonically, were anathema on account of their parochial misunderstanding of science and their extraordinary ability to intimidate people who would prefer to make a more generous view of religious experience and individual volition. While James mocked the pretensions of Popular Science Monthly – the major American medium for the dissemination of the views of this circle, Holmes so rejoiced in its influence that he sent a fan letter to its militant editor, E. L. Youmans.  Holmes celebrated the triumphs of this truly “scientific,” reality-facing, ostentatiously stoic cadre over the sentimentalism he associated with his own father.  While James thought his friend Holmes was making rather a spectacle of himself by representing his marks of toughness the scars worn by the sword-fighting duelists in German universities, Holmes seemed convinced that the battle against sentimentalism was never won. 

The idea that Holmes' "tough-mindedness", an attribute given him by James, could have been reacting to the "sentimentalism" of his father, the poet, is interesting.  It's almost tempting to see Holmes as an example of that turn from 19th century liberalism of the kind that produced the reform movements of abolition, women's rights, temperance, various reforms to protect workers and consumers, etc. into a more "scientific" liberalism that still distorts, denatures and defeats liberals today.  But I think the case is that such denatured liberalism was unable to make the distinction between a mythical, liberal Holmes and the reality of his products.  Is it his "free speech" language that deceives liberals?  Liberals go all soggy when someone says those words.  Free speech, with its potential to incite violent struggle can be seen as a useful motivator of natural selection as much as it is a vital component of liberal reform.  In the hands of the rich and powerful it has that effect, often to the detriment of genuine liberalism, as our freest press ever proves 24/7/365.  In the beginning of his essay, Hollinger points out:

.....that a major folk hero of the liberal intelligentsia is a man who has been plausibly described by Grant Gilmore as “savage, harsh, and cruel, a bitter and lifelong pessimist who saw in the course of human life nothing but a continuing struggle in which the rich and powerful impose their will on the poor and weak.  The two issues are largely distinct from one another, but they do connect through the utility of a “scientific” persona held for proponents of a genuinely secular, de-Christianized liberalism for the public culture of the United States. 

This is what I meant by the wrong turn that liberalism took as it attempted to become more "tough-minded", more "scientific", less "sentimental".  Such liberalism equates whatever is held to be science with hard reality and whatever can be associated with the "sentimental" as being an illusion, including religion, including vast stretches of morality which comprise the genuine substance of liberalism.  This is how it mistakes Holmes for a liberal when he was no such thing, it's how eugenics, the negation of everything that liberalism comprises, came to be associated with liberalism.  

Post Script:  I can't say it any better than the atheist and materialist and friend of Stephen Jay Gould,  Richard Lewontin, did in his Essay:  Billions and Billions of Demons

The struggle for possession of public consciousness between material and mystical explanations of the world is one aspect of the history of the confrontation between elite culture and popular culture. Without that history we cannot understand what was going on in the Little Rock Auditorium in 1964. The debate in Arkansas between a teacher from a Texas fundamentalist college and a Harvard astronomer and University of Chicago biologist was a stage play recapitulating the history of American rural populism. In the first decades of this century there was an immensely active populism among poor southwestern dirt farmers and miners.7 The most widely circulated American socialist journal of the time (The Appeal to Reason!) was published not in New York, but in Girard, Kansas, and in the presidential election of 1912 Eugene Debs got more votes in the poorest rural counties of Texas and Oklahoma than he did in the industrial wards of northern cities. Sentiment was extremely strong against the banks and corporations that held the mortgages and sweated the labor of the rural poor, who felt their lives to be in the power of a distant eastern elite. The only spheres of control that seemed to remain to them were family life, a fundamentalist religion, and local education. 

This sense of an embattled culture was carried from the southwest to California by the migrations of the Okies and Arkies dispossessed from their ruined farms in the 1930s. There was no serious public threat to their religious and family values until well after the Second World War. Evolution, for example, was not part of the regular biology curriculum when I was a student in 1946 in the New York City high schools, nor was it discussed in school textbooks. In consequence there was no organized creationist movement. Then, in the late 1950s, a national project was begun to bring school science curricula up to date. A group of biologists from elite universities together with science teachers from urban schools produced a new uniform set of biology textbooks, whose publication and dissemination were underwritten by the National Science Foundation. An extensive and successful public relations campaign was undertaken to have these books adopted, and suddenly Darwinian evolution was being taught to children everywhere. The elite culture was now extending its domination by attacking the control that families had maintained over the ideological formation of their children. 

Lewontin's is about the most realistic, most informed and most sophisticated analysis of the this struggle in the United States which I've read.

In a struggle that produces far more than its share of ironies, it is remarkable that as the fundamentalist anti-evolutionists who have made the best use of the history of American Eugenics, the eugenics history of Charles Darwin and his inner circle and the waves emanating from them as present day liberals are obsessively protecting the inspiration of eugenics, the lassie-faire capitalist, supporter of the 19th century British class system, anti-contraceptive, racist, flagrant bigot, etc. Charles Darwin on behalf of his science, which is long superseded by better explanations of the fact of evolution. 

How Darwinism became the great cause celebre of liberalism when it has nothing to do with a genuine liberal political agenda and, in the genuine history of Darwinism is antithetical to liberalism, is worth asking.  The separation of church and state is worth supporting but, frankly, if we've got to buy Darwinism to do it, it's not going to lead to liberalism.  I don't think liberalism has to make that deal.  At the very least it should face the real Charles Darwin and throw him off the sled.  Liberal struggle requires that. 

As I'm Headed Out The Door For The Family Picknic

Oh, mercy.  This is just too good to not post.  For those of you unfamiliar with the standards of intellectual activity at the Brain Trust.

Fiction Is Truth!

steve simelsSeptember 6, 2015 at 11:46 AM

R. McGeddon" believes Shakespeare in Love is a "bio-pic". 

Here's a clue, numbnuts -- in terms of genre, it IS a bio-pic. You may think it's not factually accurate, but that's irrelevant. It's like saying that you believe STAGE COACH is a quote " western" unquote.

On the other hand, given that you don't watch movies its no wonder that on the subject you have no idea what you're talking about.

Simps, according to you I could make up any old thing I wanted to about you and it would constitute your "biography", so long as I put it on video, perhaps. So, how many 14-year-old cousins of yours have you married?   How about I ask Ben Stein to play you in the film? 

Only Because It Involves No Labors Lost

R. McGeddon, humbugged, egad  Steve Simels, blog malignancy • 15 minutes ago

There are more extant original documents about WS than there are about almost any person of his time who wasn't royalty.

Apparently the Brain Trusters know something that about the foremost champion of the "Bard of Avon" in recent times doesn't.  

Sam Schoenbaum, among the most-quoted traditional Shakespeare biographers, after decades of research, wrote that, “Perhaps we should despair of ever bridging the vertiginous expanse between the sublimity of the subject and the mundane inconsequence of the documentary record.” (Shakespeare's Lives, Second Edition)

NOT that I expect the Brain Trusters will read this but, then, again, "R. McGeddon" believes Shakespeare in Love is a "bio-pic".  Talk about your willing dupes. Not to mention credulous consumers of fiction.  I wonder what other movies he thinks are documentary.  Lots of folks mistake Gone With The Wind for one, too. 

I took that quote from the Declaration of Reasonable Doubt About The Identity of William Shakespeare :  

“Time's glory is to calm contending kings,
To unmask falsehood and bring truth to light.”

— William Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece

To Shakespeare lovers everywhere, as well as to those who are encountering him for the first time: know that a great mystery lies before you. How could William “Shakspere” of Stratford have been the author, William Shakespeare, and leave no definitive evidence of it that dates from his lifetime? And why is there an enormous gulf between the alleged author's life and the contents of his works?

In the annals of world literature, William Shakespeare is an icon of towering greatness. But who was he?The following are among the many outstanding writers, thinkers, actors, directors and statesmen of the past who have expressed doubt that Mr. “Shakspere” wrote the works of William Shakespeare:

• Mark Twain
• Henry James
• Walt Whitman
• Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Sir George Greenwood

• Orson Welles
• Tyrone Guthrie
• Charlie Chaplin
• Sir John Gielgud
• Hugh Trevor-Roper

• William James
• Sigmund Freud
• Clifton Fadiman
• John Galsworthy
• Mortimer J. Adler

• Paul H. Nitze
• Lord Palmerston
• William Y. Elliott
• Harry A. Blackmun
• Lewis F. Powell, Jr.

Present-day doubters include many more prominent individuals, numerous leading Shakespearean actors, and growing numbers of English professors. Brunel University in West London, and Concordia University in Portland, Oregon, now offer degree programs in authorship studies. Yet orthodox scholars claim that there is no room for doubt that Mr. Shakspere wrote the plays and poems traditionally attributed to him. Some say that it is not even an important question.

We, the undersigned, hereby declare our view that there is room for reasonable doubt about the identity of William Shakespeare, and that it is an important question for anyone seeking to understand the works, the formative literary culture in which they were produced, or the nature of literary creativity and genius.

The Problematic Case for Stratford's Mr. Shakspere

Many people think that Mr. Shakspere (a frequent spelling of his name, used here to distinguish him from the author) claimed to have written the works. No such record exists. The case for him as the author rests largely on testimony in the First Folio collection of the plays, published in 1623, seven years after he died. However, nothing in the contemporaneous documentary evidence of his life confirms the Folio testimony. If Mr. Shakspere was the author, there should be definitive evidence of it from his lifetime. There is none. Not that there are no reasons to think that Mr. Shakspere wrote the works, but we find them inconclusive.

There are four main reasons to identify Mr. Shakspere of Stratford with the author William Shakespeare. First, the name “William Shakespeare” (often “Shake-speare”) appeared on the title pages of many of the poems and plays published during his lifetime. Second, Ben Jonson wrote a key phrase in the First Folio referring to the author as “Sweet Swan of Avon,” and Leonard Digges refers to “thy Stratford moniment.” Third, fellow actors Heminges and Condell, mentioned in his will, point to him as the author in the Folio. Fourth, the effigy and inscription on his Stratford monument suggest that “Shakspeare” had been a writer. These four reasons would seem to amount to a prima facie case for Mr. Shakspere (evidence sufficient to establish a presumption of fact, unless rebutted by other evidence); however, each of them is problematic.

1. It is not certain from the title pages that the name printed on them necessarily refers to Mr. Shakspere. Mr. Shakspere's last name was spelled numerous ways, even after many of the works had been published. The name on the works was virtually always spelled one way, “Shakespeare;” but it was often hyphenated — a rarity for English names at the time. Scholars have no definitive explanation for the hyphenated name. Mr. Shakspere's name was never hyphenated in other contexts, such as his business dealings in Stratford. On his baptismal record, even on his monument, Mr. Shakspere's name was spelled with no “e” after “k.” The same is true of its three appearances in his will, twice spelled “Shackspeare,” and once “Shakspeare.” Some think that it may have been pronounced with a short “a,” like “Shack,” as it was quite often spelled.

2. The First Folio testimony does point to Shakspere as the author, but should this be taken at face value? It is very unusual that the identity of such a great writer would depend so heavily on posthumous evidence. Neither Ben Jonson, nor Leonard Digges, ever wrote a personal reference to Mr. Shakspere while he lived. Not until the year Shakspere died did Jonson refer to “Shakespeare,” and then only to list him as an actor. Other than their two brief allusions, neither Jonson nor Digges offered any further identifying information — not his dates of birth and death, or names of any family members, or any revealing episode from his life. Short on individualizing facts, they gave us generalized superlatives that describe the author, not the man.

3. Perhaps the strongest link to Mr. Shakspere is the apparent testimony of actors Heminges and Condell. Neither of them was a writer, however, and several scholars doubt that they wrote the passages attributed to them. Some think their Folio testimony sounds like a sales pitch, urging undecided readers to purchase. Most orthodox scholars are untroubled by the lack of corroboration, limited specifics, ambiguities, puffery and unclear role of Mr. Shakspere's fellow actors. Skeptics ask why the Folio is not more straightforward, and why such a great outpouring of eulogies only occurred following seven years of silence after his death.

4. Yes, today the Stratford monument effigy clearly depicts a writer; but it does not look the same as the one erected in the early 1600s. A sketch by a reputable antiquarian in 1634 shows a man with a drooping moustache holding a wool or grain sack, but no pen, no paper, no writing surface as in today's monument. Records show that the monument was “repaired.” Apparently the effigy was also altered to depict a writer. The monument's strange inscription never states that Mr. Shakspere was the author William Shakespeare. For anybody living in Stratford, who may have known him, the epitaph could appear to say no such thing. It neither names, nor quotes from, any of the works; and it never mentions poetry, plays, acting or theater. Most orthodox biographers have little to say about the inscription, and some even describe it as enigmatic. Epitaphs of other writers of the time identify them clearly as writers, so why not Mr. Shakspere's epitaph?

Why We Say the Evidence Does Not Fit

If the case for Mr. Shakspere were otherwise sound, the problems in these four areas would hardly matter. Unfortunately, once one looks beyond them, one finds no contemporaneous evidence that Mr. Shakspere was even a professional writer, much less that he was the poet-playwright William Shakespeare. Further, much contemporaneous evidence that has come to light seems at odds with his having been Shakespeare. Of a few great writers, like Homer, we know nothing at all; but there is only one great writer about whom the more we learn, the less he appears to have been a writer. How can this be for England's Shakespeare?

Not one play, not one poem, not one letter in Mr. Shakspere's own hand has ever been found. He divided his time between London and Stratford, a situation conducive to correspondence. Early scholars naturally expected that at least some of his correspondence would have survived. Yet the only writings said to be in his own hand are six shaky, inconsistent signatures on legal documents, including three found on his will. If, in fact, these signatures are his, they reveal that Mr. Shakspere experienced difficulty signing his name. Some document experts doubt that even these signatures are his and suggest they were done by law clerks. One letter addressed to Mr. Shakspere survives. It requested a loan, and it was unopened and undelivered.

His detailed will, in which he famously left his wife “my second best bed with the furniture,” contains no clearly Shakespearean turn of phrase and mentions no books, plays, poems, or literary effects of any kind. Nor does it mention any musical instruments, despite extensive evidence of the author's musical expertise. He did leave token bequests to three fellow actors (an interlineation, indicating it was an afterthought), but nothing to any writers. The actors' names connect him to the theater, but nothing implies a writing career. Why no mention of Stratford's Richard Field, who printed the poems that first made Shakespeare famous? If Mr. Shakspere was widely known as William “Shakespeare,” why spell his name otherwise in his will? Dying men are usually very aware of, and concerned about, what they are famous for. Why not this man?

Mr. Shakspere grew up in an illiterate household in the remote agricultural town of Stratford-upon-Avon. There is no record that he traveled at all during his formative years, or that he ever left England. Both of his parents witnessed documents with a mark; but most surprisingly, neither of his daughters could write. One poorly-executed signature exists for his daughter, Susanna, but it only suggests a functional illiterate. His younger daughter, Judith, twice signed with a mark when witnessing a deed for a Stratford neighbor. Mr. Shakspere may have attended the Stratford grammar school, but records to confirm this do not exist. Records do survive for England's two universities at the time, but no record places him at either of them. Most orthodox scholars make no claim that he ever attended any university, inside or outside of England.

Some say that the Stratford grammar school would have provided all the formal education Mr. Shakspere would have needed to launch him on a trajectory consistent with the author's literary output. We disagree. The works show extensive knowledge of law, philosophy, classical literature, ancient and modern history, mathematics, astronomy, art, music, medicine, horticulture, heraldry, military and naval terminology and tactics; etiquette and manners of the nobility; English, French and Italian court life; Italy; and aristocratic pastimes such as falconry, equestrian sports and royal tennis. Nothing that we know about Mr. Shakspere accounts for this. Much of the knowledge displayed in the works was the exclusive province of the upper classes, yet no record places Mr. Shakspere among them for any length of time. The works are based on myriad ancient and modern sources, including works in French, Italian, Spanish, Latin and Greek not yet translated into English. How Mr. Shakspere could have acquired knowledge of these sources is a mystery.

The gap between Mr. Shakspere's youth in Stratford and the first record of him in London is known as the “lost years.” But for a few church records, the first twenty-eight years of his life could be described as lost. Scholars know nothing about how he acquired the breadth and depth of knowledge displayed in the works. This is not to say that a commoner, even in the rigid, hierarchical social structure of Elizabethan England, could not have managed to do it somehow; but how could it have happened without leaving a single trace? Orthodox scholars attribute the miracle to his innate “genius,” but even a genius must acquire knowledge. Books were expensive and difficult to obtain during those times, except at universities or private libraries. No book that Mr. Shakspere owned, or that is known to have been in his possession, has ever been found. Academic experts on characteristics of geniuses see little reason to think that Mr. Shakspere was a genius.

No record shows that any William Shakespeare ever received payment, or secured patronage, for writing. After dedicating his first two poems to the earl of Southampton, Shakespeare issued no more dedications. Why would any writer motivated by profit, as we are told Mr. Shakspere was, not visibly seek patronage? Some scholars claim that the earl of Southampton was his patron, but no record shows that they ever met. A phrase in one of the dedications (“The warrant I have of your honourable disposition… ”) suggests not. Not only did prominent patrons of other writers not support Mr. Shakspere, they did not comment on him. Up until 1623, those who commented on the author, or on his works, never indicated that they knew him. Shakespeare, the author, wrote no commendatory verse, and nobody addressed any to him while he lived.

Contrary to the traditional view that the author became a prominent public figure, there is no record that he ever addressed the public directly, either in person or in writing (other than the two early dedications); and no record shows that either Elizabeth I, or James I, ever met Shakespeare, or spoke or wrote his name. Even after one of his plays was performed as part of the Essex rebellion, Shakespeare was not mentioned. Almost uniquely among Elizabethan poets, Shakespeare remained silent following the death of Elizabeth. Early in the reign of James I, records place Shakspere in Stratford while plays were staged in London for the Court. Why was the popular playwright and leading actor of the King's Men not part of such events?

It is not that there are no documents for Mr. Shakspere; there are close to seventy, but all are non-literary. They reveal a businessman of Stratford, plus a theater entrepreneur and sometime minor actor in London. A few records show him delinquent in paying taxes, and he was cited for hoarding grain during a famine. A William Wayte, evidently threatened by him, sought “sureties of the peace against William Shakspere.” In 1612, allegedly at the height of his fame, a London court called him simply a “gentleman of Stratford.” He sued over small business matters, but never once objected to an unauthorized publication of the works. The orthodox see nothing unusual in the lack of documentation for Mr. Shakspere's ostensible career, but he is the only presumed writer of his time for whom there is no contemporary evidence of a writing career.

Stranger still, this alleged prolific writer is said to have retired in his late-forties, with his faculties intact, and returned to the same market town from which he came, never to write a play, a poem, or even a letter. There is no record that he ever put on a play in Stratford, or that any of its residents viewed him as a poet. Several people who knew the man, or knew who he was, seem not to have associated him with the author, including his son-in-law, Dr. John Hall, poet Michael Drayton and prominent historian William Camden. Nobody, including literary contemporaries, ever recognized Mr. Shakspere as a writer during his lifetime; and when he died in 1616, no one seemed to notice. Not so much as a letter refers to the author's passing. If Mr. Shakspere was Shakespeare, surely something dating from 1616 should mention the author's death. Even Heminges, Condell and Richard Burbage, whom he mentioned in his will, had no recorded reaction. Nor did those who held rights to previously published editions of plays or poems rush new ones into print.

Scholars have found few, mostly dubious connections between the life of the alleged author and the works. Why are virtually all of the plays set among the upper classes, and how did the author learn of their ways? Why is only one play set in Mr. Shakspere's Elizabethan or Jacobean England? Why are so many in Italy? How did he become so familiar with all things Italian that even obscure details in these plays are accurate? Why did he never mention Stratford, and never write a play that seems to reflect his own life experiences? While pouring out his heart in the Sonnets, why did he not once mention the death of his 11-year-old son? Perhaps a few apparent incongruities could be explained away, if taken in isolation; but there are so many! Sam Schoenbaum, among the most-quoted traditional Shakespeare biographers, after decades of research, wrote that, “Perhaps we should despair of ever bridging the vertiginous expanse between the sublimity of the subject and the mundane inconsequence of the documentary record.” (Shakespeare's Lives, Second Edition)

Finally, Hugh R. Trevor-Roper, Regius Professor of History at Oxford University, found Shakespeare's elusiveness “exasperating and almost incredible … After all, he lived in the full daylight of the English Renaissance in the well documented reigns of Queen Elizabeth and King James I and … since his death has been subjected to the greatest battery of organised research that has ever been directed upon a single person. And yet the greatest of all Englishmen, after this tremendous inquisition, still remains so close to a mystery that even his identity can still be doubted.” (“What's in a Name?” Réalités, November 1962.)

We make no claim, in signing this declaration, to know exactly what happened, who wrote the works, nor even that Mr. Shakspere definitely did not. Individual signatories will have their personal views about the author; but all we claim here is that there is “room for doubt,” and other reasonable scenarios are possible. If writers and thinkers of the stature of Henry James, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain and all the rest of the outstanding people named above, have expressed doubt that Mr. William Shakspere of Stratford wrote the works attributed to him, why is it even necessary to say that there is room for doubt? There clearly is doubt, as a matter of empirical fact — reasonable doubt, expressed by very credible people. Reasonable people may differ about whether a preponderance of the evidence supports Mr. Shakspere, butit is simply not credible for anyone to claim, in 2007, that there is no room for doubt about the author.

Therefore, in adding our names to those of the distinguished individuals named above, we hereby declare that the identity of William Shakespeare should, henceforth, be regarded in academia as a legitimate issue for research and publication, and an appropriate topic for instruction and discussion in classrooms.

And for the reading-challenged and attention deficient Brain Trusters,  the video:

A Great Labor Day Weekend Disussion

Krista Tippett interviews Mike Rose on

The Intelligence in All Kinds of Work, and the Human Core of All Education That Matters

While the cut broadcast is good, as is often the case, the longer, unedited interview contains valuable things that wouldn't fit into an hour long framework.  There is also the transcript.

I don't agree with one thing that is said, that today's too common anti-intellectualism that favors football over anything like learning is something that was common among our 19th century ancestors, the generations that established public education and who, quite often, even among those who left school early, had a great respect for knowledge.  Rufus Jones wrote about the high level of intellectual knowledge among farmers who left school at an early age but who read extensively.  While that was especially true of certain religious cultures such as the Congregationalists and the Quakers, it was no less true of many immigrant groups, many of whom read in more than one language.  I think what we have been led to believe is an American trait is, actually, the product of the presentation of condescending stereotypes which people have been suckered into buying, to their detriment as well as others.   Football was a game invented by the late 19th and early 20th century economic elites, many of whom saw education as a possession of their class, something which was too good for the great unwashed masses, the brain damage spread out from them to damage the entire culture.  It is a symptom of the degeneration of democracy from what it should have developed into, coming out of that 19th century idealist tradition into the wreck it is in 2015.*

I am also reminded of reading a book by Don Harlow in which he spoke about having the advantage of growing up with parents who were omnivorous readers of content high and low in the years before TV started to destroy that all but lost world.  TV is one of the forces most guilty for selling The People on the national myth and paranoia of anti-intellectualism and a disdain for thought over organized, violent mayhem.  That view of The People is largely brought to us by those acculturated into that degraded view of universal education and a Platonic disdain of democracy by their college educations.  That is when they aren't merely aping those attitudes for fear of not fitting into that clique.  There are few things more valued by those who have gotten onto even the lower rungs of that ladder than their faith that they are smarter and better than the ignorant masses who have no ability to aspire to anything higher and no right to even dream of that.

*  See also:  The Higher Learning in America : A memorandum on the conduct of universities by business men, by Thorstein Veblen, especially at about page 125