Bite the Hand That Feeds You: Essays and Provocations by Henry Fairlie

Posted on June 22, 2020 by Luke Ford

Here are some highlights from the late essayist at The New Republic:

* Parliament still unites freedom and order in a way which is the envy of the world, and probably its hope.

[LF: Does parliament unite freedom and order or does it reflect it?]

* He accepts Bagehot’s definition of the real function of the House of Commons as being to “express the mind of the people,” to “teach the nation what it does not know,” and to make us “hear what otherwise we should not.”3

[LF: I don’t buy any of this.]

* It works because, as he says, the members of Parliament are “ordinary people with a fair slice of ambition…. What the democratic system does is to harness a man’s ambition. . . .” Sir Ivor Jennings says that this is the worst that can be said about the members. It is also the best. The enduring virtue of the House of Commons, through centuries, is that it has been composed largely of ordinary people: drab, honest, foolish, bumptious, confused, worried, happy, unhappy, ordinary people.

[LF: Ordinary people who just so happen to be lawyers.]

* Sir Isaiah Berlin: “It is one of the stratagems of totalitarian regimes to present all situations as critical emergencies, demanding manding ruthless elimination of all goals, interpretations, pretations, forms of behaviour save for one absolutely lutely specific, concrete, immediate end, binding on everyone, which calls for ends and means so narrowly rowly and clearly definable that it is easy to impose sanctions for failing to pursue them.”

* I am extremely doubtful whether we have anything to learn from either the Fifth Republic in France or the Federal Republic in West Germany about the manner of ordering and sustaining a free society; I am not even sure whether we have much to learn in the matter from the French and Germans as peoples.

* [Churchill] was, remained, and proclaimed himself to be a Zionist. Few of his attacks on the Labour government that succeeded him were more brutal, more contemptuous, than his criticism of its Palestine policy. Ernest Bevin, the great trade union leader brought forward by Churchill during the war as secretary of labor, and then dramatically made foreign secretary by Attlee (one of Attlee’s soundest judgments)-a man who had fought communism all his life in the unions was unlikely to back down before the Soviet menace-was unquestionably pro-Arab, even anti-Semitic. Churchill, with all his admiration for Bevin, made Bevin look like the scoundrel he was over Palestine, which was, in Churchill’s mind, the historical entity of Israel. Why? Churchill chill loved the rowdiness of the Jews. He welcomed members of Parliament banging the lids of their desks in the chamber; and the best desk-lid bangers in history are the Jews.

* The old man, Hodge related, liked to watch old movies in a private cinema. Like all old men, he nodded off in the middle of it. And like all old men, he would wake up with a start, and say to young Hodge, “Tell me which are the baddies and which are the goodies, and then I can work out the rest for myself.” Which, of course, was more or less what he did with Hitler and Stalin.

* As the barge progressed down the Thames, the dockside cranes all dipped as it passed. The sight of these bowing cranes moved a nation (and me) to tears. For dockers, stevedores, are a nation’s most Bolshie workers. In Britain, certainly, none of them ever could have voted for Winston Churchill. Yet they, these proud proletarians, by their own bidding, on a day off, and not on the orders of their employers, lowered their cranes like guardsmen making an arch of their swords over the passing of a monarch.

* But television is only a step to the real goal, the lecture circuit. There is the big money for utterances that require a minimum of thought or creative work. The fundamental principle of the lecture circuit is simple: to make much the same speech to organizations nizations that wish to hear much the same thing. The system would break down if the lecturers suddenly made new speeches with original opinions. George Will addressing the National Soft Drink Association, David Brinkley addressing the Mohawk Executive Forum or the National Pork Producers Council, James J. Kilpatrick addressing ing the Potato Chip/Snack Food Association-they really do not have to think very hard in deciding what it is that their high-paying paying audiences wish to hear, and what kind of undangerous speeches will keep them on the lecture agents’ lists.

The lecture circuit today is a continuous road show in which the star performers are the media creatures, each of them projected by television, their essential instrument of self-advertisement. Thus we have the newspapers tolerating columnists who use their space to get on television, and television then tolerating the use of its political programs as a way onto the lecture circuit. Is there no editor or producer who will clean the stables of these pious self-advertisers and self-seekers? Is there not one who is aware that in such performers there is a conflict of interest?

* It gives me no pleasure to say that George Will’s columns, which promised so much seven years ago, have significantly deteriorated, in quality of writing, in force of ideas, in range of interest, since he began to devote so much time first to television, vision, and then to the lecture circuit. Lecturing from 8o to roo times a year is a time-consuming, intellectually debilitating exercise. The common criticism that one hears made of his journalism now, often said more in sorrow than in anger, is that it has become predictable; and this surely points to his surrender of time to being a performer.

The repetitiveness and predictability of most of the columns on the op-ed page of the Washington Post are directly related to their unimportance in the eyes of their authors. They are hackwork, work, which, if their authors were not media stars, any self-respecting respecting editor would drop.

* Take not a crust of bread from a politician. Take not a cab fare from a corporation. The effect on Washington is that, trading in celebrity, the media trade also in the wealth surrounding the celebrity. The very profession that should be the acid, relentless critic of the affluence and cynicism of Washington is now the most ostentatiously tatiously affluent and cynical profession in the city.

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Looking Down From Heaven

Posted on June 21, 2020 by Luke Ford

I love this picture.

I feel like this is the true perspective on life. How could one get petty from here?

The photo tells me there are many ways of living a life, and one small turn can make an enormous difference. Just a tilt of the wheel and you are off on a whole new adventure, leaving behind everything you’ve known.

I look at the picture and I feel a touch of the infinite. Surely God is in this place.

I had the same sensation driving into Yosemite. I was awestruck by the natural grandeur. I felt tiny and it felt good to be tiny.

I feel lonely looking at this picture and I like it. It reminds me of climbing to the top of a tree at Pacific Union College once I no longer lived there, circa 1982 when I was only visiting, and I was swaying in the breeze on top of the tree looking over the community that was home to the people I loved most in the world. Sitting there, I felt that my future was limitless. Looking at this picture, I feel the same way. This image connects me to the infinite in each moment, in each person, in each interaction, in each idea, in each connection.

Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.

Here’s some background on the young photographer Ian Beckley. My logo photo is of New Mexico.

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‘The Idiocy Of Rural Life’

Posted on June 21, 2020 by Luke Ford

That’s the unforgettable title (quoting Karl Marx) of the cover story in The New Republic, December 8, 1986. I never read the essay nor its follow-up by the late Henry Fairlie, though I did read other articles in those issues at that time.

I remembered these unread essays today when we had some gorgeous bloodsports between regulars Kyle Rowland and Elliott Blatt, starting at 1:34:20.

Here are some highlights from that original 1986 essay by academic Jeffrey L. Pasley, who grew up outside Topeka, Kansas (Idiocy of Rural Life):

HOW, THEN, did American family farmers become, in Harkin’s words, “the most efficient and productive in the world”? Family farmers can keep labor costs very low because the family provides the bulk of the labor. Family farms operate under vastly different labor standards than the rest of American industry. “Child labor laws do not apply to family farms because family farms must have child labor to survive,” wrote Minnesota politician and family farm alumnus Darrell McKigney. “Twenty or thirty years ago farm families commonly had ten or more children. [With automation] today five or six is a more common size.” From a very early age, family farm children participate in every phase of the operation, from work with dangerous heavy equipment to close contact
with carcinogenic chemicals and disease-carrying animals. In numerous farm areas, so many children are taken out of school at harvest time that the schools officially close until the harvest is finished. Practices that would be outrageous at a textile mill suddenly become all warm and cuddly when they appear on the family farm.

Family farmers also achieve efficiency through a draconian work schedule that no self-respecting union would allow. “The farm family does physically demanding and highly stressful work at least 14 hours a day (often at least 18 hours a day during harvest season), seven days a Week, 365 days a year without a scheduled vacation or weekends off,” wrote McKigney. “The farmer must endure all of this without the benefit of a health plan, safety regulations, a retirement plan, workmen’s compensation, or any of the benefits that most U.S. labor unions demand.” Psychologist Peter Keller, past president of the Association for Rural Mental Health, pointed out that many farmers are permanently tied to their farms. A dairy farmer, for instance, cannot just take off for a two-week vacation and not milk his cows. “Farmers lose perspective on the other things in life,” said Keller. “The farm literally consumes them.”

And the family farm physically consumes those who work on it, too. According to the National Safety Council, farming is the nation’s most dangerous job—more dangerous even than working in a mine. In 1983 farming clocked in at 55 job-related deaths per 100,000 workers, or five times the rate for all major industries combined. In 1984 Tom Knudson of the Des Moines Register published a Pulitzer Prize-winning series that cataloged the myriad health and safety risks run by farmers. Farmers working with powerful farm machinery face death or maiming by crushing, chopping, asphyxiation, or electrocution. (“As he reached for a stalk of corn dangling from the corn picker, Vern Tigges of Dexter felt a jolt. In the next moments in a fierce and frantic struggle with the machine, three fingers were ripped from his hand.”) They may be poisoned by the nitrogen dioxide gas that accumulates in grain silos, or have their lungs permanently damaged from breathing the air in enclosed hog pens. They may be crippled by “farmer’s lung disease,” caused by moldy grain dust. They may develop leukemia from contact with herbicides used on corn. (Iowa farmers contract leukemia 24 percent more frequently than the average American.) Knudson wrote that recent health findings exploded “the myth of farming as the good life of fresh air and sunshine.”

BUT WHAT ABOUT the benefits of good-old-fashioned-lemonade values and the supportive friendliness of a rural community? Though hard data is difficult to come by, many small towns appear to suffer from teenage pregnancy, alcoholism, and other social maladies at rates that are higher than average…

THE USUAL lesson gleaned from the facts of farm life is that there is nothing wrong with the family farm that higher commodity prices won’t solve. Yet farm programs have come and farm programs have gone, and still farmers (and especially farmer’s children) have left, for the simple reason that life is usually better off the farm. “It is a way of life, but so was the village blacksmith,” says economist William H. Peterson. The urban “wage-slave” worker, for all his lack of “independence” and supposed alienation from his work^ has some decided advantages over the rural yeoman. He has the security of a regular income, and definite hours set aside for his leisure. More often than not, the law guarantees the non-farmer a safe place to work, and protects him from the whims of his employer. The urban wage-earner has daily contact with a wide variety of other people, and access to cultural events and decent public services…

Tyrants from Stalin to Mao to Pol Pot have subjugated their populations by forcing them to “stay on the land.” Given the conditions of life on the family farm, if ATT or Chevron or Tenneco really does try to force some family farmers off their land, they might well be doing them a favor.

Henry Fairlie responded with the essay “The Idiocy of Urban Life”:

…bring the rat race.

[LF: One chooses how much one must participates in the rat race. How is a tough schedule in the city any different from a tough schedule in the country where cows must be milked every day?]

* Urban life today is aggressively individualistic and atomized. Cities are not social places.

[LF: It depends. Orthodox Judaism is highly social. Traditional religion tends to be highly social. If you want to be a writer, it helps to live in the city where you can meet regularly with other writers. I don’t “aggressively individualistic” is a good way to live, but that’s my subjective opinion. People in East Coast cities tend to be more socially connected to family and community than people in West Coast cities. Religion, schooling, family ties strike me as more traditional on the East Coast of America.]

* The lunacy of modern city life lies first in the fact that most city dwellers who can do so try to live outside the city boundaries…

[LF: How is that lunacy? People want what they want from cities and country and adjust themselves to maximize the things they want and minimize the things they don’t want.]

* Disdaining rural life, they try to create simulations of it.

[LF: What’s wrong with maximizing what you want? Some people want wifi when they go to Yosemite. So my girlfriend and I paid $10 for some lodge wifi one day on our visit. Some married people want to create simulations of single life so they play games. Some Orthodox Jews like to intellectually explore heretical opinions or they eat kosher versions of trafe food such as fake meats.]

* The homes, restaurants, and even offices of city dwellers are planted thick with vegetation.

[LF: And why is this worthy of contempt?]

* The professional people buy second homes in the country as soon as they can afford them, and as early as possible on Friday head out of the city they have created. The New York intellectuals tuals and artists quaintly say they are “going to the country” for the weekend or summer, but in fact they have created a little Manhattan-by-the-Sea around the Hamptons, spreading over the Long Island potato fields whose earlier solitude was presumably sumably the reason why they first went there. City dwellers take the city with them to the country, for they will not live without its pamperings.

[LF: Everybody takes their past and their preferences with them wherever they go. So?]

* Every European points out that Americans are the most round-shouldered people in the world. Few of them carry themselves selves with an upright stance, although a correct stance and gait is the first precondition of letting your lungs breathe naturally and deeply. Electric typewriters cut down the amount of physical cal exertion needed to hit the keys; the buttons on a word processor need even less effort, as you can tell from the posture of those who use them. They might as well be in armchairs. They rush out to jog or otherwise Fonda-ize their leisure to try to repair the damage done during the day. Dieting is an urban obsession. Country dwellers eat what they please, and work it off in useful physical employments, and in the open air, cold or hot, rainy or sunny. Mailmen are the healthiest city workers.

* Work still gives meaning to rural life, the family, and churches. But in the city today work and home, family and church, are separated.

[LF: Work, family and church give meaning to people in cities as well. Many people find great advantage in separating home and work and church. I don’t see anything inherently wrong in this separation.]

* What the office workers do for a living is not part of their home life. At the same time they maintain the pointless frenzy of their work hours in their hours off.

[LF: Not true. Everything we do affects us. How is hard work pointless frenzy? Some people choose to live busy lives. What’s wrong with that?]

* They rush from the office to jog, to the gym or the YMCA pool, to work at their play with the same joylessness.

[LF: Orthodox Jews don’t tend to dawdle. People with busy lives don’t dawdle. So? I haven’t noticed any difference in happiness between rural and urban living.]

* As the farmer walks down to his farm in the morning, the city dweller is dressing for the first idiocy of his day, which he not only accepts but even seeks-the journey to work.

[LF: How is commuting idiocy? It represents a trade-off between where we want to live and where we need to be for work. Why is compromise idiocy? I have created a life where I’ve not had a daily commute longer than 20 minutes.]

* There are no more grim faces than those of the single drivers we pedestrians can glimpse at the stoplights during the rush hour. It is hard to know why they are so impatient tient in the morning to get to their useless and wearisome employments;

[LF: I guess that’s why they call it work.]

I think Henry Fairlie got the worst of this exchange. Jeffrey L. Pasley gave killer facts and insights, Fairlie just evoked some feelings. I don’t see it as terribly significant that city dwellers want to recapture some parts of country life. We all want what we don’t have. Every man with a Ten yearns to have sex with someone new. That doesn’t make the Ten defective.

I grew up in the Seventh-Day Adventist tradition that regarded cities as dens of iniquity. Almost all of my experiences were rural until age 27 when I went to live in Orlando and then Los Angeles. I love cities. I love country. I don’t think either is an objectively superior way of living.

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Is Human Nature Good Or Bad?

Posted on June 21, 2020 by Luke Ford

Australian journalist Chris Masters wrote in this 2002 book Not For Publication: “But journalists do have to hold to one strong belief– that people are basically decent. I still believe that if any ordinary Australian sat down with an ordinary Afghani who had been through the hell of a serial civil war, and the Afghani was able to give the Australian an honest account of their story, the Australian would do what they could to help.”

What a great summary of the journalistic mindset! And what stupidity! First of all, to state that journalists have to hold to one strong belief that has nothing to do with the craft of reporting is absurd. Second, to state that people are basically decent defies reality. Third, the idea that ordinary members of an in-group (in this case Australians) would love to do everything they could to help a despised out-group (Afghan Muslims) is staggeringly blind to reality. People don’t care about out-groups.

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Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics (2009)

Posted on June 21, 2020 by Luke Ford

From the 2009 edition Introduction by the author Frederic Spotts:

* You can discuss Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot with calm reason. But it is almost impossible to talk about Hitler rationally. When, in 2000, Time magazine was considering whom to designate its “Man of the Century,” the rum or that Hitler was a candidate caused a minor uproar. That Hitler had more of an impact on the century than anyone else few historians would deny. But historical fact had to give way to irrational emotion, and so Time timidly
selected Einstein. There was an irony in this. Einstein himself once belittled his work by pointing out that his theories had always existed in nature and were just waiting to be propounded by one physicist or another. But a Beethoven, he said, was a unique phenomenon.

Hitler was also unique; he made history, history did not make him. His singularity as someone who rose almost literally from the gutter to become master of Europe is recognized. What is not accepted is that there is anything more to be said of him. When CBS television announced plans for a film on Hitler’s early life, a prominent Jewish leader protested. “We know who he is, we know what he did, what are we going to learn?” That Hitler might after all be found to be human, with normal, decent traits is indeed terrifying. If he is a bit like us, then we may be a bit like him, validating Thomas Mann’s assertion that “perhaps there is a little Hitler in us.”

…Even Stormfront White Nationalist Comm unity found the book “a riveting and highly original work” in showing that Hitler’s interest in the arts was as intense as his racism. Writers in Christian publications highlighted the moral contradictions inherent in Hitler’s aesthetics, and one of the most thoughtful discussions of the book appeared in Christianity Today.

A writer for The Independent praised Hitler as one of the best books of 2002. A freelance critic listed it as his 51st favorite book— but considering that Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities was number 56 and Orwell’s 1984 was number 59, this turned out to be high praise. A writer for the national Jewish student magazine was so impressed by one of Hitler’s watercolors reproduced in the book that he conducted an experiment to compare other reactions to his own. “I showed the painting to Yeshiva University students standing on Amsterdam Avenue at 185th Street in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighbourhood. They praised the sunnyness of the piece, the happy mood, and the ‘pretty colours.’ I then showed them the by-line: Adolf Hitler. Dispositions changed from pleasure to shock, horror, and embarrassment.”

* There he sits, deep in thought, studying a grand model of his home town of Linz. The model shows the city as it will look after being transformed into the culture centre of Europe. It had been delivered the day before and lighting arrangements were installed to enable him to envisage how the buildings would appear at various times of the day as well as by moonlight. The date is 13 February 1945. The place is the bunker under the Reich chancellery in Berlin. The Russians are at the Oder, a hundred miles away; the British and Americans are near the Rhine some 300 miles to the west. Yet Hitler spends hours absorbed in his model. He worries that the bell tower in the centre of town may be too tall; it must not eclipse the spire of the cathedral at Ulm further up the Danube since that would hurt the pride of the people living there. But it must be high enough to catch the first beams of the sun in the morning and the last in the evening. ‘In the tower I want a carillon to play — not every day but on special days — a theme from Bruckner’s Fourth, the Romantic Symphony, ’ he tells his architect. During the weeks and months to follow, the model will continue to offer him solace, even as his Reich – and it was his Reich — collapses around him.

* Although Hider enjoyed looking at movies, he had no interest in the film as an art form and left it to Joseph Goebbels to exploit cinema for propaganda purposes. Relatively fond of the theatre though he was, he paid little attention to it after becoming chancellor. Although in his youth he loved adventure stories — not just Karl May’s Wild West fantasies, as is often thought, but also such works as Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and especially Don Quixote — serious literature held no interest for him.

* The origin of this aesthetic bent of mind is a mystery. It was certainly neither genetic nor environmental. The family was uncultured. His father, Alois, was a rough customs official; his mother, Klara, an uneducated hausfrau. His sole brush with culture occurred in the form of singing and piano lessons, and participation in the local church choir, all of it very brief.

* Biographic orthodoxy has it that Hitler now, even more than earlier in his life, was nothing more than a feckless wastrel who led ‘a parasitical existence’, ‘a drone’s life’. But in fact he differed scarcely at all from thousands of young people of artistic bent throughout history. Such aspiring artists spend years in a tormented struggle trying to realize themselves. Those who achieve success are praised for their perseverance, those who fail are considered lazy drifters. Hitler’s problem — in a way his tragedy — was that he confused aesthetic drive with aesthetic talent.

* Hitler was not saying that he did not want war or Lebensraum in the East or to make Germany the dominant power of Europe. What he was saying was that after he had achieved his military and political ambitions, he would devote himself to what really interested him and what he considered of ultimate importance. This was to create a German culture state where the arts were supreme and where he could construct his buildings, hold art shows, stage operas, encourage artists and promote the music, painting and sculpture he loved.

* Unlike Lenin, who never set foot in an art gallery, or Stalin, whose art collection was pictures torn out of an illustrated magazine, or Mussolini, who despised the arts, he held a deep and genuine interest in music, painting, sculpture and architecture. He regarded politics not art as a means to an end, the end of which was art. Hence the paradox of a man who wanted to be an artist but lacked the talent, who hated politics but was a political genius.

* Hitler was heir to the Central European Romantic tradition. Typically, Romantics worshipped the artist and his achievement as the embodiment of the highest social aspirations of an age. At the same time they were lost in admiration for, as Isaiah Berlin said with Napoleon in mind, ‘the sinister artist whose materials are men – the destroyer of old societies and the creator of new ones — no matter at what human cost: the superhuman leader who tortures and destroys in order to build on new foundations . . . .’ Hitler was a Romantic in both senses.

* Hider too ingested but never fully digested bits of literature, art, history, music, theatre, politics, philosophy and most everything between. And what spilled out in his conversations was an ill-digested jumble of fact, pseudo-fact and non-fact. Yet in the course of his cultural musings he also showed real sense and came to grips with some of the central issues concerning the relationship between culture and the state, the artist and society, art and politics. Out of this plethora of words emerged a set of ideas that amounts to a philosophy of culture. Race was the keystone, and it established an indivisible link between his cultural and political views.

* In the cultural sphere the dispute had been openly joined in 1893 when Max Nordau, a pioneer Zionist, published his widely read book, Degeneration, which applied the concept of biological degeneration to cultural decline. According to this, societies were living organisms, subject to the ordinary human process of birth, development, decay and death. By the same token, degenerate painting was the product of biologically degenerate painters, who suffered from, among other ailments, brain debilitation and optical disease. Impressionists, for example, were victims of disorders of the nervous system and the retina. Such degenerates were enemies of society, ‘anti-social vermin’ who must be ‘mercilessly crush[ed]’. Nordau proposed that they should be tried as criminals or committed to insane asylums. Picking up on such ideas, the popular writer Julius Langbehn maintained that the arts reflected a society’s health; changes of style and fashions in art were not only anti-artistic but antisocial.

* The man responsible for more death and destruction than anyone else in modern times wished to forge a state whose cultural achievements would rival those of the greatest civilizations of the past. And inside that paradox lay another. The warlord who built up the greatest land army since Napoleon regretted having to spend money on weapons that could have been devoted to the arts.

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