Dream Log: A Piece of Urban Real Estate, Status Uncertain

I dreamed that I and a few other poor people were living in abandoned cars parked on a rectangular patch which was about fifty yards wide and jutted out about twenty yards, like a cliff, from the middle of the downtown of a city with many tall buildings. One of the fifty-yard-long sides of the area was level with the developed city around it; off of the other three sides, there was a fifty-foot drop to another relatively-flat area covered with limited-access roads.

At the beginning of the dream there were three abandoned vehicles on this patch of ground, and five of us living in them. But more people kept moving in, some bringing vehicles or tents with them.

It was entirely unclear how much the ground we were living on was man-made and built up from the lower level, and how much had been there, with the upper level of ground, before humans built anything there. The mix of concrete and earth, and of jumbles of pipes and trees sticking out from the concrete and earth, made it very hard to tell which was more primary, and which had been added on.

At some point it started to seem to me like a good idea to encourage the homeless people who were passing through to stay and to build up actual homes here, and to invite other people to do the same. There was a vague feeling that developers were going to come and claim the -- the land? the building? whatever it was -- and have us all kicked out. They hadn't tried to do that so far, but it seemed to me that the more of us there were, and the more we had done to make the place a real home, the harder it would be to remove us, when and if someone tried.

Someone donated some solar panels and batteries to us, and soon that led to our having electrical heat on cold nights, and cold for storing food, and heat for cooking it without having to build a campfire. Some lawyers started working building a case for our right to stay, when and if someone challenged that right. We started to hold free classes on engineering, architecture and law, and used what we learned in those classes to strengthen our hold on the area, physically and legally.

Television news crews stopped in now and then to film and to talk to us. Republicans sometimes yelled and threw rocks or beer cans at us out of the windows of their trucks as they drove past on the street adjacent to and level with us. Democrats walked past and were much friendlier. Often they waved and flashed peace signs or held up clenched fists. Sometimes they stopped to talk.

No one was charged any money to stay there as long as they wanted, or to eat some of our food, or to take something else if they needed or wanted it: clothes, or books, or a phone, or what have you. It got to the point where the thing which most frequently made people want to move on was overcrowding. Ordinarily, I'm one of the first to feel crowded. But in this place, my fascination with everything that was going on outweighed my discomfort over the crowding.

A lot of what was going on was high-level education. It had started out with engineering, architecture, law and medicine, for purposes of the self-preservation of the community, and although classes quickly branched out into many other subjects, those four areas remained prominent among the things we taught. It had started out with people coming and helping us, but soon we were going out into the city to help people install solar power or repair their dwellings, or to represent them in court, or to check on their physical health, or to volunteer in other ways.

One area of the law in which we soon became well-known was advocating in favor of the legalization of marijuana. Some of the people who lived with us began to complain about the pot smoke, and so we agreed to smoke pot only in one designated area, which was designed to ventilate and blow the smoke away from the rest of the community, puffing merrily out through a smokestack and carried by the prevailing winds safely away from those who chose not to partake. If you wanted to get high, and you went to the designated smoking area, at some times it wasn't necessary to puff on anything, because enough people were in there going to town on bongs and joints, and the smoke was so thick, that if you just stood or sat there for a few minutes, you'd definitely get high.

Vegans were very prominent in our community. Some of them, unfortunately, were intolerant in their rhetoric about non-vegans. It was very tiresome. On the other hand, they made vegan food which, everyone agreed, was amazingly delicious.

I had begun there as a homeless person who'd crawled into an abandoned car to try to keep from freezing to death. But soon -- despite the overcrowding, which was definitely an issue for me -- it became the best home I had ever had.

And then I woke up.

Are More People Studying Electricity?

I was wondering about that even before this power outage started 4 days ago, on the 8th of March, 2017. DTE, the electric and gas utility I use, says that over 650,000 accounts were affected by the outage, which coincided with a severe cold spell, that most of them have had their power restored and that I will be one of the 90% to get the juice turned back on before midnight tonight. I wonder whether that estimate is accurate in my individual case. I wonder what it's going to be like for the last 10% to get their power back.

I was thinking about electricity before Wednesday morning when my electricity went out, and studying books such as Rojansky's Electromagnetic Fields and Waves, because I hope and believe that, Trump, Putin and the Koch brothers be damned, we are on the verge of a huge transformation away from fossil fuels and toward electricity generated by solar, wind and other green energy. I've mentioned before in this blog how I'm taking another one of my stabs at advanced math. Studying electricity, and physics, is part of that stab.

Since Wednesday morning I've been wondering things like, How much suffering would have been alleviated if more people here in the Detroit area had solar panels on their roofs, and, What actually is up with these smart grids one hears about in the news, and just exactly how smart or stupid are our grids around here? And, Will more people study electricity as a direct result of this outage? Surely some will. How many have already begun?

What, if anything, could I have done better since Wednesday if I had been an expert on the subject of electricity?

A few years ago DTE switched me over to a smart meter. Among other things, this means I, or anyone else with a smart meter, don't have to phone in a power outage because as soon as my power goes out, DTE already knows it.

Or so they say. I have no reason to suspect mendacity on DTE's part, but the truth is that I still know very little about electricity, and so I have little means of judging public or private statements about it.

I'm 55 years old. If you're shaking your head and muttering something like, "Starting to learn about electricity when he's 55?" -- meh. I'm not claiming yet to have actually learned anything. But Izzy Stone, one of my heroes,

started studying ancient Greek in his 60's and Hungarian after age 80. When I grow weary I just think of Izzy and my strength returns. I also haven't stopped doing push-ups and crunches every day, but Izzy has less to do with that directly. I don't happen to know what his exercise regime was like, or if he had one at all.

I'm also wondering: has President Chump said anything publicly at all about this power outage? I mean, I haven't noticed the National Guard in town handing out blankets and hot soup.

"As Featured In"

I still don't know exactly what "as featured in" means, but I'm pretty sure there are few phrases which mean less.

About 144,000,000 results (1.19 seconds)
No results found for "what does as featured in mean".
Results for what does as featured in mean (without quotes):

The first few results which were found don't help much.

What I'm talking about is ads like this:

Experience our shamelessly-overpriced-at-$100, brass-plated, inaccurate and undependable quartz-powered disposable watch, as featured in House & Garden.

Ads plugging some obviously cheap and fake imitation of something better, "as featured in" some publication aimed at a market much too upscale for it.

2 possibilities occur to me about what "as featured in" might mean: 1) The watch was advertised in House & Garden, quite possibly with an equally-empty boast about how it had been "featured in" some other upscale rag; or 2) It's quite simply a shameless lie: there has never been any connection between this cheap brass-plated piece of failure and House & Garden, and the people who made the watch are betting that the people at House & Garden will either never hear about the lie, or not care.

(Btw, I'm sorry to have learned that House & Garden has not been published in the US since 2007.)

Enthusiastic supporters of capitalism are eager to talk about things such as IBM, Warren Buffet and General Motors, and less eager to talk about Donald Trump, the AIDS medication douchebag, homelessness, junk mail, and junk products "as featured in" this or that place. Let alone the relationships between the former and the latter. Gung-ho capitalists talk about how capitalism rewards hard work, integrity, dependability and other fine things, and in some cases, it has; but in many other cases it has rewarded entirely different things, such as naked greed, ruthlessness, indifference to people's or animals' health and well-being, deviousness, and having been born rich.

Some people say that capitalism has triumphed, others, that capitalism has failed. Some say that socialism has failed; others, that its triumph is inevitable. There is very, very little which I regard as inevitable. Also, where many or most others see black and white, I see grey, perhaps because I am less focused on how I believe things should be and more focused on finding out, as well as I can, how things actually are. I think that what we have now in the large state-run economies of the world, and have had since well before Adam Smith, is a mixture of capitalism and socialism. I think that less capitalism and more socialism would be a fine thing. But I don't think that more socialism can be imposed upon people against their will. I believe that, unfortunately, there is a widespread tendency to unquestioningly accept capitalist propaganda -- to the point that people will giggle when I say something which isn't funny like "capitalist propaganda." The fact that they giggle is one example of how successful capitalist propaganda has been.

Still, perhaps things like the 2007-2008 worldwide economic disaster and the disaster of the Trump administration are encouraging more people to think more deeply about economics. One issue where my attitude is close to black-and-white is education. I firmly believe it's a good thing. Remember how during the Presidential campaign Trump said he loved the poorly educated. Hopefully it's becoming more clear to more people that that love is not that of a shepherd for his sheep, but that of someone looking to shear the sheep and sell the wool for exorbitant profits, not to mention selling cheap brass-plated piece-of-junk watches to rubes for 20 times more than the most they could possibly be worth.

100 Million People Didn't Vote

According to the Washington Post, about 100 million people who could've voted in the US elections last week didn't.

According to a study by the United States Election Project, about 232 million people could've voted, and about 132 million did.

Politico claimed back in October that the US had passed the 200 million mark in registered voters. If that's accurate and the Election Project numbers are accurate, it means that about 68 million Americans were registered to vote last week and didn't, and about 32 million more could have registered but didn't.

It seems to me that we Democrats have some room for improvement when it comes to getting our campaign messages across. Very often in the run-up to the election I encountered the claim that Hillary and Donald are pretty much the same. Obviously, the differences between them are huge, and Democrats described these differences accurately and eloquently -- but apparently millions of people who despise Trump and didn't vote for him either never heard us, or heard us and didn't believe us. They despise Hillary too.

How do we improve at getting information across? How do we convince people that leading Democrats are honest, and that we did not, in fact, just nominate history's greatest monster for President?

I don't know. But it's something that we should be thinking about very seriously. How to get through.

I would've thought that a great majority of Americans are by now very concerned about climate change. If that were true, then it would have been an example of American voters not realizing that one Presidential candidate -- Hillary -- shared their concern and had all sorts of plans to deal with the issue, while the other candidate -- Donald -- is completely out to lunch on the topic. However, this web page from the Pew Research Center seems to indicate that barely a majority of Americans are greatly concerned about climate change. Only 68% of Democrats surveyed, and 20% of Republicans, agreed with the statement "global climate change is a very serious problem." Okay, so there's obviously a very serious weakness when it comes to basic scientific education in the US -- a catastrophic weakness among Republicans, but a very serious weakness among Democrats as well. We need to get people to understand science better.

The incoming Republican administration is not going to be very helpful with education. Fox and Breitbart and the "History Channel" are not going to be helpful at all. I'm sorry, I wish I were just brimming with helpful suggestions about how to turn this all around. The only hopeful thing I can say is that I see numerous surveys suggesting that younger voters vote Democratic more often, are well-educated on climate change more often, are more in favor of equal rights for women and ethnic minorities and LGBT's -- they're just more Democratic. That gives me hope that this is all turning around. Just not as quickly as we'd like.

Having a distinguished professor and pre-eminent intellectual such as Elizabeth Warren in the Oval Office would be tremendously helpful. Warren 2020!

How To Prevent Nominees Like Trump

How can the US best strive to insure that an absolute Bozo and sociopath like Donald Trump is never, ever again nominated for the highest office in the land?

1. Education. Donald Trump himself said, into a live mic before a crowd of cheering morons at one of his rallies: "I love the poorly educated." Makes sense: he's also been going around saying things in public such as that global warming is a hoax created by the Chinese in order to hurt American business. A well-educated public simply isn't going to elect anyone who says things like that, or like many of the other things Trump says. The Mexican wall? Well-educated people aren't buying that one. Trump's claim that Mexico would pay for it? They're buying that one even less. Ladies and gentlemen -- I implore you!

2. Education.

3. The US must invest much, much more in education.

3a. Education includes art, music, and, yes, also gym.

4. EDUCATION!!!!!!

5. Um zukuenftig einem Disaster wie Trump als Praesidentschaft-Kandidat vorzukommen, muessen die Vereinigten Staaten sehr viel mehr in Bildung investieren.

6. Education.

7. Wee shud spen mutch more ahn skoolz an buk lernin. Cuz havin sumbuddy lahk Trump fur ah Prezzidenchuhl kandidait? Thass jest puhthetik!

8. Education.

9. Education.

How many different ways can I say it? But the point is to keep saying it the same way.

10. Education. The US needs much, much more of it.

10a. And it should all be free like it is in some other countries. Kindergarten to grad school. Free.

10b. Even in Wyoming? No, ESPECIALLY in Wyoming!

I'm Glad Republicans Are Denouncing Trump

I'm glad that Republicans are denouncing Trump, because I want the biggest possible Democratic landslide in November. But the denunciations are hypocritical, because the only thing Trump is doing wrong from a Republican perspective is saying and doing things publicly which they say and do behind closed doors, away from live cameras and microphones -- usually, hello, 47 percent Mitt! Hey, by the way, when are we going to see your tax returns?

It's nice to see Republicans distancing themselves from Trump, but it's too bad that non-Republicans are giving them too much credit for doing so, saying what swell people they are. Do you see any Republicans anywhere denouncing the systematic Republican interference with the attempts of ethnic minorities to vote? Has there suddenly been a huge drop in Republican support for oil companies? No, because, of course, that would mean a big drop in financial support by oil companies for Republican political campaigns, and, just in case you hadn't noticed, Republican politicians are for sale.

Is there a big wave of Republicans suddenly acknowledging the findings of climatology and supporting wind, solar or other clean energy? Are Republicans suddenly in favor of affordable health care care for everyone? Women's right to choose? LGBT rights? Spending on education and infrastructure? No, no, no, no and no.

In fact, in a way it's not so great to see Republican politicians distancing themselves from Trump, because they're doing so out of a desire to be elected or re-elected in November, which doesn't fit in at all with the aforementioned Democratic landslide.

Don't suddenly forget who these people were their whole careers long, right up until they spoke out against Trump, and who they continue to be.

You're Not Going To Be Elected President In 2016, Bernie. But You Can Still Be A Hero

You're still saying, every chance you get, that you have a chance at winning the Democratic nomination. You don't have snowball's chance in Hell. And if you really don't know this, if you really can't do even that much math -- well, then I'm wasting my time trying to talk to you, and this post is strictly for the benefit of other people.

But assuming that you actually can do the math and that you realize that Hillary will be the nominee, why do you keep acting as if you don't realize it? The thing is, there are a lot of your supporters -- nobody knows for sure how many -- who can't do the math. Are you doing them any service by feeding their delusions?

Over and over, you say that your #1 priority is to ensure that Trump is defeated in the fall. So act on that. You can do more than any other single person to swing votes away from Trump and to Hillary, by dropping out of the election NOW and doing all that you can to persuade your supporters that they must vote for Hillary.

You know Hillary personally, you know she's not history's greatest monster and not a Republican in disguise. You know how close most of her positions are to yours and how far to the Left both of you are from the Republicans. But a lot of your supporters, including a lot of very noisy ones, clearly don't know any of this, and they need to hear it from the only person they would possibly listen to about Hillary: you.

You can go down in history as someone who united a nation in a time of great peril, the peril being the possibility of a Trump Presidency. Oh, you'd be such a hero. And the movement you've been in will go on, but with real power, with many of its people in office, getting things done, all clearly due to you. You will have moved the Democratic party a long way back to the Left, and people will love you for it. They will remember.

The thing is, of course, that the longer you wait to drop out and work to unite people around the goal of stopping Trump, the less your impact will be. The more time goes by, the more people will realize that Hillary has won the nomination -- and not just won it, but won it by miles and miles. The 2016 Democratic Presidential campaign has been very exciting, but it was never close, except in the deluded minds of some of your followers. That delusion is fading. The longer you stay in the race, the more you look like a nut, and the more the people who talk about you being elected President in 2016 look like nuts. In a socially-responsible society, nuts are looked after to make sure they're not hurt, but in the positions of power in politics and other practical affairs, they're shunned. They're not allowed to take over, with very few and disastrous exceptions like Hitler and Trump.

The real Stop Trump campaign, ever since he won the Republican nomination, has been Hillary's campaign, and Hillary's campaign will get on with taking care of business, with you or without you. With you joining it now -- right now -- it could be a juggernaut, not only winning the White House in a landslide, but also winning Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, and flipping Mayoral offices and City Councils and judgeships from Republican to Democrat, from sea to shining sea, so that a Democratic President and all those other Democratic elected officials will actually be able to pass laws and appropriate money and get things done, things like repairing the infrastructure and expanding Social Security, and restoring funding to education and reducing tuition costs, and converting the US to wind and solar and other clean energy -- you know: all of that long line of things which Hillary supports just as much as you do, as do the vast majority of Democratic office holders and candidates for office, and Democratic voters.

Hillary is going to take care of business with or without your help. I don't think you can actually cost her the election and get Trump elected -- the very opposite of what you claim is your #1 priority -- but you certainly can make the Presidential election, and all of those other elections, much closer than they need to be. The sooner you get on board, the closer the expansion of the social safety net and the restoration of the infrastructure and the conversion to clean energy, and all of the other things that you and I and Hillary and almost all Democrats want, will come.

But the longer you wait, the less power you have here. The more you insist on behaving like a nut who doesn't know when he's been defeated, the more people will treat you like a nut, and the less of a factor you will be in November.

Unless you actually go full retard and 3rd party. You're acting nuttier and nuttier, but I still don't think you're that far gone just yet.

Assuming that eventually you're going to be supporting Hillary and Democrats in general, the sooner you start, the more significant your support will be. If you wait too long, as I said, I don't think it will actually mean that Trump beats Hillary, but it could mean that the House and the Senate stay Republican, and that a lot of the state and local offices stay Republican as well. And then, what will you have accomplished? You will have thrown a huge temper tantrum, and because of that tantrum we will get much less of what both we Democrats and you want, than if you do what politicians have to do very often: compromise in order to get most of what they want, instead of none of it.

Time is of the essence. The longer you wait to drop out and endorse Hillary, the more you will be ignored by sensible people who have to get on with this -- beating Trump -- with our without your help. The longer you wait, the more you will leave us only with the option to ignore you.

Pope Francis

I'm starting to sour on him a little, I must say. I think the word he has repeated most frequently in his Papacy so far has been "poor." He says he wants the church to serve the poor. As we know, different people mean different things when they say they want to help the poor. When I say it I mean I want to eliminate poverty. I have a feeling that's not what Francis has in mind. And in fact eliminating poverty would directly contradict Holy Scripture: remember, Jesus said that the poor would be with him always.

And of course, as many people have pointed out, the Catholic Church is now strongest in the poorest parts of the world. Is Francis a real revolutionary, as some optimists have speculated, or, quite to the contrary, does he want to keep the Church strong by keeping the number of people in poverty huge?

Refusing to wear some of the Papal bling which had become usual before his pontificate, riding in a bus with the other Cardinals instead of in a Papal limousine, personally paying a hotel bill -- these things don't impress me. They're peanuts. The Catholic Church has billions if not trillions of Euros at its disposal -- and a Euro is more than a dollar -- and Francis apparently expects people to ooh and ahh at gestures which amount to dozens or hundreds. And anyway, conspicuous consumption doesn't spread poverty. If wealth is accumulated through sweatshops and union-busting, then yes, it does spread poverty. But ornate robes and high-end jewelry are made by skilled craftsman at high wages, a large part of which wages go into the general economy -- whatever, just study some basic economics, and no, Ayn Rand was not an economist, she was merely a creep.

Birth control in the Third World would help the poor. Francis is no help there. Education would help the poor. Francis is not a Franciscan, he is a Jesuit, and when the Jesuits began they were among the best educators in Europe and the European colonies. Many Jesuits and their fans will insist that they still are, but of course that isn't true. Many students who received the benefits of an education by the Jesuits in the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th centuries grew up to be quite secular and eventually to create secular institutions of learning. And I'm not even going to add "--paradoxically" to the end of the previous sentence. It was no paradox. In the earlier centuries of the Jesuits' existence there were no non-Christian universities in Christendom, and non-Christian schools at lower levels were relatively scarce, and private tutors and private scholars also were clergypeople more often than not. In short, Christianity still had a monopoly, pretty much a stranglehold, on Western education. Therefore it makes absolutely no sense to assume that a clergyperson had chosen his or her vocation for the sake of religion and not for the sake of education, and no sense to assume that a Jesuit teacher was Christian in more than name only. And in fact many of the leading, most blatant anti-clerics of previous centuries were Jesuit clerics. It wasn't a paradox at all, it was a function of circumstance. Now that there are abundant opportunities for education completely apart from Christendom, it does make sense to assume that a Jesuit is saddled with quite a bit of superstition of the exact kind from which earlier generations of Jesuits sought to free their charges.

If by helping the poor Francis means raising them up out of poverty, and if he actually succeeds in doing so in significant numbers, then he will succeed in significantly shrinking the Catholic Church. (As well as deservedly winning the love and gratitude of many people, Catholic and non-.) If he means to keep their loyalty with an occasional kind word and pat on the head and bowl of soup and crust of bread or bowl of rice and pair of second-hand shoes, then he's not really their friend. Many misguided Leftists seem to find poverty picturesque, and despise wealth and luxury. (I'm a Leftist, but not that kind.) Maybe Francis is one of those. If so, many Leftists will love him, and the poorest human populations will not do nearly as well as they would have with a Pope who loved the bling and the limousines and ate haute cuisine and stayed in penthouses whenever he traveled, and used his power to CHANGE things, to expose exploitative right-wing regimes, to combat multinationals which sell products from sweatshops and industrial farms, to support unions, and education, and access to the best medical care for the broadest possible populations, and birth control and other women's rights.

I was actually fairly optimistic for a few hours of Francis' papacy. Now I feel I was taken in. Which is not to say that I think Francis is insincere. I have no idea how sincere he might be. And I also don't much care. His actions are going to be what they will be, whatever motivates them. But I hope that I'm now wrong to feel taken in, and that Francis actually will change some of the big things, and not merely the Papal wardrobe.

Paradigms

The other day I was reading some things by André Gorz --his political-economic, or ecological writings, as he sometimes referred to them. Not Letter to D: A Love Story,which might be really great for all I know, but I'm not interested in it right now -- and not for the first time I was exhilarated by Gorz' great good sense, and at the same time deeply discouraged by what seems to me to be the great distance between such good sense and most people's even allowing themselves to consider such topics, let alone agree with Gorz. I'm a very enthusiastic reader of Gorz, and I would encourage everyone to take a look at such books as Ecology as Politicsand Farewell to the Working Class,although I am not a Gorzist in the sense that many people have been Marxists, inasmuch as they have treated Marx's writing as holy texts, claiming that All The Answers Are In There. (Marx himself said that he was not such a Marxist, but the Marxists have overlooked that passage in Marx just as other believers overlook whatever they have to so as not to have to actually think for themselves.) You don't have to agree with Gorz about everything, but I think it would be very helpful if more people began to think about the topics he raises.

Among these is setting limits to economic growth. This is already quite a familiar topic to ecologists (and meteorologists), but it does not compute for many economists, because much of economic theory still is predicated on constant growth. Well, we're beginning to burn the Earth to a crisp, and so we need to start thinking about this. Soon. Now. Ecologists have been thinking and talking about it for decades, but they haven't been getting through to most economists and leaders of politics and industry. Al Gore is one of the exceptions, and for his trouble he got the Nobel Peace Prize and became a laughingstock among most economists and politicians, even as the effects of global warming he and other ecologists have warned about have been coming to pass. The problem is that there is such a separation between ecological and economic thought. Gorz, unlike most ecologists, including Gore, unfortunately, has a profound grasp of the economic theories which have been put in place by the world's leaders, he understands their jargon, he understands their concerns, and he responds to them in ways they can readily comprehend. It's not very often you see an ecologist who is also an economist.

What Gorz writes about -- along with some other New Leftists -- is a paradigm shift in economics, away from the obsession solely with quantity and toward the deeper concept of quality. To this day economics is dominated by the concern with quantity and with growth and ever more growth. We've come to realize that we are endangering ourselves by burning too many petrochemicals and clearing away too many forests and wetlands and paving too much of the Earth -- but we keep on doing it. The economic markets continue to behave as if no-one had ever heard of air pollution or global warming or extreme weather, because they continue to be based on the criterium of quantity, that more is always better. This mentality is not merely absurd: it also often rewards people who frankly are just not bright enough to realize that it is absurd. William Gaddis' novel JRunderscores this point by making its title character and odious protagonist an 11-year-old boy -- and not even a remarkably bright 11-year-old -- who becomes a financial titan by observing other Wall Street titans and doing what they do. (He's surrounded by highly-cultured and sensitive adults, and when they occasionally notice and are appalled by what JR is up to, he replies, "That's what you do!")

A paradigm shift in economic thinking, from quantity as the goal to quality, would make this a much better and more satisfying world. Oliver Stone's second Wall Streetmovie, with Shia LaBeouf, Carey Mulligan and Josh Brolin, makes this point in Stone's typically un-subtle way. The original Wall Streetfrom 1987, in which Charlie Sheen dueled with Michael Douglas, had more subtle hints of this conflict between a paradigm of quantity and one of quality -- more subtle perhaps because at the time Stone was only subconsciously aware of it. I don't mind Stone not being subtle: he's trying to make people think, and in such an effort subtlety is not always called for. The examples of the Soviet bloc have shown us that it's extremely difficult to force entire nations to behave in their own self-interest. I don't believe that broad-scale paradigm shifts can be brought about in such a top-down forced manner. I think that education has to be improved, that that's the only way that the human race can be saved from itself.

Tom Paine vs the Classics, Part II

Along with new weights and measures and a new calender, the French Revolution introduced new fashions, including short hair in the style of the ancient democrats of Greece and Rome. Neither Robespierre nor Paine cut their hair in the classical style, but many younger people did, for example Napoleon. Jacques-Louis David painted very popular pictures on Roman themes. Classicism remained evident in architecture and theatre. One wonders how far the taste for classical styles was bound up with the cultivation of classical languages, or, indeed, if many of the people who dressed and cut their hair in the new way were even aware that they were copying the Romans. Presumably many people, whatever the length of their hair or their aesthetic tastes, and whatever their politics, would have rejected out of hand Paine's assertion that all the useful books of antiquity had been translated, and that therefore learning Latin and Greek was a waste of time. One of course cannot blame the decline of classical education on Paine; this decline had begun before him and continued after him, it was a gradual slipping away from one kind of learning into another. I assume that a conscious rejection of classical studies comparable in vehemence to Paine's was and remains rather rare. Among those few dull people who have read with enthusiasm the whole of The Age of Reason -- I've only read the above-cited passage and a little more, and I'm convinced that I've had enough Paine to last me my whole life. One doesn't have to drink the whole ocean to know that it's salty. A little sip will do --among Paine's actual readers, the main interest of The Age of Reason presumably has to do much more with its Deist philosophy than with specific points like language.

Apparently Thomas Edison was an enthusiastic reader of Paine, and helped to re-popularize him a century after his death. Here is Edison on Paine:

"I have always regarded Paine as one of the greatest of all Americans. Never have we had a sounder intelligence in this republic . . . It was my good fortune to encounter Thomas Paine's works in my boyhood . . . it was, indeed, a revelation to me to read that great thinker's views on political and theological subjects. Paine educated me, then, about many matters of which I had never before thought. I remember, very vividly, the flash of enlightenment that shone from Paine's writings, and I recall thinking, at that time, 'What a pity these works are not today the schoolbooks for all children!' My interest in Paine was not satisfied by my first reading of his works. I went back to them time and again, just as I have done since my boyhood days."

Paine and Edison each did a lot to improve the lot of their fellow man. It would be foolish to try to paint them in an entirely negative light. Still, I think that we have now and again had intelligences which were, in this respect or that, somewhat sounder. Let's take another example of an American widely regarded as a genius and a hero, Edison's close personal friend Henry Ford. On the one hand, for decades he paid extraordinarily high entry-level wages to his laborers, wages which changed many lives for the better and forced other companies to pay fairer wages, too; and he gave these high wages to many black employees at a time when it was quite unusual, and took some courage, to do so. On the other hand, he was an anti-semite and an enthusiastic supporter of the Nazis. And he offered his famously high wages only to those of his employees who, as far as he was able to determine, led their lives in a manner of which he approved; he established a "Sociological Department" in the Ford corporation to spy upon his employees. And he opposed labor unions with especially brutal tactics.

It is not very far from Paine's "As there is now nothing new to be learned from the dead languages, all the useful books being already translated, the languages are become useless, and the time expended in teaching and in learning them is wasted." to Ford's "History is bunk." It certainly is bunk when studied and taught as Paine and Bryan and Edison and Ford did. The illiteracy in Latin and Greek which Paine advocated has as its result an inability to improve on the historical teachings of our predecessors whenever they relied on Latin or Greek texts, to correct their errors in translation, or to know that there may indeed be books in Latin or Greek which are useful and as yet untranslated. To say nothing of previously-lost texts in these languages, ancient and more recent, which are still being discovered now and then. (It makes my head hurt just to consider Paine's assertions for the very brief time it takes to refute them!) Ignorance of these two old, allegedly dead languages, and of Hebrew, allows such nonsense as "The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion," which Ford published in his Dearborn newspaper, to crop up relatively unchallenged. Such ignorance is in line with a reliance on the Bible as the ultimate source of truth -- as THE book, from the Greek "biblius," meaning "book," any book -- and the consequent will to attack any other line of thought which contradicts this ultimate source, just as Bryan did at the Scopes "monkey" trial. Furthermore, how well can you understand even one book if you only know that one book?

Naturally, not everyone can learn everything, and even the brightest human mind cannot understand every language. There may be or may sometime have been someone so blessed with understanding as to be truly fluent, not only in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, but in Arabic and Chinese and Sanskrit and Persian, Japanese and and Mongolian and Georgian and Armenian, Nahuatl, Mayan languages, Coptic, Cherokee and Swahili as well. Even such a genius, however, would be ignorant of the foundations of many of the world's cultures. Fluency in Latin and Greek is certainly not to be confused with intellectual omnipotence. On the other hand, it's certainly not to be despised, as Paine clearly despises it. I have the strong suspicion that Paine himself was one of the schoolboys he describes, who are so cruelly tormented by the study of Greek. It seems fairly clear to me that if any effort was made to teach Paine Greek, it was in vain. Perhaps Paine had a point, when it came to the majority of schoolchildren: maybe it's wrong to force the ancient languages upon them. Maybe it's wrong to make most children go to school at all. There's so much effort expended these days just in repeating the mantra: "Stay in school," and so little reflection about the purpose of the entire educational system. As late as a century ago, only a small percentage of the population ever attended a university -- is it realistic to think that universities can do now for 60% percent of the US population what they so recently did for 3 or 4%? I think not. I don't want to turn back the clock, and re-introduce the social privileges and restrictions of a century ago. The problem with higher education back then was that it was almost exclusively for privileged, upper-class white men. And, as anyone can see by observing some past Presidents of the United States or certain chief executives of large corporations, being white, male and privileged is no guarantee of scholarly aptitude.

There are many prejudices of which we should disabuse ourselves. In the early stages of the French Revolution there was much talk of opening careers to to talent, and sometimes even more than just talk, but actual opportunity based on ability rather than social rank. This was a very good idea, and it corresponds to the very good idea here in the US, which unfortunately remains more often an idea than a reality, that everyone should have equal opportunities, in careers, and also for example in education. Much more should be done in offering equal opportunity, including improving the schools and the public libraries in poor areas.

There was also, however, a more radical attitude in the Revolution, which also lives on to this day, and which insists so utterly on equality that it denies differences in ability. This is not usually explicitly said, or probably even explicitly thought, but rather works on an unconscious level, resulting in demands which are anything but well-thought-out: Stop teaching Latin and Greek. Send everyone to college. This is a particularly complicated issue, having to do with traditional class distinctions, respect, contempt, and other factors which tend to be repressed, and which therefore express themselves the more incoherently and irrationally. Until a few centuries ago, in Western civilization, an elite made up of the aristocracy and a small group of other rich men controlled practically everything. The people in power were almost exclusively white, male, and Christian. This small elite group was also, with very few exceptions, the only segment of the population to be intensely schooled, and their education always included Latin and Greek. On rare occasions a woman would rise to power or be admitted to a university, or a Jew would be granted an aristocratic title. Apart from such rare exceptions, an exclusivity was rigidly maintained, based on preconceptions of gender and race which were clearly wrong. Just as wrong was the contempt for all the kinds of work which fell outside of the traditional education -- and the traditional education was very narrow indeed. Just as there were people from outside the traditional elite with an interest in and a talent for the traditional objects of study in the elite institutions, so there were white male aristocrats who would have been better at carpentry that at Latin, and much happier at it, if not for the traditional attitude that carpentry was beneath a man "of quality."

I suspect that Paine and Ford and other unreflective opponents of traditional education felt very keenly the contempt of the upper classes. They both worked their way up from very humble beginnings, and neither of them lost his identification with the poor, oppressed masses -- which is fine, as far as it goes. The problem is that their outlook did not expand as their power and privileges did. They did not become curious about the new culture to which they were exposed. Many people rise in social status, and then do their best to wipe out all traces of their humble origins, working with tremendous effort to change their speech, dress, habits and manners so as to blend in with others of the upper classes, if not to appear more aristocratic than any actual aristocrat. Others are very open about their past, and, while they appreciate what their new surroundings and new acquaintances have to teach them, they also continue to struggle on behalf of poor people, as they struggled to overcome their own poverty. These lucky few people are significantly free of class prejudice; having belonged to different classes personally, they can see the good in different ways of life: for example, the riches of the traditional classical education, of which the masses, unfortunately, have always been relatively ignorant; and the skill and knowledge and wit required by all forms of manual labor, of which the upper classes traditionally have been rather ignorant, and have usually quite drastically underestimated and under-appreciated. There is blindness on both sides, and it still today is nowhere near disappearing: the contempt of laborers for all sorts of cultural achievement which they do not in the least understand; and conversely the contempt of the rich for the labor of those people without whom they would be much less comfortable, labor which tends to be much more difficult, and interesting, than they assume. There are exceptions, of course: mechanics who read Vergil and Ovid, perhaps even a few who read them untranslated; and multimillionaires who can align their cars' wheels and fix their own furnaces -- but they remain exceptions.

Paine saw everywhere around him, and all the more so as he rose to ever-greater power and prominence, wealthy, privileged people who benefited from the labor of the masses without ever remotely appreciating that labor, or even acknowledging that there was any sort of skill or intelligence involved in it. He was right to condemn that ignorance. He was wrong, however, to remain ignorant of the traditional intellectual preserves of the upper classes, and to remain hostile to the classics. He himself never learned much from the classics, this much is clear. It's very unfortunate that he concluded that there was nothing there to be learned, and all the more so that such sheer ignorance is displayed in the work of such a popular and influential author.