now & forever
Q has given me a fantastically good book about Cicero. Reading it, I find myself coming back to the oft-considered idea that the narrative of historical progress is largely a myth. I am struck by the fact that the Roman Republic, even in decline, would in many ways have been surprisingly familiar to us today: warring political factions, questions of the role of populism in the governing of the democratic state, issues to do with citizenship, courtroom trials and legalistic loopholes, land reform, taxation structures, professional sports, class woes, and on and on and on. The debates and problems of Cicero's Rome are precisely the sorts of debates and problems that I could easily imagine preoccupying Congress today. Some of them give me a ridiculous sense of
déjà vu; redistributing somebody else's land to soldiers as a reward for and incentive to service is a common feature of both ancient Rome and
modern Zimbabwe, while a political rival's decision to raze Cicero's home on the Palatine Hill and to replace it with a state-sponsored temple smacks to me of the common tactic of using
eminent domain to further one's political ties to friendly, well-connected developers--or, even more, it makes me think of the recent politically-motivated
attempt to seize Justice Souter's home in order to teach him a political lesson.
It's not just the politics and psychology of ancient Rome that we would have found familiar, however. There were physical similarities (if also great differences), and we would recognize everything from sports arenas to the library. There weren't really recognizable banks, but people did give loans and there was even a legally-mandated maximum interest rate. There were tenement blocks, single-family houses, homeowners, renters, and even occasional running water. Roads had mile markers. Girls had dollhouses.
It's not surprising that one can paint an engaging picture of Cicero and his life, either. It's got to be relatively easy to write a book about the historically distant politician--after all, we have his extensive correspondence, his books, and his speeches (improved for publication), just as we have for somebody as recent as Adams or Einstein.
But this is not meant to be a lament for progress in the world, or even an exposition of the lack thereof. I do think there are some ways in which we have undeniably learnt, built, created, and improved over the years. Modern medicine comes readily to mind, as does space exploration. Perhaps the development and use of the internet is another major progressive step, though I am somewhat skeptical. At any rate, I feel comfortable saying that there exist, simply put, new things that we can do now that we could not, and did not, do before, and that these things bring about real change in the way the human life is lived or the way that we think about ourselves and our place in the world; medicine and space exploration are some of those things. Moreover, these are things we
understand now that we did not
understand before, too. Voila! Progress.
The worldview I am presenting, then, is not one in which I descend into a chaotic postmodern narrative of human development in which we never learn and in which quality of life never improves, and during which we can never hope (as a species, or a nation, or a family, or any other group) to achieve any great goal or to approach any knew sort of objective knowledge; I emphatically find such a worldview to be false. At the same time, though, I do tend to approach narratives of progress with a major grain of salt. We
can move forward, but it is hardly the inexorable march to modernism imagined by Marx or anybody else. (I'm not saying that such an idea is particularly Marxist, just that he is the proponent of it who comes most immediately to mind.)
Tangentially, I note here that I have just rhetorically placed myself somewhere between modernism and postmodernism, which is sort of amusing. Perhaps I can coin a new "ism" halfway between the two: "stmodernism," or "osmodernism," or something else with only half of the "post" included.
The thing is, it seems to me that most of our tangible improvements (both "hard" improvements like the development of pacemakers and heat-efficient buildings and fiberoptic cables as well as the more theoretical "soft" improvements in understanding, like our knowledge of how synapses work and why heat rises) are scientific. To be sure, the random legislator has at least as much and, generally speaking, probably a lot more, power over an individual's life and happiness than does a random scientist. But the legislator is doing exactly what legislators before him did, trying to balance the same forces, encouraged by the same kinds of promises and ambitions, and plagued by the same kind of difficulties. There may be different sorts of political leaders today (a king here, a Congressman there), but both seem to me to be practicing old methods of governance, necessarily rehashing again and again what has already gone before.
This is not a bad thing. I use the word "necessarily" with care; we
need governance, social work, an economy, and literature and story as much now as ever anybody did then. (The "then" being some unspecified time in the past, I know, I know.) But these things are at once ephemeral and repeating; we will play them out now, and people will replay them over and over again into the future; and they played out in various permutations in the past as well, wherever and whenever there have been people out there (I imagine).
The work of science--at least some of the work of science--is different. It is not ephemeral, but timeless: we can forget a discovery, but it cannot be less true in the future (whereas the best way to run a society may very well change as the people change). This is complicated, of course, by the way that philosophical arguments turn into scientific investigations--but I think that that is not so difficult for us to understand intuitively. We know that Aristotle's physics and our own are different sorts of beasts; we know that Descartes talking about the mind is not the same as Harvard Med School studying the brain while looking at the output of a PET scan.
But that is, again, tangential. In the end, where I mean to be going is here: I think that all of this presents to me a sense of
who one is helping when one prefers a political, social, religious, or literary calling over a scientific or mathematical one (or vice versa). In their noblest form, the former kinds of work engage in the eternal struggle to make life better for
today's people (though, in more ignoble form, they can of course be used to make life worse, or to make the power-hungry happy, or for other nefarious but short-lived purposes). By contrast, scientific work is forward-looking, more about the good it can bring to people and the world in the future than about solving present and pressing problems (or doing harm--this, too, can be seen from a more nefarious flip-side). Even the person looking for an AIDS vaccine, very much with a mind to helping her world today, is learning something which will be useful and lifesaving even more in the future than it will be during her own time. Politics is not primarily about making the world better for all time, but shepherding one's compatriots pleasantly through the present. No politician is under the illusion that she will broker a lasting and permanent peace for all people. A scientist, however, is precisely under the impression that, if successful, she will discover (or create) something forever relevant to everybody.
This does not make the social sciences more parochial than the hard sciences, nor does it make the hard sciences more divorced from today's reality than the social sciences. But it does clarify a continuing tension in my own mind. I studied history and government in school (because I loved the former, at least, and was good at both); I believe in the public service of politics; I think history and story are deeply important, underappreciated, and excitingly able to give people a sense of themselves in the world, of cultural affinities, of analytical yet abstract thought, and even of right, good, and decency, all while being straightforwardly
fun. I have occasional crises of conscience, however, in which I consider that I should devote my life to science--especially privileging medicine, physics, certain kinds of engineering, and math (don't ask). I would not be as good a physicist as I am an historian, but I wouldn't be too shabby--and it seems, on occasion, that that would be the best way to do good in the world. The question of how to make my world a better place is idealistic and perhaps even silly, but it does deeply matter to me nonetheless; it is helpful to think of these two kinds of pursuits as so explicitly complimentary, then, and so equally necessary. (I mean, we
say that all the time, but we hardly ever act that way...)
$11
I was buying ice cream at Cold Stone a couple days ago when presented with a conundrum that has bothered me ever since. I lay it out here for your consideration (and my own).
While standing in line, I found $11 on the floor. I'm pretty sure it wasn't there when I first started looking at the ice creams, which means that somebody in the line probably dropped it--and whoever it was probably still was in that line, or at least in the store, when I found the cash. Brilliantly, I announced that I had just found $11 on the floor. Whose was it?
Predictably, I suppose, no fewer than six people claimed the cash as their own. Well now, what to do? Nobody gave up their claim, and in the end there was just no way to decide between them. I kept the $11 (and subsequently put 10 of it into the United Homeless Organization's collection bin, feeling something of a guilty conscience).
Nobody in the crowded shop complained at this except those who said it was their money in the first place, so I take that as a tacit statement that this was fair. Nonetheless, I'm pretty sure that
somebody got screwed out of their money. I was in a store--they easily could have given me change for a ten and a one, and I could have divided the money up between all the claimants. But that doesn't really seem fair, either; five of them were lying, after all. At least I was telling the truth when I walked out with the cash.
But that seems suspiciously
ex post facto, as an attempt to justify the fact that I left the shop $11 richer for no apparent reason. What's more, I'm pretty sure that one of them was telling the truth, too, since I really do think that whoever dropped the money was probably in the store at that moment. Obviously, the cash was more rightfully that person's money than my own.
The problem here is not what I did, so much as the fact that I don't really know what I
should have done. If presented with the same situation, would I handle it any better? I don't really think so.
I might not announce the amount, of course, and that seems like a sound starting point. But I also know that I never know
exactly how much cash I'm carrying. If I lost $11, I might be able to see that I'm a bit short, and I might even know that I had a 10-dollar bill in there which appears now to be missing. But I'd never manage to get the exact amount with any certainty.
I imagine that others are like me in this way. I may be wrong, and, in a similar situation, there may indeed be somebody who can claim his exact loss. But if not, how does one handle this? I mean, I walked out of the store with somebody else's money, and that person was probably right there telling me that it was hers. And if so, she got totally screwed.
Stacy Kent
It's too darned hot.
I'm hot. My neighbors are hot. My coworkers are hot. While playing softball in central park, I downed--and sweated out--more water than you could get out of a small swimming pool.
But the big problem is not that people are hot here in this city. It's that the city itself can't handle the heat.
Consider, if you will, the fact that two subway lines have stopped running, a third isn't running in Manhattan, and two more are only running a few local trains and no expresses--all because there isn't enough power for them. Houses and businesses in Queens are powerless, too. People are blaming ConEd, the local energy supplier. This is largely fair, in that they are in charge of powering the city--but it's unfair, too; Monday, New Yorkers set a new consumption record of 32,624 megawatts. We're running air conditioners at record rates, far above what our power grid can handle. Today, City Hall has dimmed its lights and upped the indoor temperatures in a bid to get others to do the same so that maybe, just maybe, normal city services can come back online.
Or consider that two days ago, a sixth train line was defunct. This was also because of power, in a way, but was decidedly not ConEd's problem. The third rail--which powers the trains--had buckled in the heat. Oops. No power along the line. Guess they weren't counting on days of 100+ degrees when they built the system.
Well, so New Yorkers can slow down a bit in the heat. It's not the end of the world. Washington, DC, shuts down when it snows. Why don't we get days off when it's hot?
Philharmony
I went with LRand, DJ, and a few others to Central Park this evening to listen to the New York Philharmonic play on the Great Lawn, to an audience of at least a couple hundred thousand (I'd guess). People were spread out, picnicking, bantering, and listening.
This is a very populistic event, a civic and public event. Music in the park is the kind of thing that anybody and everybody goes to. And we go to listen, sure, but also to chat amongst friends and to sit on the grass and enjoy a New York summer evening. The songs chosen are crowd-pleasers; there are fireworks at the end.
All of this makes it very different from a night at the symphony, perhaps, but it also makes the evening fabulous in its own way. We were sometimes straining to hear the music, and sometimes annoyed, and all few hundred thousand of us were amused when the heavens broke forth with a rainstorm of epic proportions just after the last of the fireworks had gone off to good effect--but music in the park is first and foremost a very lovely thing. It is, I think, a very democratic thing. Certainly, it is a social and cultural unifier; it is familial (what with all the kids dancing through the opening strains of bum-bum-bum-BUMMMMMM it can't help but be); it is friendly.
I must say, I liked especially the fact that the best seats in the house for the music (in the north) were the worst for the fireworks (in the south, over the city skyline)--and even more than that, I liked the way that
everybody was out running through the driving rain afterwards, soaked to their bones, screaming and laughing in a very unusual shared social pleasure. I've never seen anything like it before. We were all laughing together.
Something I Didn't Consider in College
I find, as I become more firmly ensconced in the working world, that I become more boring as well. This seems to me a shame, but also not entirely a bad thing: being boring is not the same as being bored, after all, and I suspect that boringness and dependability go hand-in-hand in this world of ours. A student--of the humanities or liberal arts, at least--is expected to spend her time reading interesting things and commenting upon them all day long. She has the summers off to travel, or to work in one of many short-term jobs (each short enough to remain perpetually new and interesting), or to spend time with friends who are, one hopes, prolifically interesting when at their leisure. She can stay up late at night to talk about the meaning of life, and if she is tired in the morning, she can go to class groggy or skip class altogether.
Others get paid to lead interesting lives: the travel writer, I suspect, must work very hard to make her life uninteresting.
But the tradeoff is very real. The travel writer doesn't precisely have a home (even if she has a house), doesn't have a dependable income, doesn't have a family (or else doesn't see them very often, or else has to figure out how to move frequently with spouse and children in tow). In being predictable, one is also predictably available; I may go to work every day from 9 til whenever, and I may go to class once a week for my own perpetual sanity, and I may see the same people at each place day in and day out (and this may indeed be relatively boring)--but at least my work friends and my classmates and my bosses all know how to find me. My buddies know I'm in the city, and I will be next month, and they can plan on that. My landlord knows where my rent will come from. I know, roughly, whether or not I'll have time to go see a show on a Monday night in three weeks.
It's a boring, plodding kind of life, but it is still a good life. One needn't dislike what one boringly does.
Here, however, is an insight: professordom is an anomaly. Convincing somebody to pay you a regular, dependable salary for work that is discrete (a paper here, a new discovery there, a 9 month pedagogical period) seems to me reasonably unusual. It is made more remarkable by an expectation that one will read and investigate precisely that which is thought-provoking; indeed, this is often considered the most important part of the job. And this all seems truly fantastic when one considers that the professor does all of this in a context in which it is considered necessary to take extended periods time off (summers, sabbaticals) in order to do or discover or create explicitly interesting things. Indeed, the university professor is largely being paid to be perpetually exciting or noteworthy; if her ideas, lectures, and papers present nothing new and pique no one's interest, she has not done her job well.
There may be myriad other jobs that successfully combine stability and excitement (whether that excitement be merely intellectual or physical and bodily as well); Anderson Cooper undoubtedly has one of them, as does Derek Jeter. The insight is not therefore that professors have the best jobs in the world, but merely that such professions do exist, and are popularly attainable. Though certainly it has never before occurred to me that my fascinating history prof was as much a product of his lifestyle as a driving force behind it...
birds 'n planes 'n moral indecision
What a splendid weekend! Friday featured a high-scoring and victorious softball game. Saturday, I awoke early early and went with Bean and Ned to hike a bit of the Appalachian Trail. (Railroads, incidentally, are spectacular inventions. We took the Metro North up to the trailhead; the stop was literally a platform about 6 feet by 3 feet in size. Imagine how comical, then, this enormous commuter train looked pulling up at the stop and opening the door--one, single door--to let some 5 or 6 hikers out to make their way into the wooded, flooded wilderness.) It felt good to walk, though I was surprisingly slogged by the end of it all.
Sunday I had brunch with friends out near Columbia, and then N and I tromped off to see Superman Returns. Now I'm sitting on my balcony (with my computer, thanks to the magic which is wireless networking), enjoying a cool breeze and a laid-back New York evening before the Fourth of July holiday. Tomorrow I plan on going to a ballgame and seeing some fireworks. Hot dogs may also feature prominently.
This is the good life.
But this post was meant actually to be about Superman. N and I considered that Superman is a problematic hero. He himself is morally uncomplicated: Superman is a defender of right, good, and justice. Where Spiderman struggles internally with his powers and considers using them for revenge and personal gain, Superman remains always unequivocally good. We are meant to see his actions as invariably heroic. When Superman goes wrong, it is with the best of intentions and the purest of hearts. When he has to choose between Lois Lane and Gotham City, he always casts a wistful look in her direction and then saves the rest of the world instead. (And then, because he's Superman, he goes and saves her too.) The Superman of the movies, at least, is always a a sympathetic character. He has no internal struggles.
Superman Returns flirts with, but never fully draws out, the problems inherent in this heroic conception. There's something more than a bit distasteful about Superman as lovestruck temptation to marital infidelity, after all, and putting Lois Lane into a serious relationship is therefore an inspired move. It's not a move the film is prepared actually to make with any spine, however. What we see instead is a watered-down version that allows Superman a relatively easy way out of any moral or emotional conundrum: we are talking here only of near-marital fidelity, though the movie would have been better for an honest-to-goodness marriage that we couldn't wrong-headedly rationalize away as immoral or unimportant (relative to Superman's own great love, of course). Adding a child to the mix is similarly inspired, because it makes the right course of action so painfully clear and so painfully contrary to Superman's desires (and actions--he's never quite blatantly inappropriate, but confessing one's love to somebody in a committed relationship, with a kid, knowing she loves you back, is inadvisable and even manipulative). Making that child (so very predictably) Superman's son completely undoes the interesting twist that his presence provides, however. Instead of feeling more uncomfortable with the way that Superman is disrupting Lois's life and the life of her partner (because there's a child involved), we now feel
less uncomfortable (because it's Superman's child, and so he suddenly has a much greater right to continued involvement with this formerly happy family). The moviemakers nearly manage to bring in the tension of a competing love interest without the attendant moral quandary that the situation so obviously prompts.
But the Superman stories oughtn't so easily escape that quandary. (It's a different question whether Superman himself would be a better character if he was ever confronted by moral misgivings, or whether it's enough for the audience to sometimes recognize an irony or inconsistency in his savior-like charicature (played up particularly in this latest film) and his human-like actions and reactions.) When one is cast as the embodiment of good in a black-and-white, good-vs.-evil kind of world, surely the moral considerations follow.
Can you have a Superman who isn't always right, who isn't always good, if only because he lives in a world in which "good" isn't always clear? I'm not sure. But it seems to me a worthy lesson that sometimes questions are hard, and answers non-obvious. Given the way the movie sets this up, it's a shame they back away from it so emphatically by the time the credits roll.
