Society | Bob Schwartz

August 20, 2012

The Financier at 100

This year is the 100th anniversary of Theodore Roosevelt’s independent run for the Presidency on the Progressive Party ticket. He continues to come up in aspirational discussions, as much or more from Democrats as from Republicans. President Obama referred to him admiringly earlier this year. The Progressive Party Platform of 1912 remains a touchstone statement of political ideals.

The year 1912 is significant in other, less celebrated ways. At that time, issues of economic and social disparities were not limited to politicians. This year is the centennial of author and journalist Theodore Dreiser’s novel The Financier, the first book in his Trilogy of Desire series about tycoon Frank Cowperwood, followed by The Titan (1914) and The Stoic (1947).

Starting with Sister Carrie (1900), Dreiser explored the personal and social impact of class distinctions and ever-increasing wealth on early twentieth-century America. Dreiser was a pioneer in what’s come to be called the naturalist movement, telling stories in a plain, unromanticized way that allowed the darkest moments and motives to speak for themselves. More than a century later we’ve come to accept that style of storytelling. But at the time it was not the norm, and the effect on literature was profound.

Among the robber barons of the nineteenth century, Charles Tyson Yerkes (1837-1905) is less well-known than J. P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie or John D. Rockefeller. But you know some of his legacy, including the Chicago Loop and the London Underground. Yerkes’ roller coaster life of ambition—rich today, felon tomorrow, richer the next—was the inspiration for Dreiser’s financier Frank Cowperwood.

Any story of unbridled greed and ambition, fiction or non-fiction, is so common that it is hardly worth mentioning, especially if it is a hundred years old. But Theodore Dreiser was no ordinary observer, attested to by his stature as one of America’s great novelists. At the end of the first volume of Frank Cowperwood’s rise and fall and rise, Dreiser includes a curious little coda. Just a few paragraphs long, it is a description of a fish whose “great superiority lies in an almost unbelievable power of simulation.” The language may seem a bit dense for the twenty-first century reader, but in the context of The Financier, the point is clear:

You cannot look at it long without feeling that you are witnessing something spectral and unnatural, so brilliant is its power to deceive. From being black it can become instantly white; from being an earth-colored brown it can fade into a delightful water-colored green. Its markings change as the clouds of the sky. One marvels at the variety and subtlety of its power.

Here it is in its entirety:

Concerning Mycteroperca Bonaci

There is a certain fish, the scientific name of which is Mycteroperca Bonaci, its common name Black Grouper, which is of considerable value as an afterthought in this connection, and which deserves to be better known. It is a healthy creature, growing quite regularly to a weight of two hundred and fifty pounds, and lives a comfortable, lengthy existence because of its very remarkable ability to adapt itself to conditions. That very subtle thing which we call the creative power, and which we endow with the spirit of the beatitudes, is supposed to build this mortal life in such fashion that only honesty and virtue shall prevail. Witness, then, the significant manner in which it has fashioned the black grouper. One might go far afield and gather less forceful indictments—the horrific spider spinning his trap for the unthinking fly; the lovely Drosera (Sundew) using its crimson calyx for a smothering-pit in which to seal and devour the victim of its beauty; the rainbow-colored jellyfish that spreads its prismed tentacles like streamers of great beauty, only to sting and torture all that falls within their radiant folds. Man himself is busy digging the pit and fashioning the snare, but he will not believe it. His feet are in the trap of circumstance; his eyes are on an illusion.

Mycteroperca moving in its dark world of green waters is as fine an illustration of the constructive genius of nature, which is not beatific, as any which the mind of man may discover. Its great superiority lies in an almost unbelievable power of simulation, which relates solely to the pigmentation of its skin. In electrical mechanics we pride ourselves on our ability to make over one brilliant scene into another in the twinkling of an eye, and flash before the gaze of an onlooker picture after picture, which appear and disappear as we look. The directive control of Mycteroperca over its appearance is much more significant. You cannot look at it long without feeling that you are witnessing something spectral and unnatural, so brilliant is its power to deceive. From being black it can become instantly white; from being an earth-colored brown it can fade into a delightful water-colored green. Its markings change as the clouds of the sky. One marvels at the variety and subtlety of its power.

Lying at the bottom of a bay, it can simulate the mud by which it is surrounded. Hidden in the folds of glorious leaves, it is of the same markings. Lurking in a flaw of light, it is like the light itself shining dimly in water. Its power to elude or strike unseen is of the greatest.

What would you say was the intention of the overruling, intelligent, constructive force which gives to Mycteroperca this ability? To fit it to be truthful? To permit it to present an unvarying appearance which all honest life-seeking fish may know? Or would you say that subtlety, chicanery, trickery, were here at work? An implement of illusion one might readily suspect it to be, a living lie, a creature whose business it is to appear what it is not, to simulate that with which it has nothing in common, to get its living by great subtlety, the power of its enemies to forefend against which is little. The indictment is fair.

Would you say, in the face of this, that a beatific, beneficent creative, overruling power never wills that which is either tricky or deceptive? Or would you say that this material seeming in which we dwell is itself an illusion? If not, whence then the Ten Commandments and the illusion of justice? Why were the Beatitudes dreamed of and how do they avail?

August 16, 2012

Paul Ryan and Ayn Rand

A postage stamp honoring Ayn Rand was issued in 1999; that’s the image used in the National Review cover above. It was issued in the usual way, following a roughly three-year process of being proposed, recommended by the Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee, and then approved by the Postmaster General.

The most famous controversy over any stamp concerned the Elvis Presley commemorative. There was disagreement about which Elvis to depict, the younger leaner one or the older heavier one, and disagreement about whether Elvis should have a stamp at all. In the end, the stamp was issued, and went on to become the bestselling in U.S. postal history. There is no record that there was disagreement about Ayn Rand, though there might well have been.

Paul Ryan honored Ayn Rand too, at least until recently. He stated that her books were the most pivotal in shaping his public life. He gave them to interns as gifts. He spoke frequently about how the decline in America looked increasingly like something out of an Ayn Rand novel.

He is not alone among public servants in his admiration for Ayn Rand. Politico reported last April on 7 Politicians Who Praised Ayn Rand. Among these are Sen. Rand Paul (coincidentally named), Rep. Ron Paul (who should know about Rand Paul’s name), President Ronald Reagan, Sen. Ron Johnson, Gov. Gary Johnson, Sen. Mark Sanford and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Justice Thomas has his new law clerks watch a screening of The Fountainhead (1949), starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal, an adaptation of Rand’s second most famous novel. Maybe the most famous acolyte of Ayn Rand is former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who in the 1950s was part of her inner circle and a close confidant.

Rand’s novels are overlong, didactic, questionably artful embodiments of her very particular philosophy. It is a philosophy fed by her early experience as a child in Soviet Russia, a member of an intellectual and professional Jewish family that was reduced to dire circumstances by the forces of collectivism, Communism and totalitarianism.

She came to America and created her own ism. The Atlas Society, one of the intellectual keepers of the Rand canon, summarizes:

Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism was set forth in such works as her epic novel Atlas Shrugged, and in her brilliant non-fiction essays. Objectivism is designed as a guide to life, and celebrates the remarkable potential and power of you, the individual. Objectivism also challenges the doctrines of irrationalism, self-sacrifice, brute force, and collectivism that have brought centuries of chaos and misery into the lives of millions of individuals. It provides fascinating insights into the world of politics, art, education, foreign policy, science, and more, rewarding you with a rich understanding of how ideas shape your world. Those who discover Objectivism often describe the experience as life-changing and liberating.

One problem with Objectivism, as with the isms Rand left behind and hated, is that pure systems work well on paper and in the mind, as long as you don’t have to wrestle with the complexities and consequences of the actual world. This is probably why Ayn Rand has always had an appeal to younger people, particularly teenage boys and young men, who are empowered by the idea of their individual greatness waiting to explode, ungoverned by the limitations that the world tries to place on them. The world is filled with people who want something from us, who are jealous of us, who don’t understand our specialness, and who will do anything to hold us back and keep us down.

This phenomenon was wryly captured by Michael Sean Winters in the National Catholic Reporter:

As one wag once said: “There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”

Winters was writing in the context of the Ryan Budget. Paul Ryan is devoted to the Catholic Church, which is founded on the sort of collectivism, anti-individualism, self-sacrifice and charity that Rand abhorred and rejected as immoral. This led in May 2011 to questions about how the Ryan Budget, with reductions in government help for the poor and others in need, squared with the teachings of the Church. Archbishop Timothy Dolan, who had previously been Bishop in Wisconsin, made clear in a letter to Ryan that the budget was completely in line with the Church’s mission. Winters wrote:

Ryan’s budget certainly reflects Rand’s weltanschauung more than it reflects the vision Pope Benedict XVI put forth in Caritas in Veritate. That is why I think it was a mistake for Archbishop Dolan to write a letter that, however unintentionally, gave political cover to policies that are antithetical to Catholic social teaching. And, whatever frustrations Ryan – or anyone else – has with the modern, social welfare state, I think it can be said that the social welfare state is to social justice what democracy is to government: The worst form of administration except every other form.

Ryan can assert that his budget is built upon Catholic concerns about human dignity, but there is no dignity in Rand’s crimped vision of humanity. There really is no need to wrestle with these so-called ideas.

Paul Ryan’s distancing from Ayn Rand began last spring when he said that his supposed embrace of the author and her philosophy was “urban legend.” (If so, it is the most high-minded and intellectual urban legend of all time, since those stories are usually sordid and lowlife, as in the flushing of baby alligators into the New York sewers.) Then just yesterday he explained that while he enjoyed the novels for a long time, it was only later that he became aware of her philosophy.

As mentioned earlier, Ayn Rand’s novels are not works of art that have to be savored and investigated so that their meaning can be coaxed out. They are pages and pages of speeches and ideas, with some plot and characters hung on them like ornaments on a tree. There are only two explanations for Ryan’s assertion: he is either dull-witted, which he isn’t, or he is…being disingenuous.

Why all this effort to run away from Ayn Rand anyway? Most people, meaning voters, have never read those novels, and all this fuss is not about to move them to throw away weeks of their lives trying to plow through them.

Here’s why.

First, Ayn Rand was an atheist. In her philosophy there is no higher power than man, no life other than the objective life in front of our faces, no morality other than the morality of rational self-interest. There are plenty of atheists who embrace the moral and ethical concepts at the heart of religious beliefs, such as the Golden Rule. Ayn Rand was not one of those. This is more than inconvenient for anyone, especially politicians, who base their lives and careers on their religious foundations.

But there is something deeper and more significant going on. In 2010 the National Review, America’s most respected conservative journal, published a cover story on Ayn Rand. In it, Jason Lee Steorts writes about going back to reread Ayn Rand, given her renewed popularity following the election of Barack Obama:

Our president seems to have inspired — which is not quite the word — half the country to read Miss Rand, and I wanted to remind myself what she was teaching them. He finds that he can’t get through the books, because he sees the author for who she was and, therefore, what she espoused.

Steorts relates a scene from Atlas Shrugged. The prime movers, those who are literally the brains behind the success of the country, have gone on strike. This leaves the inferior, parasitic people to fend for themselves. In this scene, a train is stopped before an eight-mile unventilated tunnel. There are no diesel engines, no one to properly operate the train. But facing a demand to make it move, the station officials, writes Rand, “call in a coal engine, procure a drunken engineer, and condemn every passenger on the train to death by asphyxiation.”

The passengers comprise an array of losers, including a professor “who taught that individual ability is of no consequence” and a mother “whose husband held a government job enforcing directives.” They are, in essence, riding a train into a gas chamber. “But that isn’t why I stopped reading,” Steorts writes. “I stopped because Rand thinks they deserve it.”

That is at the heart of this running away from Rand. Rand’s world is not one where unbridled individualism can co-exist with a diversity of other moralities and abilities. It is either/or. There are producers, there are freeloaders, and the immoral role of government is to stifle the producers and reward the freeloaders with stolen spoils. As soon as government is gone, the producers will be free to shape the world in their image, and the others will learn how that world works or they will, ultimately, perish as their punishment.

If that sounds harsh and heartless, it is. If that sounds like an extreme version of some of the rhetoric we may have been hearing lately, it is. But even the softer version, tempered by compassion, still makes us uncomfortable. That is why, hopefully, Ryan and others will distance themselves from Ayn Rand—not just for political show, but for real. That is why, when Sheorts in the National Review looked to find out why Obama-haters were reading Ayn Rand, he recoiled at what he found. He discovered a bloodless train, and he couldn’t bear to see where it was heading.

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July 31, 2012

The Irony of Baptist Intolerance

Rev. Stan Weatherford, pastor at First Baptist Church of Crystal Springs, Mississippi, refused to marry a black couple, Charles and Te’Andrea Wilson, at the church, after a handful of congregants complained. The minister did marry them at a nearby church, but the damage was done, and this has become a global story. The meaning of the story is something that is still developing.

As for Mississippi, this has undoubtedly bolstered a painful stereotype that the state cannot shake. Personal experience in a dozen or so states, including Mississippi, says that there are racists in most states, probably totaling in the millions. Mississippi, a great state is so many ways, has the unfortunate burden of being on racial probation, maybe for the rest of American history. In fact, this hyper-consciousness has led many—though not all—Mississippians to pay special attention and take special care to move forward where others around the country just pretend that there isn’t a problem where they live.

More interesting than the Mississippi angle is the Baptist story. The Southern Baptist Convention was quick to point out that this was a sad and regrettable event, and that the refusal to marry a couple on the basis of their race is completely unacceptable. It is a congregational denomination, so decisions ultimately rest with the congregation and its pastor. In this case, SBC said, the pastor was in a difficult position—as in the likelihood, but not certainty, that he would have lost his job if he had proceeded with the marriage at the church.

This is where the irony comes in so loudly. Throughout American history, Baptists have been notable for their courage in the face of religious persecution and intolerance. American religious liberty, as ultimately codified in the Bill of Rights, is a direct response to that persecution. As the Library of Congress exhibit on Religion and the Founding of the American Republic points out:

In Virginia, religious persecution, directed at Baptists and, to a lesser degree, at Presbyterians, continued after the Declaration of Independence. The perpetrators were members of the Church of England, sometimes acting as vigilantes but often operating in tandem with local authorities. Physical violence was usually reserved for Baptists, against whom there was social as well as theological animosity. A notorious instance of abuse in 1771 of a well-known Baptist preacher, “Swearin Jack” Waller, was described by the victim: “The Parson of the Parish [accompanied by the local sheriff] would keep running the end of his horsewhip in [Waller’s] mouth, laying his whip across the hymn book, etc. When done singing [Waller] proceeded to prayer. In it he was violently jerked off the stage; they caught him by the back part of his neck, beat his head against the ground, sometimes up and sometimes down, they carried him through the gate . . . where a gentleman [the sheriff] gave him . . . twenty lashes with his horsewhip.”

The persecution of Baptists made a strong, negative impression on many patriot leaders, whose loyalty to principles of civil liberty exceeded their loyalty to the Church of England in which they were raised. James Madison was not the only patriot to despair, as he did in 1774, that the “diabolical Hell conceived principle of persecution rages” in his native colony. Accordingly, civil libertarians like James Madison and Thomas Jefferson joined Baptists and Presbyterians to defeat the campaign for state financial involvement in religion in Virginia.

The picture above is The Dunking of David Barrow and Edward Mintz in the Nansemond River (1778):

David Barrow was pastor of the Mill Swamp Baptist Church in the Portsmouth, Virginia, area. He and a “ministering brother,” Edward Mintz, were conducting a service in 1778, when they were attacked. “As soon as the hymn was given out, a gang of well-dressed men came up to the stage . . . and sang one of their obscene songs. Then they took to plunge both of the preachers. They plunged Mr. Barrow twice, pressing him into the mud, holding him down, nearly succeeding in drowning him . . . His companion was plunged but once . . . Before these persecuted men could change their clothes they were dragged from the house, and driven off by these enraged churchmen.”

Maybe Rev. Weatherford had never heard of David Barrow and Edward Mintz. Maybe the congregants who didn’t want black people married in the church hadn’t either. More than two hundred and thirty years is a long time. Maybe Rev. Weatherford could have stood up to the minority in his church, depending on whether he thought that losing his job was better or worse than being dunked in a river. Maybe he could have done a better job of bringing a part of the Christian message to those congregants, but people are stubborn in their worst beliefs, and anyway that’s not really his job. In all religions, but especially in disintermediated ones such as the Baptist Church, it all comes down to you and God, one of you talking, one of you listening and learning. It’s always true that some listen and learn better than others.

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July 20, 2012

Aurora, Colorado

We are on a forced break from Big Politics and Big Entertainment as usual, in the aftermath of last night’s massacre at an Aurora, Colorado movie theater. Words fail in the face of the still unfolding details about this off-screen horror.

Business as usual will return, as it always does, at its own pace. Meanwhile, there will be attempts to make sense of the senseless. Conclusions will be jumped to, based on varying degrees of information and ideology.

There will be questions about the seeming increase in incidents like this, whether that seeming is based on anecdote or hard statistics.

There will be questions about the prevalence and availability of weapons of multiple destruction (WMD) in our country.

There will be questions about the effect of media and entertainment content on our lives.

All these are questions worth asking and answering constructively, which means openly and intelligently, and not just to score points. There will be time enough for that. Tragedies on any scale can indeed lead to progress and evolution. But there is a fine line so easy to cross, where the incident is just a rhetorical device to make some “bigger” and “more important” point. This can easily dishonor and disregard the basic nature of the loss. All of us who believe this or that, however fervently, have to take care.

Category: Society