Kahlil Gibran-On Teaching
Kahlil Gibran
No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.
The teacher who walks in the shadow of the temple, among his followers, gives not of his wisdom but rather of his faith and his lovingness.
If he is indeed wise he does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind.
The astronomer may speak to you of his understanding of space, but he cannot give you his understanding.
The musician may sing to you of the rhythm which is in all space, but he cannot give you the ear which arrests the rhythm nor the voice that echoes it.
And he who is versed in the science of numbers can tell of the regions of weight and measure, but he cannot conduct you thither.
For the vision of one man lends not its wings to another man.
And even as each one of you stands alone in God’s knowledge, so must each one of you be alone in his knowledge of God and in his understanding of the earth.
Opening Salvo in the War on Christmas
Grit your teeth, it’s not even Thanksgiving.
All the News That Fits We Print
Mr. Friedman’s choice contribution
The End of the Experts?
The sudden outbreak of peace in Iraq has made me realize, among other things, one incontestable fact: I have no business holding a pen, at least with intent to write.
I know, you’re thinking I’m going too far. I haven’t always been wrong about everything. I recently made some sense on global warming and what we needed to do about it, for instance.
But to have been so completely and fundamentally wrong about so huge a disaster as what we have done to Iraq — and ourselves — is outrageous enough to prove that people like me have no business posing as wise men, and, more importantly, that The New York Times has no business continuing to provide me with a national platform.
In any case, I have made a decision: as of today, I will no longer write in this or any other newspaper. I will immediately desist from writing any more books about how it’s time for everyone to climb on board the globalization high-speed monorail to the future. I will keep my opinions to myself. (My wife suggested that I try not to even form opinions, but I think she might have another agenda.)
Baffled? I don’t blame you. So I’ll cite some facts to support my decision — a practice, I must admit, I have too seldom followed.
Let’s start with the invasion itself. I was pretty much all for it. Mind you, I was not one of the pundits, reporters, or public figures who said that Saddam Hussein was a threat to the United States. I knew better — but I said it didn’t matter!
Back in February of 2003, I wrote in this space: “Saddam does not threaten us today. He can be deterred. Taking him out is a war of choice — but it’s a legitimate choice.” In other words, we should invade a sovereign state and replace its government in order to remake the world more to our liking.
Now the simple fact is, an unprovoked attack on a sovereign state is a war crime, even when linked to grand ideas of the future of mankind. In fact, that’s exactly what Hitler did, for exactly the same reasons. The Nuremburg War Crimes Tribunal called it the “the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”
What was I thinking? And more importantly, why didn’t anyone stop me?
But wait, it gets worse. Having expressed how acceptable it was to commit Hitler’s signature crime, I then applauded the invasion of Iraq as an “audacious roll of the dice.” It should have occurred to me that this gamble would be unspeakably painful for an untold number of Iraqis who had done nothing to us — in other words, any of them.
Soon, when it became obvious that my pipe dreams for a peaceful and democratic subject nation were just that, I decided to say it was too soon to tell how things would turn out in Iraq, but that we would definitely know in six months to a year. I said this pretty much every six months for five years. And The Times just kept giving me more and more column-inches.
I’m not trying to beat myself up here. I’ve done that plenty already, believe me — and my wife has done the rest! But I have one question: why are newspapers like The New York Times letting people like me make fools of themselves, mislead the American people, and, worst of all, give their wives a lifetime of ammunition?
To err is human, but to print, reprint, and re-reprint error-mad humans like me is a criminally moronic editorial policy.
Nor, of course, is it only me. Just consider who populates the opinion pages of America’s top newspapers. Bill Kristol, who was actually hired by The Times long after being proven wrong on Iraq. Charles Krauthammer. Robert Novak. Mona Charen. Fred Barnes. The list goes on and on of officially-approved wise men (and a woman or two) who never once doubted that Iraq had vast stockpiles of W.M.D.s. And that’s just in newspapers.
We were all wrong again and again — and the consequences were devastating. Can anyone tell me why any of us should ever be asked, let alone paid, for our opinions ever again? Or, for that matter, why Richard Perle or Paul Wolfowitz should be allowed behind any sort of desk whatsoever as long as they live?
Peace in Iraq will undoubtedly have many far-reaching consequences. As promised, I’m not going to speculate publicly about what they might be.
Except one. As of today, I’m putting down my pen, to take up a screwdriver. I am going to retrain as an engineer and spend the rest of my life working to build non-carbon-based energy technologies. And I’m going to spend a lot of time washing my hands.
In the Realms of the Unreal
I few weeks ago I attended the Henry Darger exhibit at the American Folk Art Museum. I was so excited to see this work, having been a lover of Darger’s work since seeing Jessica Yu’s film “In the Realms of the Unreal,” a documentary about the man, in 2004. Here’s the trailer, I will let it speak for itself.
The Rhythms of Modern Life
Cyril E. Power-Merry-Go-Round
Yesterday, I saw a fantastic exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art called “The Rhythms of Modern Life: British Prints 1914-1939.” I was absolutely fascinated by these prints and the personalities of the artists, some of whom like, C.R.W. Nevinson were around Wyndham Lewis and the Vorticist group. Most of the catalog, however, was drawn from the ranks of what would be called the Grosvenor School. These artists, including Cyril E. Power, Sybil Andrews, and Claude Flight, drew on Futurism, Expressionism, and Cubism to produce linocuts and prints inspired by the dynamics and speed of modern urban life.
Like the Italian Futurists, who were a primary influence, the artists grouped around the Vorticists embraced 
the First World War as a great act of creative destruction, the “sole hygiene for the world” in the words of Futurist leader F.T. Marinetti. The Futurists, intoxicated by mechanization, speed, technology, and force, viewed War as the greatest exemplification of these modern virtues. The Vorticist journal BLAST included works by noted reactionaries Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, as well as C.R.W. Nevinson, who was perhaps the most impresive of the artists on display at the Met.
Nevinson’s work drew heavily on the imagery of war, and he himself served as an ambulence driver for the British in WWI. The images of the war provided subject matter for many of his works, including a stunning set of etchings and prints emphasizing the usual Vorticist and Futurist themes of technology, dynamism, and speed. In an impressive work called Building Aircraft: Banking at 4,000 Feet, he employs methods similar to those of the Futurists, like sharp diagonal angles and lines to suggest force and
C.R.W. Nevinson-Building Aircraft: Banking at 4,000 Feet
movement, with dramatic effect. Standing in front of this print, you almost get a feeling of vertigo, like you might fall out of the plane at any moment.
You can see why such technologies as aircraft would thrill the artists of the time. The intoxicating feeling of flying, still a novelty in this age, certainly comes through in this work. Imagine, also, the experience of being in a plane with an open cockpit, with the bracing air around you and your stomach jumping into your throat as the plane banks hard to the right.
Not all of Nevinson’s prints had this sense of giddy exuberence, however.
C.R.W. Nevinson-Hauling Down an Observation Balloon at Night
My favorite work on display was Hauling down an Observation Balloon at Night, which has a more forboding atmosphere.
One aspect of Nevinson’s fascination with the machinary of war must have included the thought that this technology can easily dwarf the powers of men to control it: in this work, the balloon looms ominously over the men below, who seem barely able to reign it in from the sky. It descends like some terrifying black cloud as dozens of troops strain bring it under their control. The thick layers of ink suggest a gloomy, nocturnal scene.
Seen up close, this work is chilling. Unlike some of his other war prints, which show troops marching to the front, dying in trenches, and the like, Hauling Down an Observation Balloon at Night has a terrifying feeling of silence. The balloon itself, despite it’s customary associations with weightlessness, suggests a tremendous weight bearing down on the men below. It’s force in the work is downward, not upward, an oppressive force, rather than an uplifting one.
C.R.W. Nevinson-Looking Through the Brooklyn Bridge
In addition to the militaristic themes of Nevinson’s work, he also was interested in urban themes, and several of the works on display were inspired by the time he spent in New York City. Looking Through the Brooklyn Bridge, completed in 1920, in some ways carries over themes which appear in Hauling down an Observation Balloon at Night. The massive scale of the bridge dwarfs the people walking across it, and the city behind it appears massive and grey. There is little that is comforting in this image of city life: rather the metropolis appears to be hostile, polluted, and inhospitable to human life. The greyish tone, as well as the apparent sheen on the metal suggests rain or sleet. The people are anonymous and shrouded by shadow, their gait suggesting that they are perhaps hurrying to escape the weather. The man in front appears to be carrying an umbrella, which reinforces this impression.
The sharp diagonal lines of this work, extending from the upper-left corner to the lower-right, remind me of Banking at 4,000 Feet. However, whereas in Banking these lines give a powerful suggestion of motion and speed, in Looking Through the Brooklyn Bridge they somehow have the opposite effect: The Bridge is unmoveable, a monument to the permenance of the new Industrial reality. It is the people who seem temporary, as fleeting as the shadows which move across it.
Cyril E. Power-The Tube Train
Other artists on display showed a fascination with urban themes, and I was excited to find many works
Cyril E. Power-Whence and Whither?
dedicated to the theme of mass transportation. Many of the artists of the Grosvenor School, most notably Cyril E. Power, produced prints on this subject. The scene portrayed in The Tube Train, seen above, is familiar to anybody who has spent time in a major metropolis, the alienated riders of the train focused on anything but the people around them; here absorbed in newspapers. The riders are anonymous and uniform, without individuality or personality, and the jilted angles suggest motion; you can imagine the train racing through the underground, tilting with the turns of the track.
The alienating aspects of urban life also come through in Power’s print Whence and Whither?, another of my favorite works from the exhibit. Here a mass of people descend down an escalator, a wave of anonymous humanity moving through the underground arteries of the city. The caption at the museum said that this work had the working title “The Bottomless Pit: Homo Mechanies,” and suggesting the sort of alienation and automatization of humanity that was a theme for many of the artists of the time.
Here again the downward angles suggest movement and force, and the working title of The Bottomless Pit seems to suggest a sort of black hole sucking the people down.
Another favorite of mine from Power was The Escalator, which reminded me very much of the 51st Street
Cyril E. Power-The Escalator
Subway Station in Manhattan, which has a long escalator which descends down a tiled, rounded tunnel to the platform for the E and V trains. When I lived downtown, I took this escalator every day on my way back from Hunter College. Here again, the man is dwarfed by the scale of the city, darkened and anonymous, and his stance makes him appear as though he were bracing himself for his encounter with the technology before him. Unlike Whence and Whither?, which suggest a force pulling downward, The Escalator seems like a massive obstacle to the man’s upward ascent. This seems to suggest the opposite of the intended effect of the escalator, a strange dichotomy that reminded me of the Ballon from Nevinson’s print above.
51st Street Subway Escalator
Like the Vorticists and the Futurists, the artists of the Grosvenor School were fascinated by the political upheavals of the time. I was very interested to learn of the themes behind Revolution, a print by Claude Flight, the leader of the Grosvenor School. One of the blurbs in the museum pointed out that Flight, like Nevinson, was fascinated by mechanization, technology, speed, and political upheaval, but unlike Nevinson he refused to embrace militarism.
Claude Flight-Revolution
Revolution, an abstract work produced in 1931, coincided with events like the rise of Fascism in Germany and the Stalinist purges in Russia, but it was also pointed out that the title may have been inspired by Leon Trotsky’s classic work The Permenant Revolution, which saw it’s first English language publication at this time. This inspiring call for internationalism was popular among a certain layer of intellectuals at the time who were put off by the repressive nature of the Soviet state but had yet to abandon hope for revolution or slide into sympathy with fascism or western-style imperialism. Here the reds and yellows, arrayed in chaotic jagged lines, suggests violence and force, but in the service of progressive, rather than reactionary political goals.
The Marxist critic Walter Benjamin, in his classic work “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” had called out Marinetti and the Futurists for glorifying war as the best outlet for technological progress, rather than applying such technology for more humanistic ends. As he pointed out:
All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war. War and war only can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system. This is the political formula for the situation. The technological formula may be stated as follows: Only war makes it possible to mobilize all of today’s technical resources while maintaining the property system.
Most of the artists of this time came from middle-class backgrounds, and had no reason to oppose the system of private property as such. Without this orientation, where else could their passion for mass violence be turned, except toward nationalism and imperialism? Flight’s Revolution suggests a rare exception in the currents which emerged from the influences of Vorticism and Futurism: violence and mechanization in the service of social progress.
Cyril E. Power-The Tube Station
Imaginary Genius
The image and idea of the Genius, the individual endowed with super-human powers of creativity and perception, is ultimately a Bourgeois concept, emerging in the 19th Century as modernity displaced the old religious order and a cult of human achievement was required to fill the ideological gap left behind by religion, which was no longer the only ideological cement of class society. The democratic ideology ushered in by the American and French revolutions, coupled with the rise of mass participation in political life in the latter part of the 1800’s, necessitated a new notion to legitimize the rule of the minority over political life. Thus the world saw a growing exultation of “Geniuses,” be they artistic, philosophical, political, etc. These individuals, not “appointed” by God as divine sovereigns, but merely endowed by Him with superior élan and talent, were the ones with the know-how and skill to steer the ship of state, and those below were best advised not to get too uppity and tell these big brains how things should be.
The cult of Genius has remained with us to our modern day, and the bankuptcy of the concept is laid bare, along with so many other bankruptcies, by the public image of Alan Greenspan. Known for his Gnomic pronouncements to many Senate hearings (“the irrational exuberance of the market,” etc.) on the virtues of low interest rates and the power of derivatives to grease the wheels of the Capitalist system, he was dubbed “The Oracle” by his admirers, a True Genius blessed with a Sixth Sense for the needs and desires of the Market. He was enamored with the creative potentialities of unbridled greed, having worshiped at the feet of Ayn Rand herself. He praised derivatives as “an extraordinarily useful vehicle to transfer risk from those who shouldn’t be taking it to those who are willing to and are capable of doing so.” These exotic investment instruments did in fact help fuel a dynamic period of economic growth, but it was, as Rosa Luxemburg would have put it, an “order built on sand.” Now the sands have shifted, and Mr. Greenspan’s legacy is up for review. What does this say of Genius?
And speaking of Ms. Luxemburg, it was over one-hundred years ago, as credit was emerging as a major component of the Capitalist system, that she wrote these words, prophetically, against those of her day who claimed that credit would provide a lubricant to the system, alleviating its tendency toward crisis:
Credit has diverse applications in capitalism. Its two most important functions are to extend product
ion and to facilitate exchange. When the inner tendency of capitalist production to extend boundlessly strikes against the restricted dimensions of private property, credit appears as a means of surmounting these limits in a particular capitalist manner. Credit, through shareholding, combines in one magnitude of capital a large number of individual capitals. It makes available to each capitalist the use of other capitalists’ money–in the form of industrial credit. As commercial credit it accelerates the exchange of commodities and therefore the return of capital into production, and thus aids the entire cycle of the process of production. The manner in which these two principle functions of credit influence the formation of crises is quite obvious. If it is true that crises appear as a result of the contradiction existing between the capacity of extension, the tendency of production to increase, and the restricted consumption capacity of the market, credit is precisely, in view of what was stated above, the specific means that makes this contradiction break out as often as possible. To begin with, it increases disproportionately the capacity of the extension of production and thus constitutes an inner motive force that is constantly pushing production to exceed the limits of the market. But credit strikes from two sides. After having (as a factor of the process of production) provoked overproduction, credit (as a factor of exchange) destroys, during the crisis, the very productive forces it itself created. At the first symptom of the crisis, credit melts away. It abandons exchange where it would still be found indispensable, and appearing instead, ineffective and useless, there where some exchange still continues, it reduces to a minimum the consumption capacity of the market.
Besides having these two principal results, credit also influences the formation of crises in the following ways. It constitutes the technical means of making available to an entrepreneur the capital of other owners. It stimulates at the same time the bold and unscrupulous utilisation of the property of others. That is, it leads to speculation. Credit not only aggravates the crisis in its capacity as a dissembled means of exchange, it also helps to bring and extend the crisis by transforming all exchange into an extremely complex and artificial mechanism that, having a minimum of metallic money as a real base, is easily disarranged at the slightest occasion.
We see that credit, instead of being an instrument for the suppression or the attenuation of crises, is on the contrary a particularly mighty instrument for the formation of crises. It cannot be anything else. Credit eliminates the remaining rigidity of capitalist relationships. It introduces everywhere the greatest elasticity possible. It renders all capitalist forces extensible, relative and mutually sensitive to the highest degree. Doing this, it facilitates and aggravates crises, which are nothing more or less than the periodic collisions of the contradictory forces of capitalist economy.
Does such a prescient observation qualify Luxemburg as a Genius, with a crystal ball for a brain? Certainly a woman of exceptional talent, she would have no doubt shirked such a title. What she did posess was a worldview capable of correctly apprehending the situation as it is, her talent mearly lay in her ability to apply this schema to its fullest effect. Mr. Greenspan, drunk on libertarianism, may certainly be a man with extraordinary intelligence, but what of it when it is used to wield such an inadequate set of intellectual tools? It is perspective, not talent, which is decisive. For this reason, we find the great majority of American society far ahead of the big thinkers who run our country, passing a $700 billion dollar bailout that was clearly ineffective. Given the poor condition of the American education system and the tremendous economic ignorance of most Americans, we can safely assume few of them could articulate in detail the abstract nature of our financial system and it’s current meltdown, and yet not having been inculcated with bullshit from college economics classes seems to have served them well.
