Monthly Archives: February 2011

Giordano Bruno

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Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake as a heretic on this date in 1600 (born 1548).

From Words with Power:

We have glanced at the way in which ideological language supports the anxieties of social authority, and of how other types of verbal authority nonetheless establish themselves, for example in science.  In the collisions of Galileo and Bruno with the religious functionaries of their time, we recognize that a scientist has a commitment to his science as well as to his society, and that in certain crises he has an obligation to remain loyal to his science, even if silenced or martyred.  This may be a simple moral issue of holding on to facts and evidence in the face of reactionary illusion, but it may be something subtler than that.  In Galileo’s day the evidence for a heliocentric solar system was not yet conclusive: the geocentric theory seemed still reasonable, and Galileo was really making what is called a leap of faith.  This term is used in religious writing, but not every leap of faith is a religious one.  As for Bruno, his leaps are so vast and various that even specialists on him find him hard to keep up with.  But then Isaac Newton presents an almost equally disconcerting picture when the whole of his output and range of interests is considered.

The authority of science, in other words, expands into a wider and compelling authority of social and intellectual freedom.  This will always be relevant as long as the scientist remains a human being whose work has a personal context as well as a scientific one, involved with the ideology even when he challenges certain accepted forms of it.  In our day, highly technological society may conscript some scientists into working for its interests, whereupon others will realize that the basis of their commitment to science is a conviction that science exists for the benefit of humanity, not for the promotion of tyranny and terror. (CW 26, 47-8)

Here We Go

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aiGNvhgv9s

This burnished old chestnut from a couple of years ago is back on the airwaves — because irresponsible badmouthing never needs much revision

The election hasn’t even been called yet — and may in fact be months away — but the Conservatives are already running attack ads against Michael Ignatieff: not anything related to what he says or believes or advocates, of course, just the fact that he exists and has a life and a career.  For Harperites, that’s enough to make him an enemy of the people.  And the attacks come, predictably enough, on the heels of a multi-multi-million dollar ad campaign promoting the government of Canada: your tax dollars spent to convince you that Conservatives are just cuddly centrists who probably really do love the CBC and universal health care — although evidently not as much as the sight of our armed forces kicking the ass of evil doers all around the world.  The Americans have only just rid themselves of Bush.  And here’s Harper apparently resolved to Rovify this country with resentment and what used to be called the politics of personal destruction but is now just called politics.  In the words of Rush Limbaugh: “I hope he fails.”

Alfred North Whitehead

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Today is Alfred North Whitehead‘s birthday (1861-1947).

Frye in conversation with David Cayley:

Cayley: Frazer and Spengler, recognizing all their liabilities, were the two people who gave you the key pieces, then.  They were not the ones you admired, but the ones who gave you something you could borrow or use?

Frye: Yes, that’s right.  It was, again, a matter of looking for what I could use, but not for something to believe in.

Cayley: What about Whitehead and the idea of interpenetration?

Frye: The conception of interpenetration, as I said, I found in Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World.  Other people have found it in Mahayana Buddhism and the Avatasaka Sutura.  It’s the way of accounting for the fact that the centre is everywhere.  Traditionally we’ve always defined God as a being whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.  But I would think of God as a being whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is everywhere too. The opposite of interpenetration, where everything exists somewhere at once, is an objective centrality, which, it seems to me, is a most tryannical conception.

Cayley: Objective centrality–what does that mean?

Frye: In political developments, for example, it’s a matter of an empire getting so big that everything gets centred in Rome or London or New York of Tokyo.  That seems to me an anti-cultural direction.  In the interpenetrating world every community would be the centre of the world.  (CW 24, 933-4)

Three examples off the top of my head: Tunisia, Egypt, and, this week (again), Iran.

Coming soon?  The overburdened middle class and the trod-under-foot working poor perhaps reassert their right to everything that has been swindled from them by corporatist greed, lies, and daylight theft  — and aided and abetted all the while by  a political class who use our votes against our interests.

“We worry less”

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Yes, that’s “top 1%” and “bottom 80%“

Frye in The Modern Century:

In political thought there is a useful fiction known as the social contract, the sense that man enters into a certain social context by the act of getting born.  In earlier contract theories, like that of Hobbes, the contract was thought of as universal, binding everyone without exception.  From Rousseau on there is more of a tendency to divide people into those accept and defend the existing social contract because they benefit from it, and the people who are excluded from most of the benefits, and so feel no obligation, or much less, of it.  (CW 11, 41)

From the notorious 2005 Citigroup Plutonomy memo:

➤ The World is dividing into two blocs – the Plutonomy and the rest. The U.S., UK, and Canada are the key Plutonomies – economies powered by the wealthy. Continental Europe (ex-Italy) and Japan are in the egalitarian bloc.
➤ Equity risk premium embedded in “global imbalances” are unwarranted. In plutonomies the rich absorb a disproportionate chunk of the economy and have a massive impact on reported aggregate numbers like savings rates, current account deficits, consumption levels, etc. This imbalance in inequality expresses itself in the standard scary “ global imbalances”. We worry less.

From yesterday’s Toronto Star:

In keeping with the government’s vision of making Canada a low-tax jurisdiction, the Conservatives have been gradually cutting taxes on corporate profits since 2007.

By 2015 under this plan, the share of federal government programs paid for by corporate income taxes will have shrunk to 12.3 per cent from 20.8 per cent in 2000.

Andrew Sullivan in today’s Daily Dish:

The logic behind president Obama’s budget has one extremely sensible feature: it distinguishes between spending that simply adds to consumption, and spending that really does mean investment. His analogy over the weekend – that a family cutting a budget would rather not cut money for the kids’ education – is a sound one. We do need more infrastructure, roads and broadband, non-carbon energy and basic science research, and some of that is something only government can do. In that sense, discretionary spending could be among the most important things government could do to help Americans create wealth themselves. And yet this is the only spending Obama wants to cut.

But the core challenge of this time is not the cost of discretionary spending. Obama knows this; everyone knows this. The crisis is the cost of future entitlements and defense, about which Obama proposes nothing.

When it comes to the fraud perpetrated by our society’s most advantaged (the 1% who currently own approximately 38% of national wealth), there is no social contract in any meaningful sense.  There is only licenced theft rationalized by the lie that economic success is ultimately a moral issue: if you play well, you win big.  After the collapse of the financial markets two years ago and the trillions of dollars of bailouts for those “too big to fail,” we are under no illusions, we know that simply isn’t true.  It’s a hoax.  It’s a fix.  Everything about our “social contract” has been rigged for the past thirty years to transfer wealth upward at an accelerating rate, whatever economic and social vandalism is committed along the way.  Our political class now has little to do with average voters — except insofar that votes against their own economic interests be must tricked out of them with promises that are never kept.  Our politicians have gone from being public servants to dead eyed enablers of the rapacious corporate class who are now their only real constituency.  It is a shame, and it has happened in plain view of everyone.  And that makes it a big reason to worry more than we do.

Now Iran?

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddF7KmosbGI

Some powerful raw footage of a protest getting under way at Sharif University, Tehran, just a few hours ago.

There are reports from the BBC of demonstrations all over Tehran, including Tehran University, Imam Hossein Square and Azadi Square.  Chant heard: “Death to the dictator, death to Khamenei.”

Thomas Cranmer

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlrGNZL7CVc

The prosecution and martyrdom of Thomas Cranmer from David Starkey’s documentary series, Monarchy. (Video not embedded: click on the image above and hit the YouTube link.)

On the heels of yesterday’s post regarding the execution of Henry VIII’s fifth wife Catherine Howard, her accuser, Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, was declared a heretic by Queen Mary on this date in 1556.  Catherine Howard’s lady-in-waiting, Jane Boleyn — Anne Boleyn’s sister-in-law who was executed as Catherine’s accomplice in treason — had previously been instrumental in bringing down Queen Anne by affirming her supposed incest with her brother (and Jane’s husband) George.  With the execution of Cranmer under Queen Mary, this particular nemesis cycle draws to a bloody close.  The person who rides the new cycle upwards is, of course, Anne Boleyn’s daughter, who ascends the throne as Elizabeth I after the premature death of her half-sister Mary.  Elizabeth as queen undoes all of Mary’s effort to make England Catholic again — and that effort was the reason for Cranmer’s arrest, conviction and execution as a Protestant heretic in the first place.  So yet another mortal cycle spins round.

Here, appropriately enough, is an excerpt from “Romance as Masque,” in which Frye once again addresses the tragic perspective provided by the wheel of fortune in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII:

The hero of Henry VIII is not so much the king as the wheel of fortune.  The first turn of the wheel brings down Buckingham, the second turn Wolsey, the third Queen Katherine and others.  If we like, we can see a rough justice or even a providence operating: Wolsey’s fall is the nemesis for his treatment of Buckingham, and Queen Katherine, though innocent, has to go in order to get Elizabeth born.  For this reason it is unnecessary to apply moral standards to King Henry: whether we think of him resolute or merely ferocious, we cannot be sure if he turns the wheel of fortune or has simply become part of its machinery.  Certainly the crucial event of the final scene, the birth of Elizabeth, there is a factor independent of his will, even though he takes credit for it, as befits a king.  In this final scene there is a “prophecy” by Cranmer about the future greatness of England under Elizabeth and her successors, which generically is a very masque-like scene, a panegyric of the sort that would have normally accompanied the presence of a reigning monarch in the audience.

The only difficulty is that the scene shows the final triumph of Cranmer and of Anne Boleyn, and the audience knows what soon happened to Anne, as well as to three of her successors, and eventually to Cranmer.  It also knows the reign of Elizabeth was preceded by that of Queen Katherine’s daughter, whose existence Henry appears to have forgotten: “Never before / This happy child, did I get any thing,” he says. (CW 18, 144-5)

Catherine Howard and Jane Boleyn

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpAy0pi7TJ8&feature=related

The executions of Catherine Howard and Jane Boleyn, from the television series The Tudors

On this date in 1542 Catherine Howard, the 17 year old fifth wife of Henry VIII, and her lady-in-waiting Jane Boleyn, were executed for Howard’s adultery with courtier Thomas Culpeper.

Frye in A Natural Perspective on Shakespeare’s depiction of the world of Henry VIII as a tragic one associated with the wheel of fortune:

The wheel of fortune is a tragic conception: it is never genuinely a comic one, though a history play may achieve a technically comic conclusion by stopping the wheel turning half way.  Thus, Henry V ends with triumphant conquest and a royal marriage, though, as the epilogue reminds us, King Henry died almost immediately and sixty years of unbroken disaster followed.  In Henry VIII there are three great falls, those of Buckingham, Wolsey, and Queen Catherine, and three corresponding rises, those of Cromwell, Cranmer, and Anne Boleyn.  The play ends with the triumph of the last three, leaving the audience to remember that the wheel went on turning and brought them down too.  Henry VIII turns the wheel himself, and is not turned by it, like Richard II, but history never can end as comedy does, except for the polite fiction, found in Cranmer’s prophecy at the end of the play, that the reigning monarch is a Messianic ruler.