Category: Literature

Categories
Being Culture Literature

What is Dignity?

Early in the story, the butler in The Remains of the Day, shares his initial conceptualization of dignity as one that stems from loyalty and pride. In his youth he believed dignity to be staunch adherence to the persona that one is expected to assume.

If one considers the difference between my father at such moments and a figure such as Mr Jack Neighbors even with the best of his technical flourishes, I believe one may distinguish what it is that separates a ‘great’ butler from a merely competent one. We may now understand better, too, why my father was so fond of the story of the butler who failed to panic after discovering a tiger under the dining table; it was because he knew instinctively that somewhere in this story lay the kernel of what true ‘dignity’ is. And let me now posit this: ‘dignity’ has to do crucially with a butler’s ability not to abandon the professional being he inhabits. Lesser butlers will abandon their professional being for the private one at the least provocation. For such persons, being a butler is like playing some pantomime role; a small push, a slight stumble, and the façade will drop off to reveal the actor underneath. The great butlers are great by virtue of their ability to inhabit their professional role and inhabit it to the utmost; they will not be shaken out by external events, however surprising, alarming or vexing. They wear their professionalism as a decent gentleman will wear his suit: he will not let ruffians or circumstance tear it off him in the public gaze; he will discard it when, and only when, he wills to do so, and this will invariably be when he is entirely alone. It is, as I say, a matter of ‘dignity’.

Ishiguro, Kazuo The remains of the day, Vintage International ed. 1993, pp 42-43.

Later on, another conception of dignity is put forth by another character whose life-experience is markedly different than the butler’s. Mr. Smith believes that dignity is produced through sacrifice to a worthy cause.

‘Mind you,’ put in Mr Harry Smith, ‘with all respect for what you say, sir, it ought to be said. Dignity isn’t just something gentlemen have. Dignity’s something every man and woman in this country can strive for and get. You’ll excuse me, sir, but like I said before, we don’t stand on ceremony here when it comes to expressing opinions. And that’s my opinion for what it’s worth. Dignity’s not just something for gentlemen.’ … ‘That’s what we fought Hitler for, after all. If Hitler had had things his way, we’d just be slaves now. The whole world would be a few masters and millions upon millions of slaves. And I don’t need to remind anyone here, there’s no dignity to be had in being a slave. That’s what we fought for and that’s what we won. We won the right to be free citizens. …’

Ishiguro, Kazuo The remains of the day, Vintage International ed. 1993, pp 185-186

Painfully, the butler faces some hard truths and he is not pleased reflecting on his past choices. His lifetime of dedicated service and professionalism did not produce within himself a sense of dignity. His prior belief proved false. On reading the passage below, the butler seems to be one of the saddest characters in modern literature in my opinion. Perhaps true dignity stems from being true to oneself.

‘Lord Darlington wasn’t a bad man. He wasn’t a bad man at all. And at least he had the privilege of being able to say at the end of his life that he had made his own mistakes. His lordship was a courageous man. He chose a certain path in life, it proved to be a misguided one, but there, he chose it, he can say that at least. As for myself, I cannot even claim that. You see, I trusted. I trusted in his lordship’s wisdom. All those years I served him, I trusted I was doing something worthwhile. I can’t even say I made my own mistakes. Really — one has to ask oneself — what dignity is there in that?’

Ishiguro, Kazuo The remains of the day, Vintage International ed. 1993, p 244

After some reflection, the butler realizes that, for most of us, most circumstances in our lives are simply beyond our control. Dignity can also come from the pursuit of one’s aspirations, regardless of outcome.

The hard reality is, surely, that for the likes of you and I, there is little choice other than to leave our fate, ultimately, in the hands of those great gentlemen at the hub of this world who employ our services. What is the point in worrying oneself too much about what could or could not have done to control the course one’s life took? Surely it is enough that the likes of you and I at least try to make our small contribution count for something true and worthy. And if some of us are prepared to sacrifice much in life in order to pursue such aspirations, surely that is in itself, whatever the outcome, cause for pride and contentment.

Ishiguro, Kazuo The remains of the day, Vintage International ed. 1993, p. 244

Categories
History Literature Philosophy

Kaleidosope

Concerning the major players involved in shaping the events during the first month of World War I (August 1914), Barbara W. Tuchman wrote in the prelude to the book’s list of sources:

They seemed to have known, while they lived it, that like the French Revolution, the First World War was one of the great convolutions of history, and each felt the hand of history heavily on his own shoulder.  When it was over, despite courage, skill, and sacrifice, the war they had fought proved to have been, on the whole, a monument of failure, tragedy and disillusion.  It had not led to a better world.  Men who had taken part at the command level, political and military, felt driven to explain their decisions and actions.  Men who had fallen from high command, whether for cause or as scapegoats—and these included most of the commanders of August—wrote their private justifications. As each account appeared, inevitably shifting responsibility or blame to someone else, another was provoked.

With much insight, she elucidates through metaphor the goal of the historian who

…gropes his way trying to recapture the truth of past events and find out “what really happened.” He discovers that truth is subjective and separate, made up of little bits seen, experienced and recorded by different people. It’s like the design seen through a kaleidoscope; when the cylinder is shaken the countless colored fragments form a new picture. Yet they are the same fragments that made a different picture a moment earlier.

Tuchman, Barbara W., The Guns of August, 1962, The Random House Publishing Group, First Presidio Press Mass Market edition, p. 525.
Categories
Behavior Being Literature Mythology

Sound like anybody you know?

The figure of the tyrant-monster is known to the mythologies, folk traditions, legends, and even nightmares of the world; and his characteristics are everywhere essentially the same. He is the hoarder of the general benefit. He is the monster avid for the greedy rights of “my and mine.” The havoc wrought by him is described in mythology and fairy tale as being universal throughout his domain. This may be no more than his household, his own tortured psyche, or the lives that he blights with the touch of his friendship and assistance; or it may amount to the extent of his civilization. The inflated ego of the tyrant is a curse to himself and his world–no matter how his affairs seem to prosper. Self-terrorized, fear-haunted, alert at every hand to meet and battle back the anticipated aggressions of his environment, which are primarily the reflections of the uncontrollable impulses of acquisition within himself, the giant of self-achieved independence is the world’s messenger of disaster, even through, in his mind, he may entertain himself with humane intentions. Wherever he sets his hand there is a cry (if not from the housetops, then–more miserably–within every heart): a cry for the redeeming hero, the carrier of the shining blade, whose blow, whose touch, whose existence will liberate the land.

-Campbell, Joseph. The hero with a thousand faces. Third edition. Joseph Campbell Foundation 2008. p.11

Categories
Culture Libertad! Literature

Life and Debt

I dare not comment on David Graeber’s monumental anthropological investigation into the role of debt in human relations in Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Any attempt by this hard sciences guy would almost certainly prove embarrassing. My motivation for reading the 400 page text (plus 62 pages of end notes) stems from a desire to understand the axioms that underlie modern concepts of indebtedness and money. Perhaps my recent interest in this subject is a natural consequence of middle age. Or maybe my heightened curiosity manifested from living in a social system whose very existence seems more precarious with each passing day.

What exactly is money anyway? What is a debt? How did these ideas come about and why do we adhere to them? Can communities function without monetary exchange? Graeber provides compelling answers to these questions by connecting a myriad of observations from cultures around the world throughout history. Connections that can explain universal, recurring trends such as the cycle of slavery to mine metals to produce coins to pay soldiers (who, in turn, captured more slaves). This “slavery-coinage-military complex” prevailed in the Axial Age (800 BC – 600 AD) in Europe, India and China that coincided with great unrest in each. If you are a human being living on planet Earth, you should read this book. The extended quote below from the last chapter provides an apt summary:

If this book has shown anything, it’s exactly how much violence it has taken, over the course of human history, to bring us to a situation where it’s even possible to imagine that that’s what life is really about. Especially when one considers how much of our own daily experience flies directly in the face of it.  As I’ve emphasized, communism may be the foundation of all human relations—that communism that, in our own daily life, manifests itself above all in what we call “love”—but there’s always some sort of system of exchange, and usually, a system of hierarchy built on top of it.  These systems of exchange can take an endless variety of forms, many perfectly innocuous.  Still, what we are speaking of here is a very particular type of exchange, founded on precise calculation.  As I pointed out in the very beginning: the difference between owing someone a favor and owing someone a debt is that the amount of a debt can be precisely calculated.  Calculation demands equivalence.  And such equivalence—especially when it involves equivalence between human beings (and it always seems to start that way, because at first, human beings are always the ultimate values)—only seems to occur when people have been forcibly severed from their contexts, so much so that they can be treated as identical to something else, as in: “seven martin skins and twelve large silver rings for the return of your captured brother,” “one of your three daughters as surety for this loan of one hundred and fifty bushels of grain.”…

This in turn leads to that great embarrassing fact that haunts all attempts to represent the market as the highest form of human freedom: that historically, impersonal, commercial markets originate in theft. More than anything else, the endless recitation of the myth of barter, employed much like an incantation, is the economists’ way of exorcising this uncomfortable truth. But even a moment’s reflection makes it obvious. Who was the first man to look at a house full of objects and immediately assess them only in terms of what he could get for them in the market? Surely, he can only have been a thief. Burglars, marauding soldiers, then perhaps debt collectors, were the first to see the world this way. It was only in the hands of soldiers, fresh from looting towns and cities, that chunks of gold or silver—melted down, in most cases, from some heirloom treasure, that like the Kashmiri gods, or Aztec breastplates, or Babylonian women’s ankle bracelets, was both a work of art and a little compendium of history—could become simple, uniform bits of currency, with no history, valuable precisely for their lack of history, because they could be accepted anywhere, no questions asked. And it continues to be true. Any system that reduces the world to numbers can only be held in place by weapons, whether these are swords and clubs, or, nowadays, “smart bombs” from unmanned drones.

It can also only operate by continually converting love into debt. I know my use of the word “love” here is even more provocative, in its own way, than “communism.” Still, it’s important to hammer the point home. Just as markets, when allowed to drift entirely free from their violent origins, invariably begin to grow into something different, into networks of honor, trust and mutual connectedness, so does the maintenance of systems of coercion constantly do the opposite: turn the products of human cooperation, creativity, devotion, love, and trust back into numbers once again.

Graeber, David.  Debt: the first 5,000 years.  Melville House 2014. pp 386-387

A bit further down, Graeber explains a false, but ubiquitous, idea that by simply being alive we are in debt–a debt so great that we can never even hope to repay:

It’s hardly surprising that the end result, historically, is to see our life itself as something we hold on false premises, a loan long since overdue, and therefore, to see existence itself as criminal.  Insofar as there’s a real crime here, though, it’s fraud. The very premise is fraudulent.  What could possibly be more presumptuous, or more ridiculous, than to think it would be possible to negotiate with the grounds of one’s existence?  Of course it isn’t.  Insofar as it is indeed possible to come into any sort of relation with the Absolute, we are confronting a principle that exists outside of time, or human-scale time, entirely; therefore, as medieval theologians correctly recognized, when dealing with the Absolute, there can be no such thing as debt.”

Graeber, David. Debt: the first 5,000 years.  Melville House 2014. p 387.

Below, Graeber captures the potential paradox that I have felt–but have not been able to articulate–that has long fueled my contempt for the rampant materialism and iniquity that so plagues our modern age, especially in post-WWII United States. Bank-imposed FICA scores come to mind here:

For me, this is exactly what’s so pernicious about the morality of debt: the way that financial imperatives constantly try to reduce us all, despite ourselves, to the equivalent of pillagers, eyeing the world simply for what can be turned into money–and then tell us that it’s only those who are willing to see the world as pillagers who deserve access to the resources required to pursue anything in life other than money.

Graeber, David. Debt: the first 5,000 years.  Melville House 2014. pp 389-390

Though Graeber’s aim in Debt was not to offer “concrete proposals” for change, the last line of the text is the crucial take away for this 21st century malcontent:

What sorts of promises might genuinely free men and women make to one another? At this point, we can’t even say. It’s more a question of how we can get to a place that will allow us to find out. And the first step in that journey, in turn, is to accept that in the largest scheme of things, just as no one has the right to tell us our true value, no one has the right to tell us what we truly owe.

Graeber, David. Debt: the first 5,000 years. Melville House 2014, p 391.

Categories
Literature

The Horror…

Apocalypse Now has long been one of my favorite movies. Last night, I finished reading the short story on which it is based. It did not disappoint:

Destiny. My destiny! Droll thing life is–that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself–that comes too late–a crop of unextinguishable regrets. I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary. If such is the form of ultimate wisdom, then life is a greater riddle than some of us think it to be. I was within a hair’s breadth of the last opportunity for pronouncement, and I found with humiliation that probably I would have nothing to say.

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer, Signet Classics (1950). p. 148