“They even tend to believe more in climate change and
to invest more to combat it. In other words, the ‘feminisation of wealth’ could
drive a meaningful societal moderation.”—Ellevest CEO and founder Sallie
Krawcheck, “On Wall Street: Feminisation of Wealth Management is Coming,” The
Financial Times, May 25-26, 2024
The image accompanying this post, showing Nikki Glaser
on “The Blocks” podcast, was taken Dec. 22, 2022, by Neal Brennan.
(Photograph of Rebecca
West by Madame Yevonde.)
It wasn’t until I read assorted essays and biographies
by Garry Wills that I discovered why he so deeply admired G.K. Chesterton,
born 150 years ago today in London.
Those who have read this blog over time know how often
I have quoted from Chesterton’s poems, literary studies, essays, and Christian
apologetics.
But years before that, as a child, I had become
enthralled by his “Father Brown” detective tales, as seen in this post from 15 years ago.
The late novelist P.D. James (herself a sterling
detective novelist) pretty much sums up what drew me years ago to Chesterton’s
work in this often-unappreciated genre:
“We read the Father Brown stories for a variety
pleasures, including their ingenuity, their wit and intelligence, and for the
brilliance of the writing. But they provide more. Chesterton was concerned with
the greatest of all problems, the vagaries of the human heart.”
(By the way: If you watch the recent BBC series Father
Brown, based loosely on Chesterton’s stories on the mild-mannered,
mystery-solving cleric, I’m afraid that I must agree with Steven D. Greydanus,
who writes, on his “Decent Films” blog, that this “cozy, nostalgic
British crime series…,while not without merit, has little in common with either
the letter or the spirit of Chesterton’s yarns.”)
The adjectives I used in the last sentence might conjure up a weepy, weak, wren-like woman accustomed to taking a back seat to sisters Charlotte (Jane Eyre) and Emily (Wuthering Heights).
That
image is reinforced by Anne’s physical appearance: a “long neck, thin features
and pronounced mouth,” writes Bronte family biographer Juliet Barker.
But Anne was also the most bitingly satirical of the
three sisters, and the one most unafraid to challenge Victorian mores about
what constituted suitable fiction for women and children—so much so that after
her death, Charlotte and early biographers did her an inadvertent disservice by
softening her sharp edges.
Partly as a result, family biographers and critics
didn’t plumb Anne’s life for clues to themes and characters in her poetry and
two surviving novels. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall has only had
one TV adaptation, the 1996 BBC miniseries with Tara Fitzgerald in the title
role, and Agnes Grey has had no TV or film versions at all—unlike
for Jane Eyre (9) and Wuthering Heights (12, counting modern and
Spanish-language versions).
Like Charlotte, Barker wrote in her epic 1994
biography, The Brontes, Anne had “a core of steel, a sense of
duty and obligation,” which manifested itself in making the best of her time
away in school, despite rampant homesickness; in how she looked after her parson
father; in how she worked as a governess for five years, despite her growing
dissatisfaction with the profession; and in an ironclad commitment to writing
that was so intense, Charlotte worried, that she dreaded for her sister’s
health.
Biographers face an unusual problem with the Brontes,
for none more so than Anne. It is impossible to understand how they came to write
at all without understanding their interactions.
But too much stress on that environment can also lead
to a failure to understand the sisters’ differences from each other, as well as
from their equally talented but troubled artist brother Branwell.
It was Branwell, for instance, who created one of the
few likenesses of the three sisters together. (Emily—and Branwell--preceded
Anne in death only months before.) But it was Branwell who seems to have
brought Anne’s second job as a governess to an end when, as tutor to a son in the
Robinson family, he engaged in a scandalous affair that led to his dismissal.
Branwell’s alcohol- and opium-spurred downward spiral when
he went home, in turn, likely inspired Anne’s characterization of Arthur
Huntingdon of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, whose alcoholic rages lead his
wife to flee under an assumed name with her child to a remote village.
The novel’s description of the suffering caused by
alcoholism (“I see that a man cannot give himself up to drinking without being
miserable one-half his days and mad the other”) has the special insight of one
who has watched a loved one undone by the disease.
Anne’s relationship with Charlotte, though not as troubled, was equally complicated.
Though it was Charlotte’s idea, for instance, to publish her and her sisters’ poems together, Emily and Anne compelled her to adopt pseudonyms to protect their identities.
Eventually, Charlotte saw the wisdom of the sisters’ not using female names, because “authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice; we had noticed how critics sometimes use for their chastisement the weapon of personality, and for their reward, a flattery which is not true praise.”
These pseudonyms—Acton, Ellis, and Currer Bell—feature gender-neutral first names, with the initials of the three authors corresponding to their actual names.
But it was other circumstances surrounding the publication of their books involving Charlotte that led the oldest sister to leave Anne as something of a cipher in the brooding family saga.
As Samantha Ellis’ January 2017 essay in the British paper The Guardian outlined, Anne had written a novel about her experiences as a governess, Agnes Grey, first. But it was Jane Eyre that was seen by British readers first, because, separate from Emily and Anne, Charlotte found a publisher more enthusiastic about issuing her book.
In addition, Anne’s challenge to conventional mores in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall led Charlotte to be overprotective of her sister’s image after her death.
It would have been bad enough that Anne, in defiance of the Anglican Church, opposed the idea of eternal damnation in favor of universal salvation.
But she also raised hackles with her depictions of a single woman (Huntingdon’s wife, adopting the name “Mrs. Helen Graham” in her new community) earning a living through her paintings, of domestic violence, and of the precarious legal position of women in Victorian England.
While Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights ultimately belong to romantic fiction with their raging but suffering chief male characters, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is unsparing in its realism.
When contemporary critics took issue with this treatment, Anne responded, in a preface to the second edition of the book, with a ringing defense of gritty, unillusioned fiction that doesn’t cater to readers’ expectations:
“To represent a bad thing in its least offensive light is, doubtless, the most agreeable course for a writer of fiction to pursue; but is it the most honest, or the safest? Is it better to reveal the snares and pitfalls of like to the young and thoughtless traveller, or to cover them with branches and flowers? Oh, reader! if there were less of this delicate concealment of facts—this whispering ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace, there would be less of sin and misery to the young of both sexes who are left to wring their bitter knowledge from experience.”
Anne also echoed John Milton’s denunciation of “a fugitive and cloistered virtue” in having her heroine directly challenge society’s encouragement of domineering boys while girls are supposed to be meek and mild:
“I would not send a poor girl into the world, unarmed against her foes, and ignorant of the snares that beset her path; nor would I watch and guard her, till, deprived of self-respect and self-reliance, she lost the power or the will to watch and guard herself.”
Anne’s death following months of depression over the death of Emily and her own ineffective medical treatment for tuberculosis left her posthumous reputation in the hands of Charlotte, who did not authorize a reissue of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in the remaining six years or her life—and who described her as a “gentle, retiring, inexperienced writer.”
That overprotectiveness led critics and English professors to overlook a writer with a contribution
to literature every bit as distinct as her older sisters.
It was true 135 years ago when Howells wrote these words, and maybe more so now, about how “caprice” can end employment, for either individuals or mass numbers of employees.
Executives screaming for less regulation may well end up playing casino with their employees’ futures. A multinational conglomerate thousands of miles away may abruptly terminate workers who’ve given the best part of their careers to a company.
All of this feeds into worker anger. Many may well accept the nearest explanation at hand that they can understand, even if they involve the creation of scapegoats.
This weekend, as we observe Memorial Day, the truth of
Ms. Renkl’s comment is borne out anew. It’s hard to understand the toll that
the Vietnam War took on America, for instance, when we read the statistic that
more than 58,000 U.S. soldiers died in the conflict.
But, to hear how even one soldier became a casualty
makes a huge difference in understanding the sacrifice that individual made and
the continuing wound his loss represented to those who loved him.
The same applies elsewhere in the world, to victims of
strife (as in Gaza) or human-rights violations (Ukraine, in the face of the
Russian invasion).
Last month marked the 300th birthday of Immanuel Kant in Königsberg, near the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea. As I learned from Lea Ypi’s essay from April in The Financial Times, his place of birth—and the extent to which his legacy belongs to one nation, rather than all humanity—has become tied up in the epic, blood-soaked wars of the 20th century that saw Konigsburg shift from East Prussian—i.e., German—control to that of Russia.
Unfortunately, changed European borders have, in the case of this pivotal modern philosopher, certainly proven the first half of George Orwell’s 1984 dictum that “Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future.” We are about to see, as the struggle over Crimea moves into another phase, whether the second part of that statement will hold true.
I first encountered Kant in the famous Contemporary Civilization” course at Columbia University. I came away with two points that have lingered in my mind about him ever since.
First, he was so quirkily regular in his habits, the legend went, that the residents of Königsberg set their clocks to coincide with his afternoon walk.
Second, though a constellation of thinkers were trying to come up with a more convenient way of viewing the world, it was Kant who offered the definition of “Enlightenment” with which I began this post—and which has come to characterize an entire strain of thought in 18th century Europe and America.
Humanity can only change by beginning a public questioning of what is true and what is false. But, Kant implied, it is inhibited by laziness and cowardice.
In moving Europe further away the sway of religion, Kant and other philosophers of his movement looked to “enlightened” rulers—i.e., “benevolent despots”—like Frederick the Great of Prussia and Maria Theresa of Austria to spread education, learning and culture.
In time, the despots became less benevolent (if they ever really were) and the continent became continually rocked by great-power struggles.
My class had read the philosopher’s stringently argued Critique of Pure Reason. What I was not aware of, however, until I read Ypi’s essay, was how difficult it was for Kant to maintain the independence of thought he advocated in his writings with the necessity of survival when Königsberg came under the influence of a foreign power: perhaps not so surprisingly, considering current events, Russia.
In 1759, Kant petitioned Russian Empress Elizabeth, asking for an academic post. But 11 years later, once the Russians withdrew, Kant went back to his original Prussian rulers and was granted a full professorship.
In recent times, some elements in Russia highlighted that reversal, calling Kant a “turncoat.” That term might be a bit strong, but “opportunist” might apply better—and even that is hardly a compliment or term of endearment.
Did Kant feel disgusted with this ideological maneuvering? Maybe, because late in life he was writing, in no uncertain terms: “No state shall forcibly interfere in the constitution and government of another state.”
Having already seen Konigsberg change hands in his thirties, he had, by his seventies, lived long enough to see how the French Revolution had introduced the notion of an entire nation in arms—and collapsed any idea that civilian populations should be off limits in wars.
In 1795, Kent wrote the piercing essay “Toward Perpetual Peace,” warning, a century and a half before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, about how “a war of extermination in which the simultaneous annihilation of both parties . . . would let perpetual peace come about only in the vast graveyard of the human race.”
Instead, he advocated a “cosmopolitan right,” based on the belief that “a violation of right on one place of the Earth is felt in all.”
Kant’s ideas have not only influenced notions of public education, but also the formation of organizations dedicated to preserving international security and guarding against the outbreak of war, such as the European Union and the United Nations.
(For yet another view of
Kant focusing on the question of his Prussian or Russian identity, please see this essay by Robert R. Clewis in the April/May issue of Philosophy Now Magazine.)
The Memorial Day weekend is here, bringing with it
summer. At this time of year, many young people gather together in houses, get
drunk and stupid, and wreck the joints.
Those are the types of idiots that Jersey Shore
was about. While it aired, some colleges offered courses on the show.
One of its “stars,” Snooki, was even paid $32,000 to speak at a
student-sponsored event at Rutgers University 13 years ago.
And then there’s “The Situation.” What I’d like to
know is who else he met in “prehistoric kindergarten”? Pebbles Flintstone?
Can you think of any better demonstration of the
crisis in American education, or even the dire state of this republic?
Watching Hud again after nearly 40 years, it struck me, in a way it never had before, that the film was, at heart, a struggle for a younger person’s soul, in much the same way that Oliver Stone’s Wall Street was.
And here is what’s dispiriting about how Hud and Wall Street ended up being perceived: The anti-heroes that each movie warned audiences against, in no uncertain terms, were actually embraced by viewers who somehow missed the message.
There should be little to admire about either Paul Newman’s Hud Bannon—an alcoholic, womanizing, unscrupulous heel—or Michael Douglas’ Gordon Gekko—a manipulative, ruthless inside trader who, taking a page from the late Ivan Boesky, blatantly announces, “Greed, for want of a better word, is good.”
Yet both Newman and Douglas were horrified to discover that these epitomes of selfishness became heroes of sorts. The actors brought such charisma to their roles that they embodied the glamour of evil for the type of male who values transgression.
I am afraid that America is now at the kind of crossroads that Melvyn Douglas’ principled patriarch in Hud feared. People in public life may disclaim being seen as role models, but they are (and they should stop pretending that they aren’t).
Preventing lying,
cheating, greed, misogyny, prejudice, or violence is difficult at the best of
times, but it becomes an epidemic when the faults of well-known politicians,
entertainers, or athletes are not merely excused but trumpeted as positive
examples. Unchecked personal appetites lead, step by step, to unmitigated
national disasters.
I confess that, in the last few weeks, I have watched
the tumult on college campuses nationwide with deep misgivings, and
particularly at my alma mater, Columbia University.
I have wondered about the damage to institutions and
to the general image that higher education presents to a segment of the public
that, more than at any other since the Second World War, suspects such schools
as being inimical to their way of life.
I have questioned how the message that most students
are probably trying to convey—the humanitarian problems faced by the people of
Gaza—with the anti-semitic fringes distracting from their discourse.
I have thought about school administrators—well-meaning,
often inexperienced, and caught between opportunistic right-wing Capitol Hill
members and students with demands frequently difficult to satisfy.
And I wonder about the students themselves—how much
their idealism mixes inextricably with willfulness, even ignorance, about
consequences.
At one point outside Columbia’s Hamilton Hall a couple
of weeks ago, a news segment featured a female protester, shouting rapidly and
furiously. In all her stridency, the young woman reminded me of the image of a
similar one from a play I had seen on public television a half century ago,
in my teens: Jean Anouilh’s Antigone.
When French audiences first saw the play staged in the
midst of World War II, they interpreted the mortal-stakes conflict they were
watching as analogous to their own, with Antigone standing in for the Resistance
movement; her uncle Creon, the ruler of Thebes, for the Nazi collaborator
Marshal Petain; and the guards for the German occupying forces who were "just following orders."
But, in a manner stronger than what I found on the
printed page for this play—and even more than Sophocles’ Greek tragedy that
started it all—the performance of Genevieve Bujold (in the accompanying image) in the title role, one year
after the end of the Vietnam War, must have brought to mind for TV viewers of
the time the fierce passions that many protesters in the conflict displayed.
Motives, emotions, and issues of right and wrong were far more clear cut in World War II than they would be in the domestic protests over Vietnam, mirroring the ambivalence in the Anouilh text.
This Antigone was every bit the “tense, sallow,
willful girl” introduced by the Chorus and embodied by both Bujold and the
young woman I saw on the news. Stubborn, obsessed, she resists the entreaties
of Creon (played by Fritz Weaver) and her more conventionally beautiful but less passionate sister
Ismene to obey Creon’s edict that the body of her brother--who led a rebellion
against the state--be left on the battlefield to rot.
Typically, in her youthful zealotry, she bursts out to
Ismene:
“The first word I ever heard out of any of you was
that word ‘understand.’ Why didn't I ‘understand’ that I must not play with
water-cold, black, beautiful flowing water-because I'd spill it on the palace
tiles. Or with earth, because earth dirties a little girl's frock. Why didn't I
‘understand’ that nice children don't eat out of every dish at once; or give
everything in their pockets to beggars; or run in the wind so fast that they
fall down; or ask for a drink when they're perspiring; or want to go swimming
when it's either too early or too late, merely because they happen to feel like
swimming. Understand! I don't want to understand. There'll be time enough to
understand when I'm old...If I ever am old. But not now.”
“If I ever am old”—she can’t see beyond the present
moment, and if it means living in a world she can’t abide, she’ll have none of
it.
Creon, who years before had “loved music, bought rare
manuscripts, [and] was a kind of art patron,” has been forced, with the deaths
of his brother-in-law Oedipus and the latter’s sons, to practice “the difficult
art of a leader of men.” But, like college administrators the last several
weeks, he has come to see order as the overriding consideration of what he
oversees, leading to a fate he can’t escape.
Creon tries to disabuse Antigone about “the kitchen of politics,” but it doesn’t work. What matters are the dictates of her conscience: “Tell me: to whom shall I have to lie?” she asks Creon. “Upon whom shall I have to fawn? to whom must I sell myself?”
In the clash between reason and passion, authority and
conscience, Antigone and Creon drag not only themselves but those around them
to disaster. Nothing else is possible when authority won’t answer the
unyielding “tribe that asks questions.”
The image accompanying this post was taken Apr. 10,
2018, by Filo gèn'.
Oh, Cousin Greg, you’re not the only one worried about
prison these days! There’s someone else who fears that “physical length”
might make him a tempting target.
Oh, because of that, and the extra pounds that
seemingly endless rounds of golf don’t seem to have trimmed…that puffy orange
hair that begs for a good yank to test its strength and authenticity…and his
former status as the most powerful man in the world.
Some might say that concern for his office’s dignity—a
quality he daily had tried to corrode—might prevent jail time, or at least a
significant amount of it.
There’s also the near-certainty that, though he’s been yelling so much about how he wants to testify at his trials, his lawyers won’t let him anywhere near the witness stand.
After all, Cousin Greg only came off
like a nervous doofus in front of Congress, whereas this guy might be
ruthlessly exposed as the vengeful liar he is (as he has been in civil cases).
But he sure seems fearful every day as he engages in
the kind of intimidation of judge, prosecutor, and anyone associated with the
case that would never be permitted of…well, of a mafia don.
As the story arc of Succession demonstrated,
“Cousin Greg” would serve as a great apprentice to anyone scheming for power.
Only the guy in recent news who dreads prison might refuse to have his picture
taken with him, loathing anyone who makes him look smaller.
Fisher traces this classic American song past the jazz
rendition that Louis Armstrong popularized, even beyond its first recording in 1923 by
the New York gospel group, the Paramount Jubilee Singers, back to—if you can
believe it—the plainchant “In Paradisum,” which became part of the Catholic
requiem mass after being written down sometime between 996 and 1011.
Now, I’m not going to argue with Fisher’s credentials
as a well-informed music maven. But I can assure him that nothing in the “rich history
of transformation” he mentions compares to the rendition of this song on the
sideline of football games played by St. Cecilia High School (what else did you
expect?) in Englewood, NJ.
At the zenith of my alma mater’s gridiron glory, stretching
from Vince Lombardi’s start as a football coach to a couple of years before it
closed in 1986, “Saints” cheerleaders would lead the packed stadium with
syncopated hand clapping and shouts as fans sensed victory.
I can assure Fisher that, no matter what he might
believe, nothing before in the history of this much-played song could compare
to the groundswell of glorious noise on these occasions—and, at this increasingly late stage in my life, I doubt that anything from now on ever will.
“If this trend continues, our nation will become a patchwork in which citizens live under fundamentally different legal regimes.”— American author, academic, political advisor, and Brookings Institution senior fellow William Galston, “Florida Turns Right, Minnesota Turns Left,” The Wall Street Journal, June 7, 2023
The accompanying photo of
William Galston was taken Jan. 8, 2012, at a Civics Ed panel at the Brookings
Institution by Medill DC.
The image accompanying this post, showing Kevin Hart
at the red carpet premiere of Ride Along, was taken Mar. 6, 2014, by Eva
Rinaldi.
The traditional commencement exercises that had been
scheduled for yesterday by my alma mater were cancelled a few days ago.
I’m not going to retrace the words and actions that
led to this decision. But I thought I would offer for students there and
elsewhere in this tumultuous year a replacement of sorts, a throwback to another commencement address, from Stephen
Colbert nearly two decades ago.
Extreme idealism—demands expected be fulfilled
immediately—is also blindness. But the deformed moral vision that Colbert
identified is more deadly in the long run, because it withers the soul day by
day.
If you want to know something close to my philosophy
on change, I can think of few lines better than these, from Bernard Malamud’s
Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Fixer:
“I am somewhat of a meliorist. That is to say, I act
as an optimist because I find I cannot act at all, as a pessimist. One often
feels helpless in the face of the confusion of these times, such a mass of
apparently uncontrollable events and experiences to live through, attempt to
understand, and if at all possible, give order to; but one must not withdraw
from the task if he has some small things to offer—he does so at the risk of
diminishing his humanity.”
“The McLaughlin legend, I quickly discovered, had shortchanged the McLaughlin reality. When I opened the door to his production company’s suite, the first words I heard came roaring up in the famous Rhode Island drawl: ‘This is s–! Unadulterated s–!’ From the shadows of a darkened office, behind a desk as vast as the deck of an aircraft carrier, McLaughlin would bellow at his staff through an intercom. His voice ricocheted down hallways, and the epithets burst like ack-ack above the dim cubicles where his assistants cowered and trembled. The abuse was astonishing, unpredictable, and, in several instances, cruel. A single tirade could last for an hour.”—Conservative commentator Andrew Ferguson, “The Man Who Started It All,” The Weekly Standard, Dec. 24, 2007, reprinted in The Washington Examiner, Dec. 24, 2007
Since death took him eight years ago, fewer and fewer people will remember what all the commotion was about each week on The McLaughlin Group.
But nobody who heard the stentorian voice of the founder and host of that current affairs show, John McLaughlin, could ever forget it—least of all, judging from Andrew Ferguson’s profile, the staffers unlucky enough to work for him.
A high decibel level was only one aspect of his impact on employees, however. As writer and TV personality John Leonard noted in a June 2000 article for The Nation, McLaughlin “settl[ed] one sexual-harassment suit out of court, facing the prospect of at least two more–and nevertheless permitting himself to savage Anita Hill on his McLaughlin Group.”
In addition, on a scale of 1 to 10—a popular measure that the host used to rate and dismiss issues or legislation—McLaughlin, a former Jesuit who appeared to display precious little humility or piety in any part of his life, rated a “10” for his impact on the level or content of political discourse over the last 40 years. He has a fair claim to being the godfather of the cable shout-fests that have raised the nation’s emotional temperature during that time.
Did McLaughlin improve the environment around him by what he said or did—the choice that ultimately all of us face and are graded by? To quote the Beltway blowhard’s frequent response on other matters during his show’s long run: “WRONG!!!”
