Author: Richard Melson

India: Deep History

In his lectures, Professor Amartya Sen, the Harvard Nobel Prize in Economics winner, mentions Sir Mortimer Wheeler, Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India. Wheeler wrote, while reporting on the excavation of the Indus Valley Civilization (of India), that the plumbing and sewerage were advanced, in some ways surpassing modern equivalents.

Sen’s larger point is that history is characterized by phases of rise and fall and not just classes and class struggles à la Marx.

Consider the following depiction of the East India Company, from The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company (also subtitled The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire) by William Dalrymple.


On 28 August 1608, Captain William Hawkins, a bluff sea captain with the Third Voyage, anchored his ship, the Hector, off Surat, and so became the first commander of an EIC vessel to set foot on Indian soil.

India then had a population of 150 million — about a fifth of the world’s total — and was producing about a quarter of global manufacturing; indeed, in many ways it was the world’s industrial powerhouse and the world’s leader in manufactured textiles. Not for nothing are so many English words connected with weaving — chintz, calico, shawl, pyjamas, khaki, dungarees, cummerbund, taffetas — of Indian origin. It was certainly responsible for a much larger share of world trade than any comparable zone and the weight of its economic power even reached Mexico, whose textile manufacture suffered a crisis of ‘de-industrialisation’ due to Indian cloth imports. In comparison, England then had just 5 per cent of India’s population and was producing just under 3 per cent of the world’s manufactured goods. A good proportion of the profits on this found its way to the Mughal exchequer in Agra, making the Mughal Emperor, with an income of around £100 million,* by far the richest monarch in the world.

The Mughal capitals were the megacities of their day: ‘They are second to none either in Asia or in Europe,’ thought the Jesuit Fr Antonio Monserrate, ‘with regards either to size, population, or wealth. Their cities are crowded with merchants, who gather from all over Asia. There is no art or craft which is not practised there.’ Between 1586 and 1605, European silver flowed into the Mughal heartland at the astonishing rate of 18 metric tons a year, for as William Hawkins observed, all nations bring coyne and carry away commodities for the same’. For their grubby contemporaries in the West, stumbling around in their codpieces, the silk-clad Mughals, dripping in jewels, were the living embodiment of wealth and power — a meaning that has remained impregnated in the word ‘mogul’ ever since.

By the early seventeenth century, Europeans had become used to easy military victories over the other peoples of the world.

* Over £10,000 million today.

Think of the larger point: what you just read is the story of Indian de-industrialization and its negative results. Ask yourself whether American de-industrialization is something of an echo of this, as manufacturing is offshored.

Heidegger vs. Marx as World Watchers

Marx (1818-1883) implies that the foundation of human reality is econo-technical, and on that basis society creates thoughts and philosophies, art and poems. This explanation seems appealing when we think of the economic development of China in our time, for example, or the rise of computers and software.

In a way, Heidegger (1889-1976) turns this upside down. At the basis of world history is society producing culture. You can make a simple “cartoon” and say that for Marx, economics shapes everything, and for Heidegger culture replaces economics.

For example, in his book, What Is Called Thinking? (English translation, 1968, Harper & Row), Heidegger argues the foundation of all Western thinking and culture comes from axioms such as logos [Ancient Greek: λόγος] (from which we have logic, cosmology, psychology, epistemology, etc.), as well as legein (the Greek verb λέγειν, “to speak”).

Heidegger states (on page 204), “Without the λέγειν of that logic, modern man would have to make do without his automobile. There would be no airplanes, no turbines, no Atomic Energy Commission.”

Our MI comment on this is that any monocausal explanation of how mankind went from Neanderthal to the Manhattan skyline is completely inadequate. You must create a “double-helix” of Marx and Heidegger, adding the dimensions of surprise and unintended consequences. Without the physics concepts of emergence and complexity, we have no possibility of understanding how we got to now. In the site tagline, we use the word “composite” as a reference to this kind of deeper understanding.

Movies as a Part of Remedial Education

It’s almost “un-American” to be honest about the nightmare side of life when you cannot “walk on the sunny side of the street” and operate under all those facile Americanisms about “I’ve got the world on a string…” in all the songs and movie lines.

Film noir is supposed to be an antidote to this “false sunniness” and there’s one classic example that exemplifies this undiscussable nightmare side of life, namely, Detour (1945), directed by Edgar Ulmer.

Edgar Georg Ulmer was a Jewish–Moravian, Austrian–American film director who mainly worked on Hollywood B movies and other low-budget productions, eventually earning the epithet “The King of PRC,” due to his extremely prolific output on the said Poverty Row studio.

Wikipedia

As a refugee/expat, he understood that life isn’t always “a bowl of cherries” and set out to show this in his films.

In this underrated Ulmer masterpiece, Tom Neal plays a musician, Al Roberts, who gets into a labyrinthian mess via bad luck and some mindless impulsiveness combined. Detour is a kind of “road movie” in hell. With life and the world a kind of hellish school, the protagonist Al Roberts captures the enforced money-madness in everything:

“Money. You know what that is, the stuff you never have enough of. Little green things with George Washington’s picture that men slave for, commit crimes for, die for. It’s the stuff that has caused more trouble in the world than anything else we ever invented, simply because there’s too little of it.”

To this nightmarishness, there’s to be added the irrationality of fate or destiny or karma or luck:

“That’s life. Whichever way you turn, Fate sticks out a foot to trip you.”

— Al Roberts, Detour

He adds:

“But one thing I don’t have to wonder about, I know. Someday a car will stop to pick me up that I never thumbed. Yes. Fate, or some mysterious force, can put the finger on you or me for no good reason at all.”

[as narrator] “Until then I had done things my way, but from then on something stepped in and shunted me off to a different destination than the one I’d picked for myself.”

Vera comments:

“Life’s like a ball game. You gotta take a swing at whatever comes along before you find it’s the ninth inning.”

Hitchhiking, say, is often hellish and not romantic and usually not a Jack Kerouac On the Road poetic or rhapsodic adventure at all, as Al Roberts explains:

“Ever done any hitchhiking? It’s not much fun, believe me. Oh yeah, I know all about how it’s an education, and how you get to meet a lot of people, and all that. But me, from now on I’ll take my education in college, or in PS-62, or I’ll send $1.98 in stamps for ten easy lessons.”

Nightclubs too are not always heavenly escapes:

[voiceover] “It wasn’t much of a club, really. You know the kind. A joint where you could have a sandwich and a few drinks and run interference for your girl on the dance floor.”

— Al Roberts, Detour

Women might not be the salvation you were told to expect in songs like “Some Enchanted Evening” from South Pacific.

“Vera was just as rotten in the morning as she’d been the night before.”

— Al Roberts, Detour

There’s a genre of American films called “lowlife stories” such as The Hustler with Paul Newman.

Ulmer’s Detour is not exactly a “lowlife movie” but rather an undiscussed dark side to life movie, nor is it “stylishly pessimistic” (like the French “poetical pessimism” movies) but rather a truth-telling exercise that shows stability and permanence and happiness as “living” on thin ice. American “cock-eyed optimism” isn’t always appropriate.

In that sense, Detour is a part of remedial education.

Education and the Triple Helix underneath It

We want to restate the basic instinct and intuitions of this education or re-education project.

To get at the “schema” it will help you if you digress for a second and absorb this writeup of Professor Richard Lewontin’s (Harvard biology) 2002 masterpiece, The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism and Environment.

The blurb from Harvard University Press tells us:

“One of our most brilliant evolutionary biologists, Richard Lewontin has also been a leading critic of those—scientists and non-scientists alike—who would misuse the science to which he has contributed so much. In The Triple Helix, Lewontin the scientist and Lewontin the critic come together to provide a concise, accessible account of what his work has taught him about biology and about its relevance to human affairs. In the process, he exposes some of the common and troubling misconceptions that misdirect and stall our understanding of biology and evolution.

The central message of this book is that we will never fully understand living things if we continue to think of genes, organisms, and environments as separate entities, each with its distinct role to play in the history and operation of organic processes. Here Lewontin shows that an organism is a unique consequence of both genes and environment, of both internal and external features. Rejecting the notion that genes determine the organism, which then adapts to the environment, he explains that organisms, influenced in their development by their circumstances, in turn create, modify, and choose the environment in which they live.

The Triple Helix is vintage Lewontin: brilliant, eloquent, passionate and deeply critical. But it is neither a manifesto for a radical new methodology nor a brief for a new theory. It is instead a primer on the complexity of biological processes, a reminder to all of us that living things are never as simple as they may seem.”

Borrow from Lewontin the idea of a “triple helix” and apply it to the ultimate wide-angle view of this process of understanding. The educational triple helix includes and always tries to coordinate:

  1. The student and their life (i.e., every student is first of all a person who is playing the role of a student). Every person is born, lives, and dies.
  2. The student and their field are related to the rest of the campus. (William James: all knowledge is relational.)
  3. The student and the world. (Container ships from Kaohsiung, Taiwan are bringing Lenovo and Acer computers to Bakersfield, California in a world of techno-commerce, exchange rates, insurance, customs, contractual arrangements, etc. In other words, always with some sense of the global political economy.)

The student keeps the triple helix “running” in the back of the mind and tries to create a “notebook of composite sketches” of the world and its workings and oneself and this develops through a life as a kind of portable “homemade” university which stays alive and current and vibrant long after one has forgotten the mean value theorem and the names and sequence for the six wives of Henry VIII).

The reader should think of Emerson’s point from his Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson: 1824–1832—“The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education, but the means to an education.”

“De-Globalization?”

The classic study of the “swirl of processes and events” that ended previous globalization episodes is the theme of Princeton Professor Harold James’ 2002 book, The End of Globalization: Lessons from the Great Depression.

“Globalization” is here. Signified by an increasingly close economic interconnection that has led to profound political and social change worldwide, the process seems irreversible. In this book, however, Harold James provides a sobering historical perspective, exploring the circumstances in which the globally integrated world of an earlier era broke down under the pressure of unexpected events.

James examines one of the great historical nightmares of the twentieth century: the collapse of globalism in the Great Depression. Analyzing this collapse in terms of three main components of global economics—capital flows, trade and international migration—James argues that it was not simply a consequence of the strains of World War I, but resulted from the interplay of resentments against all these elements of mobility, as well as from the policies and institutions designed to assuage the threats of globalism.

Could it happen again? There are significant parallels today: highly integrated systems are inherently vulnerable to collapse, and world financial markets are vulnerable and unstable.

While James does not foresee another Great Depression, his book provides a cautionary tale in which institutions meant to save the world from the consequences of globalization—think WTO and IMF, in our own time—ended by destroying both prosperity and peace.

Legitimate fears about “globalization reversal” have been well put by Zakaria:

Davos, Switzerland —

President Trump’s speech here at the World Economic Forum went over relatively well. That’s partly because Davos is a conclave of business executives, and they like Trump’s pro-business message. But mostly, the president’s reception was a testament to the fact that he and what he represents are no longer unusual or exceptional. Look around the world and you will see: Trump and Trumpism have become normalized.

Davos was once the place where countries clamored to demonstrate their commitment to opening up their economies and societies. After all, these forces were producing global growth and lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty. Every year, a different nation would become the star of the forum, usually with a celebrated finance minister who was seen as the architect of a boom. The United States was the most energetic promoter of these twin ideas of economic openness and political freedom.

Today, Davos feels very different. Despite the fact that, throughout the world, growth remains solid and countries are moving ahead, the tenor of the times has changed. Where globalization was once the main topic, today it is the populist backlash to it. Where once there was a firm conviction about the way of the future, today there is uncertainty and unease.

This is not simply atmospherics and rhetoric. Ruchir Sharma of Morgan Stanley Investment Management points out that since 2008, we have entered a phase of “deglobalization.” Global trade, which rose almost uninterruptedly since the 1970s, has stagnated, while capital flows have fallen. Net migration flows from poor countries to rich ones have also dropped. In 2018, net migration to the United States hit its lowest point in a decade.

The shift in approach can best be seen in the case of India. In 2018, Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to Davos to decry the fact that “many countries are becoming inward focused and globalization is shrinking.” Since then, his government has increased tariffs on hundreds of items and taken steps to shield India’s farmers, shopkeepers, digital companies and many others from the dangers of international competition. The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative recently called out India for having the highest tariffs of any major economy in the world.

Indian officials used to aggressively court foreign investment, which was much needed to spur growth. Last week, with India’s economy slowing badly, Jeff Bezos announced a $1 billion investment in the country. (Bezos owns The Post.) But the minister of commerce and industry scoffed at the move, saying Amazon wasn’t “doing a great favor to India” and besides was probably engaging in anti-competitive, “predatory” practices. Often, protectionist policies help favored local producers. Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad recently criticized some of Modi’s policies toward Muslims. The Indian government effectively cut off imports of Malaysian palm oil. In a familiar pattern, one of the chief beneficiaries was a local billionaire long associated with Modi.

The Economist notes that Europe, once one of the chief motors for openness in economics and politics, is also rediscovering state intervention to prop up domestic industries. And if you think the Internet is exempt from these tendencies, think again. The European Center for International Political Economy tracks the number of protectionist measures put in place to “localize” the digital economy in 64 countries. It has been surging for years, especially since 2008.

It’s important not to exaggerate the backlash to globalization.

As a 2019 report by DHL demonstrates, globalization is still strong and, by some measures, continues to expand. People still want to trade, travel and transact across the world. But in government policy, where economic logic once trumped politics, today it is often the reverse. Economist Nouriel Roubini argues that the cumulative result of all these measures — protecting local industries, subsidizing national champions, restricting immigration — is to sap growth. “It means slower growth, fewer jobs, less efficient economies,” he told me recently. We’ve seen it happen many times in the past, not least in India, which suffered decades of stagnation as a result of protectionist policies, and we will see the impact in years to come.

Nevertheless, today, nationalism and protectionism prevail.

This phase of deglobalization is being steered from the top. The world’s leading nations are, as always, the agenda-setters. The example of China, which has shielded some of its markets and still grown rapidly, has made a deep impression on much of the world. Probably deeper still is the example of the planet’s greatest champion of liberty and openness, the United States, which now has a president who calls for managed trade, more limited immigration and protectionist measures. At Davos, Trump invited every nation to follow his example. More and more are complying.

“The world is de-globalizing. Trump set the example.” The Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria

Students should sense that while history does not repeat itself, it sometimes rhymes and this is a major danger. It also might imply that coping with climate change will be all the harder because American-led unilateralism everywhere would mean world policy paralysis.

Navigating through Sources

Consciousness and the Novel: Connected Essays by the famous British novelist David Lodge is a classic work published by Harvard in 2004.

In this Lodge book, the author mentions a famous British society-watcher, Charles Masterman. In 1909, Masterman published his best-known study, The Condition of England, which tells us that England at that time experienced a greater inflow of migrants into London than in previous centuries taken together.

[Charles Frederick Gurney Masterman PC MP (24 October 1873 – 17 November 1927) was a British radical Liberal Party politician, intellectual and man of letters. He worked closely with such Liberal leaders as David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill in designing social welfare projects, including the National Insurance Act 1911. During the First World War, he played a central role in the main government propaganda agency.]

We then notice that one recurrent topic in various movie versions of the E. M. Forster novel Howards End (1910, set in those years) is the “horrifying” trend where great mansions and stately estates (Howards End and Wickham Place, say, in the novel) are all being demolished and replaced by ugly “flats.”

There must be, one thinks, a direct link between all the massive migrations into London at the time and all the proliferating flats at the “expense” of beautiful and historical villas. (This “demolish” trend is also part of the story of the classic novel A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh, 1934)

In the predecessor to Downton Abbey called Upstairs, Downstairs, the story ends in 1930 with a sign outside the great “house” at Eaton Place offering flats coming soon, as the demand for housing (think of San Francisco today) is so massive that sellers can make a fortune selling out to developers, move into one of the flats being created, and live off the sale for the rest of their lives and “duck” the higher “Lloyd George taxes.” (In Downton Abbey, the dowager played by Maggie Smith repeatedly lashes out at Prime Minister Lloyd George as a kind of financial traitor.)

We see from this simple example how students should learn to “jump” between books and movies and TV miniseries to get a stronger focus on what’s being depicted on screens and pages and not just “swim along” at the surface level without any “drilling down.”

Education is largely the struggle or habit where students learn to bring pattern and structure out of “chaos,” thus giving narratives some overall shape.

This reminds one of the opening lines of Beryl Markham’s 1942 Africa memoir:

“How is it possible to bring order out of memory? I should like to begin at the beginning, patiently, like a weaver at his loom. I should like to say, ‘This is the place to start; there can be no other.’ ”

from West with the Night by Beryl Markham

This is a similar impetus: to bring order out of memory or others’ memories in books and movies from various times and places.

Looking Around Is Educational

Julian Fellowes (the writer who gave us Downton Abbey) followed up with a 2018 movie called The Chaperone about a girl named Louise Brooks who became a global superstar, especially in Weimar (pre-Hitler) Germany:

Louise Brooks is a rebellious 15-year-old schoolgirl who dreams of fame and fortune in the early 1920s. She soon gets her chance when she travels to New York to study with a leading dance troupe for the summer—accompanied by a watchful chaperone.

Louise Brooks starts as a would-be dancer, “inducted” into an avant-garde dance school. This is the Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts (founded in 1915 by Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn in Los Angeles, California), which helped many perfect their dancing talents and became the first dance academy in the United States to produce a professional dance company.

Upon Louise’s “induction” into the school, one of the founders says to the girls, “Remember you are not in your body, your body is in you.”

The listener wonders: What could this possibly mean?

The answer is this: In one sense you have a body, but in another, you are your body. The first body is the “thing” you weigh on the bathroom scale. This is your interaction with gravity, as measured in conventions like pounds. On the other hand, you are also “somebody” (i.e., some body). To have and to be are entwined here. In philosophy, say in the writings of Gabriel Marcel during the fifties, the body you weigh is “corporeal” and the body you are is “existential.”

Very roughly, the first body is objectively weighed, the second subjectively sensed as your experience of yourself.

Physics and Dance (by Emily Coates and Sarah Demers), a recent book from Yale University Press, gives you the dancing body as a biomechanical problem. Dancing itself is the expression through biomechanics and movement based on physics, but apart from this, it’s also an art form.

The student will see that a moment in a movie—in this case The Chaperone—can open a door to a whole set of domains, realms and phenomena. Education at its best comes from learning how to go from such instantaneous accidents on the street or screen to a larger canvas.

Thus the declaration, “Remember you are not in your body, your body is in you” explains that biomechanics is an infrastructure, while the artistry of the dance is an art form (i.e., a kind of “communicative action,” to use a Habermas phrase).

Extracting “Big History” from Hollywood “Sword-and-Sandal” Movies: Cleopatra (1963)

Seen in “deep time,” the movie is not about colorful personalities only but on a larger scale, the transition from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire. This covers approximately one thousand years with some five centuries for each form of government, republic and empire.

The movie has as its background internecine power struggles in both Rome and Egypt.

The upshot of these struggles is the transition from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire. This transition is “punctuated” by two momentous battles:

  1. Land Battle of Pharsalus, 48 BC (Cleopatra begins with this battle).
  2. Naval Battle of Actium, 31 BC.

Rome went from monarchy (Kings) to republic (Senators) for five hundred years to Emperors for another five hundred.

(Notice that Napoleon was crowned Emperor of the French in 1804. The King was executed during the French Revolution and the word “king” was to be avoided.)

Other movies like Ben-Hur with Charleton Heston playing the lead role, show you the unhappiness of colonial peoples (like the Hebrews) under the Roman Empire. Christianity became the official religion in 330 AD under Constantine and the capital was moved from pagan Rome to Christian Constantinople. The very name “Roman Catholic Church” shows you the fusion after centuries of conflict.

After the Battle of Pharsalus in 48 BC, Julius Caesar went to Egypt, under the pretext of being named the executor of the will of the father of the young Pharaoh Ptolemy XIII and his sister Cleopatra.

Ptolemy and Cleopatra are in the midst of a civil war of their own and she has been driven out of the city of Alexandria.

Ptolemy rules alone under the care of his three “guardians,” the chief eunuch Pothinus, his tutor Theodotus and General Achillas.

Cleopatra convinces Caesar to restore her throne from her younger brother. Caesar, in effective control of the kingdom, sentences Pothinus to death for arranging an assassination attempt on Cleopatra, and banishes Ptolemy to the eastern desert, where he and his outnumbered army would face certain death against Mithridates.

Cleopatra is crowned queen of Egypt and begins to develop megalomaniacal dreams of ruling the world with Caesar, who in turn desires to become king of Rome.

They marry, and when their son Caesarion is born, Caesar accepts him publicly, which becomes the talk of Rome and the Senate.

After he is made dictator for life, Caesar sends for Cleopatra. She arrives in Rome in a lavish procession and wins the adulation of the Roman people. The Senate grows increasingly discontented amid rumors that Caesar wishes to be made king, which is anathema to the Romans. On the Ides of March in 44 BC, a group of conspirators assassinated Caesar and fled the city, starting a rebellion. An alliance among Octavian (Caesar’s adopted son), Mark Antony (Caesar’s right-hand man and general) and Marcus Aemelius Lepidus puts down the rebellion and splits the republic. Cleopatra is angered after Caesar’s will recognizes Octavian, rather than Caesarion, as his official heir, and she returns to Egypt.

While planning a campaign against Parthia in the east, Antony realizes that he needs money and supplies that only Egypt can sufficiently provide. After refusing several times to leave Egypt, Cleopatra acquiesces and meets him on her royal barge in Tarsus. The two begin a love affair, and Cleopatra assures Antony that he is much more than a pale reflection of Caesar. Octavian’s removal of Lepidus forces Antony to return to Rome, where he marries Octavian’s sister Octavia to prevent political conflict. This upsets and enrages Cleopatra. Antony and Cleopatra reconcile and marry, with Antony divorcing Octavia. Octavian, incensed, reads Antony’s will to the Roman Senate, revealing that Antony wishes to be buried in Egypt. Rome turns against Antony, and Octavian’s call for war against Egypt receives a rapturous response.

The war is decided at the naval Battle of Actium on September 2, 31 BC, where Octavian’s fleet, under the command of Agrippa, defeats the lead ships of the Antony–Egyptian fleet. Cleopatra assumes that Antony is dead and orders the Egyptian forces home. Antony follows her, leaving the rest of his fleet leaderless and soon defeated.

Several months later, Cleopatra sends Caesarion under disguise out of Alexandria. She manages to convince Antony to resume command of his troops and fight Octavian’s advancing army. However, Antony’s soldiers abandon him during the night. Rufio, the last man loyal to Antony, kills himself. Antony tries to goad Octavian into single combat but is finally forced to flee into the city. When Antony returns to the palace, Apollodorus, in love with Cleopatra himself, tells him she is in her tomb as she had instructed, and lets Antony believe she is dead. Antony falls on his own sword. Apollodorus then confesses that he misled Antony and assists him to the tomb where Cleopatra and two servants have taken refuge. Antony dies in Cleopatra’s arms.

Octavian and his army march into Alexandria with Caesarion’s dead body in a wagon. He discovers the dead body of Apollodorus, who had poisoned himself. Octavian receives word that Antony is dead and that Cleopatra is holed up in a tomb. There he offers to allow her to rule Egypt as a Roman province if she will accompany him to Rome. Cleopatra, knowing that her son is dead, agrees to Octavian’s terms, including an empty pledge on the life of her son not to harm herself. After Octavian departs, she orders her servants in coded language to assist with her suicide. Octavian discovers that she is going to kill herself and he and his guards burst into Cleopatra’s chamber to find her dead, dressed in gold, along with her servants and the asp that killed her.

The Battle of Actium was a naval battle fought between a maritime fleet of Octavian led by Marcus Agrippa and the combined fleets of both Mark Antony and Cleopatra VII Thea Philopator.

The battle took place on 2 September 31 BC in the Ionian Sea, near the former Roman colony of Actium, Greece, and was the climax of over a decade of rivalry between Octavian and Antony.

In early 31 BC, the year of the battle, Antony and Cleopatra were temporarily stationed in Greece. Mark Antony possessed 500 ships and 70,000 infantry, and made his camp at Actium, and Octavian, with 400 ships and 80,000 infantry, arrived from the north and occupied Patrae and Corinth, where he managed to cut Antony’s southward communications with Egypt (via the Peloponnese) with help from Marcus Agrippa. Octavian previously gained a preliminary victory in Greece, where his navy successfully ferried troops across the Adriatic Sea under the command of Marcus Agrippa. Octavian landed on mainland Greece, opposite the island of Korkyra (modern Corfu) and proceeded south on land.

Trapped on both land and sea, portions of Antony’s army deserted and fled to Octavian’s side (daily), and Octavian’s forces became comfortable enough to make preparations for battle. Antony’s fleet sailed through the bay of Actium on the western coast of Greece, in a desperate attempt to break free of the naval blockade. It was there that Antony’s fleet faced the much larger fleet of smaller, more maneuverable ships under commanders Gaius Sosius and Agrippa. Antony and his remaining forces were spared only due to a last-ditch effort by Cleopatra’s fleet that had been waiting nearby. Octavian pursued them and defeated their forces in Alexandria on 1 August 30 BC—after which Antony and Cleopatra committed suicide.

Octavian’s victory enabled him to consolidate his power over Rome and its dominions. He adopted the title of Princeps (“first citizen”), and in 27 BC was awarded the title of Augustus (“revered”) by the Roman Senate. This became the name by which he was known in later times.

As Augustus, he retained the trappings of a restored Republican leader, but historians generally view his consolidation of power and the adoption of these honorifics as the end of the Roman Republic and the beginning of the Roman Empire.

Note: Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra is of course relevant here.

The Levinas Facial Theme in Novels

[a continuation of Education and Spontaneous Learning]

The Face of Another (Japanese: 他人の顔, Hepburn: Tanin no kao) is a 1964 novel written by the Japanese novelist Kōbō Abe. Like other stories written by this author, the novel explores the alienation of modern man from urban society.[1] It is written in the first person narrative mode, and is divided into a prologue, three “notebooks” (black, gray, and white), and a concluding letter from the protagonist’s wife.[2] In 1966, it was adapted into a film directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara.[3]

An industrial accident has severely burned the face of an unnamed plastics scientist. His wife is repulsed by his disfigurement and refuses to have sexual contact with him. To regain the affection of his wife, he attempts to create a prosthetic mask in a rented apartment. With this new “face,” the protagonist sees the world in a new way and begins a clandestine affair with his estranged wife. Although the mask gives the man newfound freedom, at the end of the story, it becomes difficult to determine if the mask has taken ownership of the man or the man has taken ownership of the face.[1][2][4]

There is also a subplot following a hibakusha woman who has suffered burns to the right side of her face. In the novel, the protagonist sees this character in a film; in the film version, this is deliberately obscured.

References
  1. Hoover, William (2019). Historical Dictionary of Postwar Japan, 2nd edition. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. p. 11. ISBN 9781538111550.
  2. Abe, Kobo (1980). The face of another. Internet Archive. New York: Perigee Books. ISBN 978-0-399-50484-6.
  3. Teshigahara, Hiroshi (1967-06-09), Tanin no kao (Drama, Horror, Sci-Fi), Teshigahara Productions, Tokyo Eiga Co. Ltd.
  4. Rush, Zachariah (2014). Beyond the Screenplay: A Dialectical Approach to Dramaturgy. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. p. 59. ISBN 9780786466030
See Also

La Belle Image by Marcel Aymé, a novel with a similar premise.

Education and Spontaneous Learning

We give you examples of being receptive to the world around you and learning to see and hear as a form of education:

There is a show on PBS called Stories from the Stage. People come forward to a microphone on a stage and tell personal stories from their past, stories that they consider important, informative, educational (in the widest sense), and usable by the listener. One of the early “people at the mic” on stage is a teenage girl who says something, in a plaintive sorrowful voice, like: “I have been waiting far too long…to wait for someone…to see me.”

This perplexed girl is unwittingly raising the question of a deep human hunger: the hunger for “personhood.” At a young age, this primordial hunger expresses itself as somebody befriending me (i.e., the speaker needs a real friend) so that the befriended person comes into clearer focus to themselves, achieving personhood.

Very intelligent philosophers like Emmanuel Levinas of France have spent their entire lives trying to understand the connections between countenances (how a person “wears a face”), personhood, interactive life, etc.

In his book, The Face of the Other (the girl wants somebody to notice her and her face and like her and “smile upon her”) Levinas has a deep analysis of all these human yearnings and self-definitional journeys and quests:

“The Face of the Other” is an evocative phrase used by Emmanuel Levinas, an important twentieth-century philosopher.

  • “Other” (sometimes capitalized, sometimes not) usually translates the French word autrui, which means “the other person” or “someone else” (other than oneself). It is thus the personal other, the other person, whoever it is, that each of us encounters directly, or experiences the traces of, every day. Of course, we encounter a multiplicity of others, but Levinas more often uses the singular “other” to emphasize that we encounter others one at a time, face to face.
  • By “face,” Levinas means the human face (or in French, visage), but not thought of or experienced as a physical or aesthetic object. Rather, the first, usual, unreflective encounter with the face is the living presence of another person.

Thus, when we come “face to face” with another person, the experience is a social and ethical one (rather than intellectual, aesthetic, or merely physical). “Living presence,” for Levinas, would imply that the other person (as someone genuinely other than myself) is exposed to me—that is, is vulnerably present—and expresses him or herself simply by being there as an undeniable reality that I cannot reduce to images or ideas in my head.

This impossibility of capturing the other conceptually or otherwise reveals the other’s “infinity” (i.e., irreducibility to a finite [bounded] entity over which I can have power).

The other person is, of course, exposed and expressive in other ways than through the literal face (e.g., through speech, gesture, action, and bodily presence generally), but the face is the most exposed, most vulnerable, and most expressive aspect of the other’s presence.

Thus, a student could be channel surfing on TV, observe this young girl saying these things on Stories from the Stage, and expand one’s understanding of this entire set of hungers and self-identity efforts and go (say) from the moment of TV watching to reading Levinas.

This is a simple example from the current world of TV where a certain particular “cri de coeur” (French: “cry from the heart”) of a girl you don’t know at all could deepen and widen your understanding by following the thread to Levinas and other profound people. The girl’s plaint where she’s “waiting for someone to see me” becomes much deeper and can be understood on a larger canvas which is exactly what we want.

Many experiences from daily life, from walking around, from moments on TV, from tiny incidents, can be pathways to higher understanding and learning if you can see and hear “with the third eye and the third ear.” (Theodore Reik talks about “listening with the third ear.”)

Education is a kind of “applied awareness.”