Casual Observation

19 Comments

1. 

   Raoul Paste on August 4, 2018 at 3:35 pm

   I long for the day when the word ‘bespoke’ is associated with any part of my life.

   • 

     Parallax on August 4, 2018 at 5:30 pm

     When you start propping up authoritarian dictators (foreign and domestic), you’ll rate a bespoke suit or two of your own.

2. 

   Parallax on August 4, 2018 at 3:42 pm

   Yet another insider more than happy to sell his soul. Manafort’s among those with a modicum of historic success, at least if success can be measured in private jet travel, fancy clothing and the like. I’ve seen so many with less skill more than willing to do pretty much anything for nickels and dimes. These observations have left me with a sense that what happened in Germany in the 1930s could happen here for sure (perhaps anywhere).

   Part of the problem is that human beings are really good at rationalizing decisions that they know in their heart are wrong. Trouble with the heart is one has to pay attention to its callings, which are subtle. Thus, they’re fairly easy to cover over, at least in the moment. Reality on one’s death bed may be another matter.

   Another problem is that if one ignores conscience long enough, one forgets one ever had one. The rewards aren’t particularly satisfying. There are plenty of miserable rich people who discover too late that misery on a yacht is still miserable. But since they’ve forgotten conscience and forgotten essential goodness, they don’t remember what’s lost and think there’s no more attractive alternative. Thus, they’ll rationalize, “The world sucks, but at least it sucks a bit less in comfort.”

   The truth is one doesn’t need much money. One needs connection. Connection is primarily to one’s own truth. For some that might be to an art, to nature, to a sense of the infinite. To others too, if one isn’t too cynical and materialistic to know that one is deeply connected to others, that they can’t be treated as playthings or objects without injuring oneself.

   One can never get enough of what one doesen’t really need. So if one doesn’t know he or she is on the wrong path, it’s easy to just keep going further down that path. Manafort is one of those many folks who could serve as poster child.

   Perhaps there were times when folks were more aware of these realities, but maybe not. Opportunists have long been rampant, probably in all cultures. I don’t know if there were times or if there are cultures where the average person is more likely to be grounded in his or humanity. Perhaps so. Certain cultures emphasize the importance of being a person of substance and character. Those ideas are deep in eastern teachings through Confucius, Taoism, Buddhism and in Western teachings in my native Judaism (the notion of the tzadik or righteous person and the Yiddish term mensch) as well as in Christianity and Islam. In the case of Christianity, which is after all the dominant paradigm of the west, we forget how radical the views of Jesus were (and in fact still are if anyone gives them the time of day). Love your neighbor as yourself. If someone strikes you, turn the other cheek. Incredibly lofty goals.  

   • 

     MikeInOhio on August 4, 2018 at 4:18 pm

     I really like what you said here, and especially how you said it. Very good stuff. Thanks!

   • 

     oaguabonita on August 4, 2018 at 6:03 pm

      . . . of concepts in Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael trilogy, in partial disagreement/pushback on this:

     Perhaps there were times when folks were more aware of these realities, but maybe not. Opportunists have long been rampant, probably in all cultures. I don’t know if there were times or if there are cultures where the average person is more likely to be grounded in his or humanity. Perhaps so. Certain cultures emphasize the importance of being a person of substance and character. Those ideas are deep in eastern teachings through Confucius, Taoism, Buddhism and in Western teachings in my native Judaism (the notion of the tzadik or righteous person and the Yiddish term mensch) as well as in Christianity and Islam.

     Quinn/Ishmael posit a re-thinking/re-interpretation of human “history” that includes (to inevitably, grossly over-simplify):

     1. pushing back the understanding of “human history” beyond the 6,000ish years of biblical literalists and the 10,000ish of traditional “historians”, to the 2-3 million years of human existence that are the current scientific consensus about how long “we”‘ve been around. And, from within this more realistic perspective, aided by paleontological/anthropological evidence;
     2. recognizing that our now-global (“Taker”) culture, now subsuming and dominating probably 99.9%+ of the human population, had its beginnings as just one relatively obscure and insignificant human culture in the Fertile Crescent — among probably tens of thousands of human (“Leaver”) cultures then-extant — ~10,000 years ago. I.e., what’s traditionally thought of as “our” “history” is really a very truncated knowledge of the tiny, most-recent slice of actual human history; such that what’s traditionally thought of as human history is instead only the relatively very recent history of only our own (“Taker”) culture, largely ignoring those thousands of other cultures we proceeded inexorably to eliminate, losing their accumulated wisdom and knowledge in the process.
     3. That our “Taker” culture’s innovation — which allowed it to conquer the world, absorbing or exterminating all competitor cultures except a handful still hanging on in obscure backwaters of the globe that lacked land/resources we wanted [i.e., in that sense, not really competitors or we would have absorbed/exterminated them by now] — was The Totalitarian Agricultural Revolution. Whereby we refuse to live in ecological harmony with other species, but instead wage war on any that compete with us for food. Which provided the competitive advantages over other cultures, including the massive food surpluses that have fueled human population growth. But at immense cost to all those other cultures, species, and the planet’s ecology, which have brought us, Thelma-and-Louise-like, to the brink of the precipice with pedal-to-the-metal.

     Again, that’s massive over-simplification, but the best stab at a summary I can manage. I’ll acknowledge an implication of it that you and many may find unwelcome, i.e., that those “teachings” or religions you mention all arose and exist completely within our now-dominant “Taker” culture. That’s a premise worthy of discussion, but way beyond getting into here. Any interest in exploring it would be best served by just reading the Ishmael books (or at least that would be a necessary prerequisite to any such discussion).

     But the bottom line emerging from above — and what occasionally prompts me to write such a comment — is the conclusion which is to me both a source of great pessimism (except I just think of it as realism) and the only source of any hope: it is the concept that what so badly, potentially fatally, ails us is not the result of some flaw inherent in humanity (in which case the situation would indeed be hopeless and us doomed); but rather “only” inherent in our now-globally-dominant “Taker” culture. Which seems cause aplenty for a pessimism approaching hopelessness: how do you fix — or even mitigate — a fundamental flaw in a dominant culture comprising nearly the totality of current humanity? I certainly see little evidence of widespread cultural introspection in search of the nature of that flaw and how to fix it . . . quite the contrary, in fact. But the Quinn/Ishmael response to the bolded bit above would be ‘yes, there have been such cultures, thousands of them, and “we’ve” been systematically wiping them out for thousands of years’.

     But little hope is not no hope. Stop exterminating the few remaining cultures that aren’t “us”. Start learning from them, and from what we can piece together from those cultures already eliminated, the knowledge we’ve lost, but they’ve retained: how to live. Stop waging war on species that compete with us for food, and by extension, on nature and the Earth’s ecology.

     It’s a start.

     • 

       Parallax on August 4, 2018 at 9:01 pm

       You’re positing about a time before recorded history, so it’s not possible to know what happened. There are many hypotheses around this subject, including re: what happened to the other hominid species that show up in the fossil record. The truth is no one knows. Could be we killed them. Could also be that we out-competed them or were somehow more flexible and able to adapt to changing conditions. Of course we may cook or blow ourselves up yet (together with a bunch of other inhabitants of Planet Earth, many of whom we seem hell bent on driving to extinction one way or another).

       I agree that humans have often failed to demonstrate the most laudable behavior. I’m not wise enough to know whether those cultures that seem like exceptions are actually exceptional or have just seemed that way at certain times and in certain places.

       Clearly individual humans are capable of a great range of behaviors and of demonstrating the kind of behavior that makes it hard to be cynical about humanity in a categorical sense. Despite our flaws, we’ve managed to do some inspiring things in the collective too. But genocide is so common, even in recent history, that it cannot be considered anything less than a nearly universal norm. And the jury is still very much out on whether we will survive for any significant length of time as a species.

       • 

         oaguabonita on August 4, 2018 at 11:56 pm

         Not other cultures. I.e., our now globally-dominant (“Taker”) culture is the exception to the norm of many thousands of human cultures, to the extent that we can know what the norm was from the few surviving not-us “Leaver” cultures and surviving evidence from the annihilated cultures. This is a critical point!

         RE:

         You’re positing about a time before recorded history, so it’s not possible to know what happened.

         But “recorded history” as traditionally understood (and as I already noted) is a very truncated version of what we can know and infer from available evidence. This includes — just off the top of my head — proxy records such as tree rings, lakebed sediments, carbon (and other isotope) dating, ice cores, packrat middens, along with the better-known paleontological, archeological, and anthropological evidence such as fossils and human artifacts. This is actually all “recorded history”. The traditional notion of “history” begins with the earliest forms of writing, but this is an obviously artificial construct that amounts to self-blinding. It requires deliberately ignoring, for no good reason, factual evidence that is available to us.

         So, yes, true, it’s not possible to “know” — with absolute certainty — “what happened”. As usual, we’re stuck with our best inference from the available evidence.

         But some pretty robust and reasonable conclusions can be inferred from the preponderance of the available evidence, including:

         1. Until our now-dominant “Taker” culture emerged from among thousands of then-extant cultures ~10,000 years ago, no evidence suggests that any other human culture undertook the systematic annihilation (whether by absorption or extermination) of its neighbors, nor of other species, as ours did. Or if any did, they “didn’t live to tell about it”, i.e., no record of it exists, suggesting this was not a viable “evolutionary strategy” prior to our Totalitarian Agricultural Revolution. (It still isn’t, as “we’re” laboring strenuously to confirm by cultural — and perhaps civilizational or species — self-annihilation!)
         2. Ancillary evidence supporting this also suggests that throughout most of actual human history (as also previously noted) many thousands of distinct human cultures evolved and survived through many thousands of years. (Even the most restrictive estimates of our species’ age — i.e., Homo sapiens, excluding, e.g., other Hominins such as Neanderthals — put it at several hundred thousand years, leaving “recorded history” still a very minor fraction of human history.) Only with the advent of our culture’s Totalitarian Agricultural Revolution and the competitive advantages it conferred did the diversity of human cultures go through a steady narrowing to the current bottleneck of, for all practical purposes, just us.

         Which reminds me that I meant to mention in the first comment, but forgot: The telling of the Genesis stories of The Fall and Cain and Abel through the lens of the ideas sketched out above provides the most gobsmacking moments of the 3 books. To which a main character, a Catholic priest, responds,

         “Yipes.” I’m not sure I ever uttered that syllable before in my life, but I did then. “Where did you get this?”

         “This is one of Ishmael’s contributions.”

         “Have you ever tried it out on a biblical scholar?”

         B nodded. “Biblical scholars have seen it, and so far none has found any reason to quarrel with it. One said it was the only explanation he’d ever seen that makes sense.”

         “It’s the only one I’ve seen that makes sense, and I’ve seen them all

         .”

         I was raised religiously. It’s fair to say I was steeped in those stories. Like the priest, aspects of them made no sense to me. Until I viewed them through this prism for the first time and had a virtually identical “yipes!” response. Finally, they made perfect sense.

         Finally, just to touch on a couple other things you mentioned:

         One thing that happened to some hominid species/subspecies that co-existed at some time with our ancestors was that they became our ancestors through interbreeding: e.g., lots of us have Neanderthal genes.

         Consistent with the premises sketched out above, genocide, too, appears to be a flaw of our “Taker” culture, not of humanity. This is not to say individual humans of one culture never killed individual humans of another culture, of course. Almost surely, they did, on a fairly regular basis. What there’s no evidence of (that I’m aware of) is that any cultures other than ours ever set about the systematic extermination of their neighbors, as ours repeatedly has. Quinn/Ishmael posits, and I think this is probably right, that this would have seemed utterly insane to them — as it did when turned against them, which the Genesis stories capture mythologically.

         • 

           Parallax on August 6, 2018 at 12:51 pm

           I’m no expert on ancient anthropology, OB. My very limited understanding, based on what I’ve read through the years, is that tribal hunter/gatherer cultures have been studied fairly extensively in the last few centuries, a good thing since very few are left now. It seems there was a vast range of cultural norms in those societies. Some appeared gentle with practices that allowed for the resolution of conflict while others were confrontational and at times violent.

         • 

           oaguabonita on August 6, 2018 at 4:38 pm

            . . . a certain willingness to trust Quinn/Ishmael‘s telling of anthropological evidence* outside my expertise:

           1. Though not an anthropologist, I am an ecologist, and ecological principles figure very prominently in the 3 books. So my professional expertise does overlap with a substantial proportion of what Quinn/Ishmael propound. And where it does (e.g., “the ABCs of ecology” in one of the books, though I forget which), Quinn/Ishmael get it right, in every way that matters (not saying there are details “they” don’t get right — I don’t actually recall any; just hedging out of an abundance of professional caution). This naturally increases my trust when they go outside my personal expertise.
           2. Quinn also drops in a few references to actual research/publications. Two of which I remember because I took the hint to follow-up and check them out. They are Marshall Sahlins’ The Original Affluent Society (wiki summary version); and Riane Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade (wiki). Both stand on their own as worthwhile reads, but the point here is that the information Quinn references to them is, in my judgment, rendered faithfully and accurately in the Ishmael books. This further enhances my confidence in what Quinn/Ishmael posit about “Leaver” cultures when it goes beyond my own expertise.

           *e.g., the Alawa Law of Adultery (from The Story of B, since once, years ago, I went to the trouble of transcribing this passage from the book, and then saved it); also relevant to your (accurate!) point about “a vast range of cultural norms in those societies” — which is also what distinguishes them as identifiable, individual cultures:

           . . .

           On the nature of received laws

            . . .

           I was saying that an example will show you the difference between received tribal laws and laws invented by committees. Here’s how the Alawa of Australia handle adultery.

           Let’s suppose that you’re a young unmarried man of the Alawa.

           You find yourself in the unhappy circumstance of being attracted to your second cousin’s wife, Gurtina – and of knowing that she is attracted to you. Now, your second cousin is a fine fellow, and you wouldn’t intentionally hurt him, but these things happen: You and his wife are possessed by the love madness.

           It’s really very touching and pathetic. Living in the same camp, you can’t help but see each other daily. You circle each other like binary stars, drawn together by one force, thrust apart by another. What you read in each other’s eyes is plain but untested. You yearn to test it, but . . . you know what the testing will inevitably cost.

           No matter. Soon you can endure it no longer. The fire of love is burning you alive. One day in passing at the outskirts of camp, you confront her. She lowers her eyes modestly, as always, but your determination is fixed. “Tonight,” you whisper, “past the saltbush on the other side of the stream.”

           She hesitates a moment to consult her own heart, but she too knows that the time has come. “At the setting of the moon?” she asks. “At the setting of the moon.” She nods and hurries away, her heart bursting with joy and dread.

           That night you’re there a little beforehand, of course, to prepare your bower of love, your nest of passion. Gurtina comes to you at last. Your hands touch. You embrace. Ah!

           A few hours later, exhausted with delight, you sit by a tiny fire and watch it grow pale in the burgeoning dawn. You exchange a glance, and more is written in that glance than in all your night’s endearments and caresses. You have tested your passion. Now, this glance says, it’s time to test your love.

           With a sigh, you smother the fire and head back to camp, trying not to let your feet drag. Your faces are a careful display. Exultation would be childish and insolent. Shame would be a denial of your love. Instead, what’s seen there is something like repose, acceptance, fortitude. You both know what you’re going to see, and without fail you see it. At one side of the camp the men are arrayed, already hopping with fury. At the other side wait the women, smoldering.

           You and Gurtina exchange another glance – this one briefer than the beat of a gnat’s wing – and then you’re engulfed in a wave of wrath. The men descend on you, the women on her. Rocks and spears and boomerangs are flying through the air, clubs and digging sticks are being wielded with abandon. But you don’t just stand there and take it – far from it. You both battle back in defense of your love, answering screams with screams, rocks with rocks, spears with spears, blows with blows, until all weapons and combatants are finally exhausted.

           Gurtina, bleeding and battered, is returned to her husband, and you’re told to roll your swag and get the hell out if you know what’s good for you. For while the men’s bodies are exhausted, their fury isn’t, and when they revive, you’ll be fair game again. So you roll your swag, thinking. Thinking very hard. The test of your love isn’t over, it’s just begun. The next few hours will be the true test, and this test will be in your head and heart alone. You leave camp, knowing that as yet you have a choice . . .

           The question is: Do you really want this woman? Do you want her more than anything you hold dear in the world? If you don’t, if there’s the slightest doubt . . . you will just keep going – go on walkabout for a few weeks. When you come back, the men’s fury will have abated. They’ll jeer at you for a few weeks and then forget all about it. Gurtina . . . ah, Gurtina will know you for what you are, a craven seducer, a hollow man, and she’ll never forget. And of course there’ll be a price to be paid to your cousin. But all these are bearable. The alternative, on the other hand . . . You circle the camp all day, staying out of sight and out of reach, thinking. But by dusk you know that your doubts have vanished. In the gathering darkness, you approach camp stealthily, to the spot where your loved one is being guarded. Lightly guarded.

           Lightly guarded – to keep her from running away with you. Ah, the exquisiteness of that guard! Do you see its effect?

           Gurtina has her own choice to make, you see – the same terrible choice as yours. And the restraint provided by those guards defines and delimits her choice. For she’s guarded. You’re not. You have to prove your courage by coming for her. She doesn’t need to prove her courage by coming for you. And in fact, she can’t. She’s guarded, you see. So that, should you not come for her, she will not be shamed. Rather it will be you who is shamed.

           But this is only half of it. The guards are there to protect you as well, because Gurtina too has her choice to make. Does she really want you? Does she want you more than anything she holds dear in the world? If not – if there’s the slightest doubt – when your signal comes at dusk, she need only shrug helplessly, as if to say, “See? I can’t get away, my love. I’m being too well guarded.” Thus the presence of the guards enables her to express her choice in a way that does not crush your self-esteem. The presence of the guards makes it possible for her to end the whole episode in a moment, without a single word, as painlessly as possible.

           Now note very well that none of this is or was worked out rationally or consciously, of course. Nevertheless, the guard on Gurtina is in fact curiously inefficient. Efficient enough to serve all the purposes I’ve just mentioned – but inefficient enough to allow her to escape at your signal, if that is her will. Because of course the Alawa are sensible enough to know that if she wants you this much, it would be foolish to make escape impossible.

           The testing is over now. You and she have made your decision. Now the price must be paid. The price for disrupting the life of the tribe, for cheapening marriage in the eyes of the children. And that price is, next to death itself, the heaviest that can be paid: detribalization, lifelong exile.

           At your signal, Gurtina slips away from her guard and, together at last and forever, the two of you hurry away into the night, never to return. You are journeying into the land of the dead now. Detribalized, you are dead to all you left behind and to all you shall ever meet for the rest of your lives. Now you are truly homeless, by your own choice, alone and adrift in a vast, empty world. Your home is now each other, which you chose above the tribe. There will be no comradeship for you forever except what you find in each other: no friends, no father and mother, no aunts and uncles, no cousins, no nieces and nephews. You have thrown it all away – to have each other.

           And you know that this is truly a price you’ve paid of your own choice, not a punishment. To have each other and go on living with the tribe would be unthinkable, disgraceful, even worse than exile. It would in fact destroy the tribe, because once the children saw that there was no price to be paid for adultery, marriage would become a laughingstock, and the basis of the family and of the tribe itself would disintegrate.

           What you see at work here in this example is the stupendous efficacy of tribal law. Nothing like invented law, which just spells out crimes and punishments, tribal law is something that works. It works well for all concerned. A man and woman whose love is as great as this must of course have each other. But for the sake of the tribe, they must be gone – out of sight, out of mind forever. The children of the tribe have seen with their own eyes that marriage and love are not the trifling matters they have become among “advanced” peoples like us. The husband’s dishonor has been avenged – and there will be no snickering among his comrades about it, for they stood side by side with him to lambaste the adulterer.

           But perhaps you had a question at this point in the story: Why would the lovers return to the camp at all?

           Oh, that’s exactly the crux of the law. It wouldn’t work at all without that. Suppose, after your night of lovemaking, you were to suggest to Gurtina: “Oh, why should we wait another day to be together? Let’s run away now!” What would she think? She would think, “Uh-oh, what have I gotten myself into here? What kind of a man is this? A coward, obviously, who would have us slink off into the night rather than go back to face the others and say, `Well, here we are! Do your worst!'”

           And if she made the suggestion instead of you, you’d think the same of her. So the two of you must go back. . . .

           Every part of this process is the law, and every actor in it is a participant in the law. The law for these people isn’t a separate statute written in a book. It’s the very fabric of their lives – it’s what makes the Alawa the Alawa and what distinguishes them from the Mara and the Malanugga-nugga – who have their own ways of handling adultery, which are the best for them. It can’t possibly be said too often that there is no one right way for people to live; that’s only the delusion of the most murderous and destructive culture that history has ever produced.

           I’m sure it’s all but self-evident to you that this law of adultery could not have been the invention of any committee whatever. It’s not an improvisation or a contrivance, and because it’s not an improvisation or a contrivance, it has weight with the Alawa. It might not occur to any of them to analyze it as I’ve done here tonight, but that doesn’t matter in the least. They don’t obey the law of the Alawa because it checks out under analysis. They obey the law of the Alawa because they’re the Alawa, and to give up the law would be to give up their identity – would be to become detribalized.

            . . .

         • 

           prevdem on August 6, 2018 at 5:36 pm

           ‘The Age of Innocence’.

         • 

           oaguabonita on August 6, 2018 at 6:17 pm

            . . . of the 1920 Wharton novel, but if that was your reference, I don’t get it.

           Nor am I sure I get it if that wasn’t your reference. Personally, I wouldn’t characterize that excerpt (or the Alawa law described) as being about “innocence”. More about how they handle guilt, in fact.

         • 

           prevdem on August 6, 2018 at 9:25 pm

           I was thinking about how the mores of the society were used to rein in the groom’s attempted foray into adultery and forced him to remain in a complacent if stultifying marriage so that their civilization would not be upended.

           The cost of not abiding by the rules was to become an outcast.  

         • 

           oaguabonita on August 6, 2018 at 10:17 pm

           “The groom” threw me at first. I was on the verge of replying “no, you need to re-read the excerpt, it wasn’t the groom, it was the adulterous wife and her lover oppressed under the mores of society, and she didn’t stay in the stultifying marriage, they DID become outcasts.”

           At about the point of having formulated that thought (yeah, I can be a bit slow on the uptake at times), it finally occurred to me you probably meant Wharton’s groom (the D D Lewis character in the movie), not the Alawa groom. Right?

           Then the analogy made sense. Not perfect sense, given the non-parallels just noted above, but yeah, I think I get the reference now and it actually makes for a good comparison. Thanks for clearing that up (assuming my guess above is correct).

           At the risk of exposing my inner sexist pig, I can conceive worse fates than being stuck with Winona, though. But seriously, her character’s transition from (seemingly) meek and mild, complacent and compliant to steely (while still projecting the same sweet superficial exterior) “hunh-uh, oh, no, no you don’t, not me, I’ll not be no spurned or abandoned wife” was very well acted and portrayed.

         • 

           prevdem on August 6, 2018 at 11:15 pm

           I was still referring to ‘The Age of Innocence’, sorry I didn’t make that clear.

           I thought the saddest part was when his son offered a chance for him to meet the Countess many years later and he declined having completely succumbed to his society’s dictates.

           And yes, Winona was luscious 🙂

         • 

           oaguabonita on August 7, 2018 at 2:42 pm
3. 

   mainsailset on August 4, 2018 at 3:54 pm

   Would love to have read the resume he gave Trump to review, oh wait…

   I’m sure Trump saw that he’d worked for Reagan (and gotten paid) and thought wow, he must really love me if he’ll run my campaign for free.

   Bets on how many calls Manafort made before he sent the ‘will this make things whole?’ email? I’ll bet he called everyone he could think of to tell them he was in on the patsy’s campaign.

4. 

   ZenLoon on August 4, 2018 at 6:11 pm

   O/T, but there was just an ad on the home page urging me to join the NRA (“STAND and FIGHT or GIVE UP your guns”)– does everyone see those, or was it for some unfathomable reason targeted at me?

5. 

   shan on August 4, 2018 at 6:52 pm

   It’s you.  My ad is for ladies clothes.

6. 

   Jonf on August 5, 2018 at 10:56 am

   So Fat Donnie now says the Trump Tower meeting Don Jr had was to get dirt on Hillary. Totally legal. Seems those other fabrications were unnecessary. Good to know.