Monthly Archives: July 2011

Post Coming…

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…On Harperworld, a glimpse into what Stephen Harper has in mind for Canada as “an energy superpower,” as he has characterized it. The plan includes Canada moving up the scale of carbon dioxide producers; we’re currently at number 7, which is especially high considering our population makes up only .5% of the world’s population. Per capita, we are the worst of the worst. (France, which has about twice our population, doesn’t even make the top 10.)

For those who aren’t clear on this, in 2002 Canada ratified the Kyoto Protocol, which the Harper government has simply walked away from (clearly to Alberta’s advantage, which is what all of this is really about). Our commitment under Kyoto was a modest reduction of greenhouse gas emissions to 6% below 1990 levels by 2012. It’s not just that we aren’t even close, it’s that the Harper government’s contempt for our international treaty obligations has put us an astounding 24% above 1990 levels, and rising.

Harper’s also planning some sabre-rattling in the Arctic over gas and oil reserves. We have no reason to be showing our war face because there is already a long standing international panel negotiating the sovereign claims of a number of arctic countries, including of course the U.S., Canada, Norway and Russia. Norway and Russia, in fact, have already negotiated a settlement on disputed claims without a single shot fired in anger. But Harper wants to mix it up with troop deployments and, eventually, those shiny new jets, so that’s what we’re going to do. It’s the Russians specifically we will be baring our teeth to. So that should go well. This is completely contrary to Canada’s long history of superior diplomacy in such matters. We are not war makers. We are peace keepers. But not in Harperworld.

Finally, the only reason there is any negotiation necessary among the nations involved in these claims disputes is that global warming is reducing the Arctic’s seasonal ice, making those resources more accessible. That’s the same global warming the oil companies invest tens of millions of dollars every year to deny is even occurring. It’s a death spiral of cognitive dissonance: global warming is not occurring, but its occurrence makes available fossil fuel reserves that will in turn exacerbate global warming — which is not occurring.

Canada, by way of the Harper government, is apparently going to be a charter member of this suicide pact. And it’s doing so with the support of just 39% of the voting population, something the remaining 61% ought to keep in mind.

We will, of course, also have lots of Frye to provide perspective on our wretched history of exploiting and despoiling our wilderness whose ecosystem we hold in trust.

“The word ‘creation’ is inescapably part of the way we see things”

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Continuing with our “Frye on God” thread: we have so far been considering the “death of God.” We can now move on to consider the God that survives. From Creation and Recreation:

I want to begin with what is called “creativity” as a feature of human life, and move from there to some of the traditional religious ideas about a divine creation. It seems to me that the whole complex of ideas and images surrounding the word “creation” is inescapably a part of the way that we see things. We may emphasize either the divine or the human aspect of creation to the point of denying the reality of the other. For Karl Barth, God is a creator, and the first moral to be drawn from this is that man is not one: man is for Barth a creature, and his primary duty is to understand what it is to be a creature of God. For others, the notion of a creating is a projection from the fact that man makes things, and for them a divine creator has only the reality of a shadow thrown by ourselves. But what we believe, or believe that we believe, in such matters is of very little importance compared to the fact that we go on using the conception anyway, whatever name we give it. We are free, up to a point, to shape our beliefs; what we are clearly not free to do is alter what is really a part of our cultural genetic code. We can throw out varieties of the idea of creation at random, and these, in Darwinian fashion, will doubtless descend through whatever has the greatest survival value; but abolish the conception of itself we cannot. (CW 4, 36)

More Chagall

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Chagall’s “Birthday,” 1915

Further to Michael’s previous post:

It goes without saying that Frye’s encyclopedic range of interest in and knowledge of the variety of art forms that make up a society’s imaginative culture is remarkable, unmatched by anyone I can think of. A good example is his essay “Literature and the Visual Arts” in CW 18, originally published in Myth and Metaphor. Frye’s wife Helen, of course, had a blossoming career as an art historian before Frye became a going concern and all hell broke loose; doubtless her interests, and of course his interest in Blake, helped to awaken his own affinity for the visual arts.

It is worth mentioning that the Art Gallery of Ontario is hosting an exhibit of Chagall’s work (and some Kandinsky), October to January. You can check it out here.

The AGO, by the way, has had a great new face lift, and is really worth visiting. I caught the New York Abstract/Expressionism (Pollock et al) this spring, and it was a real treat. The new CEO of the gallery, Matthew Teitelbaum, seems to have a magic touch.

Marc Chagall

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A beautifully assembled collection of Chagall paintings, with music by Maurice Sklar

Today is Marc Chagall‘s birthday (1887-1985). Maybe one of the gentlest people ever to be a great artist, who was rewarded with an extraordinarily long life.

Frye in a single-paragraph review of The Art of Russia, in Canadian Forum, December 1946:

A very useful collection of black and white reproductions illustrating Russian painting from medieval icons on. It appears from it that after the seventeenth century, Russia become the Eastern colony of European art as America became the Western one, and Russia like America lost the ability to resist cultural invasions at the same time that she gained the ability to resist military ones. All the European fashions in painting seem to have rolled over Russia in waves, most of them dyed with a strong Germanic tinge by the time they arrived. The Revolution helped release a tremendous burst of creative energy, and the art of Lissitsky, Malevich, Chagall, and Kandinsky was the result; but, following a directive of Lenin, this energy was soon gleichgestaltet [forced into conformity] and a rather corny “socialist realism,” supposed to be directed more directly to the masses, took its place. The same development occurred in America under the WPA, where however, a more relaxed policy permitted the growth of more variety. (CW 11, 114)

William Faulkner

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Clip from an interview in which Faulkner explains why The Sound and the Fury is his personal “best beloved” novel

William Faulkner died on this date is 1962.

Frye in The Modern Century. The reference is brief, but the context — the revolutionary ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity considered in a religious context — is telling. We can just sneak this one into our continuing consideration of Frye on God.

Matthew Arnold warned the dominant bourgeoisie of Victorian England that a society could pursue liberty to the point of forgetting about equality. Today, with capitalism in a counter-reformation period and with totalitarianism  thought of a something foreign, we prefer to be reminded that society — that is, other societies — can purse equality to the point of forgetting about liberty. But neither political democracy nor trade unions have developed much sense of the third revolutionary ideal of fraternity — the world “comrade” has for most of us a rather sinister and frigid sound. Fraternity is perhaps the ideal that the leisure structure has to contribute to society. A society of students, scholars, and artists is a society of neighbors, in the genuinely religious sense of that word. That is, our neighbor is not, or not necessarily, the person in the same national or ethnical or class group with ourselves, but may be a “good Samaritan” or person to whom we are linked by deeper bonds than nationality or racism or class solidarity can provide. There are bonds of intellect and imagination as well of love and good will. The neighbor of a scientist is another scientist working on similar lines, perhaps in a different continent; the neighbor of a novelist writing about Mississippi is (as Faulkner indicated in his Nobel Prize speech) anybody anywhere who respond to his work. (CW , 57-8)

Isaac Newton’s “Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica”: “God is not a mathematical diagram”

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The BBC’s documentary, “Isaac Newton: The Dark Heretic,” on Newton’s secret study of alchemy and his speculations on God and the Bible

Sir Isaac Newton published his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica on this date in 1687. The occasion contributes nicely to our ongoing thread, Frye on God.

Blake and Newton in “The Drunken Boat”:

Blake’s view, in short, is that the universe of modern astronomy, as revealed in Newton, exhibits only a blind, mechanical, sub-human order, not the personal presence of a deity. Newton himself tended to think of God still as “up there”; but what was up there, according to Blake, is only a set of interlocking geometrical diagrams, and God, Blake says, is not a mathematical diagram. Newtonism leads to what for Blake are intellectual errors, such as a sense of the superiority of abstractions to actual things and the notion that the real world is a measurable but invisible world of primary qualities. But Blake’s main point is that admiring the mechanisms of the sky leads to establishing human life in mechanical patterns too. In other words, Blake’s myth of Urizen is a fuller and more sophisticated version of the myth of Frankenstein. (CW 17, 79)

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Quote of the Day: “Alienation and incomprehension and done-unto-ness”

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoxxmGpp6HI&feature=relmfu

Report on the rioting in Greece

John Lanchester in the London Review of Books considers the potentially disastrous world-wide consequences if Greece defaults on its debt. The paragraph below captures the sense likely shared by people around the world that our chronic economic problems have been foisted upon us by the greed, incompetence, and criminality of financial institutions that have raked in unimaginably large amounts of money with little risk and no accountability. As tens of millions people lost their jobs and life savings, financial institutuions like Goldman Sachs posted record profits and passed around billions of dollars in bonuses to those responsible for the 2008 crash. These institutions are now not only too big to fail, they are also apparently too big to jail. That means we continue to pay for the consequences as their hold upon the global economy continues to tighten:

From the worm’s-eye perspective which most of us inhabit, the general feeling about this new turn in the economic crisis is one of bewilderment. I’ve encountered this in Iceland and in Ireland and in the UK: a sense of alienation and incomprehension and done-unto-ness. People feel they have very little economic or political agency, very little control over their own lives; during the boom times, nobody told them this was an unsustainable bubble until it was already too late. The Greek people are furious to be told by their deputy prime minister that ‘we ate the money together’; they just don’t agree with that analysis. In the world of money, people are privately outraged by the general unwillingness of electorates to accept the blame for the state they are in. But the general public, it turns out, had very little understanding of the economic mechanisms which were, without their knowing it, ruling their lives. They didn’t vote for the system, and no one explained the system to them, and in any case the rule is that while things are on their way up, no one votes for Cassandra, so no one in public life plays the Cassandra role. Greece has 800,000 civil servants, of whom 150,000 are on course to lose their jobs. The very existence of those jobs may well be a symptom of the three c’s, ‘corruption, cronyism, clientelism’, but that’s not how it feels to the person in the job, who was supposed to do what? Turn down the job offer, in the absence of alternative employment, because it was somehow bad for Greece to have so many public sector workers earning an OK living? Where is the agency in that person’s life, the meaningful space for political-economic action? She is made the scapegoat, the victim, of decisions made at altitudes far above her daily life – and the same goes for all the people undergoing ‘austerity’, not just in Greece. The austerity is supposed to be a consequence of us all having had it a little bit too easy (this is an attitude which is only very gently implied in public, but it’s there, and in private is sometimes spelled out). But the thing is, most of us don’t feel we did have it particularly easy. When you combine that with the fact that we have so little real agency in our economic lives, we tend to feel we don’t deserve much of the blame. This feeling, which is strong enough in Ireland and Iceland, and which will grow steadily stronger in the UK, is so strong in Greece that the country is heading for a default whose likeliest outcome, by far, is a decade of misery for ordinary Greeks.

Independence Day

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A small but still cherished gift to America on her 235th birthday: The Glenn Beck Show is gone. Above is Talking Points Memo’s montage of the derangement of his last show.

Frye on the fundamental difference between Canada and the U.S. in the “Conclusion to the Second Edition of Literary History of Canada“:

As Canada and the United States went their separate ways on the same continent, eventually coming to speak for the most part the same language, their histories took on a strong pattern of contrast. The United States found its identity in the eighteenth century, the age of rationalism and enlightenment. It retains a strong intellectual fascination with the eighteenth century: its founding fathers are still its primary cultural heroes, and the bicentenary celebrations of 1976, from all accounts, will be mainly celebrations of the eighteenth century rather than the present day. The eighteenth-century cultural pattern took on a revolutionary, and therefore deductive, shape, provided with a manifesto of Independence and a written constitution. This in turn developed a rational attitude to the continuity of life in time, and this attitude seems to me the central principle of the American way of life. The best image for it is perhaps that of the express train. It is a conception of progress, but of progress defined by mechanical rather than organic metaphors, and hence the affinity with the eighteenth century is not really historical: it tends in fact to be antihistorical. Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, with their imperturbable common sense, are thought of, in the popular consciousness, more as deceased contemporaries than as ancestors living among different cultural referents. The past is thus assimilated to the present, a series of stations that our express train has stopped at and gone beyond. (CW 12, 453)

Gay Pride and a Sabbath Reflection

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Today is the Gay Pride Parade in Toronto.

Frye in his 1952 diary:

I have never myself felt any physical basis to my affectionate feelings for other men, but there must be one, and it seems to me to be as pointless to speak of all male love as buggery as it would be to speak of all marriage as legalized whoring. When Marlowe said that the beloved disciple was Christ’s Alexis, he wasn’t just being a bad boy: the sense of his remark is that Christ’s love, being human, must have had a substantial quality in it. (CW 8, 465)

The joke writes itself. A pasty, slightly flabby, middle-aged guy dressed up as a cowboy at an event where they “bust broncos.”

The joke continues with the observation that some “Christian conservatives,” identifiable as libertarians in the private sector and authoritarians in other people’s private lives, are also regularly discovered to be deeply in the closet, sometimes in the company of a rent boy and a ready supply of crystal meth. This includes pastors of “family values” churches and a striking number of Stephen Harper’s Republican brethren.

So nobody is suggesting that our God-fearing, End Times-friendly prime minister is anything but what he appears to be. However, according to the demands of the joke, he does exhibit eyebrow raising behavior. Most notably, a conspicuous streak of homophobia likely related to some unresolved conflict that dare not speak its name, but is expressed by an obsessive concern with restricting the sexual behavior and personal freedoms of people who do not conform to his version of “real Canadian values.” Think of the secretly cross-dressing J. Edgar Hoover’s paranoid fantasies about “the enemy within” — in the end it was clear who the “enemy” and where the “within” was.

Finally, there’s the punchline involving Harper’s billion dollar G20 Sweet Sixteen last June: all those sweaty, heavily muscled, body armored, nightstick swinging riot police “kettling” legally assembled protesters, pushing up hard against them from behind, thrusting deeper and deeper into the crowd . . . Very butch. Totally top.

However, joking aside, does any of this sound anything like what Jesus would do? Or is it a projection of what Harper’s Jesus would do if he actually existed, passing judgment and casting aside those who do not qualify as somehow fulfilling God’s love?

It’d be hard to go wrong with the assumption that any God of love worthy of the name loves gay people and would have some stern (but still forgiving) words for the odd over-compensation of our jet-buying, jail-building prime minister. There’s not a lot of peace or love in Harper’s Christianity, which means it could use a little more Jesus and a lot less idolatry, such as worshiping the golden calf of corporate power and Mammon in general.

All of which raises the very serious question: what exactly is Stephen Harper afraid of?

Gay Pride exhibits both pride and courage. Harper seems to possess neither. Except maybe the hollow courage of those who have acquired worldly power for personal gain, which is in turn closely related to the pride that goeth before the fall.