Recent Readings: 3/10 - 3/15

The lack of energy, the weariness brought about by health issues, extended to reading much online (and even less offline). The following comes (mostly) from the past few days.

And Trump's War continues insanely along: Dismay as ancient heritage sites across Iran damaged in US-Israel bombing. Why did Congress let a man known best for his irresponsibility continue this misadventure of putting other people's lives on the line?

 They make the minds behind Vietnam the best and brightest. Cheney and Rumsfield look like geniuses. I can blame the guys for Vietnam for their arrogance - that was born of ignorance. Bush's team thought they were no longer bound by history. Trump thinks he makes reality even more than the Bushies did.
 
A thought that has recently occurred to me is that we have been repeating Vietnam - Grenada, Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Iran. Maybe it is an open sore in the psyche of Republicans. 
 
They know no history. We started the Iranian problem in 1953. Apparently, they do not understand geography. I feel drained and achy, so my mind is not in its best state. We may be American rarities - we know a little history, we know a little geography; we know what did not work, we know one size does not fit all.  

The Times of Israel has coverage that needs your attention. 

International law and the Iran war (The Article)

An extraordinary social video came out of the White House last week, a mix of actual “strike footage” from Iran, illustrating the promised “death and destruction all day long”, alongside clips from Top Gun, Spiderman and (perhaps a nod at Trump’s Scottish ancestry) Braveheart.  Entitled Justice the American Way, its moral depravity is striking. Just as Archbishop Blaise Cupich of Chicago wrote in response, it depicted a “real war with real death and real suffering being treated like it’s a video game”: an “American way” which ignores the very existence of international law and the values it attempts to preserve.   Pete Hegseth, self-styled US Secretary of State for War, a man responsible for the largest military force in the world, both approved it and appeared in it.  Archbishop Cupich’s is a refreshingly clear voice of condemnation, with his focus on the victims of war.

How can a 79-year-old have the morality of a seven-year old? More importantly, what does such moral bankruptcy say about this country? 

 Perhaps it's not our leaders who fool us but ourselves?

To Be, or Not to Be, Misunderstood (LARB) by Robert N. Wilson changes my reading of Hamlet.

In Hamlet’s soliloquy, he is considering whether the wise choice is to stop caring about bad things you probably can’t change, as the widely beloved Serenity Prayer recommends. The alternative to such acceptance, Hamlet says, is “to take arms against a sea of troubles, / And by opposing end them.” That doesn’t sound like suicide, which would be more like surrendering.

The other crucially misunderstood word in the soliloquy is “quietus.” Hamlet says: “For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, […] When he himself might his quietus make / With a bare bodkin?” People generally assume that when Hamlet considers making “his quietus […] with a bare bodkin,” he is envisioning stabbing himself with a dagger, because they think “quietus” refers to the silence of the grave—“resting in peace,” as the familiar funeral language puts it, and as Hamlet’s dying line “The rest is silence” might seem to confirm. But “quietus” didn’t necessarily indicate quiet; it was a legal term for a debt paid off (“quietus est,” which translates to “he is quit,” would then be written on the loan document). It meant getting even (as when we lament “unrequited love,” love that’s not repaid in kind). Shakespeare’s only other use of the word is in the last line of Sonnet 126, where “quietus” signals a settling of accounts.

Big Men and Little People: Two recent books on Idi Amin’s Uganda present an African mirror for Trump’s United States to see itself. (LARB) by  Samuel Fury Childs Daly makes a comparison that, by the end of the review, does stand up. 

THE BEST HISTORICAL analogue for Donald Trump probably isn’t an American. It also isn’t one of the great villains of 20th-century Europe, despite a long and tired debate about his relationship to fascism. Rather, Trump’s most obvious predecessor comes from one of the “shithole countries” in Africa he disdains: General Idi Amin, the autocrat who ruled Uganda from 1971 to 1979. “It is not only the braggadocio, the self-regard, the love for military ceremony,” historian Derek R. Peterson writes in A Popular History of Idi Amin’s Uganda (2025); it’s also the cruelly funny rhetoric, the demonization of immigrants and outsiders, and the political chaos that comes from constantly hounding your rivals and betraying your friends. Amin and Trump carry themselves alike, and they give the same belligerent speeches. They share a catty kind of charisma. Like Amin, Trump tells his supporters he’s fighting for their freedom, all while turning the screws.

Let us hope Trump does not start feeding us to crocodiles.

Not much of a Liza Minelli fan, but I could not resist The Guardian's review of Kids, Wait Till You Hear This! by Liza Minnelli review—a heady brew of gossip, glamour and defiance

 3/14:

The Buried Tombstone, the Melting Iceberg, and the Random Bullet: History, Memory, and Antagonism in Ireland by R.F. Foster  (Hedgehog Review) has much to offer for those interested in Irish history or the writing of history in general. Gore Vidal wrote several times in his essays about America's historical amnesia, and I do not want to question that sharp mind, but the essay suggests another word.

...David Fitzpatrick, has acutely pointed out that the excision of World War I from the national memory was not a case of “amnesia.” The memory of Ireland’s involvement was all around us. Rather than amnesia, the proper diagnosis was aphasia, an inability or refusal to speak because the sound and meaning of words are disassociated. 

Do we not speak of some parts of our history because we have consciously forgotten them, or is it because we cannot associate words like lynching with ourselves? I do not want to excuse MAGA its efforts to literally whitewash American history, but their inability to speak on the cruelties Americans and their governments have imposed on the powerless does not seem like they have forgotten history as much as they can speak about it and maintain their charmless pursuit of an imaginary America.

 From Epstein files to Gaza and Iran: Crisis of world’s conscience (Daily Sabah). KH thought Epstein would be a story that would go away. So did more than a few pundits. That Trump completely mishandled the release of files promised by him during the campaign has helped keep this sore oozing its pus.

Consequently, within such a civilization, it is not surprising that even its most educated and prominent elites can live in ways detached from the societies they inhabit, often operating at unrestrained extremes without perceiving any wrongdoing until their actions are exposed. In such a setting, the value of other people’s lives can effectively be put up for sale. In this hierarchy of worth, the lives of Muslims in particular are often subject to devaluation and distortion. As a result, every attempt to reconcile their proclaimed moral discourse with their actual political practices ends in failure. In truth, consistency does not seem to concern them greatly; what ultimately prevails are their own interests and advantages. Yet the world, taken as a whole, is increasingly growing weary of these contradictions and is gradually becoming less willing to tolerate them.

For this reason, the crisis we are experiencing today is not merely a political or military one. It is a deeper crisis of legitimacy. Humanity has always struggled to establish institutions capable of limiting power and making it accountable. Yet, the point reached today at the global level under modern Western civilization shows that this problem has become – or has been made into – not merely an issue for individual states, but a fundamental problem of the entire international order. The growing unrest in many parts of the world today is not merely a reaction to specific wars or political crises.

In fact, people are witnessing the visible emergence of a sense of injustice that they have long felt deep inside. If the global order continues to treat human life differently depending on geography, religion or political interests, the legitimacy of that order will increasingly erode. History has shown us again and again that no system of power can endure for long once it loses its moral legitimacy. Therefore, the real question that must now be answered is this: can the world establish a new moral order in which the human being, as a valuable and dignified entity, stands at the center rather than power? Perhaps what humanity needs most today is not a new technology, but a moral horizon that enables us to value the life of another as much as our own. For when the life of the other is devalued, even the systems that appear strongest begin to collapse precisely at this weakest point.

Does culture make emotion? (Aeon) got me thinking I still have not caught up with my notes of my group sessions; we are back talking about cognitive disorders caused by emotions. But I think this applies as much to my fiction (and makes this probably the last post containing the "On Writing" tag; I have taken baby steps regarding my new blog).

 This is an example of how cultural givens become cognitive and emotive ‘habits’ that underlie shared emotions but also produce categories, prejudices and ideologies. They are built into our mental makeup and thus may seem inherent in the self. But they are in fact dynamic, cultural ‘patterned practices’. Language itself is one such instance of a patterned practice. What I hear is culturally conditioned. This is the process involved in how I internalise and then voice what seem to be collectively and normatively acceptable, authentic emotional responses to the voices of the world, such as outrage, pride or disgust. They may feel authentic, but they are precisely what can blind me to the complexity of felt experience, and to the lenses through which I inevitably look at others, or even in the mirror – because top-down goes all the way down.

Our eyes wouldn’t adjust to seeing without the lenses. But we have the metacognitive ability to become aware of their shape and understand the conditions of our own apperception, as Boas did and entreated us to do too. ‘I’ can, to an extent, stand beside the ‘we’ of which each of us is such an intricate part. In this way, we may retrieve its hidden or forgotten elements, perhaps overcome prejudices and neuroses, as Freud helped us do, and so help cultivate a healthy, plural, attentive and democratic collectivity.

The Point published Moral Mysteries: Reading Iris Murdoch on her own terms
by Parker Henry. Which reminded me I have not even tried to crack her Golden Notebook, and that time is not on my side. Coming to me during this tortuous Lent and having acquired an idea for a play on philosophical issues, this passage gave me several things:

The fantasies we project are personal. Our stories are necessarily idiosyncratic. I think this is precisely the difference that scares us. But if we have a moral philosophy that moves us away from some abstract capacity to make logical sense of the world and toward imagining the other through personal narrative, are we not saved—at least a little bit—from our loneliness? Perhaps my intuition of loneliness was itself a projection of my ego, which sought to protect me from that fear of getting closer to others. Murdoch recognizes that we may not come to a full understanding of the other, but through loving attention, we can at least glimpse them. “The tragic freedom implied by love is this,” she writes in “The Sublime and the Good”:

that we all have an indefinitely extended capacity to imagine the being of others. Tragic, because there is no prefabricated harmony, and others are, to an extent we never cease discovering, different from ourselves. Nor is there any social totality within which we can come to comprehend differences as placed and reconciled. We only have a segment of the circle. Freedom is exercised in the confrontation by each other, in the context of an infinitely extensible work of imaginative understanding, of two irreducibly dissimilar individuals. Love is the imaginative recognition of, that is respect for, this otherness.

Maybe glimpsing the segment of the circle is just enough to keep us sane.

 Orthodox Christianity teaches that we are to see others as an icon of Christ and to love them; the Other is not an enemy. The Other brings out our selves. As for the play, it gave me the basis for an argument against moral nihilism: monsters lack power of imagination; they are stuck in the stink of their own hatred.

I also decided that the play needed a little bit of David Hume, and to refresh my memory, I resorted to Hume’s Moral Philosophy (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). I find myself in agreement with Hume about revolutions, albeit my route is more Locke; I do not find them incompatible in their results.

Hume’s predecessors famously took opposing positions on whether human nature was essentially selfish or benevolent, some arguing that man was so dominated by self-interested motives that for moral requirements to govern us at all they must serve our interests in some way, and others arguing that uncorrupted human beings naturally care about the weal and woe of others and here morality gets its hold. Hume roundly criticizes Hobbes for his insistence on psychological egoism or something close to it, and for his dismal, violent picture of a state of nature. Yet Hume resists the view of Hutcheson that all moral principles can be reduced to our benevolence, in part because he doubts that benevolence can sufficiently overcome our perfectly normal acquisitiveness. According to Hume’s observation, we are both selfish and humane. We possess greed, and also “limited generosity” — dispositions to kindness and liberality which are more powerfully directed toward kin and friends and less aroused by strangers. While for Hume the condition of humankind in the absence of organized society is not a war of all against all, neither is it the law-governed and highly cooperative domain imagined by Locke. It is a hypothetical condition in which we would care for our friends and cooperate with them, but in which self-interest and preference for friends over strangers would make any wider cooperation impossible. Hume’s empirically-based thesis that we are fundamentally loving, parochial, and also selfish creatures underlies his political philosophy.

In the realm of politics, Hume again takes up an intermediate position. He objects both to the doctrine that a subject must passively obey his government no matter how tyrannical it is and to the Lockean thesis that citizens have a natural right to revolution whenever their rulers violate their contractual commitments to the people. He famously criticizes the notion that all political duties arise from an implicit contract that binds later generations who were not party to the original explicit agreement. Hume maintains that the duty to obey one’s government has an independent origin that parallels that of promissory obligation: both are invented to enable people to live together successfully. On his view, human beings can create a society without government, ordered by conventional rules of ownership, transfer of property by consent, and promise-keeping. We superimpose government on such a pre-civil society when it grows large and prosperous; only then do we need to use political power to enforce these rules of justice in order to preserve social cooperation. So the duty of allegiance to government, far from depending on the duty to fulfill promises, provides needed assurance that promises of all sorts will be kept. The duty to submit to our rulers comes into being because reliable submission is necessary to preserve order. Particular governments are legitimate because of their usefulness in preserving society, not because those who wield power were chosen by God or received promises of obedience from the people. In a long-established civil society, whatever ruler or type of government happens to be in place and successfully maintaining order and justice is legitimate, and is owed allegiance. However, there is some legitimate recourse for victims of tyranny: the people may rightly overthrow any government that is so oppressive as not to provide the benefits (peace and security from injustice) for which governments are formed. In his political essays Hume certainly advocates the sort of constitution that protects the people’s liberties, but he justifies it not based on individual natural rights or contractual obligations but based on the greater long-range good of society.

3/11:

I think I found where people like my sister get their ideas about sharia law: moronic Republicans. 

The most sensible thing I have read about Epstein.

 sch