Tag: French language

Looking Back to Look Forward

Winston Churchill said, “The farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.”

The brilliant baseball player and coach Satchel Paige seems to disagree with Churchill when he said, “Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.”

Marc Bloch, in The Historian’s Craft (French: Apologie pour l’histoire), wrote that history is obviously a backward-looking discipline, but warns against the obsession with origins.

Edward Bellamy’s utopian time travel novel, Looking Backward: 2000–1887, is another example of this thought. His protagonist has a prophetic dream in 1888 of the United States in the year 2000. The book critiques the 19th-century U.S. through the lens of the future.

Alain Badiou looks back from the Neolithic period to today, describing it as a “time of crisis.”

…everybody thinks there is a crisis. Is philosophy capable of seizing hold of this crisis, while maintaining its fundamental aims? That is obviously my position I certainly recognize that humanity is in crisis, which I take to be the final spasm of the whole Neolithic period, the period of classes, of private property, of the power of the state, of technology, and so on. This started in Egypt and China six or seven thousand years ago and now this ends up in what is after all a very difficult situation to control. It is the outcome of everything that this gigantic period has swept along with it. This includes the status of truths, which today are perhaps a bit domesticated by an uncontrollable situation of predation and destruction.

After all, technology is tributary to science; everything is supposed to be mediated by information, even aesthetics; love has become calculable because you can calculate scientifically the person who best matches with you. All this indeed is at the origin of a gigantic crisis in philosophy. My own position is that we can be in a position of active resistance to what is happening, while holding onto the original categories of philosophy. A form of resistance that nevertheless consists in dramatically changing into something else. We should not hope to reform the world such as it is: I think this is completely impossible. Of course, one can try to do the best one can, but little by little everyone recognizes that the world we live in is catastrophic. And that is certainly true. It is catastrophic because it is the end—and here we should think big—of several millennia. It is not just the end of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; it is the end of the world of social classes, of inequalities, of state power, of the subservience to science and technology, of private property colonizing everything, of senseless and criminal wars.

Alain Badiou, Badiou by Badiou, translated by Bruno Bosteels, Stanford University Press, 2022, pages 26-27.

Badiou argues that the world has always been threatened by catastrophe and philosophy is its reaction.

Let us recall that Socrates and Plato were people who already intervened at the end of the Greek city. They too found themselves in a world threatened by catastrophe: they did not live in a stable and established world at all. That ends with Alexander the Great, who brings order to all this in the form of an imperial creation, and finally with the Romans and their monster of a state the likes of which had never been seen before. The Greek city and Greek democracy thus ended in the imperialism of ancient Rome. Thus, we may also find inspiration in Plato in this last regard. Plato is the first complete philosopher, but he already lives in a time of crisis. Of course, Athens was very famous and celebrated, but at the same time it was already corrupted and fragile. During Plato’s own lifetime, not to mention Aristotle, Macedonian imperialism is already present. Aristotle was Alexander the Great’s first tutor; he was a prototype of the corrupted and, moreover, the inventor of academic philosophy!

Similarly, if we take the greatest philosophers—Plato, Descartes, Hegel—we again find the same type of figure. Hegel is obviously the philosopher caught up in the French Revolution and its fundamental transformations; Descartes, for his part, is caught up in the emergence of modern science. All these philosophers are caught up in considerable shakeups of their time, in the fact that an old society is on the verge of dying and the question of what is going to appear that is new. We too find ourselves in the same situation: we must continue along these lines, by taking inspiration from what those philosophers did. Thus, they considered that the moment had come to work on a renewed systematicity of philosophy, because the conditions had changed. So, based on the conditions as they existed, it was time to propose an innovative way out of the existing constraints, an individual and collective liberation. From this point of view, we can find inspiration in the great classical philosophical tradition: we need not reject it, nor claim that all this is finished and find solace in an insurmountable nihilism, nor adopt the Heideggerian critique of metaphysics going back all the way to Plato. All this is pointless, and finally becomes incorporated into the disorder of the world. On the contrary, we must hold onto the fact that philosophy has always been particularly useful, possible, and necessary in situations of grave crisis for the collective, and from there pursue the work of our great predecessors.

Alain Badiou, Badiou by Badiou, translated by Bruno Bosteels, Stanford University Press, 2022, pages 29-30.

Contrast “What was the Neolithic world that led to the unleashing of technology?” (Badiou, Badiou by Badiou, page 25) and “Yesterday don’t matter if it’s gone.” (The Rolling Stones, “Ruby Tuesday”). Perhaps we can conclude that wisdom is knowing when the past is useful in understanding the future.

Newspapers and the “Manufacture of Consent”

When we think about newspapers, various associations come to mind. Examples include Jeff Bezos purchasing The Washington Post or William Randolph Hearst inspiring Citizen Kane. Newspapers have, to some extent, devolved into a vehicle for propaganda, as described in Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion.

Lippmann is famously quoted for advocating the “manufacture of consent.”

Max Weber describes the economic function of newspapers:

The newspaper as an institution came into the service of commerce at an astonishingly late date.

The newspaper, as an institution, is not a product of capitalism. It brought together in the first place political news and then mainly all sorts of curiosities from the world at large. The advertisement, however, made its way into the newspaper very late. It was never entirely absent but originally it related to family announcements, while the advertisement as a notice by the merchant, directed toward finding a market, first becomes an established phenomenon at the end of the 18th century—in the journal which for a century was the first in the world, the “Times.” Official price bulletins did not become general until the 19th century; originally all the exchanges were closed clubs, as they have remained in America virtually down to the present. Hence in the 18th century, business depended on the organized exchange of letters. Rational trading between regions was impossible without secure transmission of letters. This was accomplished partly by the merchant guilds and in part by butchers, wheelwrights, etc. The final stage in the rationalization of transmission of letters was brought about by the post, which collected letters and in connection therewith made tariff agreements with commercial houses. In Germany, the family of Thurn and Taxis, who held the postal concession, made notable advances in the rationalization of communication by letter. Yet the volume of correspondence is in the beginning surprisingly small. In 1633, a million letters were posted in all England while today a place of 4,000 population will equal the number.

Max Weber, General Economic History, Collier Books, 1966 (Third Printing), page 220.

Herbert Hunt provides a useful overview of the newspaper as a political tool in his introduction to Honoré de Balzac’s Lost Illusions (French: Illusions perdues).

The first half of the nineteenth century witnessed the rapid rise to power of the periodical press. Journalism had been active — though dangerous to those engaged in it — during the Revolutionary period. Napoleon had kept the press under his thumb, as Giroudeau points out on page 235. The ‘freedom’ of the press was one of the most controversial issues both under the Restoration and the July Monarchy. Under Louis XVIII and Charles X the struggle between those who, like the Liberals and Bonapartists, wanted to keep the Revolutionary principles and gains intact, and the Conservatives of various hues, especially the ‘Ultras’, who wanted to put the political clock back, was an affair of major importance; likewise, under Louis-Philippe, the conflict between the spirit of stagnation and the parties in favour of ‘movement’. Balzac’s contention is that the majority of journalists under these three monarchs, instead of recognizing that they were called to a serious, even sacred mission, turned the Press into an instrument for self-advancement, prostituted principles to intrigue and used journalism merely as a means of acquiring money, position and power. He is reluctant to admit that there were great, responsible press organs, like Le Journal des Débats, Le Conservateur, Le Constitutionnel and, from 1824, Le Globe, which stood firm on principle; he is above all aware of the vogue which the petits journaux enjoyed after the fall of Napoleon, and of the role they played as political privateers.

The petits journaux were so-called because they were produced in smaller format than the important dailies or weeklies, which were more or less grave, staid and ponderous. They proliferated in Paris once the fall of the Empire had given a relative, though still precarious liberty to the Press — precarious because it was constantly threatened by the increasingly reactionary governments of the time. The politicians of the Right found it difficult to keep the newspapers under control even by such means as stamp-duty, caution-money, fines, suspensions and suppressions, the object of these being mainly to put obstacles in the way of would-be founders of hostile periodicals. The ‘little papers’, short-lived as they often proved to be, were much given to journalistic sharp-shooting. They preferred satire, personal attack, sarcasm and scandal-mongering to serious argument or the affirmation of ideals. They were mostly Opposition journals and were a constant thorn in the flesh of the Government. Balzac’s aim was to expose their addiction to ‘graft’, intrigue, blackmail and the misuse of the feuilleton, namely the bottom portion of the first page or other pages generally reserved for critical articles and frequently devoted to the malicious task of slashing literary reputations. Andoche Finot — the prototype of such later newspaper magnates as Émile de Girardin and Armand Dutacq, pioneers in 1836 in the founding of cheap dailies which relied on advertisement and serialized novels as a chief source of income — acquires a large share in a big daily and hands on to the equally unprincipled Lousteau the editorship of the ‘little paper’ he already owns. Balzac probably had Le Figaro chiefly in mind, a periodical which was constantly going bankrupt or being suppressed but kept popping up again under different editors. Hector Merlin’s royalist Drapeau Blanc, edited by Martainville, really existed, having been founded in 1819; so did Le Réveil. Other examples of ‘little papers’ before 1830 were Le Nain Jaume (Bonapartist), Le Diable Boiteux and Le Corsaire (both Liberal), Le Voleur, La Mode, La Silhouette, and, under Louis-Philippe, not only the phoenix-like Figaro, but also La Caricature, Le Charivari (ancestor of our English Punch), and once more Le Corsaire: a few among many. Louis-Philippe and his Cabinets were easy prey for these stinging gad-flies whose unremitting satire and innuendo remind one of the present-day Canard Enchaîné.

It is an amusing thought that, in the late twenties and early thirties, Balzac had himself been a contributor to these disreputable rags and sometimes had a hand in the running of them; for instance he had helped Philipon to found La Caricature. Throughout his career he contributed many novels in serial form to the more important newspapers, notably those founded by Girardin and Dutacq — La Presse and Le Siècle. But by the time he was writing A Great Man in Embryo he had left the petits journaux far behind him. He himself tried his luck as a newspaper-proprietor and editor: he bought La Chronique de Paris in 1836 and founded La Revue Parisienne in 1840. Both of these ventures failed. We can well imagine therefore what a large amount of bile was accumulating inside him. On the whole, reviews of his works appearing in periodicals had been hostile if not harsh. He suffered much from the disparagement of editors and critics such as Sainte-Beuve and Jules Janin respectively. He was always quarrelling with Émile de Girardin. And so he took his revenge. He had already made a preliminary attack on the periodical press in The Skin. And he followed up his attack of 1839 with his Monograph of the Paris Press (1842).

Honoré de Balzac, Lost Illusions, translated and introduced by Herbert Hunt, Penguin Books, 1971, pages xiv-xvi.

Balzac’s novel is very concerned with all aspects of journalism. For example, chapter 17 is titled “How a news-sheet is edited” and chapter 18 is a symposium on newspapers. Chapter 18 quotes a German guest who states, “I thank god there are no newspapers in my country.” (page 312). Another participant states, “In corporate crimes no one is implicated.” “A newspaper can behave in the most atrocious manner and no one on the staff considers that his own hands are soiled.” (page 314).

‘The influence and power of newspapers are only just dawning,’ said Finot. ‘Journalism is in its infancy; it will grow up. In ten years from now, everything will be subject to publicity. Thought will enlighten the world…’

Honoré de Balzac, Lost Illusions, Penguin Books, 1971, page 313.

‘Newspapers are an evil,’ said Claude Vignon. ‘An evil which could be utilized, but the Government wants to fight it. There’ll be a conflict. Who will go under? That’s the question.’

Honoré de Balzac, Lost Illusions, Penguin Books, 1971, page 313.

We should heed Vignon’s warning. Nazi Germany’s three main newspapers confirm this danger.

Problems of Perspective, Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault was one of the leading French philosophers of the 20th century. Often considered a postmodernist, he did not believe there was a final perspective that human knowledge could achieve. This immediately contrasts with the outlook of leading physicists like Stephen Hawking. In his 1988 classic, A Brief History of Time, Hawking concludes the book by saying, once science has achieved a theory of everything, which is not far off, we will “know the mind of god.”

In his 1966 key work, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (French: Les Mots et les Choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines), Foucault argued that the so-called order of things is invented, not discovered, by us. This is contrary to scientific thought.

Foucault sets up this limit in his surprising interpretation of the Diego Velázquez masterpiece painting, Las Meninas (Spanish: The Ladies-in-waiting). The painting is deliberately elusive in its use of perspective.

The great German thinker, Jürgen Habermas, explained this Foucault/Velázquez perspective difficulty:

This picture portrays the painter in front of a canvas not visible to the spectator; the painter is evidently looking, as are the two ladies-in-waiting next to him, in the direction of his two models, King Philip IV and his spouse. These two personages standing as models are found outside the frame of the picture; they can be identified by the spectator only with the help of a mirror pictured in the background. The point that Velázquez apparently had in mind is a confusing circumstance of which the spectator becomes aware by inference: The spectator cannot avoid assuming the place and the direction of the gaze of the counterfeit but absent royal pair — toward which the painter captured in the picture gazes — as well as the place and the perspective of Velázquez himself, which is to say, of the .painter who actually produced this picture. For Foucault, in turn, the real point lies in the fact that the classical picture frame is too limited to permit the representation of the act of representing as such — it is this that Velázquez makes clear by showing the gaps within the classical picture frame. left by the lack of reflection on the process of representing itself.29

29. Foucault constructs two different series of absences. On the one hand, the painter in the picture lacks his model, the royal couple standing outside the frame of the picture; the latter are in turn unable to see the picture of themselves that is being painted — they only see the canvas from behind; finally, the spec­tator is missing the center of the scene, that is, the couple standing as models, to which the gaze of the painter and of the courtesans merely directs us. Still more revealing than the absence of the objects being represented is, on the other hand, that of the subjects doing the representing, which is to say, the triple absence of the painter, the model, and the spectator who, located in front of the picture, takes in perspectives of the two others. The painter, Velázquez, actually enters into the picture, but he is not presented exactly in the act of painting — one sees him during a pause and realizes that he will disappear behind the canvas as soon as he takes up his labors again. The faces of the two models can actually be recognized unclearly in a mirror reflection, but they are not to be observed directly during the act of their portrayal. Finally, the act of the spectator is equally unrepresented — the spectator depicted entering into the picture from the right cannot take over this function. (See Foucault, The Order of Things, pp. 3-16, 307-311.)

Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate, Michael Kelly, editor, MIT Press, 1994, pages 67, 77 [archived PDF].

Let us conclude by saying one way of specifying the disagreement between scientists and these thinkers is that sciences see themselves as “objective” while the thinkers feel science lacks objectivity because of the human observer. Kant, centuries ago, argued that concepts like causality, space and time are imposed by the human mind on the world. Similarly, Heisenberg, in Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science, similarly said that science does not finally answer questions about an objective reality, but can only answer questions posed by us.

Why Is the World So Nightmarish?

The phrase, “La Belle Époque” (French: “The Beautiful Era”) refers to the atmosphere in Europe and especially France, the high point of which lasted from 1900 to 1914, with the outbreak of World War I. The whole era was characterized by the phrase, “la douceur de la vie” (French: “the sweetness of life”). People of the time would say that if you weren’t alive then, they could not communicate how charming life was at the time.

The sinking of the Titanic in April, 1912 is the symbolic catastrophe that heralded the end of the era. Anyone who watched Downton Abbey would perhaps remember the opening scene, which depicts the newspaper announcing it with a screaming headline.

The great masterpiece, Journey to the End of the Night (French: Voyage au bout de la nuit, 1932), describes the whole world around World War I as a nightmarish battlefield of previously unseen scope. Céline’s protagonist, Ferdinand, travels the world, from battles in Europe to Africa, then to New York and Detroit’s Ford assembly line before returning to France, finding that the nightmare is global and inescapable.

Céline died within 24 hours of Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway is famous for the quote from The Sun Also Rises (set in the 1920s), “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills.”

The question is how could we ever explain complete evaporation of the sweetness of life and transformation into such a nightmare, culminating into the world of today.

Lastly, think of the point made in Sebastian Haffner’s The Meaning of Hitler, how Hitler fit into this nightmarization of the world. Haffner writes:

It is impossible for a serious historian to maintain that without Hitler world history in the twentieth century would have taken the course it has taken. It is by no means certain that without Hitler a second world war would even have taken place; it is quite certain that if it had taken place it would have taken a different course — possibly even with different alliances, fronts and outcomes. Today’s world, whether we like it or not, is the work of Hitler. Without Hitler there would have been no partition of Germany and Europe; without Hitler there would be no Americans and no Russians in Berlin; without Hitler there would be no Israel; without Hitler there would be no de-colonization, at least not such a rapid one; there would be no Asian, Arab or Black African emancipation, and no diminution of European preeminence. Or, more accurately, there would be none of this without Hitler’s mistakes. He certainly did not want any of it.

(The Meaning of Hitler, Harvard University Press, 1979, page 100)

No-one has yet captured how the nightmarish feeling of 2025 is itself downstream from the preceding era.

Kierkegaard and Existence

There are various striking intuitions about human existence. For example, in his brilliant memoirs, Speak, Memory, Nabokov begins with the deep reflection where human existence is compared to a baby in a cradle, rocking, completely vulnerable and uncertain. All of this is bracketed by two episodes of infinite darkness. The first episode took place before you were born and the second takes place after you’re gone. Your existence is a temporary flame, like that of a lit match.

A MetaIntelligent comment on this would be that the profound ingenuity of the 19th century mathematicians analyzing the size and nature of infinity (e.g., Richard Dedekind or Georg Cantor) cannot in the last analysis wrestle down human existence into mathematics.

The modern progenitor of this kind of human existence-watching is the Danish genius Søren Kierkegaard. In one of his masterpieces, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments (1846), he makes the claim that knowledge, theory, speculative thinking and infinity-watching à la Dedekind and Cantor, cannot possibly explain human existence, because it subsumes all of these.

In 2025, this would mean that the Kierkegaard sense of things would tell you that neuroscience can never really explain how existence is sensed by a living person.

Kierkegaard writes, “in my view the misfortune of the age was precisely that it had too much knowledge, had forgotten what existence means, and what inwardness signifies.” He continues, “for a knowledge-seeker, when he has finished studying China he can take up Persia; when he has studied French he can begin Italian; and then go on to astronomy, the veterinary sciences, and so forth, and always be sure of a reputation as a tremendous fellow.”

By way of contrast, “inwardness in love does not consist in consummating seven marriages with Danish maidens, then cutting loose on the French, the Italian, and so forth, but consists in loving one and the same woman, and yet being constantly renewed in the same love, making it always new in the luxuriant flowering of the mood.” (Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, page 232.)

Kierkegaard’s kind of existence-watching can be understood as a turning-upside-down of the famous phrase from Descartes, “I think, therefore I am.” For Kierkegaard, “I am, therefore I think.” Notice that “I think” is an epistemological statement or knowledge-watching. “I am” is an ontological statement.

This existentialist tradition of putting ontology before epistemology finds its culmination in Heidegger. As he says in his opus, Being and Time (1927), “human being is ultimately the being for whom being itself is an issue.”

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.”

Two Kinds of Extra Understanding: Pre and Post

We argue here in this proposal for an educational remedy that two dimensions of understanding must be added to “retro-fit” education.

In the first addition, call it pre-understanding, a student is given an overview not only of the field but of his or her life as well as the “techno-commercial” environment that characterizes the globe.

Pre-understanding includes such “overall cautions” offered to you by Calderón de la Barca’s 17th century classic Spanish play, Life is a Dream (Spanish: La vida es sueño). A student would perhaps ask: “what would it be like if I faced this “dreamlike quality” of life, as shown by the Spanish play, and suddenly realized that a life of “perfect myopia” is not what I want.

Hannah Arendt warns similarly of a life “like a leaf in the whirlwind of time.”

Again, I, the student ask: do I want such a Hannah Arendt-type leaf-in-the-whirlwind-like life, buried further under Calderón de la Barca’s “dream state”?

But that’s not all: while I’m learning about these “life dangers,” all around me from my block to the whole world, humanity does its “techno-commerce” via container ships and robots, hundreds of millions of vehicles and smartphones, multilateral exchange rates, and tariff policies. Real understanding has one eye on the personal and the other on the impersonal and not one or the other.

All of these personal and impersonal layers of the full truth must be faced and followed, “en face,” as they say in French (i.e., “without blinking”).

Call all this pre-understanding which includes of course a sense of how my “field” or major or concentration fits into the “architecture of knowledge” and not in isolation without connections or a “ramification structure.”

Post-understanding comes from the other end: my lifelong effort, after just about all that I learned about the six wives of King Henry VIII and the “mean value theorem”/Rolle’s theorem in freshman math, have been completely forgotten and have utterly evaporated in my mind, to re-understand my life and times and book-learning.

Pre-and post-understanding together allows the Wittgenstein phenomenon of “light falls gradually over the whole.”

Without these deeper dimensions of educational remedy, the student as a person would mostly stumble from “pillar to post” with “perfect myopia.” Education mostly adds to all the “fragmentariness” of the modern world and is in that sense, incomplete or even disorienting.

Education in this deep sense is supposed to be the antidote to this overall sense of modern “shapelessness,” to use Kierkegaard’s term.

Then and Now Thinking: Zola Novels

Émile Zola died in 1902 and gives us a social overview of France, people caught between all kinds of pressures and changing circumstances and disruptions.

La Curée (1871–72; English translation: “The Kill”) is the second novel in Émile Zola’s 20-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart. It deals with property speculation and the lives of the extremely wealthy nouveau riche (“new money”) of the Second French Empire (1852-1870), against the backdrop of Baron Haussmann’s reconstruction of Paris in the 1850s and 1860s.

The Second French Empire, (officially the French Empire, French: Empire français), was the regime of Napoleon III from 1852 to 1870, between the Second Republic (1848-1852) and the Third Republic (1870 to 1940).

Zola’s other novels such as L’Assommoir (“The Drinking Salon”) also have various kinds of “urban renewal” as backdrop.

Baron Haussmann, who died in 1891, was the “czar” of Parisian urban renewal and the speculation fever and real estate manipulating and maneuvering were echoes of Haussmann Paris.

Think of Robert Moses in New York a few decades ago and his remaking of NYC to fit automobiles and Jane Jacobs’s bitter struggle against Moses with her cars-should-adjust-to-the-city and not cities-to-cars view.

In Japan, in recent decades, real estate “nouveaux riches” are called “tochi narikin” (Japanese: 『土地成金』, “land rich”) and are similar to Zola’s “little foxes” since the way money was made was to know in advance via insider knowledge where railroads (say) were slated to be built and which stretches of land would be therefore needed and acquired by the government at any price (in the absence of “eminent domain”).

The debates and tensions raging around the Baron Haussmann Parisian bulldozing were obviously not about cars but the nature of the tensions was similar. Another dimension of these urban renewal “revolutions” was the impact on renters.

Thus Zola and his “society and social novels” do have “echoic” lessons for us and are “raw material” for “then and now” thinking which is a pillar of meta-intelligence (i.e., perspective-enhancing).

Then and now thinking helps students get some sense of long-term trends or resonances and to get away from history-started-this-morning myopia.

Education and the Pursuit of Improved Overviews

Professor Sherman Stein was a prominent mathematician and popularizer, and his book, Mathematics: The Man-Made Universe, is a modern classic. The subtitle “The Man-made Universe” already tells you that you’re looking at a clear exposition of “humans made math” in contrast to the “mathematics fundamentalism,” à la Professor Max Tegmark of MIT, whose tone seems to say mathematics allowed for reality and us.

This is of course a perfect “argument without end.” This is the kind of argument that should help a student to rethink their assumptions and not obsess about some once-and-for-all final understanding which can become an “idée fixe” (i.e., fixed idea in French, indicating being overly rigid or stuck).

In the preface to Professor Stein’s mathematics survey classic, he writes:

“We all find ourselves in a world we never made. Though we become used to the kitchen sink, we do not understand the atoms that compose it. The kitchen sink, like all the objects surrounding us, is a convenient abstraction.

Mathematics, on the other hand is completely the work of man.

Each theorem, each proof, is the product of the human mind. In mathematics all the cards can be put on the table.

In this sense, mathematics is concrete whereas the world is abstract.”

(Sherman Stein, Mathematics The Man-Made Universe, Dover Publications, “Preface” Third Edition, page XIII, 1999)

Meta-intelligence tells you if views of what is real, what is concrete, what is abstract, what is man-made, what is mathematical, are so radically different depending on the interpreter or analyst, it makes prudent sense to keep various views in one’s mind and modify them or juggle them as you go along. Our ability as a species to nail down for eternity what the nature of mathematics, humans and kitchen sinks are and how they all interrelate, is elusive and tangled up in language, as Wittgenstein keeps saying.

Looking Backwards and Forwards at the Same Time

Janus and Bi-Directional Smarts

The Roman god Janus looks backwards and forwards at the same time and learning to be somewhat Janus-like is very conducive in the metaintelligence (i.e., larger overview) quest.

There’s a useful French phrase, “reculer pour mieux sauter” which means like a high jumper, you have to take steps backwards to jump higher. In other words, learn to look bi-directionally at the world.

First look back, then forward.

Here’s a concrete example:

W. Arthur Lewis, the “father” of development economics, originally from the Caribbean, taught at Princeton. He won the Nobel in 1979 and wrote various classics such as Growth and Fluctuations, 1870-1913 (1978).

Lewis writes:

In this book we shall not be attempting to give formal or complete explanations of why fluctuations occurred. Like the captain of a ship navigating in stormy seas, we shall need to identify the waves, without needing an exhaustive theory of what causes waves.

When analyzing these fluctuations economists have identified four different cycles, distinguished by length of periodicity, each of which is named after the economist who first wrote about it:

the Kitchin (about three years)
the Juglar (about nine years)
the Kuznets (about twenty years)
the Kondratiev (about fifty years)

(W. Arthur Lewis, Growth and Fluctuations, 1870-1913, 1978, page 19)

Lewis gives us a quick overview of how we got to the era covered by his book:

“The essence of the industrial and agricultural revolutions in the first three quarters of the nineteenth century was in new ways of doing old things—of making iron, textiles and clothes, of growing cereals, and of transporting goods and services. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century the revolution added a new twist—that of making new commodities: telephones, gramophones, typewriters, cameras, automobiles and so on, a seemingly endless process whose twentieth century additions include aeroplanes, radios, refrigerators, washing machines and pleasure boats.”

(Growth and Fluctuations, 1870-1913, page 29)

Professor Norman Stone in his masterpiece on WWI calls this late nineteenth century explosion of material change and inventions the greatest fast quantum leap in world history in transforming the world.

If one reads these lines with a “Janus mind” we wonder, looking forward from the Lewis book and its era:

  1. How does his catchy metaphor of waves in the ocean relate to fluctuations and cycles? When Ben Bernanke (Fed Chair) describes recent decades as “The Great Moderation” does he mean to imply that Lewis-type waves disappeared or got much smaller?
  2. Can computers and mobile phones really match cars and planes in profundity of impact? Or is it only the tremendous spread of mobile or smartphones in the Global South that can?

In fact, the recent economic history classic, Robert Gordon’s The Rise and Fall of American Growth argues against the assumption of endless technical change as a growth accelerator or endless frontier:

In the century after the Civil War, an economic revolution improved the American standard of living in ways previously unimaginable. Electric lighting, indoor plumbing, home appliances, motor vehicles, air travel, air conditioning, and television transformed households and workplaces. With medical advances, life expectancy between 1870 and 1970 grew from 45 to 72 years. Weaving together a vivid narrative, historical anecdotes, and economic analysis, The Rise and Fall of American Growth provides an in-depth account of this momentous era. But has that era of unprecedented growth come to an end?

Gordon challenges the view that economic growth can or will continue unabated, and he demonstrates that the life-altering scale of innovations between 1870 and 1970 can’t be repeated. He contends that the nation’s productivity growth, which has already slowed to a crawl, will be further held back by the vexing headwinds of rising inequality, stagnating education, an aging population, and the rising debt of college students and the federal government. Gordon warns that the younger generation may be the first in American history that fails to exceed their parents’ standard of living, and that rather than depend on the great advances of the past, we must find new solutions to overcome the challenges facing us.

A critical voice in the debates over economic stagnation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth is at once a tribute to a century of radical change and a harbinger of tougher times to come.

  1. Why does one not read of the four cycles mentioned by Lewis (i.e., Kitchin) and the rest listed above in today’s business and financial press? Has there been some great discontinuity?

If you apply a “Janus mind” to the past (described by Lewis) and our sense of the future (described by techno-pessimists like Gordon) you get a more thoughtful sense of “the human prospect.”