Dope
The Pilate problem
James Fitzjames Stephen was a Victorian bravo of the purest water. When Gertrude Himmelfarb gets all fluttery about Victorian masculinity, she is undoubtedly envisioning a man of Stephen's type. In his entry in the 1911 Encyclopedia Brittanica, he is described as �massive, downright, indefatigable and sincere even to unnecessary frankness.� In other words, a sort of Mr. Rochester sprung from Jane Eyre�s tale.
Stephen was a member of the Apostles, the Cambridge group, in the 1840s � well before it became the conglomeration of aestheticism and the higher buggery under Keynes and Strachey � where he met Henry Maine, the legal historian; Stephen, having no taste for curateships, went into law himself; in his practical life, he eventually devoted himself to grafting principles of English common law into the workings of the British Raj in India.
The Mills, of course, father and son, were the redeeming intellectual ornaments of the East Indian Company, and Stephen must have been highly aware of them in his work. It is said � at least, in the 1911 Encyclopedia Brittanica it is said � that on the boat back from India, Stephen, reading John Stuart Mill�s On Liberty, devised his rebuttal, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity
The book rather sank. Lately, however, it has become the subject of a little Tory cult.
Among the little band of Fitzjames Stephen's acolytes, none is fiercer than Roger Kimball of the New Criterion. Kimball, who has done his warrior bit in the Kulturkampf of the early nineties, rousting out tenured radicals and exposing them for the dubious souls that they are, has featured Stephen as a sort of Archangel Michael, putting the sword in the breast of that loathsome liberal toady of Satan, John Stuart Mill. Kimball�s loathing of Mill has breathed even in the pages of the Opinion section of the Wall Street Journal, where all conservative hobby-horses eventually find a home. But there's a problem. Mill is widely revered in Libertarian circles. Kimball represents one crucial side of the untidy conservative front. He is plainly unhappy with his libertarian allies.
In an essay in November, 1998, that served as the centerpiece for a later, book-length attack on�liberalism,� Kimball poured out the vials of his wrath on Mill, � and as is the way of New Criterion loathings and the mood of the time, he attacks him as a sexual being as well as a thinker. Kimball, like Ken Starr, is a great one for keeping up with the bedroom habits of his enemies. In Mill�s case, the great sin was one of omission, rather than commission. Kimball writes, of Mill's relationship to his wife Harriet, �it is noteworthy that this "lofty minded" relationship was apparently never consummated.� There are, it appears, no sexual depravities to which the liberal mind won�t sink � including chastity.
In this essay, Kimball referred to Stephen�s book, Liberty, Fraternity, Equality. The book has already been rescued by Richard Posner, and has found its way into the reading list of the Federalist Society. Here�s Kimball�s assessment of it:
�By far the most concentrated and damaging single attack on Mill's liberalism is Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, first published serially in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1872-1873, and then in book form in March 1873 in the last year of Mill's life. It was written by the lawyer, judge, and journalist Sir James Fitzjames Stephen (1829-1894): Leslie Stephen's older brother and hence--such is the irony of history--Virginia Woolf's uncle. Mill himself never responded to Stephen's book beyond observing, as Leslie Stephen reports in his excellent biography of his brother, that he thought the book "more likely to repel than attract." But several of Mill's disciples responded--the most famous of whom was the liberal politician and journalist John Morley (1838-1923). Stephen brought out a second edition of his book the following year, 1874, in which he reproduces and replies to many criticisms raised by Morley and others. Stephen described Liberty, Equality, Fraternity as "mainly controversial and negative." Pugnacious and devastating would be equally appropriate adjectives. As one commentator put it, Stephen made "mincemeat" of Mill.�
One notes that there is nothing worthy, sexually, of noting about Stephen. Thank God.
The Federalist Society of Wisconsin has, very kindly, made available half of Stephen�s famous polemic on-line.We�ve entertained ourselves, in these doggy days of flu and cloud, by reading the great man. It turns out that Kimball is right � at least, he is right to accord Stephen a great deal of recognition. The confused elements of American conservativism, circa 1998 � the longing for an established religion, the opposition to dissent, and the confused sense that the marketplace is no model for ideas � already form Stephen�s politics. In fact, this is no surprise � Mill might have been an eminent Victorian, but Victorian society, in its imperial flush, was much better represented by Stephen than by Mill. Stephen articulates a type that dominated the latter half of the nineteenth century in Britain. Shaw, in Heartbreak House (his best play � the only play of Shaw�s that LI re-reads, as we re-read Shakespeare�s plays), was talking of the Mill/Stephen split when he describes the difference between Heartbreak House and Horseback Hall. Heartbreak�s liberalism, of course, was falling down around Shaw�s ears as he wrote � World War I was an unmistakable counter-blast to the genteel Victorian and Edwardian virtues, and seemed, at the time, to put an end to the matter. Shaw�s description of Heartbreak culture in the preface seems, to LI�s mind, alarmingly like contemporary academia, with the substitution of other references for Wells, of course -- try Foucault, or whoever:
�With their heads as full of the Anticipations of Mr H. G.
Wells as the heads of our actual rulers were empty even of the
anticipations of Erasmus or Sir Thomas More, they refused the
drudgery of politics, and would have made a very poor job of it
if they had changed their minds. Not that they would have been
allowed to meddle anyhow, as only through the accident of being a
hereditary peer can anyone in these days of Votes for Everybody
get into parliament if handicapped by a serious modern cultural
equipment; but if they had, their habit of living in a vacuum
would have left them helpless end ineffective in public affairs.
Even in private life they were often helpless wasters of their
inheritance, like the people in Tchekov's Cherry Orchard. Even
those who lived within their incomes were really kept going by
their solicitors and agents, being unable to manage an estate or
run a business without continual prompting from those who have to
learn how to do such things or starve.�
Horseback Hall has, of course, few voices, because its texts are woven of such common-places of the governing classes as have, usually, no need for the exposure of literature, being content with the half-grunted affirmations of one's fellow club-men over a nice glass of port. However, Shaw creates a sort of ambassador from Horseback Hall in the play, Lady Utterword, whose husband, Hastings, has been a colonial governor over various tracts of the empire. At one point in the play, the house discovers a burglar, and there is a debate about sending for the police. If they do, of course, their names will be in the paper, which is the kind of publicity to which both Heartbreak House and Horseback Hall are constitutionally averse. Lady Utterword alludes briefly to her husband�s ways of dealing with crime:
�Think of what it is for us to be dragged through
the horrors of a criminal court, and have all our family affairs
in the papers! If you were a native, and Hastings could order you
a good beating and send you away, I shouldn't mind; but here in
England there is no real protection for any respectable person.�
Hastings Utterword, who never appears, in propria persona, on the stage, is embodied once and for all in that outburst. His type was invented by such as James Fitzjames Stephen.
Ah� we�ve reached the limit of the post-able, for one day. And we haven�t even gotten to Pilate! But never fear � tomorrow we will try to make a stab at Fitzjames Stephen�s Gedankenexperiment with the honorable Pontus Pilate, and connect it to the current baying for war against Iraq.
Saturday, December 14, 2002
Friday, December 13, 2002
Dope
LI has been battling the flu this week. Hence, the noticeable lack of activity in this space. Some of you probably concluded it was the curse of Coleridge -- wrestling with that writer's anfractuosities has done in many a better man than LI. But no -- we were on top of the Coleridge problem until we felt that tickle in the throat, and that slight, heady rise in the body temperature, portents and symbols of the pathogen in the blood.
We're going to try to put up some feeble thing or other in this space today, however. Coleridge, who deserves all our health, will have to be swept into that veritable out-box of promises, all the projects LI has mentioned and failed to carry out.
LI has been battling the flu this week. Hence, the noticeable lack of activity in this space. Some of you probably concluded it was the curse of Coleridge -- wrestling with that writer's anfractuosities has done in many a better man than LI. But no -- we were on top of the Coleridge problem until we felt that tickle in the throat, and that slight, heady rise in the body temperature, portents and symbols of the pathogen in the blood.
We're going to try to put up some feeble thing or other in this space today, however. Coleridge, who deserves all our health, will have to be swept into that veritable out-box of promises, all the projects LI has mentioned and failed to carry out.
Monday, December 9, 2002
Remora
Bush insatiable appetite for CEOs was apparently not sated by Paul O'Neill's unspotted record of ineptitude. There were times we rather liked O'Neill -- for instance, his idea that financial gamblers who invest in high risk emerging markets should (gasp!) take their risks. But on the whole, the man was as out of the loop as any Treasury secretary since the late Andrew Mellon. So now we have John Snow, chairman of CSX, whose arrival has been greeted by the cautious hossanahs of various Democrat honchos. This is, of course, a bad sign -- to be followed by the rote label, moderate Republican, and such business. Here is Forbes, trumpeting the integrity of the man:
"Snow has been serving as co-chairman of a Conference Board blue-ribbon commission on corporate governance. In its first report last September, the panel called for widespread reforms in the way executive compensation is determined.
In a news release accompanying the report's issuance, Snow deplored the series of corporate scandals involving companies like Enron that weighed on the U.S. stock market this year.
"These egregious failures evidence a clear breach of the basic contract that underlies corporate capitalism," Snow said in September."
There you go -- in the fashion of moderate Republicans everywhere, a scandal that stinks up the culture for almost a year finally gets struck down with the true, denunciatory thunder of a man whose own compensation package will guarantee him steaks and lobsters, with a diamond garnish, for the rest of his born days, if he so choses.
LI reviewed a book by William Leach years ago. The book rather convinced us that the new world ushered in by the de-regulation of the railroad system deserved much of the credit that went to the Internet in the nineties. The internet merely ushed in a new way to order things -- the de-regulation of the railroad industry, allowing the merger of trucking and rail companies, was a significant factor in the great decline in transfer costs. That journalists, who are much more likely to hang around a computer terminal than a railroad depot, pumped the Internet as the miraculous offspring of Gutenberg and Jesus Christ shouldn't surprise anybody. After all, when Time was portentiously summing up the century in 2000, it somehow overlooked almost everything that had happened in agriculture during the last one hundred years -- for instance, the invention of artificial fertilizer, which has had much more effect on our lives than, say, the rocket or the modem.
So what is Snow's background? This report on the Rail industry,
Railroads at a Crossroads: Time for a New Business Model?
by Steven Ryder and Jay Frazier
is a nice place to start. If, indeed, deflation is the phantom menace around the corner, Snow must have caught the fatal intimations at CSX.
One of the puzzles of economics is the continuing belief in the myth that "corporate capitalism", to use Snow's term, is the best way to efficiently distribute investment. If one looks at the amount invested in fiber optic wire in the nineties, compared with the amount invested in reworking railroad track in order to make a faster system, it is easy to see that corporate capitalism is not driven to invest in those things which will ensure long term profit, but in those things that promise some kind of short term pay-off. It is all a matter of being convinced that there is, indeed, a short term pay-off -- which is the task of those drudges in the Biz journalism racket who mindlessly report the forecasts of the bought and sold in pages meant for the guileless. Rationally, the investment should have been in creating the kind of transportation network that would reinforce just in time manufacturing. The key stat from Ryder and Frazier is this:
"...railroads remain as a low-cost service provider. The operating cost of a railroad easily undercuts its competition in bulk freight surface transport. Shippers who choose to route freight by truck rather than by train typically pay a 25% premium in price. The dramatic rise in oil and energy prices will further magnify this cost advantage for rail. "
That premium, remember, exists in spite of the considerable support given by the State in the form of a highway system that is built and maintained with tax money. As a transportation mode, railroads, with their much greater carrying capacity and their potential, given the tracks and the equipment, to achieve greater speeds than road based vehicles, should have been the recipient of heavy investment. However, it is impossible for the American mind to get itself around the idea that railroads aren't something obsolete, out of a cowboy movie.
CSX, after taking over Conrail, spawned a protest site -- CSX sux. Why it sux isn't exactly clear on the site -- there is a gabfest of disgruntled employees, and there is some news about nuclear materials run by the company. Frankly, the site looks inward, to who did what in the Montgomery station at 2 p.m. on February 15th. However, the nuclear materials story definitely deserves some press play -- although we doubt anybody is really going to look into it in the big newspapers. Lately, the news has been Bush's party.
Bush insatiable appetite for CEOs was apparently not sated by Paul O'Neill's unspotted record of ineptitude. There were times we rather liked O'Neill -- for instance, his idea that financial gamblers who invest in high risk emerging markets should (gasp!) take their risks. But on the whole, the man was as out of the loop as any Treasury secretary since the late Andrew Mellon. So now we have John Snow, chairman of CSX, whose arrival has been greeted by the cautious hossanahs of various Democrat honchos. This is, of course, a bad sign -- to be followed by the rote label, moderate Republican, and such business. Here is Forbes, trumpeting the integrity of the man:
"Snow has been serving as co-chairman of a Conference Board blue-ribbon commission on corporate governance. In its first report last September, the panel called for widespread reforms in the way executive compensation is determined.
In a news release accompanying the report's issuance, Snow deplored the series of corporate scandals involving companies like Enron that weighed on the U.S. stock market this year.
"These egregious failures evidence a clear breach of the basic contract that underlies corporate capitalism," Snow said in September."
There you go -- in the fashion of moderate Republicans everywhere, a scandal that stinks up the culture for almost a year finally gets struck down with the true, denunciatory thunder of a man whose own compensation package will guarantee him steaks and lobsters, with a diamond garnish, for the rest of his born days, if he so choses.
LI reviewed a book by William Leach years ago. The book rather convinced us that the new world ushered in by the de-regulation of the railroad system deserved much of the credit that went to the Internet in the nineties. The internet merely ushed in a new way to order things -- the de-regulation of the railroad industry, allowing the merger of trucking and rail companies, was a significant factor in the great decline in transfer costs. That journalists, who are much more likely to hang around a computer terminal than a railroad depot, pumped the Internet as the miraculous offspring of Gutenberg and Jesus Christ shouldn't surprise anybody. After all, when Time was portentiously summing up the century in 2000, it somehow overlooked almost everything that had happened in agriculture during the last one hundred years -- for instance, the invention of artificial fertilizer, which has had much more effect on our lives than, say, the rocket or the modem.
So what is Snow's background? This report on the Rail industry,
Railroads at a Crossroads: Time for a New Business Model?
by Steven Ryder and Jay Frazier
is a nice place to start. If, indeed, deflation is the phantom menace around the corner, Snow must have caught the fatal intimations at CSX.
One of the puzzles of economics is the continuing belief in the myth that "corporate capitalism", to use Snow's term, is the best way to efficiently distribute investment. If one looks at the amount invested in fiber optic wire in the nineties, compared with the amount invested in reworking railroad track in order to make a faster system, it is easy to see that corporate capitalism is not driven to invest in those things which will ensure long term profit, but in those things that promise some kind of short term pay-off. It is all a matter of being convinced that there is, indeed, a short term pay-off -- which is the task of those drudges in the Biz journalism racket who mindlessly report the forecasts of the bought and sold in pages meant for the guileless. Rationally, the investment should have been in creating the kind of transportation network that would reinforce just in time manufacturing. The key stat from Ryder and Frazier is this:
"...railroads remain as a low-cost service provider. The operating cost of a railroad easily undercuts its competition in bulk freight surface transport. Shippers who choose to route freight by truck rather than by train typically pay a 25% premium in price. The dramatic rise in oil and energy prices will further magnify this cost advantage for rail. "
That premium, remember, exists in spite of the considerable support given by the State in the form of a highway system that is built and maintained with tax money. As a transportation mode, railroads, with their much greater carrying capacity and their potential, given the tracks and the equipment, to achieve greater speeds than road based vehicles, should have been the recipient of heavy investment. However, it is impossible for the American mind to get itself around the idea that railroads aren't something obsolete, out of a cowboy movie.
CSX, after taking over Conrail, spawned a protest site -- CSX sux. Why it sux isn't exactly clear on the site -- there is a gabfest of disgruntled employees, and there is some news about nuclear materials run by the company. Frankly, the site looks inward, to who did what in the Montgomery station at 2 p.m. on February 15th. However, the nuclear materials story definitely deserves some press play -- although we doubt anybody is really going to look into it in the big newspapers. Lately, the news has been Bush's party.
Sunday, December 8, 2002
Remora
The Patriot game
Lately there has been a lot of, to LI�s mind, rather unseemly genuflecting to the American flag on the part of a group in the left press that apparently entertains the fear that honorable goals, such as economic justice and anti-belligerence, are being undermined by a googley eyed gang of flag burners. We have little patient with the thesis that America is the Great Satan; on the other hand, when lefists get chummy with the tropes of jingoism, we look for the exits.
Dissent recently published an essay by Michael Kazin, an editor, entitled �A Patriotic Left.� This is an excellent example of the neo-Popular Front in the age of Bush. Kazin has a good time sporting in progressive cant. You know the variety: You call for some moderate objective in the most bloodcurdling ultra rhetoric. After the writer is finished, you are supposed to count the silverware in the silverware drawer, to see if any of it has been expropriated by the masses. Since the rhetorical style at Dissent is fatally oriented towards what was hip when Sidney Hook bought his first Flivver, you get bizarre tirades against �cosmopolitanism.� It turns out that patriotism and cosmopolitanism are deadly enemies, in Kazin�s mind:
�In daily life, cultural cosmopolitanism is mostly reserved to the rich and famous. Radical environmentalists and anti-IMF crusaders seek to revive the old dream of internationalism in a version indebted more to John Lennon's "Imagine" than to V. I. Lenin's Comintern. But three years after bursting into the headlines from the streets of Seattle, that project seems stalled indefinitely in the Sargasso Sea that lies between rhetorical desire and political exigency.�
Wow. If the rich are for it, I must be agin� it � I suppose that is the response Kazin wants to induce in his readers; who will then form a posse to string up the varmints. However, LI rather likes those rich who are cultural cosmopolitans � are we talking about Gertrude Stein, here? Well, we are very fond of her. As well as Henry James, John Lennon, and the rest of em. The Frankfurt exiles � just loved those guys! Dutch architects and radical Italian fashion divas � love and kisses, guys and gals.
However, we have our doubts that this class of the rich and the famous actually still exists. Maybe some relics can be found in Tangiers. We live near the border with Mexico, and have found a lot of non-rich'nfamous cosmopolitans. For instance, the sons and daughters of Mexican migrants � or even Mexican migrants themselves, who cross the border to see the family on holiday occasions. They speak Spanish at home and in the street, they make meals that will, no doubt, eventually grace the tables of the the rich and famous (oh, please, please, let us get within rubbin', pick pocketing distance of the rich and famous) with a plethora of unpatriotic ingredients -- chiles, cilantro, or that displacement, to the Puritan mind, of chocolate from the frivolity of pastry to the sober thighs of chicken � mole, in short. Mostly, they are stalled indefinitely in the Sargasso Sea � of credit card debt.
However, just because the Left Patriot side is represented by Kazin�s risible New Masses rhetoric doesn�t make LI want to abandon patriotism to the New School rubes. For the next two posts (approx.), we want to look at Coleridge�s Patriotism � that is, we want to look at how Coleridge transformed himself from a Romantic Jacobin to a Burkean conservative around 1800 in the pages of The Morning Post � and John Stuart Mill�s idea that patriotism is a necessary adjunct of social stability, which, we believe, was probably influenced by Coleridge�s example. Coleridge gives us a sort of emblem of the career of the British intellectual, with its stages -- the romantic enthusiasm for Revolution with its aesthetic root -- the confrontation with the accidents and barbarisms of a real revolution � thebeing absorbed in that confrontation to the extent that the sense of the barbarism of tradition, the continuing structures of oppression, begin to blur � and the ending up speaking for the worst Tory elements � the jingoists, the theocrats, the belligerents, the fatuous defenders of massive economic injustice, etc. etc. Even as we speak, this pattern is being etched in the diatribes of Christopher Hitchens, who is floundering, rather sillily, to find some third, past reference in whose career he can justify his vain attempt to make consistent his past and present stands. Orwell, his choice, is perfect because he was cut off before he could really crawl into the carapace of crankdom that closed around Koestler. Orwell seems wrong, to us, for C.H.'s quest. Hitchens should touch up on his Burke and Coleridge � much more logical intellectual antecedents.
The Patriot game
Lately there has been a lot of, to LI�s mind, rather unseemly genuflecting to the American flag on the part of a group in the left press that apparently entertains the fear that honorable goals, such as economic justice and anti-belligerence, are being undermined by a googley eyed gang of flag burners. We have little patient with the thesis that America is the Great Satan; on the other hand, when lefists get chummy with the tropes of jingoism, we look for the exits.
Dissent recently published an essay by Michael Kazin, an editor, entitled �A Patriotic Left.� This is an excellent example of the neo-Popular Front in the age of Bush. Kazin has a good time sporting in progressive cant. You know the variety: You call for some moderate objective in the most bloodcurdling ultra rhetoric. After the writer is finished, you are supposed to count the silverware in the silverware drawer, to see if any of it has been expropriated by the masses. Since the rhetorical style at Dissent is fatally oriented towards what was hip when Sidney Hook bought his first Flivver, you get bizarre tirades against �cosmopolitanism.� It turns out that patriotism and cosmopolitanism are deadly enemies, in Kazin�s mind:
�In daily life, cultural cosmopolitanism is mostly reserved to the rich and famous. Radical environmentalists and anti-IMF crusaders seek to revive the old dream of internationalism in a version indebted more to John Lennon's "Imagine" than to V. I. Lenin's Comintern. But three years after bursting into the headlines from the streets of Seattle, that project seems stalled indefinitely in the Sargasso Sea that lies between rhetorical desire and political exigency.�
Wow. If the rich are for it, I must be agin� it � I suppose that is the response Kazin wants to induce in his readers; who will then form a posse to string up the varmints. However, LI rather likes those rich who are cultural cosmopolitans � are we talking about Gertrude Stein, here? Well, we are very fond of her. As well as Henry James, John Lennon, and the rest of em. The Frankfurt exiles � just loved those guys! Dutch architects and radical Italian fashion divas � love and kisses, guys and gals.
However, we have our doubts that this class of the rich and the famous actually still exists. Maybe some relics can be found in Tangiers. We live near the border with Mexico, and have found a lot of non-rich'nfamous cosmopolitans. For instance, the sons and daughters of Mexican migrants � or even Mexican migrants themselves, who cross the border to see the family on holiday occasions. They speak Spanish at home and in the street, they make meals that will, no doubt, eventually grace the tables of the the rich and famous (oh, please, please, let us get within rubbin', pick pocketing distance of the rich and famous) with a plethora of unpatriotic ingredients -- chiles, cilantro, or that displacement, to the Puritan mind, of chocolate from the frivolity of pastry to the sober thighs of chicken � mole, in short. Mostly, they are stalled indefinitely in the Sargasso Sea � of credit card debt.
However, just because the Left Patriot side is represented by Kazin�s risible New Masses rhetoric doesn�t make LI want to abandon patriotism to the New School rubes. For the next two posts (approx.), we want to look at Coleridge�s Patriotism � that is, we want to look at how Coleridge transformed himself from a Romantic Jacobin to a Burkean conservative around 1800 in the pages of The Morning Post � and John Stuart Mill�s idea that patriotism is a necessary adjunct of social stability, which, we believe, was probably influenced by Coleridge�s example. Coleridge gives us a sort of emblem of the career of the British intellectual, with its stages -- the romantic enthusiasm for Revolution with its aesthetic root -- the confrontation with the accidents and barbarisms of a real revolution � thebeing absorbed in that confrontation to the extent that the sense of the barbarism of tradition, the continuing structures of oppression, begin to blur � and the ending up speaking for the worst Tory elements � the jingoists, the theocrats, the belligerents, the fatuous defenders of massive economic injustice, etc. etc. Even as we speak, this pattern is being etched in the diatribes of Christopher Hitchens, who is floundering, rather sillily, to find some third, past reference in whose career he can justify his vain attempt to make consistent his past and present stands. Orwell, his choice, is perfect because he was cut off before he could really crawl into the carapace of crankdom that closed around Koestler. Orwell seems wrong, to us, for C.H.'s quest. Hitchens should touch up on his Burke and Coleridge � much more logical intellectual antecedents.
Friday, December 6, 2002
Remora
LI learned our probability theory from the Dover Press edition of Richard Von Mises book on same. At the time, we did not realize that Von Mises was presenting a much controverted thesis on probability -- that he represented the extreme point of the extensional school. von Mises was the brother of the conservative economist -- although, according to his biography, he was definitely not hedged about by his brother's libertarian ideology. He gave up an honor given to him by East Germany with the admission that he would have taken it if the times -- the year was 1952 -- didn't make any truck with the communists automatically suspicious.
James Rizzo, in this essay on expected utility, gives a good overview of the difference between the view that that probability refers to the frequency of the observation of an event's occurence in a series of observations, and the 'subjectivist' view, which makes a softer case for the meaning of likelihood.
"Probability is neither a simple nor innocent concept, and there have been profound disagreements, especially during the 20th century, over basic matters of definition. Although I have relatively few original things to say about the terms of these debates, my discussion cannot proceed without minimally outlining them -- for probability is where, I am arguing, decision theory stows its metaphysical baggage. I am not sure how obvious my basic point that probability is a metaphysics might seem. On the one hand, it is clear that even our everyday concept of "probability" depends on fairly specific claims about the nature of the universe (the cosmos) and its knowability. And Ian Hacking?s (1975, 1990) efforts to relate the emergence of probability to various modernist projects, like the building of the nation-state, are well-known. On the other hand, critical social theory and Marxism have paid far less attention to probability than it deserves -- if we take its metaphysics as seriously as I propose we do.
A first step in this direction would be to account for the opposition between the frequentist (objectivist) and personalist (subjectivist) definitions of probability.
In large part, frequentism represents an extension of the classical theories of Laplace and Pascal, in which probability was treated as a ratio of favorable to equally possible cases --the paradigmatic events here being series of coin tosses, dice rolls, and other recreations of the French aristocracy. Modern objectivism treats probability as the limiting value of the relative frequency with which certain events, or properties, recur within a sequence of observations. Most frequency theories (such as the one advanced by Richard von Mises) do not require this sequence of observations to be finite, i.e., it can stand in for limiting relative frequency that would be manifested by the unlimited repetition of the event. Peirce, whose theory of probability is in many respects frequentist, is quite clear on this point:
"Probability never properly refers immediately to a single event, but exclusively to the happening of a given kind of event on any occasion of a given kind. [I]tis plain that, if probability be the ratio of the occurrences of the specific event tothe occurrences of the generic occasion, it is the ratio that there would be in thelong run, and has nothing to do with any supposed cessation of the occasions.This long run can be nothing but an endlessly long run..."
Hans Reichenbach, who was also a logical positivist, was dissatisfied with a position that seemed to rule out saying things about singulars - like giving the probability of landing on Mars at a certain date. A professor Uchii has a nice site sorting through these issues. Reichenbach's compromise basically gives us a concept of possible worlds -- thus embedding a theory of probability in what will later, under Kripke, become a theory of description: i
"According to Reichenbach, the probability concept is extended by giving probability a "fictitious" meaning in reference to single events. We find the probability associated with an infinite sequences and transfer that value to a given single member of it. ... This procedure, which seems natural in the case of the coin toss, does involve basic difficulties. The whole trouble is that a given single event belongs to many sequences, and the probabilities associated with the different sequences may differ considerably. The problem is to decide from which sequence to take the probability that is to be attached "fictitiously" to the single event."
So: the point, here, is that when we are making probability claims, we have to get our theory of probability straight. And a refined version of extensional probability, one that can encompass a single event, still needs to construct a a reference class and an attribute class. The attribute class is some definite description, and the reference class is the particular, defining order of events or properties under which to classify our observations. Got that?
So what, pray tell, is William Saletan doing with his Saddameter in Slate?
The premise is the jokey one that invading Iraq is much like Wheel of Fortune -- an idea reinforced by the visual. This is, of course, in accordence with the idiosyncratic Saletan touch, tasteles and tacky, a subdeb Harvard Lampoon conceit. But it is also a completely odd exercise. Every day Saletan gives us the "odds" on invading Iraq. Well, what does this mean?
The problem is that the relationship to a reference class, here, begs the question: what is the reference class? Let's try to think this one through.
100% must refer to the certainty of invasion. But, if this is so, what does 0% refer to?
On the one hand, LI could make the case that, unconsciously, Saletan has constructed a reference class that includes all the non-USA nations. We can then assign hostility quotients to them -- Canada, for instance, would get so much, and Syria would get so much, and so on. Thus, the probability of invading Iraq would refer to the class of invadable nations.
But we doubt this is Saletan's point. Although he believes that odds talk is self-explanatory, LI thinks that Saletan's assumption is much more revealing than his exercize. The relevant reference class, in LI's opinion, is the punditocracy sense of the certainty of an Iraq invasion. The odds, in other words, refer to another level of odds. And that refers to the penchant, among the punditry, for belligerence or pacifism. So 100% would be, say, the Weekly Standard editorial board, and 0 would be,, say, Hans Blix p.r. man. With the in betweens probably being those who are pacifistic but think the US will invade Iraq, those who are belligerent but think Bush will chicken out, and so on.
You'll notice the large divergence between the reference classes. They don't, actually, share any members. Well, this doesn't surprise us. Saletan, for all his snobbery about the great unwashed that live outside his zip code, has never shown himself to be a very bright bulb himself. That the odds thing continues to take up space on the Slate site is a little amazing to me, however, since Slate prides itself on running nit-picky pop sci features that knock down buncomb in other forums.
LI learned our probability theory from the Dover Press edition of Richard Von Mises book on same. At the time, we did not realize that Von Mises was presenting a much controverted thesis on probability -- that he represented the extreme point of the extensional school. von Mises was the brother of the conservative economist -- although, according to his biography, he was definitely not hedged about by his brother's libertarian ideology. He gave up an honor given to him by East Germany with the admission that he would have taken it if the times -- the year was 1952 -- didn't make any truck with the communists automatically suspicious.
James Rizzo, in this essay on expected utility, gives a good overview of the difference between the view that that probability refers to the frequency of the observation of an event's occurence in a series of observations, and the 'subjectivist' view, which makes a softer case for the meaning of likelihood.
"Probability is neither a simple nor innocent concept, and there have been profound disagreements, especially during the 20th century, over basic matters of definition. Although I have relatively few original things to say about the terms of these debates, my discussion cannot proceed without minimally outlining them -- for probability is where, I am arguing, decision theory stows its metaphysical baggage. I am not sure how obvious my basic point that probability is a metaphysics might seem. On the one hand, it is clear that even our everyday concept of "probability" depends on fairly specific claims about the nature of the universe (the cosmos) and its knowability. And Ian Hacking?s (1975, 1990) efforts to relate the emergence of probability to various modernist projects, like the building of the nation-state, are well-known. On the other hand, critical social theory and Marxism have paid far less attention to probability than it deserves -- if we take its metaphysics as seriously as I propose we do.
A first step in this direction would be to account for the opposition between the frequentist (objectivist) and personalist (subjectivist) definitions of probability.
In large part, frequentism represents an extension of the classical theories of Laplace and Pascal, in which probability was treated as a ratio of favorable to equally possible cases --the paradigmatic events here being series of coin tosses, dice rolls, and other recreations of the French aristocracy. Modern objectivism treats probability as the limiting value of the relative frequency with which certain events, or properties, recur within a sequence of observations. Most frequency theories (such as the one advanced by Richard von Mises) do not require this sequence of observations to be finite, i.e., it can stand in for limiting relative frequency that would be manifested by the unlimited repetition of the event. Peirce, whose theory of probability is in many respects frequentist, is quite clear on this point:
"Probability never properly refers immediately to a single event, but exclusively to the happening of a given kind of event on any occasion of a given kind. [I]tis plain that, if probability be the ratio of the occurrences of the specific event tothe occurrences of the generic occasion, it is the ratio that there would be in thelong run, and has nothing to do with any supposed cessation of the occasions.This long run can be nothing but an endlessly long run..."
Hans Reichenbach, who was also a logical positivist, was dissatisfied with a position that seemed to rule out saying things about singulars - like giving the probability of landing on Mars at a certain date. A professor Uchii has a nice site sorting through these issues. Reichenbach's compromise basically gives us a concept of possible worlds -- thus embedding a theory of probability in what will later, under Kripke, become a theory of description: i
"According to Reichenbach, the probability concept is extended by giving probability a "fictitious" meaning in reference to single events. We find the probability associated with an infinite sequences and transfer that value to a given single member of it. ... This procedure, which seems natural in the case of the coin toss, does involve basic difficulties. The whole trouble is that a given single event belongs to many sequences, and the probabilities associated with the different sequences may differ considerably. The problem is to decide from which sequence to take the probability that is to be attached "fictitiously" to the single event."
So: the point, here, is that when we are making probability claims, we have to get our theory of probability straight. And a refined version of extensional probability, one that can encompass a single event, still needs to construct a a reference class and an attribute class. The attribute class is some definite description, and the reference class is the particular, defining order of events or properties under which to classify our observations. Got that?
So what, pray tell, is William Saletan doing with his Saddameter in Slate?
The premise is the jokey one that invading Iraq is much like Wheel of Fortune -- an idea reinforced by the visual. This is, of course, in accordence with the idiosyncratic Saletan touch, tasteles and tacky, a subdeb Harvard Lampoon conceit. But it is also a completely odd exercise. Every day Saletan gives us the "odds" on invading Iraq. Well, what does this mean?
The problem is that the relationship to a reference class, here, begs the question: what is the reference class? Let's try to think this one through.
100% must refer to the certainty of invasion. But, if this is so, what does 0% refer to?
On the one hand, LI could make the case that, unconsciously, Saletan has constructed a reference class that includes all the non-USA nations. We can then assign hostility quotients to them -- Canada, for instance, would get so much, and Syria would get so much, and so on. Thus, the probability of invading Iraq would refer to the class of invadable nations.
But we doubt this is Saletan's point. Although he believes that odds talk is self-explanatory, LI thinks that Saletan's assumption is much more revealing than his exercize. The relevant reference class, in LI's opinion, is the punditocracy sense of the certainty of an Iraq invasion. The odds, in other words, refer to another level of odds. And that refers to the penchant, among the punditry, for belligerence or pacifism. So 100% would be, say, the Weekly Standard editorial board, and 0 would be,, say, Hans Blix p.r. man. With the in betweens probably being those who are pacifistic but think the US will invade Iraq, those who are belligerent but think Bush will chicken out, and so on.
You'll notice the large divergence between the reference classes. They don't, actually, share any members. Well, this doesn't surprise us. Saletan, for all his snobbery about the great unwashed that live outside his zip code, has never shown himself to be a very bright bulb himself. That the odds thing continues to take up space on the Slate site is a little amazing to me, however, since Slate prides itself on running nit-picky pop sci features that knock down buncomb in other forums.
Wednesday, December 4, 2002
Dope
James and Dickens
Only a short time ago it might have been supposed that the English novel was not what the French call discutable. It had no air of having a theory, a conviction, a consciousness of itself behind it-of being the expression of an artistic faith, the result of choice and comparison. I do not say it was necessarily the worse for that; it would take much more courage than I possess to intimate that the form of the novel, as Dickens and Thackeray (for instance) saw it had any taint of incompleteness. It was, however, na�f (if I may help myself out with another French word)... -- Henry James, The art of fiction.
LI, yesterday, contended that the first chapter of Our Mutual Friend could be put up against Dickens great first chapters -- that of Bleak House, of David Copperfield, and of Great Expectations. Of these, OMF is most like BH in its blending together of nature -- in the case of Bleak House, London fog; in the case of OMF, the Thames River -- and the polis. The London fog in which the bodies of the dispossessed rather bob, and become alternately trackless and to be tracked -- become, that is, objects upon which there is an interest in tracking -- makes of the first chapter of BH something on the order of the musical overture to an opera, rehearsing a set of motifs that will assume greater import later, as these motifs structure the dramatic situation of the songs. That sense of tracking and tracklessness, and the implication of texture in which the trace is supported, or erased, is even more marked in OMF. The first chapter begins on the Thames, with some unnamed thing, which by numerous hints assumes, eventually, a form of some horror to the reader, is being towed behind a boat that is powered by a girl. The unexpected conjunction of the girl, the boat, and her scavenger father gives us, who have read Dickens before, the idea that sentiment, here, will be wound by Dickens art of exaggeration, juxtaposition, and comparison into the sort of grotesque that makes Dickens novels, sometimes, seem to lurch, rather than to progress.
Henry James review of the book in the Nation is a startling shot across the bows, from its first condemnatory sentence to its last. James does not chose, at this point, to clutter his judgement with the tone of retraction and balance that becomes, later, his signature style. In this review, however, James sentences are definitely more in the way of bullets, those most unretractable of the things one might shoot across the bow, rather than, as it sometimes seems in his latter essays and fictions, the murmurs of a foggy judge on a winter night in the uncertain light of a dying fire. Here's how the review pops off -- really, in the manner of some kid on the streets of Boston bringing down a Beacon Hill bourgeois:
"Our Mutual Friend is, to our perception, the poorest of Mr. Dickens's works. And it is poor with the poverty not of momentary embarrassment, but of permanent exhaustion."
After such a death sentence, James reads out a bill of particulars that alternates between the insinuation of senility and the insinuation of pandering. This is from the second graf:
"To say that the conduct of the story, with all its complications, betrays a long-practised hand, is to pay no compliment worthy the author. If this were, indeed, a compliment, we should be inclined to carry it further, and congratulate him on his success in what we should call the manufacture of fiction; for in so doing we should express a feeling that has attended us throughout the book. Seldom, we reflected, had we read a book so intensely written, so little seen, known, or felt."
There is one aspect of OMF that seems, in particular, to have stirred up the acids in James' soul -- it is the treatment of Miss Jenny Wren. Here's James' inimitable prosecutory description:
"What do we get in return for accepting Miss Jenny Wren as a possible person? This young lady is the type of a certain class of characters of which Mr. Dickens has made a speciality, and with which he has been accustomed to draw alternate smiles and tears, according as he pressed one spring or another. But this is very cheap merriment and very cheap pathos. Miss Jenny Wren is a poor little dwarf, afflicted, as she constantly reiterates, with a "bad back" and "queer legs," who makes dolls' dresses, and is for ever pricking at those with whom she converses, in the air, with her needle, and assuring them that she knows their "tricks and their manners." Like all Mr. Dickens's pathetic characters, she is a little monster; she is deformed, unhealthy, unnatural; she belongs to the troop of hunchbacks, imbeciles, and precocious children who have carried on the sentimental business in all Mr. Dickens's novels; the little Nells, the Smikes, the Paul Dombeys."
This is the most striking passage in James' review, at least if we read it in the light of James' future work. The review was written in 1865. Interestingly, when James came to write a novel on the scale of one of Dickens -- namely, Portrait of a Lady, in 1881 -- he choses, in Ralph Touchwood, the benefactor of Isabella Archer in the novel, to present us with just such an unhealthy and deformed creature, all the way down to the queer legs. In fact, James, as well as Dickens, choses to carry out all the sentimental business with a more decorous train of precocities. LI can't, at the moment, recall a definite Jamesian hunchbacks, but the mysteriously sick abound -- the supreme instance being Milly Theale, in Wings of the Dove. In the preface to that novel, written in 1902, James might almost have been thinking of his review of OMF almost forty years before, speaking of the crystal of inspiration in these terms:
"It [the idea of the story] was formed, I judged, to make the wary adventurer walk round and round it--it had in fact a charm that invited and mystified alike that attention; not being somehow what one thought of as a "frank" subject, after the fashion of some, with its elements well in view and its whole character in its face. It stood there with secrets and compartments, with possible treacheries and traps; it might have a great deal to give, but would probably ask for equal services in return, and would collect this debt to the last shilling. It involved, to begin with, the placing in the strongest light a person infirm and ill--a case sure to prove difficult and to require (vi) much handling; though giving perhaps, with other matters, one of those chances for good taste, possibly even for the play of the very best in the world, that are not only always to be invoked and cultivated, but that are absolutely to be jumped at from the moment they make a sign."
So what, our longsuffering and probably fewer readers might be asking, is your point, LI? We don't, exactly, have one today -- there are times when having a point, as my old Dad used to say, following George Wallace, just makes you pointy headed. So we are entertaining the first drafts of speculation, and without trying to weave it into the denser texture of an argument. Speculation, pursued to a certain degree of exhaustion, merely evaporates, as though it had reached some scientifically calculable temperation of cognition that determines a change in the phase of the thing. Which point has been here, we think, reached.
James and Dickens
Only a short time ago it might have been supposed that the English novel was not what the French call discutable. It had no air of having a theory, a conviction, a consciousness of itself behind it-of being the expression of an artistic faith, the result of choice and comparison. I do not say it was necessarily the worse for that; it would take much more courage than I possess to intimate that the form of the novel, as Dickens and Thackeray (for instance) saw it had any taint of incompleteness. It was, however, na�f (if I may help myself out with another French word)... -- Henry James, The art of fiction.
LI, yesterday, contended that the first chapter of Our Mutual Friend could be put up against Dickens great first chapters -- that of Bleak House, of David Copperfield, and of Great Expectations. Of these, OMF is most like BH in its blending together of nature -- in the case of Bleak House, London fog; in the case of OMF, the Thames River -- and the polis. The London fog in which the bodies of the dispossessed rather bob, and become alternately trackless and to be tracked -- become, that is, objects upon which there is an interest in tracking -- makes of the first chapter of BH something on the order of the musical overture to an opera, rehearsing a set of motifs that will assume greater import later, as these motifs structure the dramatic situation of the songs. That sense of tracking and tracklessness, and the implication of texture in which the trace is supported, or erased, is even more marked in OMF. The first chapter begins on the Thames, with some unnamed thing, which by numerous hints assumes, eventually, a form of some horror to the reader, is being towed behind a boat that is powered by a girl. The unexpected conjunction of the girl, the boat, and her scavenger father gives us, who have read Dickens before, the idea that sentiment, here, will be wound by Dickens art of exaggeration, juxtaposition, and comparison into the sort of grotesque that makes Dickens novels, sometimes, seem to lurch, rather than to progress.
Henry James review of the book in the Nation is a startling shot across the bows, from its first condemnatory sentence to its last. James does not chose, at this point, to clutter his judgement with the tone of retraction and balance that becomes, later, his signature style. In this review, however, James sentences are definitely more in the way of bullets, those most unretractable of the things one might shoot across the bow, rather than, as it sometimes seems in his latter essays and fictions, the murmurs of a foggy judge on a winter night in the uncertain light of a dying fire. Here's how the review pops off -- really, in the manner of some kid on the streets of Boston bringing down a Beacon Hill bourgeois:
"Our Mutual Friend is, to our perception, the poorest of Mr. Dickens's works. And it is poor with the poverty not of momentary embarrassment, but of permanent exhaustion."
After such a death sentence, James reads out a bill of particulars that alternates between the insinuation of senility and the insinuation of pandering. This is from the second graf:
"To say that the conduct of the story, with all its complications, betrays a long-practised hand, is to pay no compliment worthy the author. If this were, indeed, a compliment, we should be inclined to carry it further, and congratulate him on his success in what we should call the manufacture of fiction; for in so doing we should express a feeling that has attended us throughout the book. Seldom, we reflected, had we read a book so intensely written, so little seen, known, or felt."
There is one aspect of OMF that seems, in particular, to have stirred up the acids in James' soul -- it is the treatment of Miss Jenny Wren. Here's James' inimitable prosecutory description:
"What do we get in return for accepting Miss Jenny Wren as a possible person? This young lady is the type of a certain class of characters of which Mr. Dickens has made a speciality, and with which he has been accustomed to draw alternate smiles and tears, according as he pressed one spring or another. But this is very cheap merriment and very cheap pathos. Miss Jenny Wren is a poor little dwarf, afflicted, as she constantly reiterates, with a "bad back" and "queer legs," who makes dolls' dresses, and is for ever pricking at those with whom she converses, in the air, with her needle, and assuring them that she knows their "tricks and their manners." Like all Mr. Dickens's pathetic characters, she is a little monster; she is deformed, unhealthy, unnatural; she belongs to the troop of hunchbacks, imbeciles, and precocious children who have carried on the sentimental business in all Mr. Dickens's novels; the little Nells, the Smikes, the Paul Dombeys."
This is the most striking passage in James' review, at least if we read it in the light of James' future work. The review was written in 1865. Interestingly, when James came to write a novel on the scale of one of Dickens -- namely, Portrait of a Lady, in 1881 -- he choses, in Ralph Touchwood, the benefactor of Isabella Archer in the novel, to present us with just such an unhealthy and deformed creature, all the way down to the queer legs. In fact, James, as well as Dickens, choses to carry out all the sentimental business with a more decorous train of precocities. LI can't, at the moment, recall a definite Jamesian hunchbacks, but the mysteriously sick abound -- the supreme instance being Milly Theale, in Wings of the Dove. In the preface to that novel, written in 1902, James might almost have been thinking of his review of OMF almost forty years before, speaking of the crystal of inspiration in these terms:
"It [the idea of the story] was formed, I judged, to make the wary adventurer walk round and round it--it had in fact a charm that invited and mystified alike that attention; not being somehow what one thought of as a "frank" subject, after the fashion of some, with its elements well in view and its whole character in its face. It stood there with secrets and compartments, with possible treacheries and traps; it might have a great deal to give, but would probably ask for equal services in return, and would collect this debt to the last shilling. It involved, to begin with, the placing in the strongest light a person infirm and ill--a case sure to prove difficult and to require (vi) much handling; though giving perhaps, with other matters, one of those chances for good taste, possibly even for the play of the very best in the world, that are not only always to be invoked and cultivated, but that are absolutely to be jumped at from the moment they make a sign."
So what, our longsuffering and probably fewer readers might be asking, is your point, LI? We don't, exactly, have one today -- there are times when having a point, as my old Dad used to say, following George Wallace, just makes you pointy headed. So we are entertaining the first drafts of speculation, and without trying to weave it into the denser texture of an argument. Speculation, pursued to a certain degree of exhaustion, merely evaporates, as though it had reached some scientifically calculable temperation of cognition that determines a change in the phase of the thing. Which point has been here, we think, reached.
Tuesday, December 3, 2002
Dope
My friend S. and I were talking about Christmas movies. I mentioned a cartoon version of the Christmas Carol that I remember, still, with great affection -- the affection one feels for those tv shows of childhood in which the memory is less of the show itself than of the very experience of watching it, of being, in retrospect, that small body so consciously cocooned in the warmth, the sofa, the pjs, the accumulated stuff -- embodying a family history of purchases, breakages, hobbies taken up and abandoned, and the crude taste for the adornments of mass merchandizing characteristic of middle class America - of some room in your house that is all turned, like the minds eye gazing at the image of the self, towards the pictures that might show on the tv screen, that box's weirdly animating presence, while outside the window the clouds are gray, low and full of the odious promise of chill.
My friend S. is from Istanbul. She had never heard of the Christmas Carol.
Now, this didn't surprise me -- I had the misfortune to tell her the story of Christmas, as it is derived from Luke, once. She found the whole thing an amalgam of tedious nonsense, too long by half and unrelieved by the poetry that, for me, at least, makes the whole myth emotionally weighty. So I didn't know what she would make of the Christmas Carol. We rented an eighties version, starring George Scott as Scrooge. Scott was his usual scenery eating self -- which was all to the good, since the rest of the movie was a fat, suet pudding of theatrical Victorianism. The actors had that look of constraint as they mouthed various of the sentimental pieties Dickens attributes to his walk on characters, as though they couldn't believe it, either. Scott, who has all the good lines -- well, almost all -- the spirits of Christmas past and present also get off a boutade or two -- went through the puddingness like an electric carving knife.
Still, I was really moved. I mean, to tears, gentle tears, moved at Scrooge's immersion in the ruin of his life, and his redemption, and the way that redemption, for a brief moment, seems indissolubly connected to the redemption from misery of the poor, the working class, and the system that paid so little to so many and so much to so few.
S. was moved too. I was glad to see this.
It has been a long time since I've read Dickens, so yesterday I went hunting around for Dombey and Son, and began to read it. I've read almost all of Dickens novels at one time or another. Dombey and Son, and Little Dorrit, are the two major ones that defeat me. Reading the first chapter of Dombey and Son, I realized that it was going to defeat me again. So I turned, instead, to one of my favorites -- Our Mutual Friend. The first chapter of that novel is one of the best in all of Dickens, a writer who was very conscious of first chapters. After all, the sale of a serialized novel depends greatly on the appeal that exists, from the first, in that opening. No time for the long haul -- for the gradual winding in of your audience. I'd put that chapter against David Copperfield, Bleak House, and Great Expectations.
At the time it was published, however, Our Mutual Friend received withering blasts of criticism -- especially from the young Henry James. Tomorrow's post will be about the ferocity Dickens work aroused in James, who read it as exactly the kind of thing that would never do; and that, still, with the great reading public, did. In my opinion, James is the greatest artist of the English language novel, but Dickens is a much greater writer -- a matter I should sort out some time.
My friend S. and I were talking about Christmas movies. I mentioned a cartoon version of the Christmas Carol that I remember, still, with great affection -- the affection one feels for those tv shows of childhood in which the memory is less of the show itself than of the very experience of watching it, of being, in retrospect, that small body so consciously cocooned in the warmth, the sofa, the pjs, the accumulated stuff -- embodying a family history of purchases, breakages, hobbies taken up and abandoned, and the crude taste for the adornments of mass merchandizing characteristic of middle class America - of some room in your house that is all turned, like the minds eye gazing at the image of the self, towards the pictures that might show on the tv screen, that box's weirdly animating presence, while outside the window the clouds are gray, low and full of the odious promise of chill.
My friend S. is from Istanbul. She had never heard of the Christmas Carol.
Now, this didn't surprise me -- I had the misfortune to tell her the story of Christmas, as it is derived from Luke, once. She found the whole thing an amalgam of tedious nonsense, too long by half and unrelieved by the poetry that, for me, at least, makes the whole myth emotionally weighty. So I didn't know what she would make of the Christmas Carol. We rented an eighties version, starring George Scott as Scrooge. Scott was his usual scenery eating self -- which was all to the good, since the rest of the movie was a fat, suet pudding of theatrical Victorianism. The actors had that look of constraint as they mouthed various of the sentimental pieties Dickens attributes to his walk on characters, as though they couldn't believe it, either. Scott, who has all the good lines -- well, almost all -- the spirits of Christmas past and present also get off a boutade or two -- went through the puddingness like an electric carving knife.
Still, I was really moved. I mean, to tears, gentle tears, moved at Scrooge's immersion in the ruin of his life, and his redemption, and the way that redemption, for a brief moment, seems indissolubly connected to the redemption from misery of the poor, the working class, and the system that paid so little to so many and so much to so few.
S. was moved too. I was glad to see this.
It has been a long time since I've read Dickens, so yesterday I went hunting around for Dombey and Son, and began to read it. I've read almost all of Dickens novels at one time or another. Dombey and Son, and Little Dorrit, are the two major ones that defeat me. Reading the first chapter of Dombey and Son, I realized that it was going to defeat me again. So I turned, instead, to one of my favorites -- Our Mutual Friend. The first chapter of that novel is one of the best in all of Dickens, a writer who was very conscious of first chapters. After all, the sale of a serialized novel depends greatly on the appeal that exists, from the first, in that opening. No time for the long haul -- for the gradual winding in of your audience. I'd put that chapter against David Copperfield, Bleak House, and Great Expectations.
At the time it was published, however, Our Mutual Friend received withering blasts of criticism -- especially from the young Henry James. Tomorrow's post will be about the ferocity Dickens work aroused in James, who read it as exactly the kind of thing that would never do; and that, still, with the great reading public, did. In my opinion, James is the greatest artist of the English language novel, but Dickens is a much greater writer -- a matter I should sort out some time.
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