Category Archives: Books

Nigger

Books, Classic Books, Free Speech, racism

 

There is a bad word that recurs in the novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It recurs 219 times. That is difficult to read.  Many people don’t like that.  I don’t like that. Some people want the book to be banned as a result. But I know there is a reason. It is a terrible word that represents more than 400 years of racial subjugation. It is deeply offensive to African Americans. It should be equally offensive to white Americans (and Canadians). Amazingly, it is still used sometimes. More often than it. Thank goodness for that.

Many people have wanted to ban the book because of that word. But the words is important. It was the way people talked in those days. And sometimes still do. Twain knew that. He wanted us to squirm when we heard that word. Many of us do exactly that. I know I did.

If the word were excised from the book, as many have suggested, it would emasculate the book. It would not be telling us the truth about America in the 1870s. It would whitewash America much like Tom Sawyer had to whitewash the fence. It must stay in. Nothing else will do. To insist on its removal on pain of banishment of the book, as some people have done, is to refuse to look at the reality of 19 century America, and that is a reality that must be confronted. Not evaded. Twain did exactly that in the noble character of Jim.

Some liberals have wanted to eliminate the word to placate African Americans. Many of them have called for that. I prefer the approach of Toni Morrison who said, Twain’s use of the word, “the narrow notion of how to handle the offense Mark Twain’s use of the term ‘nigger’ would occasion for black students and the corrosive effect it would have on white ones,” was “a purist yet elementary kind of censorship designed to appease adults rather than educate children. Amputate the problem., band-aid the solution.” Children should not be protected from this word they should face it. That may be hard, but it is important. They should think about what the word signifies about white society of the day. And what the effects of that society are still felt today.

Azar Nafisi said it well in her wonderful book Reading Lolita in Tehran ,

“Education’s goal is to impart knowledge, and knowledge is not only heretical but unpredictable and often uncomfortable.  One has to pause and imagine what it would mean to censor all that is uncomfortable from our textbooks. How if we cannot face the past as it was, can you ever hope to teach history.”

 

As the American literary critic Leslie Fiedler showed, we have to be willing to walk into a dark cave and carry a torch to the back and see the truth. Then we must come out and speak the truth we have found. Nothing short of that is good enough. That is the kind of courage we must have. The book challenges our courage.

Twain used this word deliberately. As Nafisi said, “He wanted to shock us, make us uncomfortable, to arouse us from our indolent acquiescence.” That is what modern American conservatives don’t like. They want the bad parts of history to be removed. Such indolence is the begging of oppression.

Twain understood as perhaps few others ever did, the extent to which racial bias was hidden and deeply embedded in American society.  That was deeply pernicious, yet it was the basis for justifying slavery. It was the basis later for Jim Crow laws.

Nafisi made a very important point:

“Each time the word (nigger) is used, it is simultaneously questioned, subverted, destabilized and discredited—in the same manner that terms like “respectable” or “white” are transformed and undermined. When Huck tells Aunt Sally that no one but a nigger was killed and she expresses her joy at no one’s being killed, this, as the saying goes, speaks volumes—not about the inhumanity of slaves but about the blindness of a good-hearted, God- fearing woman.”

 

Twain punctured the self-satisfaction of people who considered themselves respectable and encourage slavery and discrimination. He also wanted to puncture the self-satisfaction of those who used the word “nigger”.

 

As a result, for the same reason Twain used the word I will use the word.  I don’t want to sugar coat the reality by saying something like “the N-word.” I don’t say this to offend or hurt African American people. I say to offend white Americans and Canadians. They should be offended by the truth. Not because they are responsible for what happened. But they are responsible for what they do about it. For what they think about it. And for how that reality changes them now in the here and now.

 

Huck Finn : The Rebel

Books, CBC radio, Classic Books, Rebel, Religious Quest in the Modern Age

 

 

As readers of my blog may remember I am engaged in two quests. One is to pursue the religious quest in the modern age. The other, is to re-read at least one book each year.  Well reading this book does both!

 

I am often asked what is the best novel ever written? I answer that question in different ways at different times. That is entirely appropriate to a person who is meandering, uncertainly, I hope, towards the truth. In my opinion this book is certainly one of the best novels ever written, perhaps the very best. I think is my favourite novel of all time!

The book was published first in England in 1884 and America in 1885. In many ways it is the story of America.

Please note in this review I won’t worry about ‘giving things away”. Even if one hasn’t read the book it has been around long enough that everyone knows what the book is about and more or less what happens. So if you don’t like that, read the book first. It is much better than this paltry review.

Many years after I read and immensely enjoyed the novel, I read a book by Azar Nafisi called The Republic of the Imagination. It is a book about a number of American novels, including this one. That book significantly deepened my understanding of this great novel.  Nafisi was a teacher of English literature in Tehran, Iran, before moving to the United States and becoming an American professor of literature.

That seems almost inconceivable.  In Iran she taught a class of mainly young women, many who had asked her to form a book club which she led. One of her students was Farah who was dying but wanted the last year of her life to be devoted to the pursuit of a classic. This book—The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 

 

Many people consider this book a book for children, particularly young boys. Why is it that so many great American novels are considered books for children?

Nafisi said about young Iranian women reading this novel:

 

“The original Huck was our guide, our inspiration, the thorn in our side who reminded us to be true to ourselves and who, goaded us when we became too complacent, too conventional in our preoccupations,  whenever we seemed too comfortable with our lot. He gave us vital chaos as the kind of American we wanted to be.  He reminded us—best American heroes are wary of being overcivilized, and that they carve out their own path and look to their heart for what is right and just.”

 

Nafisi denied that a book was in the ordinary sense moral. She did say this, “it can be called moral when it shakes us out of our stupor and makes us confront the absolutes we believe in.” That is precisely what Huck Finn does. It wakes us from our moral slumbers. And all of us fall into such slumbers. It is intellectual indolence. A common disease.

 

One of the most amazing scenes in Nafisi’s  book is when her class at the University decides to put the book The Great Gatsby on trial. The prosecutor is a strict straight-laced Muslim regime supporter. The defense counsel is one of her female students. It is a remarkable achievement. Both learned a lot by reading closely that novel.  According to Nafisi, “a great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals , and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil.”

 

This of course is exactly what happens in a totalitarian society like Iran. The mullahs and morality police control everything in the lives of the people. The people are told what to do and what to think and even what to wear and how to wear it. This is what is now happening in Iran when the people are revolting against these restrictions, but it will be difficult. Yet the courageous women in her class did quietly revolt too. Merely reading Huck Finn was rebellious. Huck Finn was a rebel without a cause. No he was actually a rebel with a cause. A very important cause. We will get into that.

 

But how different is America?  As Nafisi said, “I wanted to write about Huck, to capture what he could teach us, at a time of reality TV and phony bombastic patriotism, about a more authentic American ideal.” It is interesting that I write this right after the 2022 midterm elections in the US. These are normally excruciatingly boring. But this year Americans were given a chance to reject the phony patriotism of the Trumpsters, and at least to some extent they seized the moment. Farah “wanted what Huck appeared to be escaping from—a comfortable and predictable home.” This is what Nafisi wanted too.

 

Huck of course became an orphan in the book. His father, Pap,  was mean and inscrutable and in his death freed Huck. So many novels about orphans who encounter a cruel and ungenerous world but then finds wealthy patron and all is then well.  But Huck was different. As Nafisi said about Huck, “But here was one little orphan who not only did not find a home, but was repulsed by its very idea, taking off whenever he was offered one.”

 

Nafisi made a bold statement about Twain: “If there was any figure in the history of American fiction who through his writing, created a literary declaration of independence, it was Mark Twain.” Huck was the classic scamp, rapscallion, and rebel. He dissented from the moral constraints imposed by society. As Nafisi said,

“Huck was a mongrel, an outcast, uneducated and unmoored, and since his creation countless Americans have recast themselves in his image.. He was suspicious of the smothery ways of conventional society, but in his ideals, his moral courage, his determination to open himself up to the lessons of nature and the vagaries of experience, he was as much a product of the Enlightenment as were George Washington and Benjamin Franklin…”

 

Twain understood how difficult it was to dissent from conventional morality.  It is never easy to turn your back on what most others are doing or saying in your society. It is much easier to paddle with the stream rather than against it. But Huck Finn found he could not do that.

That is why Huckleberry Finn is such a subversive novel.

That is why it is such a great novel.

 

 

Desire for Cruelty

Books, Death of Democracy, Extremism, Populism, The Sleep of Reason, True Believer, Trump the Saviour, Trumpism, Tyranny and Fascism

 

Because of their incredibly strong desire to separate themselves from respectable society—the establishment as 1960s rebels would call it—the true believers of totalitarian movements of the 1930s and following in Europe, inculcated a desire for cruelty. They were driven by a desire for cruelty. That desire fueled their passion.

Lately I have been rewatching the mob of Trumpsters on Capitol Hill on January 6th and have noticed the same phenomenon. The similarities to the older totalitarian mobs are astonishing. As Hannah Arendt said in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism in which she described the insurrectionists of the 1930s and 1940s:

“They read not Darwin but the Marquis de Sade.  If they believed at all in universal laws, they certainly did not particularly care to conform to them. To them, violence, power, cruelty, power, were the supreme capacities of men who definitely lost their place in the universe and were much too proud to long for a power theory that would safely bring them back and reintegrate into the world. They were satisfied with blind partisanship in anything that respectable society had banned, regardless of theory or content, and they elevated cruelty to a major virtue because it contradicted society’s humanitarian and liberal hypocrisy.”

 

That applied to Nazi mobs and Communist mobs. I think it also applied to modern American Trump inspired mobs.

Watching the rioters on Capitol Hill on January 6th of 2021 I was struck by how much fun they were having.  It was obviously a blast for them. Literally a blast. It was probably one of the most exciting days of their lives. Running down the corridors of the Capitol in search of Mike Pence chanting that they would hang him and  Nancy Pelosi was incredibly exciting for them. They were filled with passion. Arendt mentioned in her book how the older rebels has a “yearning for violence.” Arendt had said how the revolutionaries experienced

“the self-willed immersion in the suprahuman forces of destruction seemed to be a salvation from the automatic identification with pre-established functions in society and their utter banality…”

They were finally loosed from the chains of mediocrity. As Arendt said about the older rebellions,

“What proved so attractive was that terrorism had become a kind of philosophy through which to express frustration, resentment and blind hatred, a kind of political expressionism which used bombs to express oneself, which watched delightedly the publicity given to resounding deeds and was absolutely willing to pay the price of life for having succeeded in forcing the recognition of one’s existence on the normal strata of society. It was still the same spirit and the same game which made Goebbels, long before the eventual defeat of the Nazis, in case of defeat, would know how to slam the door behind them and not be forgotten for centuries.”   

 

Many have been surprised by the fact that Donald Trump could attract support from elites as well as those who had been humbled by globalization. How was that possible?

First, as Hannah  Arendt said, “The members of the elite did not object at all to paying a price, the destruction of civilization, for the fun of seeing how those who had been excluded unjustly in past forced their way into it.” Next, Arendt also said this about earlier insurrectionists: “The temporary alliance between the elite and the mob rested largely on this genuine delight with which the former watched the latter destroy respectability.” The elite wanted to see the cruelty of the mob in action. It was the same on January 6th 2021. The lust for cruelty can be surprising powerful.

Anyone who unleashes these powerful and uncontrollable emotions must be prepared for the unholy explosion that is likely to follow. Trump was prepared for that. Some of his followers were not, for they abandoned him. It is now being determined how many others are prepared to enjoy the train wreck too.

Yearning to Belong

Alienation, Books, The Sleep of Reason, True Believer, Trump the Saviour, Trumpism, Tyranny and Fascism

 

Hannah Arendt commented on how early supporters of Hitler in Germany demonstrated astonishing selflessness. She described that this way:

“The peculiar selflessness of the mass man appeared here as a yearning for anonymity, for being just a number and functioning cog, for every transformation, in brief, which would wipe out the spurious identification with specific types of predetermined functions within society. War had been experienced as that “mightiest of all mass action” which obliterated individual differences so that even suffering, which traditionally had marked off individuals through unique unexchangeable destinies could now be interpreted as “an instrument of historical progress.”

 

This desire to be part of a movement—to belong to a group—is of course of vital significance. Humans have strong desires to be part of groups.  Groups are desired to heal feelings of alienation and isolation. They are exhilarating. If you have any doubt about this go to an American football game. You will be convinced.  The feeling is that this is “us” against “them” and the excitement is palpable. These feelings are beyond reason. Cheering for your team has nothing to do with reason.  That is what the rapture must feel like.

Bakunin, the Russian anarchist expressed this feeling deeply. He said, “I do not want to be I, I want to be We.”

To us from afar this seems insane. It is insane. But it was real for those members of the movement. Will it be the same for modern authoritarians and their followers such Donald Trump’s Trumpsters? We cannot know that in advance, no matter what Arendt has told us about earlier mass movements, but it certainly must make us consider what comes next?

Absolute Loyalty

American Fascism, Books, Death of Democracy, Populism, The Sleep of Reason, Trump, Trump the Saviour, Tyranny and Fascism

 

As Hannah Arendt said in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism totalitarian movements required and received absolute loyalty. A member might have to let himself be tried, found guilty of any crime, cooperate with the authorities, without objection—all in the name of the movement.

Of course, not everyone is able to give such loyalty. As Arendt said,

“Such loyalty can be expected only from the completely isolated human being who, without any other social ties to family, friends, comrades, or even mere acquaintances, derives his sense of having a place in the world only from his belonging to a movement, his membership in the party.”

Notably, that was also the kind of loyalty Trump demanded of the Trumpsters, and usually got. That’s what he told James Comey who refused to give it. It did not take long and Coney was out of his job as Director of the FBI. That happened to countless others.

Arendt found it interesting who was able to give such loyalty. It was surprising. As she said,

“What is more disturbing to our peace of mind than the unconditional loyalty of members of totalitarian movements, and the popular support of totalitarian regimes, is the unquestionable attraction these movements exert on the elite, and not only on the mob elements in society. It would be rash indeed to discount, because of artistic vagaries or scholarly naiveté, the terrifying roster of distinguished men whom totalitarianism can count among its sympathizers, fellow-travelers, and inscribed party members.”

 

Again Trumpism found similar support among elite conservatives. Trump and Trumpsters expected Mike Pence to overthrow the votes of states despite the fact that courts had refused to do this, and despite the fact that there was no way this could be done and when he refused Trump immediately turned on him even though he had received 4 years of abject loyalty from Pence. And with only the vaguest of suggestions, the Trumpian mob marched to the White House with chants “Hang Mike Pence.” Later. even though his life had been endangered by Trump and his followers at his behest, Pence did not overturn the election results because he thought he could not do that, but after this devotion to the leader was stubbornly persistent

Loyalty is an astonishing thing. Absolute loyalty is incomprehensible. But it is real. It can persist long past what reason would suggest.

 

Zealotry

American Fascism, Books, Death of Democracy, Extremism, Hate, The Sleep of Reason, True Believer, Trumpism, Tyranny and Fascism

 

Hannah Arendt looked closely at the supporters of totalitarian movements of the 1930s and 1940s and many of the things she learned are applicable to the current authoritarian movements. She found that the enthusiasm of the true believers was stunning. This is what she said about the totalitarians of the 1930s and following decades:

“They shared with Lawrence of Arabia the yearning for “losing their selves in violent disgust with all existing standards, with every power that be. They all remembered the “golden age of security,” they also remembered how they had hated it and how real their enthusiasm had been at the outbreak of the first World War. Not only Hitler and not only the failures, thanked God on their knees when mobilization swept Europe in 1914. They did not even have to reproach themselves with having been an easy prey for chauvinist propaganda or lying explanations about the purely defensive character of the war. The elite went to war with an exultant hope that everything they knew, the whole culture and texture of life, might go down in its “storms of steel” (Ernst Jünger) In the carefully chosen words of Thomas Mann, war was “chastisement” and “purification”; “war in itself,” rather than victories, inspired the poet.” Or in the words of a student of the time, “what counts is always the readiness to make a sacrifice, not the object for which the sacrifice is made”; or in the words of a young worker, “it doesn’t matter whether one lives a few years longer or not. One would like to have something to show for one’s life.”

 

The true believers were truly zealots. And note the religious significance here. Sacrifice is of course a fundamental religious concept in virtually every religion. It is no accident that the words “sacred” and “sacrifice” come from the same root. You only have to look at that wonderful series, A History of Religious Ideas, in 3 volumes by the Master Mircea Eliade to see the similarities.

 

Arendt also pointed out how

“the “front generation” in marked contrast to their own chosen spiritual fathers, were completely absorbed by their desire to see the ruin of this whole world of fake security, fake culture, and fake life. This desire was so great it outweighed in impact and articulateness all earlier attempts of a “transformation of values,” such as Nietzsche had attempted…Destruction without mitigation, chaos and ruin, as such assumed the dignity of supreme values.”

 

Arendt also pointed out in her book The Origins of Totalitariainism that willingness to go to war for the cause was in itself insufficient. This attitude had to survive the war, no matter how horrific it was:

“The genuineness of these feelings can be seen in the fact that very few of this generation were cured of their war enthusiasm by actual experience of its horrors. The survivors of the trenches did not become pacifists. They cherished an experience which, they thought, might serve to separate the definitively from the hated surroundings of respectability. They clung to their memories of four years of life in the trenches as though they constituted an objective criterion for the establishment of a new elite.”

 

So it is hardly surprising that Trumpsters were not done after the storming of the Capitol. They wanted more. I believe it is likely that. They want to follow their leader into the next battle.

Hannah Arendt said this about the totalitarian believers of Europe:

“This generation remembered the war as the great prelude to the breakdown of classes and their transformation into masses. War, with its constant murderous arbitrariness, became the symbol for death, the “great equalizer” and therefore the true father of a new world order. The passion for equality and justice, the longing to transcend narrow and meaningless class lines, to abandon stupid privileges and prejudices, seemed to find in war a way out of the old condescending attitudes of pity for the oppressed and disinherited. In times of growing misery and individual helplessness, it seems as difficult to resist pity when it grows into an all-devouring passion as it is not to resent its very boundlessness, which seems to kill human dignity with more deadly certainty than misery itself.”

 

Will the same be true of Trumpsters? We have no way of knowing. None of this is pre-ordained. I am not suggesting Arendt was a prophet. I am just saying her remarks about true believers of the totalitarians makes one look at the modern variants with deep trepidation. At the very least we have little justification for easy optimism or over confidence. We should not be quick to believe the troubles are over. It is more likely that they are just beginning. That is not a comforting thought.

Hannah Arendt on Mass Society

American Fascism, Books, Death of Democracy, Populism, The Sleep of Reason, Trumpism, Tyranny and Fascism

 

Hannah Arendt may be the most important political philosopher of the 21st century. She wrote about some of the most important political issues of the times. She wrote about violence, the Holocaust, and the rise of totalitarianism. She lived through totalitarianism in Nazi Germany before she fled to the United States. She knows whereof she speaks. I read her again after about 40 years away and was shocked at how relevant her books were to the current times.

John Wiens an educator from the University of Manitoba and Dean Emeritus of the Faculty of Education described Arendt’s concern about mass society this way in an article in the Winnipeg Free Press:

 

“Mass society, according to Arendt, appears in some rather familiar forms: anti-government rhetoric and resistance couched in perverted claims to personal freedom and/or nationalism; mob mentality laced with racism and fabricated enemies; conspiracy theories and anti-intellectualism; and tyranny and violence fuelled by tyrannical ambitions.”

 

That sounds like a perfect description of Trumpism 60 years before it happened. It also describes fascist supporters around the world. Arendt analyzed these ideas in her magisterial book, The Origins of Totalitarianism. While totalitarianism is not the same as Nazism, or Communism, or fascism, I think her analysis is applicable to all forms of tyranny. She described groups of deeply disenchanted and resentful individuals that were highly susceptible to authoritarians. She also described how modern people 60 years after she wrote the book would be attracted to authoritarians like Viktor of Hungary, Putin in Russia, Xi Jinping of China, Rodrigo Roa Duterte of the Philippines and Donald Trump in the United States.

People attracted to such authoritarians can even be found in Manitoba. Members of the so-called Truckers Convoy in Ottawa have many of these characteristics including deep resentment, an exaggerated sense of entitlement to unrestricted personal freedoms for themselves but which they deny to those who disagree with them. Interestingly, modern evangelical Christians provide strong support for authoritarians in the US and Canada. 60% of them still support Trump, long after his character is well understood.

As if she was talking about Trumpsters, rather than Nazis and Communists, Arendt pointed out,

“The fall of protecting class walls transformed the slumbering majorities behind all parties into one great unorganized, structureless mass of furious individuals who had nothing in common except their vague apprehension that the hopes of party members were doomed, that consequently, the most respected, the most articulate and representative members of the community were fools and that all the powers that be were not so much evil as they were equally stupid and fraudulent.”

 

These people who supported the Nazis and Communists were filled with “self-centered bitterness.” Once more a masterful description of Trumpsters and Canadian Convoy truckers, among others. Those Europeans, Arendt wrote, had a

“Radical loss of self-interest, the cynical or bored indifference in the face of death or other personal catastrophes, the passionate inclination toward the most abstract notions as guides for life, and the general contempt for even the most obvious rules of common sense.”

 

Arendt, along with others, calls these supporters of totalitarian movements mass men. They were mainly men. Trump would call on women too. Women for Trump. I can see them now in with their blonde hair and red MAGA hats often cheering wildly behind him at MAGA rallies. Supporters of tyrants, German, Russian, or American grew out of alienated western societies. As Arendt described them,

“The truth is that the masses grew out of the fragments of a highly atomized society whose competitive structure and concomitant loneliness of the individual had been held in check only through membership in a class. The chief characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness, but his isolation and lack of normal relationships. Coming from the class-ridden society of the nation-state, whose cracks had been cemented with nationalistic sentiment, it is only natural that these masses, in the first helplessness of their new experience, have tended toward an especially violent nationalism, to which mass leaders have yielded against their own instincts and purposes, for purely demagogic reasons.”

 

The Russian Communist Party had to create the atomized society that Germany, and later the United States, found ready at hand.

As Arendt said, “Totalitarian movements are mass organization of atomized, isolated individuals.” The reason for that is that they demand absolute loyalty. Total loyalty. It is often difficult for married men and women to give such undivided loyalty. Their families distract them from their cause—from their duty.

The key ingredient of mass men (or women) is their total disgruntlement about government and their readiness to jump to support perceived “strong men” even when they are so strong that they are authoritarians.

They claim to want freedom but are quick to give up their freedom to support their strong leaders wherever they may lead.

 

Hannah Arendt: Mass Support for authoritarians

American Fascism, Books, Death of Democracy, The Sleep of Reason, Trump, Trump the Saviour, Tyranny and Fascism

 

Dictators live on mass support. To many people that seems strange, but it isn’t. Massive power comes from mass support. They can’t do it alone. That does not mean a democracy is necessary. Not at all. Tyrants realize that democracy is not important. Mass support is important and there are better ways to get it than messy elections. Hannah Arendt described it this way in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism:

“It would be a still more serious mistake to forget, because of this impermanence, that totalitarian regimes, so long as they are in power, and the totalitarian leaders, so long as they are alive, “command and rest upon mass support” up to the end. Hitler’s rise to power was legal in terms of majority rule and neither he nor Stalin could have maintained the leadership of large populations, survived many interior and exterior crises, and braved numerous dangers of relentless intra-party struggles if they had not had the confidence of the masses.“

 

Often it is startling how brazen tyrannical leaders can be. Trump was not the first, though I acknowledge he was not a tyrannical leader-so far he is just a wanna be authoritarian, but he could easily tip in that direction if elected again. Arendt had another important observation here:

“Nor can their (totalitarian leaders) popularity be attributed to the victory of masterful and lying propaganda over ignorance and stupidity. For the totalitarian movements which precede and accompany totalitarian regimes, invariably as frank as it is mendacious, and would-be totalitarian rulers usually start their careers by boasting of their past crimes and carefully outlining their future ones.”

 

Trump did exactly that many times. For example, when he talked openly to Bob Woodward a reporter about how he minimized the risks of Covid-19 and told the American public they had nothing to fear. Later he kept saying, without evidence again, that “the end of the pandemic is around the corner.” He also bragged how he could stand in Times Square and kill someone and would not lose any support. He might have been right.