Un-meditative

I found Aurelius' Meditations boring.  I'm glad that he was so reflective, but his observations on life just didn't appeal to me.  I guess I'm as bad as any other American in my inability to appreciate a philosopher-king.

New Book: Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

My next book will be Meditations by Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius.  Apparently it's a bunch of thoughts that he wrote down over two decades, rather than a unified treatise.  It's also said to be a work of Stoic philosophy.  I know very little about this.  Nonetheless, the concept of a philosopher-king is quite appealing right now, for abundantly obvious reasons, so let's find out what an actual philosopher-king had to say.

More thoughts on the Iliad

The Iliad is very much a tale of opulent wealth:  Heroes with magnificent weapons and jewelry and furs, constant sacrifices of cattle and sheep (a form of wealth) to the gods, and great feasts.  This is clearly absurd:  Real wars are fought by poor schmucks eating crappy food.

On the other hand, the idea of Greek politicians squandering most of their GDP on a land war in Asia (Troy was in Asia Minor) sounds like exactly the sort of thing that politicians of any era would do.  I dare say that the US Department of Defense could manage to squander at least as much money as any Argive king ever managed to squander, and for even more pointless ends.  At least the Greeks ultimately did sack Troy, which guarded the waterway connecting the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea.  WTF has the US DoD accomplished since WWII?

Latest Read: The Iliad

I'm reading the Iliad.  I'd only read excerpts before, and that was a long time ago. I won't post every thought I've had on it, but I have two big takeaways from the first 11 chapters:

First and foremost, the Iliad was basically an ancient TV series with an ensemble cast.  It arose from an oral performance tradition, and consists of 24 chapters of roughly equal length.  (No, not exactly equal, but within a factor of 2 of each other.)  Some chapters are very much about the bigger story, the constant back-and-forth between the Trojans and Achaeans, with the Gods wrapped up in the drama and the central characters (e.g. Hector, Achilles, Paris, Agamemnon, Diomedes, Odysseus, Menelaeus, Nestor) making decisions that will shift the fortunes of war.  Other chapters are more episodic, from that part of the TV season where the writers want to focus on a few characters in side plots.  So you get chapter 10 ("Marauding through the night"), which focuses on an inept Trojan spy who folds as soon as he is caught, spills all of his info, and then gets a dishonorable death in spite of an earlier promise to not kill him.  Or chapter 11 ("Agamemnon's day of glory"), which is largely about a D&D party rescuing their healer after he's been wounded in battle.

Of course, the writers on a TV series can only do so many of these "side plot" episodes before the audience will expect a return to the main story.  So chapter 11 concludes with Patroclus realizing that the Achaeans desperately need help.  It's pretty clear that he'll rejoin the fight soon.  And all of this will lead up to heart-breaking deaths of main characters, and then an epic conclusion as the sun sets on doomed Troy.

In another parallel with TV, the Odyssey is basically a spinoff series about a supporting character who had his own die-hard fans. I can only assume that these parallels arise from ancient poets needing to keep an audience fixated over the long haul, coming back for more as they sang and chanted for their supper, just as modern TV writers need to keep an audience's attention in order to get paid.

Second, having noted analogies between the Iliad and modern popular entertainment, I was pretty astounded by some lines spoken by Achilles in chapter 9 (lines 383-391):

No, what lasting thanks in the long run
for warring with our enemies, on and on, no end?
One and the same lot for the man who hangs back
and the man who battles hard. The same honor waits
for the coward and the brave. They both go down to Death,
the fighter who shirks, the one who works to exhaustion.
And what's laid up for me, what pittance? Nothing—
and after suffering hardships, year in, year out,
staking my life on the mortal risks of war.

Compare with these lines from Ecclesiastes, in which the author questions the point of wisdom and labor, when the wise man will suffer the same death as the fool, and the wise man who works can take nothing with him, but must leave it behind to a man who may be a fool:

And I saw that wisdom has as much profit over folly as light has over darkness. 

   Wise people have eyes in their heads, but fools walk in darkness.

Yet I knew that the same lot befalls both. So I said in my heart, if the fool’s lot is to befall me also, why should I be wise? Where is the profit? And in my heart I decided that this too is vanity. The wise person will have no more abiding remembrance than the fool; for in days to come both will have been forgotten. How is it that the wise person dies like the fool! Therefore I detested life, since for me the work that is done under the sun is bad; for all is vanity and a chase after wind.

 And I detested all the fruits of my toil under the sun, because I must leave them to the one who is to come after me. And who knows whether that one will be wise or a fool? Yet that one will take control of all the fruits of my toil and wisdom under the sun. This also is vanity.

(Ecclesiastes 2:13-19)

Or these, in which he asks what the point of bravery is:

Again I saw under the sun that the race is not won by the swift, nor the battle by the valiant, nor a livelihood by the wise, nor riches by the shrewd, nor favor by the experts; for a time of misfortune comes to all alike. (Ecclesiastes 9:11)

Now, the Iliad was hardly the only ancient work in which a man questioned the point of valor, but it was an influential work in the Hellenistic world, and I understand that the author of Ecclesiastes had at least some exposure to that world.  So I'm left to wonder if these parallels with Achilles' speech were deliberate literary devices.  I understand that the extent of Hellenistic influences on Ecclesiastes are very much debated by people who know the original texts and background far better than I do, so I will merely note the common, resonant themes, but offer no further speculation on the extent (if any) of Homeric influence on Ecclesiastes.

A sign of my growing elitism

I don't normally read The Federalist, but I stumbled across this article while googling "constitutional monarchy."  As I become ever more elitist I've started to think that Americans need a monarchy.  Or maybe a di-archy with two co-kings/queens.  Americans are a desperately jingoistic bunch, all convinced of their exceptionalism (even the less visibly patriotic liberals mostly believe in American ideals, and want to see us live those out better than anyone else).  We need to give them symbols that they can swoon over and hold up as infallible, while a real human being runs the government.  So let's have a Prime Minister as Head of Government and two co-Royals as Head of State.

We need two so that liberals and conservatives both have somebody to swoon over.  The liberals can have a diverse NPR host with a best-selling book, while the conservatives can have a country singer or football player who served in the Marines.  The Royal Liberal will host vegan banquets, while the Royal Conservative will lead hunting parties and then roast whatever they kill.  And to make the centrists happy, whatever modest powers these heads of state wield can only be wielded by joint consent.  So most stuff will be done by a Prime Minister, but every now and then the two co-Royals will do something bipartisan and centrists will swoon.  Everybody's happy.

Seriously, it's better than giving actual executive power to a TV star.

Latest Book: First Class by Alison Stewart

I just read First Class by Alison Stewart, a history of what was once America's finest high school for African American students.  It is a rather tragic story:  During segregation, African American students in DC were limited to just a few high schools (the number depending on the era), and the "academic" school (to contrast with a nearby vocational school) was Dunbar high school.

Admission was selective, so only the best African American students got in, and the results were exactly what you'd expect when you have selective admission from a pool of students whose parents wanted them to be there:  Absolutely outstanding.  Over several decades, Dunbar's students frequently out-performed white kids (from a similarly selective high school) on academic measures. Dunbar alumni went to elite colleges, became doctors and lawyers and professors, broke barriers at military academies, and rose to the top of the arts.  In short, they proved that talent and motivation know no color, and that excellent students of any group can hold their own against any other group, even groups that enjoy substantial advantages.  It shows the cruel hollowness in systems of privilege, the way that such systems artificially elevate the mediocre while suppressing the excellence of human ability that is abundant in every group.

Perversely, Dunbar's excellence was destroyed at the same time that school segregation ended (thanks, in part, to lawyers who had graduated from Dunbar).  The problem was not desegregation, but rather an effort to circumvent desegregation:  Dunbar became a "neighborhood school."  Desegregating schools didn't desegregate housing, and most neighborhoods remained either primarily black or primarily white.  Consequently, making all schools serve their local neighborhood ensured that most schools would remain either primarily black or primarily white.  Had Dunbar (and its white counterpart) remained selective then talented students of all races could have mixed, to the benefit of all.

Instead, schools remained racially segregated in practice, and the only integration that actually occurred was integration of the motivated and unmotivated into the same classroom, to the downfall of excellence.  That's pretty much what you'd expect from the society that went on to make Donald Trump President (albeit several decades later).  We Americans are a fiercely anti-intellectual bunch.

Since then, Dunbar has been exactly like any other school in DC, and as communities have deteriorated so has Dunbar. Later chapters describe the school with narratives that we hear for every troubled urban high school:  A faculty with a mix of earnest and disenchanted people, an underachieving student body, and periodic attempts to "reform" (to little effect).  There are people who keep their spirits up by focusing on the "diamonds in the rough", which is an ironic contrast with the era when selective admissions made it a well-stocked jewelry store of talent.

Sadly, this wasn't solely the doing of white people who wanted to avoid mixing talented white and black students.  Apparently many African Americans resented Dunbar students and parents, seeing them as rich and elite.  Some certainly were well-off by the standards of black people in DC several decades ago, but most were of modest means and just happened to have some mix of good brains and good upbringing.  The book talks about this a bit, and one gets the sense that these resentments may have played a role in keeping Dunbar from returning to selective (albeit race-neutral) admissions.  American anti-intellectualism knows no color, and Americans of every background resent smarty-pants types.  Maybe our best hope for racial understanding is for people of all races to come together and discover that they all hate smart people.

Quick thoughts on "We're All Multiculturalists Now"

Much of this book is descriptive, and reasonably even-handed for such a hot button topic as multiculturalism.  There's a lot of discussion of history, both noting that debates over cultural assimilation of immigrants are nothing new (all of this has happened before and will happen again) and also noting that assimilation mostly works.  HOWEVER, what is different is that after decades of ever-increasing attempts at integration, with a large-scale marshaling of resources for a more-or-less benevolent (though not necessarily respectful or well-informed) effort to reduce educational and economic disparities, it's much harder for some people to sustain faith in integration.  It's worked for new immigrants but not for a continuing underclass.  The woes of that underclass arise directly from America's original sin, and will not be remedied easily.  So, some people throw up their hands cynically and say do nothing, while others throw up their hands earnestly and decide to define the problem away by celebrating difference, and declaring that disparities come from policymakers' failures to properly account for cultural difference rather than inflicted pathology.

I think I largely agree with this.  We are desperate to define a problem away, or channel guilt, because if we don't define the problem as arising from some difference worthy of celebration then people will define it as arising from some difference worthy of scorn.

But, as I've said before about how you can have different theories of failure, you can have different theories of difference.  Making difference into too big of a thing will eventually cause some to question whether it is always a positive thing, let alone a positive thing that always favors a group that you are trying to shield from harm.  As unsavory as the motive is, they will be able to wrap themselves in the mantle of disinterestedness and open-mindedness.  Spend enough time saying that groups are different and eventually someone will come along and say "Yeah, groups are different, and I freakin' love my group!  My group is the best!"

And that never takes us anywhere good.

But as easy as it is to scold those who celebrate difference, it's a response to an original sin that we've been unable to wash away.  Its effects linger, they resist efforts at reform, and the legitimacy of the system requires that we either remove the difference, rationalize it, or properly assign blame.  The first has yet to be realized, the third is something that people try to do but don't really get satisfying results from, so we go to the second.