November 27: Addams Family Utopia

The Seelbach. "Bourbon does more than More could do/ To bring Utopia into view."

How was everyone's Thanksgiving? I made Seelbachs which went over big. There was also turkey of some sort. And, the most American thing of all, Ritz Cracker dressing. I had also read the excerpt from More's Utopia but was a little too wiped out to write about it.

I'm not going to beat myself up too much, though, because one of the shocking things from the reading is that Thomas More, who wore a hair shirt as a constant reminder of self-mortification, takes up for the cause of self-esteem:

Then if it be a point of humanity for man to bring health and comfort to man, and specially (which is a virtue most peculiarly belonging to man) to mitigate and assuage the grief of others, and by taking from them the sorrow and heaviness of life, to restore them to joy, that is to say, to pleasure: why may it not then be said, that nature doth provoke every man to do the same to himself? For a joyful life, that is to say, a pleasant life... if thou not only mayst, but also of duty art bound to procure it to others, why not chiefly to thyself, to whom thou art bound to show as much favour as to other? For when nature biddeth thee to be good and gentle to others she commandeth thee not to be cruel and ungentle to thyself. Therefore even very nature (say they) prescribeth to us a joyful life, that is to say, pleasure as the end of all our operations.

I'm still kind of blown away from that -- that's like the last attitude I would expect from a martyr of the Church.

I also want to emphasize the "very nature prescribeth to us...pleasure as the end of all our operations." Most of the "cultural literacy" handwringing that gets into the media makes being acquainted with some of the treasures laid up here in Western Civ feel like a painful duty. The headline might as well be, "WHY AREN'T OUR CHILDREN SUFFERING MORE?" But in reality it's been pleasurable, this year, loping around the Excerpt Museum like a baboon. Maybe it's not fun in the going-to-Disneyland sense, but it's a pleasure to read and talk and think about things outside of the sucking vortex of oneself and one's own problems. You are not alone, etc. And it's nice to see More speak up for it -- he does seem like a man who really enjoyed sitting around the table talking about stuff, even if his guests must have wondered why he itched so much.

However, Utopia itself, as described by More, looks to be a very tedious place. I know that allowances must be made, as he was inventing this genre, but it all seems very Addams Family -- i.e. the things they like are the opposite of the things we like! Check it:

For whereas they eat and drink in earthen and glass vessels, which indeed be curiously and properly made, and yet be of very small value: of gold and silver they make commonly chamber pots, and other like vessels, that serve for most vile uses, not only in their common halls, but in every man’s private house. Furthermore of the same metals they make great chains, with fetters, and gyves wherein they tie their bondmen.

Heavy stuff. And, you know, dollars are just pieces of paper, man. Utopia is also not a place for the individualist:

If any man of his own head and without leave, walk out of his precinct and bounds, taken without the prince’s letters, he is brought again for a fugitive or a runaway with great shame and rebuke, and is sharply punished. If he be taken in that fault again, he is punished with bondage.

It would have been hell on Thoreau.

November 5: Politics

Also, I believe that it will become fashionable again to join the Masons. You just watch.

Today I will start off with a confession, and then hopefully it will wind around to the reading. The confession is this: I voted for Nader in 2000. My exculpations are as follows: 1) I wouldn't have done it if I'd been living in someplace like Pennsylvania instead of safely blue California, but 2) I was sympathetic to the radical critique that our political opinions are forced into narrow little boxes, as if we were veal. (Recall, too, that 2000 is pre-blogosphere; it was a lot harder then to get your nutty ideas out to the people.)

In fact, given my default Tory sensibilities, wrapped up in my readings like old plaids (to paraphrase Larkin) as I am, I am skeptical of the words on the dollar bill: Novus Ordo Seclorum. But sometimes, even for us cynical believers in the overarching power of The System, change happens; I felt decidedly uncynical yesterday, and here is more pro-change evidence today, in an account of Thomas More written by his son-in-law.

More is remembered, of course, as a martyr and creator of martyrs. But before that unpleasantness he was Speaker of the House of Commons, and his petition to King Henry to allow the Commons to speak freely during debate is so groveling it is shocking:

Yet such is the weight of the matter, such is the reverend dread that the timorous hearts of your natural subjects conceive towards your high Majesty (our most redoubted King and undoubted Sovereign) that they cannot in this point find themselves satisfied, except your gracious bounty herein declared put away the scruple of their timorous minds, and animate and encourage them out of doubt. It may therefore like your most abundant Grace (our most gracious King) to give to all your Commons here assembled, your most gracious licence and pardon freely, without doubt of your dreadful displeasure, every man to discharge his conscience, and boldly in everything incident among, declare his advice, and whatsoever happeneth any man to say, it may like your noble Majesty of your inestimable goodness to take all in good part, interpreting every man’s words, how uncunningly soever they be couched, to proceed yet of a good zeal towards the profit of your Realm and honour of your Royal person, the prosperous estate and preservation whereof (most excellent Sovereign) is the thing which we all your most humble loving subjects, according to the most bounden duty of our natural allegiance, most highly desired and pray for.

I like that "timorous" is used twice; also, "most dreadful displeasure". In light of this, maybe you don't have to be a full-on subscriber to the Whig interpretation of history to feel that we're making progress, even though this is exactly how I imagine Bush's advisers have to talk to him. Still, compare More's rhetoric with this story about New Yorkers yelling at Bloomberg for wanting a third term. Democracy in action! And Bloomberg's even richer than Henry VIII was.

Also of note is a little snapshot of More the dad:

...to provoke his wife and children to the desire of heavenly things, he would sometimes use these words unto them. “It is now no mastery for you children to go to heaven. For everybody giveth you good counsel, everybody giveth you good example. You see virtue rewarded, and vice punished, so that you are carried up to heaven even by the chins.” If his wife or any of his children had been diseased, or troubled, he would say to them. “We may not look at our pleasure to go to heaven in feather beds, it is not the way. For our Lord himself went thither with great pain, and by many tribulations, which is the path wherein he walked thither, and the servant may not look to be in better case than his Master.”

I don't really have any opinion, I just like the diction ("carried up to heaven even by the chins" -- my poor children are going to be hearing this, mark my words.) He also taught his daughters Latin, which was considered quite remarkable in his time, while in ours, by contrast, it would merely be considered remarkably eccentric. So maybe change is the only constant.

October 1: Of Princedoms, And Why It Seems Like A Lousy Job, Except For The Meal Plan, Which Is Excellent

It's fast food week!

In case we think the Renaissance was all possibility and overwrought Italian dudes getting models pregnant, Machiavelli reminds us that you might also get yourself beseiged:

Moreover, it is to be expected that the enemy will burn and lay waste the country immediately on their arrival, at a time when men’s minds are still heated and resolute for defence.

The citizens are going to win this war, but still all their cows and stuff were laid waste and burned. And that's when they're ruled by a good prince.

Reading "The Prince" is like opening the owner's manual to your car and seeing that all the chapter headings are about all the complicated stuff you have to do to keep it from blowing up at any moment: "I have already said that a Prince must lay solid foundations, since otherwise he will inevitably be destroyed." In this case, (Chapter XII) it's mercenaries he's talking about -- are there any examples where the use of mercenaries turns out well for a state? -- but consider the poor Popes:

For in the ten years, which was the average duration of a Pope’s life, he could barely succeed in humbling one of these factions; so that if, for instance, one Pope had almost exterminated the Colonnesi, he was followed by another, who being the enemy of the Orsini had no time to rid himself of them, but so far from completing the destruction of the Colonnesi, restored them to life.

You can change water into wine, but Italian politics, you cannot change.

August 17: 16th Century Dudes Part I: Luther

Wrong Luther.

Today we got Martin Luther, and tomorrow is his contemporary Benvenuto Cellini, so I might do some compare-and-contrast as I go. Cellini, of course, is my favorite, because he is such a titantic individual. Luther is a titantic individual too, but denies it; even though he battles with, well, Satan. Or, to give him his proper Italian name, Satani:

Therefore it must have been the arch-devil himself who said, as we read in the ecclesiastical law, If the Pope were so perniciously wicked, as to be dragging souls in crowds to the devil, yet he could not be deposed. This is the accursed and devilish foundation on which they build at Rome, and think that the whole world is to be allowed to go to the devil rather than they should be opposed in their knavery.

The work that's excerpted today is called "To The Christian Nobility of the German Nation," and it must have been music to their ears, because Luther tosses them the keys:

Since, then, the temporal power is baptised as we are, and has the same faith and Gospel, we must allow it to be priest and bishop, and account its office an office that is proper and useful to the Christian community.

When you are familiar with some of the abuses of the Church (just in tomorrow's excerpt, Cellini is given the income from an abbey just for sculpting good), you can see why Luther hoped the way he did -- the princes can't be worse, he must have thought. But of course it led to great bloodshed, so Luther, as it turned out, was a little naive. Naive, too, his hope for a council to help get everything right:

Councils have often put forward some remedy, but it has adroitly been frustrated, and the evils have become worse, through the cunning of certain men. Their malice and wickedness I will now, by the help of God, expose, so that, being known, they may henceforth cease to be so obstructive and injurious.

Whenever you hear someone say that the solution to some dispute (labor, territorial, what have you), is just "get all the parties in the room and lock the door," I beg of you, be more cynical. Luther hoped the same thing, and hoped, in addition, that all we needed was for the good people to have power and the bad people to be crushed. But he was to be disappointed in both hopes.

Tomorrow, however, we will see why a good German burgher might have gotten so horrified in the first place.

July 6: Thomas More, martyr and smooth operator

Utopia is one of those books I read in college which I instantly forgot, and now, years on, I find its prose style forgettable. (It is, I know, translated from the Latin, and so has the old-timey problems that plague most of the translations.) Here's how it starts:

THE MOST victorious and triumphant King of England, Henry the Eighth of that name, in all royal virtues, prince most peerless, had of late in controversy with the right high and mighty King of Castile, weighty matters and of great importance. For the debatement and final determination whereof, the King’s Majesty sent me ambassador into Flanders, joined in commission with Cuthbert Tunstall, a man doubtless out of comparison, and whom the King’s Majesty of late, to the great rejoicing of all men, did prefer to the office of Master of the Rolls.

So there we are, full of debatements and final determinations whereof. It's as if More were the patron saint of lawyers or something! There's one other thing I note, and not to the benefit of the prose either -- which is that More ladles out the flattery like someone introducing the next speaker. It's one thing to overpraise the King (for all the good it did him), but Cuthbert Tunstall? (There's about 100 more words of praise for C.T. that follow). A bit further down we encounter Peter Giles, of whom, "it is hard to say, whether the young man be in learning, or in honesty more excellent."

Utopia having (I looked it up) some radical notions in it, it is possible that all this praise right from the get-go is designed to put the reader off so that only the cognoscenti would bother to proceed. If so, mission accomplished.

Then we meet Raphael Hythloday, who is going to tell us about Utopia, and if I were Idealistic Young English Teacher Who Tries To Make It Relevant, I would talk about how "The New World is like space!" and "Utopia is the first science fiction novel!" but I won't. However, I do like how Raphael is given street cred because he scorns the Latin classics in favor of the Greek ones -- it's sort of (and I guess I can't help relevantizing) like preferring bands before their songs were chosen to be on "Gossip Girl".

The final part of this reading shows that More had paid attention during the many committee meetings he must have sat in on. He and Peter Giles are trying to persuade Raphael to go inside the Beltway and counsel kings, but Raphael says no way:

Moreover, they that be councillors to kings, every one of them either is of himself so wise indeed, that he need not, or else he thinketh [emphasis added] himself so wise, that he will not allow another man’s counsel, saving that they do shamefully and flatteringly give assent to the fond and foolish sayings of certain great men. Whose favours, because they be in high authority with their prince, by assentation and flattery they labour to obtain....Then if a man in such a company...should bring forth anything, that he hath read done in times past, or that he hath seen done in other places: there the hearers fare as though the whole existimation of their wisdom were in jeopardy to be overthrown, and that ever after they should be counted for very fools, unless they could in other men’s inventions pick out matter to reprehend, and find fault at.

It reminds me of a passage about committee meetings in one of those Stephen Potter "Upmanship" books:

If rival makes obviously good bold and original point, counter it
(i) by saying: "Yes, I think that's a good idea -- I wonder if we were right to discard it five years ago where there was all that rows." Or
(ii) if you can only think of something conventional and commonplace as alternative, make your flat suggestions in an "of course I'm completely mad" voice (Flairship) and add: "I know you'll think I'm making a fool of myself, but I think some of us are bound to make fools of ourselves before anything really happens, don't you?" Or
(iii) simply say: "Yes, but that isn't really what we're discussing, is it?"

No wonder "Utopia" means "No place".

May 3: Living in the future

I have to go to a wedding today -- in fact I'm there right now, high atop the Oviatt Building in downtown LA. Here's my view:

Ha! You people all look like ants to me! While, thanks to Blogger's future-posting gizmo, I'm able to do two things at once -- as if I were a single mom!

Unless I screw it up, that is. In which case you guys didn't look like ants at all. I was just playing a character.

Today (or is it...tomorrow?) we have the first four chapters of Machiavelli's Prince, which I know I read in college, because this is the volume of the Harvard Classics I took down to college and lost, requiring me, when I took over this set, to get a slightly different-looking Volume 36 from Alibris. Good times.

Having had to read this book back in the day (for two different courses!) I am surprised by how differently it struck me. Mostly because now I've been in plenty of pitches and meetings and stuff and I appreciate how wicked organized Machiavelli ("Don't call me Nick") is. It becomes clearer when you strip out the examples and re-format (and learning to skim is something else that has only happened to me since college). Here's Chapter I:

Princedoms are either hereditary...or they are new.
New Princedoms are either wholly new...or they are like limbs joined on to the hereditary possessions of the Prince who acquires them....
The States thus acquired have either been used to live under a Prince or have been free;
and he who acquires them does so either by his own arms or by the arms of others, and either by good fortune or by merit.

Can't you just see the Powerpoint? I'd do it myself but I don't know how. (Here, however, and I highly recommend it, is the Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation>.)

I do remember being taught that Machiavelli is not to be trusted -- but not because he's being deliberately obscure, but because he's trying too hard to prove whatever case he's arguing at the moment. He appears to be a serial believer. On the one hand:

The Romans, therefore, foreseeing evils while they were yet far off, always provided against them, and never suffered them to take their course for the sake of avoiding war; since they knew that war is not so to be avoided, but is only postponed to the advantage of the other side. They chose, therefore, to make war with Philip and Antiochus in Greece, that they might not have to make it with them in Italy, although for a while they might have escaped both.

Invading Greece is a great idea! And then a chapter later:

Hence the repeated risings of Spain, Gaul, and Greece against the Romans, resulting from the number of small Princedoms of which these Provinces were made up. For while the memory of these lasted, the Romans could never think their tenure safe.

The invasion of Greece is a bad idea! There is no question that Machiavelli would fit right in on Meet The Press; he may, in some ways, have been the first pundit. Speaking of that, Nick, how do you like the Iraq War? I mean, you were for pre-emptive war just a few paragraphs ago, I'm sure you're not going to change your tune now, right?

But if instead of colonies you send troops, the cost is vastly greater, and the whole revenues of the country are spent in guarding it; so that the gain becomes a loss, and much deeper offence is given; since in shifting the quarters of your soldiers from place to place the whole country suffers hardship, which as all feel, all are made enemies; and enemies who remaining, although vanquished, in their own homes, have power to hurt. In every way, therefore, this mode of defence is as disadvantageous as that by colonizing is useful.

See what I mean? He's so smooth! Machiavellian, even. But can he post from the future?