Nature: red—and compassionate—in tooth and claw

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Animals living in groups, such as the very social homo sapiens and certain other primates such as chimpanzees, must find ways to get along. We all know that this “getting along” is a relatively flawed and halting proposition. But still,there must be some basic sense of cooperation within the group for such primates to have evolved and prospered at all.

Some intriguing research on primate behavior indicates that some of the roots of compassion for others are present in those animals. The New York Times reports on the work of primatologist Frans de Waal, whose controversial assertion is that animals share with humans some rudimentary ethical behaviors that may be hardwired.

Reading the article, it’s not clear to me that the behaviors described by de Waal are actually genetic; we know that primates have traditions and ways that are passed down through example and teaching. Nor does he assert that chimps actually have ethics itself. What he does say is that “human morality would be impossible without certain emotional building blocks that are clearly at work in chimp and monkey societies.”

De Waal’s descriptions of chimp behavior are touching. He noticed years ago that, after fights, other chimps would console the loser in the battle. This behavior wasn’t present in monkeys; it seemed to be an ape thing. But the emotion that could be described as compassion is even exhibited by some monkeys, it seems:

Chimpanzees, who cannot swim, have drowned in zoo moats trying to save others. Given the chance to get food by pulling a chain that would also deliver an electric shock to a companion, rhesus monkeys will starve themselves for several days.

The latter observation made me think of the famous Milgram “obedience to authority” experiments, in which human subjects were surprisingly willing to be talked into giving what they thought were very painful electric shocks to a total stranger (turns out the stranger was actually an actor and confederate of the researcher, but the subjects didn’t know that). The Milgram experiments demonstrated that whatever natural compassion exists in people can all too often be overridden by an appeal from an authority figure who says it’s all okay.

Other primates, being nonverbal, are unlikely to be as amenable to such appeals. It is one of the triumphs of human civilization and one of its drawbacks that human beings can be reasoned into doing something against their natural instincts, both for better and for worse. A doctor cuts into a patient’s flesh in order to heal the sufferer. A soldier fires a weapon in order to defend against those who would destroy a society or cause greater harm to innocent people.

And a murderer kills for any number of reasons: power, money, rage. A terrorist believes he’s doing the work of God when he blows a bunch of women and children into a thousand pieces.

Research indicates that all primate societies have evolved the following characteristics in order to survive: empathy, the ability to learn and follow social rules, reciprocity and peacemaking. These elements are present at least within the small groups in which primates live, but in these groups all is not lightness and love. Far from it; there’s tough love as well:

Young rhesus monkeys learn quickly how to behave, and occasionally get a finger or toe bitten off as punishment.

In human society that would be considered child abuse; to rhesus monkeys it’s apparently a “spare the finger and spoil the child” philosophy.

And that is by no means the worst of it. The work of Jane Goodall, who lived among chimpanzees and studied them for decades, shows that they exhibit a surprising and extraordinary amount of violence both within and without the group.

It used to be thought that humans were the only species that warred on itself. This is untrue. Chimp violence certainly hasn’t reached the levels of human violence, but that’s apparently only through lack of technological advances. The phenomenon of inter-chimp violence is relatively newly discovered and poorly understood, but chimps seem to defend territory aggressively:

It was hard for the researchers to reconcile these episodes [of violence] with the opposite but equally accurate observations of adult males sharing friendship and generosity and fun: lolling against each other on sleepy afternoons, laughing together in childish play, romping around a tree trunk while batting at each other’s feet, offering a handful of prized meat, making up after a squabble, grooming for long hours, staying with a sick friend. The new contrary episodes of violence bespoke huge emotions normally hidden, social attitudes that could switch with extraordinary and repulsive ease. We all found ourselves surprised, fascinated, and angry as the number of cases mounted. How could they kill their former friends like that?

Human morality is not simple, and the same appears to be true of the roots of that morality in primates. But human behavior is mediated by the ability to verbalize and to reason at a far higher level than that available to any other primate. This results in (among other things) the development of tools to extend both the healing power of compassion and the lethal power of war—although in most cases, of course, the tools are not the same.

These issues about human and animal behavior and morality cut across several disciplines: philosophy, psychology, biology, sociology. And you can bet that there’s a lot of disagreement among them over how it all works:

The impartial element of morality comes from a capacity to reason, writes Peter Singer, a moral philosopher at Princeton, in “Primates and Philosophers.” He says, “Reason is like an escalator ”” once we step on it, we cannot get off until we have gone where it takes us.”

That was the view of Immanuel Kant, Dr. Singer noted, who believed morality must be based on reason, whereas the Scottish philosopher David Hume, followed by Dr. de Waal, argued that moral judgments proceed from the emotions.

But biologists like Dr. de Waal believe reason is generally brought to bear only after a moral decision has been reached. They argue that morality evolved at a time when people lived in small foraging societies and often had to make instant life-or-death decisions, with no time for conscious evaluation of moral choices.

I’m not sure what good such “which came first, the chicken or the egg” discussions do, other than provide a living for academics. But I believe it makes sense that societies must have evolved some sort of altruism, if only in the group, in order to function successfully and to continue to exist. It also makes sense that this fact does not preclude violence, both in order to defend that group and for other less functional reasons as well.

Those who think that compassion can be extended to all peoples and all circumstances, and that violence can be eradicated from the human heart and mind, are seriously deluded. And they can become dangerous if they make decisions about the world based on those assumptions.

I once heard a story about the Jewish attitude toward what we are describing here, the element of human and animal nature known in Hebrew as the yetzer ra, or the “evil impulse.” It’s the source of violence and selfish drives, and in the legend the evil impulse is held captive by the people for three days. At the outset, the yetzer ra utters a foreboding warning:

Realize that if you kill me, the world is finished.

The world is finished? Whatever could this mean? The people found out soon enough. With the evil inclination out of commission, the hens stopped laying. It was discovered that the impulse was what gave the drive to life itself: desire, striving, commerce, sex, all sorts of things that are necessary for life to have any vitality at all.

It can’t be eradicated, nor should one wish to do so. It can only be tamed and harnessed at times in a more positive direction.

Here’s another parable about the paradox of good and evil in the world of living things, this one based on the story of Genesis:

And God saw all that He had made, and found it very good”¦vehinei tov zeh yetzer hatov, vehinei tov me’od zeh yetzer hara—“good” refers to the Good Inclination but “very good” refers to the Evil Inclination. Why? Because were it not for the Yetzer ha-Ra no one would build a house, take a wife, give birth, or engage in commerce.

I can think of no better way to close than with the poet Yeats’s “Crazy Jane Talks With the Bishop, which comes at the same idea from another direction:”

I met the Bishop on the road
And much said he and I.
‘Those breasts are flat and fallen now,
Those veins must soon be dry;
Live in a heavenly mansion,
Not in some foul sty.’

‘Fair and foul are near of kin,
And fair needs foul,’ I cried.
‘My friends are gone, but that’s a truth
Nor grave nor bed denied,
Learned in bodily lowliness
And in the heart’s pride.

‘A woman can be proud and stiff
When on love intent;
But Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.’

The ivory tower: clean hands and leading by example

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I happened across the February 19th issue of Newsweek at the home of friends with whom I’m staying. Picking it up and thumbing through it (and how odd it seems to me nowadays to see a hard copy of a periodical anywhere outside of the doctor’s office) I saw a letter to the editors written in response to a review of Dinesh D’Souza’s new book The Enemy at Home.

I haven’t read D’Souza’s book, but apparently it has the singular distinction of having been panned by both left and right. So I’m not planning to discuss or defend it; what caught my eye was the text of the letter, which expresses quite well the abstractly idealistic point of view of many, if not most, of the liberals I know:

Taking a stand against torture, no matter the perpetrator; fighting for a belief in human rights and dignity for all, including women, homosexuals and others who are mistreated simply for how they were born; nurturing a hope that America will unswervingly uphold the principles of democracy and justice that it preaches to the rest of the world; tell Dinesh D’Souza I’m proud to belong to the “domestic insurgency” that holds these “decadent moral values.” Continue reading →

Crossing the country: night flight

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Yesterday I flew on Jet Blue from Boston to Los Angeles.

For me this involves not enough sleep the night before as I pack and suddenly realize in the wee hours of the morning that I can’t take half of what I’d planned to, and that even the remaining half is way too much. It also involves a lengthy drive to Boston itself, and the need to be there an hour or two ahead of time to deal with security; a stop in New York to change planes; and then the cross-country flight to a place that is about as different from New England as you can get and still speak the same language and be part of the same country.

In my youth I often used to do the cross-country drive—with companion, of course. Many, many times. So I know what it’s like to drive through the plains, to traverse the mountains and the deserts, to go the northern route and the southern route and the in-between route, back when motels cost about twenty-five dollars and many of them were one-of-a-kind rather than chains.

I even remember traveling with my family before some of the major highways were built. With great regularity, our car’s progress was slowed by the need to pass through a town. Many of them had a main street called “Main Street,” which amazed me at the time; I’d never seen that in New York.

And even those meandering journeys were stupendously quick compared to the way it was back when the western part of the nation was first settled. Covered wagons and real danger. And, before that, there were Lewis and Clark and earlier explorers. And before that….

But back to Jet Blue. They’ve got a system whereby they don’t serve those little airplane meals on board. Instead, the airport waiting areas have been turned into food courts worthy of the most upscale malls. Organic? Kosher? Soba with seaweed? Imported chocolate bar? Wasabi peas? Or chicken sandwich with apples and brie, my somewhat more pedestrian selection? You can get it all at the counters at Kennedy Airport while you wait.

My plane left Kennedy about forty five minutes late. This was cause for concern because I had a car rental waiting for me in Burbank, and the counter was due to close only a few minutes after my flight was scheduled to arrive there.

Once on the plane, time flies as the plane flies, thanks to those little TVs Jet Blue has kindly provided. I settle in with “American Idol” (the first time I’d watched it this season; it seems the women are much stronger than the men). On another channel, Jet Blue has a screen whereby you can simply watch a map of the US, showing where the plane is at the moment, as well as its speed and altitude. This graphic demonstration of the way airplane travel has collapsed the extraordinary distances involved continues to astonish me; we have barely left Kennedy and we are looking at Philadelphia, and then halfway across Pennsylvania.

It’s nighttime and dark now. We fly over cities near where friends I hardly ever get to see anymore live—Cincinnati, Wichita—and I have to repress the urge to wave to them below. We fly over places I’ve never been—Hoover Dam, for example. We fly over places I have, both from the ground and the air—the Grand Canyon. It’s invisible, nothing like the spectacular view that was spread out under me once on a clear day from another airplane in another time, a view that showed the vast extent of that wondrous cleft in the world and actually brought tears to my eyes.

But now it’s pitch black; the Grand Canyon I pass over is a Canyon of imagination and memory only. But I know it’s there.

And soon—much sooner than expected—we are in Los Angeles. And, wonder of wonders (although not a wonder on the scale of the Grand Canyon), the pilot has made up all the time in the air and the Alamo rental counter is still open. I’m given the keys to a shiny new car and I drive off in a soft night rain, onto the well-lit freeways that only moments before had sparkled below me.

Cathy Seipp’s world

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I had heard that blogger Cathy Seipp had been illl and that the prognosis was poor, so this news shouldn’t have come as a surprise.

But it did. Someone so young and full of life shouldn’t be dying, we think, even though we know it happens far too frequently.

I didn’t know Cathy Seipp personally. I had met her so briefly at the PJ launch back in November of 2005 that we barely exchanged more than a “hello.” But there was no mistaking her syle, flair, wit, and penetrating intelligence, even in those few seconds.

And no one reading her articles or her blog could fail to notice that she had one of the most distinctive voices in journalism. Hard-hitting but never bombastic, with a tone that seemed casual and yet was extraordinarily clever, she made it clear she didn’t suffer fools gladly. And almost everything she wrote was laced with graceful humor.

She made it look easy. It’s not.

Cathy Seipp’s blog was (is) called “Cathy’s World.” Like most bloggers, she wrote about whatever she felt like writing about; that’s the special joy of a blog for a professional journalist like Cathy. As she said in her normblog profile back in Novermber of 2004:

For many years as a journalist who spent a lot of time interviewing people, I imagined writing a book or column called What About ME and MY Feelings?!?. But now that I have a blog, that’s handled.

Here are a few more quotes from the profile that might give you a small taste of the special flavor of Cathy’s wit and thought:

What philosophical thesis do you think it most important to disseminate? > That just because nice people believe something doesn’t mean it’s true….

If you could effect one major policy change in the governing of your country, what would it be? > More funding and support for the military. Those ‘Support Our Troops – Bring Them Home’ protest signs from the left don’t count as support. That’s like demonstrating outside a burning building, screaming at the firemen running in that for God’s sake they should turn around and run back out.

What would be your most important piece of advice about life? > I’ve always been a big believer in the importance of kicking your own ass. That is, forcing yourself to do what you don’t necessarily feel like doing at the time.

What do you consider the most important personal quality? > A certain large-mindedness, or generosity of spirit – because this encompasses not only extending yourself for others, but other qualities like courage, and having friends who disagree with you politically, and not constantly worrying about what other people think. …

What is your most treasured possession? > My house, which I bought when the LA real estate market bottomed out 10 years ago. I wouldn’t want a different house even if I had a zillion dollars – which, come to think of it, is practically what it’s worth now.

If you had to change your first name, what would you change it to? > Now that’s a sore subject, because when I was a teenager I really hated my boring name. I would doodle idiotic alternatives like Olwyn Sayre or Chelseureka Paprika in my school notebooks, and regularly pestered my mother to tell me other names she’d considered, but the only one she ever came up with was Nancy, which obviously is just as plain. How could she have been so unimaginative?! So then I’d ask about my younger sister, who got the slightly more exotic name of Michele. Didn’t she at least consider another name when she was pregnant that time? ‘Well, I always liked Nancy…’ Hopeless. I still don’t think Cathy is a particularly fine name, but by now I’m used to it.

There’s an ancient Talmudic saying that when anyone saves a single life it is as though he saves a world. The reverse seems true as well: that whenever anyone departs from this life, it is as though we lose a world.

And now, sadly and way too soon, we are about to lose the funny, wise, idiosyncratic, never-to-be-duplicated world of Cathy Seipp.

Please send your hopes and prayers to Cathy Seipp and her family and friends.

Escaping the mud

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Right now even though it’s almost April, and technically the last day of winter, there are huge mounds of snow here, as well as the occasional sidewalk of ice. Soon that will be followed by what’s known as mud season. It looks exactly like it sounds; brown and mushy, no green leaves or new grass in sight.

But today’s a travel day. I’m on a trip to warmer climes to see family and friends: Los Angeles, for starters. I’ve got my laptop and my headset, and my plan is that the blog posts and podcasts continue relatively uninterrupted.

Those were the days, my friend: Vietnam and Iraq protests, protesters, and nostalgia

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A succinct headline in the Washington Times summed it up nicely: “Anti-war protesters echo Vietnam.” The accent is on the word “echo”—as in “a distant, fainter, repetition.”

The anti-Iraq War demonstrations in DC over this weekend were self-consciously and purposefully designed to mimic the protests of yesteryear. But like all retro fashions, they didn’t quite resemble the originals.

Approximately forty years ago, on October 21, 1967, before Tet and before Nixon, the first mammoth Vietnam antiwar demonstration was held. Participation was estimated at 100,000 plus, and clashes with police resulted in 600 arrested.

I wasn’t at that one—and I wasn’t at Woodstock either, although most people my age claim they were. But I was there for the next big one, on the cold clear day of November 15, 1969, along with what are estimated to have been between 250,000 and 500,000 of my peers.

It was a group event all the way; I drove down from Boston with a carful of housemates and their boyfriends, including mine. I recall the sky in DC that day as being a deep and startlingly clear blue–almost as blue as the bluest sky I’ve ever seen, on a certain sad day in September almost thirty-two years later.

Back in DC in 1969, the crowd was very calm:

…the government had figured out how to handle the huge crowds, monitoring the demonstration with 3,000 police officers, 9,000 Army troops (who were kept out of sight in reserve), 200 lawyers and 75 clergymen. The New Mobe [the group organizing the event] had recruited thousands of its own armband-wearing “parade marshals” to help keep order.

By November of 1969 major US involvement in the Vietnam War had gone on for about five years and caused approximately 22,000 US deaths. The draft was still very much in operation, and it’s no coincidence that the demonstrators were mostly of college age; the immediacy of the draft fueled the size of the protests.

What did we expect as a result of our efforts? Demonstrations always have an element of self-indulgent theater, it’s true. But I believe many of us did think we’d actually make a difference. Our own template may have been the Martin Luther King Civil Rights march of 1963, which predated the passage of the historic Civil Rights legislation of the mid-60s, even though there was no simple one-on-one cause and effect involved.

I’ve already written at length about the 60s, Vietnam, and my own small participation in the antiwar effort, in the multi-part Section 4 (it starts here) of my “A mind is a difficult thing to change” series. So I’m not going to go into depth about that right now. Suffice to say I’ve rethought the entire era and come to different conclusions.

Some, of course, have not. And some have, but have moved in a different direction. An example is good old Ramsey Clark, who was at this weekend’s festivities, fresh from his failed attempt to save Saddam Hussein from the noose. It’s been almost forty years since that 1967 march, an event Clark feels was the turning point in rallying sentiment against the Vietnam War. Clark, of course, was on the other side of the barricades back then (literally) as Lyndon Johnson’s Attorney General, engaged in some of the administration’s preparations to deal with the march.

But it just ain’t like it used to be. You can’t go home again, according to Clark. “I can’t tell you that we have the depth of passion or breadth of commitment today that we had then,” he said (although the “we” back then to whom Clark refers remains a bit obscure, given his position at the time).

The numbers this past weekend? Estimated at between 10,000 and 20,000, with counterprotesters—many of them, interestingly enough, Vietnam vets—numbering “in the thousands,” as well. The Vietnam vets were on both sides of this demonstration, of course, as would be expected.

Differences are vast between these two wars. There is no draft now, for one thing. For another, the number of US casualties in this war is significantly less. I can’t speak for everyone, of course, but to us back in 1967-1969 a US win in Vietnam seemed (rightly or wrongly) to be of more marginal importance, the consequences of withdrawal less grave. And remember, we did not have the example of what happened in 1975 and afterwards in South Vietnam before our eyes; it hadn’t happened yet (see this and this for my more recent thoughts on the end of the Vietnam War and its aftermath).

This is not true of today’s protesters, who should at least be aware of that history, however they may interpret it. Some of them, such as 36-year-old Maggie Johnson, show an astounding inability to understand differences in scale when making historical comparisons. This quote from her referring to World War II is a good example:

We’ve been in Iraq longer than we were in World War II and we’ve accomplished a heck of a lot less. It’s time we wrap it up.

Does this woman understand how many men fought in World War II? How many died to achieve what was accomplished then? Would she for a single moment have stood for such numbers?

Here are the figures: the estimates are that between thirteen and sixteen million Americans fought in that war. About 311,000 were killed. Many millions more died all over the world; here are some figures to ponder. The numbers are staggering, and these are just the military deaths, although during WWII civilians in Europe and Asia suffered and died almost as readily.

Ms. Johnson is making some other errors of comparison. Because the length of World War II to which she refers was the length of the “hot” war, the one that in Iraq lasted a matter of mere weeks. World War II was followed by lengthy occupations and rebuildings of both Germany and Japan before it was over and its “accomplishments” solidified.

Apparently, people were more patient then. Here’s a quote on the subject from General Abizaid, due to retire soon as Centcom commander:

How do you win a “long war” against Islamic extremism if your country has a short attention span? That’s an overarching concern for Abizaid in a conflict where time — not troops, not tactics — is the true strategic resource. “The biggest problem we’ve got is lack of patience,” he says. “When we take upon ourselves the task of rebuilding shattered societies, we need not to be in a hurry. We need to be patient, but our patience is limited. That makes it difficult to accomplish our purposes.”

The protesters are nostalgic for the heady days of the 60s, when hundreds of thousands could be mobilized for the street theater of the time. They may forget that, when the draft ended, so did most of the protests. Or perhaps they don’t; maybe that’s what’s behind the call by some of them to resume the draft.

Ah, nostalgia; ain’t it wonderful? They’re nostalgic for the good old days of the mega-demonstrations. I’m nostalgic for the days when the American public had more patience for the fight against an evil that they seemed to see more clearly, and the endurance for the long hard slog of rebuilding a broken country afterwards.

You heard it here first: decline in divorce rate predicted

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Confession: now that I’m the proud owner of an ipod, I’ve been buying headsets like Imelda Marcos bought shoes. It’s a futile search for listening perfection of the noise-cancelling variety.

But I’m different from Imelda; I return all the pairs I don’t use.

And so I happened to find myself in Radio Shack the other day returning a headset. As I was leaving, a display of GPS navigators caught my eye. They were pricey although pretty tempting, so I’m happy to say I resisted.

It occurs to me that, once GPS systems become a commonplace technology in every car, you can expect the divorce rate to plummet. It will be the merciful end of those fascinating arguments about whether to stop for directions, or whose turn it might be to ask for them.

Remember, you heard it here first.

Blog Week in Review

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This week was a two-podcaster for me. I was kindly invited by writer, Colonel, and all-around Renaissance man Austin Bay to be on the Blog Week in Review along with the insightful and articulate Jeff Goldstein of Protein Wisdom (yes, Jeff, you’re a Renaissance man, too, and yes, Austin, you are insightful and articulate!).

We talked about identitarianism, otherwise known as identity politics, as well as how the truth in the Wilson/Plame/Libby case looks quite different to people on opposite sides of the political spectrum. Twas ever thus.

Twanging, from Homer to Cohen and back: music and poetry

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I’m still on a bit of a Leonard Cohen kick, as well as a YouTube fling.

Stay with me here, though; this isn’t just about Cohen.

As Gerard Vanderleun has noted, Cohen has an even darker side than the one I pointed out—which was already dark enough, to be sure, but with its redemptive qualities.

Follow the above link to a video of Cohen performing his very disturbing song “The Future.” While pondering its bleak vision of violence and anarchy, consider the fact that it was written around 1992 (although probably started years before; Cohen is on record as saying in interviews that it usually takes him years, if not decades, to write each song).

Cohen doesn’t turn to political matters often, but when he does, he has been known to demonstrate a certain prescience. Could it be that poets can sometimes sense things before others can? At least, certain poets. Then again, it may just be blowin’ in the wind.

In this interview on the subject of the song “The Future” back in 1992, Cohen says:

That’s a terrible song…It’s a grim vision, I think I left my anti-depressant pills at home.

Indeed. Here are just a few of the lyrics:

There’ll be the breaking of the ancient
western code
Your private life will suddenly explode
There’ll be phantoms
There’ll be fires on the road
and the white man dancing
You’ll see a woman
hanging upside down
her features covered by her fallen gown…

Cohen has said (scroll down to the last article) that the impetus for this song was the fall of the Berlin Wall, “which all my friends rejoiced about. I was the only dour person at the party, saying, ‘This isn’t that good news. This is going to produce a great deal of suffering. You’re going to settle for the Berlin wall when you see what’s coming next.'”

Well, it might be some type of foresight into the twenty-first century. Then again, it just might be Cohen seeing the always-half-empty glass; he is a pretty gloomy guy. But there’s an even more strangely disturbing foreshadowing song Cohen wrote, entitled “First We Take Manhattan.”

Here are some lyrics from that little ditty, published in 1988 on the album “I’m Your Man” [emphasis mine]:

I’m guided by a signal in the heavens
I’m guided by this birthmark on my skin
I’m guided by the beauty of our weapons
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin…

Ah you loved me as a loser, but now you’re worried that I just might win
You know the way to stop me, but you don’t have the discipline
How many nights I prayed for this, to let my work begin
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin…

(If you want to watch Cohen performing it, go here.)

Another fact about Cohen I learned from that interview is that—at least in 1992—he thought Hillary Clinton to be “immensely attractive.” Make of that what you will; after all, Cohen is a self-described “Ladies’ Man” (and please note the plural possessive).

But why am I going into all of this? Aside from the fact that Cohen’s songs, listened to with regularity, create some rather spectacularly tenacious earworms in the listener (although, to be sure, they are mercifully tuneful ones, unlike the notorious “It’s a Small World After All”)?

A while back I wrote about how poetry insinuates itself into our brains—or at least it used to, back when it rhymed. And about how modern poetry, with its general lack of rhyme or meter, has no such qualities. It’s difficult to memorize and eminently forgettable, even if enjoyed at first reading; it doesn’t create the poetic equivalent of earworms.

Relatively few poets today write what’s called formal poetry; that is, with rhyme and meter, or even simply with meter. True, there has been a small revival of forms, called—appropriately enough–the “new formalism,” somewhat analogous to a recent revival of representative art. Neo-neocon that I am, I’ve always been attracted to forms in poetry—and, in recent years, even before my political conversion, have written in forms. In some ways, my attraction to forms in writing (sonnets, for example, or villanelles, or terza rima), and in dancing (ballet), may have foreshadowed my later political changes—a closet conservative all the time, no doubt, despite my artsy-fartsy ways.

All of this is a lengthy means of coming around to saying that Cohen, as a poet, may have been drawn to songwriting partly because it afforded him the opportunity to use those archaic things known as rhyme and meter without running the risk of being called old-fashioned. No doubt there were plenty of other reasons—from his interviews, I’d say the man is pretty driven—but my guess is that this was one of them.

In my thread about rhyme and remembering poetry, many of the commenters wrote that in some ways songwriting has filled in the slack taken by the departure of forms in poetry. It’s true that there’s always been quite a bit of overlap, at least historically; “minstrels.” for example.

Homer, one of the earliest poets of whom we’re aware, is known to have used a lyre when he recited. But, apparently, he didn’t actually sing of Troy; he accompanied himself on the lyre in a sort of hybrid:

Homer not only recited his poems but used a κίθαρις, a sort of stringed instrument similar to a lyre. Homer did not sing his poems however, but he used the κίθαρις to mark rhythm, to play a musical interlude while he was thinking of something (let us not forget there was a certain amount of improvisation involved) and to indicate tone, pitch, and even mood (playing in a major chord to begin a thought, heightening it to a minor as the action or suspense rises, and resolving into major after some climax.) This musical accompaniment was indispensable to Homer and his contemporaries.

And then there was David, author of the psalms, and inspiration for many of the lyrics in Cohen’s much-beloved work, “Hallelujah” (“I’ve heard there was a secret chord/That David played, and it pleased the Lord”). The very word “psalm” means “songs sung to a harp.” Their longevity and memorizability, even in translation, are legendary. My understanding is that although they do not rhyme in the original, but rely on a sort of echoing quality of repetition of similar thoughts expressed in different words, their musicality is profound.

Poetry occupies some hybrid ground between words and music, but is neither. As I quoted Frost not long ago:

I have a tune [when writing poetry], but it’s a tune of the blend of [meter and rhythm]. Something rises–it’s neither one of those things. It’s neither the meter nor the rhythm,; it’s a tune arising from the stress on those–same as your fingers on the strings, you know. The twang!

Both poetry and song speak to arenas of the soul that prose can rarely reach. Poetry and song are linked to each other, and both are linked to the deepest wellsprings of human feeling. Both can descend into doggerel, but both can reach that height known as art—and, when they do, they can last for millenia.

Dangerous Nation: another look at the Spanish American War (Part II)

The New Neo Posted on by

[See Part I.]

After Proctor’s turnaround speech, more and more former naysayers came on board in support of war with Spain for the liberation of Cuba. But still, McKinley tried his best at negotiations to avoid it, machinations that ultimately failed.

Finally, when McKinley felt war to be inevitable, his stated reasons for the conflict (and, Kagan believes, his deeper reasons, as well) were mostly—although not totally—humanitarian. The proximity of Cuba to our shores was part of the motivation, as was the fact that the US was flexing newly acquired muscles; it liberated Cuba in part because it could. But the liberation nevertheless had deeply idealistic motivations.

Europe, however, wasn’t having any of it. Many monarchs there quite naturally sympathized with Spain and were against US intervention. Queen Victoria’s reaction summed up this attitude about the perceived threat to European interests, “They might just as soon declare Ireland independent!”

But it wasn’t just the royals who were against the US drive for war. Europeans had long had a love-hate relationship with America, with the accent often on the hate. The asserted the superiority and refinement of the Old World over the crass New, and world-weary European cynicism trumped American claims of altruistic motives:

European commentators of all ideological stripes took the occasion of the war to revive long-standing images of American “materialism, greed, vulgarity, selfishness, hypocrisy, and barbarism.”…[E]ven outside Spain few accepted American claims that the war was for the liberation of Cuba or to relieve Cuban suffering. This was seen as more rank hypocrisy…Across Europe there was an “astonishing scarcity” of any discussion of Cuban suffering or aspirations.

But there was more. Even many of those who had previously seen America as a beacon of light, advocating and defending its republican principles, were disillusioned. It’s not all that clear why, but one of the reasons was that the US move was seen by many as a threat to the international legal order in which they’d been placing much hope.

Many US commentators were no less upset than the Europeans, and no less doubtful that the US could not possibly be truly going to war for mainly humanitarian motives. They sought to explain the war drive as a sort of mass psychosis; quotes such as “hysteria” and “emotional outburst” were not uncommon. Kagan writes:

Other historians have solved the problem differently, insisting that American expressions of moral outrage and humanitarian concern were just a cover for selfish economic reasons…Still others have argued that the American goal was, above all, to prevent Cuban independence and thereby gain control of the island; that this was a war, “deliberated and by design, for the purpose of territorial expansion.” This, even though McKinley made it clear he did not want to annex Cuba and even though the United States did not, if fact, annex it.

I doubt I need to point out how familiar this all sounds.

Kagan places the Spanish American War squarely in a prior tradition of a humanitarian and idealistic United States, one not entirely reluctant to intervene when necessary in the affairs of others. Some, of course, consider this a tradition that needs to be ended. But those who look at US activities in fighting WWI, WWII, and the Cold War, even though the conflicts were not on our own shores, find that our interventionist and freedom-defending proclivities might not be such a bad thing, after all. Certainly they are not above asking for our help when needed, even in haughty Europe.

There’s no doubt, of course, that the US—like every other nation on earth that ever has been and ever will be—has had its own selfish interests at heart, as well, in all these activities. Countries are not saints, nor could they ever be.

But the US, a country founded on an idealistic set of ideas, is an unusual combination of altruism and self-interest. This is a brew that has indeed led to our entry in wars in the past, and certainly the Iraq War is an example of such a war in the present.

Kagan mentions that, in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War:

The United States succeeded in putting an end to the civil war in Cuba and to the suffering of the reconcentrados. The intervention saved many lives, probably tens of thousands. But it left the United States saddled with the occupation of Cuba for the next four years, an occupation that ultimately produced mixed results that fell far short of most Americans hopes and expectations when they had entered the war, as well as most Cubans’ hopes and expectations.

It also led to some other unforeseen consequences, including the war in the Philippines, a much more morally ambiguous and problematic endeavor.

Kagan points out that the Spanish American War [my emphasis], “like all wars, solved one set of problems but unleashed another set.” It seems that in recent years this simple truth has been forgotten by many, war supporters and antiwar activists among them. War is the answer to certain questions, but it doesn’t come easy, and it sets up a host of other questions that may have other answers—including more wars.

But then again, so does the decision not to go to war.

Dangerous Nation: another look at the Spanish-American War (Part I)

The New Neo Posted on by

Remember the Spanish-American War? You probably learned about it in your history classes–which was a long time ago, perhaps.

If you were anything like me, you only remember a few key phrases: “yellow journalism.” “Remember the Maine.” The American people whipped up into a frenzy of warmongering by the hungry press. Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders, looking like overgrown boy scouts. The US as an imperial power.

Robert Kagan’s Dangerous Nation has the unwieldy subtitle “America’s place in the world from its earliest days to the dawn of the twentieth century.” The book advances Kagan’s thesis that the US was never all that isolationist to begin with—and that, from the founding of our nation, the US had demonstrated a strain of self-interested economic and geographic expansionism combined with an idealistic universalism about liberty and its spread.

This is only the first volume of a projected two-volume work. It ends with the buildup to the Spanish-American War. The next volume will pick up where the book left off, with the conduct of that war and its aftermath.

Kagan goes back to original sources to maintain that the impetus towards the Spanish-American War was not the lies told by a jingoistic and overreaching press eager for the conflict. In fact, by the time the war began, bipartisan support was strong, even among many of those who had originally opposed it. And the newspapers hadn’t gotten it very wrong.

Kagan points out [emphasis mine]:

It was true that the press did print some fabrications–sometimes fed to reporters by the Cuban junta–just as it did in every other conflict in American history. But the main thrust of what the press reported about events in Cuba was accurate. Even Hearst could not exaggerate the horrors of the [re]concentration camps, or tell a story more “sensational” than three hundred thousand Cubans dying of starvation and disease….The pressure [for war]…was the product of Cuban reality and American outrage over actual human suffering.

You’ll have to go to Kagan’s book to read the details of the political and diplomatic maneuverings engaged in with Spain by the McKinley administration in its efforts to avoid the war. Suffice to say there were many.

A turning point, after the explosion of the Maine, was a visit to Cuba and a subsequent speech by Senator Redfield Proctor of Maine.

Proctor had heretofore been against going to war over Cuba. He had traveled there to see the situation for himself and to evaluate it, with a “strong conviction that the picture had been overdrawn” in terms of the suffering of the Cuban people.

What he saw there profoundly shocked him. What the press had said about what were euphemistically known as “reconcentration camps”—places of widespread death and suffering in which huge numbers of Cubans who had wanted to be free from Spanish rule were housed—was quite true. Addressing the Senate, Proctor reversed his previous antiwar stance, stating that the reason for this war was neither the Maine nor revenge, it was “the spectacle of a million and a half of people, the entire native population of Cuba, struggling for freedom and deliverance from the worst misgovernment of which I ever had knowledge.”

In other words, liberation from oppression.

[Part II, dealing with the continuation of the buildup to the Spanish-American war, and how it was seen by Europe and subsequent US historians—as well as how it might be compared to the war in Iraq—will appear tomorrow.]