Category: Personal Responsibility

What On Earth Were They Thinking?

How often have you heard somebody question people who lived “back then,” in the swirling historical mist, who somehow just didn’t have the knowledge, the nuance, or the capability that we so proudly wield today?

“Things back then were just a lot more simple.”

“They just weren’t as developed back then as we are today.”

“Society back then was a lot less informed than we are today.”

It’s difficult to even confront such statements out of their context, but where I’ve had all three of these spoken to me in (separate) conversations, I challenged each impression as an insinuation that we’re somehow smarter than all the peoples of history, more skilled, more sophisticated, more aware, more woke (as they say, these days), that we’re, in the main, altogether better than our elders merely for having lived later than they did. These days, apparently, “we’re more evolved” – ha! 🙂  more evolved, that’s always a good one, as if back then everyone was Australopithecus while here we are jetting across the oceans, toting our iPhones, and drinking fine wines.

Well, sure, maybe things have changed since back then, whenever “then” was. But, more typically I’ve found, contemporary judgments levelled upon history are borne of an unintended arrogance, a symptom of 20:20 hindsight and the self-righteous assurance that, today, we’ve finally seen the error – actually, make that the errors – of their ways.

Surely, these days, few – or any – would believe that we’re ignorant or unaccomplished or incapable, not the way someone might say of us while looking back from our future. At any given point on the historical timeline, I wonder whether a person at that point would feel as good about their era, looking back, as any person on some other point of the timeline would feel, also looking back, about theirs. Is it a common tendency, this judgment of contemporary superiority?

These days, we might well feel superior to people who had no indoor plumbing or viral inoculations or Internet access, just as someone earlier would have appreciated, say, some technological tool, like a hydraulic lift to raise heavy objects, or a set of pulleys, or a first-class lever. It really is arbitrary for a person, looking back at history, to feel better about contemporary life because contemporary life infuses all that person’s experience while history’s something that must be learned, at a minimum, second-hand.

I’ll guess that learning ‘history’ means learning whatever has lasted and been passed on because what has lasted and been passed on has been deemed to have merit: we’re taught the history that has been deemed worth remembering. The kinds of things I’ve found to have been deemed worth remembering, i.e. the kinds of things I learned in History class, are the general mood of the times, the disputes and fights that occurred (violent or academic), a select handful of the figures involved, and an inventory of whichever non-living innovations and technologies simultaneously arose alongside all that. If, later, we demerit and no longer pass on the history that lasted up until then, and instead pass on some different history, then that’s entirely indicative of us, now, versus anyone who came before us, and it reflects changed but not necessarily smarter or better priorities and values.

For me, we shouldn’t be saying we’re any smarter or better, only different. So much literature has lasted, so much art. Commerce has lasted, institutions have lasted, so much has lasted. Civilization has lasted. Cleverness, ingenuity, shrewdness, wit, insight, intellect, cunning, wisdom, kindness, compassion, deceit, pretense, honesty, so many many human traits – and they all transcend generations and eras. People vary, but human nature perdures. I’ll trust the experts, far more immersed in specific historical study than me, to identify slow or subtle changes in our traits – hell, I’ll even grant we may have culturally evolved – and I can only imagine how many ways the world is different now as compared to to back then before now. But what does it mean to be better? Better than other people? Really? And who decides, and what’s the measure?

We can measure efficiency, for instance, so to say technology has advanced and is better than before is, I think, fair. Even then, an individual will have a subjective opinion – yours, mine, anybody’s – making culture not proactive and definitive but rather reactive and variable, a reflection, the result of comprised opinions that amplify what is shared and stifle what is not. As we’re taught merited history, you’re almost forced to concur, at least until we reconsider what has merit. That’s a sticking point because everyone will have an opinion on what is culturally better and what is culturally worse. What we call ‘morality’ inevitably differs, and suddenly we have ‘ethical’ debate, which is to say disagreement or even discord over which perspective is ‘right’. But to blithely say a people or culture is better, I think, is too subjective to rationalize, not to mention a questionable path to tread… a path that maybe says a little more about the one who said it.

Consider this as well: we each know what we’ve learned, and as individuals, we’ve each learned what we value. But what we’re taught in Culture ‘X’ is what’s broadly valued and, thereby, prescribed for all ‘X’s. We’ve all heard the rather hackneyed epigram, that those who neglect history are doomed to repeat it. But maybe the ones screwing up just didn’t learn the right history to begin with.

I tend to abide by another hackneyed epigram, that they are wisest who know how little they know. And wouldn’t real historical wisdom and real historical understanding mean being able to see and think and understand as people earlier did? But short of firing up the Delorean for an extended visit some place some time, it seems to me that judgments about history are made with an aplomb that might be better aimed at acknowledging our finite limitations. We’re no angels. If anything, this error of judgment speaks volumes about us. Condescension is what it is, but in my opinion, it’s no virtue.

We should hardly be judging the past as any less able or intelligent or kind or tolerant or virtuous as us, especially not if we aim to live up to today’s woke cultural embrace of acceptance. Being different should never be something critiqued; it should be something understood. Conversely, in proportion to how much we know, passing judgment is assumptive, and we all know what Oscar Wilde had to say about assuming (at least, we know if we’ve studied that piece of history). At the very least, we ought to admit our own current assumptions, mistakes, errors, accidents, troubles, disputes, and wars before we pass any judgment on historical ones.

On that positive note, I will say that considering all this has prompted me to notice something maybe more constructive: so often, at least in my experience, what we seemed to study in History class were troublemaking cause-and-effect, bad decisions, and selfishly motivated behaviours. Far more rarely was History class ever the study of effective decision-making and constructive endeavour – maybe the odd time, but not usually.

Maybe my History teachers were, themselves, stifled as products of the system that educated them. What could they do but pass it along to me and my peers? Bearing this in mind, I might more readily understand how people, alive today, could conclude that all who came before were simply not as enlightened, not as sophisticated, or not as adept as we are now.

Yet that merely implicates contemporary ignorance… assumptions and mistakes still happen, errors still occur, accidents – preventable or not – haven’t stopped. Troubles and disputes and wars rage on. If the axiom of being doomed to repeat history were no longer valid, we wouldn’t still feel and accept its truthful description, and it would have long ago faded from meaning. All I can figure is that we’re still poor at learning from history – the collective “we,” I mean, not you in particular (in case all this was getting too personal). We need learned people in the right positions at the right times, if we hope to prevent the mistakes of history.

Not enough people, I guess, have bothered to study the branches of history with genuine interest. Or, no, maybe enough people have studied various branches of history, but they don’t remember lessons sharply enough to take them on board. Or, no no, maybe plenty of people remember history, but the circumstances they face are just different enough to tip the scale out-of-favour. Epigram time: history doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme. Or maybe we’re just full of ourselves, thinking that we’ve got it all solved when, evidently, we don’t.

It also dawned on me, considering all this, that high school “History” class influences what many people think about broader “history.” My high school experience, and university too, was mostly a study of politics and geography, and toss in what would be considered very elementary anthropology – all this as compared to those other branches of historical study: archaeology and palaeontology come to mind as detailed, more scientific branches of history, but there are so many – literary history, philosophical history, religious, environmental, military, economic, technological, socio-cultural… on and on they go, so many categories of human endeavour. I’ve even come across a thoughtful paper contemplating history as a kind of science, although one that is normative and susceptible to generational caprice. One final epigram: history is what gets written by the winners, which some will rue, some will ridicule, and some will call “unfair,” but which I will simply acknowledge as what people evidently do.

And that’s really the point here: throughout what we call human history, where we’ve subdivided it so many ways – right down to the perspective of every single person who ever bothered to contribute, if you want to break it down that far – it’s people all the way back, so it’s all biased. So it’s neither complete nor even accurate until you’ve spent oodles of time and effort creating a more composite comprehension of the available historical records. And, dear lord, who has time for that.

History, in that respect, is barely conceivable in its entirety and hardly a thing to grasp so readily as to say, simply, “Back then…” History is people, and lives, and belief inscribed for all time. To know it is to know who lived it as well as who recorded it. Knowing others is empathy, and empathy is a skill trained and fuelled as much by curiosity and diligence as emotion or opinion. p.s. emotion and opinion come naturally and without effort. For me, valid history derives from informed empathy, not the other way around.

As far as recording history for future study… ultimately, it will again have been people recording and studying all of it, “it” being whatever we care to remember and record about what somebody was doing, and “doing” being all of what people were doing to attract the attention of those doing the recording. It’s all a bit cyclical, and completely biased, and someone will always be left out. So people might be forgiven when shaking their heads in judgment of the world “back then” because, without empathy, what else could they possibly know besides themselves?

Catch-22: A Masterpiece by Joseph Heller

WARNING! This post is an analysis and celebration of Joseph Heller’s novel, Catch-22, and it DOES contain PLOT SPOILERS. If you wish to read the novel for the first time, do not read this post.

“Give the first twelve chapters a chance” has long been my advice to anyone who asks about Catch-22, Joseph Heller’s modernist masterpiece that critiques the absurdity of the military during wartime. If you haven’t read the book, I will hardly spoil things by explaining how eagerly we witless first-timers set out to read such a lauded modern classic, only to be confronted by what might be the most frustrating paragon of show-versus-tell in existence. (However, I will be discussing spoiler details from here on, so be warned.) From the seemingly disparate chapter titles to the disjointed narrative, which repeatedly folds back upon itself, from a maddeningly mirthful plot device, which tempts you to toss the book aside and deny its existence, to an irresolute closing – if you make it that far – the book continually challenges readers to deduce what’s happening and piece together what’s happened. Toss in what seems like an endless cadre of characters, ranging from odder to oddest to perhaps not so odd, the book is a challenge, no question.

For seven years, I assigned this book as summer reading for returning seniors. Oh, how the students complained about those twelve chapters – excessive! pointless! irritating! – only to feel more aggrieved at hearing, “Exactly,” my necessary reply. Once the venting subsided – usually at least half the first lesson – we’d begin discussing why Heller’s book could only be written this way as compared to some more conventional, accessible way.

For one thing, we need to meet the protagonist, Yossarian, and understand his circumstances so that, at appropriate upcoming times, which of course will have already occurred, we won’t criticise but will instead favour him. To this end, the entire story is told out-of-sequence, opening apparently in media res during Yossarian’s hospital stay. We have character introductions and letter censoring, foreshadowing how words and language will be manipulated while characters will be isolated, alienated, and demeaned. Subsequently, we learn the logic of Catch-22 from Doc Daneeka. And that Snowden dies. If we’ve navigated the twelve opening chapters and lived to tell about it, we learn that Yossarian, originally a young, excited airman, once needed two passes over a target in order to bomb it successfully, which gets his crewmember, Kraft, killed. Yossarian is further distressed upon returning when he receives a medal for the mission. Meanwhile, Milo opens his syndicate. The tension of tedium, the injustice of fortune. The folly of command, the depravity of humankind. Capping the story is the gruesome account of Snowden’s death, the key incident that incites Yossarian’s fear and lands him in hospital, where we first meet him – naturally, Heller waits until the end to tell us the beginning.

Heller writes with an absurd, illogical narrative style that characterises Yossarian’s internal eternal predicament, wending its way through isolation, alienation, discord, misery, paranoia, fear, senselessness, deception, vice, cruelty, even rape and murder. Catch-22 being what it is, its victims have zero-chance to overcome because the antagonists are permitted to do whatever the protagonists are unable to prevent. All along the way, Heller has Yossarian wanting out of the military (fly no missions = live), and he continually ups the ante between Yossarian and all the disturbing confrontations and contradictions that antagonise him, from his enemies and his commanders to his acquaintances and his comrades. But ultimately, and most potently, he has Yossarian suffering from his own self-interest. As the narrative flits and tumbles about, in its own progressive way, Yossarian’s self-interest evolves or, better to say, devolves. What does evolve, inversely to self-interest, is his compassion as he gradually grows more concerned for the men in his squadron, and which by Chapter 40, “Catch-22,” has extended to all innocent people beset by oppression, prejudice, and exploitation. So when Colonel Cathcart’s promised deal to send him home safely, definitely, comes ironically (fittingly!) at the expense of the squadron, Yossarian ultimately recovers enough self-reliance to overcome his personal anguish but not enough to remand himself to the cycle of absurdity. Given Heller’s dispersed timeline, describing Yossarian’s character development as a narrative arc or an evolution is less accurate than the piecing together of a jigsaw or the unveiling of a secret.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Yossarian’s instinct for self-preservation is the source of his personal torment. His despondency and disgust over the preponderance of all human self-interest finally turn Yossarian’s decision to go AWOL, at criminal risk but personal safety. That such a climax works is because readers – like Yossarian – are no longer fighting back but giving in, yet even then Heller offers no respite – the story ends ambiguously, leaving readers to satisfy their own vexation. Even so, I suspect that Heller appreciated John Chancellor’s life-imitating-art intiative as one inspired by more than a spirit of fandom. So where some characters have been subjects of compassion, others agents of absurdity, readers’ resultant responses have also undergone a perfectly natural evolution, mirroring Yossarian’s character development and culminating with his terrifying walk through Rome. The horrors of “The Eternal City,” in this light, are not only an essential but an inevitable piece in Heller’s plan.

Yossarian’s shall-we-say militant decision to desert is borne of Snowden’s ugly death during the Avignon mission, only a week after the death of Kraft and the award of Yossarian’s medal. Seeing Snowden’s innards spilling rudely from his body nauseates Yossarian and haunts him throughout the entire (or, from Yossarian’s perspective, for the rest of) the story. Yossarian, inset by Heller on behalf of soldiers as a protagonist, has no way of making things better. His futile effort at comfort, “There, there” (p. 166), is comically insincere for its honest helplessness, an understated shriek from all soldiers continually sent to face death – not death without context but without resonance. However, for Yossarian and his comrades, the context of sacrifice is all too irrationally clear: thanks very much. Catch-22. Soldiers face the dilemma of following orders that entirely devalue their very existence.

Participation as a soldier offends Yossarian to the core, yet it also helps him to reconcile his fear over death: “… man is matter,” finite, mortal and – without spirit – simply “garbage.” In fact, this sentence sums human worth as a blunt statement: “The spirit gone, man is garbage” (p. 440). Six words of sad, harsh consequence, war, no longer wearing a comic mask. The absolute phrase, a terse syntactical effect, annuls man’s significance – spirited briefly, gone abruptly, an empty corporeal body left over, garbage. Garbage is a harsh image – rotting flesh, buzzing flies, scum, residue, stench. Pessimism, cynicism, worthlessness. On such terms, one wonders whether anyone might willingly die to save themselves, as it were, another troubling revelation engineered by a masterpiece of unprosaic illogic. Yet even on this point, Heller’s genius is flawless. Haunting though it is, Snowden’s death gradually reveals to Yossarian the very path to life and safety that he has pursued ever since the opening chapter in the hospital – which is to say, ever since Snowden’s death drove him there in the first place.

This is why Heller refers to Snowden’s death, specifically his entrails, as a “secret” because to reveal it any earlier would be to end the novel. And he calls it Snowden’s “grim secret” to illustrate Yossarian’s suppressed mental anguish. Heller has Yossarian recall Snowden a number of times, each admitting more detail, each growing more vivid, each driving him a little closer to his final resolution. Heller’s portrayal of Yossarian’s traumatised memories in this way suggests the nightmarish flashbacks that people, particularly soldiers, endure following the horrors of war. His final flashback in Chapter 41, “Snowden”, is prompted when Yossarian wards off the mysterious stranger in – where else? – the hospital. It’s most revelatory for Yossarian – and readers, by extension – because, here at the end of his patchy, appalling flashbacks, he is finally secure enough to divine for himself – or is it to admit to us? – the grim secret found in Snowden’s entrails. In the same way, the climax is most revelatory for readers who – at the mercy of Heller’s dispersed narrative structure – have been made to wait until the closing, when the time is finally ripe.

To get there, we are dragged unwittingly by Heller down a path of frustrating sympathy, illogical absurdity, and agonising anticipation. By the time Yossarian is introduced (in the opening chapter!) censoring letters and conniving a way to escape the war, he is that much nearer to desertion than we can yet know. Certainly, Snowden will convince us to desert as surely as he convinces Yossarian, but that will happen later, after Heller has aggravated our tolerance and mottled our innocence. Heller must drag us down Yossarian’s agonising path, or else he places us at risk of passing premature judgment upon not merely his protagonist but his entire message. Finally, when the moment arrives that we gather full appreciation of Snowden’s death, we have all we need to share in the vindication of Yossarian’s desertion.

So here is our way to grasp the grim secret behind the novel’s dissembling structure as restlessly and imperturbably as Yossarian does: the root of conflict, Snowden’s death, can only occur at the end of Heller’s narrative path, not Yossarian’s. The story simply works no other way.

From PBS – Nova Next: “Fake News is Spreading Thanks to Information Overload”

Originally posted on Monday, June 26, 2017

 

Has the Internet Revolution helped to raise the level of discourse? Not necessarily – read on. But the situation isn’t entirely without hope, according to Bianca Datta, whose article also offers a dose of good news.