Tag: anarchism

Does History Operate on a Long Fuse? Evidence from Isaac Bashevis Singer

Isaac Bashevis Singer’s The Manor orbits two Polish rebellions (1830 and 1863).

Author’s Note to the Original Edition

The Manor was written between 1953 and 1955. As with many of my stories and all my novels (with the exception of Satan in Goray, which I wrote while still in Warsaw), it was first serialized in The Jewish Daily Forward. Although The Manor was published many years after The Family Moskat, it portrays an earlier period—the epoch between the Polish insurrection of 1863 and the end of the nineteenth century. It was the era of gas lamps, the time when the Poles had finally become resigned to their loss of independence and turned to a kind of national positivism. Poland now began to emerge as an industrial country; railroads were built, factories were opened, and the cities grew rapidly. The Jews, who until 1863 for the most part still lived in a ghetto atmosphere, now began to play an important role in Polish industry, commerce, the arts and sciences. All the spiritual and intellectual ideas that triumphed in the modern era had their roots in the world of that time—socialism and nationalism, Zionism and assimilationism, nihilism and anarchism, suffragettism, atheism, the weakening of the family bond, free love, and even the beginnings of Fascism.

The Estate, a sequel to and the conclusion of The Manor, ends in the last years of the nineteenth century—an epoch when humanism undertook to practice what it had preached for generations. What happened in the village of Jampol, and what was discussed by a small group of self-educated youths in furnished rooms in Warsaw, became the basis of the social upheavals and the terrible disillusions of our present time.

Isaac Bashevis Singer. The Manor. Avon Books, 1979.

If you look at his sentence above describing “All the spiritual and intellectual ideas”, you may start to see what we describe as the long fuse of history. When we are in the present, a lot of the issues from the past emerge again in the future. Reality is such that there is no permanent yesterday.

The novel is also haunted by another kind of deep change, the rise of the world market or globalization.

The novel’s protagonist, Jacoby, acquires a hill, which allows him to begin his fortune with a quarry:

The peasants complained that the Jew was contaminating the Polish countryside, putrefying the air, but the authorities ignored them. Poland, after the insurrection, was full of activity, as if awakened from a long slumber. Workshops sprang up, mines were dug, forests cut down, and railroads built. Polish products, textiles, leather goods, brushes, sieves, sheepskin coats, glassware appeared on the world market. As soon as the Jews were granted permission to reside freely in the cities, the country began to grow.

It was said that Calman had been blessed by a holy man. A building boom was in progress, and his lime quarry yielded immense profits. Scores of Jews and Gentiles earned their livelihood from it. Calman purchased horses and wagons and built a smithy. As if all this were not enough, the Russian government decided to build a railway line through Jampol. …

Isaac Bashevis Singer. The Manor. Avon Books, 1979. p. 9.

Accompanying the rebellions and the commerce are a set of perpetual questions that have yet to be definitively answered.

Does a live carp suffer agonies when it is scaled and cut to pieces for the Sabbath meal? Why are some people poor and others rich? What was there before the universe? Does a goat have a soul? Was Adam a Jew? Did Eve wear a bonnet? And he was constantly finding contradictions in the Holy Writ, pointing out that in one place it is stated that a man is punished only for his own sins, but in another, that the third and fourth generations must suffer for them; and first the Lord is said to be invisible, then it is written that the elders while they ate and drank saw the Lord. For another thing, Ezriel criticized the prophet Elisha for causing the children to be attacked by bears; the boy felt bitterly reproachful toward King David for slaying Uriah the Hittite, and he wept and blasphemed when he read how Abraham sent his concubine Hagar into the desert with nothing but a jug of water, and how she almost perished of thirst.

Isaac Bashevis Singer. The Manor. Avon Books, 1979. pp. 23-24.

Consider specifically the question of what was before the universe. Today our greatest cosmologists and physicists continue to ask this very question. This confirms a famous quote from William Faulkner, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Do Disintegrating Societies “Vomit Up” Disturbed and Demonic Leaders? Durkheim’s “Anomie”

The great American social critic Chris Hedges, who has seen a lot of disintegrating political systems in his travels as a foreign correspondent, offers a very resonant or thought-provoking concept when he says that disintegrating societies often “vomit up” criminal psychopathic leaders like the Serbs Mladić, Karadžić, Milošević, et al and Trump himself.

Hedges brings back the Émile Durkheim (one of the fathers of sociology who died in 1917) usage of “anomie” which Durkheim introduces in his masterful book Suicide from 1897. Anomie refers to a level of social bewilderment and lostness where a person or people opens the door to suicide or demonic demagogues who become cult figures rather like Trump to his supporters.

The real question becomes the social rot and dislocatedness that allowed for the rise of the devilish leaders (and secondarily the leaders themselves). The anomie is the problem, the leader a symptom of the problem.

The term anomie—“a reborrowing with French spelling of anomy”—comes from Greek: anomía (ἀνομία, ‘lawlessness’), namely the privative alpha prefix (a-, ‘without’), and nomos (νόμος, ‘law’). The Greeks distinguished between nomos, and arché (ἀρχή, ‘starting rule, axiom, principle’). For example, a monarch is a single ruler but he may still be subject to, and not exempt from, the prevailing laws (i.e., nomos). In the original city state democracy, the majority rule was an aspect of arché because it was a rule-based, customary system, which may or may not make laws (i.e., nomos). Thus, the original meaning of anomie defined anything or anyone against or outside the law, or a condition where the current laws were not applied resulting in a state of illegitimacy or lawlessness.

The contemporary English understanding of the word anomie can accept greater flexibility in the word “norm,” and some have used the idea of normlessness to reflect a similar situation to the idea of anarchy. However, as used by Émile Durkheim and later theorists, anomie is a reaction against or a retreat from the regulatory social controls of society, and is a completely separate concept from anarchy, which consists of the absence of the roles of rulers and submitted.

Nineteenth-century French pioneer sociologist Émile Durkheim borrowed the term anomie from French philosopher Jean-Marie Guyau. Durkheim used it in his influential book Suicide (1897) in order to outline the social (and not individual) causes of suicide, characterized by a rapid change of the standards or values of societies (often erroneously referred to as normlessness), and an associated feeling of alienation and purposelessness. He believed that anomie is common when the surrounding society has undergone significant changes in its economic fortunes, whether for better or for worse and, more generally, when there is a significant discrepancy between the ideological theories and values commonly professed and what was actually achievable in everyday life. This was contrary to previous theories on suicide which generally maintained that suicide was precipitated by negative events in a person’s life and their subsequent depression.

In Durkheim’s view, traditional religions often provided the basis for the shared values which the anomic individual lacks. Furthermore, he argued that the division of labor that had been prevalent in economic life since the Industrial Revolution led individuals to pursue egoistic ends rather than seeking the good of a larger community. Robert King Merton also adopted the idea of anomie to develop strain theory, defining it as the discrepancy between common social goals and the legitimate means to attain those goals. In other words, an individual suffering from anomie would strive to attain the common goals of a specific society yet would not be able to reach these goals legitimately because of the structural limitations in society. As a result, the individual would exhibit deviant behavior. Friedrich Hayek notably uses the word anomie with this meaning.

(Wikipedia’s entry for “Anomie”)

Chris Hedges’ point is intriguing because it offers an unusual “flashlight” on the problem of “destructive charisma” in leadership styles where the socially diseased state of the society itself calls forth (i.e., “vomits up”) such leaders from Hitler to Trump.

While not perhaps the whole story, it does get at something crucial, the “endogeneity problem” not in economics where it is usually discussed but in politics. Endogeneity comes from endogenous (i.e., generated from within). Exogenous is the opposite.

The German literary masterpiece Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) shows a society where life and values are too topsy-turvy and dislocated to be sustainable and this creates an “ecosystem” of disorientation where Nazis begin to emerge or rather “crawl forth.” Thus the Hedges metaphor of “vomit up” is suggestive.

Movies as a “Parachute” or Backdoor Into the Field of Economics

Here’s a second example of using movies to “sneak up on” a field such as economics.

Think of the movie, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, from 1948, a Humphrey Bogart classic:

In 1925, in the Mexican oil-town of Tampico, Fred C. Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart) and Bob Curtin (Tim Holt), two unemployed American drifters, survive by bumming for spare change. They are recruited by an American labor contractor, Pat McCormick (Barton MacLane), as roughnecks to construct oil rigs for $8 a day.  When the project is completed, McCormick skips out without paying the men.

Returning to Tampico, the two vagrants encounter the grizzled prospector Howard (Walter Huston) in a flophouse. The loquacious and penniless ex-miner holds forth on the virtues of gold prospecting and the perils of striking it rich. The two younger men feel the lure of gold and contemplate its risks. Dobbs and Curtin run into McCormick at a cantina, and after a desperate bar fight, they collect their back wages in cash. When Dobbs wins a small jackpot in the lottery, he pools his funds with Curtin and Howard to finance a gold prospecting journey to the Mexican interior.

The flophouse mentioned above (“Oso negro”) has a quick scene which is a marvelous “parachute” into economics:  a group of men begin to reflect on why gold is so expensive while the basics of life like water or air are not.  Howard (their “cracker barrel philosopher-sage,” played by Walter Huston) explains that a thousand men set out to find gold.  999 of the men fail to find any, one finds some.  The price of gold has to reflect the costs of finding it (i.e., men, equipment, time, effort, opportunity costs, risks, danger, etc.) by all thousand and include the 999 failures and not just the one success.  This is an example, albeit primitive, of something like the labor-theory of value explored by Ricardo and then Marx:

Labor theory of value

The labor theory of value (LTV) is a heterodox theory of value that argues that the economic value of a good or service is determined by the total amount of “socially necessary labor” required to produce it. … Marx did not refer to his own theory of value as a “labor theory of value.”

Again, using this movie as a charming or enchanting “jumping off place,” you would begin to “dive into” those pages of the textbook that are relevant, much as you’d use a dictionary to look up some words. You then read towards the front and the back of the textbook, coming at it your own way, mindful of these questions of yours which begin to give the field a “shape.” You could do the “standard slog” through the textbook, none of which you remember three days after the course because nothing was based on your own “enchanted” searching and exploring.

Lastly, the author of the original 1927 novel, on which the movie is based, B. Traven was a German anarchist and he may have analyzed the world and its prices and costs (i.e., economics) like Howard in the movie.  This too is itself another “pathway” into economics, a biographical one.