Leviathan

The idea of a social contract matters, of civil society. Would one prefer some kind of ideal like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness or a permanent state of violent chaos?

Check out what Thomas Hobbes wrote about living without any order or rules or social contracts or government whatsoever:

"where every man is Enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength . . . no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short."

-- Hobbes, Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Common Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil, 1651.

In 2013, let's take something as basic as water. If there were no rules on water usage, what do you suppose would happen during this year's droughts? If there was no government service, how do you suppose people would acquire water on a daily basis in most places? Yet destruction of government is exactly what Tea Party ideology stands for. Yes, ideas matter -- especially when put into practice.

Today's Rune: Defense.   

Wicked Company, Part 1

Ideas matter. The idea of a social contract matters, of civil society. Would one prefer some kind of ideal like life, liberty and the pursit of happiness or a permanent state of violent chaos?

Check out what Thomas Hobbes wrote about living without any order or rules or social contracts whatsoever:

"where every man is Enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength . . . no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short."

-- Hobbes, Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Common Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil, 1651.

In 2011, let's take something as basic as water. If there were no rules on water usage, what do you suppose would happen during this year's droughts? If there was no government service, how do you suppose people would acquire water on a daily basis? Yet destruction of government is exactly what Tea Party ideology stands for. Yes, ideas matter -- especially when put into practice.

I finally finished Philipp Blom's excellent tome, A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment (Basic Books, 2010), which plunges the reader into the fizz and excitement of interconnected thinkers, dreamers and philosophes of the 1700s. Do their ideas matter now, more than two hundred years later? Hell, yes! To be taken up in the next post.

Today's Rune: Fertility.

Larry McMurtry: Literary Life

Larry McMurtry's Literary Life: A Second Memoir (Simon and Schuster, 2009) is a quick, enjoyable read. I recommend it for anyone who writes or has an interest in the writer's life.

McMurtry is one of a rare breed in the USA: the writer who sustains a living almost entirely from writing; in his case, through novels, screenwriting and nonfiction. Money matters, McMurtry makes realistically clear, is always an issue for most writers; in this memoir, he evokes the pressing financial concerns of Honoré de Balzac and Charles Dickens, among others, as prime examples. He's frank about writing conferences and worshops, too -- they are done mostly for earning income.

Literary Life touches on a lot of topics, not only writing but also reading, teaching, history, book collecting, aging and matters of style. McMurtry also discusses in mordant, irreverent terms his presidency of the American PEN American Center (PEN being, by its own defintion, "A global literary community protecting free expression and celebrating literature"). Which reminds me to underscore this: Larry McMurtry, despite his Pulitizer Price and Academy Award, is an independent "man of letters" (just as he has aspired to be) and, really, an iconoclast or, as he puts it, a "Hobbesian cynic." His take on other writers is often hilarious.

How long will Larry McMurtry keep writing? "In most cases it's probably the Reaper, rather than the writer, who decides what the final book will be" (p. 168). He admits to being surprised every time he finishes another book, especially a work of fiction.

Of the many McMurtry books I've read so far, these are my favorites:

Horseman, Pass By (1961)
The Last Picture Show (1966)
In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas (1968)
All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers (1972)
Terms of Endearment (1975)
Texasville (1987)
Crazy Horse (1999)
Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen (1999)
Duane's Depressed (1999; McMurtry's stated favorite of his novels)
Roads: Driving America's Great Highways (2000)
Paradise (2002)
Books: A Memoir (2008)
Literary Life: A Second Memoir (2009).

What strikes me is how easy he makes them all seem to have been written -- because they're so easy to read. But we all know good writing is rarely as easy as it looks.   Cheers to Mr. McMurtry. I look forward to his third memoir, on Hollywood; and to a good biography about him. 

Today's Rune: Partnership.

Secrets of the Invisible World

I was driving my car on Interstate Highway 94 the other night at the height of a snow storm when another car came zooming by me like a bat out of hell, going way too fast for the icy roads and wild snowpacked crosswinds. It came as no surprise that this enemy driver crashed into the concrete median and spun out of control.

Glad to be alive, I still wonder: what prevents an entire society -- or a whole civilization, if you will -- from spinning out of control?

It's certainly not rational behavior -- if we consistently acted with even a modicum of common sense, we'd all be living in a new Eden.

Yet many of us clearly do want to survive and evidently we must also be hoping to thrive, aiming to fulfill basic human needs and way more than the minimum, maybe "luck into some shit," as the saying goes, along the way.

How dependent are we on negatives to keep things from sliding into total anarchy?

How much are we willing to give up with the idea -- even if we are not fully conscious of it -- that we can still enjoy some individual freedom in exchange for abiding by such things as traffic rules, working with clowns, laws, insurance, taxes, rent/mortgage/regular payments, banks, police, military, construction, politics, media conglomerations, for-profit sports seasons, religious and miscellaneous cultural institutions and various other forms of social control/civil society/social outlets?

Is Iggy Pop essentially correct when he says, "Man is the Village animal, united by the glue of our loathesome qualities"? Or just as creepily on target with: "Just the night for a conquering tribe"?

How thin is the veneer of civilized bahavior? Iraq and Afghanistan have become like the Wild West only with bombs and suicide bombers added into the mix. Are they functional societies? Would they be even semi-functional without large occupying armies in their midst, or would they be more so? Does a country like Iraq require what Thomas Hobbes dubbed "The Leviathan," a strong authoritarian center, does one like Afghanistan require decentralized tribal leadership instead of a unifying government?

Here in the USA, whole sections of the the fabric of our society have been tested many times, most recently after 9/11 with the Great Blackout of 2003 and hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005. Society collapsed in places, sometimes for days and sometimes for weeks or months.

But overall, resilence and survival instinct kicked in, apparently. What might cause complete collapse and how long would it last before something new came along? A common question explored in horror and science fiction, which is one of the things besides entertainment that makes them so valuable.

All I know is, I'm glad that asshole driver crashed his own car and not into me.

Today's Rune: Defense.

Today's Birthdays: Chaim Potok and Marian Anderson.

Kudos to Clint Eastwood for being inducted into France's Légion d'honneur by President Jacques Chirac, an honor first created by Napoleon I in 1802.

Here's to the joie de vivre!