Made of Paper: Discovering George Orwell

About the time I was 15 and 16 years old, I became fascinates with the works of George Orwell.  I don't recall which book I read first, but it was probably 1984. While that may have been Orwell's most important work, I believe I liked his autobiographical Down and Out in Paris and London best. Someone said of that book that "going native" is a characteristic of English adventurers (think Sir Richard Francis Burton) and that Orwell in Down and Out went native in his own land. Orwell was a perpetual outsider, which was probably what made him such an incisive critic of his own society and probably also makes him so difficult to place on our "left" "right" political continuum today. As an outsider, he penned the bitter criticisms of the vulgarity of contemporary civilization in The Road to Wigan Pier and Keep the Aspidistra Flying  and as an outsider he decried the shallowness and mendacity of modern politicized intellectual life. Orwell's essay "Politics and the English Language" (reproduced here) is probably the best thing written on style.

Made of Paper: Books of Early Adolescence



By the time I entered junior high school, I had developed the habit of reading by the author. I’d find an author I liked and then look for all of his (they were pretty much all men) works. I began to enjoy science fiction. The berserker stories of Fred Saberhagen , about the desperate fight of humans against self-replicating robot war machines gone out of control, were among the fictions that made the biggest impression. I also liked reading collections of stories from ancient mythology, especially Norse mythology.  This combination predisposed me for a discovery many other young people were making at the time, the fantasies of J.R.R. Tolkien.

Tolkien has suffered the fate of many “cult” writers; the excessive esteem of fans and the excessive contempt of critics reacting against popularity. When as an adult I read his books to my daughter, I could see his imperfections. Notably, his erudition led him to mimic and mix a variety of literary forms (the folk tale, the fairy story, the myth, and the heroic epic) that don’t always fit well together in a single narrative. But I would still include his books on any list of general recommended readings. The Fellowship of the Ring, the first volume in his trilogy, has always seemed to me his best work because of his successful evocation of the relationship among the adventuring hobbits facing a dangerous world.

About the age of fourteen, I grew more interested in social and political issues. Here, I step into perilous territory because I have to acknowledge that Ayn Rand was a big influence on me at this time. If Tolkien has supporters and detractors, Rand has devotees and denouncers. I don’t fall into either camp. The clarity of her reasoning attracted me, but I gradually came to disagree with some aspects of her perspective. Her ideals of human behavior allowed only Howard Roark-type supermen and weak, despicable cheats. As I thought more about her work, I could not see that this left any room for real human beings. She did not, in other words, have a grasp of psychological complexity or an appreciation for people, as opposed to abstract ideals. But I did not altogether reject Rand. I accepted and still accept her recognition of the importance of the individual human ego. Since the social world is composed of selves and relationships among selves, a demand that we be “selfless” is a demand for a society without people.  The refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of rational self-interest is more likely to create hypocrites than saints.

Also at fourteen, I found two books in the public library that exercised a great, if not entirely healthy, influence on me. One of these was The Penal Colony : Stories and Short Pieces, by Franz Kafka. I still think of Kafka as more of a short story writer than a novelist, although I liked The Castle, The Trial, and Amerika, which I read after the stories (I think in that order).  I say the influence was not necessarily healthy because reading Kafka contributed to a tendency toward introversion and self-absorptiion. The tales I liked best, “The Burrow” and “The Hunger Artist” may have been particularly notable for the sense of withdrawal from the external. The other book that I found in the library may have made an even greater contribution in this direction. This was the Discourse on Method, by Rene Descartes.  I was impressed by the author’s program of accepting nothing as true but what could be indubitably proven. His method, though, was to erase everything outside of himself and turn to his own thought as the only sure proof of reality. It was a useful exercise in the history of philosophy, but doubting everything and turning inward was probably not the best psychological path for a teenager inclined toward solipsism.

I did follow some of the more standard authors. It is unfair that Thomas Wolfe has fallen into the category of writers for adolescents. I think he deserves to be appreciated as a major American writer for readers of all ages. But Wolfe’s concentration on fictionalized autobiography of his own youth does give him a special appeal for the young. I loved his expansiveness and garrulity. Since I came from a southern family that still had close links to the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century, Wolfe’s novelistic recollections struck familiar notes for me.

I can remember taking long walks to think about the ideas, events, and images in the books I was reading and becoming so lost in thought that I’d fall into a sort of trance. I’d look around and suddenly realize that I’d been walking for hours and that I was miles away from home.

Made of Paper: The Childhood Books

The seventeenth century painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo made a wonderful series of portraits, representing human heads and faces as composites of objects such as fruit and leaves.  Arcimboldo’s “The Librarian” is a man constructed from a pile of books, an image especially striking for those of us of literary formation. The books in Arcimboldo’s picture can’t be readily identified, though. Which books make the man?

 

As I think about the early books in my life, I have to confess that one of the most important texts for me was Watty Piper’s The Little Engine that Could.  Although it may not sound very sophisticated, to this day when I have to face some challenge I still involuntarily hear “I think I can, I think I can, I think I can” in my mind.  Sure, the lesson is simplistic and moralistic. But it’s a good lesson, and what’s wrong with a simplicity and morality?

When my maternal grandmother was a little girl, she used to buy every book by L. Frank Baum as soon as it came out. As a result, the bookshelves in my home held first edition copies of nearly all the Oz books.  I have a distinct of memory of lying in bed with some childhood illness, being taken to another world by the Oz books. The Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Cowardly Lion (the mind, the heart, and the spirit) today seem to me like one of the great fictional trinities of the soul, like the three Karamazov brothers.

I can recall, a bit later in life (maybe about second grade), liking the “we were there” series.  These were historical novels that featured children as eyewitnesses to important events in history.  The one I remember best is We Were There with Cortes and Montezuma that told the story of the conquest of Mexico from the perspective of a young boy and girl.

My favorite childhood writer was Edgar Rice Burroughs. I think I read all of the Tarzan books, the Apache books, and most of his Mars and Venus series. I still think that Tarzan of the Apes was a skillfully wrought tale, as well as an evocation of an archetypal idea. Although, of course, I did not make all of the associations when I first read the book, it echoes many of the thoughts from western intellectual history, including the image of the noble savage, concerns about civilization and decadence, and questions of nature versus nurture. Even at the time, it did strike me as strange and fascinating that Tarzan first learned to read in English (from books left in the cabin of his dead parents) and then first learned to speak in French (from a Belgian he rescued).

At the ages of maybe 11 and 12, I enjoyed other adventure writers, such as Zane Gray and H. Rider Haggard. But the writer who made the biggest impact on me at that period was Jack London.  I did like The Call of the Wild, but the most important book for me was The Sea Wolf, which I first read in the summer between sixth and seventh grade. The conversations between the soft, wealthy, humanitarian Humphrey van Weyden (“Hump”) and the hard, individualistic, self-serving Wolf Larsen set me thinking about the complexities of social and political philosophy. Although London apparently meant to oppose the standpoint represented by Larsen, he and his fictional protagonist, van Weyden, were both drawn to the charismatic sea captain.

Degrees and Unemployment

A recent article in Fiscal Times reported that recent college graduates with degrees in architecture had the highest unemployment rate, a fact that the periodical attributed to the housing crash.  I did my own calculations on unemployment rates among college graduates under 30, which is not exactly the same as recent graduates. I also used the individual-level census data from 2009. I came up with a lower rate than the study cited in the Fiscal Times (mine was 11.8%, rather than 13.9%), but this could be because the data were a couple of years old and because I was looking at all young graduates rather than recent graduates. But it supports the contention that architecture is a high unemployment degree.  I wonder, though, if this is a temporary phenomenon, since architects do have a definite occupational skill that could be in demand again in the future. In my calculations, though, the highest unemployment rate was for people with degrees in languages other than what the census classified as common languages, such as French and German (13.8%). School student counseling, which I had thought would have a low rate, came in at 13.6%. Interdisciplinary social science graduates were also pretty likely to be out of work (13.3%). By contrast, English language & literature, liberal arts and history don't look too bad (7.2%, 7.2% and 8.4%, respectively). My discipline, sociology, looks almost like an economic boom field, with a young unemployment rate of only 6.1%.

Of course, we don't know exactly what all of these folks are doing. It might be easier for English majors than architects to get jobs slinging hamburgers, or they might be more willing to take those Among the lowest earners were people with degrees in early childhood education, who had an unemployment rate of only 4.0%. This makes me think that there may be a tradeoff. Sometimes training for a potentially high paying, high prestige job may actually put you in a market in there is more supply than demand, while training in the low-paying field may give you a better bet for employment. Given the point that I have previously made about the continuing demand for workers at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, perhaps part of our problem with unemployment lies in excessively high expectations for widespread upward mobility,

FIRE and Syracuse U's Attack on Freedom of Thought

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) is in my opinion one of the most admirable organizations involved with higher education today.  FIRE is dedicated to preserving freedom of thought and expression in colleges and universities. These institutions should require no such effort, but unfortunately many of them have dedicated themselves to policing the thinking of their students and faculty, instead of promoting the free and open exchange of ideas.

FIRE has now managed to  help a student whose rights have been violated by Syracuse University's School of Education in one of the most outrageous attacks on liberty perpetrated by any academic administration.  Matthew Werenczak, a white graduate student in the school, was engaged in his student teaching at a local middle school. A local community leader complained in front of Werenczak and another white student teacher that city schools should hire more teachers from historically black colleges, rather than from Syracuse.  Werenczak understandably took this as a racially prejudiced remark and he described the complaint as "racist" on his Facebook page.  In response to this posting, the administration of the School of Education called him to a meeting and required him to seek counseling for "anger management," attend a course on "cultural diversity," write a reflective paper showing that he had seen the error of his ways, and then have the School of Education review his paper to decide whether he could continue in the graduate program. He completed the steps required, but Syracuse effectively expelled him anyway.

This case should make any reasonable person's jaw drop in astonishment. Werenczak's "wrong-doing" was objecting to a racially offensive comment, not making one.  Syracuse apparently believes that its students not only do not enjoy freedom of thought or speech in its classrooms, but that they cannot even exercise these freedoms in non-university media, giving the institution the power to police the minds and voices of students everywhere and at all times.  If any student at any time expresses views inconsistent with officially mandated doctrine, the university can mandate re-education to enforce orthodoxy. Even then, Syracuse maintains no due process, so that a student can be arbitrarily expelled. 

The good news is that Werenczak was readmitted to the School of Education at Syracuse within hours after FIRE took up his case. This makes me thankful that FIRE exists. But the very fact that the organization would need to defend a student against such appalling behavior by the regime at Syracuse to me indicates that there are serious problems with its commitment to the type of liberty essential to higher education. That the events at Syracuse only offer an extreme example of pressures for intellectual conformity at institutions across the nation may be an indictment of academia in the United States today.

How Well Off is the Average American Today?

We are currently in a time of economic troubles and many Americans are indeed out of work or experiencing financial difficulties. The relative extent of these difficulties can be overestimated, though. If we look, for example, at the report Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2010 issued by the Census Bureau in September 2011 we might question whether our present problems qualify this as a time of crisis.  

Figure 1 in this report, on page 8, shows us the median household income of major racial and ethnic groups in the United States in 2010 dollars. The striking thing about this figure is that it shows median income, the best measure of the economic situation of the average household, rising for all groups. Today, in our time of troubles, all groups are better off than they were back in the 1970s, 1980s, or even early 1990s. Median incomes did generally peak in the early 2000s, though, and have dipped since then. Part of our perception today, then, involves our comparing ourselves to the high prosperity of the very recent past, rather than to our longer historical background. We should keep in mind, also, that inflation-adjusted dollars may underestimate present-day well-being because they attempt to hold purchasing power constant. But what would be the dollar value in 1975 of such common 2010 goods as a cell phone, an ipad, or a GPS?

It is true that the poverty rate is relatively high today. But is it at a historical pinnacle? Figure 4 in this document shows that there are indeed more people below the official poverty line than ever before. But that is because the population of the United States is larger than ever before. As a percentage of Americans, our present 15.1% poverty rate is lower than the estimated rate until the mid 1960s.  The rate has gone up and down since then, but it was as high as it is today in the early 1980s and in the mid 1990s.

Finally, since insurance is such a topical issue today, we might look at Figure 7 to see if it supports perceptions of an insurance crisis. Again, the reason that there are more uninsured people today is that there are more people. Today's 16.3% uninsured is high, but only about as high as it was in the late 1990s and it is not really dramatically different from the low point in 1987. Since this chart only begins in 1987, moreover, we can only speculate that there were many more uninsured people in earlier years. It is true that health care is more expensive today than ever before, but the care also provides treatment that did not exist in earlier years (like those cell phones and ipads). This also means that the overwhelming majority of Americans (83.7%) do have health insurance.

I would not say that we have no cause for economic worry. As I've argued previously, our debt-ridden, demand-side economy raises serious questions about the future well-being of the United States. As we look at our real situation right now, though, we want to avoid exaggeration and excessive alarmism.  

Patrick Wilcken's Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory.

I recently read Patrick Wilcken's Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory (Penguin, 2010). Lévi-Strauss may well have been the most influential anthropologist of the late twentieth century. More than any other individual, he gave rise to the theoretical approach to the humanities and social sciences known as “structuralism” and to its successor “post-structuralism.” His fundamental idea, derived primarily from the structural analysis of language, was that human kinship relations and mythological accounts expressed systems of thinking driven by the need to order the world according to binary systems of oppositions.

Young Levi-Strauss in Brazil

Although he generally expressed his theories in complex and difficult literary works, Lévi-Strauss also achieved a wider renown among members of the general reading public. His bittersweet, elegiac memoir Tristes Tropiques (roughly “sad tropics”) about his field work in Brazil, published in 1955, established him as one of the great commentators on the labors of anthropology, the questionable benefits of modernity, and the nature of the disappearing life of tribal people. Ironically, as Patrick Wilcken points out in this account, Lévi-Strauss was not much of a field worker and the explorer of the pre-literate mind always felt most at home in libraries. I was reminded of that other armchair anthropologist, the British author of The Golden Bough, James G. Frazer.

Born into a family of secular Jews of Alsatian origin, Lévi-Strauss from his youth found himself at the boundaries of different cultural worlds in the frequently anti-Semitic society of France. His father, Raymond,  was a portrait painter just at the time when the adventurous movements of artistic modernism and the rise of mass photography were making realistic portrait-painting outmoded. From his father, Lévi-Strauss acquired a strong aesthetic sense and perhaps also an old fashioned fondness for tradition that would lie behind the anthropologist’s inclination toward tribal societies and that would come to the surface in the growing conservatism of his later years.

As a student, Lévi-Strauss became involved in socialist politics and studied law and philosophy. After teaching secondary school for a time and marrying Dina Dreyfus, he accepted an offer to go with his wife to Brazil as part of a French cultural mission. The two were appointed visiting professors at the University of São Paulo. Although most French expatriate intellectuals formed insular communities, Lévi-Strauss and Dina became friends with Brazilian writers and artists and they conceived the idea of a journey of ethnographic exploration into the vast inland region of Mato Grosso.

The first forays into the indigenous cultures of Brazil brought Lévi-Strauss into contact with the Caduveo and the Bororo. Prefiguring his later fascination with structural forms in cultures, he became intrigued with the elaborate facial designs of women in the former and the expressions of social relations through housing patterns in the latter. The early studies on these groups helped to establish Lévi-Strauss as an anthropologist. His, however, was far from the ideal approach to fieldwork. His stays with his subjects were brief. He did not speak their languages or have deep grounding in their cultures.  The great journey into Mato Grosso that followed also showed these shortcomings, since it was more of a caravan of exploration than an immersion in indigenous cultures.

In 1938, Claude and Dina Lévi-Strauss and a well-supplied team set out to follow the Rondon Line, the remains of a telegraph line that had been strung earlier in the century, making contact with the indigenous people who lived along the way. Lévi-Strauss had corresponded with the anthropologist Curt Unckel, who had adopted the Brazilian name Nimuendajú. He tried to get Nimuendajú, the foremost expert on the peoples of the region, to accompany them, but the authority was too busy working on his field notes. Although the expedition that followed was amateurish in many respects, Lévi-Strauss proved to be an assiduous note-taker and a talented photographer. Although he would never again do fieldwork after this trek, the Brazilian adventure did inspire some of the ideas that helped to form his theories and it supplied the material for his 1955 memoir.

Lévi-Strauss might well have enjoyed a distinguished career if he had spent the rest of his life in France after the Brazilian expedition, but World War II sent him to another exotic location, where he came into contact with some of the great minds of his time. When the war broke out, he was drafted into the French army. The German invasion and the rapid collapse of France left Lévi-Strauss, as a Jew, vulnerable to Nazi anti-Semitism. At first, he was so unaware of the danger that he requested an appointment to teach in Paris, which was within the German Occupied Zone. However, he soon learned the insecurity of being Jewish even in the unoccupied zone governed by the French administration in Vichy when he was fired under an anti-Jewish statute. The reputation he had made in Brazil earned him an offer of a teaching position at the New School for Social Research in New York, which was taking in German refugee intellectuals. Although he offered to bring his now ex-wife Dina with him, Lévi-Strauss made his way alone to America.

New York enabled Lévi-Strauss to flourish in one of the most vibrant intellectual hothouses of the twentieth century. War and oppression drove many of Europe’s most notable artists and scholars across the seas and New York held the greatest concentration. On board the ship, Lévi-Strauss formed a friendship with the surrealist André Breton and once in New York he associated with Breton and the surrealist artist Max Ernst. Lévi-Strauss and the surrealists shared interests in mythological expressions of the subconscious mind and they became collectors of tribal artifacts in the shops in New York. This environment encouraged Lévi-Strauss to move away from the specialized study of particular human groups and toward patterns of thought underlying all of the mythologies and artifacts Lévi-Strauss and his associates were collecting.

The most important of his contacts in New York may have been the Russian linguist, Roman Jakobson. Jaksobson argued that languages should be understood not as ways of representing the world, but as systems of structural relations, expressing mental patterns. Drawing on structural linguistics, Lévi-Strauss developed the concept of an abstract system of oppositions and linkages lying behind specific cultural relations. This led to a doctoral thesis and to a first major book, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949) that presented kinship as a code of relations among people.

As Wilcken presents the life, New York provided the foundation for the rest of Lévi-Strauss’s career. The time in New York not only brought him in to the currents of thought of the mid-century, it also helped to bring him into the intellectual establishment. Once back in France, he became an able administrator.  As he produced a steady stream of erudite works, he became recognized as part of the post-war intellectual elite of France. He became particular friends with the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.  Although Lévi-Strauss wrote only a little directly about psychoanalysis and the unconscious, the idea of an unconscious was clearly part of his structural anthropology. In turn, Lacan incorporated some of Lévi-Strauss’s ideas into elaborate and often incomprehensible psychoanlytic theories.

Being Jewish continued to be a barrier to Lévi-Strauss’s acceptance in the inner circle of France. However, the old prejudices were weakening.  After the war, he had almost been elected to membership in one of the most selective circles of the French academic hierarchy, the Collège de France. He had, though, been repeatedly blocked, apparently by the unwillingness of some members to accept a Jewish colleague. In 1960, though, he finally achieved this honor. By the early 1970s, his public appearances and his popular memoir had made him almost a celebrity intellectual, while he had become enough of an established figure that many of the new “post-structuralists” had begun to define themselves in contrast to him. In 1973, Lévi-Strauss reached the pinnacle of French intellectual life, when he was elected to the Académie Française.

Ironically, as Lévi-Strauss moved into the center of his own tribal group, he became ever more a loner. In his own work, he assembled examples and illustrations of his theories from the reports of ethnographers and travelers, some of which were not always accurate. While many were influenced by his writings, he had no close students or successors who would carry on his tradition. Also ironically, as French intellectuals in general tended to move sharply to the left, Lévi-Strauss became much more conservative socially and politically. One of the interesting points made by the biography is that his conservatism was not an aberration at all but was deeply rooted in his anthropological respect for tradition.

Levi Strauss in Later Years

The biography portrays Lévi-Strauss as a polite but distant and stand-offish figure. In interviews with the biographer,  Lévi-Strauss refused to provide much information on his personal life. His first wife, Dina, appears in these pages largely because of her role in the Brazilian expedition. His second wife, from whom he was also divorced, and his third receive only a few lines of text.  Although it does not give a very intimate portrait of a man who apparently did not take readily to intimacy, it does give an account of the development of his ideas. Patrick Wilcken’s critical discussion of these ideas is somewhat limited. He does not, for example, give much consideration to the question of how much tribal people actually do think in terms of abstract binary oppositions, rather than in terms of coming up with practical solutions to the material and social problems that face them daily. I wondered whether Lévi-Strauss described how tribal people really think or whether he was giving his imaginative version of how tribal people would think if they happened to be French intellectuals in loin cloths. Wilcken also does not discuss the problem of how the theories of Lévi-Strauss might be verified or falsified, or, if they cannot be falsified, what use the theories might have beyond giving us pleasurable contemplation.