BOOKS

by William H. Benson

May 10, 2000

     We need the stimulus of differing opinions and opposing ideas.  Human beings are mortal; they die, but the ideas and thoughts that they can conceive and propose can then live forever.  Certain ideas that transcend a human being’s position and that uplift and enhance and spur that person on toward a greater future are ideas that should and must live forever.  Optimism, encouragement, and achievement are ideas permanently stored on the shelves of the libraries around the world.

     But not everyone has always agreed.  For example, on May 10, 1933 the Nazis celebrated their contempt for learning by building an enormous bonfire of 20,000 books, incinerating works on psychology and philosophy and all were written either by socialists, liberals, or Jews.  This is a sad anniversary, for book burning falls into the same category as does censorship and other forms of ruthless conformism.  It is a reversion or a step backwards from Western Civilization’s ideals.

     Friedrich Nietzche said that the final lesson of history is, “Let’s never go back there again.”  Indeed, book burnings are grim events.  There are no welcome signs.  Let’s not go there.

     Seven years later, tense discussions and long faces adorned England’s War Cabinet after Germany attacked Belgium, Holland, and France.  The English-speaking people on the British Isles understood that they were next.  So, on May 10, 1940 the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, offered his resignation to King George VI.  The King then summoned Winston Churchill to Buckingham Palace and asked him to form a new government to deal with Germany’s threat to England.

     Churchill was a professional politician, who had served off and on for four decades in the House of Commons.  He was also a journalist who wrote lengthy essays for journals about the issues and governmental policies that he either opposed or favored.  Also, he wrote dozens of books, primarily histories but also about his adventures.  Both friends and political opponents loved to hear him give a speech, for he was labelled the best speaker in Parliament.

     But he was considered a gadfly, a nuisance, and a pest who invariably pointed out the British government’s faults and mistakes, more than he offered a solution.  He was not the logical choice for Prime Minister at this grave hour in England.

     Three days later on the 13th, Churchill stood before the House of Commons and challenged the English:

     “I would say to the House, as I have said to those who have joined this Government:  ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.’  You ask what is our policy?  I will say: It is to wage war, by sea, land, and air, with all our might and with all the strength God can give us.  That is our policy.  You ask, what is our aim?  I can answer in one word:  It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.”

     His words rallied the British, and eventually after a very costly war he realized his victory;  Western Civilization he helped preserve.

     The choice remains today.  Do we burn the books or do we write the books?  Do we empty the library shelves of their books or do we add to the collection?  Do we search out and eradicate ideas that do not conform to our own or do we listen and, at least, try to tolerate others’ opinions.

H. L. Mencken said, “It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.” Book burners are so absolutely and thoroughly convinced that they are right that they are, of all things, most dull.  Socrates, the first of philosophers, suggested that “truth” is not usually ever possessed, but that it can only be found in its pusuit.

     And what was the victory that Churchill so pursued with a promise of blood, toil, tears, and sweat?  He simply wanted to secure the right for others to voice their opinions without fear of reprisal.  In other words, he wanted to end all future book burnings.  

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

by William H. Benson

April 26, 2000

     Because William Shakespeare was baptized on April 26, 1564, historians hypothesize that he was probably born on either April 22 or 23.  But they definitely know that he died exactly 52 years later on April 23, 1616.  He grew up in Stratford on the River Avon in England, a pleasant community of about 2000 people then.  At age 16 he graduated from Stratford’s school, but did not go on to either of the two universities–Oxford nor Cambridge.  Then, at age 23 evidence exists that he was in London working as a playwright, beginning his brilliant career.

     No one knows what he did in those intervening seven years, but he must have had access to books and read extensively.  He had detailed knowledge of royalty’s pageantry and decorum, and he also understood the mechanics of the courts, the lawyers, the judges, and the law.  And what he read he remembered.

     Recently, I picked up Harold Bloom’s book on Shakespeare–“The Invention of the Human”.  The title serves up Bloom’s thesis–that Shakespeare brought human character into creation.  Literary character before Shakespeare is relatively unchanging, but with Shakespeare his characters develop rather than unfold.  And they do so by listening to their own speech.

     Bloom puts Hamlet at the apex of Shakespeare’s writing talent, and indeed considers Hamlet the highest leterary art ever produced before or since.  Consider Hamlet’s words.

     “Our wills and fates do so contrary run

       That our devices still are overthrown:

       Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.”

In other words, what we want and what actually happens to us run on two different paths.  Our desires are thrown over, pushed aside, and trampled into the dirt.  We can take ownership of our thoughts, but what actually befalls us, our fate, that is not of our doing nor of our choice.  So says Hamlet in a philosophizing moment.

     Shakespeare holds up a mirror to see ourselves, and sometimes the mirror shines so brightly that we are blinded.  Our eyes are unaccustomed to such piercing light.  For example, Shakespeare created Lady Macbeth and the hunchback King Richard III, both murderous and desperately evil.  Shakespeare peered deeply into their hearts and drudge up the blackness therein.  For a moment audiences peer blindly into savage behavior and a brazen thirst for power.

     But then, at other times the mirror shows softlight and colorful–of a forest outside of Athens on a warm midsummer night where fairies named Peaseblossom, Cobweb, and Mustardsee flitter about, and where love potion douses people’s eyes.  These comedies revolve about getting the right girl with the right guy, and the awkward misups to get there bring out the gentle laughter.

      Through his characters, Shakespeare put on paper and then on stage and ultimately brought into life a galaxy of human natures and emotions, global in scope and multicultural in depth: sadness, discontent, happiness, staisfaction, despair, and horrible sorrow for despicable acts.

     Thomas Carlyle said, “If called to define Shakespeare’s faculty, I should say superiority of Intellect, and think I had included all under that.”  Harold Bllom says that Shakespeare’s intellect is superior to that of all other writers, both in the East and the West.  No other writer approaches his stature, for he stretches to the limits and even beyond human intelligence.

     I happen to like his Elizabethan language, described as “jewels in the mouth”.  For an example, consider the Prince’s final words at the end of the play after the two major characters are dead.

     “A glooming peace this morning with it brings;

      The sun for sorrow will not show his head.

      Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things;

      Some shall be pardon’d and some punished;

      For never was a story of more woe

      Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.”

FLAGS

by William H. Benson

April 13, 2000

     Last week the two major news items continued to puzzle.  Elian Gonzalez’s father arrived on Thursday in Miami demanding his son’s return to Cuba with him.  And then, the Confederate flag is still popping in the wind high atop South Carolina’s capitol dome.  Neither issue comes with a ready-made answer.

     The battle over Elian underscores the forty years of hostility between Castro’s Cuba and the United States.  Elian’s Cuban relatives who live in Little Havana in Miami want him to stay with them and enjoy America’s opportunities, for they have nothing but scorn for Castro’s poverty-stricken experiment with socialism in Cuba.  The father simply wants his son, and Janet Reno agrees that they should be together.  The hostility simmers for a season and then boils.

     In mid-April of 1961 the Cuban anti-Castro forces in the U.S. were so unhappy with the situation in Cuba that they landed on Cuban soil at the Bay of Pigs with the naive intention of overthrowing Castro, all done with the Kennedy Administration’s backing.  The forces shouted, “We must conquer or we shall die choked by slavery.”  Castro easily routed the invading forces; hence the phrase–the Bay of Pigs Fiasco.  Castro vowed defiance.  “The organizers of the aggression against Cuba are encroaching on the inalienable right of the Cuban people to live free and independently.”  The resulting suspicion and rancor between the two governments has marred their diplomatic relationship ever since.

     As for the other news item, the NAACP wants the Confederate flag removed, and to force the issue, the organization sanctioned a boycott against South Carolina until the flag comes down.  The Confederate flag represents a government, defeated and destroyed 135 years ago, that supported the enslavement of entire families–men, women, and children, from birth until death.

     This boycott underscores the hostility between the North and the South.  On April 12, 1861 the Confederate forces fired upon the U.S. garrison at Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, and the Civil War began.  Four years later on April 14, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln was shot at Ford’s Theatre, and the next day he died.  Those four years sapped the nation’s resources, turned villages into blood baths, and scarred innumerable families.  Thousands of children lost their dads.

     April 13, 1743 was Thomas Jefferson’s birthday.  Last Saturday a thirteen-member panel at the University of Richmond agreed that results from a DNA test link the Jefferson family to Sally Hemings’s youngest son, Eston, verifying the claim that Sally was indeed Jefferson’s mistress.  One person in the audience argued against the conclusion:  “This is not the truth.  This is a man’s reputation.  If (Jefferson) said there was no relationship, there was no relationship.”

     It is difficult to get into another person’s head and understand his or her thought processes, especially a Southern plantation owner in the the latter half of the the eighteenth century.  What Jefferson read, said, and wrote was one thing, for he set forth “inalienable rights” and included “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” among them.  But what he did was quite another thing.  He bought slaves to work his fields, even expanded his farming enterprise to include more slaves, and probably took for himself Sally Hemings.

     Flags represent an allegiance to a government that is attached at a point in time to a geographical region.  We say the words, “We pledge allegiance to the flag . . . ”  Apparantly, Elian Gonzalez’s father pledges his allegiance to Castro’s flag, a socialistic government.  Then, that Confederate flag atop South Carolina’s capitol dome represents a diminishing of Thomas Jefferson’s principles for the children of future generations.

     In these two issues we have seen battle lines drawn, people taking positions, and each side is convinced that they are on the right side, and that the opposing side is wrong.  And the issue is really about what to do with the children.  When we finally come around to face the issues of family (children) and of country (flags), we find that they can be inextricably woven together, joined at the elbow, and to pull on one pulls at the other.  What is best for Elian?  What is best for the children of South Carolina?  Rhetorical questions such as those do not yield simple answers, but I return again and again to Jefferson’s words: “. . .  that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  We cannot go too far wrong if we stick with those inalienable rights.  

ELECTIONS

by William H. Benson

March 30, 2000

     Vladimir Putin is Russia’s newest President, officially elected last Sunday.  He has been the acting President since last December 31st when Boris Yeltsin had had enough of the job and resigned and appointed Putin.  A former KGB officer who never quit the Communist Party, Putin is 47 years old, and unlike the typical robust Russian, he is thin.  He makes a striking counterpart to America’s Bill Clinton and Great Britain’s Tony Blair.

     Free elections in Russia are a cause for celebration.  After the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 Lenin had disbanded freely-held elections.  It was just eleven years ago on March 26, 1989 that Mikhail Gorbachev allowed the first free election in the Soviet Union.  Boris Yeltsin was the biggest winner that year, and that election opened the flood gates of change and of revolution.

      The following June Solidarity swept to victory in Poland.  In November the Berlin Wall crumbled, and then in October of 1990 the two Germany’s reunited.  On March 31, 1991 the Warsaw pact dissolved, and thereafter the various republics broke away from the Soviet Union.  Finally, on Christmas Day of 1991 Gorbachev resigned, and the Soviet Union ceased to exist.  In less than three years after that 1989 election, the people said, “No more!”

     Vladimir Putin inherits a mess.  Lenin, Stalin, Brezhnev, and the Communist Part had abused and bruised the people.  Stalin’s regime deliberately slaughtered the nation’s citizens–an estimated 25 million.  (That figure does not count all those lost in the war.)  Robert Conquest in his book, “Reflections on a Ravaged Century” concluded that Stalin was motivated by “a savage desire to remake society according to a preconceived model.  Human variety had to be pulverized into a malleable and unresisting mass.”  Stalin had drilled round holes and saw people as square pegs who needed cut up. 

     We, the citizens of the early twenty-first century, know fully well that governments can sponsor deliberate killing of their citizens.  Hitler’s Nazi regime, Mussolini’s Facist regime, and the Japanese imperialist leaders required a massive second World War before their frenzied killing stopped.  Then, just a year ago Slobodon Milosevic practiced his own version of ethnic cleansing, extricating people from their homes and then killing those who chose to stay.   The Western powers watched and finally responded, bombing Milosevic into submission.

     Evil can work this way.  A sides with B and convinces B to injure, abuse, and then kill C.  B feels great to be especially chosen by A and does what all good henchmen have always done–B kills C.  Then, once C is eliminated, surprise!  A pushes B into the empty C position, and then finds a new B to attack the newly-designated C.  The pattern is repeated again and again.  Hitler and Stalin both played this game on a national scale.

     Fortunately, the fifty-year Cold War of West against East finally ended with a whimper when the Soviet Union’s Communist Party, totally discredited, dissolved under its own weight.  Ronald Reagan’s U.S. military buildup overwhelmed the Soviet leaders and eventually bankrupted the nation.  The planned economy could not feed and clothe the people and also support a modern military arsenal at the same time.

     And then the Soviet people heard whispers of Reagan’s rhetoric that America was a “shining city on a hill” and that the Soviet Union was “an evil empire”.  But they did not need Reagan to tell them, for they instinctively knew that the American system was vastly superior to theirs.

     “We the people”, says so much.  The Constitution assures its citizens that power resides with them–the people, with their vote, with their election ballot.  Individual differences of gender, race, and ethnic heritage are allowed and even protected by the law, as a matter of national policy.  The law accomodates all shapes of pegs–square, triangle, and odd-formed.

     The slick demogouges can misled the people in the short run, but in the long run they can see the truth–who it is that ultimately benefits from a policy.  Is it the leaders or the people?

     Vladimir Putin faces enormous challenges and obstacles.  Will he come down hard on those who disagree with him?  Will he allow different opinions?  Or will he pull out a saw and cut off the pegs’ squared corners?  How will he treat the people?  The answers will soon be forthcoming. 

INTELLIGENCE AND SOCIAL CLASS

by William H. Benson

March 16, 2000

     Recently, I came across The Bell Curve, a 1994 book by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, in which they argued most forcefully that intelligence is the decisive dividing force in social statification.  They point to the elite who work their way clear to the right on the Bell Curve and enjoy the benefits of American society.  Those then with increasingly low intelligence find themselves clear to the left on that same Bell Curve and reap lesser rewards.  Intelligence, Herrnstein and Murray propose, is the engine that pulls the train of social mobility.

      Those are interesting thoughts; however, I would argue that this is not such a recent phenomenon.  Two centuries ago America concluded that our society’s best rewards should belong to those with the intelligence, or, a better word–brainpower.  Our society then set up a series of chutes and gates that herd the best and the brightest students through high school, into the best colleges, and then into the best jobs where they can climb the ladder.  Social mobility, and to a certain degree even social justice, in America is predicated upon IQ.

     And yet, the difficulty is that the gates are continually getting narrower and narrower.  Colleges demand higher and higher grades, SAT/ACT scores, and class ranks, and then they expect almost superhuman achievements in extra-curricular activities.  Add in the hyper-accelerating costs required once through the gate, and you can have a frustrating, even a pressure-cooker, situation.  The less-driven students just exit the chute, opting for an easier path.  They give up.  And then the disappointment if not allowed through the gate is most severe.

     In last week’s Newsweek a U.S. Department of Education employee, Clifford Adelman, suggested that the strongest predictor of college completion/success is determined by how rigorous and challenging the students’ high school courses are, no matter what grades they received.  He pushes hard for the nationwide adoption of Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate courses.

     “When well taught,” he says, “such courses put students in the position of setting up their own experiments, searching for their own specialized materials.  You don’t necessarily learn that in a regular high-school course.”

     If intelligence is truly the determining factor in social advancement, then is it “fair” that Mother Nature dictates where any of us fall along that Bell Curve?  Philosophers have endlessly debated this question–the fairness issue;  Karl Marx answered the question, “No, it wasn’t fair.”  He yearned for social equality–a narrow rectangle or even a single point rather than the smooth Bell Curve.  To him it just did not seem right that those with the brains should, generation after generation, run off with all the marbles.

     And what about the other factors besides intelligence that contribute to social standing, such as work habits, persistence, luck, risk tolerance, or initial economic position?  Of course, these attributes play a role, but all of them stacked together would probably not exceed the crucial part that IQ plays.

     On this day, March 16, in 1802 President Thomas Jefferson signed the law that established West Point–the U. S. Military Academy on the banks of the Hudson River.  This was one of those first steps the nation took in democratizing education and establishing a meritocracy; only those with the ability were allowed to attend West Point.  Up until then higher education was only offered to those who could afford it.

     The story of higher education in the U.S. during the twentieth-century is one of the great American success stories.  The U.S. has led the world in opening colleges to a mass population of young people who have the ability–regardless of creed, gender, financial resources, or other restrictive requirements.  College is the place where people with high intellect excel and people with low intellect fail.  When America opened itself to higher education, it opened up as well a revolution in the way the American population sorted and divided itself.