Picktures and Pieces 25: Tactic, Strategy, Philosophy

Tactic, Strategy, Philosophy

by Randall Auxier

Nonviolence. Just refraining from hitting somebody? Gandhi's original idea, ahimsa, had the same problem. It's called a "privative" term --the absence of something that might have occurred. But Gandhi made it clear that he meant something positive by "nonviolence." It's supposed to designate a kindness and respect for others and for oneself, a certain power of the soul by which the violence and oppression we experience can be transformed into a force for good. Not to trivialize it, but say, for example, someone cuts you off on the expressway. You feel a surge of energy in your body. You snarl, you want to make a certain gesture, right? You are empowered. Nonviolence is the power to take that energy and channel it into constructive action. Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., believed that this power could create peace where violent responses never could.

Picktures and Pieces 24: Bus 109

Bus 109

by Randall Auxier

To tell the truth, I don't remember the bus number. I thought I would never forget it. But I chose 109 because Kate Campbell's song by that name pretty well sums it up. It was a strange time to be a kid. (I speak from experience.) In the South, we tended to act --and to think-- like our parents. I don't know what they did in California or New Hampshire, but in Tennessee we learned to say "sir" and "ma'am" in addressing all (white) adults. Some of us were taught to say that to black adults as well. Some of us used the "n" word; some of us were told never, ever to say it. By accident of birth, I was in the latter group. Many of my white friends were in the former group.

Picktures and Pieces 22: Conversion(s)

Conversion(s)

by Randall Auxier

Here is a smiling Malcolm X. Many think of him as the angriest black man ever, and the most famous photographs of him show intensity, conviction, defiance, an iron will. Yet, those who knew him well always talked about his sense of humor, his charm, his easy manner. Men and women of great personal power often seem contradictory to more ordinary folks. It isn’t surprising. The same exasperating spread of stories is told about Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Gandhi, Joan of Arc. Malcolm X surely belongs in such company, historically, and we aren’t likely to get any final clarity on such extraordinary people.

Picktures and Pieces 21: True Believers

True Believers

by Randall Auxier

To dangle at the end of a tether seems extreme. But these devout fellows don't worry about the judgments of other people. What calls human beings away from comfort to freely chosen suffering can't be fully explained. It's for those who can discern a reality that exceeds our everyday senses, but also pervades all that we see, hear, feel. There is an aesthetic quality to this religious pull, but the senses are subordinated as the pain becomes a conduit of connection between those who find themselves confined in a human body and those intelligences not so cramped.

Picktures and Pieces 19: Indian Givers

Indian Givers

by Randall Auxier

When I was a kid, my schoolmates used the phrase "indian giver" as a slur against anyone who gave something away but then wanted it back. I probably said it myself. None of us knew any Indians and I don't know where we got this phrase --probably from television. The stupidity, racism and injustice of this verbal tick needs no further analysis. But the context that creates such slurs is worth pondering. Every image is reversed when you see it in a mirror, and TV of that time reflected the dominant culture back to itself in two dimensions. When the white-dominated culture tried to grasp the customs of native peoples, and when the values expressed in those customs were strange, the white people overlaid their own values and fears on what they saw. Distortions abounded and spread.

Picktures and Pieces 18: The Heart in the Dark

The Heart in the Dark

by Randall Auxier

A bleeding heart liberal. That's what Richard Henry Pratt was. At this late date it doesn't matter whether believed "white civilization" was superior to other ways of life, or whether he just saw the inevitability of its march. Either way he stood on the advancing edge of a world that would have no place for these children unless somebody did something. The problem of the good heart in the dark isn't what it foresees, or why, but what it believes must be done. Pratt believed that the ancient connections these children carried around within themselves had to be severed, for their own good, of course.

Picktures and Pieces 17: Isn't It Rich?

Isn't It Rich?

by Randall Auxier

This fellow stands out in a crowd. I'll bet he wants it that way. Most of us would be unable to connect with him. Say, you and me are having coffee and he wanders into the Starbucks. Are we allowed to stare? Surely the answer is "yes, you may even gawk." A person who is made uncomfortable by a few stares does not work this hard to attract them. Our question to him and to ourselves is: "Dude?"

Picktures and Pieces 16: Belly Up Boys!

Belly Up Boys!

by Gary L. Herstein, Guest Blogger 

Let me tell you a story.
Well, first, let me explain why I want to tell you a story.

Science (for example) can give us a pretty compelling account about what and how things are, employing the tools of logical coherence and empirical adequacy. However, once we've gained some sense of what and how things are, we've yet to determine what we should do about them or why we should care. For that we need a different kind of understanding, not just logic and facts. We need a convincing story. So let me tell you a story about why I want to tell you a story. I hope you’re convinced.

Picktures and Pieces 15: The Land of the Free

Picktures and Piece 15: The Land of the Free

by Randall Auxier

The stray apostrophe on this sign doesn’t surprise me. No one likes a grammar snob, but I don’t like this sign. It comes from “Goldwater country,” now world famous for its inhospitality. The meaning of “white” is a moving target. With so many Italians arriving a hundred years ago, they somehow ceased being “white,” as did the Irish in the 19th century. Both groups are "white" again, now, it appears. In the great Southwest, evidently “white” includes people who are ethnically Jewish, like Barry Goldwater, but not people from Spain or Mexicans, even Mexicans of German parentage, I suppose.

Goldwater said: “The Mexican is industrious, kind and a very warm family man whose hogar (hearth) is his citadel, his castle and his life. A Mexican is particularly devoted to his country and will defend it against any slur or attack. Mexicans are loyal and true friends whose word becomes their bond. One doesn’t find all of these attributes reflected in any one face, but often a reflection of the dignity born of them comes through.” He had many Mexican friends, and many Native American friends, and his friends saw in him an old-fashioned kind of integrity they could recognize, even when they differed with his opinions. His word was his bond and his hospitality was not extended for personal gain.

The Goldwater version of the Republican Party was supposed to shun racism and bigotry of all kinds, and it would not cozy up to religious fundamentalists. His party would actually cut government programs to prevent the encroaching menace of executive power. It would stay out of education because the Constitution does not authorize such intervention. (This is true. It really doesn’t.) And Goldwater’s Republican Party would pass laws in accordance with a strict interpretation of that document.

Barry’s pipe dream. He was repeating what James Madison said in Federalist 10 and 44. Each branch of government to tries to expand its own power at the expense of the others. There is excellent evidence for this observation, and not just among governmental entities. Look at corporations, universities and schools, and pretty much any complex social structure. To prevent the problem, Goldwater wanted a civil right defined as a right already protected by law, as distinct from natural rights or human rights. He was willing to defend whatever rights the legislature specified, if they were in keeping with the Constitution. Many Libertarians take this view, but Republicans and Democrats are both heavily disposed to exercise executive power broadly and to legislate without explicit reference to the Constitution.

Not many people know that Goldwater was a daring pilot, one of the few to fly the U2 spy plane. He was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 1982, three years after Neil Armstrong (ironically, Lyndon Johnson signed the law creating that institution). Goldwater eventually retired as a major general from the Air Force Reserves. But when he became chief of staff of the Arizona Air National Guard, in 1947, one of his first acts was to desegregate the unit. He insisted on it. His crews came in all shades. But that was the military, not a private business. You can’t make private citizens nonracist through government intervention, he believed.

Goldwater was soundly defeated in 1964, carrying only his home state of Arizona and the five most reactionary, segregationist states in the deep South. He won the latter because he voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. I doubt the white citizens of those Southern states (and they were the ones voting, make no mistake–the Voting Rights Act passed the next year) understood Goldwater’s position on the bill. I wonder whether Goldwater would have actually voted for the Voting Rights Act. He was not a member of the Senate when it came up.

The stated reason for Goldwater’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act had nothing to do with his views about desegregation. He had some integrationist credentials in his past, after all. But he wouldn’t pass a law, federal, state or local, to make this benighted fool remove that sign from his window or change his business practices. Goldwater’s solution to that problem? Don’t eat there, or anywhere that bigotry reigns. He served everyone at his family's department store. That is the solution, for “a free people,” as he understood that concept. Any government that can force this business owner to do things differently cannot be trusted to refrain from deeper incursions into the freedoms of its citizens.

I struggle with this. I admire the Civil Rights Movement, about as much as I admire anything. I don’t believe things would have changed without the law. Things needed to change. I am also aware that many of the negative effects of integration Malcolm X predicted have come true. Like anything human, desegregation involved trade-offs. And there has been creeping executive authority: Cheney’s “unitary executive,” and so on. We all want the government to act when it is doing what we think ought to be done, but then we cry foul when government uses the same kind of authority to do what we don’t favor. Each side argues that freedom is being taken away. Do we or don’t we agree on what freedom is?

I think we don’t. Just as there is an old fashioned and a new fangled version of integrity, there is an old version of freedom that says people are free when they are left alone, and a younger version that says unless all are free, no one truly is. These are individualists arguing with communitarians. Communitarian freedom favors using governmental power to secure a level playing field, while the individualists say that if you use governmental power in that way, pretty soon no one will be free.

There are good citizens on both sides, but the old fashioned integrity is what makes them so. The new integrity, like everything that has fear as its seed, puts down no deep roots in history or experience. It isn’t a perennial. You have to plant fear over and over. It grows mainly in the shade and isn’t indigenous to human nature. Goldwater may have lost an election because of it, because people thought he would blow up the world, or because they feared he was a racist, or because they were afraid of having three presidents in just over a year.

Goldwater grumpily put up with being feared, but he didn’t think anyone needed to be afraid of that sign in the window. He said the biggest mistake he ever made wasn’t his vote on the Civil Rights Act, or his acceptance speech, it was his decision not to buy this bar in Phoenix. We will pick up next time with that, in the final entry on Goldwater.

Picktures and Pieces 14: A Giant Leap

A Giant Leap

by Randall Auxier

There was no internet, needless to say. That gave the US government a kind of control over images that we can barely imagine today. No one fully understood the power back then. I like watching the characters in Mad Men as they gradually discover what images can do when disseminated throughout an affluent mass culture. The government seems to have had some early inklings of the power invested in these media, but not enough to keep it off television when Bull Connor’s dogs and fire hoses were turned on the children of Birmingham. And they failed to understand the likely effects on young people of watching a war on television, the war they would be expected to fight. They didn't understand that by 1968 Walter Cronkite was more credible than any government.

But when it came to the moon shot, the government got the memo. They knew what message they wanted to send. Here is Neil Armstrong, American pioneer. He was carefully chosen by his government to exemplify everything noble, decent, brave, brilliant, adventurous, and most of all independent in the “American spirit.” He was chosen because he knew how to keep his mouth shut, too. He managed to do that until he was near the end of his life, when he really felt he had to speak out against President Obama’s plan to privatize the space program. No one ever doubted Armstrong was a Republican, but to have the American Right criticizing the Left for privatizing a government program is ironic, to say the least. Pictured also, looming upper left, is our technological achievement, and center stage, bathed in pure white light, is the flag. It looks interestingly windblown considering the complete absence of wind on the moon--an indication of foresight more likely than fraud, I think; they must have consulted Don Draper on this point.

The space programs of the super-powers struck fear into the hearts of everyone, pretty much, but the fear was tinged with hope and awe. Apart from the military advantages that are too scary to think about, there was the race to see whether the “loyalty of free men” or “Soviet class consciousness” would prevail in this greatest of all races –the race for the meaning of freedom. Nothing in human history comes close to this contest for the meaning of freedom. That, friends and neighbors, was the giant leap. Any sensible person knows that winning or losing the space race isn’t proof that one form of government is superior to another, but there is something inexorable in the symbol above, something that cannot be reasoned away. Ecce homo. It is a fact. Either that picture would exist or a different one with a very different meaning, featuring a different flag. I don’t know how the Soviet Union would have chosen to present the moment, but I’m sure they thought about it. A lot. They might even have gotten the windblown effect, although I'm guessing not. That seems like an American touch to me.

No one disagreed with the Soviets about the meaning of freedom more profoundly than Barry Goldwater. He prophesied their downfall in his famous acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in 1964, saying: “I can see and I suggest that all thoughtful men must contemplate the flowering of an Atlantic civilization, the whole world of Europe unified and free, trading openly across its borders, communicating openly across the world.” That seems to have happened. But Goldwater added: “This is a goal far, far more meaningful than a moon shot.”

Hmmm. Is it?

I was a kid and too young to understand all this when it was happening, but memory is a tricky companion in the best of us. It seems to me now that the moon shot won the Cold War, not in fact but in the more important arena of hearts and minds. The rest was not easy, but the Soviet image, and hence also its social philosophy, never recovered from this picture. It is so visceral and powerful that it portends, indeed, partly causes one course of history instead of another. The moon shot was the symbol of the giant leap, but it was not the leap itself. Goldwater missed this one. I think about how much Goldwater and JFK really had in common and I don't wonder that the rest of the world cannot distinguish our Democrats from our Republicans. Goldwater criticized the war in Viet Nam that night, which had not been formally declared and hadn’t had a chance to become entrenched in the conservative mind. He blamed all of our wars on Democrats, which, up until Nixon bombed Cambodia, seems to have been supported by all of history. The story is rather different now, but it doesn’t look like anyone’s hands are clean.

Some people say that Goldwater lost the election that night and also initiated our present culture wars. Others say that Bill Moyers famous TV ad showing a little girl who is about to be vaporized by a nuclear explosion is what defeated him. Some say it was his association with segregationists. I think Crispin Sartwell makes an interesting point when he suggests that Goldwater knew the nation would not accept a third president in the space of one year. Kennedy’s assassination made it impossible for anyone but Johnson to win that election. Seeing this as the reality of things, Goldwater decided to do what he really wanted to do, which was speak his mind as fully as completely as he could.

Sartwell, an anarchist of the libertarian stripe, admits that he admires Goldwater’s “integrity,” and by this he means that we (the public) could believe that Goldwater believed what he was saying, whether we agreed with him or not. And he may have been the last politician on the national stage about whom we could feel certain of that. Somehow, after the 1964 election, things changed. Maybe the Bill Moyers ad was the turning point, the moment when the parties realized that persuading people to vote against the candidate they feared was better strategy than appealing to hopes, aspirations, or dreams of the MLK fabric.

There was an old fashioned sense of integrity: we stick with who we are, with what we know, with our own experience, learning, roots and convictions, even if it costs us friends, elections, money, or even our freedom and our lives. That idea of integrity seems completely absent from public and civic life today. It may be dying in private life too. I have been disappointed, as I have aged, at the willingness of people I thought were good to put self-interest ahead of truth, or simply to be unable to see the difference.

Today, integrity seems to be defined by the fear that we will be “called out” about who we really are, that the world may learn the truth about us. Integrity today only means that our enemies can’t dig up any dirt on us and the stuff they fabricate doesn’t stick. No one seems to believe that anyone would hold to truth if it means great sacrifice. But the fear of being “called out” is a pretty flimsy line of defense for one’s character. If we are morally decent because we fear the censure of others, can anyone’s character survive the fickleness of collective emotion? Most of all, whose character can hold up when mass fear is driving opinion? If anyone can hold firm, it won’t be due to the new-fangled sort of integrity. I want to look next at the issue of civil rights from this pivotal moment in US history. So much of what we face today was set in motion between October of 1962 and November of 1964.

Picktures and Pieces 13: Culture Wars, Old and New

Culture Wars, Old and New

by Randall Auxier

I lived in Oklahoma for some years, and learned to be suspicious of pictures like this one. Friends there helped me begin to grasp the depths of my own unconscious racism. One day I was walking with a colleague and our Dean to the lunchroom. We were discussing campus politics and I made the remark “it’s time to circle up the wagons.” After a pause, my colleague, a member of the Choctaw tribe, remarked, with a half smile, “yes, there must be some wild savages out there.” I wanted to crawl under a rock.

This stoic looking fellow was named Charlie Potato. The picture was taken in 1938 by Barry Goldwater. Yes, that Barry Goldwater. He was a very good photographer–as my friend Crispin Sartwell says, he’s no Ansel Adams, but he’s very good. You should visit his photography site. When you do, you will see that Goldwater regarded this as one of the most successful of his photographs, and it is certainly the most famous. The photo is now called “The Navajo,” but it was originally called “Charlie Potato.” The subject himself wanted the title changed. Goldwater obliged. I like the original title better, and so did Goldwater, who didn’t like stereotypes. Speaking of an equally rugged looking photo of a Mexican friend, he said: “There is no more typical Mexican face than there is a typical face of any other people.”

Whatever Goldwater was doing here, it wasn’t supposed to be about the “Noble Savage” or the “Stoic Indian.” He was sensitive to that side of the question, but, like my thoughtless remark about the wagons, perhaps he overlooked some crucial unintended information conveyed by his image. Of Charlie Potato he wrote: “the dignity of the ancient citizens of Arizona shows clearly in the features of this man.” That seems to contradict what he said above, but there is a difference. It isn’t the face as an example of the race or the tribe, it is the dignity of a group of citizens that Goldwater sees in his features. Is he referring to bone structure and cranial capacity? I don’t think so. Goldwater intends us to see, and himself only sees, a citizen who has worked all his life, someone who is representative of the dignity of others who work in the heat for their living.

That is a thin line, isn’t it? The racial generalization compared with the intended meaning. The racial generalization might be defended by some, since some generalizations may not be automatically racist. We are hyper-sensitive to it these days. It's the culture wars. Try to forget, if you can, who took the picture and attempted to convey his intention. It is the very same man who initiated the present culture wars. “Extremism in pursuit of liberty is no vice; moderation in defense of justice is no virtue.” That’s what he said. But what he meant in practice is that government shall not be used to protect this man’s civil rights, because given the authority to do that, government will also have the authority to deprive him of those rights.

In my last post I pointed out that Victor Hugo, and indeed, the anarchist Voltairine de Cleyre, have more in common with Goldwater than with radicals of Emma Goldman’s stripe. Unlike her, these strange bedfellows believe, with heart, mind, soul and strength, that the individual is both the most basic unit of social reality and that its liberation is the meaning of history. And they are all willing to kill (and die) for that idea. Goldwater looks at Charlie Potato and sees an individual he can respect, and a citizen, and a person whose work is etched into his physiognomy. It is a powerful story, quite appealing when defended by de Cleyre, based on unselfishness rather than narcissism (Barry and Victor needed a few hours with de Cleyre).

But they are not conscious of everything they could learn. I am not sure what my Choctaw friend would say about this image (and I may get a chance to learn, if he sees this post), but I think it is good to balance this image against the sobering reminder of the troubled history between the Navajo and the Hopi. I don’t dare recount the story as if I had scholarly understanding, let alone genuine cultural understanding. I have read that the Hopi have always been agrarian. The Navajo have always been herders. These are incompatible ways of life. The story of the Navajo and the Hopi looks a good deal like the Bible, wherever Canaanites and Hebrews had land disputes, and with similar results (it doesn't pay to be a Canaanite). The history of the range wars in the US recapitulates this same history, except the herders eventually lost. It has happened ten thousand times in ten thousand places over the last ten thousand years. Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel devotes fair attention to it.

This is the primal culture war. Until recently the agrarians almost never prevailed. Prior to modern times, agrarians were physically smaller and did not usually cultivate the arts of war. They defended themselves when necessary, but determined invaders almost always won. Agrarians are not mobile and they need a lot of land--too much to defend. Herders are mobile. The politics, religion, ethos and outlook of these two groups are profoundly incompatible. Agrarians tend to be communitarian and to favor customs over formal organization. Their religions are about fertility and the earth. Herding peoples tend to have very strict rules that lead to frequent and violent conflicts within and without the group. One result of the herding ethos has been, over several millennia, the creation of individuality. Their God is an individual with a powerful will and, generally speaking, a plan.

Barry Goldwater was no agrarian. But he respected hard work, and this is something that good people from both cultures generally agree upon. The ground of dignity is hard work. If Goldwater, Charlie Potato, and the communal Hopis have something in common, it probably grows from hard work. But Goldwater could not and would not recognize that the communists and socialists he despised also believed in hard work, at least as ardently as he did. They do disagree on what motivates people to work hard. For Goldwater, it is only the lash and the lure, the ignominy of failure and the rewards that go with success. For his opponents, what makes work dignified is precisely because we choose it freely. Those who will not work do not respect themselves, according to Goldwater, but for his communitarian counterparts, those who will not work fail to respect anyone.

If you were expecting a suggested resolution to these culture wars in a blog post, then you are of a hopeful nature. The individual and the community may always exist in tension. My own moral feelings are agrarian. I merely tolerate individualism, at the visceral level. I do not know how that sort of thing happens, since my family, like most I think, has both temperaments within it. But I will say that if ever I saw “the individual” romanticized, I see it more in this picture of Neil Armstrong than the one of Charlie Potato. I want to talk about this next.

Picktures and Pieces 10: Like a Horse and Carriage

 Picktures and Pieces 10: Like a Horse and Carriage
By Randall Auxier

I was shuffling through the available radio stations on a long trip when the seek function paused on a preacher. I usually pass over such offerings, but he was launching into a sermon, promising to reveal the secret of successful marriage. “Well,” I thought, “this might be interesting.” I expended a couple of calories commanding the radio to desist seeking and decided to commit a few seconds to considering someone else’s opinion on this important topic, someone unlikely to see the world my way. I agree with many preachers about many matters, but the likelihood of agreement is inversely proportional to the odds of hearing those preachers on the radio. And this one had a southern accent.

Don’t get me wrong. I have a southern accent too. But what I mean is that this guy was obviously a southern Baptist, shepherding a large metropolitan congregation of what were surely all white, all Republican, all fundamentalist, all privileged, all well-fed, all straight, hide-bound and heaven-bound suburbanites. But I know that nearly all are well-meaning, morally decent, sincere people whose experience must be taken seriously, and to fail in empathizing with them, however benighted they may be, will serve no one, least of all me. So I listened to the preacher.

He was a kindly man, funny, articulate, caring, sincere, fatherly, intelligent, dare I say wise in a certain Baptistly idiom. I could easily imagine how he finagled a “call” to such a well-heeled congregation as he had. (I remember who it was, but I won’t say the name here; suffice to say it was a very large church in a large southern city.) His idea of marriage was pretty much what is diagrammed above. He was adamant that he wasn’t speaking of changeable emotion, but trying to guide our thinking about how to bring our minds into conformity with some realities of our experience.

The preacher peppered his sermon with Scripture, but the principal reading was 1 Corinthians 13, as one might imagine. They are among the best words ever written about love by anyone in history, but of course, they are not about marriage, even though Christians generally have them recited at weddings. Paul wasn’t too keen on marriage, after all. But this sermon was not mainly about making Christ the head of the household, it was practical, divided into two halves: advice to wives, advice to husbands.

Shockingly, the preacher simply came out and said what we all sort of know and won’t admit. Men respond first and foremost to the way women look. Therefore, ladies, watch your weight, get your hair done, be dressed in becoming ways for him, and don’t let any other woman catch his eye. Yes, from the pulpit, the man said this is the secret to marriage from the woman’s side, which is about keeping your husband from straying. The female half of the congregation was reminded never to nag him, and most importantly, don’t do anything to undermine his self-confidence and do everything necessary to build it up. I thought about all this. It is basically true –given our time and place. Not many “wives,” in the relevant sense, would lose their “husbands,” in the relevant sense, if they followed this formula. Who wouldn't want an attractive partner in whose eyes one is a demi-god?

It’s all in the diagram, given the misleading name of “respect,” which I admit angers me. Respect is far too important an idea to be trivialized. But the diagram isn’t trivial. It’s about commitment, in a certain interpersonal context, and it well describes the amalgamated customs, however misguided, of our time and place –not just old fashioned people, but many, many secular folks who have moved beyond their proximal upbringings and into a wider world of vague expectations. What if this diagram is what I want? Does that make me a reactionary barbarian? A sexist pig? This diagram describes what Martin Luther King, Jr., wanted, I’ll bet. Many good and decent men want this. Of course they do –look at what they get in the deal!

Emma Goldman seethed and boiled when she mulled over the deal that men got for themselves by dominating the religious, economic/political, and legal arrangements surrounding marriage. No self-respecting person, woman or man, would consent to such an arrangement, she thought. It is inherently unequal, oppressive to women, and because of that, also dehumanizing to men. She believed we could rise above our customs and their inequalities and recognize that, as she says, love and marriage have nothing to do with each other.

Goldman allows that, in rare cases, people who are married do make it from the altar to the grave and remain in love the whole way, but they have beaten the odds. More common is the way that marriage destroys love, she says. We all know the story, but here is an interesting tidbit. Goldman cites the rising divorce rate. Did you know that between 1870 and 1910 the number of divorced persons in every 100,000 people went from 28 to 73? Clearly marriage is failing us as an institution. One wonders what Emma would say now, when 10,000 in every 100,000 people is divorced (remember that over 15,000 in every 100,000 are too young to marry, and 24,000 will never marry, etc.). The change is that women really don’t have to marry now, so many don’t, and it is easier to get out, so many do. But Goldman wouldn’t be satisfied even with marriage from inclination because of love. Love doesn’t cause marriage, she says. They are at odds.

Surely you’d like to know what that preacher said to the men. Can you guess? He said that women must feel secure, first and foremost, and that means never being taken for granted. The man must remind the woman every day that she is the only one for him –flowers, opening doors, treating her like a lady, yes, yes, all of that. But more is required. The man must actually listen to what she says, even when he isn’t interested. He must be a good bread-winner but trust her judgment about the household economics. And never let the sun go down on an argument, and even when she’s wrong, you are the man and you must apologize.

It’s hard to know what to say about all this. I want to make it harder. Meet Chang and Eng Bunker. They had an interesting life, including being married. They were also southern Baptists, of the North Carolina type –and there is no more serious type of Baptist, in my experience. They had ten and eleven children respectively. They owned slaves and ran a plantation. I wonder what that preacher would have said to them. And what would Emma say? Was it worse that they married or owned slaves, or would it be the same? It strains the limits of propriety to wonder about it, but I am going to do so in my next post.

Picktures and Pieces 8: "Ever Thus to Tyrants?"

Picktures and Pieces 8: "Ever Thus to Tyrants?"

Randall Auxier

This handbill is interesting. I’m reading along in Emma Goldman’s essays, the first time I have done so, and in “Anarchism: What It Stands For,” she says that government and ignorance are linked to each other. It never crossed my mind that every government has at least some motive for keeping its people ignorant of at least some information. Only anarchism, she argues, which opposes government in principle, advocates full education for every person. I had to give that some thought. Like most semi-educated people (I assume I have not achieved a fully clear view of things in the way Goldman favors), I know that anarchism gets a bad rap in the press and in mainstream histories, and that it gets blamed for things it doesn’t advocate and hardly ever gets a full hearing. And I now know that “Red Emma” is not so very red, if by that one means communist or socialist, neither of which describes her views at all. That being said, I want to understand how it is that democracies might benefit from keeping their citizens ignorant, which seems far-fetched. 

But maybe not. 

We are all accustomed to the Jeffersonian democratic cant about our limitless confidence in ordinary people to govern themselves. We tie that confidence to our commitment to educate everyone, since it is the educated citizen who can carry off that self-government task, as well as choose those among the populace who can represent them in the formal governing process. How could a sincere advocate of democracy ever have a motive to keep anyone ignorant? I note that communist and fascist propaganda also tout universal education. But since I am not a fascist or a communist, I must deal with my dismay at being told that democracy, when it creates a government, creates at the same time a motive among those who govern for keeping people ignorant. This motive is not inherent in democracy, per se, it is inherent in the creation of a state, Goldman believes. 

The exercise of power, wherever it is found, of any one person or group of people over any other, is always facilitated by keeping those who are subordinated ignorant of their genuine alternatives, and even of their subordination, if that can be pulled off. In this sense, then, looking around me, asking whether I see ignorance in the American public that is making them easier to “govern,” I must admit that I see it everywhere, including myself. Rather than anger anyone in the present needlessly, I will consider that poster instead. The abolition fight had been building in the US for a long time by 1837, and this poster is an interesting plea to preserve the union and defend the Constitution by silencing (what happened to the First Amendment?) this “revolting character.” His “lecture” is “seditious” because it impugns the rights given to the states by the Constitution, advocating the abolition of slavery (using federal power, presumably, but who knows what that vile abolitionist was saying, or not saying if this poster succeeded). This silencing is to be done peaceably, however. After all, we are not barbarians, here in the land of the Constitution. We are "Fellow Citizens," excepting that seditious fellow whom the Presbyterians have invited to ruin our union. I have a feeling that some minister may have had a hard time holding onto his job after this event. Thinking back to Emma Goldman’s point about governments, I look for the vested interest in ignorance here. Lincoln's birthday is upon us and many of us will have seen Stephen Spielberg’s Lincoln. 

Almost 30 years after this poster was printed, and well over 600,000 deaths (that was just the number of soldiers), the US still couldn’t manage to find the political will to use federal power to abolish slavery by the ordinary Constitutional process. It wasn’t a failure of democracy, it was a failure of government. Looking into an issue as plain as the immorality of slavery, we find powerful forces that are profoundly invested in keeping people ignorant, and not just the slaves themselves, but more importantly the tyranny over the human mind exercised by those with the power to leverage ideology or need or force on people as if it were truth. The poster was written by someone who wants his fellow citizens to remain ignorant, for the sake of the union, although he (and I'm confident it was a he) does not know he is doing that.

Emma Goldman speaks of three domains in which ignorance does its work: in the domain of mind, where religion (as an “us vs. them” worldview) closes people’s minds to certain kinds of ideas, even quite obvious ones, such as “slavery is wrong.” Second, in the domain of physical need, in which economic forces may drive people into all sorts of oppressive political arrangements, where people can only choose which group of powerful bullies shall oppress them. And third, in the domain of physical power or force, there is government itself, exercising coercive authority.

There is a barricade to freedom in each of these. Together, they effectively keep people ignorant, frightened and subordinated, and, as in the author of this poster, ignorant of their ignorance. This characterization sounds so radical, but when I look at the poster above, I cannot help thinking that people in our very midst make exactly the same arguments, not about the abolition of slavery, but about other things, and none of them is very eager to have you hear a fair and balanced version from the other side. Good people, well-meaning people struggle with themselves to silence, usually peaceably, those whose words may threaten their religious convictions, their economic well-being, or their tiny shot at influencing government. 

Today’s versions of that poster are believed because the issues are regarded as living ones, which for Emma Goldman generally means that someone is using our ignorance of the full story to control us. Should we wage war pre-emptively? Should abortion be legal? Should the wealthy be more heavily taxed? Should we allow corporations or governments to destroy the environment? Well, I honestly don’t know. I mean that in the sense of “I’m genuinely ignorant” of many of the sources of my own convictions. Like everyone else, I have absorbed billions of images, leading to thousands of opinions. Very few are products of my practical experience. What do I know about slavery, really? What do I know about Arab Spring, really?

The fact that we must rely on others for much of what we learn makes our power arrangements all the more crucial to our happiness, and Goldman was convinced that only the anarchist has a shot at happiness, because only he or she has the courage to refuse the power arrangements that keep us ignorant. Even Thomas Jefferson thought that the tree of liberty must be periodically watered with the blood of patriots and tyrants, and he had in mind that this would happen several times in a century. And even John Wilkes Booth had the temerity to shout “sic semper tyrannis” as he silenced one of the few voices of conscience our system has ever put into actual power. And what did Leon Czoglosz say as he assassinated President McKinley? Was this the act of an anarchist? What actions are justified in the name of happiness and the lifting of human ignorance? That has to be the next question.