The Stars My Destination

The Stars My Destination.

The Stars My Destination

I must have been in my early teens when I came across A Treasury of Great Science Fiction, edited by Anthony Boucher. It wasn’t ALL great, but a pretty large percentage of it was, including the four novels that began and ended each of the two volumes. And, in my opinion, the best novel was saved for last: The Stars My Destination, by Alfred Bester.

Bester wasn’t one of the brightest stars of the so-called Golden Age of science fiction that began in the 1930’s when John W. Campbell became editor of Astounding Science Fiction, and began emphasizing literarty quality along with good science and fictional ideas, but he was still a star, with quite a number of arresting short stories, as well as two novels published in the 1950’s. The Stars My Destination was the second of those, and his best work overall, in my opinion. Sometime after it was published he worked fulltime for a magazine, took a long vacation from science fiction, but then returned, 15 or 20 years later, after the magazine folded, to write some more novels, which weren’t bad, but, in my opinion, weren’t quite as good either.

This novel is built on Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, which I had already enjoyed. Like its model, it takes a fairly ordinary man, unjustly imprisons him, and turns him bitter and vengeful. In Bester’s novel the time is in the future, and (as usual) there’s a war going on. The solar system has been colonized, and the Inner Planets and Outer Satellites are at war for reasons no better than the usual. But death and universal destruction threaten, which gives the primary characters a certain amount of motivation.

The other main feature of the story is “jaunting”, which is the ability of people to teleport themselves from one place to another. A large number of people have learned to do this, which has destabilized society, as people are no longer isolated in their home countries. They can and do travel the world, bringing a wave of crime, among other things. But ability to jaunte is limited. No one can jaunte more than 1000 miles at a time, they have to know where they are, and where they’re trying to go. Some have tried to jaunte through outer space, but have never come back.

The main character, Gully Foyle, is motivated by revenge, though. He begins the book as a very ordinary man, who has sort of coasted through life, but now is marooned in a wrecked spaceship, going through a dangerous routine just to survive. Mere survival is the only thing on his horizon, until a spaceship passes by. He shoots of flares, yells and screams (useless in the vacuum of space), but the ship passes him by. Suddenly he is inspired to punish that action, finds a way to make the ship’s engines fire, and eventually is rescued and returned to civilization.

His first attempt at revenge is to try to blow up the ship that passed him by. He fails, and is drawn into the drama behind the scenes of the war. People want something from him, he can’t understand what, and lands in prison. Coincidence brings him in contact with an inmate of the women’s section of the prison: for some reason they can hear each other from a great distance, and she becomes the teacher to Foyle that the Abbe was to Edmond Dantes in The Count of Monte Cristo. Here the story diverges though, as Foyle and the woman with whom he’s fallen in love escape prsion together, unlike Dantes, who only gets his chance to escape when his teacher, the Abbe dies. Foyle has meanwhile discovered one reason why people want information from hm: 20 million credits worth of platinum bullion in the ship he’d been marooned in. That ship has been cemented into an asteroid where Foyle had landed, and been tattooed on the face by the savage people living there. He had escaped in another ship. Now he and the woman head for the asteroids to find the platinum.

When they arrive, they find the ship, get the safe out, then find they’ve been followed. They manage to get the safe into their ship, but it’s so big it blocks the cargo door, so the woman can’t get aboard. Unwilling to be captured, Foyle blasts off and leaves her behind.

When next seen, he has transformed himself. His tattoos have been removed, leaving scars beneath his facial skin, which show blood-red when he gets emotional, so he’s learned to control his considerable emotions. He’s also become something of a showman, spending money voluminously to gain attention so he can travel around the world finding out just why the spaceship didn’t stop to pick him up. Jisbella McQueen, the woman he met in prison, had pointed out to him that the ship itself had nothing to do with what had happened. He had to find out who gave the orders to leave him behind, and why. That is what he sets out to do, in disguise, but disguises are only good for so long, and the people hunting him before become aware of who he is, and are hunting him again.

Meanwhile, the Outer Satellites have been bombing the Inner Planets, so the Inner Planets are getting desperate. During a bombing attack on Earth, he meets the daughter of a magnate, who is beautiful, but can only see in wavelengths that most of us cannot. She doesn’t have normal sight, and though beautiful, she’s also enraged, though she doesn’t often show it. Foyle meets her, falls in love, but then must leave, driven by his obsession with finding the brain behind his desertion. He follows another lead, which takes him to Mars, where he kidnaps a telepath to tell him what the former captain of the ship knows. The captain is a Skoptsy, of a sect that originated in Russia, believing that sexuality was the root of sin, and castrating themselves. In the 24th century, they now believe that sensation is the root of sin, and the captain has entered a monastery after having her (unusually in that culture, the captain is a woman) nervous system turned off. She can’t feel, hear, nor speak, so telepathy is the only way to get her knowledge.

But the telepath is uncooperative. Instead, Foyle is confronted by hinself, in flames, who tells him who the person was that gave the order to pass his spaceship by. It’s the woman he’s only just fallen in love with. He is devastated by the knowledge, but immediately after that discovery, the telepath calls for help, help arrives, and he’s about to be captured when Mars is bombarded by the Outer Satellites. This gives him the chance to escape, but he drives his spaceship so hard he passes out. He wakes to find the woman he loves has rescued him.

Now conscience assails him. He realizes both he and the woman he loves are monsters, and seeks punishment by confessing to a lawyer. But the lawyer is an agent of the Outer Satellites, who wants the secred of PyrE, a material tremendously explosive, which had also been carried by Foyle’s ship, and which can be exploded by Will and Idea: a telepath who wishes fervently enough can explode it. This, after the principal actors pursuing Foyle consult, a telepath does. The lawyer has taken him to the ancient cathedral in New York City where his headquarters currently is, and where a small amount of PyrE is exposed. There’s PyrE in other corners of the world too, but most of it is there, and that amount explodes. There isn’t enough to completely destroy the cathedral, but there’s enough to ravage it, start a destructive fire, and melt a large amount of copper which threatens to engulf Foyle, who is dazed, trapped, and hurled into a condition called synesthesia, in which his senses become cross-wired, so that he hears movement, tastes different materials around him, and so on. Dazed as he is, he tries to escape, and jauntes, but not from one place to another–rather into his past. He’s unable to escape the flames until the telepath who set off the blast explains what he must do. When he wakes up he’s with the people who have been pursuing him.

They want the PyrE from him, and he questions why he should give it to them. The magnate offers him money and power, and, under prodding, his daughter, with whom Foyle has fallen in love. Another man offers him glory, and to excuse his crimes. The woman he left behind in the asteroids explains to him what PyrE is, and urges him to destroy it. But the head of government Intelligence wants something else from him.

Foyle has never been able to remember how he became trapped in the spaceship. Now he’s told that his ship had been disabled by the Outer Satellites, and he had been removed from it, and stranded in a spacesuit where he might lure Inner Planets ships to be desroyed. This ploy hadn’t worked because he had space-jaunted 600,000 miles back to his spaceship. Intelligence wants to find out how he did it. He asks each of them if they’re willing to follow the logic of what they’ve proposed. Is the magnate willing to give his daughter up to the law to be tried for murder? Will the telepath forgive that daughter for murdering her mother and sisters? Is Foyle to allow PyrE to be used against the Outer Satellites to turn his name into another synonym for monstrous behavior? No one answers. Except for a servant robot, apparently deranged by radiation, who suddenly speaks like a philosopher. It tells him that man is a member of society first, an individual second, and must go along with society, even if it chooses destruction. He may disagree, but must teach, not dictate. He must live, not expecting society to stop because he wants to, and if he wants a deeper meaning, must find it in himself. The robot then collapses.

So Foyle jauntes to the gutted cathedral, gets the rest of the PyrE out of the safe, and starts jaunting around the world, throwing pellets of PyrE to the crowds, and exhorting them to find out what it is. The people he’s been talking to follow him, telling him he’s crazy, that ordinary people can’t be trusted with a secret like that. “We’re driven,” says one, “We’re forced to seize the responsibility that the average man shirks.”

“Then let him stop shirking it. Let him stop tossing his duty and guilt onto the shoulders of the first freak who comes along grabbing at it….”

“D’you want to die in their ignorance? You’ve got to figure out how we can get those slugs back without blowing everything wide open.”

“No, I believe in them. I was one of them before I turned tiger. They can all turn uncommon if they’re kicked awake like I was.”

He jauntes to the top of a statue above Piccadilly Circus.

“Listen a me, all you! Listen, man! Gonna sermonize, me. Dig this, you. You pigs, you. You goof like pigs, is all. You got the most in you, and you use the least. You hear me, you? Got a million in you and spend pennies. Got a genius in you and think crazies. Got a heart in you and fell empties. All a you. Every you…”

“Take a war to make you spend. Take a jam to make you think. Take a challenge to make you great. Rest of the time you sit around lazy, you. Pigs, you! All right, God damn you! I challenge you, me. Die or live and be great. Blow yourselves to Christ gone or come and find me, Gully Foyle, and I make you men. I make you great. I give you the stars.”

He jauntes then, but is unable to go where he wants to go. It can be done, he thinks, it must be done. I believe. I have faith.

He tries again and fails again.

‘”Faith in what?” he asked himself, adrift in limbo.

‘”Faith in faith,” he answered himself. “It isn’t necessary to have something to believe in. It’s only necessary to believe that somewhere there’s something worthy of belief.”‘

Then he jauntes to one great star after another that mankind has looked up at and revered for millenia, then finally back to the asteroid from which he had escaped, now in a trance as his whole organism tries to assimilate what he’s experienced. There he is found, and hte priest there says, “He is dreaming. I, a priest, know these dreams. Presently he will awaken and reat to us, his people, his thoughts.”

The book ends there, with Foyle apparently about to become a prophet.

This isn’t a perfect piece of writing, but it’s suffused with a momentum that carries the reader with it to the end. It’s an evolutionary story in which a man begins as nothing and becomes human, then something beyond the ordinary human. It’s a story always applicable to current events, in which humans usually show their worst sides, and all to rarely transcend themselves to become something great. Ordinary people are always lied to, always condescended to by those with power, those who are driven. The exception is the driven person who refuses to be seduced by power and tries to bring others to the higher ground he or she may have found.

I was amazed and inspired by this novel, but didn’t take its lesson, and never accomplished what I could have. But the lesson is still there for anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear. It’s a novel I’d recommend to anyone. The lesson speaks for itself.

Catastrophes

Catastrophes.

Catastrophes

Immanuel Velikovsky may not be a name many people recognize, but 60 years ago it was. That’s when he was publishing a series of books about what he claimed to be mistakes in our vision of history. He claimed that Venus had once been a comet, ejected by Jupiter, and it was later discovered that Venus has a tail. He claimed that Venus had not always been in its current orbit, and that it’s proximity to earth in about 1500 BC had caused the plagues of Egypt described in the Bible, for which he found corroboration in some Egyptian writings.

He claimed a number of other contoversial things too. That the model for the myth of Oedipus had been Akhenaton of Egypt, and that the history of Egypt was misdated, so that Akhenaton lived in the 8th or 9th century BC, instead of about a thousand years earlier. This timeline would make sense of Greek history, which seems to have about a 400 year Dark Age between the fall of Troy and when we begin to know something of Greek history again. Maybe there wasn’t such a long break.

In Earth in Upheaval a lot of Velikovsky’s point is that that the geological and evolutionary theory of Uniformitarianism makes no sense. He doesn’t argue from speculation in this book, but from the writings of scientists of the previous 150 years, more or less.

Uniformitarianism theorized that there were no geological forces operating in the past that we don’t see today, and that geological processes therefore take a very long time. This view was also part of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, and Uniformitarianism is demonstrably false, as Velikovsky duly demonstrates.

We find that there are fossils of tropical life near the north and south poles, that many of the highest mountains in the world are the youngest, and that some of them seem to have risen during the lifetime of the human race, including the Alps, the Himalayas and the Andes. To underline the age of the Andes is the town of Tiahuanaco, situated on what used to be the shore of Lake Titicaca. This is a saltwater lake, with ocan-like life in it, but at a height of 12,500 feet above sealevel. People can survive at that height, but not live comfortably or grow crops, as they evidently did in the Tiahuanico area.

Why did a theory like Uniformitarianism get started? One theory is that it began after the Napoleonic Wars, the chaos of which had disgusted many. The theory was born of revulsion for war. Velikovsky also points out that the theory of ice ages was formulated largely to avoid admitting there had been at least one worldwide flood, as stated in the Bible, and a number of other places. But there is much evidence for at least one flood, and Velikovsky gathers a lot of it in this book.

One is boulders called “erractic stones” found in places to which they’re unrelated geologically. Possibly glaciers could have deposited some of them where they are, though it’s questionable if glaciers could have pushed boulders uphill, but it seems that a particularaly violent flood explains their appearance much better.

Not only that, but there have been findings of the remains of both tropical and arctic animals mixed together. You couldn’t imagine a circumstance in which both sorts of animals lived together, so how did they die together? As a hint, note that in many cases they were torn apart, and/or their bones were mostly broken. Sounds like the effect of a flood. So does finding the fossilized remains of whales all at least a hundred feet above sea level in Alabama, Vermont and Ontario.

The name of the doctrine opposing Uniformitarianism is Catastrophism: the idea that the earth has been shaped by catastrophic events that we often know little about. There is evidence of a worldwide flood, but what caused it? We can speculate, but don’t really know. Not only that, but there’s evidence of extensive vulcanism in that past that makes modern volcano eruptions look like nothing. What was once lava flow covers much of Canada, as well as much of India. Volcanoes were BIG whenever those deposits were laid down.

We also know that many species of animals died at the end of the last Ice Age (there’s evidence of ice ages as well as floods–the problem is attributing the action of floods to glaciers), particularly in North America, but we don’t know why. One clue is that many of these species were of big animals, generally bigger than are alive today, which suggests that there were conditions in which there wasn’t enough food. At least one writer thinks that humans exterminated these animals (we know there were humans in the Americas at the time), but that seems unlikely to me. Not only were there a lot of these animals individually, but a large number of different species, who had been surviving just fine until a certain point at which we don’t know what happened. Mammoths, mastodons, sabre-toothed tigers, camels, horses, giant sloths and giant beavers, to name just a few, used to live in North America. Something happened to exterminate them, and we still don’t know just what.

Catastrophism is becoming more accepted now. It’s generally accepted that the reason for the death of the dinosaurs was an asteroid landing in a shallow part of the Gulf of Mexico near Central America. The tremendous heat generated by that landing killed a lot of life immediately; the dust and gas cast into the upper atmosphere must have blocked off the sun, preventing plants from growing, and possibly starting an ice age. What’s amazing is not so much that the dinosaurs were killed, but that any animals at all survived.

We don’t know the mechanics of all that we find evidence for, though we may eventually find out. In the Bible the declared reason for the flood was mankind’s sinfulness, though it doesn’t go into detail of just what humans were doing that was so sinful. This explanation doesn’t seem to be limited to the Judeo-Christian tradition either. Many cultures, around the world, say that there have been previous worlds, which have been destroyed because of man’s sinfulness. There doesn’t seem to be any theory giving details of how that works, and a lot of people will simply put that view down to superstition. But suppose there’s some truth to it? We can’t say scientifically that this behavior will cause earthquakes, and another will cause meteors to fall. But we’ve entered an age of potential catastrophe that we CAN ascribe to human behavior.

There’s climate change, which is controversial: not so much that it may be happening, but that human behavior may be a primary cause. What’s less controversial is that pollution of various kinds isn’t good for the environment, including human beings. That doesn’t stop pollution, though. There’s money to be made from many pollution-causing actifities, especially in manufacturing and the acquistion of energy sources to power both manufacturing and an awful lot of other human activities, especially in this country.

An essay I read a couple of weeks ago points out that the beginning of the United States of America coincided with the beginning of the industrial revolution, so that our economy has been expanding for most of our history, and our way of life has changed very dramatically in just over two hundred years. My father, for instance, was born in 1906, which means that the manufacture of cars didn’t predate him by much. Radio became a commercial proposition in his teens, and he was very interested in that. Television didn’t become common until he had gotten married, at about the same time that I was born. America changed a lot during that time, and since.

One of the inventions that made life a lot more convenient was the invention of plastic. Working in the medical field, I see quite a variety of things made of plastic that were designed to be used only once, then thrown away. The one problem with this is that plastics don’t biodegrade–unless over a very extensive period of time. I read that there are places in the ocean that there are large amounts of plastic sheeting, in which the sea life gets tangled up. That doesn’t seem particularly smart, on the part of humans.

Plastics are just one of the products of carbon in the form of oil, coal and natural gas, which also are used to make artificial fertilizers, as well as supplying the lion’s share of our energy needs. There’s only one problem with this: we’re running out of these resources.

It was only in the 19th century that oil began to be widely used for providing energy. Now we read that there’s still plenty of oil left, but very little where it can be extracted most easily. That has mostly been used up, a lot of it in the wars of the 20th century and since. It’s notable too that we’ve used these resources wastefully. Many places have automatic doors, for instance. In the case of hospitals and nursing homes this may make sense. I don’t think stores need them quite as badly. Most kitchen appliances are electric now, as I discovered when I tried to find a grinder like my mother had, with which I could make the sandwich spread she used to make, as well as cranberry relish. Electric appliances you can use for grinding usually have a set of blades at the bottom of a large sort of cup. This isn’t a good design for grinding, and it’s wasteful of electricity. I eventually found a hand grinder in a hardware store, which works much better.

The essay I mentioned above displayed a graph of the primary carbon-based energy resources, which showed their extraction rates getting higher into the near future, then all going down precipitously, because there is realtively little of them left. Yes, we can still get more by fracking, but injecting water and chemicals deep into the earth sounds like a risky business to me. Some say it causes earthquakes. I don’t know if that’s true, but I would suspect it causes pollution of the ground water. I know there’s money to be made supplying those resources, but at the cost of poisoning people? And maybe a lot of people?

I shouldn’t be surprised, though. Large industries have been polluting for a long time, and the way we buy their products shows that we don’t mind very much. Do I sound preachy? I might be entitled to be if I lived in way really harmonious with nature, but I don’t. I’m just as much a part of the problem as most people. We’re used to our comforts, and don’t want to lose them. But the time is coming when we’re likely to lose not only our comforts, but our ability to survive.

Suppose we start running low on oil and natural gas (we’re already running low on coal, I understand). Recently electric power in India was blacked out in an area so large that it constituted twice the population of the United States. That’s something we may have to look forward to. Another is the breakdown of transportation, not only of our own personal transportation, but of the freight haulers who bring us food and other supplies we’ve come to depend on. Unless we find other dependable forms of energy and have them ready to carry the load soon, expect not only discomfort, but death.

That’s one of the causes of conflict in the world. Those producing coal, oil and natural gas want to get as much profit out of them as possible, while they still can. That makes them hostile to more environment-friendly resources like wind, solar, etc. You could also make a good case that oil was the main reason for the most recent war in Iraq and the possible war with Iran that some people want us to undertake. Remove oil as a power source, and one reason for conflict is also removed–assuming that other forms of energy and the infrastructure to deliver them are in place first.

Otherwise, we’re going to have a very painful, and possibly very long period of adjustment which could easily be catastrophic if we fail to plan for it and implement an effective plan. I may live to see that, or not. My grandchildren almost certainly will.

The products of cheap energy have been very seductive, and continue to be. But they come at a price. We have recently fought two wars on China’s credit card, which hasn’t seemed very smart. The price of cheap power is on Nature’s credit card, and I see no reason to believe that Nature is going to be more forgiving of us than the Chinese. We can speculate about the reasons for natural catstrophes, but for a lot of the potential catastrophes of this century we have only ourselves to blame.

A Musical Memory

Me and some of my high school friends moved to the nearest big city after we graduated, and started going to a music club called La Cave at a time when almost everyone our age was excited by music.

We all felt the power of it  then. We’d gotten the message from radio and records, and were thirsty for the embodiment of it. That’s what we were there for. Others may have seen it differently, or gone for other reasons, but I think a lot of us felt that music was going to save us, and maybe even saave the world. Moby Grape was one of the bands we saw there.

The band missed the first night they were supposed to be there, so we went back the second night. I knew there were 5 members, but only 4 were there. I didn’t know what had happened, and the band didn’t play much of their own stuff, just played a lot of blues, which I was unable to appreciate much at that time. So I didn’t much care for the show they put on that night, but still listened to their first two albums (especially the second) now and then. Many years later I may have found out something of what was going on then.

The band had been founded by Skip Spence, who had drummed for the Jefferson Airplane, but was more comfortable with a guitar. He’d put the band together, they apparently worked pretty well together, got a pretty big push from their record company, but failed to get very far. Part of that seems to have been because of their manager cheating them, something that wasn’t unusual then. But part of it had to do with Spence.

It was part of the zeitgeist that musicians had to take drugs, and if you were from San Francisco, you had to take psychedelic drugs. Such drugs are volatile in a way that depressants, for instance, are not. Some people who took them never came back. Some felt raised beyond what they usually were; others went straight to hell, or to madness (which may be much the same thing). Spence picked up a fire axe one night, and tried to kill one of the members of the band with it. He then spent some months in an insane asylum. I think that may be why there were only 4 people in the band when I saw them. That incident may have just happened.

The band tried to keep going, releasing at least two more albums in the years immediately following. I didn’t buy them, and I don’t think too many others did either, but there seem to be some people who remember them fondly. And strangely enough, according to what I read in reviews on Amazon, the band kept trying to record together during the ensuing dcades, probably with mixed results.

According to writers on Amazon, two of them had been homeless for awhile in California, while Spence had been in and out of mental hospitals. Then, later, I read that he had died.

All that made one of the songs on the second album particularly poignant for me. The song was called Rose-Colored Eyes, and had a kind of unusual sound. The tune was somber, the guitar sort of skittered around the edges, and there were bass runs between each vocal phrase.

Stars eyes once gazed upon me here/Now fallen ……../ Empty smiles on youth today/And wisdom’s teachers gone away they say….

(There are dots where I can’t remember the words).

Smiling people, crooked toys, walked by the store/ Go ahead to the monkey clock/Said I what for?/A horror sight went laughing too/And broken dreams are just as they are told to you

Tell me I’m wrong/I don’t care if I’m right/I’ll just groove along/….and ring your gong/Forget the breath you’ve stolen each day/And someone prays the rains will come/And that’s today

From there into the bridge:

Heartache, nothing but trouble/haunts my every dream/Sadness, you take me/Inside of that which I have seen….

Then it goes into a spoken word hippie-dippie kind of thing which you have to ignore to appreciate the beauty of the song, after which it returns to the final verse:

…forget the breath you’ve stolen each day/And someone prays the rains will come/And that’s today….

How hauntingly isolated and alienated the singer sounds. I think the writer (who was probably the singer) was one of the band who became homeless later on. Looking back, the song seems to foreshadow that. This was the time of rebellion, as this is the time of counter-revolution. Children just barely grown were asserting their adulthood, often enough in unfortunate ways. Durg-taking,, and especially psychedelic drugs, were supposed to lead automatically to the New Jerusalem. Obviously, it didn’t quite work that way.

As I remember it, there was a kind of hope in the country then that was pretty unique. I was caught up in my own problems at the time, so I only shared it to a certain exent. Maybe it’s just as well I didn’t get lost on some psychedelic journey, but I was lost in another way then, which may not have been a lot better.

Some peoples lives seem to have been consumed with trying to make the world better through protesting, political action of various sorts, and art, and they were much more alive to the the times than I was. Some of them accomplished some pretty wonderful things. A lot of them didn’t accomplish much, or accomplished mostly negative things. That’s the period that a lot of conservatives hark back to now, hating the way my generation helped to change the country. I didn’t take much personal part in that, but liked a lot of the changes, and wish they had gone deeper. But not having made myself deeper in any active way, I didn’t have much of a positive impact on the world. I’m hoping I can do so now, if only in a small way.

I’d like to be someone who brings hope to people, because that helps bring hope to me. Did Moby Grape, or any of the other muscians we saw then do anything important? I don’t know. We saw musicians in other venues besides the club, and some of them bcame quite famous and outstanding musicians. And maybe they were even, some of them significant in a deeper way. A lot of them spoke to me in ways that seemed meaningful at the time, but whether anything I’ve done has been meaningful because of them, I don’t know. The old world passes away, and I don’t know what the new one will be like. If the people I care about have hope, and the possibility of good lives, that will make me happy.

We Need Better Voters

In Friday’s Roanoke, VA Times there’s an editorial entitled We Need Better Voters, by Timothy P. Buchanan. I can agree with a lot of what he says, but not with his conclusions. The writer’s basic postition is that the current presidential election is a struggle between right and wrong, though it hasn’t always been that way. One of my friends sees it in those terms too, but his conclusion is the opposite of this writer’s. Mr. Buchanan’s basic definition of right and wrong has to do with abortion, acceptance of homosexuality, and higher taxes to support wasteful government. His position on these matters is based on sterotypes.

Not everyone sees abortion as a black and white issue. I used to, but from the opposite point of view. My reasoning was that laws against abortion didn’t stop it from happening, but it did prevent women who chose it to have it performed competently. Many such women would have complications that prevented them from ever having children again, and some died as a result from the procedure. That didn’t seem like a good thing to me.

I’m reminded of an article I read many years ago by a woman who got into an argument about abortion with a conservative friend or acquaintence, lost her temper, and said, “Abortion is a matter between me and my God.” She said that inadvertently she had put her feelings into terms her friend could relate to. That suggests that even abortion, which many people DO see as a black and white issue, can be seen from different viewpoints. Does that make it absolutely right or absolutely wrong? Not in my opinion. I believe that, given the right of abortion, the decision should be made for better than superficial reasons, but no one can be forced to make decisions by the criteria or in the spirit that we think they should. As with anything else, some will treat abortion as a serious decision, and others will not.

Homosexuality is another issue that causes a lot of people discomfort. Some consider the Biblical prohibition of it to be the absolute indicator of its wrongness. Others see the Biblical context as having little to do with our times. Just why the subject is so threatening to some people I don’t think many of us understand clearly. Somewhere in the first five books of the Bible, where the prohibition is, is also this quote: “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, sayeth the Lord.” I would interpret this as saying that if there’s something wrong about the practice, God will punish it. Humans need not involve themselves. Many will disagree with that view, especially those who consider homosexuality a choice. If they believe this, then they presumably can make that choice themselves, and until I get clear evidence that at least one person with such beliefs has done so, I will politely disagree. I never felt my own sexual orientation was a choice, and doubt that those who see themselves as gay feel that way either.

There’s no question that government is frequently wasteful, but that’s not true in every case. According to my reading, Medicare, despite a high incidence of fraud (unacceptable, but probably difficult to prevent), is more efficient than private insurance companies, with (according to my memory) approximately 2% overhead, compared to the insurance industry’s average of 20 %. I also read that we have the most expensive health system of the developed world, much of the rest of which has “socialized” medicine. By some this is considered an obvious evil. I used to have a German friend who became a doctor and subsequently worked in many parts of the world. He explained that European governments considered it to their advantage to have a healthy population, which seemed reasonable to me. The whole uproar about “death  panels”  in which the government decided who was to live and who die, actually referred to something we already have: private insurance companies have the power to decide, on the basis of “preexsisting conditions” who gets treatment and who doesn’t. Does this being a private sector phenomenon make it better?

Mr. Buchanan says that Republicans generally favor life over abortion. In the case of abortion, that’s true, but Republicans also generally favor war. That’s a bit of a contradiction. I read tonight about a Pro-Life woman who concerns herself with the welfare of children after birth as well as before. That comes a lot closer to something I can get behind. The article said that she also tries to find ares of agreement with people who disagree with her, and works with them on the issues they DO agree on. That seems much closer to a Christian way of doing things than what we often see.

He says that Republicans also generally support the rights of individuals to create and hold wealth, and the right to do with it as they please. Generally this is true, but says little about the way in which wealth is obtained, for one thing. Many Republicans seem to think that almost any method of obtaining wealth is defensible, and some of the results of that attitude is that jobs get shipped overseas, to the detriment of American workers, and fraudulent practices go unpunished. Recently on Facebook I saw a sign which said, “Why is Bernie Madoff the only crooked banker doing jail time?” or words to that effect. The answer at the bottom was, “Because he stole from the 1%.” That seems to be all too sadly true.

And the question of freedom to do what you want with your money has limits too, and should. Wealthy people shouldn’t be able to raise private armies, for example, or contribute to their favorite politicians doing so, as happened in Germany between the end of the First World War and the accession of the Third Reich. Granted, a lot of what wealthy people choose to do can just be silly–see Romney’s elevator for his cars–but it can be pretty serious too, if you care about democracy.

Mr. Buchanan also says that our government imposes higher taxes “…to fund wasteful government programs, stealing the public’s money through taxation to pay for the basic needs of those who would rather not work for a living.” Here’s a stereotype that only the poor are lazy. Are wealthy people, especially those who have inherited money, more motivated to work than poor people? I would guess they’re often less motivated, and that they often use their money to influence the government to treat them preferentially. I see no good reason for CEO’s to make 300 to 400 times as much as their individual employees, especially when this depresses the economy because ordinary people have little money to spend. I also suspect that I know more poor people than Mr. Buchanan, and can assure him that not all of them are lazy. Laziness is not specific to one social class, though I would suggest that people with inherited money have less reason to want to work than poor people. Most people I’ve known who have been on welfare haven’t particularly enjoyed it.

And a lot of the wealthy who are taxed preferentially aren’t doing anything particularly productive with their “earnings”. They’re often using it to on the stock market and other places to make a profit. Something like what the Marxists used to call the “rentier class”. They don’t work for a living, but let their money make money for them.

A few hours before reading Mr. Buchanan’s piece, I heard a discussion on the radio about disgust. The fundamental form of that is an instinct that helps prevent us from putting things in our mouths that might cause us harm, but the phenomenon strays far beyond that to various ideas that many people are sensitive to, on one side or another. As I was listening to this, I found myself wondering if there was any connection to political mindset, and discovered there was. The people studying this question had discovered that conservatives are generally more squeamish than liberals, and that they prefer low-risk occupations. This seems paradoxical, since those who claim to speak for conservatives seem, at the moment, to idolize entrepeneurs, and to suggest that all of us should become one. It’s hard to think of a higher-risk occupation than being an entrepeneur. Not only do you have to have access to a lot of money, but you have to have a good idea and the ability to implement it. Not many people have all three, and more entrepeneurs fail than succeed, as it is. For years I’ve compared this entrepeneurial idealization to mandating that everyone become a musician. Self-made billionaires, according to another interview I heard on NPR, tend to the world-view that if they can make it, so can anyone else. A friend of mine, who has met a number of successful people, told me that all of them said they’d been lucky. Who’s right? You can probably guess my opinion.

The writer at least admits that Republicans aren’t blameless, as I admit that Democrats are far from blameless themselves. HIs view is that Democratic positions appeal more to people’s basic desires than noble principles. That one I have a lot of trouble with. You can find abortion ignoble, but what’s ignoble about ending discrimination, whether it’s of homosexuality or other minorities? That’s a form of nobility that Republicans don’t seem to get much at all, much less economic discrimination. He points out that adults can become vicious when denied their wishes, just like 2-year olds. That’s not specific to any political party or any other group, though. Consider Sarah Palin.

He ends by saying that we need a better electorate as well as better legislators, and it’s hard to see how anyone could disagree with that. Just what that better electorate, to say nothing of the better legislators would look like is probably in the eye of the beholder, though. If you consider homosexuals and other minorities evil by definition, you’ll have a different view from those who find other people acceptable who don’t look just like them. We don’t just need better voters, we need better thinkers: people who won’t fall for the propaganda of either side.

Carl Jung

Carl Jung.

Carl Jung

The other day I picked up a copy of Carl Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections for the first time in years, looking for a quote that I wanted to use in something else I intended to write. I began reading, and couldn’t stop very quickly, feeling that what I was reading was very wise. This was a bit surprising to me, since I’ve read things since I first read that book which  put Jung in a very different light. So I picked up Richard Noll’s Aryan Christ, and reread that as a corrective.

Noll also encountered Memories, Dreams, Reflections in his teens, as I did, and found it a very powerful book. So did I. For the most part it’s very well-written, and some parts of the story it tells are startling. Noll says that Jung wrote the first draft of the first three chapters of the book, and one of the last chapters. The rest was put together by Aniela Jaffe with editorial help (Noll says “copious”), and really amounts to a hagiography (biography of a saint or saintly person) rather than anything like a complete biography.

According to Noll this was partly Jung’s doing, as he carefully constructed masks throughout his life to conceal aspects he thought others would be put off by, and partly done by Jaffe and the other editors. They didn’t want to include anything that might reflect badly on him, even though there were some things he did want to include.

The first three chapters of the book fascinate because they’re startling. Jung talks about many of his dreams and visions throughout his life, but some of the most surprising are from his early life. One of these, at a time when he was only about 5 or 6, according to him, was a vision of an underground room which he went into and found a gtigantic phallus on a throne. He says he was too young to know what it was, but immediately understood that it was a secret not to be mentioned to anyone else. You’d think this was a vision more suited to Freud, though sexuality was also important in Jung’s life.

The second vision was one of God sitting on a throne, then shifted to a cathedral. As it did so, Jung became conscious of a feeling that if he thought further about this he would be guilty of a sin, and be damned forever, so he tried to avoid thinking about it. He says he tried for three days, then reasoned that seeing this vision must be something God wanted him to do, that he hadn’t asked for the vision, and that it was analagous to the story of Adam and Eve, who disobeyed God before they had enough experience to understand any possible consequences. So Jung let the vision come, and saw a gigantic turd fall on the cathedral and destroy it. His explanation of this was that it was a test by God, similar to tests undergone by Abraham and Job, because he felt blissful after the vision, and interpreted that as God’s grace. At least one author has pointed out that the vision might have expressed his hostility to Christianity, of which Jung had a closeup view  since not only his father, but 8 of his uncles were ministers. Later in the book he says that he listened to their religious discussions, and never felt any of them knew anything about the mystery of the underground phallus or God’s grace. When it came time for him to be confirmed, he says that the bread was a bit stale, the wine was sour, and nothing happened, though he had desperately hoped something would. From that point he was disillusioned with Christianity.

He also mentiones feeling that he was both a Swiss boy growing up in Basel, and an elderly important man living in the 18th century. These are experiences most people don’t seem to have.

One episode of his life that is mentioned in his so-called autobiography, but all the details not given,  is his interest in spiritualism. This took place during his teens, when he gathered with several girls more or less his own age for seances. One of them was his cousin, several years younger than him. Grownups were uncertain about what was going on, and put a stop to it for several years, but then Jung started it again, again with his cousin. Gradually, however, he began to feel that what seemed to be happening wasn’t real: he felt that his cousin was consciously inserting things into what the spirits seemed to be saying because she was interested in him and wanted his attention. The seances stopped, and a couple of years later he wrote a thesis about what had happened, characterizing his cousin as an “hysteric”. Although the names were disguised, people in Basel, where both had grown up, immediately recognized what and who he was writing about. His cousin had been seeing someone, and marriage had been a possibility: the thesis put an end to that, and she died of tuberculosis at an early age.

In his book, Jung says that his choise of psychiatry as a career was happenstance. He was interested in science, but also in the spirit, and realized that psychiatry was the field in which the physical and spiritual “collided”, as he put it. He says that beginning to read Kraft-Ebbing was his turning-point. He found a sentence saying that mental illness was a “disease of the personality”, and felt a tremendous excitement. He says that he had intended to specialize in internal medicine, but this showed him a field in which he could unite both his primary interests.

So after graduating from university he entered the Burgholzli mental hospital in Zurich, and began to try to understand the field he had chosen. He studied hard, as he felt lost for some time, and gradually began to make some progress in understanding his patients. He said that it was necessary to discard all preconceptions and listen to what the patient was trying to communicate, or trying to hide, trying to understand his or her own “language”. He had some notable successes this way, and began to become known in his field.

Perhaps the most famous relationship in the early psychoanalytic movement was Jung’s with Freud. Jung says that Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams was very important to him in understanding how to treat his patients, and he found it necessary to defend Freud when others tried to disparage him. Eventually this led to a friendship between the two of them, and Jung became very important in Freud’s movement.

At the same time this was going on, Jung was being influenced by others. Otto Gross was a son of a famous father (who had largely introduced scientific criminology to the German-speaking world) who was also brilliant, and had become extre,e;u omterested om psychoanalysis. He was also a drug addict, of cocaine and heroin, and a “polygamist”, feeling that sexual repression was evil, and that one shouldn’t say no to one’s sexual desires. Because of his addiction he was being treated in the Burgholzli by Jung, until he managed to escape, and, during the analysis Jung was trying to perform with him, had influenced Jung in the direction of polygamy. Jung had previously treated a young Russian woman named Sabina Spielrein, whom he had helped, and who had fallen in love with him. He had rejected her, but after his time with Gross, decided he wanted a relationship with her. She became his mistress, and being very intelligent, had come up with interesting psychological ideas which Jung used, usually without crediting her.

Although Jung’s relationship with Freud seems at first to have been valuable to both, it eventually devleloped tensions. Jung says it was because of Freud’s insistence that sexuality was the basis of all psychiatric problems, while Jung felt there were other issues comparably important. Jung says he accepted Freud’s authority for some time because Freud was older and more experienced, but in Memories, Dreams, Reflections he manages to sound superior to Freud. He had begun to see things psychology differently, and wrote Transformations and Symbols of the Libido in 1912, which finally broke their friendship. In the very next year he had an experience, not mentioned in his autobiography, which led him to believe that he was a religious prophet.

He had been using a sort of spiritualist technique that he later called “Active Imagination”. In this episode he found himself falling and reached what he realized was the underworld, where he met an old man, a young girl who was blind, and a snake. The old man identified himself as Elijah, and the young girl as Salome. The implication was that these were the biblical figures. In the course of this, the girl told Jung that he was Christ, which he said he immediately denied. At that point the snake wrapped itself around him, up to his chest, he began sweating, and then relaized he was in the physical position of Christ on the cross. He then felt his face changing to that of a lion, and at the same time Salome was cured and able to see again. A pretty strange vision, and not easy to intepret, but Jung took it as a sort of deification, legitimizing him as a religious prophet. That wasn’t something he was ready to say to very many people, but that experience inaugurated a period in which he was close to a nervous breakdown, but also came up with most of his own original ideas. These included his theories of human types, the collective unconsicous and the “gods” that ruled it, which he later called archetypes. These are at least somewhat familiar to most people, if not easy to understand. Jung subsequently became a famous figure worldwide, and his “autobiography” probably cemented that fame. But did it make him a better psychiatrist?

Noll includes several cases of people who worked with Jung and didn’t seem to profit a lot. One was an American woman related a one of the most prominent American psychiatrists of the time, who became upset when he heard how Jung was treating her. The record is ambigouous. Maybe she did profit from her treatment, but it’s not clear that she did.

Another American woman, very wealthy, was treated by Jung for agoraphobia, an inability to leave home and be around other people. She became fascinated with Jung and psychoanalyisis, gave him money, helped publicize his work, and even practiced pyschoanalysis herself. She was never able to cure her problem of agoraphobia, though, and in the years she stayed in Zurich to be treated her marriage broke up, and she ended her life some years later in poverty.

One turn that Jung’s practice seems to have taken at this point was to demand that his patients follow his example in eliciting visions and expressing them in writing or drawing as he did. That seems different from his previous attitude of trying to find the patient’s own language. Noll recounts a story from the 1930s in which Jung’s wife told him that he was never interested in his patients unless they exhibited something to do with the collective unconscious, at which point, according to Noll, Jung shut up.

The problem with the idea of the collective unconscious, as valid as that idea may be, is that what Noll calls “cryptomnesia” may affect it. Things one has been previously exposed to may surface in the sort of visions Jung had, and be taken for something new, when they’re not. Noll points out that Jung was very well-read in mythology, and the Lion-headed god which he supposedly became was not something he had never heard of. He apparently wasn’t above lying about that sort of thing either, when there was a question of whether someone had been previously exposed to an idea or image. This makes the concept of the collective unconscious questionable. I’m inclined to think there is such a thing, but Jung was unable to prove its existence, and apparently was aware that he hadn’t. Nonetheless his visionary experiences seem to have been very rich, and to have meaning for others. Jung was a charismatic man, and his autobiography seems to say that he felt he had accomplished something great. I think he had accomplished something, but that whatever it was wasn’t quite what he thought or claimed.

He was trying to reinvigorate religion, and this led him away from Christianity and into pagainism. To understand this we have to understand an important tendency beginning in the 18th and 19th centuries, when Germans became particularly nationalistic (especially after Napoleon’s defeat), and incorporated theories of race into that nationalism. We may forget that until the later 19th century Germany was not united, but was dozens of different states, small and large. Many of these were incorporated into one state by Prussia in 1870, something that a lot of people had been hoping for a long time.

Part of German nationalism was the idea of the Aryan race as being different from others, which went with the idea that, on the one hand Jesus had been Aryan, and on the other hand that Christianity wasn’t a suitable religion for Aryans–or Europeans in general. Some thought that Jesus’s father had actually been a German Roman Centurion who had been stationed in Judea. Others considered the Semitic race to be older than the Aryans, and urbanized in a way Europeans weren’t. This sounds impartial, but it wasn’t too distant from the anti-Semitism that had exsited in Europe for most of the previous 2,000 years. And after the Jewish attempt to assimilate in the 18th century, anti-Semitism was reactivated in the 19th century. The composer Richard Wagner, politicians in Austria and the Dreyfus case in France were all prominent in this process. Many people hoped for a German messiah. Jung nominated himself for the position, but it was taken by Adolph Hitler. Hitler’s legacy makes it difficult to understand the background of Jung’s beliefs, and to discern anything positive in them.

The dissatisfaction with Christianity was fairly widespread, because it seemed to many to be ritual without any substance. Jung, among others, wanted to make religion alive again. There are still people who feel that way, and often reject traditional Christianity, while traditional Christians have, in some cases, gotten more extreme. Aleister Crowley and George Gurdjieff were two almost exact contemporaries of Jung with very similar messages. Crowley was a practitioner of ritual magic, and never as popular as Jung. He was seen as being disreputable, and often was. He too rejected Christianity. Gurdjieff was undeniably Christian, but had little use for organized religion. All three taught individual transformation, with limited success. Jung became probably the most popular of the three, though all have retained some influence since their deaths.

Jung said of his particularly visionary period during the First World War when he came very close to a nervous breakdown trying to integrate what he was experiencing, that it was necessary to treat his visions ethically, that they weren’t just for him, but for the rest of the human race too. Unfortunately, he was less than ethical in other areas of his life, from his treatment of his spiritualist relative to his treatment of his patient and mistress, Sabina Spielrein, to his treatment of Freud, and including at least some of his subsequent patients. Noll also points out that Antonia Wolff, who became Jung’s mistress at the beginning of his visionary period and evidently collaborated with him in his theorizing, as well as helping him retain his psychological balance, was important to him in a way his wife couldn’t be. His wife, though very intelligent herself, found it difficult to follow Jung’s theorizing, and also had five children to take care of. Noll says that at best she accepted Jung’s “polygamous” activities. She wasn’t consulted about them.

There seems to be little doubt that Jung experienced things most people don’t, but that doesn’t, in itself, make him a good man. Like many others, he was sometimes good and sometimes not so good. His experiences may have made him good in some respects, but they didn’t make him absolutely moral, as far as people lacking such experiences can judge. Richard Noll’s book illuminates some previously unseen corners of Jung’s life, but doesn’t give any final judgement on the man. His autobiography remains powerful, but as Noll points out, must be taken with a grain or more of salt.

 

Thoughts About Columbus Day

I just got reminded that Columbus Day is coming up. Some may feel we shouldn’t celebrate it since Columbus, as has been pretty clearly shown, was certainly not the first person from a different continent to discover America. The Vikings did it about 500 years before, Some believe the Templars also did it after Philip the Fair of France had them proscribed, and tried to steal all their money. It seems that he got relatively little of it, the Templars were at least somewhat aware of his plans, and many of their ships sailed before their crews and passengers could be arrested. Some of them seem to have gone to Scotland, but there’s evidence in a small church built by the Sinclair family in Scotland that at least some of the Templars were aware of the continents west of Europe. Some say some of the Welsh also settled in the Americas, and there were tribes of “white” Indians living somewhere in North America, who seem to have gotten exterminated once the massive influx of Europeans began.

More anciently, the west coasts of the American continents seem to have been influenced by travelers from Asia, and at least some of the Central and South American peoples seem to have traveled west across the Pacific too. In Costa Rica are a great many large round stones, placed in groups, usually of three, which seem to have been used as aids to navigation.

Besides that, a Roman galleon was found sunk off the coast of South America. Probably this was accidental: the ship most likely was blown off-course, and reached the vicinity of South American before sinking. Even more interesting is the discovery that a good many ancient Egyptian mummies had, as found in tissue samples, been using cocaine and tobacco. There may be some species of tobacco original to the Old World, but as far as I know, the coca plant is successfully grown only in South America.

But while Columbus was by no means the first to make trans-oceanic journeys, his discovery of what would later be called the Americas was a real turning-point in history: many Europeans became anxious to explore, to settle and to exploit the new lands for as much wealth as they could extract, either by outright armed robbery, mining, or agriculture. Many Europeans came here to get rich quick, which a fair number did, but there were other reasons too, one of the major ones being religious freedom. Many saw the Americas as a way to make a new and better life, in whatever way attracted them. It’s been more than 500 years since that process began. How has it worked out?

North American countries (Mexico being an exception) are some of the richest countries in the world. In South America Brazil is also wealthy, and perhaps Argentina. Most of the other Latin American countries are not. Several of the groups seeking religious freedom didn’t advocate it for anyone else, and their doctrines proved unattractive to those with different goals. Still, there’s always been a strong religous presence in this country (perhaps less so now, or maybe the form of it has just changed), and freedom of religion is still available in this country, and appreciated by many.

The USA, and to maybe a lesser extent Canada, did become wealthy countries; in the case of the USA, largely built on slavery. That’s one of the less than positive aspects of the colonization of the New World. And with that came racism, which I think can be seen mostly as an attempt to justify slavery. Slavery had been a constant part of the ancient world, and if Europeans didn’t keep slaves in Europe (I think some must have, even if relatively few), serfdom wasn’t a great deal different.

Racism is peculiar in that it doesn’t seem to have existed in ancient times, and in its present form seems to be a relatively recent phenomenon. Almost any human group has been and usually still is xenophobic, to greater or lesser extent. People generally are afraid of strangers, but that’s different from the virulent hatred aroused by various groups: Jews, blacks and homosexuals are some of the favorite targets, rather than just random strangers. The historic roots of this probably begin in Europe, but the particular hatred of blacks seems to have been mainly a product of this side of the ocean. The Founding Fathers of our country were aware of the problem slavery represented, though they may have been less aware of the problem of racism, which in this country seems to be a sort of justification for slavery, though it has subsequently taken on a life of its own. That’s a big part of the dark side of this country, which counterbalances all the positive things in our history.

Not that racism or genocide are unique to this country, though the particular shape they’ve taken here may be. One student of the history of violence says that it was only in the last century that people began to think there was something wrong with genocide (a lot of people still don’t), so that attention was paid to it. In this country, a large percentage of genocide was unintentional: native Americans had no immunity to European germs, so many of them died from epidemics or even pandemics, quite possibly never even having seen a European in many cases. We can’t exonerate our ancestors completely, though: when they discovered that their presence literally made the natives sick some amplified the effect by giving the Indians blankets deliberately exposed to smallpox.

But racism and genocide haven’t been the only realities of this country. Our government became one of the first democracies of modern times (since the
Greeks and Romans), though England’s constitutional monarchy reseembled and preceded our government. Our revolution inspired both the French and Haitian revolutions shortly after ours, and it’s instructive how those differed from ours.

Haiti’s revolution was significant in one way: it’s the only successful revolution we know of by slaves. Toussaint L’Ouverture was an outstanding leader who managed to defeat both the French and English, while trying to find common ground with whites. He might possibly have succeeded if the French hadn’t taken him to France and imprisoned him in the Alps, where he died of lung disease. But it’s unlikely that Haiti could have successfully existed as a separate country, since it was so small, in a region where three great powers contended. None of the leaders following had the wisdom of Toussaint, so the military was allowed to become ineffective, whereupon France imposed a penalty on Haiti for the loss of revenue its loss as a colony represented. At the time of the rebellion it had been the most profitable colony in the world; now it may be the poorest country in the Western hemisphere.

France’s revolution was another matter. There had been bitterness during the American revolution since a large percentage of people had no desire to become independent of England, and there was some violence because of that, but not to the same extent as France. The United States of America were fortunate to escape the massive Terror that France endured, and even more fortunate in its political leaders. Someone said that we’ve never had as many outstanding political leaders in this country since then, and I believe it. George Washington set a precedent by not becoming a king or dictator. He served two terms as president, then retired. Napoleon didn’t have that kind of humility, or did have that kind of hubris. I also greatly respect Washington for something I only learned recently: while president he brought quite a number of his slaves to Philadelphia (then the nation’s capitol) and freed them there. Unusual for a southerner, though it seems that when young he had been friends with another young man of mixed blood, so he may have sympathized more with blacks than most people of his region and class.

The most defining struggle this country has had has been the Civil War, and while it’s tempting to paint that in black and white to say it was a struggle between good and evil, it obviously wasn’t that simple. One notable thing about it was that black slaves, about whom the war was ostensibly fought, came out worse than almost any other group participating (poor southern whites may have been a close second). Neither northerners nor southerners liked or sympathized with blacks much. The war was essentially a regional affair, with southerners fearful of losing their “peculiar institution”, and northerners feeling that southerners were treating THEM like slaves. Ultimately, I doubt that many of the participants had a very complete understanding of the issues, and they’ve never been resolved, still tormenting us today.

I don’t think it was just a matter of racism, but also a question of who would hold power. American imperialism might be seen as an endeavor related to that of slavery: becoming wealthy through theft. Slaves had been stolen from their own countries and brought to this one, where their labor did a great deal to build the country without their getting much recompense for it. In the early to mid-19th century, first Thomas Jefferson made the Louisiana Purchase (which Napoleon agreed to because he had just lost the colony of Haiti and needed money), then James Polk fomented the war with Mexico, which brought us the other part of the western half of this country (leaving out Texas, which has its own story). Part of the disagreement leading to the Civil War was whether these territories would be slave or free, and we can only say that the story of this country would have been much different if, first, we had never acquired those western territories, and second, if the north had lost the Civil War. As it was, slavery as an institution had failed, while imperialism as a strategy had succeeded. I might suggest that both activities spring from the same impulse: for one group to profit at the expense of another. This desire was nothing new or unusual, but it was part of the process of turning the New World into a copy of the Old World.

At the end of the 19th century and throughout the 20th, imperialism was largely the way the USA did things. We forced Spain into a war it didn’t want in order to take its remaining colonies, and intervened in a number of other countries for the benefit of big businesses primarily. Some might try to justify these interventions, but they should be asked if they would justify another country’s intervention into our internal affairs.

Throughout American history there have been waves of reform. Andrew Jackson reformed the banking system and extended the voting franchise from property-owners only to almost any citizen, except for women and slaves at that time. Theodore Roosevelt, while in favor of imperialism, did reform the financial system and initiated national parks as a method of conservation. During the Great Depression Franklin Roosevelt initiated many reforms in an effort to end the Depression, but was unable to do so until the Second World War gave an overwhelming stimulation to the economy, and provided an economic model for the rest of the century.

The foundation laid during the Depression made the country extremely prosperous in the 1950s and later, but there were predatory forces in the country operating throughout that time, which became more obvious later. Our interventions in other countries continued, and later in the century the system that had bolstered the middle class started to come undone, and there was a resurgence of class warfare (which had always existed to some degree in the country), though it was rarely called by that name, complicated by racism. The Civil Rights legislation of the middle 1960s had changed some lives for the better, but had led to great bitterness on the part of many whites.

That’s pretty much where this country is today. At least two conspicuously different mindsets contending for power, neither of which is entirely virtuous, though different people will consider one side more virtuous than another. Many have considered the political system of the United States worthy of great adulation, and the foundation of our power in the world. Thomas Friedman pointed out, in at least one book, that as positive as our political system has been, we were fortunate in many other ways as well. We have a large country, with a large percentage of arable land, a favorable climate, and lots of natural resources. Few other major powers of today or the recent past have all of those advantages. China has lots of territory, but less arable land, and a much higher population. Russia also has much territory, but less arable land, and an inhospitable climate. As good as our political system may be, it wasn’t the only reason for our ascendence, and having been designed by humans (even though relatively wise humans), and operated by humans, it has been as susceptible to corruption as any other human institution.

Everything about the European takeover of the New World hasn’t been bad, but not everything has been good either. And there are few things in the world that can objectively be said to be unequivocally good. Idealists would like to have seen this hemisphere produce more highly evolved human beings. Technology has changed our ways of living, but it hasn’t produced better people. Those who have profited from the way the country has worked tend to like things the way they are. Things will change, no matter what we do, but we can hope to make the changes positive. This is an interesting time to be living, to watch the collision of the various worldviews, and to hope that something good and decent will come out of it all. Results have been mixed before, so it’s unrealistic to think that they won’t be mixed again. This continues to be an interesting process to watch.

A Comparison of Leaders

It might be simply a truism that sociopaths are attracted to power. Governments are generally not led by nice people, though there have been some notable exceptions. Governments are also generally not nice institutions, though some are obviously better than others.

Two of the most notorious dictators of the 20th century were clearly very able in their own ways, but also seem to have been driven by deep feelings of inferiority. One of them was Adolph Hitler.

Between 35 and 40 years ago I first came upon a book entitled The Spear of Destiny, which depicted Hitler as a black magician who had allowed the spirit of the Anti-Christ to possess him. I had been reading about the Nazis and Communists for several years previous, trying to understand why they behaved the way they did. This theory seemed as plausible as any to me, and the narrative was compelling. I stopped short of total belief, however.

Several years later I came across another book about Hitler that fascinated me: Hitler: the Psychopathic God, which delved into Hitler’s background and attempted to psyco-analyze him. This also seeemed plausible to me, but I didn’t become a total true believer either. Ron Rosenbaum’s Explaining Hitler looked at the great variety of theories about the man, and what he felt and believed. A number of these theories he exploded without much difficulty. The theory he himself opted for may or may not be correct, or it may be as close as we’re going to get to understanding.

The problem with Hitler as black magician is, what about Stalin and Mao, his contemporaries who both surpassed him as killers?  Were they also inspired by the Anti-Christ? Or were their slaughters simply less noticed by western observers? Stalin ruled Russia, at least somewhat alien to western Europe. Mao ruled China, which was even more so, and both were able to control (at least to some extent) the news of their murders. Hitler did too, but Germany was and is part of western Europe, and part of our own cultural group, as the other two countries are not. Whether he was more evil or not, he made a greater impression here than did Stalin or Mao.

What were the reasons for Hitler’s feelings of inferiority, and how did he manifest them? One part of the theory of the Psychopathic God’s author, Robert G.L. Waite, was that Hitler had only one testicle (I remember a little song to that effect, as a child. so a number of people must have believed it in those years not so long after the war), and this was a main basis for feelings of inferiority. That theory may or may not have some truth to it, but there seems to be no question that Hitler did suffer from feelings of inferiority.

Rosenbaum recounts a journey taken to the area where Hitler’s ancestors came from, and tells how Hitler had moved the inhabitants out to make the small town part of an artillery range. Rosenbaum comments that there must have been things there that he didn’t want anyone finding out.

One of them could have been just who his father’s father was. Hitler’s grandmother had never been married, had given birth around the age of 40, and had never been willing to tell the name of the child’s father. One legend had it that she had worked for a wealthy Jewish family as a servant, and had been impregnated by her employer’s son. Research has seemed to say that this legend has no factual basis.

But Hitler’s father Alois, spent the first about 40 years of his life as Schickelgruber, then suddenly changed his last name to Hitler. If anyone knows why, I haven’t heard of it. Some have suggested that had Adolph Hitler retained the name of Schickelgruber, he would never have been as successful: Heil Schickelgruber doesn’t really have the same ring to it.

But Hitler does seem to have feared that his blood was polluted by some less than German strain. It might have been Jewish, as the aforementioned legend suggests; in that case, maybe his anti-Semitism was at least partly a way to prove he WASN’T Jewish–I’m persecuting Jews, so I can’t possibly be one.

Rosenbaum cites a journalist who became an anti-Nazi very early, and seemed able to get into Hitler’s head, to understand what he was thinking. An example was a piece the journalist wrote in which he said that Hitler didn’t look Aryan, he looked more Mongolian, and indeed Hitler seems (at least from outward appearance) to have been an unlikely advocate of the Aryan race. According to Rosenbaum, at the time this journalist’s piece was published, Hitler seems to have been thinking quite a bit about the Mongols at the time of Genghis Khan, fantasizing about the many people they killed during the military campaigns that conquered substantial parts of Asia, and brought them to the threshold of Europe before they turned back. They inspired Hitler to thoughts of genocide, it seems, which he may have begun thinking about as early as the end of the First World War.

Rosenbaum and others note that Hitler was a role-player, and one author suggests that he felt unable to live up to the roles he aspired to. One has him telling his mistress Eva Braun, that she shouldn’t expect anything of him (or words to that effect), presumably in the sense of sexual relations. Having a great many secrets that he felt unable to expose may indeed have hampered his sexual life.

And there seems to be little doubt that he had a strong Oedipus Complex, very strongly loving his mother (though ambivalently), while hating his father, who seems not to have been a very nice person, particularly in sexual matters. In the Psychopathic God, Waite says that Hitler spoke of Germany as his Motherland, contrary to common usage. Most Germans refer to Germany as der Vaterland, and Hitler also spoke of having conquered his Motherland, which is quite suggestive. This paints a picture of an unusual personality, and one that Hitler may have felt compelled to keep hidden.

Josef Stalin was like Hitler in some ways, but unlike him in others. He and Hitler respected each other a good deal, and Hitler probably modeled his own regime at least partly on what the Communists had previously done in Russia. But there were differences too. Hitler’s father worked for the Customs authority in Austria, and had risen from poverty to modest prosperity by his own efforts. Stalin’s family was poor, and his father was a drunk. He left Stalin’s life relatively early, and though he beath the boy, so did Stalin’s mother. This seems to have had an unfortunate effect on Stalin, though it’s hard to say how much of one.

Stalin’s family situation seems not to have been good, but how much it shaped him is questionable. One thing that probably did have a major effect on him was his time in a seminary, training to be a priest. The seminary seems to have represented everything he most hated, and he went directly from there into life as a professional revolutionary. One of Stalin’s biographers says that his first public notice came from having a poem published in a magazine in the Caucasus region where he grew up. He calls Stalin both a poet and a gangster, and depicts him having created a reign of terror in the Caucasus through bank robberies and kidnappings, all to finance the Bolshevik Party, which had been named and taken over by Vladimir Lenin at the beginning of the 20th century. Stalin was obviously able too, rising from nothing to become the dictator of the gigantic Russian empire, but he too had inferiority feelings.

Some of these may have come from his family background, but some seem to have come from comparisons between him and other figures of the Bolshevik Party and the Russian revolution. Others, like Trotsky, Linoviev and Kamenev (to name only a few) were more obviously brilliant than Stalin, were better writers and speakers, but ultimately were not as able. He outmaneuvered and killed most of them, destroying the Old Bolsheviks (as members of the party were known whose participation predated the Revolution). Stalin had not been well-liked among that group, so he slowly began getting rid of them and building his own constituency among younger men who had mostly entered the Party after the Revolution.

Both men lost women they were intimate with, whose loss probably affected both strongly, though it’s difficult to say exactly how with any precision. Hitler lost Geli Rabaul, his neice and lover, and it seems very likely that he killed her himself, though probably not on purpose. He had wanted to control her whole life, which she had begun increasingly rebelling against. At the time of her death it was rumored that she had a lover whom she wanted to marry, who was Jewish. Obviously, this would not have made Hitler happy.

Stalin lost his wife, with whom he had been married since about the time of the Revolution. One biographer characterizes their marriage as being fairly happy, but that Nadezhda Alliluyeva was somewhat mentally unstable. It’s been suggested that Stalin killed his wife, but this seems to be less likely than in the case of Hitler. On the other hand, it seems that she also felt that he was trying to control her too much, and resented it. This too may have influenced Stalin, as Geli Rabaul’s death may have influenced Hitler, but it’s hard to say just how. Both men had committed atrocities before these deaths (both of which occurred in the early 1930.s). The Nazi party had, according to Rosenbaum, early on decided to enhance their political chances through murder. Stalin had been a dominant force in Russia since the early to mid 1920s, and had recently ordered the forced collectivization of Russian farmers, which had caused devastation. Both he and Hitler would go on to do even worse things, but they had both already committed acts which we consider criminal.

How did their feelings of inferiority affect them? Obviously both were able men. One of the perplexing symptoms in Stalin was his desire to rewrite history to show that he had played a more important role in the Bolshevik party before World War I and the revolution than he had. One might think his accomplishments thereafter might have been enough for him, as they were not inconsiderable. With Hitler, the feelings of inferiority seem more basic, as they seem to have involved his sexuality and feelings of masculinity. A man who considers brutality a positive feature of masculinity has a somewhat odd viewpoint. Stalin was certainly brutal, and apparently towards women to some extent, as well as men, but Hitler seems to have been actually perverted. Waite suggests that his Oedipal feelings were so strong that he feared the usual forms of sexual experience. There’s no doubt that both men were sadistic, but some question as to whether their paths to that state were similar.  Both were obviously resentful, and may have felt that feelings of inferiority were imposed on them by the bad opinion of others. That seems plausible, but is still just speculation.

Would we not find feelings of inferiority among most national leaders, even those most respected and beloved? That seems possible, but difficult to answer definitively. Abraham Lincoln may possibly have been the greatest president in the history of the United States, though some must have considered him a monster then, and some probably still do today. Certainly his acts caused much death and destruction, and the war he presided over remains the most traumatic of our history. But Lincoln seems to have agonized over his decisions, and not made them out of bloodlust or joy of destruction, as Hitler and Stalin did. Was he more or less able than them? Like them, he didn’t come from a greatly respected family, but made his own way, and rose to great power. He seems not to have been terribly happy with power–at least not in the way that Hitler and Stalin seem to have been. Could he have done better than he did? The question doesn’t seem to be very answerable, since he seems to have tried to do his best, while both Hitler and Stalin preferred to do their worst.

I can’t find a clear-cut answer to these questions, though asking them seems interesting. Many ingredients go into human behavior, and it’s difficult to say just how much Hitler and Stalin consciously chose evil, though it seems pretty certain that they did. Maybe some aspect of their family lives, historical forces, and maybe even the influence of the stars presented them with the abilities that they felt could be more easily turned towards evil than good. Maybe it’s something of an accident that Lincoln seems to have been generally a virtuous man. In the end, we have some idea what these men did, but just why they did what they did, interesting as the question is, remains elusive.